Adam's Peak (44 page)

They'd reached another clearing, an abandoned tea stop probably, and Rudy, grateful for the distraction, shook off his knapsack and took out his water bottle. While his uncle relieved himself behind some shrubs, he lifted the lid of a rough wooden crate in the futile hope of discovering some food. They'd not yet finished off the package of tea biscuits, but the dry, bland rectangles served only to stir up wistful thoughts of cousin Bernadette's beef inferno and coconut sambol. Predictably the crate was empty, and there was nothing to be found in the mess of planks scattered next to it. Rudy took a swig of water and turned his attention to a blue plastic tarp covering part of the clearing. The tarp, which had apparently served as a barrier between the now-dismantled tea stand and the tangle of vegetation behind it, was strung at one end to a scrawny tree that had fallen across the clearing. Massaging his hip in the drizzling rain, Rudy studied the incongruous sheet of plastic on the mulchy ground. He returned the water bottle to his knapsack. Then he crouched and began picking at the wet knot that attached the tarp to the fallen tree. Uncle Ernie's muddy loafers appeared next to him.

“What's this, men? What are you doing?”

Rudy looked up. “I thought I'd take this thing with us. Not that we'll—I mean, we can still turn back.”

“You're expecting we might spend the night here?”

If anything, the old man seemed excited by the prospect.

Rudy grimaced. “I hope not.”

He desperately hoped not. Sri Pada in the middle of night would be a thoroughly inhospitable place. And yet, as before, he was incapable of doing anything to avoid it, of breaking his inertia and making a decision that would prevent what would certainly be a miserable, even dangerous, experience. They would keep climbing, he supposed, either until they reached the summit or until progress became physically impossible.

Uncle Ernie went to the other end of the tarp, attached to a sturdier tree, and set to work on the knot. “Best to be prepared, though,” he called over his shoulder. “This is good thinking, Rudy. We can rig a shelter out of this.”

They folded the tarp, and Rudy crammed it into his knapsack. He sent his uncle on ahead, then he unzipped his trousers and urinated in the middle of the clearing, facing the trail, daring hypothetical strangers to make a sudden appearance. The sensible part of him wished they would. Some pilgrims or hikers heading back to the base would shake him up.
You're crazy
, they'd say.
No time to get up there now; come back down with us.
When he'd zipped up his fly and no one had appeared, he wondered vaguely if it would be most practical to set up camp immediately, right there in the clearing, while there was still light—fashion a tent out of the planks and the tarp, start scouring the forest for edible plants, drying some sticks to make a fire. The sort of things they must have taught in Boy Scouts. But the Boy Scout ethos, Rudy decided, wasn't designed for circumstances such as his. With a sigh, he picked up his walking stick and carried on, up the interminable steps.

For a stretch of time that might have been two minutes or twenty, as he fell farther and farther behind his uncle, he managed to think of the climbing itself as the objective. He discovered a quiet satisfaction in the measured, meditative planting of his feet and his stick, while even the pain in his hip took on a necessary and gratifying role.
We must imagine Sisyphus happy
, he repeated to himself every few steps, like a mantra. But the final steep approach, for which chain-link railings had been installed, broke his trance. He jettisoned the stick and took hold of the iron chain. If the Toronto girl's recollections could be trusted, they were almost at the summit, though apart from the railings there was nothing to signal an impending climax. The cloud mass was thicker than ever—they'd actually entered it—while wet
branches drooping across the stairway gave the impression that they were being swallowed into the mountain. Hauling himself forward, Rudy tried to recreate the sense of triumph his grandfather had experienced in February 1944. When that failed, he remembered, almost too late, the true purpose of the climb: he was here for Adam. The gruelling ascent was an act of atonement. He couldn't have talked himself out of it if he'd wanted to.

To compensate for his negligence, he concentrated all of his attention and the remainder of his energy on his brother. He pictured Adam in his hospital bed, rested and serene, and imagined that with each near-vertical step he took, he was dragging his brother up from the depths of his languor, up through the enigmatic recovery levels. He started at level one, to be thorough, and gradually advanced, through stages marked by particular degrees of “confusion” and “agitation,” toward level eight, that peak of “purposeful—appropriate” behaviour, according to the Rancho Los Amigos scale. It was hard to know how many steps to allot each level, for the end of the stairway remained stubbornly out of sight. He devoted several to the first five, then, worried that he'd reach the summit before he was done, he decreased the allotment. Between five and six, he slowed down to wipe unexpected streams of sweat from his face. He saw Adam out of bed, walking and conversing. Approaching level seven, he gripped the railing tighter and planted his feet with leaden purpose, while in his imagination Adam steered Zoë like an airplane through the rooms of the house. At level eight, he wasn't yet at the summit, but the mist had thinned, and he'd spotted a small building up ahead. It wasn't the fanciful pavilion of Uncle Ernie's painting, but it was enough.

“Come on, machan,” he whispered. “This is for you. Adam's Peak.”

As he climbed the remaining steps, he returned to the day of the last afternoon tea on his grandfather's lawn. Not the time he spent listening to Grandpa read from his diary, but what came after that: sitting on the lawn next to his father while his sister and cousins squabbled on their makeshift cricket pitch; the news, delivered quietly, without fuss, that Mum was to have a baby, and the parental good sense with which Dad allowed him to choose the baby's name. In the rain and the dark grey gloom, he took a final step, and he was there. He
leaned his forehead against the locked chain-link gate at the end of the route and caught his breath.

But as his lungs calmed and his legs went rubbery beneath him, the rest of him—creepingly, insidiously—mutinied. His stomach cramped and his throat strained; his eyes stung. He couldn't have imagined how it would be when he started out on his pilgrimage, but the reality now was glaring: his achievement was meaningless. He'd made it to the summit of Adam's Peak, was undeniably planted there, thousands of feet high, but what did it matter? For all the formidable exertion, his brother was no better off. Nothing had changed; nothing had been proven. The climb was useless. Even worse, this uselessness that now poisoned the very contact between the soles of his shoes and the final step of the ascent was merely a symptom of something bigger. As a brother, as a son, a teacher, a lover ... he'd failed. The top of Sri Pada might just as well have been the middle of a deserted, frozen plain. Rudy himself might just as well have been lost in his brother's mysterious world. Confused, agitated, exhausted, he coughed and gasped and struck his forehead against the gate.

IN THEORY, THERE WAS JUST ENOUGH TIME
for a fit young person to get back to the base before nightfall. Uncle Ernie might even have made it, on his own. As things stood, though, Ernie had engaged the gatekeeper in a conversation, in the hope that the man would make his tiny shed available as an overnight rest house. Rudy slouched on a bench in the shed, staring out at the darkening sky, under which his uncle and the gate-keeper talked and smoked in the fog, like film noir characters. The inside of the wood plank hut was plastered with newspaper and magazine clippings. Most of them were in Sinhala or Tamil. The few English ones seemed to be about the peak itself, though one rogue article featured the headline “Dozens Killed in Jungle Battle Near Trincomalee.” Rudy dared not read it. Turning away, he concentrated on his own agonies.

His hip was throbbing, and the hot pain radiated down his thigh and across his lower back. Stopping for tea in the gatekeeper's shed had done it. Given a taste of immobility, his body had
packed it in and refused to go on. If the gatekeeper proved unable or unwilling to give them shelter, he and his uncle would be spending the night under the plastic tarp, in less hospitable conditions than the clearing down the mountain had offered. Or Rudy would, anyway, for there would be nothing stopping Ernie from returning to the car.

It did seem likely, however, that the gatekeeper would oblige. It had to be a lonely post, guarding the sacred footprint out of season, and the man had appeared pleased, in a quiet way, to have visitors. When they arrived, he'd escorted them, barefoot, to the pavilion that housed the print, which was marked, as the Toronto girl had described it, by a large stone slab, vaguely shaped like a foot. “Real footprint is underneath,” the gatekeeper had informed them. The stone was strewn with coins and marigolds, hints of a devotion that Rudy could scarcely imagine. But though the relic held no spiritual meaning for him, he found the entire scene moving. Fierce gusts of wind now tore through the fog and drizzle, and when he rang the heavy bell hanging outside the pavilion—once, for his sole ascent of the peak—he imagined himself and his two companions as the only survivors of some destroyed civilization, banished to this harsh outcrop of land and charged with the responsibility of carrying on as best they could.

The fantasy was fleeting, though. When the gatekeeper touched his arm and said, “You like tea?” Rudy could have hugged the man. He took a last look at the grey nothingness beyond the bell, then he limped hurriedly back to the gate, where he and his uncle had left their shoes and socks.

The gatekeeper's shed was furnished with two wooden benches, which formed an L around a small table. Another table was cluttered with magazines, mugs, tins of tea supplies, and a Primus stove on which water was boiled. The tea was good strong Ceylon stuff, and the longer Rudy had sat drinking it in the unexpected comfort of the shed, the clearer it had become that he'd never make it back down the mountain without a very long rest. He'd explained his predicament to his uncle, at which point Ernie and the gatekeeper had gone outside to smoke, leaving the rickety door ajar.

When Ernie ducked back inside, his expression was nonchalant.

“Well, Rudy, everything is arranged,” he announced. “We're welcome to spend the night in here. This chap has a house of some kind up here. He says he'll fetch us some blankets.”

Rudy wondered if his uncle were disappointed not to be camping out under the tarp.

“Thanks for fixing that up,” he said. “Sorry for wimping out on you.”

Uncle Ernie waved his hand dismissively. “Who knows? The way this wind is blowing, we may actually get a view in the morning. Make it all worthwhile, no?” He rubbed his collarbone. “At any rate, I'm going to go with this chap to get the supplies. You'll be fine here on your own?”

Rudy nodded. “Tell our friend I appreciate his help.”

When his uncle and the gatekeeper had left, Rudy hoisted himself up and hopped awkwardly to the magazine table. There was nothing in the stack that he could read, but he selected two fashion glossies with plenty of photos and tossed them onto the other table. He then fished his journal and pen out of his knapsack.

July something or other
. I made it, barely. The top of Adam's Peak. Closest thing to the end of the earth I've ever experienced. Where are you right now, Clare? I wish you were here. I'd make you a cup of tea. This is really good stuff (better than arrack, although I wouldn't mind a swig of that too). Have you ever had decent tea? I guess Scottish people are probably as crazy about it as the English, so I suppose you have. Do you know how it gets made? I could tell you. It's a family business, sort of. The fermenting of the leaves is the most important stage. It's not as exciting as the rolling or the heating, but that's what'll make or break a batch. Goddammit, Clare, I wish you were here. I wish I had some fucking aspirin, and I wish

He gave up. In the fading light, he closed his journal and began flipping through one of the magazines. A long section on wedding wear
featured women in glittering saris and white dresses, posing in front of exotic backdrops. There was a feature on office wear, which seemed to be endorsing East-West combinations. An English-titled “What's Hot, What's Not” section gave Rudy pause as he recognized a version of his sarong and T-shirt combination in the “not” column. He was absorbed in a series of hairstyle makeovers when his uncle and the gatekeeper returned, laden with blankets, a kerosene lamp, and a cardboard box that looked promisingly to contain food.

“Well, we won't go cold or hungry,” Uncle Ernie announced, depositing the box on the table, and again Rudy suspected that the old man might be itching with a frustrated desire to rough it in the bush. Rudy himself, however, could only sink back in immeasurable relief as he noticed, wedged between a basket of hoppers and a comb of bananas, a foil packet of painkillers. Dumbly smiling his gratitude, he made a mental note to write down the angelic gatekeeper's name and address so that he might send a gift when he returned to Colombo. He would have liked to chat with the man for a while; it seemed the least he could do. But the gatekeeper didn't stay. His armful of blankets unloaded, he lit the kerosene lamp and hung it from a hook on the ceiling, said a few words to Ernie, then left, closing the door behind him.