The Pale of Settlement (9 page)

Susan's parents' founding myth was this: that her father had caught one glimpse of her mother—then an
NYU
coed with long dark hair— and followed her around for the next year or two—back to Israel, around New York—until she finally gave in and agreed to go out with him. They were a sexy couple; there was no denying that. You could see it in the photographs—in the way her father folded his arm around her mother's waist, in the heavy-lidded, postcoital look in her mother's eyes. Within three months, they were married; seven months later, Susan was born. Not premature.

This myth—that Susan's mother was a flighty spirit whose feet needed to be held to the ground, that with a single glance, her father knew that they were meant to be—persisted, as such myths do, despite the transformations of the years, despite her father's infidelities, her mother's capacity to forgive, their tugs of war and fights. The myth provided roles for them to play: the skittish maiden, the dogged suitor; the one who pulled away, the one who
reeled the other back again. It was possible that they stayed together because of the myth—so her mother could believe that she was free to leave, so her father could believe that he was, in fact, the constant one.

Susan sat in the Namche trekkers' lodge, trying to write a letter to her parents that she couldn't mail until she got back to Kathmandu, meaning she'd already be back in New York when it arrived. Their group leader was sitting across the table, flipping through a two-week-old copy of the
International Herald Tribune
, the headphones of Joyce's Discman on his head.
Making love is a mental disease!
he exclaimed suddenly. For a moment, Susan thought he was talking to her, until she realized those were the lyrics to the song.

Clouds were rolling into the cirque and a fine snow had begun to fall. Susan touched the cornrows she'd let Ross braid in her hair since she wouldn't be able to wash it for the next two weeks. Her scalp felt strangely tight. Already it was hard to remember the smell of the subway, the feeling of high heels, the cursor blinking on her computer screen. She'd stopped feeling that she should check her voicemail or listen to the news. It was good to be away.

At first, Dubi and the others—the plodding Assaf, the kibbutznik Ofer, the Russian Sergei with the missing eyetooth—took the checkpoint seriously. They set their jaws beneath their sunglasses, squared their shoulders, shouted commands into their megaphones, fired warning shots into the air. But it wasn't long before the whole thing began to drive Dubi mad.

Little by little, it became a game, to see what he could make the Arabs do.

Hey, you
.

Hand over those cigarettes
.

Go on, sing us a song
.

Get down on your hands and knees and bray like the ass you are
.

No one stopped him. The commander of the unit leaned back in his chair and chewed on a matchstick and laughed, and everyone else laughed, too.

You're meshuga! they said, tapping a finger to their temples. Dubi took it as the compliment it was meant to be.

Gaza was a landscape made of borders: an
IDF
patrol line, rolls of electrified barbed wire, concrete blocks, a sandbag barricade, a bulldozed field, a concrete post, a road, a trench. Settlers here, Arabs there, the army in between. There, in the borderland, he discovered you could cross the line.

Over the next six days, along the ascending trail to Khunde, Tengpoche, Pangboche, Dingboche, and into the moraine of Everest itself, Dubi kept showing up. He'd appear midmorning along the trail, or at night inside the trekkers' lodge in the hamlet where they'd camped. He slept in the lodge bunkrooms, ate the teahouse fare, drank the arrack
raksi
and the moonshine
chang
. He gave Susan a hard time about her cushy tent and catered meals. He said, How can you stand being waited on by the fucking Sherpas? They smile too much.

He made her laugh.

Each morning he said, So tell me something new, Suzy Q.

So she told him about the characters in her group: the truck driver's adventures trying to retrieve his glove that fell into a fetid
charpi
pit; the skull (human? monkey? yeti?) that the retired shrink bought from an old woman outside a village
gompa
; how one of the
single girls developed acute mountain sickness at twelve thousand feet and had to be carried back to Lukla in a basket on their sardar's back. She told him about her family in Israel, about her cousin Gavi and how close they once had been. She answered his blunt questions (So why don't you come to live in Israel? Why aren't you married? Don't you want to have any kids?) and gave him daily plot updates from
Anna Karenina
, the one book she'd brought along on the trip. She never would have guessed that he'd take an interest in a literary Russian novel, but he was always eager to find out what had happened in the chapters she'd read the night before, as if they were episodes of a soap opera he'd missed. He couldn't get over that Karenin wouldn't give Anna a divorce, or that Vronsky would try to kill himself for love. Russians, he said dismissively. Such people he could not understand.

He told her about his girlfriend, about his mother and her latest man, about his dead father (the tank hero from the Sinai war). He told her he'd like to be a graphic designer, or a film director, or a high-tech entrepreneur. Sometimes he said he'd like to live in California for a while, learn to surf. Other times he said he'd never leave Israel, that all those Israelis living in the States, the
yoredim
, were copping out. She found his twitchy intensity compelling in a way she couldn't quite explain. Mostly, he struck her as being very young.

He's got a major crush on you, Joyce said.

They were arranging themselves for the night, tucking water bottles and contact lens cases deep into their sleeping bags so they wouldn't freeze, pulling on extra long underwear and their nighttime hats. It had been days since they'd taken off all their clothes.

Oh come on, Susan said. She checked the clasp on her watch,
then snapped off her headlamp and pulled her mummy bag up around her face. She said, He's just a typical Israeli guy.

Well, Joyce said, he's cute.

Just that day, Susan and Dubi had been the first to arrive at a field where the Sherpas were setting out their lunch. They lay down on a tarp in the hot sun. A milk-green river flowed nearby, a string of spinning prayer wheels suspended in the stream. Out flowed the mantra, burbling on the rushing water:
Om Mani Padme Hum
. There were the sinuous muscles of his arms. There was the smooth skin along the side of his neck. The sun pulsed red behind her eyelids. The edges of their fingers touched. In the roiling green water, the prayer wheels whirled.

Souvenirs. That was the joke—they were collecting souvenirs. A watch. A pack of cigarettes. A photograph.

Ofer had the Polaroid. He took the picture of Dubi with the bloody Arab. The image was overexposed, so that even then, watching his own ghostly body emerge out of the Gaza haze, it already looked like a memory.

Right off, Dubi hadn't liked the look of him—those obsequious cow eyes, those cheeks all graying stubble topped with greasy hair. Put your arms up, Dubi said, and when the Arab did, Dubi hit him, hard. He felt his fist connect with bone, pain radiating through his knuckles, up his arm. The Arab stumbled backward and collapsed onto the road. Dubi cuffed his hands behind his back. Blood was running from the Arab's nose and he was making a low, whimpering sort of sound. When Dubi pulled the Arab up, the blue cloth of the man's jacket clenched in his throbbing hand, Ofer had the camera out and was pointing it at him.

Smile, he said.

When they got back to the post, everyone said what crazy fuckers they were. The truth was he felt happy then. He felt strong.

At Dingboche, 15,200 feet above sea level, Susan lay on her stomach inside her sleeping bag and tried to read. Anna had just told Vronsky that she was pregnant with his child. Levin was droning on about the beauties of a simple life on the land. Susan couldn't concentrate. She had a pounding altitude headache, the communal cough and runny nose. Even with her Russian soldier's fleece pants and the down jacket on over all her other clothes, she was cold. They were above tree level now, on a rubble-strewn plateau left by the glacier's retreating path. Ama Dablam was behind them and Everest dead ahead, a wisp of cloud snagged across its windy peak. Somewhere up there, people were inching their way across the ridge. Susan would never survive an expedition like that. She'd give anything for a shower, a real bed.

It was too dark to read. Susan crawled out of her sleeping bag and pushed back her tent flap to the cold. She could hear the others coughing, the barking of a dog. Suddenly, Lhotse appeared from behind a snake of cloud, its snowy flank gleaming golden-pink as if lit from within. Then in a swirl of wind, the vision disappeared. She could see why people invested mountains with mystical belief.

In the
thangka
paintings inside every village
gompa
, the Sakyamuni Buddha pointed to the ground, calling the earth to witness. The monks blew horns carved from human femurs. Here we are. See.

The light was almost gone. In front of the tents, Ross stood juggling limes borrowed from the cook. A group of dirty-faced children had gathered around to watch. In down overalls and a multipocket vest, his curly hair sticking out from under a knit cap
pulled low over his brows, Ross looked like a ragged jester holding court. The limes flew up in a circle, over his head and around. The children laughed.
Ooooh, dai!
they cheered.

Inside the teahouse, a Sherpa girl was cooking rice and dal, while an old woman rocked an infant in a cradle on the floor. The yak-dung fire threw off a choking smoke into the chimneyless room, but at least it was fairly warm. The old woman rocked the cradle with her foot, rapidly back and forth, back and forth, in time to her muttered mantra.
Om Mani Padme Hum
. The grandmother looked ancient, hunched and lined, but the girl was surely no more than twenty and the baby just a few weeks old. How could anyone give birth in such a place, a six-day walk from anywhere? They were light-years from the sun, on a rocky, ice-bound moon.

He wasn't the only one.

When the Arab dropped his identity card, Sergei made him crawl after it in the dirt and then kicked him in the head.

Ofer posed two men naked in front of their wives and kids and took their photograph while the rest of the soldiers stood around and jeered.

Assaf let the one-armed merchant cross, but without his donkey cart. Today only one asshole gets through, he said.

They found ways to close the road and keep them waiting at the checkpoint for hours so they'd miss a day of work. They let through the old man who said he needed dialysis, but turned away the pregnant girl. They shot at the little boys who hurled stones at them from behind the concrete barricades. They said, That's the only way they'll learn.

They were average soldiers, average kids. They did the things they did because they could.

Now, here in Nepal, Dubi watched the trekkers—the young Americans and Australians and Japanese and Brits—partying in the teahouses late at night. On his way outside, he stepped over the Sherpa guides and porters who lay sleeping, curled up with the dogs, like dogs themselves, outside on the ground.

He watched them posing together along the trail, in front of tilted mani stones and snowy mountain backdrops, the trekkers and their Sherpa guides, arm in arm. He willed his body not to tense up as he watched them smile.

It came on in the middle of the night: stomach cramps, nausea, the runs. Susan stumbled to the latrine, clutching her jacket closed against the wind. Inside, her headlamp illuminated clumps of soiled toilet paper littered around the feces-smeared hole. She retched. Somewhere, not far away, a dogfight erupted into snarls. Back in the tent, Joyce slept, her breathing ragged in the oxygen-poor air, her mummy bag cinched around her face. Susan fought the urge to wake Joyce up. She lay feverish and shivering in the dark, listening to the rattle of the tent zippers in the wind.

At dawn, the group leader stuck his fur-covered head under the flap and touched her leg. Are you coming? he said. They were getting an alpine start on the climb to Kala Pattar, the black peak overlooking Everest, the Khumbu icefall and base camp. Today was the high point of the trip.

She could hear the others outside the tent, the sounds of Velcro and people spitting and stomping their feet on the frozen ground.

No, go on, she said, I'll just wait here for you all to get back.

She sipped some water from her Nalgene bottle, dizzy, and lay down again. The world had shrunk to the confines of this triangular burrow, this ripstop nylon sky.

Once, as a little girl, she'd gotten lost. They were in the transit lounge at Heathrow Airport, en route to Tel Aviv. Susan remembered waiting in a shop by a revolving rack of books. Her mother stood off to one side. She wore a light blue thigh-length coat. Susan followed the coat around the rack and across the lounge. She reached for the light blue hem—a pinwale corduroy—and held on. But when she looked up, there was a strange woman peering down at her, her eyes empty and surprised. Susan let go and the room tipped, the air squeezed from her lungs. There was an ocean of orange and blue carpet, a forest of bucket seats bolted to the floor. Outside the enormous plate glass windows, jets lifted off into the glare. Susan didn't remember the voice over the loudspeaker calling her name. There must have been shouting and tears, the smother of an embrace, but she didn't remember any of that. She didn't remember being found.

Here on the black shale crest of Kala Pattar, looking out onto the white sea of peaks that marked the border with Tibet, Dubi felt the energy rising like a snake. It rose through his chakras, from the root of his perineum to his head, with a burst of color and a receding rush of heat, like the Kabbalist Sefirot emanating from the void. Each chakra was a spinning lotus blossom wheel. The vibration quickened, his body aligning to true pitch. He was trembling, his tongue thick inside his mouth, a cracking sound inside his head. He was disintegrating into particles of light.