The Edge (6 page)

I was a little shocked to hear this. Mom rarely talked about how she actually felt, except when I was doing something wrong. “You're going to climb?”

She smiled. “I have all this cool gear. Why wouldn't I climb? I mean, I won't be climbing officially with you for the documentary, but I'm sure there are some pitches an old lady like me might be able to struggle up. And I know what you're thinking. Mom hasn't climbed in years. She isn't in climbing shape. Blah, blah, blah . . .”

That was exactly what I was thinking.

“But for your information, I've been hitting the climbing gym almost every day for the past six months, while you were at school, or while you were sleeping in. I'm in pretty good shape. I don't think you'll be embarrassed.”

“More like inhibited,” I said.

“Liar. But thanks.”

Before I came along, Mom was considered one of the best climbers in the world. There were many who said she was a better climber than my dad, although I doubted Josh would have agreed, or if he did agree, ever admit it to anyone. Climbers are competitive. We can't help ourselves. Now that she mentioned it, I saw that she did look leaner and more cut than she was a few months earlier, which went to show that I didn't pay much attention to how she looked. I wondered if all kids did this. If she were a friend of mine, and not my mom, I would have noticed and said something.

“Wanna go for a hike?” I asked. “See if we can find the others and the climb master?”

“Maybe we should take some gear just in case we see something we want to climb.”

“I like how you think.”

We stuffed small packs with rope, carabiners, quick draws, harnesses, chalk, belay gloves, flashlights, knives, helmets, tricams, camming devices, hexes, nuts (not the kind you eat), water, and energy bars. Gotta love gear.

Ebadullah and Elham had a short conversation with each other as we slipped into our heavy packs. Ebadullah wandered over to the film crew, fifty feet away, and squatted down to watch their gear sort, which was probably more interesting than our sort because they had camera and sound equipment in addition to the climbing gear. Elham said something to me in what I guessed was Pashtun.

“I think he's offering to lead us to the others,” Mom said.

TRYING TO KEEP UP WITH ELHAM
was like trying to keep up with someone riding a dirt bike. He moved upriver over the loose rocks, or scree, effortlessly, with his hands locked behind his back, like he was floating instead of walking. We almost had to jog to keep him in sight.

“His backpack is tiny,” Mom pointed out.

“I don't think it would make any difference. He'd still walk the pants off of us.”

Elham took a sharp left onto a narrow, twisting animal trail and headed straight uphill. His rapid pace didn't alter, and soon he disappeared. We stopped to drink water. I don't think Elham was even carrying water.

“Bet you a dollar that when we get to the trailhead, Elham is napping in the shade of a tree,” Mom said.

“You're on.” The only reason I took the bet was that I was pretty certain there wouldn't be trees at the top of the trail. Trees and bushes need water, and what lay ahead was as dry as any landscape I had ever seen.

Mom took the lead and set a pretty fast pace herself . . . a pace I could have kept up with, but didn't, because I didn't want to rush. I wanted to enjoy the feel of Afghanistan under my old boots.

It isn't long before she vanishes like Elham. I'm climbing alone. The rocks slip and crumble under my boots. In several places I have to use my hands to catch myself from skidding backwards on the scree. After one of these skids, I pause to catch the view, but what I'm really doing is catching my breath. I see something move a couple hundred feet above me along the cliff face. A flash of dusky white. Elham? His pants and kurta are white, a soiled white, but he couldn't possibly be this far ahead, nor could he be traveling horizontally on a sheer cliff in sandals. I wipe the sweat from my face and shade my eyes against the glare of the setting sun. I wish I'd thought to bring sunglasses and binoculars, both of which Plank provided. I catch the flash of white again. It isn't Elham. It isn't Mom. It's a
shen
. A snow leopard. It makes an impossible leap. Twelve feet. Maybe fifteen. Up the sheer rockface. Landing on a narrow shelf as if it's lighter than air. Impossible. A hallucination, a flashback caused by altitude, dehydration, sun, jet lag, or a combination of all four. But it isn't. The cat pauses on the narrow ledge and looks down at me. I see its thick tail clearly, flicking back and forth . . .

“You okay?”

Mom had backtracked to check on me.

I pointed up at the cliff. “Did you see him . . . or her?”

“Him or her what?”

“The . . .” I scanned the wall. There was no sign of the
shen
. “I guess I just imagined—”

“I saw,” a familiar, but completely out of place, voice said.

Now I really thought I was having an audio hallucination. I turned toward the sound of the voice to confirm that I had officially lost it. Standing up the trail just past Mom was a man.

It wasn't Elham.

Mom turned and looked at the man. “I don't understand. What did you see?”

“A
shen,
” Zopa answered.

I translated. “A snow leopard.”

Seeing Zopa in the Wakhan Corridor is less likely than spotting the
shen
on the cliff. As far as I know, he has never been out of Nepal and Tibet, where I last saw him standing on a road in the middle of nowhere as I left my failed climb and headed home. When I asked him, on that lonely road, how he had gotten there ahead of me, which was impossible, he had shrugged, showed his thumb, and said he had hitchhiked. He had also found the time to get rid of his climbing equipment and his Sherpa clothes, shave his head, and put on an orange Buddhist robe. He took me to the airport in Kathmandu and thanked me for what I had done for his grandson, Sun-jo, on Everest. It was the least I could do. Zopa's son, Ki-tar, died saving my father's life on K2. I'm not close to my father, but a debt like that had to be repaid.

THE ORANGE BUDDHIST
robe was gone now, replaced by jeans, a T-shirt that had seen better days, a vest, scuffed hiking boots, and a battered baseball cap that looked like he had picked it up out of a ditch. Two coils of rope were slung across his broad chest like bandoliers. White stubble was growing beneath the cap. He'd been away from the monastery for a while.

I am obsessed with the mystery of things. Not solving the mysteries. Observing them. And Zopa was the most mysterious human I had ever met.

“You're the climb master?”

Zopa shrugged.

I almost laughed.

The shrug.
This is what everyone does when you ask a question about Zopa, because they don't know the answer. This is what Zopa does when he is asked a question he doesn't want to answer or you ask a question he doesn't think is worthy of an answer.

Of course Zopa was the master for this ridiculous climb in Afghanistan. Who else could it be?

“You've met my mom.”

“She is just as I knew she would be. Stronger than you. And much stronger than your father.”

Mom was smiling. I wondered if she was aware that this was probably the best compliment she had ever received.

“I must go back to the top to make sure no one has fallen.”

Mom and Zopa scrambled up the slope like a pair of mountain goats. I took my time, enjoying the view of two of my favorite people negotiating the steep scree.

Their trail ended at a sheer wall several hundred feet tall. Zopa, Mom, and Elham waited for me outside the entrance of a cave opening big enough to drive a bus through.

“You have light?” Zopa asked, fishing his headlamp out of his vest pocket.

Mom and I pulled out our new expensive headlamps and slipped them over our foreheads.

Zopa pulled off a coil of rope and handed it to Mom. “You will check on the young climbers?”

“I would be honored.” Mom slipped the coil around her neck.

Mom and Zopa had never met. She only knew him through what I had written about him on Everest. He didn't know her at all, but somehow he did. Now he was asking her to check on his climbers. Deciding about someone at first glance is so Zopa-like.

Elham pointed to the sky and said something in Pashtun.

To my surprise, Zopa answered him back in what sounded like the same language.

“You speak Pashtun?” I asked.

“Kathmandu is an international city. Many people from many countries.”

Typical Zopa answer, which explained nothing. New York City is an international city with many people from many countries, including Afghanistan, and I don't speak Pashtun.

“What did Elham say?” Mom asked.

“He says he prefers to wait outside so he doesn't miss the evening prayer if we are delayed.”

We left Elham watching the sun and followed Zopa into the dark cave. I expected the cave to be cool, but it wasn't. It felt like I was walking into a kiln. It smelled musty and close. Fifty feet from the entrance was a dim shaft of light coming from the ceiling. A single rope dangled from the opening to the ground.

“Chimney,” Zopa said.

I couldn't see the source of the light, but obviously the chimney went all the way to the top of the cliff. Three hundred feet up. Maybe more.

“The others should have reached the top by now,” Zopa continued. “Climb up and meet them. Have them rappel down the north face cliff on the river side.”

I put my pack on the ground. “I'll get my ascenders.” Ascenders are mechanical devices that slide up on ropes and grab, making it easier to pull yourself up. Plank, of course, had included the newest and best, and I was eager to try them. But Zopa shook his head.

“Not you,” he said. “Just your mother.” He looked at her. “Do you need ascenders?”

She smiled. “No.”

She slipped on her gloves, grabbed the rope, hooked her leg around the slack, and started up like a vine snake, with effortless fluidity. I had never seen her climb. It was beautiful to watch, but it's not cool for sons, or climbers, to express how they really feel.

“Showoff!” I shouted.

Off, off, off
. . . echoed throughout the cave.

She smiled down at me, then disappeared behind a boulder. The rope went slack, and a second later it dropped to the ground. She was free climbing.

I coiled the rope and attached it to my pack.

“How are the other climbers?” I asked, but what I really wanted to know was why Zopa didn't want me to climb the chimney.

“One is odd. Two are out of shape. One is pretty good. None are as good as your mother . . . or you.”

“I'm not in great shape either.”

“We watched you and your mother come up the scree. You looked to be in great shape to us.”

“Us?”

“The
shen
and me.”

“I was in slow motion.”

“Climbing is not a race.”

I was never sure if my strange conversations with Zopa were a result of his English, which was actually pretty good, or if he just thought this way.

“I'm surprised to see you here,” I said.

“You have to be somewhere.”

“But it's a long way from Nepal. A long way from the monastery. I thought you only came out of retirement to get Sun-jo to the top of Everest.”

“People offered the monastery money. It was decided that I should climb again.”

“Sebastian Plank.”

Zopa shrugged. Although I was sure he knew who Plank was, and all the minutiae of the deal.

“So the monastery made you climb?”

“Nobody can make one climb. It is always a choice.”

Here we go,
I thought. All answers are indirect. Questions are answered with questions. I changed the subject.

“Odd seeing a
shen
here. I saw one a couple of days ago in New York City. In fact, I was looking at a snow leopard at the very moment I got the call to come here.”

“Odder yet to see a
shen
in New York City, where there are no mountains.”

“It was at a zoo.”

“The ghost cat belongs in the mountains.”

“Ghost cat?”

“Snow leopard,
shen, sah, barf
ā
n
Ä«
ch
Ä«
t
ā
, w
ā
wr
Ä«
n p
ṛā
ng, shan, bars, barys, irves, ilbirs, him tendua
. . . it's called many things in many languages, but I like
ghost cat
because it is rarely seen, and not everyone can see it. Your mother did not see it. The other climbers did not see it either, even though it was there in plain sight.”

“My mom wasn't in a good position to see it.”

“She was in a perfect position. She wasn't looking. You were looking.”

It was more luck than looking.

“How long have you been here?”

“Three days. It took me four days to get here from Kabul.”

So Zopa was the old guy Rob was talking about on the jet.

“On the camel and the donkey?” I asked.

“Not all the way. I caught rides on trucks and cars. When the road ran out, I rented the camel. I did not need the donkey, but the owner said they were inseparable. If I wanted the camel, I had to take the donkey.”

“Why didn't you just take the helicopter?”

Zopa shrugged.

“When did the others arrive?”

“This morning. The film crew is with you?”

“Yes. And you know them. JR, Will, and Jack.”

“Good. They are likeable.”

“There's a new guy with them named Ethan.”

“What does this Ethan do?”