Right of Thirst (10 page)

“How long will it take to melt?” I asked.

“I don't know,” he said. I stared at him.

“Sanjit,” I said. “Have I come all this way for nothing?”

He shrugged, and didn't answer.

So we were back in the dining tent again. Rai stamped in behind me, brushing the snow from his clothes in the entrance, and then he turned and shouted over his shoulder for what I assumed was Ali and lunch. The air was close and thick.

Elise sat comfortably by the heater, hat off, flushed, her hair, damp from the snow, sticking up at odd angles. She looked entirely cheerful, and smiled as we came in.

We took off our coats, and sat down, but Ali did not appear. Rai glanced at his watch again, then he stood abruptly, apologized, and went out into the snow.

“Have you seen Ali?” I asked

“At breakfast,” she said. “While you were sleeping.”

After a while we heard voices—Rai's, in anger, and then Ali's, lower and cajoling. A few minutes passed, then Rai returned to the dining tent in disgust.

“He was sleeping in his blanket,” he said. “He said he was cold. Our lunch is late.”

“Do they have a heater in their tent?” I asked.

“They have the stove. It warms the tent when they cook.”

“But no heater?”

He inclined his head.

“It is okay,” he said.

Ali entered the tent a few minutes later. He looked entirely wretched in his green cotton jacket and his tracksuit, bowing his head and murmuring his apologies. He was visibly shivering, and I realized that his clothes were wet. He looked chilled to the bone, miserable, and even as he apologized I could see him inching closer to the heater and the great mass of warmth it gave off.

“He's soaked,” I said to Rai, who sighed in response and shook his head.

“It is always a problem with them,” he said. “They are no good in the cold.”

“Well,” I said, “he needs to warm up. Let him sit by the heater.”

Captain Rai said something curt to Ali, who bowed some more. Then he spoke, looking down at his feet.

“What is he saying?” Elise asked.

“Part of their tent collapsed because they did not clean it off,” Rai said. “They got wet setting it up again. That is why our lunch is late.”

“Where is the boy?” Elise asked.

“He is in the cook tent,” Rai said. “He is wet also.”

“Then he must come and get warm as well,” Elise said, sitting up in her chair. “Tell him.”

Rai shot a glance at me, then spoke. Ali bowed and bowed again, his voice rising in thanks, until Rai cut him off with a wave of the hand. Ali left immediately, returning a few minutes later with his nephew, who if anything looked even wetter and more miserable than Ali himself. He wore a thin cotton blanket over his tracksuit jacket, stiff imitation blue jeans, and plastic sneakers. I'd hardly noticed him in the weeks we'd spent together—he was perhaps sixteen, with the barest beginnings of
a mustache, and a tangle of black hair that obscured his face. He was shivering violently.

Elise stood up then and gestured to her chair by the heater. Ali refused, however, and instead he and his nephew crouched beside it, rubbing their hands together. They got as close to the heater as they could, their faces turned away from us, and after a while the tent began to smell. Soon the odor was overpowering, and both Elise and I moved away and sat at the edge of the dining table. Steam began to rise off Ali and his nephew as they dried.

Elise wrinkled her nose.

“They smell bad,” she said. “Really bad, yes?”

“Yes,” I said.

Rai said nothing, but he looked intensely mortified, as if the presence of the stinking cook and his nephew reflected on him personally. And I suppose it did—they were his countrymen, after all, and he could speak to them, and he alone among us understood them.

Rai spoke, sharply again, and both Ali and his nephew flinched and stood.

“They are warm now,” Rai said.

“Ask them if they have any dry clothes,” Elise said.

Rai did so, and Ali and his nephew shook their heads.

“That is all they have,” Rai said.

“Do we have anything?” I asked. “Blankets or clothes in the supplies?”

“I will issue them some blankets,” he said, and shook his head. “They are useless like this.”

He stood and left the tent. Ali and his nephew took the opportunity to instantly crouch down by the heater again.

“I have a jacket also,” Elise said, “maybe it will fit the boy.”

I did not have an extra jacket, but I had a sweater, and a soft
fleece shirt that I was reluctant to part with. But I parted with it nonetheless, and the depth of their gratitude was painful to see, so raw that it generated guilt rather than pleasure. But not for Captain Rai; when he made a show over handing the blanket to Ali it was with a look that said
understand why you are receiving this
. I watched it carefully; I saw it for what it was. And in that moment I had no doubt that had we been absent, Ali and his nephew would have remained soaked and miserable all night, until the sun finally burned through the mist and warmed them up again.

That evening, before bed, I wandered over to where the pallets of supplies lay cloaked in snow beneath the tarps. I looked at them carefully, and finally did some calculations in my head, and for the first time realized that we had nothing close to what we needed.

The next morning the storm was over, and it was all blinding light again, and soon the avalanches were thundering gloriously down the walls across the river.

“It was kind of Sanjit to give Ali the blanket,” Elise said. Already the villagers were at work, kicking places in the snow for the remaining tents.

I didn't answer at first. My stomach rumbled. I'd made several trips out into the rocks already.

“You do not think so?”

I turned to her.

“Yes,” I said, after a moment. “It was kind of him.”

She looked at me in puzzlement. We were walking out to check the tents. The sky was blue and hard and clear. The drifts we walked through were so soft and light that they barely resisted our passage, and our tracks fell in on themselves almost immediately. A minute or two of wind and there would have been no sign of us at all. It was quiet, full of the stillness that covers every wilderness after a snowfall.

The tents had held up well—none had collapsed, though snow had drifted between them and many of the doors were blocked. But there they were, intact, in their lines, waiting. Dozens of them now.

“We don't even have a single latrine,” I said. “We're lucky the storm will delay them.”

“Sanjit says they will dig the latrines when the tents are ready.”

“The ground is rocky,” I said. “Digging is going to be difficult. Plus there's no privacy.”

“They can go at night,” she said. “Then no one will see them.”

“They won't have lights. And they probably won't use the latrine. If we're not careful it's going to be a mess. Water is going to be a problem also.”

“There is the river.”

“It's a half-hour walk. There are enough tents for two thousand people when they're all set up. But there's practically nothing to burn. There's nothing to cook with unless they have kerosene stoves. And there's hardly any kerosene, have you noticed?”

She shook her head.

“There's enough for our uses. But not nearly enough for two thousand people.”

“They will have to bring in more.”

“There is also not enough food,” I said. “There are not enough blankets. There is not enough of anything except tents and medical supplies. That's because I arranged the medical supplies.”

She looked at me, uneasy.

“Are you sure?” she said finally.

“I finally did some calculations last night,” I said. “We don't have close to what we need. We're completely unprepared.”

“We need to talk to Sanjit,” she said.

“Yes, we do.”

“It is not his fault, I am sure,” she said.

“No,” I said. “But they don't care very much, do they?”

She gave me a look, much like the one she'd given me the day Rai and I had shot his pistol.

“I am not a child,” she said.

“I don't mean to patronize you,” I said, “but if the villages were important to the army we'd have supplies. As it is we barely have enough to get started. I can't believe I didn't see it earlier.”

“Scott also says this. He gets very angry. But he said there was enough to begin, and when the refugees come the army will have to do something.”

“I hope that's true,” I said.

“Do you think this is all for show?” she asked suddenly.

“I don't know. But there aren't any refugees, are there?”

I thought of the president, with his stern military eyes and his monotone, speaking in his native tongue. In the distance, the villagers were digging the last of the folded tents from the snow, as Captain Rai stood and watched.

“Maybe you are right,” she said, pensively. “But there is nothing we can do now. And it is beautiful, you know? It is an adventure, like you said.”

“I didn't come here for an adventure.”

She nodded, and bit her lower lip, and looked young, and I felt a sudden wave of fondness for her.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that I'd begun looking forward to seeing her in the mornings, and thought about her when I was alone in my tent. If something caught my eye, I would wonder what she would think of it, and wish I were her age, or another man entirely, and sometimes I would pretend that I was. How predictable, I thought, and yet how little I resisted. She could easily have been my daughter, and had circumstances not placed us together I hardly would have noticed her. She would have been simply another of the young, a medical student, perhaps,
whom I might glance at in passing. But then, up there, with my own body rising up against me, I felt far more than tenderness. My body, it seemed, cared nothing for the differences between us. It lusted on, and was afraid, or exhilarated, or hungry; it consumed, it excreted, it slept, it dreamed and wanted, and had no use for dignity at all.

Rai was right. A few days later they asked for more. It was one of the men, one of the pack of wolves, as I'd come to think of them. Young, with a handwoven brown lamb's-wool cap and yellow-brown eyes. A wispy dark beard, a quick smile. A brown shawl over his thin shoulders. Perhaps he weighed 130 pounds. As we left the dining tent after breakfast, zipping up our jackets, the man was there. He wanted to speak to Captain Rai.

Rai listened, impassively. At first I wasn't sure whether he understood the man, whose voice was hesitant and soft. The man bowed his head, several times, then gestured toward the village below us and out of sight.

“What does he want?” Elise asked, as she came out of the tent behind us.

“Someone is sick in the village,” Captain Rai said. “He is asking us to help him.”

“Who is sick?” I asked.

“I am not sure. A girl.”

“What's wrong with her?” A girl, I thought—I hope it's not a delivery gone bad. I hope it's not that.

Rai said something, short and curt in tone, and the man replied, touching his hat as he spoke.

“Her foot,” Rai said. “There is something wrong with her foot.”

The news relieved me. It's only a foot, I thought—something I probably can deal with. My stomach groaned.

“Tell him I will come and see her,” I said. Captain Rai glanced at me, quickly, then looked away, his face unreadable.

“We should try to have good relations with the village,” I said. “Don't you think?”

“Of course,” he replied. “But this is a delicate matter. It is a girl. I am surprised that they have come to us.”

“Why?”

He did not answer, but instead turned to the man and said a few words. The man replied quickly.

“She is his sister,” Rai said.

“I will go also,” Elise said immediately.

Captain Rai studied her.

“For this, it is okay,” he said finally.

All these nuances that I didn't understand, all these questions of hierarchy and propriety and honor—the subject, at least, was clear—all of it annoyed me, though I hid it as best I could.

“What should we bring?” Elise asked.

“Let's just see what the problem is first,” I said.

My stomach was rumbling again, and I felt a wave of nausea. I'd certainly caught it from Ali's cooking and for a moment I was tempted to go to the cook tent and see what they were doing. I imagined them rubbing mold from cheese with their unwashed hands and leaving the cracked eggs out for hours. But they'd been through enough, I thought, and as I imagined Rai, standing in the cook tent, putting on a show for my benefit, the temptation left me.

So we went, the three of us, Captain Rai tight and correct, with the villager leading the way. At first, the others tried to
come along as well, but Rai stopped them in their tracks, and set them back to working on the tents.

By then the snow was melting rapidly in the sun, leaving pools of water in hollows as we picked our way down across the stones and gravel of the slope. The roar of the river filled the valley; it had doubled in size since the snowfall, and in places nearly swallowed the path that normally ran a safe distance up the bank. Near the water's edge, the sound was deafening, the river tumbled and poured, and we stepped into an icy mist that covered the stones like a thin layer of oil.

Rai was shouting at us over the rushing water, and I tapped Elise on the shoulder to get her attention. She stopped, and looked up at me, and then we bent our heads to hear him.

“Do not slip,” he yelled. “Or you will be done for.”

He was obviously correct—the violence of the river, as we stood beside it, shook the ground at our feet. Had any of us fallen in, we would have been carried away and drowned without a chance of saving ourselves—a flick of the eye, a red or yellow streak of a jacket through the white sheet of foam, and then gone. So we were careful, moving hand to hand and foot to foot, and then the path eased up the bank away from the river, and soon enough we were walking on flat ground and could speak to each other once more.

The sky was very blue above us, and then the snow on the banks began to give way to green undergrowth, and the first of the small pines.

“It is very nice,” Elise said, and I agreed with her—the air, warm in the sun, and the cold breath of the snow against our legs, and the clear panes of ice here and there in the rocks along the river's edge. We walked in a line through the snow, with the villager leading us, and every so often I caught a whiff of him. But it was nothing like Ali, just damp wool and smoke.

The house was at the far end of the village, and they must have been expecting us, because they were waiting in the doorways, and as soon as they heard the cries of the children, who once again met us at the outskirts, they stepped out into the alleys and stared at us unreservedly, parting only to let us pass. We followed the young man through the center of the village, past the orchard, nearly to the edge of the fields. It was one of the last houses, identical to the others, a low mud wall around it, narrow slit windows like the rest. He stepped up to the door, knocked, and called out.

A moment later a woman emerged through the door, wearing a red head scarf and a ragged dark shawl. She looked at us with a kind of ferocity, it seemed, and when she spoke it was with a high, rough-sounding voice. Perhaps she was forty-five, perhaps ten years younger.

The door was crude, made of many boards nailed together. Local wood, unstained, planed by hand. All those boards wrung out of the bent and stunted trees, then filed and nailed—who knew how long it must have taken. It was probably a week's worth of labor. The result was a bad, rickety door, full of chinks and drafts. The ridges over the roof of the house were lovely in the snow. I could hear the sound of birds at work in the orchard, and the brook at our feet babbled and chuckled despite all the cold flecks of excrement and trash it carried. The smell of mud, the stronger smell of smoke, a goat knocking its pinpoint hooves on the rocks at the edge of the path, moving from patch to patch. The ragged crowd, watching. The woman wiped her nose on her sleeve and coughed.

The woman and her son went back and forth for a bit. The open door behind her gave way to a room so dark I could not see inside. The men standing around us in a circle all began speaking at once, and then the woman turned to her son and spoke
hoarsely and rapidly. He nodded, then walked quickly through the door into the house.

“What's going on?” I said, to Rai.

“I am not sure,” he said. “I think they are bringing her out.”

I looked at the black square of the doorway. We waited. A few minutes passed, and finally the young man stepped out into the sun with a small blinking girl on his back. She was very young—perhaps seven—with a dirty face, and wide brown eyes. She had a small dried red flower in her hair. I wondered if she had just put it in, or whether it was something she always wore.

Her left foot was wrapped in a gray rag.

Rai spoke to the young man who had led us here. Halting, even to my ear, but he made himself clear enough, because there was an answering torrent from the woman, who had stepped aside to make way for her children.

“She was collecting wood,” Rai said, gesturing to the steep slope above us. “A stone fell.”

“When did it happen?”

He spoke again to the man

“A week ago,” he said. “She did not come back for many hours.”

“She was by herself?” Elise asked.

“Children here must work,” he said. “It is part of life in these villages. All girls must collect wood.”

She nodded, and then said nothing further.

“Is it only her foot?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

The girl's mother interjected, speaking rapidly to Captain Rai, who gazed at her impassively.

“She says that if her foot is no good no one will want her.”

“What is her name?” Elise asked. Rai glanced at her before translating.

“Her name is Homa,” he replied.

“I need to look at it,” I said, as a discussion ensued.

In the end the woman brought a blanket from the house and spread it out on the ground in front of the door. Then the boy let his sister down, gently, and she stood on one leg. She didn't make a sound, holding on to her brother for balance.

“Ask her to sit down,” I said, “and please tell her I need to look at her foot.”

Rai spoke to the woman, who in turn spoke to her daughter. Coldly, I thought, though I could not be certain.

The girl did as she was told. When I crouched down beside her, I saw that she was trembling. The crowd immediately pressed closer, craning their necks for the view.

“Please ask them to step back,” I said, wishing I'd insisted on entering the house. But there was no light inside, only an oil lamp or two, and I needed to get a good look. Rai did as I asked, but they retreated only a few inches.

The rag looked as if it had never been changed. As I bent down, I could smell it.

The rag was stuck to the wound. The girl shook, but she made no sound. Elise, however, took a quick breath, a little hiss behind me, with each tug. I was as gentle as I could be, but it needed to be done. After a few seconds I pulled it free.

The girl's foot had been crushed. Her foot was nearly the size of my own—a hot black club. There was exposed bone, gray white, through the split foot, and a clear trickle of pus. Bleeding now, and smelling, the scabs torn away by the dry rag.

Of course I'd seen worse, so many times I've lost count, but never like that, so far from anywhere. The infection was into the bones; the bones themselves were splintered. Her foot needed to come off. At the very least it needed to be opened and drained and scrubbed to a raw and bleeding bed, which then, in turn,
had to be kept clean. Weeks of antibiotics, also, and daily dressing changes, and something for pain. My heart sank.

I looked up at Rai.

“She needs an operation,” I said.

Elise wrinkled her nose and turned her head away.

He said a few words, and then the crowd at my back began talking excitedly to one another. The woman went back and forth with them for a few seconds.

“They want to know if you can give medicine like you did for the others. They say the medicine has helped them.”

I tried to explain as best I could—the foot was crushed, the antibiotics alone were not enough, the infection had spread to the bones, an operation was the only thing. How much they understood I could not say. The girl sat on the cloth, and said nothing.

“They need to take her to a hospital,” I said.

Rai spoke. The woman listened intently, then replied, with her rough voice.

“She says there is no hospital,” he said.

“Is that true?” Elise asked.

“They would have to go down,” he said. “It would take perhaps one week to walk there.”

“Then we must call a helicopter,” Elise said, looking back and forth.

Rai looked at me, quickly, before turning to her. She understands nothing, he seemed to say. She knows nothing about this country or these people.

“It is not possible,” he said.

“Why not?” Elise asked. Her tone was measured, but I knew her well enough by then to see her blossoming anger.

Captain Rai looked at her directly. His face was impassive.

“We are a poor country,” he said. “One helicopter flight, do you know how much it costs from here?”

Elise shook her head.

“Three thousand pounds,” he said. “More than everything they have. Who will pay?”

Elise flushed.

“I will pay,” she said.

She caught him off guard. She didn't surprise me, though. By then it was the sort of thing I expected from her.

Rai sighed, and looked away.

“You do not understand,” he said. “It is impossible.”

“Why?”

“It is more than the helicopter,” he said. “It is the hospital. The operation. The medicines. And someone must go with her. All the time it is like this in these villages.”

“I will pay,” Elise said again.

“Do you have three thousand pounds?” he demanded.

“I do not have so much here,” Elise said, coloring.

He was getting angry as well, and turned to the woman, speaking rapidly. She answered him.

“She has nine children,” he said. “Two of them died already.”

“Yes,” Elise said, with sudden ferocity, “and now you want to make three.”

Rai was looking at me.

“Why can't you do it?” he asked. “You are an American doctor.”

“I'm not a surgeon,” I said. “I don't do surgery.”

Rai shook his head, and looked away.

So there we were, and there I stood, looking at the girl as she sat on the blanket and trembled in silence.

“All right,” I said, finally, because I knew I had to. “Let's take her up to the camp.”

I was feeling worse. My stomach rumbled and groaned.
Captain Rai said his piece, and then everyone began talking all at once. A wave of cramps came again, and I knew that I would need to relieve myself before I could make it back up the hill. I felt intensely mortified, and suddenly the whole scene—the jabbering villagers, the girl on the blanket, even the sun and the snow melting out of the apricot trees, all of it seemed nightmarish and terrible and for a moment I thought longingly of my home on a winter's day, with its study overlooking the fields and the smell of a fire in the woodstove behind me. My dog, now staying with friends, a cup of coffee and maybe a long-distance talk with my son.

But there was nothing to be done, and so I touched Rai's arm and whispered my intentions, grateful that he simply nodded and said nothing. I stepped back from the blanket, and made my way down the alley, looking for a place, but to my dismay my departure did not go unnoticed. The children followed me, despite my best attempts to frighten them off. The alley opened into a field of barley, the green strands rising to my shoulders out of the melting snow. I pushed my way in, desperate now, and squatted down in the snow and the mud. I felt the children's eyes on my head as I struggled with my clothes. It was only then that I realized that the slush beneath my feet was mixed with human excrement, that the field served as the latrine for the village. Only the cold of the snow kept the odor at bay. The green field, so lovely from a distance, was this—a latrine, and the children were watching me, and a wave of cramps passed through me and expelled themselves in grotesque coughs as the ground sucked at my boots. In that moment I felt as if I would never be clean again, and I wondered what ever had possessed me to come to this godforsaken place, with all those eyes upon me as I crouched there, caught up with the indignity of the act—I felt entirely like an animal, revealed before everyone and everything.
I panted, and felt the barley brush against my face, and the cold against my exposed haunches, and I heard the children calling out to each other, craning their necks, drawing as close as they dared. It was as disgusting a moment as any I had ever experienced in my life.