The Pale of Settlement (8 page)

Susan's mother would have liked it here in Kathmandu. She had an enthusiasm for spicy food, exotic scenery, the romance of the East. She loved bargaining for trinkets, the whole charade of feigning outrage and pretending to walk away over the equivalent of fifty cents. She would have made a pilgrimage to every temple, drank the yak butter tea. Susan had actually considered inviting her mother to come along. But when she'd mentioned the trek, Leah had tapped her temple with one finger and said:
At meshuga?
Are you insane? For what do you want to sleep on the ground in the freezing cold? To see some mountains? Go to Switzerland if you want mountains! There at least you can sleep in a bed like a civilized person!

Civilization had its limits, in her mother's mind.

Gaza was a cesspool, and Dubi was the operator of the valve. He turned the spigot on and off. Green light on. Red light off. When the light turned red, the Arabs in their trucks and cars and yellow taxis stopped and sat and waited for the road to open again. They rolled down their windows and fanned themselves with sheets of cardboard or a scarf. They stepped out into the sun or squatted in the shade of the trucks and smoked. Pallets of dahlias wilted in the heat. There was a smell of rotting fish. Cell phones bleeped, babies wailed, chickens clucked, arguments broke out.
Khalas!
the Arabs yelled, waving their fists. Enough.

In the heat of the day, Dubi draped a shirt over the back of his
helmet to shade his neck. His
M
16 rocked against his side like an extra limb, his flak vest heavy and far too hot. He scanned exit permits and searched the trunks of cars. From time to time, he'd pull aside a suspicious man or boy, force him to the ground, and hold him there beneath his pointed gun until a jeep arrived to take him off to jail. But the mid-1990s were not a time of war; from Rabin's assassination in 1995 until the second intifada began, things were relatively quiet there. Quietly, the shit flowed out at dawn, and at dusk it flowed back in again.

The group that Susan had signed up with for the Everest Base Camp trek included a truck driver, a retired shrink, a mining engineer from the Yukon, a neurosurgeon and his wife, a hairdresser from Redondo Beach, and four other single women, all from New York. They stood around the lobby of their hotel, looking, with their baseball caps and fanny packs and camera gear, just like the American tourists that they were. They shook hands and said, Hey, how's it going. Susan wished she had the nerve to travel on her own.

Susan was assigned to share a tent with one of the other single women, who, it turned out, lived only three blocks away from her on the Upper West Side. Joyce was a talkative woman in her mid-thirties with ash-blond hair and a pale, moist face. She'd come on the trip, she told Susan, in hopes of meeting a man, but had already ruled out the immediate possibilities: the truck driver, the hairdresser, the mining engineer. She should have been born a Hindu, she said. An arranged marriage wouldn't be so bad.

Clipboard in hand, the group leader circled around, inspecting their duffel bags and gear. He checked off the essential items, fingered their mummy bags, their water bottles, their stashes of
granola bars. When it was Susan's turn, he shook his head. He told her to go rent some fleece pants and a warmer jacket in the Kathmandu bazaar.

Susan skipped the bus tour of Patan and Bhaktapur and headed out to Durbar Square alone. She felt sealed inside her body, her limbs unnaturally light. It might have been the jet lag, although she'd never felt more wide-awake. It was festival time, and the city streets were hung with strings of flowers and prayer flags and tiny lights. Groups of children passed playing flutes and drums, chanting Tihar songs. A girl who could be no more than eleven or twelve carried an infant in a sling across her back, her eyes rimmed in black, her mouth and cheeks smeared red with rouge. Shop windows were stacked with Nikes and Nintendo cartridges, bootleg Chinese
CDS
and videotapes. In front of the Kathmandu Tours and Travel Agency stood a ribby, sway-backed cow.

In the maze of stalls in the bazaar, Susan found a pair of Russian army-issue fleece pants and a puffy blue down parka that looked as if it had survived its share of Everest expeditions. Feathers flew out of the seams when she pressed on it; it would certainly be warm. She hoped she'd have time to wash the pants before they left for the mountains in the morning. She didn't even want to think about some soldier's unwashed groin.

She was on her way back to the hotel when she noticed him, crouching in the shadow of a courtyard, pointing a video camera at a balcony above. There could be no mistaking those Bedouin pants, that close-cropped hair. Three young monks were leaning over the rail, shiny-headed and bare-shouldered in their saffron robes, jostling each other and waving down to passersby. Susan wondered if this was the Temple of the Living Goddess, the Kumari Devi, the little girl selected by augury, whose feet must never touch
the ground. She'd read that the girl sometimes came out onto her balcony, but if this was in fact her home, there was no sign of her now. Susan watched the monks, wondering if they knew they were being videotaped. Didn't they care? She turned around, but the Israeli guy had disappeared.

The army was what everybody did. After high school, you went to the army, and when you got out you did your
miluim
for a couple of weeks a year until you got too old. The army was the melting pot. The army was where you made your closest friends. The army was there for you, for life.

As a child, the only thing Dubi could really imagine about being a soldier was the uniform. He pictured himself in the lace-up boots, the olive-green fatigues, an Uzi underneath his arm. He saw himself hitchhiking at the bus stops, his arm held out, his index finger pointing down. Later, he imagined himself carrying out daring raids on the arms-smuggling tunnels in Rafah, or Syrian positions in the Golan. He'd leap through the gun turret of a tank, crawl on his belly through the burning Negev sand. The army made you strong.

Dubi wasn't even born until the mid-1970s, was just a kid during the Lebanon campaign. He remembered the Gulf War, though. He'd never forget waiting with his mother in their apartment building's basement shelter, their gas masks on. They sat on the edge of a cot, listening for the whistle of an approaching
SCUD
, the tremor of explosion, the wail of ambulances speeding to the scene. He remembered the metallic taste of adrenaline, the expansion inside his chest as he put his arm around his mother, cupped her shoulder in his hand.

Dubi's father had slipped in his military service—a desk job in
Tel Aviv, on account of his bad back—between '68 and '71, when everything was quiet. He was killed in a car accident in Hadera when Dubi was five years old. Dubi often told people that his father had died in a burning tank in Sinai during the Yom Kippur War. He told the lie so often that it seemed that it was true.

The nineteen-seat Royal Nepal Airways Twin Otter took off at 7:28 a.m., banked sharply to the northwest, and rose out over the terraced fields and knobby green hills of the Terai. Susan pressed her forehead to the window, feeling the vibration of the engines inside her head. In the seat next to her, the truck driver was droning on about the engineering qualities of short-landing-strip aircraft, the high standards of the Nepalese Air Force, the good fortune of a cloudless sky, but Susan wasn't listening. She was watching the shadow of their plane flitting across the valley floor. It was ridiculously small, as insubstantial as a fleck of ash.

A murmur ran through the cabin as the Himalayas appeared in the cockpit windscreen, beyond the pilots' upraised hands. The 26,000-foot snowcapped peaks floated across the horizon, looking just like any other mountains, the Rockies or the Alps, until you remembered that the ground they rested on was over 15,000 feet above sea level to begin with, and that they went up from there. Everything was out of scale.

And then they rounded a crenellated ridge, green and steep, and they were there, the Lukla landing strip rising suddenly in front of them, an uphill dirt runway cut into the mountainside. The plane roared, bounced twice, and skidded to a stop just short of a stone wall. They climbed down underneath the wing, ducking their heads, taking deep breaths of the sun-warmed air that smelled of smoke and mud and ice and pine, 9,200 feet high.

Transported, Susan thought, as they pointed out their duffel bags to the Sherpa porters who had gathered to meet them there. Transported, carried off. It was glorious to be plucked up and carried off like Thumbelina on a swallow's wings. To be raised into the air, like the Kumari Devi back in Kathmandu. What a comedown for her, at puberty, to be sent back to the ground.

The trail to Phakding, their first stop, wound past lowland fields of beans, potatoes, radishes and peas, smoky teahouses, children playing in the sun. The dirt path was broad and flat, more a road than a mountain trail. Susan walked alongside Joyce, her daypack bouncing against her shoulders, her hiking boots rubbing a little on her heel. A Nepali girl passed them, whistling, barefoot, two gigantic duffel bags tied onto her back with a rope looped across her forehead. Outside a teahouse, a sign read
COKES $1.50, HOT APPLE PAE
. A man passed herding a procession of
dzokyos
and yaks. The air rang with the sound of tumbling water. The sun turned red, lost heat, fell behind the ridge. Susan looked up, light-headed, and wondered if it was possible to get motion sickness solely from the spinning of the earth. A vulture wheeled across the sky.

After dark, they sat inside the Phakding trekkers' lodge and Susan played gin rummy in the light of an oil lamp with Ross, the hairdresser from Redondo Beach. A group of children trouped through the smoke-filled room, giggling and tapping on a Tihar drum, passing around a plate for coins. Is Hindu dharma, the tallest one said. Good luck give. Out the window, a translucent moon ducked behind a hidden peak. Shadows fell across the stubble field, studded with blue and orange tents. There was a peal of laughter, a muffled shout. Hebrew? Here? Susan squinted through the fogged-up
glass. Yes, Hebrew, she was almost sure. A shadow passed, the low voice of a man.

Yo Susan, Ross said, waving a hand in front of her face. Gin.

Most Fridays, Dubi went home to Tel Aviv for Shabbat. He hitchhiked from the border or took the Egged bus. He carried a duffel bag stuffed with dirty laundry and his gun. When he could, he sat on the left side of the bus so he could watch the sun set into the sea. He'd count the seconds it took for it to slide behind the band of haze, flattening as if it were being squeezed beneath an enormous weight of sky. Faster than it seemed possible the earth could turn, the orange sphere would extrude itself into a liquid line, and then the sky and sea would turn dull and flat and it would be gone.

Dubi came home from his week in Gaza like a worker coming home from the factory or fields. He'd climb the steps of his apartment building, ring the doorbell as he fished in his pocket for his key. The bell chirped like a manic bird. Inside, he'd drop his bag, prop his
M
16 next to the door, call out that he was home. Usually his mother's boyfriend would be there, watching
TV
, drinking a Maccabi beer out of a can. He was a peacenik, a grizzled hippy type. Oh ho, here comes the big hero, he liked to say.

Dubi ached for home all week but once he got there everything felt wrong. He'd pull off his uniform, take a shower, but it made no difference at all. He couldn't bear his mother's anecdotes about her job at the insurance agency, couldn't care less about what was up with her boyfriend's snot-nosed kids. In the background, the baritone
TV
newscaster pronounced the word
Gaza
as if it were an outpost on the moon. But Gaza stuck to Dubi, got inside the creases of his skin like sand.

On summer Saturdays, Dubi went with his girlfriend, Maya, to the beach. They spread their towels on the sand. Maya was in the army, too. Her job was showing schoolchildren how to use gas masks. She was a skinny, large-boned girl with a halo of frizzy blondish hair, and she wore a too-short army skirt that gave Dubi a hard-on when he saw her in it, every time. But when she leaned her head against his shoulder, Dubi retracted like a snail. All along the beach, people laughed and played. They whacked racquet balls back and forth, dove into the waves, rubbed suntan lotion on their skin. Gaza was barely seventy kilometers away.

Susan spotted him again just past the crest of the steep hill along the trail to Namche, where the first glimpse of Everest hovered through the trees. He was sitting on a rock, playing a wooden flute. A small crowd of trekkers had gathered there to rest, snap photographs, buy cups of
kala chia
and bottles of Coke from the tea tent set up near the scenic overlook. He hopped down to the ground and picked up his pack as she drew near, fell into step alongside her on the trail. He had on the Bedouin pants again, a baseball cap, cheap Chinese sneakers on his feet. The muscle twitched beneath his eye as his jaw tensed. Not a wink.

Maybe I know you from someplace? he said.

Where are you from? she said, even though she knew.

He told her he was from Tel Aviv, that everybody called him Dubi although his real name was Dov, and that Dov meant “bear.” He'd gotten out of the army just before coming to Nepal. He spoke in such a low tone that she had to strain to hear. She couldn't have said what it was, but there was something about him—that nervous energy, or that guttural accent, so like her cousin Gavi's, or the nakedness of the pale skin around his eyes that showed when he
pushed his sunglasses up on his head—that kept her walking with him all that afternoon.

The sun was already fading when they rounded the bend to Namche Bazaar, with its terraced fields and red-roofed Sherpa houses built along the curved slope of the cirque. Dubi stopped to light a cigarette, cupping the flame between his hands. Strings of prayer flags fluttered along the houses' eaves, the words of the Buddhist mantra shaking loose and flying out onto the wind.
Om Mani Padme Hum
. Up the hillside, in a stone-walled field next to a whitewashed house, Susan could see the Sherpas setting up their tents. She could hear the sound of singing, women's voices, high and clear. They were praying to Yama Raj, god of the underworld, for the long life of their brothers. It was the last night of Tihar.