Every Lost Country - Hardcover

Heighton, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307397394 ISBN 13: 9780307397393

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2010

Synopsis

“The longer you stare at the mountain, the more it seems a refuge above human borders and distinctions and this constant dialogue of violence. Up there, he’d hoped, he and Sophie could step away from trouble for a while.”
 
Lewis Book, a doctor with a history of embroiling himself in conflicts, and his daughter, Sophie, travel to Nepal to join a climbing expedition. One evening, as Sophie sits on the border between China and Nepal, watching the sun set over the Himalayas, she spots a group of Tibetan refugees fleeing from Chinese soldiers. When shooting starts, Dr. Book rushes toward the ensuing melee, ignoring the objections of Lawson, the expedition leader, who doesn’t want to get involved and spoil his chance to be the first climber to summit Kyatruk. Lawson is further enraged when Amaris, a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker recording the expedition, joins Book with her camcorder in hand. When the surviving Tibetans are captured just short of the border, Lawson and Sophie look on helplessly as Book and Amaris are taken away with them, down the glacier into China. From that point, Lawson continues his ascent, and the fugitives are caught in an explosive and thrilling pursuit that will test their convictions, courage, and endurance.

From one of Canada’s finest writers comes a literary page-turner of the highest order. Inspired by an actual event, Every Lost Country is a gripping novel about heroism, human failings, and what love requires. When is it acceptable to be a bystander, and when do life and loyalty demand more?

About this title

About the Author:

Steven Heighton is the author of the novel Afterlands, which has appeared in six countries; was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice along with a best book of the year selection in ten publications in Canada, the US, and the UK; and has been optioned for film. He is also the author of The Shadow Boxer, a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year. His work has been translated into ten languages, and his poems and stories have appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, The Walrus, Europe, Agni, Poetry London, Brick, Best English Stories, and many others. Heighton has won several awards and has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Award, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

One
Border Stone
 
 
Air this thin turns anyone into a mystic. Dulling the mind, it dulls distinctions, slurs the border between abstractions—right and wrong—or apparent opposites—dead and alive, past and present, you and him. The brain, rationing oxygen, quiets to a murmur, like a fine-print clause or codicil. You’re at high altitude for the first time and this mental twilight is a surprise as rewarding as the scenery. This recess from judgement, sedation of the conscience. How your sleep here seems too shallow for the nightmares that await you at a certain depth. You and the rest of the party are basically drunk. Till now you’ve had to treat others for minor problems only, small cuts and contusions, headaches, insomnia, so this intoxication remains a luxury, not a medical challenge. Or a moral one.
 
To you, right and wrong are not abstractions.
 
Still, think of the freedom of those summit squads dreamily bypassing climbers fallen in the Death Zone—the strange luxury of that. What Lawson himself has done. You might have thought twice about joining his expedition as doctor, and bringing along your daughter, if you’d known his story when you signed the contract. But at this altitude your numbed mind has to wonder. Camp One. Put yourself in his boots if you can. Now say for certain what you’d have done, or will do.
 
 
September 20, 2006, 4:17 p.m.
She sees the trouble coming because she knows her father.
 
Sophie sits where she has sat for the last few afternoons, on the flat top of a concrete cylinder rebarred into the glacier, her backside in Nepal and her boots in China—Tibet. The seat of her favourite ripped jeans covers the line of Chinese characters inscribed in the concrete. Beside her stands a lightweight aluminum flagpole not much taller than she is and skewed some degrees off vertical. The breeze cooling her back can’t stir the small Chinese flag, because monsoon winds or, more likely, mischievous Sherpas like Kaljang and Tashi have spooled and tangled the flag tightly to the pole. Come to think of it—and the notion pleases her on a number of grounds, playful, political—she is likely seated a dozen steps or more inside China now. Chinese border patrols have to hike up the glacier and adjust the markers from time to time. A week ago, she and her father and Kaljang and Amaris stood at the edge of base camp and watched the Chinese set up a device on a tripod and take readings and untangle and lower the flag and remove the flagstaff and pry out the marker and roll it laboriously upslope and core new holes in the ice and slot it in. Some of the men were in blue coveralls and black toques like a swat team, others in olive down vests over camouflage gear. They trudged from chore to chore and said little. They ignored their audience, though one of the men in camouflage, maybe eighteen or so, waved shyly and blew kisses to her and Amaris. Amaris ignored him. Sophie waved back. Beside her, Kaljang’s eyes narrowed merrily in his brown face and he showed his nicotine teeth. She snuck a glance at her father on her other side, but he too seemed tickled by the scene, rubbing his salt and pepper stubble, shaking his head affably. He seemed almost himself again up here.
 
The Chinese formed up in a crescent and saluted as they raised the repositioned flag. The red had faded to pink. “There,” her father said. “They just reclaimed the thirty feet of territory the glacier pinched from them.”
 
By four in the afternoon here the sun sets behind the Himalayas, but a quarter-hour later, the cold dusk already deepening, it finds a nock between two summits and reappears, spotlighting the pass and the valley and dyeing the glacier descending into China, so it resembles a vast, glowing channel of lava running down a volcanic slope. It happens a minute or two earlier each day. Yesterday a few others walked over from base camp to watch with Sophie, but today she’s alone with her sketchbook/journal. Perfect. She was a romantic as a child—a keeper of padlock diaries, a lover of horses, fantasy novels, evenings in the dark of the covered porch on her papa’s or mama’s or yiayia’s lap, hearing the natter of rain on the roof shakes, the nicking of drops off the eaves into the garden—and at seventeen she retains enough of that lyrical spirit to choose sunset over the recreational flirtations of the Sherpas in base camp. Kaljang especially. He’s cute, for sure, and to her surprise they like some of the same music, though on the whole she prefers to hang out with—tag along behind—Amaris McRae. She understands herself to have a bit of a crush on her. What girl wouldn’t?
 
Now, as small figures, distinct in the sun’s spotlight, inch toward her up the glacier, she thinks not only of her father but also of Amaris. Amaris will want to be here, to see and film this . . . this what? It’s no border patrol, even at this distance she can tell. She glances over her shoulder at the slopes of Kyatruk, where Amaris, with Wade Lawson and the rest of the summit team, should be back at Camp One after an acclimatization run and a night at Camp Two. The sun in her eyes shuts them hard. She turns back and looks down the glacier. She stands up. The figures, of varied sizes, children, adults, some in brilliant maroon garb, some in parkas, are in hurried, jerky motion, a few coming at a tottery jog. Clawing at the thin air as if pulling themselves up a fixed rope. She catches sight of other figures some distance behind them—the blue swat team and soldiers in camouflage gear. They’re yelling, the cries coming small but emphatic, caroming off the valley’s steep walls. Then another noise she can’t identify—small popping sounds, like someone stepping on bubble wrap. She pulls back the hood of her fleece. A few of the soldiers are halting and falling to one knee, as if resting. More of that popping sound. An awful thought occurs to her. She turns around to base camp, gets a faceful of sun. Visoring her eyes with a hand, she opens her lips to call out. Her father, though—he will probably be first to respond.
 
Kaljang is slouching among the tents at the edge of camp, smoking a cigarette and watching her. It’s becoming a minor annoyance, how she always seems to be on his GPS, but now she’s relieved. He waves, flips back his hair and with the cigarette clamped in his lips he trots toward her on short bowlegs packed into tight jeans. Maybe he hears the faint shouting from below the pass—it’s growing clearer, along with that other noise—or has he just read her anxious posture? “White people are easy to suss out,” he said once in an untypically tentative way, and at first she guessed that he must have heard others, maybe British climbers, use “suss,” and he wasn’t sure he was using it right. Then it hit her—he felt awkward because he didn’t mean all white people were easy to read, just Sophie.
 
She turns back and looks down. The amber light on the ice is shearing to one side. In the widening blue penumbra, one of the lead group has fallen, others stopping to help. Some glance back over their shoulders. She herself edges back from the border stone. Her father will be angry at her for not calling him, but he will hear the shots soon enough and he will come. Kaljang, winded, reaches her side, tosses his cigarette, takes a look down the glacier and clutches her arm through the fabric of her hooded fleece.
 
“Sophie. Come on.”
 
“What? We have to do something.”
 
He pulls her toward a crop of rockfall boulders, another of her sunset lookouts. When the expedition first arrived, Mingma Lama and his nephew Tashi strung ropes between the boulders and festooned them with white scarves and prayer flags in navy, white, scarlet, green, and yellow, and she and her father helped them. Mingma Lama said the flags and prayers would go down with the glacier into China, a gift to the Tibetans. The colours seem weirdly lurid now, hyper-bright. She tugs her arm free. She is taller, maybe even heavier than Kaljang, but he’s always foisting his chivalry on her—helping her over obstacles, grinning as he grapples with her pack, trying to wrench it off her body and lug it himself—and this pushy helpfulness bothers her most when in fact she does require his strength and expertise.
 
“I think the one is shot,” Kaljang says. “Tibetans.”
 
“I know.”
 
A housefly, by the sound of it, has just whizzed overhead. That’s strange.
 
“I’m okay,” she says.
 
He grips and pulls her more firmly and her legs lag, numb and clumsy, as if the tendons are severed. Again she yanks her arm free. As if in refusing his help she might conjure away the situation that has caused her to need it. In air this thin the brain slows, so when things happen quickly, your thoughts straggle—the climbers tell her it’s a prime danger up here, and far worse higher up.
 
“Here,” he says. “Stay.”
 
He tries to push her down behind the nearest boulder, whose grey face in the last of the sun radiates dry heat like a sauna stove. “Dr. Book!” he yells toward base camp.
 
“Don’t call him yet! I need to think. We need to think what to do.”
 
“Please, down.”
 
Jigme and Lobsang are strolling toward them. They hiked down here from Camp One this morning. Jigme is in cargo shorts and a parka and wearing earbuds, wires running down to the MP3 player in his hand. Kaljang flaps his raised palm at them: go back! Jigme shrugs and they keep dawdling over. Kaljang plucks his two-way radio from its holster with a flourish of manly compete...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0307397394
• ISBN 13: 9780307397393
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352