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  The Australian suddenly answered the rhetorical question seriously. “Perhaps her long tenure under the oppressive all-powerful Rana Regime has forced her into this meditative religious state?”

  “What?” Col replied.

  “While other independent countries in the world have gone through a scientific and industrial revolution,” he continued, “Nepali society is frozen in feudalistic isolation, becoming one of the poorest countries in the world.”

  Looking around her, Ellen took in the profusion of colors, collections of gold, brass, and silver jewelry and trinkets strewn across blankets and rugs, ubiquitous ragged and endlessly flapping prayer flags strung across every doorframe, and got the impression that this well-preserved ancient square would have appeared exactly as it did had she arrived a century or two earlier by horse-cart or on foot bearing goods and chattel from Europe via India to trade with these enterprising people. All around there was private commerce; whether they had been trapped in a feudal society or not, these people certainly took it with a smile.

  The trip to the mission at Jiri required a five-hour drive in the old military jalopy, and their small village, the Australian informed them, was better known as the trailhead for trekkers and mountain-climbers making an assault on the South Col of Mount Everest.

  “For a privileged few, flights can be secured from the Kathmandu airport to a tiny airstrip in Lukla,” he explained. “Beyond the treacherous Khumbu Ice-flows and on the cusp of the final ascent on Mount Everest — or Sagarmatha to the Nepalis, meaning, “Goddess of the Sky.” Or Chomolungma to the Tibetans and Sherpas, meaning, “Mother Goddess of the Universe.”

  “That’s very interesting,” Col remarked. “You really know your Nepali stuff, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Well I’ve been here for a fair few years and picked up a little Nepali and Hindi. I met Sir Edmund Hillary once when I was a younger man on one of my first attempts. Did you know that the much less expressive ‘Mount Everest’ moniker known to the western world was established in 1865 in honor of Sir George Everest, the British surveyor-general of India who in 1841 mapped the location of the world’s highest peak?” He continued, “Its height was measured by others, but the peak officially became Mount Everest in the English lexicon. Prior to this it was known for a time simply as Peak B, and then Peak XV. Hillary told me that himself.”

  The guide’s monologue continued for most of the journey, punctuated sporadically by Col’s interjections, but after the third or fourth hour Col’s attention flagged and he found himself dozing to the sonorous sounds of the Aussie’s drone. When he awoke, it was to see the truck pull into a clearing where a ramshackle old wooden building stood forlorn and uninviting.

  “So, is this where our luggage ended up? It’s a long way from Kathmandu. The message said they were somewhere inside the capital.” The village, it would appear, had no other distinction besides the two important nominations of being Sagarmatha’s trailhead and the site of the hospital and school. These two, however, were enough to warrant a dozen or two hangers-on to climb aboard the convoy of trucks and bus and literally hang off the side of the vehicles as they made their way wafting and backfiring across the precipitously steep, death-defyingly narrow and winding cliff-side roads from the outskirts of Kathmandu to these small dusty and sand-soaked hamlets. About half an hour before the final destination, all but one of the hangers-on alighted from their precarious perches on the trucks and tossed a few coins into the hands of the driver.

  Not long after that brief stop, the trees and foliage re-appeared; a distinct drop in temperature and a clearing of dust occurred like a miraculous parting of the sea. Ellen allowed herself to doze a bit while the gravelly road wound higher and higher into the tree cover, and then was awakened with a start when the convoy came to a sudden stop at a place where the light green canopy of trees and light speckled ground cover seemed to consume what little road was left in its arid green jaws. There was no room for the bus to turn, but somehow it did and the driver shut the engine with the bus facing the opposite direction. The silence was nerve-shattering.

  Thanking their armed escorts profusely with smiles and waves, although their knees were jittery and achy and their jaws not yet unclenched, Col and Ellen began to disembark from the truck, holding nothing more in their sweaty palms than the guitar in its case and Ellen’s handbag. One of the young Gorkhas at the front of the bus jacked up his rifle across Col’s chest to suggest they were not quite ready to release their captives into the wild. The driver held up a handful of rupees in his fist and waved them slowly under his eyes. Col put up his hands as if in surrender, looked at the Australian, sitting silently now in his seat, then reached into his trouser pocket and removed a folded U.S. ten-dollar bill. With smiles, the driver snatched up the note.

  “Again?” he said, as more a demand than a question. Col dug deep again and this time surrendered two Canadian twenty-dollar bills. He and Ellen were allowed to disembark. As they exited the camouflage-painted truck, they saw two soldiers carrying several boxes from the bus onto the veranda of the hospital.

  “What’s going on there?” Col asked the Australian.

  “I presume those are your things,” he replied sheepishly.

  “What things?” Ellen inquired, her eye now catching a familiar leather trunk being lugged up the stairs by a scrawny boy soldier. “Oh! Those are OUR things!” she declared, abruptly panicking. “You’ve brought them here along with us! Did you know they were with us all along? Why didn’t you tell us?” Her eyes rolled involuntarily as she thought about the last seven or eight hours of bumpy careening road dust. “We were meant to pick those up and take them back to Thailand with us!”

  “No, Ma’am, I didn’t know they were in the truck. I’m in the dark as much as you. I’m so sorry. I was told to accompany you lovely people here to make sure you arrived safely. I’ll just be heading back now with this burly lot. Here is my number in Sydney, if you get in a bind.” He handed them a crumpled calling card which read:

  Darren Grimes

  31 Elizabeth Street

  Surry Hills NSW 2010

  Australia

  61 2 9215 9190.

  The driver interjected, “Instructions to take you and your tings here to Jiri. For hospital-school. We are very much here now. Namaste!”

  With this announcement he fired up the loud shotgun engine and sped away, spraying copious amounts of dust and gravel at the travelers before they could say another word, their jaws slack in spite of dry dust settling unceremoniously on disbelieving lips.

  The hospital was a plain raw timber building, a schoolhouse in a former guise. While they were careening on the cliff-bending road into Jiri, Darren had explained to them that it was built by a doctor from New Zealand about ten years ago after he arrived as a “tourist-slash-mountaineer” and discovered the good natured half-naked Sherpa children running about in the spring snow with “ … nary a stitch of warm clothing or a pencil to write with.” Illiteracy was never considered a handicap in this part of the world, but the altruistic young doctor raised the funds back in his native New Zealand and returned a year later with medicines — penicillin, antibacterial ointments, and aspirin — plus a substantial stash of funds to build a two-story, seven-roomed house that doubled as a school and a temporary surgery for his annual five-week holidays in Nepal, during which he undertook to perform the most pressing medical or surgical procedures required during the first week, before packing up his rucksack again and trekking up to Sagarmatha.

  Initially the Sherpa villagers flocked to the doctor to have themselves prodded and poked and a stethoscope held to their children’s tender chests. But over time the prodding and poking were deemed unnecessary, and eventually the doctor found his schoolhouse abandoned and announcement of his annual visits eliciting a major exodus of residents to the higher reaches of the mountain ranges during the summer months
he was due to be in residence. Recent efforts, however, to recruit teachers from New Zealand and Australia, as well as the occasional medical locum, were met with some enthusiasm, and there was hope that the school at least would be resurrected in the next year or so.

  It seemed that Ellen’s qualifications as a teacher were the reason she was redirected to Nepal, without her prior knowledge of this, rather than Thailand, where, as it turns out, somebody else was assigned to administer a hospital run by Catholic missionary doctors and nuns on the outskirts of Chiang Rai. After several unsuccessful attempts to attract the attention of the caretaker of this particular hospital-school by rapping vigorously on the door and every window they could reach, the Tenderfields sat down among their boxes and luggage to consider what to do.

  After a time, they found an unlocked window and Col crept into the building with less alacrity than he would have liked, and let his wife in through the proper threshold. Not surprisingly, no one was in residence or attendance, and from what they could see, no schooling or medical activities had occurred in there for quite some time. A light layer of dust covered the floors and remaining few bedraggled school desk-chairs. Half a dozen child-sized chairs with attached desk tablets were shoved in one corner of the large room; the expansive black chalkboard was covered with some sort of Nepali graffiti, scratched out across the slate with a small stick of white chalk which lay now in pieces on the floor below the board. Where the teacher’s desk should have stood, Ellen pulled up a small desk-chair and laid down the guitar case, which she had never let go.

  “This is not what I planned for us, Col,” she sighed. “We are supposed to be in Chiang Rai right now, tending to the needs of those poor tribal children, not sitting here in an empty schoolhouse with no children to teach or tend to. What shall we do?” To her surprise, her husband was smiling wanly as he looked around him at the empty room.

  “I think this is a rather good alternative, my dear,” he replied cheerfully as she shot back a perplexed and annoyed expression. “I didn’t want to tell you this, but I had heard from one of the sources at the Y in Bangkok that the mission in Chiang Rai was actually a leper colony! Imagine us there?”

  “A leper colony?” Her annoyed expression transformed into a look of horror. “Really? You should have told me!”

  “Yes, I know, dearest. I was going to tell you as soon as we collected our items and were heading back. I didn’t expect this … this diversion. Of course, that source could have been wrong, you know. But, I tell you, I think this could be a very good diversion indeed!”

  “Do you really think so?” Ellen was now curious at her husband’s rather gleeful look.

  “Yes, I do. Come now, we’ll gather up the children from the various villages, and eventually we will figure out a way to bring some new books and pencils up here to these wretched mountains, and teach them ourselves.”

  “We will?”

  “Yes. I’m rather keen to try my hand at teaching math.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes! It will be refreshing. And you can teach them to play the guitar, on top of everything else you will teach them. Now, if I recall correctly, Darren — before he turned into a rather dodgy character — said there had been a recent recruitment drive for teachers and a doctor in New Zealand and Australia; soon enough there will be a swarm of others here to help.”

  “And if they don’t come?”

  “And if they don’t come? Well, then we will have to build it up ourselves. Simple.”

  “Yes, I see what you’re saying,” she concurred finally as the possibility of resurrecting the school became a rather interesting challenge. She imagined all those cherubic cherry-cheeked children filling the seats before her. Children in clean uniforms seated in rows of desk-chairs, eyes gleaming, tidy heads neatly plaited and bobbing with excitement as the roster is called. One by one they call out sweetly, “Present, Missus Tenderfeeld!”

  All at once her husband changed the subject. “Now, let’s hear you play that guitar again!” he bellowed.

  “What?” she stammered still lost in thought.

  “The guitar!” he protested with a wry smile. “The guitar; let’s hear you play it again! Not only is it a ghost instrument, but it’s a receptacle of secrets. What next from this extraordinary creature? Will it dance a jig at the next full moon?”

  “What?” she replied indignantly. “What are you going on about, Col? Honestly, one would think you have completely lost your mind. First you want to do the impossible and resurrect a school no one here wants — in fact you absolutely abhor anything that is impractical! And then next you want me to teach them something as unproductive as playing guitar?”

  “How can you say that? I like music — just never knew your ability to play it so well. You never taught the children … ” Col opened the guitar case, lifting out the instrument in question and handing it ceremoniously to his wife of forty-five years, “ … and while we are on the subject of music, how could you have kept that a secret from me all these years?”

  “Probably the same way you kept the secret of the lepers of Chiang Rai a secret from me!” she retorted, taking hold of the finely crafted instrument.

  “Hardly the same thing!” Col replied. It was then that they both heard the haunting melody again. It was slow, rhythmic, and ceremonial like a tribal dance and it lifted their spirits as the weakening light from the pale dusky sun darkened beyond the dusty window.

  •

  The approaching spring season proffered a potential to Lorraine which required much physical and mental preparation. She drifted aimlessly and mostly alone for the two weeks of the honeymoon, which was spent at the manor following the arduously drawn-out wedding celebration. It was near the end of that time that she came to suspect that something was different in her body. Much of the time she felt tired and irritable. Unfamiliar guests appeared on the château grounds out of nowhere and addressed her intimately like family, making her nerves rattle, her heart race, and a cold sweat break out on her brow. Her secret conspired against her. Only her mother, who stayed with her only daughter beyond the wedding, knew something was not right with her. But Lorraine insisted it was only a touch of the flu or something harmless that made her feel unwell. After a week at the château, Sylvie-Marie reluctantly left her daughter, an alien now in the ancestral castle.

  The one person who seemed not particularly interested in speaking to her was her husband, Joël. Perhaps he already recognized the flushed look on her face, or the queasy stomach she nervously clutched behind her new rabbit fur. If he suspected anything, he did not let it show. He was cordial and took a genuine interest in her well-being and comfort within the confines of his family’s expansive estate, but — as far was bedtime rituals were concerned — he continued to leave her mystified by his dispassionate distance. As soon as dinner was finished he retired to the smoking salon with his many cousins and childhood friends. Amongst the merry band of gentlemen Lorraine tried to identify a special one that might become her ally, but the close coterie of school chums seemed determined to close ranks against her and keep cheerfully to themselves in cigar smoke–filled rooms. By the final week, however, she began to worry that their lack of consummation would bring suspicion, particularly if she began to show prematurely.

  At dinner on the penultimate evening of their Loire Valley stay, Lorraine placed a warm hand on her husband’s thigh as they drank yet another champagne toast at the start of the first course. She felt his leg contract suddenly and he nearly spilled his champagne as he turned to stare at her with indignant eyes.

  “Que c’est-?” he stopped himself abruptly and she watched as his outrage was immediately checked, and his expression turned theatrically into embarrassment. “I’m sorry, my darling,” he corrected himself. “What was that you were saying?” Lorraine smiled wanly at this sudden change of deportment.

  “I was jus
t saying … uh … um … ” she stammered, whispering now. “Uh, that this champagne is quite nice. Makes me quite giddy, you know.” Her eyelashes flew up and down as she stared expressionless at his champagne flute. Both hands, now above the table, moved to the tall glass, which she grasped in one hand and began to stroke with the other ever so slightly. A light-headedness overtook her and the sudden pallor of her face alarmed him.

  “Are you … are you all right?” he queried, taking hold of her hands strangely cold, almost clammy.

  “I’m so sorry,” she replied, closing her eyes and shaking her head. “I think it’s already gone to my head. I must have played too much tennis this afternoon. Will you take me to our bed, right now?”

  The request was made rather loudly, causing the older guests to shift in their seats and clear wobbly throats, while the younger ladies, particularly the unmarried lot, chirped and blushed, attaching lips to champagne glass to quiet giggles and avert stares.

  “All right, my sweet,” Joël replied in a sugar-coated voice. “Right away; let us go.” He stood up, asked his mother across the table if they could be excused, then helped his new bride from the table. Holding her upright, they retired from the room. Lorraine continued the charade all the way up to the bridal chamber, where, once inside, she locked the door with the large brass key and threw it out the window. As he looked on in surprise, she cornered him beside the bed.

  “We are alone now, Joël. I’m not sure what game you are playing, but I know you can do this.”