The Pass Above Drangkar

Sea Level, More or Less

*Elevation 30 meters. Woodside, Queens. Pulse 68. Oxygen 99 percent.*

The 7 train came past our building every four minutes in the morning, and I had learned to talk around it the way you learn to step around a crack in your own kitchen floor. I would start a sentence, hear the rails begin to sing from the direction of Sixty-Ninth Street, stop, let the cars go over in their long iron shout, and then finish what I had been saying. My son had never known anything else. When Nima was small he slept through it. When he was six he began to time it on my phone. Now that he was ten he did not hear it at all, which I understood, because I did not hear it either until I had been away from it, and I had not been away from it in six years.

We lived on the third floor of a brick building on Sixty-First Street, two rooms and a kitchen with a window that looked straight across at the elevated tracks. The window glass hummed when the trains passed. On cold mornings the tracks smoked with frost, and the light came under them in long gray bars and lay across the sidewalk and the parked cars and the fruit stand on the corner, where the man from Bangladesh stacked his oranges in a pyramid that never fell. I could see all of it from the stove while I made Nima's eggs.

That October morning I made the eggs the way he liked them, scrambled hard, with too much ketchup, which I did not watch him put on. I made my own chiya in the small steel pot, black tea boiled with milk and sugar and a crushed pod of cardamom, and I drank it standing up. I took my own pulse at the wrist out of habit while the water came to a boil. Sixty-eight. I took it most mornings. It is a thing you do when your job is to take other people's.

"Ama," Nima said, not looking up. "Can I bring my phone to Grandma's?"

"We have not decided we are going."

"You decided," he said. "You were talking to her for an hour."

He was right, though I had not known it until he said it.

I had talked to my mother the night before, late, which was morning for her. My cousin's wife, Yangzi, held the phone, and I could see the low ceiling of the lodge kitchen behind my mother's head, the black beams, the shelf of steel plates turned on their edges, the corner of the clay stove. The picture froze every few seconds and then lurched forward. My mother's voice came in pieces. She was sixty-three. She wore a gray wool cardigan over her chuba and her hair was pulled back the way it had always been pulled back, flat and tight, with a red thread wound into the end of the braid. She asked about Nima's school. She asked whether the people in my building had heat yet. Then she said her knees were not good this year and that Ongchu was asking what would happen to the lodge.

That was all she said about it. Then she asked if I was eating.

When the call ended I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. The trains went over. I thought about the lodge, which had been my father's and my mother's, a long stone house with blue window frames on a terrace above the river at almost four thousand meters, with eight guest rooms and a dining room where the stove sat in the middle like a fat iron animal. I had not been inside it since my father's funeral, six years before, and I had not taken my son there ever.

---

My job was with an agency on Roosevelt Avenue that sent home health aides to the old and the sick across Woodside and Sunnyside and Jackson Heights. I had worked for the agency for seven years. I had a certificate in a plastic sleeve, a blood pressure cuff, a pulse oximeter that clipped onto the finger like a clothespin, a notebook, and a bag of other people's socks that I washed at the laundromat on Woodside Avenue on Thursdays because I did not trust the dryers in their buildings. My main client that year was Mrs. Inge Pfeiffer, ninety-one, who lived alone on Sixty-Ninth Street in an apartment that smelled of floor wax and the apple cake she could no longer bake.

I walked there every morning after I took Nima to school. The walk was eight minutes. Under the tracks the air was always a few degrees colder, and pigeons sat in rows on the girders, and the steel above me ticked when the sun came on it. Somebody's music came out of a car window. A woman on the corner sold tamales from a cooler. The 7 went over and the whole street shook a little, the way a table shakes when someone sets something heavy down at the other end.

Mrs. Pfeiffer was already dressed when I let myself in, which meant she had been up since five. She sat in her chair by the radiator with her feet in their slippers set exactly side by side.

"You look like a person who has made a decision," she said.

I wrapped the cuff around her arm. Her skin was soft and loose and very warm. I pumped the bulb and listened through the stethoscope for the thump to come back, and when it came I read the needle and wrote the numbers in my notebook. One forty over eighty-two. I clipped the oximeter onto her finger and we both watched the little red numbers settle. Ninety-six. Pulse seventy-four.

"I might go home for three weeks," I said. "To Nepal. With my son."

"Good," she said.

"I would have to ask the agency to send someone else."

"Sabina," she said, because she knew my friend Sabina from the days Sabina covered my Saturdays. "She sings while she does the dishes. I like her." She took the clip off her own finger and handed it back to me, which she was not supposed to do. "Your mother?"

"Her knees."

"Ah." She looked at the window. Her window faced a brick wall, but she always looked at it as if it faced something else. "When I came here from Hamburg, I was nineteen," she said. "I thought I would go back every summer. I went back twice. Once for my father and once for my mother. Both times I was too late to talk to them. Go now, while the talking is still possible."

I did not tell her that my mother and I had never been very good at talking even when it was possible. I made her oatmeal and cut a banana into it in coins, the way she liked, and counted out her pills on the saucer with the blue rim, and watched her take each one with a sip of water. Then I washed the saucer and dried it and put it back in the cupboard upside down.

---

That night, after Nima was asleep, I opened the family tree on the tablet the agency had given me for my notes. I was not supposed to use it for anything else, but everyone did. The tree was in our family's private space, the one my cousin in Kathmandu had started two years before so that all of us scattered in Queens and Denver and Kathmandu and the villages could see each other's children grow. You could only see it if someone in the family had invited you. My mother was in it, though she could not read the screen, because Yangzi had made her a page and put her photograph at the top.

I looked at it for a while. My father's name, Dawa Gyalzen, with the years under it, and a photograph of him in a red down jacket with a ladle in his hand. My mother's name, Mingma Futi, with her photograph squinting into the sun outside the lodge door. Their branch went down to me, Pemba Diki, and from me a short line went down to Nima, born in Queens, with his school picture. To the side, my mother's sister's line went down to Ongchu and Yangzi, and from them to a new small box with no picture yet. Chhoki, the baby, eleven months.

Somebody, probably my cousin in Kathmandu, had added a map to the tree, so that each person's box had a small pin under it. Most of the pins stood close together in the mountains on the screen, in a valley that from this height looked like a crease in a brown blanket. Then there was a thin line that went all the way across the screen to two pins on the far side of the world, one in Woodside, almost at the edge of the ocean, and one in Denver, where Nima's father lived with his new wife. I had never looked at it that way. From the mountains to Queens the line was very long and very straight, as if someone had pulled a thread tight between two fingers.

I added the baby's photograph, which Yangzi had sent me in a message the week before: a round face in a pink hat, held up to the light in the lodge doorway. Then I sat with the tablet on my knees and listened to the trains.

I tried to remember what the air in Drangkar felt like. I could remember facts about it. That it was thin. That it was dry enough to crack your lips in a day. That in October the sky above the pass turned a hard blue, nearly black at the top, and that the light came down so clear and cold you could see every stone on the far slope as if it had been drawn with a pencil. That the stove smoke smelled of juniper in the morning and of dried yak dung by evening, sweet and grassy and a little sour. But I could not feel it. My body had been at sea level so long it had forgotten how to be anywhere else.

Nima came out of the bedroom in his socks.

"I can't sleep," he said.

"You were asleep."

"I was pretending." He sat down next to me and looked at the screen. "Is that Grandma's house?"

"That is where it is."

He put his finger on the pin in the valley and made the map grow. The crease became a gorge, the gorge became a river, the river had a name in small letters, the Bhote Koshi, and above it on a shelf of land there were a few gray squares that were houses. The map did not show the stone walls or the potato fields or the blue window frames. It did not show the stove.

"How high is it?" he said.

"Almost four thousand meters."

"How much is that in feet?"

"About thirteen thousand."

He thought about this. He was a boy who liked numbers. He knew every stop on the 7 from Flushing to Hudson Yards in order and how many minutes each one took, and when we rode into Manhattan he said them under his breath like a song. He knew how many steps there were from the street to our door. Forty-four.

"The Empire State Building is one thousand four hundred and fifty-four feet," he said. "With the antenna."

"So nine Empire State Buildings," I said. "Stacked."

"Can you breathe up there?"

"You can breathe," I said. "You just have to breathe more."

He did not seem satisfied by this, but he did not argue. He took my wrist the way he had seen me take his and held two fingers on the inside of it, in the wrong place, and counted with his lips moving. The train came over. He lost count and started again.

"Sixty," he said. "You're alive."

"Good to know."

"Will mine be different there?"

"Faster," I said. "Your heart will work harder. You will hear it at night."

"Hear it?"

"In your ears. Like someone knocking very softly."

He took his fingers off my wrist and put them on his own neck and held still. Outside, an empty train went over, out of service and slower than the others, and the window buzzed in its frame. When it passed, he said, "Okay," as though something had been settled, and went back to bed.

I sat up a while longer. I called the agency's night line and left a message asking for three weeks of leave in November. I sent Sabina a message asking if she would take Mrs. Pfeiffer. Then I looked at the airline prices, which were what they always were, which was more than I had, and I bought two tickets anyway, New York to Doha to Kathmandu, with my credit card, and wrote the number down in my notebook under Mrs. Pfeiffer's blood pressure.

Before I went to bed I took my own pulse again. It was ninety-one. I watched the red numbers for a while and waited for them to come down, and they did not, and finally I turned out the light.

Seventy-Fourth Street

*Elevation 24 meters. Jackson Heights, Queens. Pulse 72. Oxygen 99 percent.*

On the Saturday before we left I took Nima shopping on Seventy-Fourth Street, which is where everyone from the mountains goes in Queens when they need something from home or something to take home. You come down the stairs from the 7 at the Seventy-Fourth Street station and the noise of the trains above mixes with the noise of the street below, the buses breathing at the curb on Roosevelt, the jewelry store men calling to each other in Gujarati, music from three shops at once. Then you walk south past the sari windows and the sweet shops and the travel agents with their posters of beaches, and the faces start to change, and the signs start to have Nepali on them, and somewhere around Thirty-Seventh Road you hear someone call a name you know.

That day it was Lhamu Auntie, who ran a restaurant in a narrow room half a flight below the sidewalk. She was standing at the top of her steps in a fleece vest, smoking, which she was not supposed to do because of her lungs.

"Pemba," she said. "Your mother's boy is going?"

"My boy."

"Your mother's boy," she said again, and looked at Nima. "Look at him. He has his grandfather's ears."

Nima put his hands over his ears.

The restaurant had a yak painted on its sign and eight tables and a television on the wall showing a Nepali singing contest with the sound off. On the walls there were photographs of mountains cut from calendars and taped up, and one framed photograph of a man in sunglasses standing on a summit, which was Lhamu Auntie's brother-in-law. Every restaurant on the street had one of those. My father had never been on a summit. My father had been in the kitchen tent below.

We ordered momos because Nima would eat nothing else in that room. They came in a steel steamer, ten of them, pleated at the top in a little twist like a closed purse, with a bowl of tomato and sesame sauce, orange and thin and full of crushed chili. He ate them the way he always did, biting a hole in the top and blowing into it to cool the juice inside, and then dipping the whole thing in the sauce and putting it in his mouth and breathing out through his nose with his eyes watering. I ate four. The steam from the basket smelled of onion and ginger and wet flour. Lhamu Auntie came and sat at our table, which she did with everyone, and told Nima that in the village his grandmother's lodge made the best potatoes on the whole trail.

"Better than fries?" he said.

"Fries are potatoes," she said. "Your grandmother makes potatoes eleven ways. Boiled with salt and chili to dip. Fried with onion. In the stew. In pancakes with butter. Mashed with greens. In the bread. If you are lucky she makes the pancakes."

"That's six."

"Ask her for the other five." She tapped the table. "You speak Sherpa?"

"A little."

"How little?"

"I understand," he said. "I just don't say."

That was the truth. At home I spoke to him in Sherpa and he answered in English, the way water runs downhill. When he was very small he had spoken both, but then he went to school, and then his father left, and somewhere in those two years the Sherpa went underground in him like a stream under a field. He understood when I told him to put on his jacket. He understood when I was angry. But he did not say.

"Your grandmother has no English," Lhamu Auntie said. "Not one word. Not even okay."

"She says okay," I said. "She learned it from the trekkers."

"Okay, then she has one word." Lhamu Auntie laughed, and coughed, and went back to her kitchen.

---

After lunch we did the shopping. I had a list on the back of an envelope. Two knee braces from the pharmacy on Seventy-Fifth Street, the kind with the hinge on each side. Reading glasses, plus two, three pairs, because my mother lost them. A steel thermos with a wide mouth. Vitamins with calcium. A tin of the hard butter cookies she liked, the blue tin with the Danish house on it. Socks, wool, women's, six pairs. Something for Ongchu. Something for Yangzi. Something for the baby. Boots for Nima, real boots, not his sneakers.

The boots took an hour. The store was on Seventy-Third Street and sold trekking gear to the Sherpa families in Queens who went home for the season and to the young men who still went up to work on the mountains, and the boy behind the counter, who was from Solukhumbu too, from a village below Lukla, got down on his knees and pressed his thumb on the toe of every pair Nima tried. He told Nima to stamp. He told him to walk up and down the little wooden ramp they had built in the corner and to stop and stand on his toes. Nima did all of it seriously, the way he did things when another young man asked him to and not his mother.

"Going down is what hurts," the boy said to him. "Not going up. Going down, your toes go into the front of the boot. So you need room." He tapped the toe. "This one. Thumb's width. Good."

The boots were brown and orange and heavier than anything Nima had ever worn. He wore them out of the store and clumped all the way back along Thirty-Seventh Road, past the grocery with the bins of mustard greens and bitter gourd outside, past the shop that sold brass ladles and steel thermoses and rice cookers, past the money transfer place with the line out the door. Under the 7 he stopped and stood on the sidewalk with his eyes closed while a train went over.

"What are you doing?"

"Feeling it in my feet," he said. "It's different in boots."

At home that evening I packed. My mother had sent a package to me in September through a man from the village who was flying to New York, and in it, wrapped in newspaper, was a pangden, the striped apron that women from home wear over the front of the chuba, tied at the back. It was new, woven in stripes of red and green and gold and dark blue, narrow and tight, with a band of plain cloth at the top. I had not worn one in years. In Queens I wore jeans and a fleece and the blue scrubs the agency gave us. My old pangden was in a drawer somewhere, faded to pink and green, the stripes softened from washing. I held the new one up against myself in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door. The colors were very bright against my gray sweatshirt. I folded it and put it at the bottom of the duffel, under the knee braces and the socks, with my old chuba, dark brown, which I had kept even when I thought I would never wear it again.

---

After Nima went to sleep I opened the family's private space again and went into the folder of my father's photographs.

My cousin in Kathmandu had made the folder after the funeral. He had collected everything he could find, from my mother's tin trunk, from my father's sister, from men who had worked with him, from the trekking agencies in Kathmandu, and he had scanned them and put them in order by year as well as he could. There were three hundred and twelve. My father was in most of them. He was never the one in the middle.

In the early ones he was eighteen or nineteen, very thin, with a load on his back held by a strap across his forehead, standing on a trail with other porters, all of them squinting. Then he was older, in a kitchen tent, which was where he spent most of his working life: a big canvas tent at a base camp somewhere, with blue barrels and gas burners and a row of pressure cookers hissing, and the light inside the tent orange because of the canvas, and my father in the middle of the steam with a ladle. He was laughing in almost every one. In one he was holding up a cake, which he had baked in a pressure cooker on a gas ring at five thousand meters, with a name written on top in red jam for some climber's birthday. In another he was peeling potatoes into a basin with two other cooks, all three of them sitting on upturned buckets, and the potatoes were small and yellow and the peel came off in long spirals into the snow.

Under many of the photographs I had written captions myself over the years, in the evenings, when I could not sleep. *Kitchen tent, Lhotse side, 1998. Father is on the left.* I wrote the captions in English, and in English he was Father, a word I had never once said to his face. *With Ang Karma and the Polish team, potatoes.* *Cake for the Japanese doctor.* For a lot of them I did not know who the other people were or where the tent was, and I had written only *Father, cooking*, or nothing.

There were climbers in the photographs, foreign ones, in their big suits, with their goggles pushed up on their foreheads. Some of them had become famous. I did not know which ones. My father never talked about them as anything but people who needed to eat. He said, *They come up thin and they go down thinner, and my job is to make the difference smaller.* He said, *A man who will not eat at base camp will not come down from the top.* He said the hardest thing was not the cold or the work. It was boiling an egg at that height, where water boils at a lower heat and nothing cooks right, and you have to learn everything again.

He never went higher than the camps. He had no wish to. He told me once that he had stood at the top of the icefall one morning when he was twenty-five, carrying gas for the kitchen at the next camp, and looked up at the summit, and felt nothing at all except that his head hurt and he wanted his tea. Then he went down and never carried that high again. He cooked.

Nima's door opened. He had been listening, the way children do, to the sound of a screen.

"Is that Grandpa?"

"Yes."

He sat next to me and I turned the tablet toward him, and he scrolled with one finger, fast, the way he scrolled through everything, and I made him slow down.

"Did he climb Everest?"

"No," I said. "He made breakfast for people who did."

"That's it?"

"That's a lot," I said. "You try making breakfast for forty people in a tent where water boils at a little over eighty degrees."

He looked at the photograph of the cake. "Eighty what?"

"Celsius. Not hot enough. The rice comes out hard. You have to use pressure."

"Like a pressure cooker."

"Like a pressure cooker."

He scrolled back to the one where my father was laughing with the ladle and enlarged it until the face was all pixels. "He looks like you," he said. "When you laugh at Sabina on the phone."

"I don't laugh like that."

"You do," he said. "With your whole mouth."

He went to bed. I sat with the folder open. Then I did something I had not done before: I opened the map in the private space and made a pin at the lodge in Drangkar, and in the note I wrote, *Our lodge. Built by Father and Mother, 1994. Kitchen faces east.* I did not know why I wanted the kitchen to be in the note. It seemed the most important fact. I attached the photograph of him with the ladle. Then I set the pin to be seen by family only and closed the tablet and sat in the dark until the next train came, and the next.

Kathmandu, 1,400 Meters

*Elevation 1,400 meters. Boudha side of Kathmandu. Pulse 78. Oxygen 97 percent.*

Kathmandu met us the way it always met me, with a hot wall of dust and diesel at the bottom of the airplane steps, and behind the dust a softer smell I could never name until I was standing in it again: wet brick, marigolds going brown, cooking oil, smoke from somebody burning leaves. It was the first week of November. The monsoon had been gone six weeks and the valley was dry and gold, and the hills around it stood in a brown haze, and above the haze, very far off to the north, there was a white line that might have been cloud and was not.

"Is that them?" Nima said, on the bus from the plane to the terminal.

"That is them."

"They look fake."

"They always look fake from here."

My father's sister met us outside, behind the barrier with the taxi men and the hotel boys holding up pieces of cardboard. I called her Phupu, the word for a father's sister, and she called me nothing at all, only took my face in both her hands and looked at it as if checking a melon. She was seventy and very small and wore a purple fleece over her chuba and a striped pangden so old the colors had gone the soft shades of dried fruit. She looked at Nima for a long time. Then she said to me in Sherpa, "He is tall for a Sherpa," and to Nima she said, in Nepali, "Hungry?"

He understood. He nodded.

"Good," she said, and that was his introduction to his grandfather's family.

---

Phupu lived in a flat on the fourth floor of a concrete building in a lane behind Boudha, where many Sherpa families had moved from the mountains over the years, so that the lanes there were full of people you might have known as children. The building had no elevator. The stairs were wide and dark and smelled of kerosene and somebody's lentils. Nima counted them without being asked. Seventy-two. On the roof Phupu kept pots of chilies and marigolds and a clothesline, and from the roof you could see the whole neighborhood of flat roofs with their water tanks and their laundry and their rebar sticking up for the next floor someone would build when there was money, and pigeons going around in one big turning cloud.

That evening Phupu cooked a dinner of dal and rice and spinach and a dry curry of potatoes with cumin and too much chili, and we ate on the floor on cushions, and her neighbor from down the hall came in with a bottle of homemade rakshi that I refused and a bag of dried yak cheese, small white cubes on a string, hard as stones. Nima tried one and chewed it for twenty minutes and finally put it in his pocket. The neighbor laughed until he had to wipe his eyes.

"In the village," the neighbor said to him in Nepali, "the children suck those all day on the trail. One piece, one day."

Nima understood about half of it. He looked at me.

"One piece lasts all day," I said in English.

"Because it's disgusting," Nima said, but he did not take it out of his pocket.

After dinner Phupu took a photograph out of a drawer and handed it to me. It was not in my cousin's folder. It was small, square, black and white, cracked across one corner, a picture of a boy sitting on a stone wall with a ring of bread in his hand and his mouth full, looking straight into the camera with an expression of pure guilt.

"Him," she said.

"How old?"

"Nine. Ten. A schoolteacher from Kathmandu had a camera. He was so afraid our mother would see the picture and know." She laughed, very softly. "She saw it. She kept it."

I held it for a long time. Then I asked if I could photograph it, and she said yes, and I held my phone over it under the kitchen light and made a picture, and added it to my father's folder in the private space with a caption: *Father, about ten, with stolen sel roti, on the wall at home. From Phupu.* Phupu watched me type.

"Now everybody can see him steal," she said.

"Only the family."

"That is everybody," she said.

---

We were supposed to fly to Lukla the next morning, though not from Kathmandu. In the busy months the small planes for Lukla left from an airstrip at Ramechhap, in a hot river valley to the east, and to catch the first flights you left the city by jeep in the middle of the night and rode for hours on a road that was mostly bends. Everyone told me not to count on the flight either way. Planes went to Lukla only if the clouds around it were clear, and the clouds did what they wanted.

"Tomorrow, maybe," Phupu said. "Or the day after. Or Thursday."

"I have a ticket for tomorrow."

"Everyone has a ticket for tomorrow." She went into the kitchen.

I slept badly, and not for long. The flat was quiet in a way I was not used to, and then not quiet at all: dogs barking from one end of the lane to the other in relays, a motorcycle, a man coughing for a long time in the next building, a pressure cooker somewhere below us whistling three times and going quiet. Nima slept on a mat on the floor beside me with his phone under his pillow and his new boots standing side by side at his feet like two patient animals.

At midnight I woke because I smelled oil.

Phupu was in the kitchen in the dark with only the blue ring of the gas burner lit. She had a bowl of batter on the counter, rice flour soaked overnight and ground and mixed with sugar and a little ghee and milk, thick and pale, and a wok of oil on the burner, shimmering. She was making sel roti. She took a handful of the batter in her fist and squeezed it out between her thumb and fingers in a ring, around and around, into the oil, and the oil rose up around the ring and hissed, and in a few seconds the ring floated, and she turned it with a long stick. When it was brown she lifted it out with the stick through the middle and hung it on a rod over a steel plate to drain. Then another. She did not look at her hand while she made the circle. She looked at the oil.

"For the trail," she said, when she saw me in the door. "Lukla food is all noodles from a packet."

"You don't have to."

"I am already doing it."

I stood next to her and watched. In the window behind the burner the lane was dark except for one lit window across the way, where someone else was up early, or late. The roti made a ring on the plate, then a stack of rings. They smelled of fried sugar and rice and something toasted, and when they cooled the outside went crisp and the inside stayed soft and a little chewy, like a doughnut that had decided to be thinner.

"Your father loved these," she said. "When we were children, our mother made them only for the big days. He would steal one from the plate and run out of the house and eat it on the wall where she could not see him. Every time. Every time she pretended not to see." She squeezed out another ring. "He told me once that at base camp he tried to make them for the foreigners. With some flour from Kathmandu. They came out flat. The oil does not get hot enough up there, he said. Everything up there is a little wrong."

"He told me the eggs."

"The eggs," she said. "Yes. He was always talking about the eggs."

When the batter was finished there were twenty-two. She wrapped them in newspaper in four bundles and put the bundles in a plastic bag and tied it, and put it in my duffel herself, between the knee braces and my mother's socks.

The jeep came at one. Nima slept against my arm the whole way, out of the valley and down along the river roads, and woke only when the driver stopped for tea in a town where every shutter was closed but one.

---

The flight did not go that day.

We sat in the little terminal at Ramechhap from six in the morning until one in the afternoon. It was a low building at the edge of a wide dry riverbed, with a tin roof that popped and creaked as the sun climbed and rows of plastic chairs bolted together and a single board on the wall where the airline men wrote things in marker and then rubbed them out. Outside on the strip the small planes stood in a row with their propellers still. Trekkers sat on their duffels and read paperbacks or slept with their mouths open, and their guides, who were mostly Sherpa and Rai boys from the hills, stood in a group by the door smoking and laughing and checking their phones for the weather in Lukla, which was always the same word: cloud.

Nima ate three sel roti and went through his phone battery by ten. Then he walked around the terminal counting things. He counted the chairs: one hundred and eighty-four. He counted the planes outside the window: nine. He counted the trekkers with red jackets and the trekkers with blue. He came back and told me all of this and I wrote it down in my notebook for him under Mrs. Pfeiffer's numbers, because he asked me to.

"Why do they have to see?" he said. "Can't they fly by instruments?"

"The runway is on the side of a mountain. You have to see it."

"How long is it?"

"Short."

"How short?"

"Ask one of the guides."

He went and asked one of the guides, a boy of maybe twenty with a ponytail, who crouched down and drew the Lukla runway on the floor with his finger: a short line that went uphill, with a wall at the top and a drop at the bottom. "A little more than five hundred meters," the boy said in English. "Uphill. Almost twelve percent. At the top, a wall. At the bottom," and he made a little falling motion with his hand and whistled. Nima came back delighted.

At one o'clock they rubbed everything off the board and wrote TOMORROW.

We slept that night in a guesthouse beside the strip, in a room with a ceiling fan that did not turn and a dog outside that barked at the moon until it set, and we ate four more of Phupu's sel roti for supper.

In the morning the board said LUKLA, GO, and the guides by the door threw their cigarettes on the ground and shouted, and the trekkers stood up all at once and gathered their bags, and outside on the strip the propellers of the first plane began to turn, slowly at first and then too fast to see.

Lukla, 2,860 Meters

*Elevation 2,860 meters. Lukla airstrip. Pulse 94. Oxygen 93 percent.*

The plane held sixteen people and our bags were thrown in a heap in the back behind a net. The seats were narrow and the cabin was so small that I could see past the pilots' shoulders through the front window, and the young woman who served as the whole of the cabin crew went down the aisle with a basket of hard candies and cotton balls for our ears. Nima took two candies and four cotton balls. He put the cotton in his ears and then took it out again because he wanted to hear.

For the first part of the flight we went low over the hills with the haze below us, and the hills were green and terraced in thin steps all the way to their tops, with a house or two on every ridge and a path going up to it like a scratch in varnish. Then the plane turned north and the hills came up. They came up very fast. The terraces ended and the forest began, dark green and then darker, and the ridges stood so close on both sides that I could see individual trees, a white waterfall, a single prayer flag line strung across a gully and snapping in the wind, red and white and yellow, and then the white peaks were not a line in the distance anymore but a wall in front of us, bright as metal in the morning sun, too big to look at all at once.

Nima had his face against the window.

"Ama," he said. "Ama, Ama."

I took his hand and did not say anything. I had flown into Lukla four times before, and each time I had decided beforehand that I would not be afraid, and each time I was. The plane dipped. The engines changed their note. Through the pilots' window I saw the strip, very small, a gray tongue laid on the side of the mountain, tilted up toward us, with a wall at the top of it and a cliff at the bottom, and the plane went down at it in a straight line as though it meant to hit the mountain and had decided to accept the consequences. Then the wheels struck and bounced and struck again, and the whole cabin leaned back as we ran uphill, and the engines roared in reverse, and we slowed, and slowed, and turned at the top in a tight half circle in front of the wall, and stopped.

The trekkers clapped. Nima clapped too, then stopped, embarrassed, then clapped again.

---

When they opened the door, the cold came in first.

It was not a cold like Queens in winter, wet and gray and in your bones. It was a dry, thin, bright cold that went straight into the nose and made the inside of it sting, and it smelled of nothing at all, and then, under the nothing, of woodsmoke and jet fuel and something green and resinous from the hills. I climbed down the steps and stood on the apron with our duffel at my feet and took a breath.

It did not fill me. That is the only way I can say it. I breathed in the way I had breathed in my whole life, and the air came in, and my chest rose, and then my body waited for something that did not arrive. I breathed in again, deeper. It was like drinking from a glass that had looked full and was a third empty. My heart began to pound, not fast yet, but loud, as though it had moved up from my chest and into my throat to see what was going on. I put two fingers on my neck without thinking and counted. Ninety-four.

Nima was standing very still beside me with his mouth open, looking up. The peaks went up on all sides of the airstrip, close and enormous, with their snow lit gold on one face and blue in the shadows of the other, and the sky above them was a blue I had forgotten existed. Not the blue of a painted wall or of a pool. A blue with black behind it, as though the sky were very thin there, too.

"It's so loud," he said.

"What is?"

"My heart."

"Yes."

"Is that normal?"

"That is normal. Walk slowly."

He took a step. Then another. Then he forgot and ran ten steps to see a helicopter landing at the far end of the apron, and stopped, and bent over with his hands on his knees, breathing hard, and looked back at me with an expression of complete betrayal.

---

My cousin Ongchu was waiting at the gate in the airport fence.

I had last seen him at my father's funeral, when he was twenty-five and thin and quiet and wore a borrowed jacket. Now he was thirty-one and broad through the chest, with a short beard and a wool hat pulled down to his eyebrows and a down jacket so faded by sun that it had gone from red to the color of a brick. He had walked down two days from Drangkar to meet us. He did not shake my hand or hug me. He took the duffel out of my hand, the way he would have taken a bucket of water from his mother, and said, "Didi," the word for an older sister, and that was enough.

Then he looked at Nima.

"This is the New York one," he said in Sherpa.

"Queens," Nima said in English.

Ongchu grinned. His front tooth was chipped. "Queens," he said, carefully, as though trying out a new food. "Okay. Queens."

He had brought a doko with him, the tall cone-shaped basket of woven bamboo that every porter in the mountains carries, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, and a namlo, the long strap that goes across the forehead and down to the bottom of the basket so that the weight rides on your head and your back together. He put our duffel in the doko and tied it in with a cord. He put my small pack on top of that. Then he crouched with his back to the basket, settled the strap across the top of his forehead, just above the hairline, leaned forward, and stood up in one movement, the basket rising onto his back as though it had been waiting there all morning.

Nima stared at him.

"Doesn't that hurt your neck?"

I translated. Ongchu laughed.

"Tell him it hurts if you do it wrong," he said. "Tell him I will show him."

"He's ten."

"I was carrying at ten."

"You were carrying firewood."

"Firewood is heavier than socks," Ongchu said, and set off up the lane.

---

Lukla is a town built for the people who pass through it. The lane from the airstrip was paved in flat gray stones, worn smooth and slick, and on both sides of it were two-story lodges painted white and blue and green, with names on their signboards in English: Paradise, Everest Gateway, Namaste, Yeti Coffee, Himalayan Hill, and bakeries with glass cases of apple pie and cinnamon rolls. Outside every lodge a boy or a girl stood calling to the trekkers. There was music from somewhere. There were stacks of gas cylinders and stacks of beer crates. A man was shoeing a pony in the middle of the lane, holding its hoof between his knees, and the pony watched us go by with its ears flat.

My lungs did not stop complaining. Every step up the lane I felt them working, a fist in my chest opening and closing. I walked slowly. I made myself walk the way my father had taught me when I was Nima's age: a short step, place the whole foot, breathe in, another short step, breathe out. *Bistarai,* he would say. Slowly. *The mountain is not going anywhere. Neither are you, if you run.*

Ongchu walked ahead of us with the doko and turned around every hundred meters to wait. He did not breathe hard at all.

Halfway up the lane a line of porters came down past us, going back to the airstrip for their next loads, their dokos empty and light and bouncing on their backs. One of them was a girl, not much older than sixteen, in a pink fleece and plastic sandals, with a plywood sheet folded under her arm that she had carried up and was now carrying down again for some reason nobody explained. Her namlo hung loose around her neck like a scarf. She looked at Nima in his new boots and his clean jacket and smiled with her whole face, and said something to the porter behind her, and they both laughed. Nima looked at his boots. Then he looked at her sandals, and at the soles of her feet, which were gray with dust and hard as the stones, and he did not say anything for a long time.

At the end of the lane, where the town ended and the trail began, there was a stone archway painted in bright colors, and beyond it the trail went down, into the trees, toward the river we could hear but not see. I stopped there to drink water. My lips had already begun to feel tight. The sun was on my face, and it was hot, which seemed impossible in that cold, but at that height the sun comes through with nothing to soften it and burns you in an hour while you shiver. I took out my phone and opened the map in our family's private space. The little dot that was me had jumped from a hot river valley to the side of a mountain. I made a pin there and wrote, *Lukla. Start of the walk. Nima's first breath here: he said his heart was loud.* I put a photograph of him with it, his mouth open, the peaks behind him.

"Who are you writing to?" Nima said.

"Nobody. Grandma, maybe. Yangzi will show her."

"Grandma can't read."

"She can look."

He took the phone from me and looked at the pin, and then at the line on the map that went up the valley, north, along the river, to Namche, then west, to Thame, then up again, to a small dot I had pinned two weeks before in Queens. He traced it with his finger.

"How many days?"

"Four," I said. "Maybe five. It depends on our hearts."

"Ongchu does it in two."

"Ongchu has a different heart."

"Can I get one?"

"You can grow one," I said. "Slowly."

He gave me back the phone and went through the archway after his cousin, walking carefully, placing his new boots on the stones as though they belonged to someone else and he had to return them in good condition. I watched him go. Then I put my own feet where his had been, and breathed, and followed them down into the trees.

Phakding, 2,610 Meters

*Elevation 2,610 meters. Phakding, on the Dudh Koshi. Pulse 88. Oxygen 94 percent.*

The first thing the trail does after Lukla is go down, which nobody expects. You have flown up into the mountains and climbed out of the airplane gasping, and now for three hours you descend, through pine and rhododendron, down stone steps and along shelves of packed earth, down toward the river, losing two hundred and fifty meters that you will have to win back tomorrow and the day after. Nima found this outrageous.

"We're going the wrong way."

"We are going the way the trail goes."

"But we have to go up."

"Later."

"So why are we going down?"

"Because the river is down," I said, "and the villages are by the river, and the trail goes from village to village, not from top to top."

He thought about this for half a kilometer and then said, "That's dumb," and kept walking.

The air got thicker as we went down, and I felt it. Not much, but enough that the fist in my chest loosened a little and my heart went back down where it belonged. The forest smelled of pine resin warming in the sun and of wet earth in the shady places, and there were small yellow flowers on the banks, and once a bird with a long tail and a cry like a rusty hinge that flew across the trail ahead of us and disappeared. The light came through the needles in slanting rods with dust turning in them. Every so often the trees opened and we could see across the valley to the far wall of the gorge, terraced with tiny fields, brown now after the harvest, and a white house or two clinging to the slope, and a waterfall so long and thin that it seemed not to be moving, only hanging there like a white ribbon pinned to the rock.

Then we heard the bells.

---

The first dzo train came up behind us around a bend. Ongchu heard it before we did and stepped to the inside of the trail, against the hill, and pulled Nima in beside him by the back of his jacket.

"Always this side," he said in Sherpa, and pointed at the hill, and then at the drop on the other side of the trail, which was not a cliff exactly but a long steep slope of brush and stones down to the river. "Never that side. They push."

I translated. Nima pressed himself against the hill with his eyes very wide.

There were eleven of them. Dzo are the animals that carry most of the loads below Namche, a cross between yaks and ordinary cattle, smaller than yaks and with shorter hair, black and brown and some patched with white, with curved horns and wet noses and big patient eyes. Each one carried two loads strapped to a wooden saddle, one on each side: blue plastic drums, sacks of rice, crates of beer, a bundle of long aluminum poles, a gas cylinder on each flank like a pair of saddlebags. Each one had a bell around its neck on a thick red cord, and the bells were all different, some flat and clanking, some round and ringing, so that the sound of them coming up the trail was not one note but a whole loose untuned music. Their hooves clicked on the stones. They breathed hard through their noses in the cold and the breath came out white. They smelled of warm hair and dung and the rough sweet smell of crushed grass.

The driver walked behind them with a stick he never used, whistling through his teeth. He was about sixty, with a woolen cap and a face gone dark and creased as a walnut. He nodded at Ongchu. Ongchu nodded back. That was the whole conversation.

When they had gone, Nima stepped out onto the trail again and looked after them.

"Eleven," he said.

"You counted?"

"I always count."

By the time we reached Phakding he had counted four more trains. Nine, fourteen, six, and twenty-two. He wanted to know if they were yaks. Ongchu said no, yaks lived higher, the dzo were for down here, and Nima asked how he could tell, and Ongchu said yaks had more hair and were angrier, and Nima asked how much more hair, and I stopped translating and let them work it out with hands. Ongchu made long hair hanging off his own arms. Nima made horns. Ongchu made a face that I suppose was an angry yak. Nima doubled over laughing and had to stop and breathe, which set him off again.

---

The bridges were the other thing.

The trail crosses the river and its side streams again and again on suspension bridges, long ones, steel cables and steel mesh, strung from one side of the gorge to the other high over the water. The first one we came to was perhaps a hundred meters long, and it swayed under the feet of the people already on it, and it was covered from end to end in prayer flags, so many of them tied along the cables and the side rails that the bridge looked dressed in rags of color.

I am not going to say anything about the flags except what I saw, because that is all I know to say. They were five colors, blue and white and red and green and yellow, in that order, again and again, square pieces of cotton tied on a string, hundreds of strings, old ones and new ones together. The new ones were bright as candy. The old ones had been washed by the monsoon and dried by the sun so many times that they had gone pale and soft, pink and gray and the faint green of lichen, and some had torn into strips and the strips had frayed into threads. The wind came up the gorge from the south, from the plains, steady and cool, and all the flags moved together in it, snapping and fluttering, so that the whole bridge made a sound like many small birds taking off at once, over and over, without ever leaving.

Nima stopped at the edge of the bridge.

"No," he said.

"It's safe."

"It's moving."

"It moves. It's still safe."

He looked down. Far below, the river was a gray-green color, almost milky, and fast, and loud, and full of white where it went over stones. It came from the glaciers, which is why it was that color, full of ground stone. Its name meant Milk River.

Ongchu went first with the doko on his back and walked across as though on a sidewalk, his hands loose at his sides. In the middle he turned around and grinned back at us, and the bridge swung under him, and he did not hold on.

"He's showing off," Nima said.

"Yes."

"I'm not going to hold on either."

"Hold on," I said.

He held on. He went across with both hands on the side cables, one foot in front of the other, looking straight ahead at Ongchu and not down, and I walked behind him, and the flags whipped at our faces and the wind pushed at us and the bridge swayed and the river roared below. In the middle a dzo train started across from the other side and the whole bridge began to bounce, and Nima stopped dead and held on with his eyes squeezed shut, and I stood behind him with my hands on his shoulders. The dzo came across slowly and passed us, so close that I could feel their warmth and smell them, one after another, their loads bumping the cables, their bells ringing. When they had gone Nima opened his eyes.

"Okay," he said, mostly to himself, and went on.

On the far side he turned around and looked at the bridge for a long time.

"How many bridges are there?"

"To Namche? Five or six. Then more after."

"I'm going to count them," he said. It seemed to make it better.

He asked for my phone and took a photograph of the bridge from the end, the cables going away from him in a long sag with the flags blurred into streaks of color, and then he made a pin on our family map himself, under the one I had made at Lukla. He typed the note with his thumbs. *Bridge 1. 100 meters maybe. Dzo came across in the middle. I held on.* He showed it to me before he saved it, as if I might want to correct him, and I did not.

---

Phakding was a long row of lodges on a flat shelf beside the river, with stone walls and potato fields between them and the noise of the water under everything. Ongchu took us to a lodge run by a woman he knew from Khumjung, painted green, with a dining room that had big windows on the river side and a stove in the middle burning wood. We had the dining room nearly to ourselves. It was late in the season. Most of the trekkers had come and gone in October, and the ones who were left were the serious kind, with their maps spread on the tables and their headlamps around their necks.

I ordered fried potatoes with onion and chili, a plate of boiled potatoes in their skins with a dish of salt and ground chili to dip them in, and dal and rice. The potatoes were small and yellow and tasted of the soil they came from, nutty and dense and a little sweet. You peeled the skin back with your thumbnail and dipped the potato in the salt and chili and ate it in two bites, and the salt was rough and gray and the chili was fierce enough to make your nose run. Nima ate eight of them.

"These are better than fries," he said, in a voice of great seriousness, as though confessing to a crime.

Ongchu asked what he had said. I told him.

"Tell him at the lodge they are better," Ongchu said. "Our potatoes come from higher. More flavor."

"Everyone says their potatoes are better."

"Ours are," he said.

After dinner Nima took out his phone. He had not had a signal since Lukla. He held it up toward the windows and turned around in a circle and looked at it.

"There's no internet."

"There is sometimes. You can buy a card."

"Can I?"

"Tomorrow, maybe. In Namche."

He put the phone down on the table face down. He did not take it out again that night. Instead he asked for my notebook and wrote down the dzo trains in a column, eleven and nine and fourteen and six and twenty-two, and drew a line under them and added them up. Sixty-two. Then he wrote BRIDGES and made two marks.

Before bed I took his pulse. Eighty-four. Mine was eighty-eight. He wanted the oximeter and clipped it on his own finger and watched the number climb to ninety-five and stay there.

"In Queens I'm ninety-nine," he said.

"Here you're ninety-five."

"Where am I going to be at Grandma's?"

"Lower."

"How low?"

"We'll see."

He lay awake in the bunk next to mine in the cold room with its plywood walls. I could hear the river through the walls, and through the river, faintly, a dzo bell somewhere in a field, ringing once whenever the animal moved. After a while he said, "I can hear it," and I said, "The river?" and he said, "My heart," and I said, "Yes," and he said, "It's like someone's walking around in there," and then he slept.

Namche, 3,440 Meters

*Elevation 3,440 meters. Namche Bazaar. Pulse 102. Oxygen 89 percent.*

Everyone who walks into the Khumbu knows the Namche hill, the way everyone who rides the 7 knows the curve before Queensboro Plaza where the train leans and the people standing have to grab the pole. You cross the river one last time on a high bridge, very high, slung across the gorge where two rivers meet, so far above the water that the roar comes up to you thin and late. Then the trail turns and goes up. It goes up for six hundred meters, through pine forest, in switchbacks, dust and stones and roots, without a single flat stretch long enough to rest your legs, and at the top of it, which you cannot see from the bottom, is Namche.

I had walked up that hill as a girl of twelve carrying a basket of eggs for my mother to sell. I had walked it at twenty, coming down, on my way to Kathmandu and then to Queens, crying most of the way and not knowing why since I was the one who had decided to go. I had walked it six years ago, up, for my father. I did not remember it being this hard.

It was not my legs. My legs were fine, strong from fourteen years of walking up and down subway stairs and the stairs of fourth-floor walk-ups with groceries for people who could not carry their own. It was the breathing. Each step took a breath, and then two, and then by the second hour three breaths for one step, and the breaths came in short and shallow and did not satisfy. My heart pounded in my ears. It was very loud. I could hear it over the wind in the pines, a dull wet thumping, like someone hitting a mattress with a stick in the next apartment. Behind my eyes a headache started, a small one at first, a pressure, and then a band that went all the way around my head and tightened every time I bent down to tie a lace.

Nima was ahead of me with Ongchu. Some children seem to manage the height better than their parents at first; they do not know enough to be afraid of it. He was walking at Ongchu's heel, matching him step for step, and every so often I heard him ask a question in English and Ongchu answer in Sherpa and both of them laugh. Once he stopped and waited for me. His cheeks were bright red and his lips were already beginning to crack.

"You're slow," he said.

"I'm old."

"You're thirty-four."

"Up here that's old."

He looked at me with real worry. "Do you have a headache?"

"A little."

"Ongchu says drink water. He says garlic soup. He says don't go too high too fast or your head will explode."

"He did not say that."

"He said something like that." He handed me his water bottle. "Drink."

I drank. Then I took the oximeter out of my jacket pocket and clipped it on my finger in the shade of a pine while he watched. The numbers flickered and settled. Eighty-seven. Pulse one hundred and eight. In Woodside I would have called the agency nurse. Here I put it back in my pocket and stood up and took the next step.

---

Namche sits in a great horseshoe bowl on the side of the mountain, facing west, its houses built in curving terraces one above the other like the seats of a stadium. When we came over the last rise the afternoon sun was on it, and every roof was blue or green or red tin, and every wall was white, and the windows were painted blue and yellow, and the whole town glittered against the brown slope like a handful of beads spilled on a blanket. Above it, across the valley, a peak I had known all my life stood up white and sharp into a sky gone the deep hard blue of the high places. Nima stopped and said nothing for once.

The lanes were steep stone steps between the lodges and shops. The shops sold everything: down jackets and fleece hats and gloves, hard candy and chocolate bars and tins of fruit, batteries, rope, cards for the internet, copper pots, carpets, yak-wool scarves in gray and brown and cream. There were bakeries with espresso. There was a place that sold pizza. Porters sat on the steps with their dokos beside them and smoked and talked. A woman in a chuba and a pangden was washing pots at a public tap, the water ice-cold and loud on the steel, and she looked up at me and said, "From where?" and I said, "Drangkar, but Queens," and she nodded as though this made perfect sense and went back to her pots.

We stayed two nights. You have to stay two nights in Namche, to let the body catch up. Ongchu took us to a lodge high on the east side of the bowl owned by a cousin of Yangzi's, and that evening I lay on the narrow bed with my head pounding and listened to Nima in the dining room below, laughing at something the owner's children were showing him on a phone. I did not go down to dinner. Ongchu brought me a bowl of garlic soup, thin and gold, with whole cloves of garlic floating in it soft as butter, and stood in the doorway while I drank it.

"Didi," he said. "The boy is good."

"He's a Queens boy."

"He carried my water bottle all the way up the hill. He asked me to teach him to carry the doko. Tomorrow I will teach him."

"He's ten, Ongchu."

"I will put a small load." He went away.

---

On the second morning my head was better. I woke at five in the dark with the cold pressing on my face and my heart going quietly and steadily, as though it had finally agreed to the arrangement. Outside the window the bowl of Namche was still in shadow, and the white peak across the valley was lit at the top, just the top, a single tooth of pink-gold light, and as I watched the light slid down it slowly, and the pink went to gold and the gold went to white. I stood at the window in my socks and watched until the sun reached the town.

At breakfast we had Tibetan bread, which every lodge in the mountains makes and which is not bread in the way Queens means bread. It is dough rolled flat and fried in a pan of oil until it puffs up in great blisters, golden and chewy and a little sour, with a crisp edge, and you tear it with your fingers and spread honey on it, or jam, or eat it with a fried egg. Nima ate two with honey and asked for a third. The owner's wife laughed and brought him one with a fried egg on top, and the yolk ran out over the bread and he looked up at her as though she had saved his life.

Then I went to find my father's friend.

His name was Nuru. He had been my father's partner in kitchen tents for twenty years, the two of them working the same expeditions season after season, my father as head cook and Nuru as his assistant, until his back gave out at fifty and he came down to Namche and opened a little shop on the lower lane. He sold socks and gloves and plastic sandals and soap and toilet paper and cans of tuna, and kept a gas ring at the back, and if you were a friend he made you tea.

He was sitting on a stool in the doorway of the shop in the sun, a small man with a gray crew cut and very bad teeth and a face that broke into pieces when he saw me.

"Dawa's girl," he said. "Dawa's girl. Look at you. You got fat in America."

"Thank you, Uncle."

"Good, good. It is good to be fat." He looked at Nima. "And this is Dawa's grandson. Come here. Let me see your hands."

Nima, not understanding, held out his hands. Nuru turned them over and looked at the palms and then at the backs and then gave them back.

"Soft," he said in Nepali. "Like dough. We will see."

He made us butter tea in a narrow wooden churn behind the counter, the kind with a plunger, pushing it up and down with a sound like a hand pump at a well. Black tea boiled for a long time, then salt, then a lump of butter, all churned together until the tea went pale and cloudy and frothy on top. He poured it into three cups. Nima looked at it and then at me.

"Salt?" he said in English.

"Salt."

"In tea?"

"Drink it. It's good for the altitude."

He drank it. His face did several things at once. Then he drank the rest of the cup, very slowly, and set it down, and said, "It's like soup," and Nuru, who understood the word soup, roared with laughter and filled it again.

---

We sat in the shop for two hours. Nuru told stories about my father. He told how my father had once fed a whole camp of stranded porters, twenty-six of them, for three days during a snowstorm when the supply loads could not come up, using nothing but flour and a sack of dried radish and a block of butter and salt, making stew after stew. "Shakpa," Nuru said to Nima. "Do you know shakpa? Stew. With little pieces of dough pulled by hand. He pulled them so fast it looked like the pot was snowing." He showed it, his fingers flicking at the air over an invisible pot. "Twenty-six men. Three days. Nobody went hungry. Nobody even complained. The foreigners in their tents were eating from tins. The porters were eating your grandfather's shakpa."

"Did they climb the mountain?"

"Who?"

"The foreigners."

Nuru waved a hand. "Some. Some not. Who remembers? I remember the shakpa."

Then he told about the egg. Not the boiling one; another one. How my father had once carried a single raw egg from Namche to the highest kitchen tent, wrapped in a sock inside his jacket, three days of walking, because a climber from somewhere far away had told him it was her birthday, and she wanted an egg, a real one, not powder. And it had arrived without a crack. And he cooked it for her. "Fried," Nuru said. "Sunny-side. In butter. She cried."

I had never heard that one. I took out my phone and asked if I could write it down, and he waved his hand as if to say, write what you like, and I wrote it in the notes of the photograph in my father's folder that showed him in the kitchen tent with a frying pan. *The egg carried in a sock for three days. Told by Nuru, Namche, November.* I made a pin on the map at Nuru's shop, too, and put a photograph of him with it, grinning in the doorway with his bad teeth, and under it I wrote, *Uncle Nuru. Father's kitchen partner, twenty years. Butter tea.*

When we left he gave Nima a pair of yak-wool socks, gray, thick as felt.

"For the cold," he said. "At Drangkar the cold is serious. Here it is only a joke."

That afternoon Ongchu put a small sack of rice in the doko, five kilos, and showed Nima how to set the strap on the top of his head and lean forward and stand. Nima stood. He wobbled, and stood again, and walked ten steps down the lane with his face red and his neck rigid and his eyes fixed on the stones, and then Ongchu took the doko off him and Nima sat down on the step and held his neck with both hands.

"That," he said, "is insane."

"Tomorrow, more," Ongchu said, and Nima understood him perfectly.

Thame, 3,820 Meters

*Elevation 3,820 meters. Thame, in the Bhote Koshi valley. Pulse 104. Oxygen 88 percent.*

Above Namche the trail divides. Most of the people go northeast, up the main valley, toward the big mountain and its famous base camp. We went west.

You feel it as soon as you turn. The trail to Thame is a smaller trail, narrower, with fewer lodges and fewer people, and after an hour the bakeries and the music and the voices of Namche are gone behind the shoulder of the hill, and there is only the wind, the river far below, and the sound of your own feet. We met one dzo train in the whole morning. We met an old man walking down to Namche with an empty doko and a cigarette, who stopped and talked with Ongchu about someone's roof. We met two trekkers, a pair of gray-haired women from Slovenia with walking poles, who told me in careful English that they had been coming to the Khumbu every November for eleven years and that this valley was the only one left where they could hear themselves think. Then nobody.

The valley was wide and brown and very open, with the river cutting down through the middle of it in a narrow gorge, and on the shelves of land above the gorge there were villages: a few stone houses together, a grove of stunted trees, and around them the fields. The fields were small and square, each one walled in stones piled without mortar, gray stones stacked so carefully that you could not have put a finger between them. The potatoes had been dug two months before. The earth in the fields was turned and dark and dry, and in some of them women were working with short hoes, breaking the clods, and their striped pangdens were the only bright color in the whole wide brown valley. They straightened when we went by and looked at us with their hands on their backs, and some of them called to Ongchu, and he called back.

"They know you."

"Everybody knows everybody," he said. "In Queens, does everybody know you?"

"In my building, maybe."

"Here it is the building," he said, and swept his arm up the valley, "all of it."

---

The smell changed too. Below Namche it had been pine. Up here there were no tall trees, only low dark bushes on the slopes, juniper and a small rhododendron with leathery leaves, and the smell of the juniper came off the hills in the sun, sharp and resinous and clean, like a pencil just sharpened. Every house in the valley burned juniper in the morning to start the fire. As we came near each village, before we could see the houses, we smelled the smoke, a sweet blue smoke that hung low over the fields in the windless pockets and drifted up the slope in a thin line where the wind found it.

Nima wanted to carry again.

Ongchu took the rice sack out of the doko, where it had ridden all morning on top of our duffel, and put it in a smaller basket he had borrowed from the lodge owner in Namche, a child's doko, which children in the villages use to carry firewood and dung and potatoes from the fields. He put the sack in. He put Nima's own pack in on top. He helped Nima set the namlo on his head.

"Not on the forehead," he said, and I translated. "Higher. On the top. Where the bone is strong. Now lean. Not too much. Let the basket sit on your back. Your head holds it, your back carries it. Both."

Nima leaned. He stood. He took a step.

"Don't look at your feet," Ongchu said. "Look a little ahead. Three steps ahead."

"How do I see my feet?"

"Your feet know where they are."

Nima walked. He walked for ten minutes, then twenty, then forty, on the flat part of the trail along the valley side, his neck stiff and his face red, his breath coming hard and white. Every few minutes Ongchu said something to him, low, and Nima nodded without turning his head. I walked behind them both. I could see my son's shoulders working under the basket, and the strap pressing a red line into his hair where it crossed his head, and the back of his neck, which was thin and pale and still a child's neck, set against the weight. Once he stumbled and I started forward and Ongchu, without looking, put out an arm and caught the edge of the basket and steadied it and let go, and Nima kept walking.

At the end of an hour Ongchu stopped him by a stone wall and lifted the basket off. Nima stood up straight and put both hands on top of his head and pressed down, hard.

"It feels like my head is floating," he said.

"Because the weight is gone."

"How do you do this for eight hours?"

Ongchu understood the question without me. He held up his own hands and turned them over. They were thick and scarred and square, with nails cracked from stones.

"Every day," he said in Sherpa. "From small. From when I was your size. Slowly, slowly, every day a little more. Then one day you are a man and you carry thirty kilos to Gokyo and you think it is nothing." He grinned at me. "Tell him I carried a refrigerator once. To Namche. Two days."

I told him. Nima did not believe it.

"Ask the woman who owns the lodge in Namche," Ongchu said. "It is in her kitchen."

---

In the afternoon, on a long climb with the wind behind us, Ongchu dropped back beside me and walked at my pace, which for him must have been like walking underwater.

"Didi," he said. "Your mother doesn't sleep."

"Her knees?"

"Her knees. Her back. Last winter she fell on the ice going to the toilet in the night. She didn't tell you."

"No."

"She told Yangzi not to tell you." He walked for a while. "In the winter there are no guests. The lodge is closed from December to March. Everyone goes down to Kathmandu, the young ones, the families. Only the old people stay. The water freezes in the pipe. You carry it from the stream in the morning, you break the ice with a stone. She does that, Didi, with her knees."

"I know."

"You don't know," he said, without anger. "You knew. Now it is different."

I did not say anything. My heart was very loud. I could not tell how much of it was the climb.

"I don't want anything," he said. "I am not asking for anything. I want you to know. Yangzi and I, we run the lodge now in the season, the two of us, with Aunt in the kitchen. We do the guests. We do the money. We want to put a new roof, a second floor, solar for hot water, more rooms. The trekkers now, they want hot showers, they want charging. If we don't do it, the guests go to the new lodges in Thame. But to borrow from the bank in Namche, the bank wants to know whose lodge it is." He looked at me. "It is your father's and your mother's. It is yours."

"It's my mother's."

"Yes. And after?"

The wind came down the valley and pushed at our backs. I did not answer him. He did not ask again. We walked on, and after a while he went ahead to catch up with Nima, and I watched them, the man and the boy, one tall and broad with the big doko on his back and one small with the child's basket, which Nima had asked to carry again, walking up the long brown slope in single file toward the next village and its blue smoke.

---

Thame was a scatter of stone houses on a broad shelf at the meeting of two valleys, with high cliffs behind it and the river roaring in a gorge below. We stayed at a lodge run by a friend of Ongchu's from school, a big quiet man named Gyaltsen who had worked on the mountains for ten years and then stopped, and whose wife cooked us potato pancakes in the evening: grated potato mixed with a little flour and salt and fried flat in an iron pan until the outside was brown and crisp and lacy at the edges, served with a lump of yak butter melting on top and a heap of chili paste, red and oily, beside it. Nima ate two and lay down on the bench by the stove with his hand on his stomach and closed his eyes.

That night I could not sleep at all.

It is one of the things altitude does. You lie in the cold dark under three blankets, and your body is exhausted, and your mind is not, and your heart beats loud and fast in your ears, and every so often your breathing stops by itself, for a few seconds, and then starts again with a gasp, and you jerk awake, and lie there waiting for it to happen again. Nima slept through it. I lay and listened to him breathe, the soft regular sound of it, and once, when his breath paused, I put my hand on his chest in the dark and waited until it began again.

I thought about my mother breaking ice in the stream with a stone.

I thought about Mrs. Pfeiffer in Woodside, who had been born in Hamburg and had gone back twice, both times too late.

I thought about my apartment on Sixty-First Street, two rooms, and a third-floor walk-up with forty-four steps, and the window that looked straight at the train. I tried to see my mother in it. I tried to see her sitting by the window in her chuba and her pangden with the 7 roaring past at eye level every four minutes, and the brick building opposite, and the fruit stand on the corner, and nobody on the whole block who spoke her language except me, and me at work from eight to six. I could see it very clearly. I could not see her in it at all.

At three in the morning I got up and went out to the toilet across the yard. The cold was so sharp it hurt my teeth. The stars were out, more than I had seen since I was a girl, so many and so close that the sky was not black but gray with them, and the cliffs above the village stood up against them as flat black shapes cut from paper. My breath went up white and vanished. I stood in the yard and breathed, as deep as I could, and the air came in thin and cold and did not fill me, and I breathed again.

When I got back into bed my phone was lit. There was a message in the family's private space. It was a voice message from Yangzi's account, but the voice was my mother's, very close to the phone, as if she were not sure how far away I was.

"Thame," she said. "Ongchu says you are at Thame. Tomorrow, then. I am making the room ready. Tell the boy to wear a hat."

That was all.

Drangkar, 3,980 Meters

*Elevation 3,980 meters. Drangkar. Pulse 106. Oxygen 87 percent.*

From Thame the trail goes north along the Bhote Koshi, up a valley that gets narrower and higher and emptier with every hour, until the last trees are gone and the slopes on both sides are only brown grass and gray stone and the low dark mats of juniper, and the sky over the top of the valley is that black-blue that seems to be the color of the air running out. It was the trail I had walked to school as a child, two hours down to Thame in the morning and three hours up again in the afternoon, with my tin lunch box tied to my waist with a string. I knew every bend of it. I had not expected that my feet would know it too.

They did. Somewhere above the second bridge, where the trail goes around a big rock with a black streak of water stain down its face, my feet slowed by themselves, and turned in toward the hill, and stepped up onto a flat stone I had not seen but had known was there, and I nearly cried, and did not, because I needed the breath.

Nima was walking beside me. He had been quiet all morning.

"Are we close?"

"Close."

"How close?"

"One more hill."

"You said that before."

"This time it's true."

We came over the hill at about one in the afternoon. The valley opened, the way valleys do up there, into a wide high bowl of brown grass with the river running through the bottom of it, braided and shallow, glittering, and on a terrace above the river, against the north slope, out of the wind, were the houses of Drangkar. There were fourteen. I had counted them as a child. There were still fourteen. Stone, whitewashed, with flat roofs weighted with stones and slate and piles of firewood and dried dung stacked on top, and blue window frames, and at the near end of the village, longer than the others, two stories, with a painted signboard over the door that I could not read from there but did not need to read, our lodge.

Up the valley, beyond the last of the houses, the slopes closed in toward a wall of rock and snow at its head, white against that black-blue sky. The pass was up there, behind the shoulder where the valley turned. You could not see it from Drangkar. As a girl I had believed you could, if you stood on the right stone.

"Is that where we're going?" Nima said. "Up there?"

"Maybe. At the end. If our hearts are good."

"How high?"

"Five thousand three hundred and sixty."

He did the arithmetic in his head. "Seventeen thousand feet," he said. "More than. That's twelve Empire State Buildings."

"A little more."

"Twelve and a bit," he said.

---

My mother was standing at the wall.

She was standing on the low stone wall at the edge of the lodge's yard, which she must have climbed onto to see us coming, holding herself steady with one hand on the post of the gate. She had seen us long before we saw her. She was very small at that distance, a dark figure with a bright stripe down her front, and she did not wave. She only stood there.

As we came closer I saw that she had dressed. She was wearing her good chuba, the dark blue one, long and wrapped and belted at the waist, with the sleeves of a white blouse showing at the wrists, and over the front of it a pangden in stripes of red and orange and green and blue, the stripes narrow and bright and very straight, falling from her waist almost to her ankles. Over all of that a gray down jacket, unzipped, and a wool hat pulled down to her eyebrows, maroon, with a pompom. Her braid hung down her back with the red thread at the end. She had a walking stick in her other hand. She had never used a walking stick before.

Ongchu went ahead and helped her down from the wall. She let him. Then she stood at the gate and waited for us to come up the last bit of path, and I came up, and stood in front of her, and could not think of anything to say.

She looked at my face for a long time. She looked at it the way Phupu had looked at it in Kathmandu, checking it, the way you check a melon. Then she reached up and took my chin in her fingers and turned my face a little toward the light, one side, then the other.

"Your lips," she said in Sherpa. "Look at your lips. Didn't you put anything on them?"

"I forgot."

"You forgot." She let go of my chin. "Fourteen years in America and you forgot." She said it the way she would have said the weather was cold, as a fact, without a fight in it. Then she looked past me at Nima.

He was standing a little behind me, with the child's doko still on his back, because he had insisted on carrying it the last hour, and his hat in his hand, and his face very red and very solemn. He did not know what to do. I had not told him what to do. I did not know what to tell him.

My mother went to him. She leaned her stick against the gate and went the three steps on her bad knees and took his face in both her hands, the way she had taken mine, and bent down, and put her forehead against his forehead, and held it there. She did not say anything. Neither did he. I watched them, the old woman in her striped apron and the boy in his orange-and-brown boots, forehead to forehead in the bright cold light, and the wind blowing the end of her braid across his shoulder, and the line of flags over the gate snapping behind them, red and white and blue and green and yellow, and I put my hand over my mouth.

When she stood up she said to him in Sherpa, slowly, "You are Nima."

He understood. He nodded.

"Say it," she said.

He looked at me. I did not help him.

"Nima," he said, very quietly. Then, in a rush, before he could stop himself, the first Sherpa I had heard him say in five years: "Grandmother. I carried the rice."

---

She brought us inside and sat us down in the dining room and brought butter tea.

The dining room was as I remembered it, and also smaller. It was a long low room with windows on the south side looking down the valley, and benches along three walls with wool carpets on them, dark red and blue with patterns of clouds and flowers, worn bald in the places where people sat, and long low tables in front of the benches. The walls were painted pale green to the height of a person and white above that. In the middle of the room stood the stove, a big black iron box with a pipe going up through the ceiling, and a kettle on it, and a pot, and around it on the floor a ring of guests' boots drying. On the walls were the things that are on the walls of every lodge in the mountains: a calendar from a trekking company, a map of the region printed on cloth, a few faded photographs of peaks. And one of my father, which had not been there before. It was a print of the one with the ladle, framed in plain wood and hung over the door to the kitchen.

There were three guests, a young French man with a beard who was reading a paperback by the window, and an Australian couple in their sixties, both wearing the same blue fleece, who were playing cards. They looked up and smiled at us and went back to what they were doing. To them we were the cook's family arriving.

My mother poured the tea from a big thermos into glasses. It was hot and pale and frothy, the color of milky coffee, with little golden eyes of butter floating on top, and it smelled of smoke and salt and something faintly rancid that was not unpleasant, the smell of yak butter, which is stronger than cow's butter and has a grassy tang to it. I drank. The salt hit first, then the fat, then the bitter of the tea under it, and it went down warm and heavy and sat in my stomach like a stone in the sun. I had forgotten how much I loved it. In Queens I had tried to make it with salted butter from the supermarket and a stick blender, and it had tasted like nothing.

Nima drank his. He did not make a face. He had learned in Namche. He drank it all and put the glass down, and my mother filled it again without asking, and he drank that too.

"Good boy," she said in Sherpa. "Your mother never drank more than one."

"I did."

"You didn't. You poured it in the dog's bowl when you thought I wasn't looking."

I had. I had forgotten that. The dog's name had been Bhote and he had been black and enormous and had loved butter tea more than any of us.

---

That evening I opened the map on my phone, in the dining room, by the stove, with the stove's heat on my face and the cold from the windows on my back. The dot that was me was sitting exactly on the pin I had made two weeks before in Queens. *Our lodge. Built by Father and Mother, 1994. Kitchen faces east.* The kitchen did face east. I could hear it through the wall behind me, my mother and Yangzi talking over a pot, the baby crying and then stopping, the scrape of a ladle.

Nima was asleep on the bench beside me under a blanket, with his new socks from Nuru on his feet and his boots on the floor in the ring with the guests' boots.

I added to the note on the pin. *Arrived. Mother was on the wall. Father's photograph is over the kitchen door now.* I attached a picture of the dining room with the stove in the middle and the boots around it and my son asleep. Then I sat and looked at the line on the map, the long straight thread from the edge of the ocean to this pin, and at the pin's small round head, a dot of red sitting on a brown crease in the mountains, and listened to my mother in the kitchen telling Yangzi that the boy had his grandfather's ears.

Kitchen Camp, 3,980 Meters

*Elevation 3,980 meters. The lodge kitchen, Drangkar. Pulse 98. Oxygen 88 percent.*

On the first morning I put on the chuba.

I had not planned to. I had brought it because it seemed wrong to leave it in a drawer in Queens while I came here, the way it would seem wrong to leave a photograph of someone face down. But I woke at six in the cold with frost on the inside of the window and my breath standing in the air above the blanket, and I heard my mother already in the kitchen, and I got up and took it out of the duffel and put it on.

It was dark brown wool, heavy, a long sleeveless wrap that goes on over a blouse and crosses in front and ties at the side, then is belted at the waist with a long sash so that it falls straight to the ankle. I had worn it every day from the age of fifteen until I left. My body remembered how to cross it, which side went over which, how to pull the sash tight and tuck the end. It was looser than it had been. Nuru was wrong; I had not gotten fat in America. I had gotten thinner, in the way of people who eat standing up.

Then I took the new pangden out of its newspaper and held it against my front. I could not tie it. The ties went behind the back and crossed and came around and tied again in front, under the band, and my fingers had forgotten the order. I stood in the cold room fumbling with it for a long time.

My mother came to the door. She looked at me. She did not say anything. She came in and turned me around by the shoulders and took the ties out of my hands and did them, quickly, with a small hard tug at the end that pulled the apron flat against me, and then turned me back around and looked at me again. She straightened the stripes with her palm, smoothing them down from my waist to my knees.

"There," she said.

"It's beautiful, Ama."

"Yangzi's aunt wove it. In Khumjung. I told her the colors." She touched the red stripe. "I told her bright. In America everything is gray. I have seen the pictures."

---

The kitchen faced east, as I had written. At that hour the sun was just coming over the ridge behind the village, and it came in through the one small window over the stove in a single block of yellow light, full of smoke, so thick with smoke that it looked solid enough to lean on.

The kitchen was dark otherwise, with a low ceiling and walls blackened by thirty years of fire, black and shining in the corners where the soot had built up like lacquer. Along one wall were the shelves of steel plates and bowls and cups, turned on their edges and stacked, gleaming dully. Along another were the big copper water pots, three of them, each the size of a child, with dented sides. Sacks on the floor: rice, flour, potatoes, a sack of dried radish, a sack of tsampa. A wooden butter churn in the corner, taller than Nima. On a hook a bunch of dried meat in strips, dark red, like strips of old leather. And in the middle of the back wall, the stove.

It was not the iron stove of the dining room. It was the old kitchen stove, the one my father had built with his own hands the year they built the lodge, out of stones and clay, waist high, a long low hump with three holes in the top for pots and a mouth at one end where you fed the fire. The clay had been smoothed and smoothed again over the years by my mother's hand, with mud and dung, so that it was soft and gray and rounded as a river stone. My mother was feeding it now with dried yak dung from a basket. The dung was in flat round cakes, dry and light and fibrous, brown-gray, like big crumbling cookies, and when she broke one and pushed the pieces in, they caught at once and burned with a low steady orange flame that hardly smoked at all and smelled sweet, of grass and earth and something like burnt sugar.

"Juniper to start," she said. "Dung to cook. Wood, there is no wood up here. Never was."

Nima came in in his socks and his pajamas and a down jacket over them, rubbing his eyes. He stopped in the doorway.

"It smells like a barn," he said in English.

"It smells like home," my mother said in Sherpa, without knowing what he had said, and he understood her, and sat down on the low stool by the fire she pointed to.

---

Yangzi came in with the baby on her back, tied on in a shawl. She was small and round-faced and quick, twenty-seven, with her hair cut short like a city girl's and a fleece jacket over her chuba and her own pangden in dark blue and gold. She kissed my cheek and took the baby off her back and put her in Nima's lap before he could object.

"Hold her," she said in Nepali. "I need my hands."

Nima held her. He held her the way boys hold babies, at arm's length, as though she might go off. Chhoki looked up at him with enormous black eyes and a fat solemn face and then reached up and took hold of his lower lip and pulled.

"Ow," Nima said. "Ama. Ow."

"She likes you."

"She's hurting me."

"That's how they like you."

My mother laughed. It was the first time I had heard her laugh since we arrived, a short dry bark that came out of her as if by accident, and she put her hand over her mouth and turned back to the fire.

---

That morning she taught him shakpa.

It was not a lesson exactly. She did not announce it. She simply began to make it, as she made it most days for the lodge staff and whatever guests wanted something hot that was not noodles, and she put things into his hands as she went, and he did them, and when he did them wrong she took his hands in her own hands and moved them and gave them back.

First the dough. Flour, white flour, in a steel basin, and water from the copper pot, cold enough to ache, and a pinch of salt, and she mixed it with her hand into a stiff ball and kneaded it and then pushed the basin across to Nima. He kneaded. She watched. She took his hands and pressed the heels of them into the dough and pushed, and folded, and pushed. He did it. His face went pink from the effort. When the dough was smooth she tore it in two and rolled each half into a long rope between her palms on the board, as thick as a thumb, and gave one rope to him.

Meanwhile Yangzi had put the big pot on the middle hole of the stove with water in it and a spoon of butter, and was cutting potatoes into chunks, and a white radish into thin rounds, and an onion, and three cloves of garlic, and a piece of ginger, and dropping them into the water as she cut. My mother took a handful of the dried meat strips from the hook and cut them small with scissors over the pot. The water began to steam. The kitchen filled with the smell of onions and garlic and meat, salty and dark.

"Now," my mother said.

She held her rope of dough over the boiling pot in her left hand. With the thumb and first finger of her right, very fast, she pinched off a small piece, flattened it with a little push of her thumb, and flicked it into the pot. Then another, and another, pinch flatten flick, pinch flatten flick, so fast her fingers blurred. The little pieces of dough went into the pot like a flurry of snow and sank and then rose again.

"Like the pot is snowing," I said.

She looked at me. "Who told you that?"

"Uncle Nuru. He said my father did it like that."

She did not say anything for a moment. Then she said, "Your father was faster," and handed her rope to Nima, too, so that he had two, and nodded at the pot.

He tried. The first piece was too big and he dropped it in whole and it splashed. The second stuck to his finger. The third flew off past the pot and landed on the stove top and sizzled. Yangzi laughed. The baby, in Yangzi's lap now, laughed because Yangzi did. My mother did not laugh. She reached over and took his right hand in hers, and held the thumb and the first finger together, and moved them, pinch, flatten, and let go, flick, and did it again with his hand inside hers, slowly, five times, ten times. Then she let go.

He did it. Pinch, flatten, flick. A small flat piece of dough went into the pot and sank. Then another.

"Bistarai," my mother said. "Slowly. Then fast later."

He understood her. He did it slowly. The pieces went into the pot one by one, all different sizes, some flat and some lumpy, and sank and rose. It took him twenty minutes to finish his two ropes. My mother stood beside him the whole time, not saying anything, with her hands folded over her striped apron, watching his hands.

When it was done she threw in a handful of spinach from a sack, dark green and wilted from the cold, and a spoon of chili paste, and a spoon of salt, and stirred it and tasted it from the ladle and added more salt. Then she ladled it into bowls. It was thick and brown and steaming, the broth gone cloudy and heavy from the dough, full of chunks of potato and soft rounds of radish and little shreds of meat and the dough pieces, tender and chewy, some thin and slippery and some thick as dumplings. Nima's lumpy ones were easy to find.

He ate a whole bowl and asked for another and said, in Sherpa, carefully, "Good." Then he said, also in Sherpa, "Again tomorrow?"

My mother looked at him over the rim of her own bowl.

"Tomorrow you make it alone," she said.

---

In the afternoon, when the kitchen was quiet and the guests had gone out walking, she asked me to show her Queens.

I did not understand at first. She pointed at my phone. She said she had seen pictures, Yangzi had shown her what I had put in the family's private space, but they were small and Yangzi always went too fast. She wanted to see them slowly.

So I sat with her on the bench in the dining room by the window with the low sun coming in and opened the private space on my phone and went back through two years of photographs, one by one. She held my wrist to make me stop on the ones she wanted. Nima at his school in a white shirt, with the flag behind him. Nima on the beach at Rockaway with his trousers rolled up. Our kitchen, with the window and the train going by outside it, a blur of silver and purple. Lhamu Auntie's restaurant. The laundromat on Woodside Avenue. Mrs. Pfeiffer, whom I had photographed once with her permission, sitting in her chair by the radiator, smiling at the camera. My mother looked at that one a long time.

"Who is she?"

"The old woman I take care of. Ninety-one."

"Where are her children?"

"Her son is in California. Her daughter died."

My mother nodded slowly. She looked at the photograph some more.

"She sits by the window," she said.

"Yes."

"And you come in the morning."

"Every morning. And then I go to the next one."

She did not say anything else about it. She made me go back to the picture of our kitchen window with the train in it, and she enlarged it with two fingers the way Yangzi must have shown her, clumsily, so that the picture jumped and spun, and she held it close to her face and looked at the blur of the train.

"It goes over your house?"

"Beside it. On a bridge. Every four minutes."

"Every four minutes," she said. "Like a yak caravan on a bridge. All day."

"All night too. Less."

She gave me back the phone. She looked out the window at the brown bowl of the valley, where nothing moved at all except a hawk, very high, turning in a slow circle over the river, and the wind in the grass, and far away on the slope a single black yak walking, the size of an ant.

"I would hear it," she said. Then she stood, slowly, with one hand on the windowsill, and went back into the kitchen to wake the fire for the evening.

High Pasture, 4,350 Meters

*Elevation 4,350 meters. The summer pasture above Drangkar. Pulse 112. Oxygen 84 percent.*

The yaks had to come down.

All summer they had been up on the high pasture above the village, a long shelf of grass under the ridge, four hundred meters above the houses, grazing in the short season when the grass was green and the nights were not too cold. Now it was the middle of November, and the grass up there had gone brown and dry and thin, and the nights had begun to freeze hard enough that the stream by the herders' hut was ice in the morning, and it was time to bring them down to the winter fields by the village, where there was hay stacked on the roofs and walls to keep the wind off.

Our family had four yaks, or rather naks, the females, which give the milk and the butter, and one young bull. The rest of the herd, thirty-some animals, belonged to Gyalbu, who lived in the house next to the lodge and had been my father's friend since they were boys. He was seventy-four. He had herded yaks his whole life and had never been to Kathmandu and had no intention of going. He came to the lodge door at seven in the morning with a stick in his hand and a sling of woven yak hair over his shoulder and a pouch of tsampa on his belt and said, to nobody in particular, "Today," and my mother looked at Nima and said, "Go with him."

Nima looked at me.

"Go," I said. "I'll come too."

---

We went up behind the village on a path that was hardly a path, only a line of beaten earth through the brown grass, very steep, with the stones of old walls half buried along it. Gyalbu went first. He walked the way old herders walk, slowly and without stopping, a short step and then another short step, his back very straight and his stick swinging. He never looked as though he was hurrying, and he was always far ahead.

I could barely follow him.

At four thousand three hundred meters there is a little more than half the oxygen in each breath that there is in Woodside. You do not feel it as a lack of air. You feel it as a weight, as if someone had put a heavy wet blanket on you and was slowly piling stones on top of it. Your legs are not tired, but they will not go. Your heart beats so loud that it is not a sound anymore but a pressure, a pulse you feel in your eyes and your fingertips and your teeth. My head was clear. I had been at the lodge three days and my body had begun to make its peace. But the climb took everything, and every twenty steps I stopped and stood with my hands on my knees and breathed in great gasps, five, six, seven, until the black spots went away from the edges of what I could see.

Nima stopped with me each time, standing beside me, breathing hard too, not saying anything. His cheeks were burned bright red on top from the sun and his lips were cracked in two places, and he had my mother's maroon hat pulled down over his ears. Once, while I was bent over, he took my wrist and put his two fingers on it, in the right place now, and counted.

"One hundred and twenty," he said.

"I know."

"Is that bad?"

"It's high. It's okay. It comes down."

"Mine is one hundred and ten," he said. "I counted at the wall."

"That's okay too."

He was quiet. Then he said, "I can hear yours. Like when I put my ear on your back."

The light up there was the strangest thing. It was so clear that it did not seem to be light at all, only a kind of absence of anything between you and what you were looking at. The far side of the valley, which must have been two kilometers away, looked close enough to hit with a stone. Every rock on it was sharp. Every patch of snow had an edge as clean as a knife cut. Our shadows lay on the brown grass beside us, black and small, and when a cloud went over the sun, which happened only twice that morning, the cold came instantly, the way it comes when you open a freezer, and then the cloud passed and the sun was on my face again and so hot it stung.

---

The pasture was a long tilted shelf of grass a kilometer wide, with a stream down the middle of it and a stone hut at one end, low and square and roofed with flat stones, where the herders lived in summer. The yaks were scattered all over it, black and brown and a few with white faces or white patches on their flanks, grazing with their heads down, their long skirts of hair hanging almost to the ground and moving in the wind like curtains.

Nima stopped at the edge of the shelf.

"They're huge."

"Bigger than dzo."

"They're so hairy."

"I told you."

"Ongchu was right. They look angry."

They did not look angry. They looked like they were thinking about something very far away and did not want to be disturbed. One of them, a big black nak with a white star on her forehead and a red cord tied in her ear, raised her head and looked at us and chewed and put her head down again.

Gyalbu walked out into the middle of the pasture and stood still and whistled, a long sliding whistle that went up and then down. Then he threw a stone with the sling. He did it without seeming to aim, a quick whip of his arm, and the stone went out in a high arc across the pasture and landed in the grass a few meters behind the farthest yak, and the yak lifted its head and turned and began to walk toward him. He whistled again. Another stone, on the other side. Another yak turned.

Slowly, from all over the pasture, the yaks began to come in.

"Count them," Gyalbu said to Nima, in Sherpa, and then, when Nima looked blank, in Nepali, slowly, the way you speak to a child or a foreigner. "Count. How many?"

Nima understood that. He began to count in English under his breath. Gyalbu shook his head.

"Not like that." He held up one finger. "Ek." Two fingers. "Dui." Three. "Tin."

"Ek, dui, tin," Nima said.

"Char, panch."

"Char, panch."

"Chha, saat, aath, nau, das." He held up all ten fingers and then closed his fists. "Das. Ten. Now count."

Nima counted. He stood at the edge of the stream with his lips moving and his finger pointing at each animal as it went by, and he counted in Nepali, ek, dui, tin, and when he got to das he started again and held up one finger on his other hand to show one ten. The yaks went by close enough to touch, huge and dark and smelling of musk and dung and wet hair, their hooves sucking in the boggy ground by the stream, their breath coming out in long white plumes, the bells on their necks clanking, deep and dull, like pots knocked together. Gyalbu walked behind them, whistling, and tapped one on the haunch with his stick, and it went on.

"Thirty-seven," Nima said at the end, in English. Then he corrected himself, in Nepali, struggling, "Tis... tis-saat?"

Gyalbu laughed. "Close. Saintis. Thirty-seven, yes. Good. But wrong."

"Wrong?"

"Thirty-eight. One is behind the hut. Black one. She hides every year." He pointed with his stick. Behind the stone hut, half hidden, a small black nak was grazing by herself in the lee of the wall, not looking at anybody. "She doesn't want to go down. She likes it up here."

"Why?"

Gyalbu shrugged. "Some like the high place."

He went to get her. Nima watched him go. Then he took out his phone, which he had not looked at in two days, and photographed the black nak behind the hut, and then the whole herd going down the slope together toward the village, a long dark line of animals on the brown grass with their tails swinging, and then, after a moment, Gyalbu, who did not notice.

---

We ate at the hut before we went down. Gyalbu made a fire in the hearth inside with dung cakes from a pile by the door, and when the cakes had burned down to embers, glowing red and gray, he pushed six potatoes into them with his stick and covered them with ash. The hut was dark and smoky and very small, with a floor of beaten earth and a bench of stones along one wall covered with a yak-hair blanket, and the smoke went up and out through a gap in the roof stones, and the light came in through the gap in a thin blue shaft. It smelled of smoke and sour milk and old butter.

While the potatoes cooked, I showed Gyalbu my father's photographs.

I had not planned to. But he asked about my father, the way everyone asked, and I took out the phone and opened the folder, and he took it from me and held it far from his face and squinted, and I enlarged the pictures for him one by one. The kitchen tents. The cake. The potatoes peeled into the snow. He looked at each one for a long time without speaking.

Then he stopped me at one I had never captioned. It was an early one, black and white, my father at nineteen or twenty, standing on a trail with a load on his back, with three other porters beside him in a row, all thin, all squinting, all with their namlos across their heads. I had always written nothing under it.

Gyalbu put his finger on the second porter from the left, a short boy with a round face and a gap in his front teeth.

"That's me," he said.

"You?"

"Me. That is the first expedition. We carried in from the road, far down in the hills, where the buses stopped. Many teams still walked in then, to save the cost of the planes. Seventeen days of walking. Your father and me and these two." He touched the other two faces. "This one is Pasang from Khumjung. He died long ago, in Kathmandu, sick. This one, I forget. A Rai boy from below. He carried the gas." He looked at the photograph for a long time. "Look how thin we were. We ate tsampa and chili for seventeen days."

"Did you go up the mountain?"

"Me?" He laughed, and coughed in the smoke. "No. I went home to my yaks. Your father went back. Every year he went back. I went home."

I asked him to say their names again and I wrote them under the photograph in the folder. *Father, about 20, first expedition, carrying in from the road. With Gyalbu (second from left, from Drangkar), Pasang of Khumjung, and a Rai boy who carried the gas, name forgotten. Told by Gyalbu at the summer hut.*

Nima was reading it over my shoulder. He looked from the old photograph to the old man and back.

"That's him?" he said in English. "That's really him?"

"That's him."

Nima looked at Gyalbu's face very carefully, the way he looked at train maps, searching for the boy with the gap in his teeth. Gyalbu, seeing what he was doing, opened his mouth wide and showed him: the gap was still there, between two front teeth gone brown, and around it a few more gaps where other teeth had been.

Nima laughed so hard the yaks outside the hut lifted their heads.

Then Gyalbu raked the potatoes out of the ash with his stick, black and hard and smoking, and broke them open with his thumbs, and inside they were white and dry and floury and so hot the steam stood up out of them, and he put a lump of butter on each and a pinch of rough salt from a twist of paper, and gave them to us. We held them in the ends of our sleeves until they were cool enough to bite, and ate them standing in the doorway of the hut, looking down the long brown slope where the yaks were walking slowly toward the village and its fourteen houses and its blue smoke.

Night Camp, 3,980 Meters

*Elevation 3,980 meters. The lodge kitchen, 2:10 in the morning. Pulse 96. Oxygen 86 percent.*

I woke at two because my breathing had stopped again.

It had been happening every night. I would be asleep, and then I would be awake, sitting up in the dark with my mouth open, gasping, my heart going like a fist on a door, not knowing for a second where I was. Then the cold would tell me. Then the sound of Nima's breathing in the other bed. Then the wind outside, which never stopped in Drangkar, which only changed its voice from a hum to a whine to a long low moan along the eaves and back again.

I lay there waiting for my heart to slow and it would not. So I got up and put the chuba on over my long underwear and a down jacket over that and went into the kitchen, because the kitchen was where the fire was.

My mother was there.

She was sitting on the low stool by the stove with a blanket around her shoulders and her hands held out to the mouth of the fire, which she had banked for the night and opened again. There was no light but the fire. It came out of the stove's mouth in a low orange glow and lit her hands and the front of her blanket and the bottom of her face and left the rest of the kitchen in a black so deep that I could not see the shelves of plates or the water pots or the ceiling, only hear the wind pulling at the roof.

She did not seem surprised to see me.

"You too," she said.

"Every night."

"Your father was the same. Born up here, lived up here, and every night he woke at two like a foreigner." She moved over on the stool, which was not big enough for two, and I sat on the floor beside her instead, with my back against the warm clay of the stove, the way I had sat as a child. "He said it was the kitchen tents. Twenty years of sleeping at five thousand meters, his body forgot how to sleep anywhere else."

---

We sat for a long time without speaking. She fed the fire a dung cake, breaking it in her hands and pushing the pieces in. The flame rose a little and settled. The smell of it was sweet and grassy and close. Somewhere in the lodge a guest coughed and turned over.

I had been going to ask her in the daytime. I had planned it. I had planned to ask her at the table after dinner with Ongchu and Yangzi there, so it would be a family matter and not just ours. Or to wait until the last day. Or to write to her from Queens, through Yangzi, so I would not have to see her face. Now I was sitting on the floor of her kitchen in the dark at two in the morning with my heart pounding from the altitude, and it came out by itself.

"Ama. Come to Queens."

She did not move. She kept her hands out to the fire.

"Come and live with us. With me and Nima. I have two rooms. Nima can sleep in with me. You can have his room. It's warm. There's heat in the walls, you don't need a fire. There's a doctor at the corner for your knees. There's a woman on Seventy-Fourth Street who sells butter from Nepal. Lhamu Auntie is there, and Phurba from Khumjung, and a whole street of people from home. You wouldn't have to carry water. You wouldn't have to break ice."

She was quiet for so long that I thought she had not heard me over the wind.

Then she said, "What would I do in the day?"

"Rest. You've worked your whole life."

"Rest," she said, as if tasting the word. "In two rooms."

"There are parks. There's a park near us with benches. There's the street."

"And you are where?"

"At work."

"From when to when?"

"Eight to six. Sometimes seven."

"And the boy?"

"At school. Eight to three. Then after-school."

"So I am in two rooms," she said, "from eight to six. With heat in the walls. And the train every four minutes. And nobody to talk to."

"There's the street. You could go to Seventy-Fourth Street."

"How?"

"On the train. Two stops."

"Alone? I can't read the signs. I can't read anything, Pemba, I never went to school. I can't read the numbers on the buses. I can't ask a policeman where I am. If I get lost on the train, who do I ask?"

I did not have an answer. I knew all of it already. I had known it in Thame, at three in the morning, standing in the yard under the stars. I had known it in Woodside, looking at the map. Knowing it had not made me stop wanting to ask.

"I would be like her," my mother said. "Your old woman. By the window."

"She's ninety-one."

"I will be ninety-one," she said. "If I'm lucky."

---

The fire ticked. She pushed in another piece of dung.

"Last winter I fell," she said. "Ongchu told you."

"Yes."

"I was going to the toilet in the night. There was ice on the step. I lay there for a while. Maybe half an hour. I couldn't get up. My knees. Then Gyalbu's dog came and barked and barked and Gyalbu came with a light." She said it flatly. "So I know. You don't have to tell me. I know what it is to be old up here."

"Then come."

"I know what it is to be old up here," she said again. "I don't know what it is to be old there. Here, when I fall, Gyalbu's dog comes. There, who comes?"

"I come."

"From work. At six."

I put my head back against the warm clay and closed my eyes.

"Pemba," my mother said, in a different voice. "Look at me."

I opened my eyes. She had turned on the stool and was looking down at me, her face lit from below by the stove, very lined, very tired, the eyes black and bright.

"Do you want me to come," she said, "or do you want to have asked me?"

I could not answer her. I tried. I opened my mouth and nothing came. She waited. The wind went along the eaves with its long low voice. And I sat on the floor of her kitchen at four thousand meters and understood that I did not know, that I had not known for fourteen years, that maybe the whole reason I had walked up here with my son was so that I could say, later, in Queens, to myself, to Sabina, to Mrs. Pfeiffer, that I had asked.

"Both," I said at last. "I don't know. Both."

She nodded, as though that was the answer she had expected and it was not a bad one.

"Good," she said. "That is honest. Your father would have said the same."

---

We sat there until four. She told me things I had not known. That after my father died she had thought about going down to Kathmandu, to Phupu's, and had gone for one winter, and had hated it, the noise and the dust and the cars and the stairs, and had come back up in March before the snow was even off the trail. That she had been afraid, when I left at twenty, that I would never come back at all, and that every year I didn't, she had made herself think it was fine. That she watched the pictures of Nima in the family's private space every night before she slept, Yangzi had shown her how, one button, and she pushed it, and he came up, at the beach, at school, in the kitchen with the train.

"But it's Yangzi's," she said. "Her phone. When I want to talk to you I have to ask her. She's good. She doesn't mind. But I have to ask her, and she holds it, and she hears."

"I could make you one," I said. "Just for us."

"How?"

"In the family space. A room just for two people. You and me. Nobody else can see it, not even Yangzi. I'd leave you Ongchu's old phone, he has a new one. You'd press one button and talk, and it would come to me. And I'd answer. And nobody would hear but us."

She thought about it.

"Show me," she said.

So at four in the morning, by the light of the stove, I did it on my own phone, and then on Ongchu's old cracked one, which was sitting on the shelf by the door where he had left it. I made a space with only two names in it, mine and hers. I put a photograph at the top, the one of her I liked best, squinting at the lodge door in the sun. I set it so that when you opened Ongchu's old phone, it went straight there. And then I showed her the button, the round one at the bottom, and told her: press and hold, and talk, and let go.

She held the phone in both hands, close to her face, as she had held the photograph of the train. She pressed the button. She did not let go for a long time. Then she said, into it, in Sherpa, very formally, as if speaking to an official, "This is Mingma Futi. In the kitchen. It is four o'clock. The fire is good."

She let go.

My phone, in my lap, lit up with her voice. *This is Mingma Futi. In the kitchen.* She heard it come out of my phone a second later and jumped. Then she laughed, the dry short bark, and put her hand over her mouth, and laughed again behind it, her shoulders shaking, and I laughed too, both of us on the floor and the stool in the dark kitchen, trying to be quiet so we would not wake the guests.

---

At dawn she made tsampa.

Tsampa is roasted barley flour, fine and tan, smelling of toast and nuts and a little of dust. She put a handful in a wooden bowl for each of us and poured butter tea over it from the thermos, a little at a time, and stirred it with her finger. For herself she made it the old way, with less tea, so that she could knead it in the bowl with her fingers into a stiff dough and roll it into little balls and eat them one by one. For Nima, who came in rubbing his eyes, she made it thinner, a porridge, with a spoon of sugar, the way she used to make it for me.

He ate it with the spoon. Then he watched her knead hers, and put down the spoon, and asked for a dry handful, and poured his own tea, too much, and tried to knead it with his fingers. It turned into paste. She took the bowl from him and added more flour and gave it back. He tried again. This time it held. He rolled it into a lumpy ball and ate it, and chewed for a long time, and said in Sherpa, "Good," and then in English, "like the cereal at school," and my mother asked what he had said, and I told her it was a kind of American breakfast that comes in a box, and she nodded and said, "Then it is a good breakfast," and gave him another handful.

Lungden, 4,380 Meters

*Elevation 4,380 meters. Lungden, the last houses below the pass. Pulse 110. Oxygen 84 percent.*

On the morning we left for the pass, Nima made the shakpa alone.

Nobody told him to. He got up before me, which he had never done in his life, and I found him in the kitchen at six with my mother on her stool by the stove, not helping, just watching, with her hands folded on her striped apron, and Yangzi at the other end of the room nursing the baby and pretending not to watch. He had the steel basin between his knees and his sleeves pushed up to his elbows and flour to the wrists, and he was kneading.

He did all of it. The dough, too wet at first, and then he added flour without being told. The two long ropes, rolled on the board, uneven, one thicker than the other. He asked Yangzi in English and gestures for the potatoes and she gave them to him and he cut them, badly, in chunks of every size, with his tongue between his teeth. He cut the radish. He could not cut the onion without crying and stood there with tears running down his face and kept cutting. My mother cut the meat for him with the scissors, the one thing she did. When the water boiled he stood over the pot with a rope of dough in his left hand and pinched, and flattened, and flicked.

Slowly. Then a little faster. Not fast. The pieces went into the pot one by one, and sank, and rose.

When it was done he ladled it out into bowls for everyone in the lodge: my mother, Yangzi, Ongchu, me, the two lodge boys from Thame who helped with the guests, Gyalbu, who had come over from next door at the smell, and the young French man, who was leaving that day for Namche and had come into the kitchen to pay. Nine bowls. Nima counted them out loud in Nepali as he filled them. Ek, dui, tin. The French man took his bowl to the dining room and came back ten minutes later for a second and said to Nima, in English, "This is the best thing I have eaten in Nepal," and Nima went so red that his ears looked like they would light the room.

My mother ate hers slowly. When she finished, she put the bowl down on the floor beside the stool and wiped her mouth and looked at Nima.

"Too much salt," she said in Sherpa.

His face fell.

"Your grandfather," she said, "also put too much salt." She stood up, slowly, with one hand on the stove, and took the ladle from him and filled her bowl again.

---

Lungden is three hours above Drangkar, up the same valley, where the valley narrows and turns and climbs toward the foot of the pass. There are only a few houses there and a couple of lodges, stone, low, with flat roofs and walls around them for the yaks, set on a brown flat beside a stream under the great gray wall of the mountain. Trekkers sleep there the night before they cross the pass, to start in the dark. That was why we went. My mother did not come. Her knees would not do it, and she did not want to; she said she had crossed the pass once, when she was sixteen, to get married, and once was enough for anybody.

Ongchu came with us. He carried nothing but a small pack with water and chocolate and a thermos of butter tea from my mother and a down jacket for each of us, and walked at our pace the whole way without complaint, which was the hardest work I saw him do.

My body knew the height now. It no longer argued with every step. But it was still slow, slower than I had ever been, and every hundred meters of climbing I stopped and stood and breathed. My heart beat high and steady in my ears. My lips had cracked open at one corner and bled a little when I talked, so I did not talk much. The cold up there was a different cold even from Drangkar, drier, sharper, with a smell of snow and stone and nothing living. There was no juniper anymore. Only grass, short and brown and stiff with frost in the shade, and lichen on the rocks in round patches of green and orange and black, like spilled paint.

Nima walked beside me. Halfway up he stopped and held his head with both hands.

"It hurts," he said.

"Where?"

"Here." He pressed his temples. "Like someone's squeezing."

I clipped the oximeter on his finger. Eighty-four. Pulse one hundred and fourteen. I looked at his face, his eyes, his lips, which were cracked but not blue, and asked him if he felt sick to his stomach, and he said no, and if he was dizzy, and he said a little, and I gave him water and two of the tablets I had brought and made him sit on a rock for twenty minutes with his head down.

Ongchu crouched beside him.

"It's normal," he said, in Sherpa, slowly, and Nima understood. "Drink. Breathe. It goes."

"Does it hurt you?"

Ongchu thought about lying. I watched him think about it. Then he said, "At Lungden, no. At the pass, a little. At the high camps on the big mountain, yes, very much. Everybody's head hurts there. Even Sherpas." He tapped his own head. "We just don't say."

Nima looked up at him. "My grandpa's head hurt?"

"Your grandpa said his head hurt every single day for twenty years," Ongchu said. "And every day he made breakfast anyway."

In twenty minutes the number on the oximeter was eighty-seven and Nima said his head was better, and we went on.

---

The lodge at Lungden was a long single-story stone house with a dining room heated by a dung stove and six cold rooms with plywood walls. There were four trekkers there, all planning to cross in the morning: two German brothers in their fifties, a Korean woman traveling alone, and a Nepali boy from Kathmandu who was guiding her. We ate dal and rice and potatoes fried with garlic, and the German brothers argued in German about something on a map, and the Korean woman read, and her guide played a game on his phone with the sound off, and Nima fell asleep on the bench by the stove at seven o'clock with his boots still on.

Ongchu and I sat up.

We sat on the bench by the window, with the cold coming off the glass, and outside the window the wall of the mountain went straight up into the dark, and above it, where it ended, the stars were coming out one by one, then all at once.

"Didi," he said. "I have to tell you something."

I waited.

"Yangzi is pregnant again. Four months." He did not look at me. "We have not told anybody. Only Aunt."

"Ongchu. That's good."

"It's good," he said. "It's also two children in two rooms behind the kitchen, and the lodge with no hot water and the roof that leaks in July, and the new lodges in Thame with showers and charging, taking the guests." He was quiet. "Yangzi wants to go to Kathmandu. Her sister is there. There is work. A school for Chhoki later. I said wait. I said, let's see what Didi says. If the lodge is ours to build, we stay. If it isn't," he shrugged, "we go down. And then Aunt is alone up here with Gyalbu and his dog."

I looked at him. He looked out the window at the dark mountain.

"I am not asking," he said. "I want you to know."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it's true."

The stove ticked. One of the German brothers laughed at something and the other told him to be quiet.

"If I said yes," I said slowly, "what happens to her?"

"She stays in her room. Her kitchen. Nothing changes for her except we do the work, and she does what she wants. We build the second floor around her. She tells us we're doing it wrong." He almost smiled. "We take care of her. In the winter, if she doesn't want to go down, we stay up with her, or one of us does. If she gets sick, we carry her down. I would carry her down on my back. Didi, you know I would."

"I know."

"And it is still your father's lodge. The sign stays. The photograph stays. When you come, your room is your room. When the boy comes." He stopped. "He should come. He should come in the summer, when it's green. He can stay with us. He can herd with Gyalbu."

"He's ten."

"He won't always be ten," Ongchu said.

---

At nine o'clock my phone lit up on the bench beside me.

It was the room for two people. My mother's photograph was at the top, squinting at the lodge door. Underneath it there was a message, a voice message, two minutes and twelve seconds long, sent from Ongchu's old cracked phone in the kitchen at Drangkar, three hours below us in the dark.

I did not play it in the dining room. I took the phone outside.

The cold hit me like a wall of water. It was the coldest I had ever been. The sky was so full of stars that the ground was faintly lit by them, gray, and the frost on the grass glittered, and my breath went up in a column and hung there. Far below, down the valley, I could see nothing, no lights at all, only the dark. I stood with my back against the stone wall of the lodge, out of the wind, and pressed play, and held the phone to my ear.

"Pemba," my mother said. "This is your mother. In the kitchen. It is half past eight. The fire is good.

"I have thought about what you asked. I don't want to say it with your face there. So I say it here.

"I will not come to live in your country. I am sorry. I thought about it all day. I thought about the two rooms and the heat in the walls and the train. I think I would die there, not from my body. From the quiet in the day. Here I have the kitchen. Here I have Gyalbu's dog.

"But I will come to see it. One time. In the winter, when the lodge is sleeping. If you buy the ticket, and if Ongchu walks me down to Lukla, and if Phupu puts me on the big plane in Kathmandu. I want to see the boy's school. I want to see the train go by the window. I want to see your old woman. I want to see where you are when you are not here. Then I will come home.

"The lodge. The lodge is not mine to give. When your father and I made the paper in Namche, he wrote your name under ours. I didn't tell you. He said, *She will go, but it will be hers.* So it is yours to say, not mine. Say what you want. Whatever you say, I will stay in my kitchen.

"The boy made the shakpa well. Too much salt. Tell him I said it was good.

"That's all. The fire is good. Go to sleep. Tomorrow is the pass."

The message ended. The phone went dark in my hand.

I stood against the wall for a long time. My heart was beating so hard that I could feel it in the stone behind my back, or thought I could. I played the message again, and then a third time. I did not cry. I thought I would and I did not. My eyes were too dry; the air took everything.

Then I pressed the round button, and held it, and said, "I heard you, Ama. Tomorrow is the pass," and let go, and went inside, where Ongchu had covered Nima with a second blanket and was sitting by the stove with his hands out to it, waiting, not asking.

The Pass, 5,360 Meters

*Elevation 5,360 meters. The pass above Lungden. Pulse 126. Oxygen 78 percent.*

We left at four in the morning with our headlamps on.

The cold at that hour was not like anything I have a word for. It was not a temperature. It was a substance, thick and silent, that filled the dark between the stars and the frozen ground and came in through every gap in my clothes, at the wrists, at the neck, at the place where my hat did not quite reach my ears. The water in my bottle had frozen at the top in the night, though it had been inside my sleeping bag, and I had to break the skin of ice with my thumb to drink. The stream beside the lodge had stopped talking. It was solid, white and gray, with air bubbles caught in it like the eyes of fish.

There were nine of us on the trail: the German brothers, the Korean woman and her guide, two porters carrying for the brothers, and the three of us. We went up in a line, each with a circle of white light on the ground in front of us, and the circles moved up the dark slope in a slow zigzag, and nobody spoke. You do not speak, going up to a pass in the dark. You need everything for breathing.

Nima walked between Ongchu and me. He had his headlamp on over his grandmother's maroon hat, and the pompom stuck up above the strap, and every time he turned his head the beam swung across the frozen grass and the stones and the white plumes of everyone's breath. He had slept well. His head did not hurt. He had eaten a bowl of tsampa porridge at half past three without complaining and drunk two glasses of butter tea, and put Nuru's yak-wool socks on over his own socks, and laced his boots himself, tight, the way the boy in the store on Seventy-Third Street had shown him.

For the first hour the trail went up a valley of stones and frozen grass beside the stream. Then the stream ended and the grass ended and there was only rock, gray and brown and broken, and the trail climbed through it in short steep switchbacks. Then, above the rock, the stairs.

Someone, years ago, had set flat stones into the steepest part of the slope, so that in places the trail became a rough staircase, the steps all different heights, going up and up toward the notch in the ridge. In the dark I could see only the step in front of me in the circle of my headlamp and the step after that. I put my foot on one. I breathed. I put my foot on the next. I breathed twice. On the next, three times. My heart was beating so loud now that it was the only sound, louder than my breath, louder than the scrape of my boots, a deep slow pounding that seemed to come from outside my body, from the mountain, from the stone under my feet. I had the feeling that if I stopped, the pounding would go on without me.

*Bistarai,* my father said, somewhere. *The mountain is not going anywhere.*

---

The light came while we were on the stairs.

It did not come from the east, where I expected it. It came from above. The sky over the ridge went from black to the dark blue of a bruise, and the stars went out one by one from the bottom up, and then, all at once, the highest peaks to the north and east caught the sun, while we were still in shadow. They lit up gold, then pink, then white so bright I could not look at them. The light stood on them like fire on the tips of candles. Below them the slopes stayed blue and dark, and below that the valley we had climbed out of was still black, and somewhere down in that black was Lungden, and below Lungden, three hours, Drangkar, and my mother's kitchen, and her stove, and her stool, and Ongchu's old cracked phone on the shelf by the door.

Nima stopped on the stairs and looked.

"Ama."

"I see."

"It's like they're plugged in."

I laughed, and it cost me half a minute of breathing.

The Korean woman and her guide passed us, slowly, and then the German brothers, and then the porters, who were not slow at all. Then it was only the three of us on the stairs, in the blue shadow, with the gold on the peaks above. Ongchu took Nima's hand. He did not ask. He just took it, and Nima let him, and they went up step by step together, the man in front and the boy behind, and I came after.

Near the top Nima stopped and bent over and put his hands on his knees and breathed in great hoarse gasps, and I clipped the oximeter on his finger, my own hands so cold I could barely work the clip. Eighty-one. Pulse one hundred and thirty. His lips were dark but not blue. His eyes were clear.

"Do you want to go down?"

He shook his head. He could not speak. He held up one finger. One more minute.

We waited one minute. Then he stood up, and Ongchu took his hand again, and they went on.

---

The pass was a narrow saddle of rock and snow between two shoulders of the ridge, perhaps twenty meters wide, open to the sky on both sides. When we came up onto it the wind hit us. It had been behind the ridge the whole climb and we had not felt it, and now it came straight across the saddle from the east, from the far side, hard and steady and so cold it made my eyes stream and the tears froze on my cheeks. Across the saddle, from one rock to the other, there were flags. Hundreds of them, string after string, old and new, tied to cairns of piled stones and to each other, crossing and recrossing, so thick in places that they made a kind of roof. The wind took them all at once. They streamed out flat toward the west, every one of them, blue and white and red and green and yellow, cracking like whips, and the sound of them was so loud and so steady that it was like standing inside a drum.

I am not going to say anything else about them. That is what they were: color and wind, at the top of the world I had come from.

On the other side, the east side, the mountain fell away. Far below was a valley I had never seen, with a long gray glacier lying in the bottom of it like a dead snake, and beside the glacier a chain of lakes, a color I had never seen in water, a hard milky turquoise, bright as something made in a factory. Beyond them more peaks, and more, and far off to the east, very far, one dark pyramid of rock with a long white plume of snow blowing off its top in the jet stream, small and black and calm, which every trekker who came over that pass photographed and which my father had cooked below for twenty years. I looked at it for a while. It did not look like anything. It looked like a mountain.

Nima sat down on a flat rock out of the wind, behind one of the cairns, and put his head between his knees. Then he lifted it and looked out at the lakes.

"Twelve Empire State Buildings," he said, between breaths. "And a bit."

"And a bit."

"Can I tell Grandma?"

"Tell her."

He took my phone and held it close to his face with both hands, his fingers too cold to work it, and I opened the room for two for him, and showed him the button, and he pressed it and held it and said, in Sherpa, slowly, with long stops between the words for breathing: "Grandmother. It's Nima. I'm at the pass. My heart is loud. I counted the steps. I lost count. It's very cold. I'm okay."

He let go. Then he pressed it again and said in English, "Tell her I'm okay," and let go, and handed me the phone, and put his head down again.

---

Ongchu was standing at the edge of the saddle with his back to us, looking east.

I went and stood beside him. It took me a long time to cross those twenty meters. The wind pushed me sideways and the snow was hard and slick and my legs were heavy as if I were wading in a river, and when I got to him I could not speak for a full minute. He waited. He was breathing hard too, I saw, for the first time on the whole walk. The plume of his breath tore away in the wind.

"Ongchu," I said finally.

He turned his head.

"Build the second floor."

He did not move.

"In the spring we'll go to the office in Namche and do the paper. The lodge goes to you and Yangzi. Her room stays hers, and the kitchen, as long as she lives, and you write that down. The sign stays. My father's photograph stays over the door. If she wants to come to Queens for the winter, you walk her down to Lukla. If she gets sick, you carry her down." I stopped to breathe. "And you tell me. Everything. Not just when it's bad. You tell me when the roof leaks."

He looked at me for a long time. His face was burned dark across the cheekbones and his eyes were wet from the wind, or from something, and his beard had frost in it. He did not thank me. I would not have known what to do if he had. He took off his hat, there in the wind at five thousand three hundred meters, and held it against his chest for a moment, and then put it back on.

"Okay," he said, in English, the way he had first said it to Nima at Lukla. "Okay, Didi."

---

I want to say I was sure. I was not.

I stood on that pass with my heart going at a hundred and twenty-six and my oxygen at seventy-eight, with the wind making a drum of the flags, and the answer I had given was already sitting in me like a stone I had swallowed. I had given my father's lodge to my cousin. I had done it so that my mother could stay where she wanted to be, in her kitchen, with Gyalbu's dog. I had done it so that Ongchu and Yangzi would not go down to Kathmandu and leave her alone. I had done it because it was right.

I had also done it so that I could go back to Woodside. So I would not have to bring my mother to two rooms on Sixty-First Street and watch her sit by the window all day from eight to six while the train went by every four minutes. So I would not have to choose between my mother and Mrs. Pfeiffer and the woman after her and the rent. I had done it because it was easier. I could not tell, standing there, which of these was the true reason, and I understood that I never would, that both would live in me together for the rest of my life, the way the thin air and the heartbeat had lived in me together the whole way up.

My mother would come to Queens in January, or she would not. The ticket would cost what tickets cost. The paperwork would take what it took. Her knees would let her walk down to Lukla, or they would not. She might see the 7 go by the window. She might not. She might come for one winter and want to stay, or she might come for one week and want to go home, and I did not know which would be harder.

Nima would want to come back in the summer, when it was green, to herd with Gyalbu. He had already asked twice. I had said, "We'll see," which was what my mother used to say to me, and which, when she said it, usually meant no.

And one day, in a year, or ten, or twenty, there would be a message in the room for two, and it would not be from her. It would be from Ongchu, or from Yangzi, and I would be on the 7 between Sixty-First and Seventy-Fourth with the train roaring in my ears, and I would read it, and I would be more than seven thousand miles and nine Empire State Buildings away from the kitchen that faced east.

I knew all of that on the pass. I gave the answer anyway.

---

We did not cross. The others went on, down the far side toward the lakes, small dark figures on the snow, and we turned around and went back down the stairs the way we had come, into the blue shadow and then into the sun, which had reached the valley by then and lay on the frozen grass so bright it hurt.

Going down, the air thickened a little with every step. I felt it. I felt the fist in my chest open by a finger's width at a time. I felt my heart come down from my ears into my throat and from my throat back into my chest, where it belonged, and go on beating there, quieter, steadier, the way it had beaten all my life at sea level, so that I could almost stop hearing it.

Nima walked in front of me. Halfway down he stopped and took my phone and made a pin on our family map, at the pass, and typed the note with his thumbs, slowly, and showed it to me before he saved it.

*The pass. 5,360 meters. I lost count of the steps. Ongchu held my hand. Ama said yes to something. Grandma heard me.*

"What did you say yes to?" he asked.

"I'll tell you at the lodge."

"Is it good?"

I looked down the valley. Somewhere at the bottom of it, three hours away, there was a stone house with blue window frames and a kitchen that faced east, and smoke coming out of its roof, juniper in the morning and dung by evening, and my mother on her stool by the fire with Ongchu's old cracked phone in both hands, listening to her grandson tell her he was okay.

"I don't know yet," I said. "Ask me at sea level."

He thought about it, and nodded, and gave me back the phone, and we went on down, a short step and then another, placing the whole foot, breathing in, breathing out, the way my father taught me.