went back to my camera. He went back to his light stand.
In less than two hours I was done. I’d taken another two rolls of film, one up close and one with the glyph in context, and at the end of the evening, I handed Jan the sketchbook with six new drawings in it, one of them pretty damn good. He seemed pleased with the night’s work, though I was suddenly exhausted. We hadn’t had a shower for two days, and our tents were going to be soaked. It was close to 11:00 p.m., and we still had the hike up the shaft and the long trudge back to our camp. This was nothing new in my line of work, but I’d been spoiled, maybe, by the rest in the passageway with Jan’s cozy pipe. I could hardly stagger around.
Jan caught it. “Steady on,” he said, more kindly than I’d ever heard him. Maybe he was starting to get used to me.
Chapter Five
It took me six days to figure out an interesting fact, which was that not every photograph I took was equally important to my boss. In fact, three-quarters of my work seemed entirely extraneous. After a while, I could tell pretty easily when we were just shooting and when it was a very big deal. The same old glyph—the four-petaled k’in symbol—night after night, but never the same reaction out of our leader.
I also noticed another thing. He spent a lot of time writing things down, usually in the morning before Rikki and I crawled out of our tents to cook breakfast. He wrote in a large, bound journal, often with an open book beside him, which he would study from time to time before writing some more. I know this because I was studying him through the open flap of my tent as I lay in my sleeping sheet with one arm crooked behind my head.
It was the strange similarity between him and Stefan that fascinated me. Once I made the connection, I could not shake the thought that there was something I could learn about my brother if I just watched Jan long enough. Jan was older, of course, and weighted down by cares probably having to do with his mysterious marriage and who knows what else, while Stefan was, in contrast, less burdened by worldly matters, or at least less burdened than he’d been for so many years after Djed died, finally letting that grief slip from him. They also did not resemble each other physically. Stefan looked like a male version of me, tall and slenderly built, his prodigious nervous energy masked, like mine, beneath an air of studious calm, while Jan came across as the Dutchman he was, slow-moving and rock solid. In spite of his old demons, Stefan had managed to retain his sweet, abstracted smile—at least he still had it the last time I saw him—while Jan seemed sunk beyond where happiness could reach. But in some important way—maybe in the focused way they tackled life, or how they were both at home with silence—they shared some common ground that, on first blush, you wouldn’t think to look for.
As it turned out, Bruno was dead wrong about Stefan’s drug dealing, or, for that matter, all other aspects of his alleged debauchery. I was wrong, too. I figured my brother must have found shelter in one of his pothead friend’s garages when he got kicked out. Instead, he was quietly taken in by one of the priests at St. Silvan’s, Fr. Anthony, yet another postwar immigrant, the very guy who’d baptized both of us and who apparently understood everything there was to know about our family without having to be told. Priest or not, he was streetwise enough not to flaunt what he was doing in front of my parents. He made sure Stefan ate, slept in an actual bed, found a night-shift job at a grocery store stocking shelves, and got enrolled at the local public high school, from which, by some miracle, he actually graduated on time.
I learned all this when I caught up with Stefan a few years later in Nepal. My leaving Chicago was preordained. Not only had my brother advised me to get the hell out as soon as I possibly could, I’d also managed to embroil myself in an increasingly dicey liaison, my first venture into the dangerous thickets of erotic love, during my senior year at St. Silvan’s. Alexander was his name. Urgent were his hands. Perilous was my lot. It was time to flee.
Over the years, I’d gotten sporadic postcards from Stefan, sent not to the house but directly to St. Silvan’s and mysteriously passed on to me, who never figured out the identity of our cagey postman, Fr. Anthony. I knew that for the past three years, Stefan had been living in Kathmandu, but I assumed—thanks in part to Bruno’s self-confident, made-up accounts of what Stefan was up to—that he’d probably been hanging out somewhere my tata had never heard of: on the infamous Jochen Tole, aka Freak Street, just another pilgrim on the long and winding hippie trail. As it turned out, he was taking care of terminal TB patients at a hospice run by—you guessed it—Catholics. Or one Catholic, at least: a Yoda-like priest from India called Fr. John.
At first, though Stefan seemed happily shocked to see me, we were a little shy with one another. It had been so ridiculously long. And we had both changed. I was no longer the little girl who’d sobbed into his T-shirt during that final, agonizing farewell. And after years of nothing but dal bhat and endless cups of chai, he himself was almost unrecognizable. Clothed in your typical Newari villager garb—loose white pants, loose white shirt, woven skull cap, and Goodrich tire sandals—he didn’t even look American anymore. But slowly, in the warm glow of Fr. John’s benevolent presence, we started to relax. At Fr. John’s insistence, Stefan took a few days off to show me the countryside.
And this is where, in the car-less streets of medieval Bhaktapur, in the shadow of the Himalaya, I caught a glimpse of the future, which was that I would be a photojournalist. I’d go to crazy places and meet people I’d never meet except in the boonies. Life would be a thrill instead of the boring grind my parents had inflicted on themselves. And I would do something with it, though it was hard to say, even to myself, what that meant. I tried to explain all this to Stefan, who nodded wisely (all that time with Yoda) and said he could see it. That I was brave and tough and willing and smart—I took this with a large grain of salt—and already a good photographer. That all I needed to do was take myself seriously.
Then we indulged in some tender reminiscing about our long-ago visit to the Art Institute. He’d known right then, he told me, which was why he bought me the Brownie 127.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “that I broke into your room that day. I was so jealous of you and Djed . . .”
He waved me off, and I could see he was not yet ready to talk about our grandfather. So I held myself back from quizzing him about the mysterious locked box.
After we parted with a vow to stay in better touch, I kicked around on my own for a bit, testing out my wee new wings. Riding third-class buses into the mountains, venturing down into the Terai, the grasslands and jungles of southernmost Nepal, then taking the trains to South India, everywhere snapping pictures like a madwoman. When I finally ran out of money and it was time to catch a flight back home, I could not bring myself to do it. So I headed to London instead, got myself a job at the front desk of a twee hotel, and on my days off, started hanging around the Magnum office, hoping to meet a world-class photographer or two. Not only did I meet one, I got offered six unpaid hours a week as a volunteer file clerk, the official start of my brand-new life.
For Stefan’s part, three years with Fr. John at the hospice must have taught him whatever it was he needed to know, because shortly after I headed for London, he flew to California, enrolled himself in college, and, smarty-pants that he always was, set out to earn himself degrees in philosophy and theology. Back in London, I was grappling with an unwelcome revelation: not everything gets learned through osmosis. Like the celebrity photographers among whom I so diligently filed, if I were serious about the craft, I needed to hie me to photography school. And the only good one I could afford was in Southern California, which turned out to be a mere six-hour drive from where my brat was beavering away at the university.
I glanced through the tent flap. Jan was still frowningly absorbed, and Rikki slumbered on in his happy teenaged coma. I pulled out the packet of letters Jonah had given me before I flew to Guatemala. Though I’d skimmed them on the plane, understanding
