Split (43 page)

When I hit that path, I decided to run. I would run until the sun went down, which it seemed near to doing, and then I would turn on my flashlight and walk by its light until the batteries went dead, and then I would crawl in the dark. I started to jog, found a steady pace I could maintain uphill or down, and gave in to its rhythm. After a while, the trail seemed to tend downward, and the snow lightened on the slopes, but I refused to take hope. When I passed the first rhododendron, I didn't even pause. I took that mark of lower altitude like a runner grabs a drink midstride, without thanks or hesitation. I was sailing down the trail, no sound but the heavy thunk of my sneakers and my ragged breath. Trees appeared between the rocks, and then I turned a corner and saw a hut—a real hut this time, not the rock piles that had tantalized me, but four sturdy walls and roof. I walked up to it slowly and stuck my head inside. It was empty, no bed or blanket, but I could sleep there out of the rain, and I would not freeze. It would buy me a night. In the morning I would begin again.

Then I smelled wood smoke on the wind. I can't say how that first whiff wrenched me. I walked out the doorway and over a small rise, and there, on the lee side of the hill, was a collection of huts, each chimney expelling a thread of smoke. A small boy stepped out of a doorway and came toward me, holding his hand up in greeting.

"
Namaste,
" he said, as if I had just stepped away for a moment, and he had been expecting me.

At first, my awkward sobs seemed to confuse him. He stood in front of me, in a small peaked cap and a tattered windbreaker, furrowing his brow.

Then he recovered his poise. "Come," he said, pointing toward the huts. He started toward them, and when I didn't follow, he came back again. I didn't think I could move, and I didn't want to, so we stood there for a while, as the mist fell apart and at last I could see where I was. Below us was a scallop of hillside, and below that a deep valley, thick with pines. I quit crying and wiped my face, and the boy nodded, but he didn't move. We waited together a while longer, as steam lifted from the roofs of the huts, and watched a pair of goats chewing their way across the tough mountain grass.

 

Once we were inside, the boy set about stoking the coals for tea. As the room filled with smoke and the sun went down, I mimed and gestured at the way I had come. The boy spoke quickly to his father, who sat on the doorstep puffing on a long pipe.

The man turned and gave me a surprised look. "Road no good," he said. He waved his pipe in the direction I had come, clicking his tongue. "Three men lost." So it wasn't Ron and Juliet I had been following after all. It seems that three other trekkers had made the wrong turn the day before, and it was their boot prints that had led me astray. The man squatted on the mud floor beside his son, nodding encouragement while I gulped down some broth. The boy made lemon tea and bread, which puffed up on the fading coals. Then he showed me to a bed—a pile of hay wrapped in a cloth. I lay awake for hours listening to the snap of the fire and the rustle of beetles in the straw. Brief flashes of the afternoon returned with a clarity that made my heart thud. Then I slept without warning, as if I'd fallen into a black slot.

 

It took me three days to hike back down to Kathmandu. My knees were like jelly. Every morning I ate four aspirin with my tea and picked out a stout walking stick from the scrub. The trail cut back and forth across the hillsides, through terraced fields of rice and wheat. As far as I could see in the hazy sunshine, the hills were banded with bright green and gold, and children passed by with scythes on their backs.

On the third day, I arrived at a dirt turnout with a few houses and a store: Sundarijal. Here the bus would come to take me to Kathmandu. The turnout was filled with schoolchildren in blue cotton uniforms and villagers who had trekked down from the mountains. I half expected some kind of reception, some ac knowledgment that I had finally hit flat ground. I did get a few long looks, mostly for my green backpack and running shoes. But no one knew or cared where I had been.

I stepped into the store and bought myself a Hershey bar. The proprietor told me I had just missed a bus. The next one would come in three hours. I didn't mind. I laid my pack against a low rock wall and turned my face up to the cold mountain sun, eating chocolate and dozing.

When the bus came, a crowd suddenly appeared and I was lucky to get a seat. The man who wedged himself in beside me was a businessman, an English speaker, and we chatted a little as the driver revved the engine and turned the bus around. Just as we were pulling out onto the road, a woman came running beside the door, cradling a bundle against her chest. The driver stopped and she got on, dipping her head in thanks. Something in her bundle moved, and then a small foot pushed out of the cloth. The woman edged her way down the aisle, protecting the child's head from bags and elbows, and squeezed onto the bench across from me. She turned then, and adjusted the drape, and I saw a face I will never forget. It was the face of a girl, a one-year-old with round cheeks and a button nose, but her eyes were ancient, and her whole scalp from forehead to nape was a raised blister, ruddy and crusted with matter.

The mother held the cloth gingerly away from the bum, and the child didn't once shift or whimper. Her stillness sent ripples out into the crowded seats, all of us turning and murmuring, a few of the mothers touching the woman's shoulders and arms. Someone asked what had happened, and the man beside me translated her story. The baby had pulled a kettle of hot dahl onto her head. The mother had carried her for two days to the bus.

"Where will they go?" I asked the man.

"To a clinic. They might have to wait a day or two, but someone will see them."

"Can't they afford a doctor?"

"Probably not," he said.

No one near me spoke for the three-hour ride into Kathmandu. The bus jolted over deep ruts, and at first I would glance over to see how the baby was faring, but her expression never changed, and after a while I couldn't look. When the bus stopped at the terminal, I asked the man how much a doctor would cost. He shrugged and named an amount. On the concourse, I found the mother and pushed a wad of rupees into her hand. She looked blank, and turned to the man for an explanation. "For the baby," I said, pointing to the child's head.

I looked at this woman, her face drawn tight with pain and now softened by confusion, and felt ridiculous. I wanted to rescue this child, as I had wished to be rescued from the snow, but she was already in competent hands. This mother had walked two days to Sundarijal, probably leaving other children behind. I remembered her courtesy, the way she paused in the foot well to give a word of thanks to the driver.

The businessman tapped my arm. "She says many thanks," he said. And then he was gone, and the baby was gone, and I walked toward Durbar Square in search of a room.

 

I spent the next week wandering through the streets of Kathmandu, not caring whom I spoke to or if I spoke at all, browsing through the bookstores, drinking hot chocolate in the sunlit cafes. I can't remember when I felt so content over simple things. In the afternoon, I went back to my single room—narrow, with a narrow bed—and washed my clothes in the concrete bathroom. The days were warm, and I went through everything in my backpack, welcoming the chill of cotton, the heft of soaked shirts. From the window came the sullen clop of cattle, whistles and laughter of schoolchildren let out for the day. I stripped down and piled the clothes against the wall, soaped and rinsed them under the rusty tap, then strung a line across my room and hung them under the ceiling fan. At the end of the week, I booked a flight to Bangkok, and from there I would go to Hong Kong, but in my mind I had reached the farthest point of my travels. I was already turning toward home.

On my last morning in Nepal, I woke at first light, put on earphones, and rode off on a rented bike—a rickety one-speed with bent rims—toward a temple on the outskirts of town. The sun broke across the peaks, and in the cobbled streets and down the short alleys a gray predawn mist still held, pale as tufts of cotton wool. A few elderly women walked at the edges of the road, swinging prayer wheels. I came clattering up behind them, sounding my bell in warning as the bike-rental boy had instructed, and none of them turned or flinched. The tape hissed in my ear, then a song began. It was the opening cut from Joni Mitchell's
Blue,
borrowed from a man in my hotel, and from the first bars her voice conjured up Alan Sarkissian's living room, in that valley were I grew up, the smell of gear oil and the polished wood of his sarod. But this was a song I had never heard. "I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling..." The words made my blood ring. There was the unmistakable presence of a person in those lines—in the bell-clear soprano, the strumming, the wit. I swooped downhill in my skirt and sandals, dodging potholes.

In a trough at the bottom of the hill, a catch basin for the last bit of moonlight, I passed two boys carrying sacks of saffron on their backs. They were bent double by the heavy loads, stepping quickly over the wet cobblestones, hands braced on their head straps. Who knows how far they had come? Far enough that the spice had sifted through the burlap and over their arms and shoulders so their bodies glowed yellow in the phosphorescent light. Perhaps it was coarse to see such beauty in their labor, but I couldn't help it. I was glad I had lived until then.

M
AU FOUND A COPY
of my letter in Bolivia, and when I made it home from India we moved into an apartment together. He enrolled in a Ph.D. program in zoology at U.C. Berkeley, which he stuck with until he tired of studying a rare epiphyte that only thirty people in the country could call by name and went into medicine. I wrote a letter to Michigan (the only school that accepted me) saying thanks but no thanks, and spent a few years doing scut work at a software company and trying to write poetry. And in time the swami's prophecy came true, in a manner of speaking. But that's another story.

This one seems to have arced down a few years ago, when Mau and I decided that ten years was a sufficient test drive and set a date to be married. We gathered for that event at an old hall in the Berkeley hills, where nine of our parents walked down the aisle, mothers and stepmothers and ex-stepmothers, the accumulation of seven marriages, my ring having been handed down from a union that petered out in Mexico City circa 1974. Hope springs eternal.

Once we made it out to the huppah, and the rabbi had ascertained that, pale as he looked, Mau was in fact not going to faint, our parents got up and made a series of speeches. Mau had gone through a brief but passionate return to his Jewish roots in the months before the wedding, and so the speeches were supposed to correspond loosely to the seven blessings of the Jewish marriage ceremony. We could have used the origi nais, which were lines of general praise and hosanna—except "Thank you, God, for making the barren woman fruitful" stuck in my throat.

My mother got up that day and talked about particle physics. "In the search for a unified field theory which would explain the mysteries of the universe, we've learned that tiny subatomic particles behave in unison across vast distances, in the absence of time, sharing their state and maintaining their relationship." She was holding a slip of paper, her voice shaking, but her face was as calm as it had been on those days when she stood at the head of a classroom. "I am Ann. My blessing today is for the field that structured the lives of Fanny and Bush and Carl and me, bringing us together for a while to send these good sweet children, Lisa and Mau, out of the void and into the future, drawing them together and toward this moment, from their births at almost the same time, a continent apart."

The blessers were offered a sip of ceremonial wine at the close of their speeches, but Jim made a show of taking a slug before he began, doing a vaudeville tremble to cover his nerves. Then he read a poem that I had recited to my mother during our mail-truck days.

Leslie was next, and she—who often took a role behind the scenes—surprised everyone by telling a story. "With the phrase 'Dare to struggle, dare to win,' little Lisa, in 1975, read the words of the Chinese communist Chairman Mao Tse-tung to bond her father and new stepmother in marriage." She looked elegant in a long black dress, a hat and high heels, and grasped my hand as she talked. "Little did we know then, another Mau would come on the scene..."

Leslie had been my consultant on the wedding dress—a long sheath with appliqué straps—which turned out to be an easy buy, compared to what went underneath it. She and I drove all over Los Angeles in search of the right bra, which was finally unearthed at Olga's Corsetorium, a dusty shop off Fairfax where the mustachioed Olga presided and the bras stood up by themselves.

My father got up and spoke of ethics, the closest he came to religion. "In the best tradition of ethical Judaism, of the laying on of hands and the laying down of words, I wish you happiness and love." My father's brevity was a measure of the ease between us. He had thrown himself into the wedding with sentiment and gusto, hosting the rehearsal dinner, handpicking the wines, flying up to Berkeley to plan the menu, the flowers, the music. By the time he stood up under the huppah, nothing much more needed to be said.

Then Mau's mother and stepfather said words of good luck, and his father sang a blessing in Hebrew and dissolved into tears. I wept. Mau wept. The rabbi wept. My sisters, who held the huppah poles, were—in the words of one of my friends—"wrecked," makeup moving down their faces in streams.

The night before, after hours of tossing and turning, I had risen to stare out the hotel window. The city glittered away below me, and beyond it I could see headlights moving over the Bay Bridge. Those lights calmed me. I was getting married in the morning. Someone else was headed for the night shift. Life went on.

I pried a banana from the fruit basket, went into the bathroom, plunked down on a nest of towels, and wrote my vows. In the other room, Mau was sleeping soundly, but he'd already passed through his own moment of anxiety. The day before, I'd gone down to the pool to nap under an umbrella, and when I came back to the room he was frantic.