Nineteen

The old Sherpa breaks the silence once more. He points to the abyss and to the Englishman who is its decoration.

‘Why won’t he do anything? He could cry out, at least.’

The old Sherpa wants the Englishman to scream, to get up, to get on a plane where he can run afoul of the flight attendants… Anything for him to drop the mineral attitude he has now. But that doesn’t seem to be an option for him. What he can do, it seems, is lie there Britishly upon the mountain. Detach himself from disquiet and its retinue of shallow breaths, blank stares, and self-satisfaction. The Sherpa would like for it to rain, at least. Hard. Big, fat drops. Let the sidewalks of the cities flood, the storm drains overflow; let pluvial ducts be insufficient in their underground array.

The young Sherpa hears the old man despair at the Englishman’s lack of reaction, and he nods. He gazes into the obscene transparency of the oxygen-poor air, and he nods.

He would have liked to tell the older man about his thoughts on naval engineering. Ask him for his opinion and find acceptance in it, feel his enthusiasm being fed back. But he knows there isn’t any point with the old Sherpa. He recalls when he told him he wanted to study History of Law. The older man did not take that well. The greater part of his response was unintelligible. Now he senses – or rather fears – that something similar will happen. He senses – or fears – that the old Sherpa will tell him that a boy raised in the mountains could never establish an intuitive relationship with the sea. That that shortcoming would cause him insurmountable problems designing ships, submarines, oil platforms, or whatever it is naval engineers do. He senses – or fears – that the old man will raise his voice. That he’ll shout: ‘Idiotic caprice!’ That he’ll mock: ‘A boy who has never in his life set foot outside Nepal intends to launch his career in the ocean…’ That he’ll conclude: ‘You were born with a seven-hundred-kilometre restraining order on your head, issued by the ocean. What do you think the damned ocean is? I actually know what it’s like, and I can assure you it’s not how you imagine it.’ The old man could well say all of that. And, given the choice, the young Sherpa prefers to avoid making scenes.

Which is why he keeps his ideas about his vocational options to himself. Decides, instead of sharing, to silently nod. Let that silence speak for him. If the thunderous noise of the wind crossing the ridges of the Himalayas can be considered silence.

It’s not like he lacks arguments, of course. At this very moment, in a muted hypothetical argument against his colleague’s imagined objections, he thinks that he has seen the ocean countless times. For starters, on TV. And, although it should go without saying, online. And, since he was very young, in photographs at school. He has seen it from every possible angle: from faded images of sunsets over the Pacific to bathyscaphe expeditions in the Mariana Trench. He is practically an expert on the ocean, the young Sherpa now believes. And that thought, in conjunction with that show of restraint, that control over what he keeps to himself and what he does not say, lends him courage, a kind of new confidence in himself. An impulse that leads him to tap the older man’s shoulder and say something – something else, something new, unrelated to the Englishman or to naval engineering. He shifts onto his knees and asks:

‘Shall we get up?’