The Kashmir Shawl (16 page)

‘It means we wait it out. At least we’re safe here, and sheltered. There are some trucks and cars stranded, Gulam says. They’ll want to find those people.’

‘Have some porridge, honey.’ Karen passed Bruno a tin bowl.

‘I just wish I’d bought a Jammu and Kashmir mobile,’ he fretted. ‘Or a satphone.’ He turned his BlackBerry over and frowned at the sleek, dead screen. Mair understood his anxiety. The absolute isolation of this place struck her afresh. They were dependent on Gulam’s mobile for as long as its battery lasted, unless there was any power supply in Lamayuru with which to charge it. And without that fragile link, they were entirely cut off from the outside world.

‘How long does Gulam think it will take to clear the roads?’ Karen persisted.

‘Unless there’s a freak heatwave, it could be several days.’

‘Really? That long?’ Karen turned to Mair, collecting up her mass of hair as she did so and twisting it into a knot. ‘I hope you’ve got a good book to read,’ she said. ‘Or you could come with me up to the monastery. The wall paintings are magnificent.’

A silence fell. Lotus found her doll among the damp clothing strewn on the mattress. She began crooning to her in French, her small voice rising into the cold air.

Bruno said that he would go with Gulam and retrieve the rest of their luggage from the Toyota. It would mean digging the car out of the snow, he warned them, so it might take some time. Karen immediately jumped to her feet and Lotus scrambled up too.

‘We’ll come. We can have a walk in the snow.’

‘Make a snowman,’ Lotus gurgled. ‘
Oui
, Pappy?’

Bruno said shortly that this wasn’t the park in Geneva.

‘Hey, don’t be so crabby,’ Karen rebuked him.

She wasn’t going to be dissuaded. She wanted fresh air and exercise, she insisted – in fact, they all needed some if they were to be cooped up in this place for the rest of the day. She swung round to Mair. ‘You’ll come too, won’t you?’

Mair reckoned that a blast of cold fresh air might help her hangover.

In the end, Bruno agreed that they would all go. Armed with shovels borrowed from the guesthouse they set out into the cavernous mist. Gulam led the way and each step forwards took him deeper into the murk.

The cold was raw and insistent. Keeping close to the wall, they sidestepped in a series of footprints that descended from the ledge. Lotus grasped her mother’s hand. She slipped once, her feet skidding from under her, but Karen swung her upright.

‘Again,’ Lotus chirped, launching herself off the next step. Her pink face shone and she seemed enviably unaffected by the cold.

It was a long descent. A monk came climbing past them, his top half wrapped in an anorak and the hem of his robe soaked and dragging. His shaved head was covered with a bobble hat. An old woman followed, bent under a bundle of firewood almost as big as herself.

Life at Lamayuru would go on, as it always had done, in conditions much worse than today’s.

They came to the foot of the steps and reached a steep section of road that curled round the hill. Mair recognised none of this, but Gulam knew the way even in the disorientating mist.
Gingerly they edged their way downwards to a point where the road widened and flattened. With every contour gentled by snow and the mist, a line of tumbledown sheds and a broken cart loomed with the eerie beauty of a winter still-life. Animal pawprints tracked the whiteness here and there. They rounded another corner, and in front of them appeared the mounds of several abandoned vehicles. The snow had been heavily trampled all round them and soiled heaps clogged the road margins where some of the cars had already been partly excavated. Beside the rear door of one were more animal prints and a dismembered bag of rubbish. Shreds of plastic and gnawed vegetable peelings stuck out of the dug-over snow.

The Toyota was the furthest along the line of cars, still a pristine humped dome. Bruno and Gulam swung their shovels at it.

Mair stopped to catch her breath. Something made her glance upwards just as a single gust of wind tore a hole in the mist. Far above, so high up that she had to tilt her head backwards to see them, a cluster of a dozen squat white domes topped with fantastic spirals of black and gold appeared to float in the sky. Ragged flags danced between the pinnacles before vanishing into streams of vapour. It was like a glimpse of another world, and even as she stared at it the mist closed everything out again.

The clink of shovels carried to her, and she could hear voices shouting directions from somewhere below. A generator started up, coughed, and settled into a steady thrum. She stamped her feet and swung her arms to get the blood circulating, but a sense of detachment persisted. She felt that she was standing apart, watching the day unravelling and winding out of her grasp.

The next moments would remain in her memory for ever.

Karen seized a double handful of sticky snow. She compacted it with slaps of her mittened hands, then rolled it on the ground to make the beginnings of a snowman. Lotus scrambled in the churned snow at her mother’s feet, and behind them Bruno
twisted and stretched with a loaded shovel. Mair’s visual memory of him was as a black query-shape printed on blankness. Lotus was darting towards her now, a shining grin showing her small teeth, her button nose runny and her hands lifted in the air.

‘Make a jump, My,’ she called. ‘Jump!’

Mair glanced over her left shoulder. There was enough space, and the snow had been trampled in a rough circle. She gathered her muscles in readiness and took in a breath.

Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed an oncoming shadow. It slid from beneath one of the cars and flattened itself among the rubbish. But she was already in the air, the cars and the snow and the blank sky and the shadow itself revolving round her as she executed her back flip. She landed, and heard Lotus’s cry of delight.

As she regained her balance the shadow swept in front of her.

It sprang from the ground, straight at Lotus.

The child’s cry mutated from delight to a scream of terror, and then there was abrupt silence as she fell to the ground.

The brindled dog straddled the small body, jaws wide to bite, its body shivering and jerking.

Karen screamed and plunged forwards, but it was Bruno who reached the fallen child first. He kicked the dog in the head with such force that it was flung backwards into the air, a rope of saliva twisting from its jaw. Even before it landed Gulam was smashing at its skull with his shovel. The creature snarled and made to attack again, but one more shovel blow sent it skidding through the debris before it vanished into the mist.

Bruno snatched Lotus up and held her in his arms.

Her face was ice-blue and white, her mouth was stretched open but no sound emerged from it and her eyes made huge shocked circles. In the middle of one cheek was the dog’s bite. From the margins of torn skin the blood was beginning to spring, pinpricks of shocking crimson in the colourless world.
Her hat had come off and her hair fell in pale threads over her father’s shoulder.

Doors opened and people emerged. Where there had been emptiness there were faces and pointing fingers and a clamour of voices.

Bruno was already running. His legs pumped as he raced through the snow, past the staring people, plunging up the steps the way they had come. Karen flung herself after him. Mair snatched up Lotus’s fallen hat and clenched her fist on the ball of soft wool. She ran too, hearing Gulam panting beside her and – a long way ahead now – the shiver of Lotus’s voice rising in the first thin wail of shock and pain.

Bruno had reached the steps and instantly the mist swallowed him up. Mair had never seen anyone move so fast. She ploughed in his wake, her heart thumping and her breath coming in irregular gulps. Over the rushing of blood in her ears she could hear Lotus’s faint cries. At last she came to the top of the steps and the snow-shrouded guesthouse took shape just ten yards away. On collapsing legs she raced across the courtyard with Karen and Gulam at her heels.

In the kitchen a circle of faces gazed down. Bruno had laid Lotus on the nearest mattress. He knelt beside her and battled to keep her still as she writhed and screamed. He poured a trickle of water into the bite, trying to bathe it clean.

Over his shoulder he ordered them, ‘Get more water. Soapy water.’

Karen frantically grabbed the arm of one of the cooks. Mair caught sight of Gulam’s face as he rattled off a sequence of commands. He looked terrified.

Lotus moaned, ‘Mama,’ as Karen knelt beside her husband. She reached out her hand and stroked back Lotus’s wet hair, murmuring softly, ‘It’s okay, baby. You’ll be all right, everything is all right, Mama’s here.’

A basin of water was fumbled through the circle of spectators, and a hand held out the bathroom cake of soap.

‘A clean cloth,’ Bruno demanded. Karen stared wildly round
the kitchen. There wasn’t a shred of anything clean in this house, and their bags were still in the Toyota. Mair quickly peeled off her coat and her fleece. One of her intermediate layers was a fine cotton shirt, put on in Leh yesterday morning. Only
yesterday
? She stripped it off and, with a strength that surprised her, tore it into rags. Bruno soaked the first, lathered it and went on washing the bite while Karen held the child. Mair prepared another strip of cloth with soap and water.

Bruno raised his head to glance at his wife. ‘She hasn’t had any shots,’ he said.

Karen’s body stiffened. ‘What shots?’

He whispered, out of a mouth that was distorted with anguish, ‘You know what shots I mean.’

Mair knew, but she had tried to stop herself thinking it. When she dared to look at her again Karen had aged, and her beauty had tipped into gauntness. Clumsily she wagged her head from side to side, trying to hold back the tide of horrified recognition.

‘No,’ she insisted. ‘No, that can’t happen.’

‘Will you take over?’ Bruno said to Mair. He gave her the cloth and indicated the bowl of water. ‘Keep on rinsing. Just keep at it.’

Silently she took his place. Lotus’s shock seemed to be subsiding. She cried more normally now, as rage and pain flooded up in its place, clenching her fists and drumming her feet on the mattress.

Bruno gripped Gulam by the shoulder. His knuckles showed white. ‘I need your mobile,’ he said.

After that, Mair’s memories spooled away into darkness.

She remembered hours of Bruno talking, shouting, or abjectly pleading into the borrowed phone. His face was etched with deep lines and there were navy-blue shadows under his eyes.

When the battery went flat, she left Bruno and Karen with the child and scrambled in Gulam’s wake, through the mist-thickened lanes, to locate the generator she had heard earlier.
It had gone off for lack of fuel, but with their growing retinue of interested villagers they were directed upwards to the monastery. A monk met them, listened to what they wanted, nodded with an impassive face. Freighted with sick desperation, minutes crawled into hours. Another phone was found. Frustration burnt like acid in Mair. She could see too clearly what Bruno and Karen were suffering.

The phone connections were fragile. Bruno would get through to someone, a doctor or a consular official, or an officer at an Indian Army medical base, and then the signal would break up and he would have to start all over again.

The information was meagre, and it changed with every call. There was rabies vaccine in Kargil. Or else it was available in Srinagar. Or there was none in the entire state, only in Delhi, and the doses Lotus needed would have to be flown up. There was a break coming in the weather. An army helicopter could fly to collect the Beckers, maybe tomorrow. The mist was going to cling for at least a week: no flights could take off. The roads would definitely open again soon; they would stay closed until the spring.

After each reversal Bruno pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, as if this might obliterate what he dreaded seeing, then grimly resumed the pursuit. Once they had been alerted, his family and Karen’s began doing everything they could from Europe and America, but they couldn’t relay even what they were able to orchestrate from so far away.

With Lotus in her lap, Karen watched the negotiations out of clouded eyes. Her thin body was tense as a wire.

They all waited in the kitchen, the squalor of it rancidly familiar.

At the end of that first terrible day, there was a clamour in the courtyard. Gulam summoned Bruno outside to see. The dog had been found, and the villagers had circled it and then stoned it to death. Its body was tied up in a sack and deposited in an outhouse. If a way of escaping from Lamayuru ever came, a sample of the dog’s brain tissue would be taken for veterinary
analysis. In a low voice Gulam told Mair that he didn’t doubt what would be found. He had seen this before. A nun had died of rabies here last year. When she sickened she had begged to be taken to hospital, but there was nowhere within reach.

‘Many wild dogs now.’ He shook his head and then sadly shrugged. ‘We try to kill, but …’

Mair remembered reading somewhere that the modern veterinary drugs given to livestock poisoned the vultures that had always cleaned up the carcasses of dead animals. With the near-extinction of vulture species, and the abundance of carrion, there had been an explosion in the numbers of feral dogs. And with the dogs came disease. This was what happened.

Acceptance of circumstances and the belief that what would ensue was inevitable was Buddhist, she supposed. Her own response was the opposite. Whatever could be done must be done, and everything beyond that should be attempted. But she fought to suppress all her own urgencies, even a flicker of feeling, beyond what would be immediately helpful to Karen Becker.

Performing grotesque contortions, time alternately crawled and galloped into the second day.

And then the third.

‘When?’ Bruno pleaded yet again into the phone. ‘How long?’

Lotus wore a bright white square of antiseptic dressing taped to her face, but otherwise seemed herself again. She was bored by the enforced confinement, and all three of them did their best to distract and amuse her. Mair saw the separate tenderness that her parents poured on their child, but with each other Bruno and Karen were minutely considerate, and distant. Every exchange about what was to be done, what might happen in the next hour or the following day, was too freighted with importance for them to admit their dread. The fluid intimacy she had envied, long ago in the bazaar in Leh, had solidified into a sheet of clear glass. The two of them moved alongside each other, but not together. Mair couldn’t even imagine what their nights must be like.