Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

During the meal, we met six young devotees and students, who exchanged stories of what it was that had brought them to the top of the mountain. Abdullah and I listened, without comment.

By the time we’d finished eating the modest meal of daal and rice, it was late. We cleaned our teeth, washed our faces, and settled down to sleep. But my little sleep drowned in a nightmare that choked me awake before dawn.

I decided to beat the early risers to the simple bathroom. I used the long-drop toilet, then took a small pot of water and a piece of soap, and washed myself with half a bucket of water, standing on the pallet floor of the canvas-screen bathroom.

Dried and dressed and cold awake, I made my way through the dark camp to sit by the guttering fire. I’d just built the embers into a flame with twigs of kindling around a battered coffee pot, when Karla came to stand beside me.

‘What are you doing here?’ Karla purred.

‘If I don’t get coffee soon, I’m gonna bite a tree.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Oh, you mean, on the mountain? I could ask you the same thing.’

‘I asked you first.’

I laughed gently.

‘You’re better than that , Karla.’

‘Maybe I’m not what I used to be.’

‘We’re all what we used to be, even when we’re not.’

‘That’s not telling me what you’re doing here,’ she said.

‘What we tell, is rarely what we do.’

‘I’m not doing an aphorism contest,’ she said, frowning a smile and sitting down beside me.

‘We are the art, that sees us as art.’

‘No way,’ she said. ‘Keep your lines to yourself.’

‘Fanaticism means that if you’re not against me, you’re against me.’

‘I could report you for aphorism harassment, do you know that?’

‘Honour is the art of being humble,’ I replied, deadpan.

We were speaking softly, but our eyes were sharp.

‘Okay,’ she whispered, ‘you’re on. My turn?’

‘Of course it’s your turn. I’m already three up on you.’

‘Every goodbye is a dress rehearsal for the last goodbye,’ she said.

‘Not bad. Hello can lie, sometimes, but goodbye always tells the truth.’

‘Fiction is fact, made stranger. The truth about anything is a lie about something else. Come on, step it up, Shantaram.’

‘What’s the rush? There’s plenty more where they came from.’

‘You got somethin’ or not?’

‘Oh, I see, it’s to throw me off, and put me off my game. Okay, tough girl, here we go. Inspiration is the grace of peace. Truth is the warden in the prison of the soul. Slavery can’t be unchained from the system: slavery is the system.’

‘Truth is the shovel,’ she fired back. ‘Your mission is the hole.’

I laughed.

‘ Every fragment is the whole entire,’ Karla said, firing at will.

‘The whole cannot be divided,’ I said, ‘without a tyranny of parts.’

‘Tyranny is privilege, unrestrained.’

‘We’re privileged by Fate,’ I said, ‘because we’re damned by Fate.’

‘Fate,’ she grinned. ‘One of my favourites. Fate plays poker, and only wins by bluffing. Fate is the magician, and Time is the trick. Fate is the spider, and Time is the web. Shall I go on?’

‘Dark funny,’ I said, happier than I’d been in a while. ‘Nice. Try this – all men become their fathers, but only when they’re not looking.’

She laughed. I don’t know where Karla was, but I was with her, at last, in a thing we both loved, and she was my heaven.

‘The truth is a bully we all pretend to like.’

‘That’s on old one!’ I protested.

‘But a good one, and worth a second run. Whaddaya got?’

‘Fear is the friend who warns you,’ I offered.

‘Loneliness is the friend who tells you to get out more,’ she countered. ‘Come on, let’s move it along here.’

‘There’s no country too unjust, too corrupt, or too inept to afford itself a stirring national anthem.’

‘Big political,’ she smiled. ‘I like it. Try this on for size – tyranny is fear, in human form.’

I laughed.

‘Music is death, made sublime.’

‘Grief is ghost empathy,’ she hit back quickly.

‘Damn!’

‘You give up?’

‘No way. The way to love, is to love the way.’

‘Koans,’ she said. ‘Grasping at straws, Shantaram. No problem. I’m always ready to give love a kick in the ass. How about this – love is a mountain that kills you, every time you climb it.’

‘Courage -’

‘Courage defines us. Anyone who doesn’t give up, and that’s just about everybody, is a man or woman of courage. Stop with the courage, already.’

‘Happiness is -’

‘Happiness is the hyperactive child of contentment.’

‘Justice means -’

‘Justice, like love and power, is measured in mercies.’

‘War -’

‘All wars are culture wars, and all cultures are written on the bodies of women.’

‘Life -’

‘If you’re not living for something, you’re dying for nothing!’ she parried, her forefinger on my chest.

‘Damn.’

‘Damn, what ?’

‘Damn… you got… better, girl.’

‘So, you’re saying I won?’

‘I’m saying… you got… a lot better.’

‘And I won , right? Because I can do this all day long, you know.’

She was serious, her eyes filled with tiger-light.

‘I love you,’ I said.

She looked away. After a time she spoke to the fire.

‘You still haven’t answered my question. What are you doing here?’

We’d been husky-whispering in the contest, trying not to wake the others. The sky was dark, but a ridge of dawn the colour of faded leaves hovered over the distant, cloudy horizon.

‘Oh, wait a minute,’ I frowned, realising at last. ‘You think I came up here, because you’re here? You think I set this up?’

‘Did you?’

‘Would you want me to?’

She turned the half-profile on me, that sadder, softer eye searching my face as if she was reading a map. Red-yellow fire shadows played with her features: firelight writing faith and hope on her face, as fire does on every human face, because we’re creatures of fire.

I looked away.

‘I had no idea you were here,’ I said. ‘It was Abdullah’s idea.’

She laughed softly. Was she disappointed, or relieved? I couldn’t tell.

‘What about you?’ I asked, throwing a few sticks on the fire. ‘You didn’t suddenly get religion. Say it ain’t so.’

‘I bring Idriss hash,’ she said. ‘He’s got a taste for Kashmiri.’

It was my turn to laugh.

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘About… a year.’

She was dreaming something, looking out at the dawning forest.

‘What’s he like?’

She looked at me again.

‘He’s… authentic. You’ll meet him later.’

‘How did you meet him?’

‘I didn’t come up here to meet him. I came to meet Khaled. He’s the one who told me that Idriss was here.’

‘Khaled? Which Khaled?’

‘Your Khaled,’ she said softly. ‘ Our Khaled.’

‘He’s alive?’

‘Very much so.’

‘ Alhamdulillah. And he’s up here?’

‘I’d pay good money to see Khaled up here. No, he’s got an ashram, down in the valley.’

The hard-fisted, uncompromising Palestinian had been a member of the Khader Council. He’d been with us on the smuggling run into Afghanistan. He killed a man, a close friend, because the friend endangered us all, and then he walked alone and unarmed into the snow.

I’d been a friend, a close friend, but I’d heard nothing of Khaled’s return to the city, or anything about an ashram.