Authors: Linda Leblanc
During the night, thin drifts of snow seeped through the roof, and condensation from everyone’s breath froze on the ceiling. Any brush against the fabric caused an immediate storm inside. When Dorje woke in the morning, his bag and clothes were wet. His pad had deflated, leaving his bottom pressed against nearly bare ice. Numb with cold, he fumbled with the zipper but his swollen fingers weren’t cooperating. Knocking his hands together and blowing on them, he tried warming them enough to pick up the frozen boots. Fortunately, another porter had lit the stove, so he and Dorje sat thawing their boots and complaining about how miserable they felt. The smell of roasting leather slowly roused the others.
When Rinji stirred, they realized that in his stupor the night before he hadn’t taken off his crampons and had merely pulled his bag over himself rather than climb inside. Dorje removed the metal spikes so they wouldn’t tear the tent. Rinji was trembling. “I can’t feel my feet,” he gasped so faintly that Dorje barely heard him. As a young child, he’d seen a climber coming down with black, frostbitten hands and face and later heard they had cut off the man’s fingers and toes. Dorje leaned out the door and yelled for help. Mark and Jarvis came running. “I think his toes are frozen,” Dorje explained.
Mark quickly unlaced Rinji’s boots and carefully pulled them off. “Tell him to try wiggling them.”
“I can’t,” Rinji explained in Nepali, his voice growing more urgent. “Can’t feel anything at all.”
Removing Rinji’s socks, Mark said his feet were hard and icy to the touch with the blue-white tinge of frostbite. “We’ll warm them slowly, but I think it’s already too late,” he whispered to Jarvis, seeming to forget that Dorje could understand.
“He wore his crampons all night,” Dorje added, “and slept out of his bag.”
Mark cupped his hands around Rinji’s toes. “The metal probably drew more cold into his feet.”
“I carried his load most of the way,” said Dorje.
Jarvis nodded. “Yes, we all heard about that.”
Lowering the porter’s legs to the floor, Mark set them closer to the fire while he told Dorje, “Explain that he must return to Base Camp immediately and someone will carry him.”
“I’ll go,” said a porter from the rear of the tent. “I don’t want to work anymore.”
“Me either,” said another, and then a third and fourth.
Soon they all told of knowing someone who had lost fingers and toes with frostbite. The mountain gods were angry because their abode had been polluted by sex and excrement. Dorje translated their desire to leave but said nothing about angry gods, knowing the climbers wouldn’t understand. Once again he voiced Mark’s appeal to their pride and natural desire to help. The porters finally bargained for a full day’s rest at Camp II if they stayed.
“I’ll take him,” Dorje said, his heart aching to see Beth. “I am the strongest and fastest porter you have. Plus, I can translate between him and the doctor.”
While they were preparing a
doko
to transport Rinji, Marty sauntered over to the tent with a cup of the hot lemon drink they used to fortify themselves. “What’s up, Buck buck?”
“Rinji can’t walk. I’ll carry him to the doctor in Base Camp.”
“Base Camp? I’m going too.” Marty told Mark and Jarvis, “The snow covered our trail. I’ll need to guide them down.” When the men still expressed doubt, he added, “Dorje and I need to practice working as a team if we’re going to the top together.”
“We’ve already picked the assault teams and you’re climbing with Jarvis,” said Mark.
The Brit threw his hands in the air, walked away a few steps, and strode back, his face as hard as the black face of Everest. “I wouldn’t trust my life ten feet with Marty. He’s an irresponsible madman and I won’t climb with him.”
“Then who?” asked Mark. “Everyone is paired up.”
“I don’t know. We’ll decide later. Anybody but him.”
A mantle of new, unstable snow concealed the hundreds of crevasses that crisscrossed the landscape where they had passed only the day before. Marty probed endlessly, searching for deadly fissures with Dorje cautiously following in his tracks. Once again, he sank knee deep but his spirit rose with visions of standing on the summit, higher than birds can fly. The promise of accomplishing something that grand made all else bearable. But his mood suddenly plunged back to earth when Marty announced, “I’m really going to Base Camp to see Beth again because wacky Marty is crazy in love for the first time ever in his life.” His words leapt into the air and chased each other around like giggling children. Dorje wanted to scold them and drive them home without supper. They had no right to be joyous. Beth was his love, his life, and his future. Not Marty's.
Beth was going crazy at Base Camp. Every time an avalanche thundered down a mountain or a sérac toppled in the icefall, she wanted to scream. It was worse than waiting for a soldier to return from war because she was at the battlefront hearing the artillery. And this enemy was powerful, unpredictable, unwilling to negotiate. All she could do was light a juniper bough every morning and pace around chanting, “
Om mani padme hum,
” to Dorje’s gods. Her only respite was conversing and playing cards with the British doctor and French reporter who shared this god-forsaken, groaning glacier with her. Assuming she was here simply to write a story, they had no idea the hell she was enduring. To make things worse, those damn guilt gnats kept flapping their wings to remind her that Eric was probably getting his head blown off somewhere in Nam because of her.
Nights were the worst. Even wearing her parka in the sleeping bag, she could not get warm without Dorje’s body heat. She lay shivering and wondering where he was and if he longed for her half as much as she did for him. Every afternoon, she hiked to the base of the icefall and stood for hours searching between the pinnacles for him to travel down the ice river and throw himself in her arms. As the days blurred together in this frozen nightmare, her stomach gnawed at itself.
The only other denizens were a cook and two kitchen boys, a Sherpa who periodically dug a new
charpi
and took care of the camp in general, numerous porters who shuttled fresh eggs and fruit from the lower Khumbu villages, plus curious village eyes coming to observe an expedition after the four-year hiatus. Late one afternoon, Beth and her two western companions were playing a three-handed game of hearts in the dining tent. Just as she was about to slap the queen of spades on the doctor’s trick, loud shouts and commotion from outside the tent panicked her. Had the awful moment she’d been dreading finally arrived with news of something happening to Dorje? Dropping their cards, they all raced to the icefall and watched two dark figures slowly making their way through the maze of séracs and crevasses. Waiting was interminable.
As the figures neared the end, one of them yelled and started schussing down a narrow valley. Remembering Dorje skiing the first day they met, Beth’s entire being melted in relief until, “Hey, Sweet-ness, I’m back,” careened off the ice with a chilling blow. Marty strutted onto the glacier, dropped his axe, grabbed her face between his gloves, and kissed her. “Glad to see me?”
“Yes, of course,” she answered, dazed. Beth politely stepped back. “What’s happened?”
“One of the Sherpas has severe frostbite in his toes and might lose them. I volunteered to bring him down just so I could look on your radiant-ness again.”
“Which Sherpa?” she asked, her voice growing thin.
“Rinji, the little one who should have never gone up there. But I guess he has three kids and needed the money.”
“A family that needs its father safe and in one piece. And the others?”
“Everyone is tired, cold, and sick,” he said walking her back to camp.
His face was gaunt and had a faint blue cast. “You look thinner,” she observed.
“Yeah. We all have headaches as big as a house, coughs that break your ribs and shred your throat, dizziness. Nobody feels like eating and when you do, it makes you sick. The trail is spotted with colorful vomit stains. One of the French cut his hand and it still hasn’t healed. It’s hell up there and we haven’t even reached the death zone yet.”
“So why do you do this?” she asked, seeking some kind of logic.
Marty perked up and wiggled his eyebrows. Grinning and in his usual singsong voice, he answered, “Because I have to.”
Before she and Marty reached camp, something tugged at her—a feeling, an unheard voice. She turned and gazed at a shadowy image in the distance, bathed in the strange glow of sunset. Dorje had come back to her. On legs trembling like the quaking aspen leaves at home, Beth tried to appear casual as she strolled towards him, her heart racing. They met without an embrace because of Marty and Rinji.
“I was so scared,” she whispered. “Don’t ever leave me here like this again.”
“Don’t worry. I’m the smartest and strongest on the mountain. Nothing will happen to me. Soon I will reach the top and return to spend the rest of my life with you.”
Beth swallowed the tears flooding into her throat. “Are you coming to my tent tonight?”
“The largest yeti could not keep me away.”
She brought her notepad to dinner and tried to distract her yearning by asking every possible question about a porter’s life on Everest. Sitting across from her, Dorje locked his feet around hers under the table with a knowing smile as Marty bragged about keeping his promise to give her the inside scoop. When all the lanterns, stoves, and flashlights dimmed, Dorje slipped through her tent flaps and zipped the door behind him. Naked in a minute, they pulled the sleeping bags over their heads to muffle sounds as they explored every inch, skin on skin.
“You killed me,” he said laughing and then rolled onto his back and collapsed. “I have never felt anything like that.”
“Me either,” Beth whispered. “Me either.”
Dorje dressed shortly before dawn. “I have to go now,” he said, pulling a wool shirt over his head. “But you stay warm here. We will meet again at breakfast.”
With the heat of his body still lingering in her bag, Beth watched him through the door as he started for the porter’s tent. Suddenly a figure confronted him spitting angry words. “I heard voices in her tent when I got up to piss, but I thought it was the Frenchman or doctor.” He shoved Dorje with both hands, knocking him backwards. “Not you, an ignorant, ungrateful Sherpa.” He shoved him again. “I got you this job and how do you thank me? By fucking the only woman I’ve ever loved. I meant it when I said I’d do anything to keep her.” He charged at Dorje swinging his fists but missed.
“You can’t keep what you never had,” Dorje muttered as they prowled around each other like two angry bulls, steam pouring from their mouths.
“Beth’s mine. You don’t understand western women.”
“But I know her,” Dorje said. “And you will never have her.”
“You bastard,” Marty growled and punched him square in the face.
Dorje checked the blood streaming from his nose and returned a blow to Marty's cheek that sent him reeling onto the ice. He lunged on top of the American and they rolled across the glacier with flailing fists.
“Stop it,” Beth ordered, standing outside the tent with her bag wrapped around her.
Dorje released Marty's jacket with a final push to the chest and then got back to his feet and stood beside her.
“Marty, I’m sorry,” she said as he slowly rose.
Wiping blood across the back of his sleeve, Marty asked, “How could you let a porter into your tent instead of me? I thought you had more class.”
Feeling Dorje about to explode, Beth grabbed his arm. “Marty, I’m sorry if I hurt you, but I’ve never led you on.”
“When you came here with me, I felt it wasn’t just to write a story.”
“You were right. I’ve been in love with Dorje since last fall and returned to tell him so.”
His face wrinkled in confusion. “Why didn’t anyone bother to tell me?” With a cold, menacing stare, he addressed Dorje with bitterness. “You let me talk about how much I wanted her and how I thought she liked me. But you never said anything. Why?”
“Because you are my friend and I wanted to climb Everest with you,” Dorje answered.
“Well, that’s not going to happen.” Marty snarled. Starting to walk away, he turned and marched back. “And I’ll see that nobody else does either.”
Beth felt Dorje’s body slacken as a sixteen-year dream vanished. “Come back inside. You’re wet and shivering.” As they lay together waiting for the first glow of dawn to crawl across the roof, she didn’t know how to comfort him. Making it to the top was important for his self-esteem, but at the same time she was relieved he would no longer be risking his life. “I have enough for a great story already. We can go back now and arrange for your passport. I can hardly wait to show you all the things in America. Lights and heat that turn on by pushing a button, warm water that comes out of the wall, indoor toilets that flush, machines that wash and dry your clothes, giant stores with everything imaginable to buy, cars to drive instead of walking. Hundreds and thousands of exciting things.”