Authors: Linda Leblanc
All Dorje could see was a red blur as the pendulous sleeve rose and Mingma struck back with the vengeance of an angry god. “You corrupted him with your cursed blood money and sent him onto Everest.”
“Wasn’t me. He saw where the future is and wanted it. Lhakpa wasn’t like you, a stubborn old dog with its tail curled so tight it can’t straighten out.”
Dorje covered his ears and yelled, “Stop it! Stop it! I’m sick of your fighting. Beth needs to go down and the others are still up there. They all need your help now!”
“I will show them the way,” Royd interjected, “while you and your father take Beth.”
After consuming the first water in days, the Norwegian left with Pemba and four yaks. Squinting into a bright sun now, Dorje watched steam snorting from their nostrils as they plowed up the hill in his jagged path. With visions of Sangbu and the others screaming from the icy depths of some chasm, he retreated from guilt and despair by turning his thoughts to Beth and his father.
“Your woman is shivering but her skin is hot,” said Mingma. “My most gentle yak will carry her to the monks at Tengboche. But tonight we must stop at a
yersa
where we stored food, water, dung, and blankets on the way up. Many trekkers are lost.”
“And you came for me,” Dorje said, incredulous that his father had risked the cold.
“Now perhaps you will stop all this nonsense and I won’t have to worry about you so much.”
Worry about you so much?
The words halted Dorje in his tracks. He was grateful and didn’t want trouble with his father, but fourteen years of anger and disappointment bubbled into accusing words that appeared on his tongue and would not be silenced. “Why do you worry now when you never did before?”
“What are you talking about?”
“How . . . how can you ask that when you abandoned your sons and stopped loving them?”
Eyes averted from Dorje, Mingma continued with an unbroken stride. “I never stopped loving you.”
The anger had smoldered too many years for Dorje to let go. “Then why did you never come for us?”
Mingma’s voice hardened. “It’s too cold now. You must wait until tonight, my angry son, and we will finally speak of this.”
With one yak for Beth and another for gear, Dorje and Mingma returned using the animals’ earlier path and reached the sole hut at Phulong Karpa just as the setting sun cast a pink wash across the white landscape. No one spoke. Only the clanging of yak bells and Beth’s persistent, deep-throated cough broke the silence. After building a dung fire and supplying the young people with dry clothing, wool blankets, and water, Mingma went outside to give them time alone.
Sitting next to the hearth, Beth was still shivering uncontrollably. “I’m soooo cold. Hold me.”
“I will as soon as you are out of these wet clothes.” As he unbuttoned her shirt, Dorje noticed flat, rose-colored spots that had not been there before. Not wanting to alarm her, he distracted Beth by pulling a shirt over her head while he checked for more and discovered the rash covered her entire lower chest and abdomen. A scrap of fear attached itself firmly to his ribs and wouldn’t let go.
Wrapped in two blankets, he was holding her by the fire when Mingma knocked and entered. “How is she?” he asked in Nepali.
Dorje tightened his jaw to keep his voice from wavering. “She has red spots all over her chest and is still too hot. What does that mean?”
“That a
shrindi
or witch has possessed her. We’ll leave at first light for Tengboche.”
Staring at Mingma, Beth said, “Is your father really here? I thought I was dreaming.”
Dorje wanted to give her only good news. “Yes, and he just told me you are the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.”
“Thank you,” Beth said, nodding at Mingma. “Does he understand?”
Dorje chuckled. “No. Not a word of English. We can speak of love all night and he will think we are talking only of yaks and the storm.”
As Beth giggled and nestled closer to him, Dorje tried to ignore the nervous field mice who had again invaded him, scurrying about in a fearful frenzy. In order to squelch them, he would hold onto Beth all night and believe the monks could exorcise her demons. After a meal of
tsampa,
nak
cheese, cold
chapatis,
and tea of which she ate very little, Beth lay on the bench wrapped in her sleeping bag, her head in Dorje’s lap.
To keep from thinking about the rash, fever, and coughing spells, he looked at his father lying on the other side of him—the closest they had been since Dorje’s return to the Khumbu. “You promised we would talk later,” he said quietly, not wanting to wake Beth.
Mingma shouldered himself upright and closed the blanket over his chest. “I have started to tell you many times, but your anger always comes between us. Can you put it away long enough for me to explain?”
“I will try.”
Hands folded in his lap and eyes to the floor, Mingma said, “Sometimes, especially when we’re young, we don’t always make the right decisions. And so much was happening when you were six and seven that I . . . ” He paused and opened his thumbs in a kind of shrug. “But none of that matters to you.”
“None of what?”
Mingma was silent as if he didn’t want to go on.
“What was happening that was more important than your sons?” Dorje demanded.
“I didn’t say more important.”
“You watched us being dragged away, crying for you, and did nothing about it.”
“Your mother wanted to leave me and I couldn’t talk her out of it. Away for months at a time on trading trips, I couldn’t have taken care of two young boys. I had to let you go.” His shoulders arched and his back stiffened. “I don’t know where to begin. As a boy, I was educated in Tibetan monasteries while my father traded there.”
“You could have done that with us,” Dorje said, as if pleading his case now would change the past.
“No. Things were different then. And you are very impatient,” his father added frowning. He shifted onto the other hip. “I knew early on that I didn’t want to be a monk, so at fifteen I disrobed and gave back my vows. When I was seventeen, my father needed an alliance with a wealthy salt trader, so he arranged a marriage with his daughter.”
“My mother?”
“Yes. She was from a different village. And although we had never seen each other before, we learned to care. But there was never real passion or love. I found that years later . . . with a Tibetan woman.”
Stunned, Dorje suddenly didn’t recognize the man next to him. Mingma was no longer the pacing, indomitable figure whose eyes could impale him to the wall but a man desiring the same depth of passion he felt for Beth. Of all the possible explanations he’d conjured up over many years, this was not among them. “What happened to her?”
Hands clenched tightly between his knees, Mingma stared at the fire. “I’ve made some bad decisions in my life but none as terrible as that one. For years Nimputi begged me to bring her to Nepal. She was scared of what was happening around her. Chinese troops occupied the cities and claimed Tibetans must return them to the Motherland.” Still gazing into the fire, Mingma pressed his fingertips together. “I was young and ambitious, too absorbed in trading animals to really understand what was happening—not the way she did. Then one year, she told me rumors of Tibetans in Kham fighting back. The Chinese retaliated by destroying villages, torturing and executing thousands. This region was far to the east, away from Nimputi’s home. I didn’t believe she was in immediate danger, but I promised to return for her and our children as soon as I finished trading in India.”
“Children?”
His fingertips splayed together, Mingma tapped them lightly against his lips. “Yes, two young girls.”
Tibetan sisters. Unprepared for this, Dorje didn’t know what to feel: anger, jealousy, curiosity. “But what about us?”
His father turned to him with a surprised look. “My feelings hadn’t changed. I loved you as much as always and planned to take care of you and your mother. Many Sherpas have two wives, especially those who travel, but I waited too long. She had heard stories of Nimputi before I asked her permission, and that caused her to lose face. Feeling disgraced and betrayed, she walked away from me and took you with her.”
Understanding now the angry voices in bed the night his father returned and the raging silence the following days, Dorje couldn’t condemn him for having wanted love. If he were married to Shanti now, would he not be guilty of the same? Dorje ran his hand along Beth’s sleeping body, feeling the curve of her hip, the slenderness of her waist. The thought of anyone taking her from him sent a chill through his bones. With unexpected compassion for his father, Dorje asked, “What happened to her?’
Mingma’s chest rose and then let out slowly as if the air were too heavy to breath. “I don’t know.” Leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, he buried his face in his hands. “I never believed the Chinese would commit such crimes. I never . . . ” His voice faltered. “Never thought they would harm women and children.” When Mingma lapsed into silence, Dorje waited, trying to imagine the visions haunting his father.
“I went back for them right after India, but when I arrived in her village . . .” He folded his hands as if squeezing them would mitigate the pain. “It had been destroyed. The buildings were in rubble, broken glass and wood everywhere. From a large open grave came the sickening stench of death. Searching through hundreds of decaying bodies, I prayed I wouldn’t find them. I wandered for months, half crazed, asking everyone I met what had become of the others in her village. And it was always the same. No one would talk to me. I was a stranger—someone to be feared. The Chinese had created so much distrust that people were afraid of their own neighbors betraying them.
“Anyone accused of believing in the old ways before the Chinese
liberated
Tibet was subject to
thamzing
, what the Chinese called a struggle session. I witnessed one of these horrible scenes where people were brought to a courtyard and questioned about the old society. Any kind of wrong answer resulted in immediate beatings and execution. I stood helplessly while soldiers wrapped a man in a blanket and set him on fire, and I watched them behead and disembowel another.” Shaking his tightly clenched hands, Mingma stared at the ceiling with a strange laugh. “All this time the Tibetans thought I was spying for the Chinese while I was in constant fear of the Chinese thinking I was Tibetan.”
Dorje sympathized with the urgency and pain of Mingma’s search, but a young boy aching for his father didn’t care about Tibetans or Chinese. He simply wanted him back. “Then you should have left them and come home to us.”
“How could I?” Mingma sat back with the color draining from his face. “All around me, Tibetans were starving because Chinese troops confiscated their crops and shipped them off to the Motherland. I knew my wife and children were hungry somewhere. I couldn’t abandon them.”
“You did us,” answered the angry man-child.
Dropping his hands in his lap with an impatient look, Mingma said, “I had hoped my oldest son would have more compassion. You and Nima were safe with your mother, but I didn’t know the fate of Nimputi and our children. I had been without food for many days and my stomach was eating away at itself. So I finally gave in and joined others scavenging through refuse thrown to the pigs. But I still couldn’t bring myself to break apart the manure of soldiers’ horses looking for undigested grain.”
When Mingma paused again, Dorje thought of the debilitating hunger and thirst of the previous days and couldn’t imagine enduring it for weeks and months. His father continued a few minutes later. “As always, I asked if anyone knew of the people from Nimputi’s village and got no reply. Remember I was a stranger and not to be trusted. But late one night as I lay shivering in a rocky ditch, a man quietly approached in the cover of darkness and whispered that he’d been there when the soldiers came.”
“Been where?”
“In Nimputi’s village. The Chinese had taken all the valuable religious objects and packed them off to the Motherland. They removed the carved pillars and beams for use in their own construction and then burned the scriptures in a great bonfire in the temple courtyard before destroying the buildings. While the ashes still glowed, soldiers forced the monks at gunpoint to have sex with nuns and made the villagers watch. Anyone who protested was immediately executed. Then they . . .” Mingma took a long breath and closed his eyes as if he couldn’t bear to look. “Marched the women and young girls naked through the village . . .” His voice came from a hollow, dead place as he uttered, “And raped them.”