by Justin Go
The climbers mean to start before dawn, but when the moment comes they do not stir. It would be death to leave the tent. They wait until yellow rays of sunlight strike the canvas, the hunks of frozen condensation melting and dropping on their faces. The wind has all but ceased.
Price sits up in his sleeping bag.
—Sleep at all?
—I dreamt, Ashley rasps. But I didn’t sleep.
Price runs his fingers on the slushy canvas walls.
—Weather seems improved. We may have a go after all.
Ashley does not answer.
They move slowly, weak from their night of agony. It takes them an hour to dress and boil water for a thermos of hot coffee. Ashley’s mouth is chalky. No quantity of melted snow or tea will quench him. He feels cold everywhere. At last they leave the tent, Price with a coil of rope slung over one shoulder, over the other a small bag holding a vest-pocket Kodak.
Price leads. They traverse a slope of ragged scree, moving toward a sunlit pocket of rock in the distance. The golden rays seem a mirage. Above them hovers the summit pyramid, the vaporous plume jetting past.
Ashley has trouble navigating the stones beneath him. The twin circles of his vision are vignetted by his snow goggles, obscuring his lower view. He stumbles on the lip of a rock and catches himself with the steel tip of his ice axe. Price removes his goggles, lifting them onto his hat brim for a better view. There is little snow here.
Cutting across the mountainside, the steep slope is within an arm’s grasp as they walk. Ashley halts and doubles over, coughing in violent fits. Price waits for him, panting all the while. Price motions to move on, but Ashley glances back, as if waiting for someone.
—Something wrong?
Ashley shakes his head. For a moment he thought there was another climber with them. He treks forward with short strides, straining to make twenty steps before pausing. He makes twelve strides. He leans and pants feverishly. Thirteen strides. He gasps at the searing air, shivering in the sunlight. Price wheezes beside him at each halt.
They reach a patch of névé, snow hardened under pressure into a coat of blue glass. Price pulls down his goggles and swings his ice axe from the shoulders, chipping at the packed granules to carve a step. After a few swings he leans on the axe gasping. He steps forward, fitting his boot into the notch. He begins chopping the next step. The pace is pitifully slow.
—My vision’s going double, Price calls. Shouldn’t have taken off my goggles.
Ashley’s mind is slow and simple. He follows Price through the névé, then frets at each boulder in their path, deliberating over which route requires the fewest steps. In his hazy consciousness he is reassured by the presence of the third climber, and though the apparition vanishes upon close scrutiny, it always returns in time. During gasping pauses he looks absently at the spectacle far below, a flattened array of pinnacles piercing through the cloudbank, whitecaps on a distant sea.
They reach the band of yellow sandstone that rings the upper mountain. A gale begins to howl. They are traversing a line a few hundred feet below the northeast ridge of the mountain, following the slant of this arête steadily toward the final pyramid. Price’s pace slows to a crawl. They take a breath for each step, gasping in fits, leaning upon their axes or propping elbows on bent knees. Ashley feels distanced from their predicament, a spectator to his own performance.
Price halts and spikes his ice axe. He waves his hand before his goggles, puffing in exasperation.
—It’s over, he gasps. Weather’s turning. I’m going snowblind.
The wind whips over their words.
—What?
—It’s over.
Ashley shakes his head vigorously. He bellows hoarsely into Price’s ear.
—It might go. I’ve plenty left.
Price fans his mitten at the swirling snow.
—It’s a storm.
—I’ll go on a bit.
Price grabs Ashley’s arm. For a moment they stand eye to eye, Ashley in his green-glass goggles and leather helmet, Price in his brimmed hat, his face covered in an icy stubble of beard. Ashley glances up to the summit pyramid, appearing and dissolving through breaks in the churning whiteness.
—A thousand vertical feet, Price screams. Hours away.
—I’ll move faster without you.
—It’s impossible.
—I’m going.
Price releases Ashley’s arm. He looks at Ashley for a moment. Then he turns and begins stumbling down the tracks in the snow.
Ashley continues up the sloping rocks. The wind reaches a howling fury. He is traversing a face of crumbling slabs, the stones overlapped like roof tiles dusted with snow. Suddenly he skids down a slab, his leg groping for support in the loose powder. He catches his weight with his axe, gasping.
Ashley goes on, gripping the axe in his outside hand and prodding it into the hollows of the rock for balance. He senses the tenuous purchase of his boot nails on the slabs, the uncertain surface concealed by snow. He kicks and hacks at clumps of powder obscuring the tiles. Ashley glances down at the drop. The slope tumbles off to the Rongbuk Glacier ten thousand feet below.
A violent gust of wind roars past, nearly toppling him. The face angles steeply, the slabs now close to his inside mitten. Ashley wades into an immense couloir of soft snow. He sinks in past his knees. The wind is bearing thick snowflakes now and he cannot see far.
He takes the altimeter from his pocket. The needle has swung slightly past 28,000 feet. He looks up toward the summit, but there is only the swirling sky, the air dense with snow. The storm is gathering force.
Exhausted and indifferent, Ashley turns around. He begins to slowly retrace his path. His footsteps are rapidly filling with snow.
Beneath his goggles Ashley’s eyes burn with snapping cold, and he truly believes they may freeze solid and splinter. He has been descending for some time in the blizzard, but he does not know how far he has gone. He traverses the scree at a crawl.
The bloody monsoon, he thinks. Arrived bloody early to get me.
With each gust the wind goes through the fibers of his garments, delivering a surge of pain like immersion in flowing ice water. His nose and mouth are frozen hard with condensation. His face drapes tiny icicles. Each gasp of frigid air sears his throat and lungs, giving further torment, but he only has to gasp more, his body straining dumbly for oxygen. Ashley has dropped his ice axe somewhere. His goggles have fogged opaque and crusted with ice. He peels them from his face and they whirl off in the wind.
Ashley stops to orient himself, collapsing into a patch of snow. He thinks he may have passed Camp VI, but he cannot be sure. He can see only a yard or two. Suddenly he remembers the altimeter in his pocket. He holds a mitten in his teeth and pulls out the altimeter with a brittle hand, the metal disk freezing upon his fingertips. He strains to read the dial in the blizzard. The wind gusts hard, smashing him against the scree. His numb hand falters and the altimeter is carried off. Ashley replaces the mitten carefully, stumbling on in his course.
The third climber was once ahead of him, but is coming back to lend aid. The climber comes at a slow but even pace, a rising speck in the whiteness. He has brought a flask of hot tea from Camp V; he carries a candle lantern and magnesium flares, and he knows the way back to the tents. Ashley stops and sinks into the snow, watching the speck approach through whirling flakes. Perhaps the climber whistles and calls through the wind, but Ashley cannot yet hear him.
Ashley blinks heavily, his eyelashes partly stitched together by ice. He rubs his eyes to break the crystals. There is no third climber and he knows it. He waves his mitten before his face, then looks to the side for a long time to clear his eyes, jets of snow lashing him. Ashley walks a few more steps, panting hard. He will take only the shortest break. He leans against the slope. The speck is still approaching, pausing for breath before continuing up.
When the climber arrives he will pour hot tea into Ashley’s mouth. He will guide Ashley down to Camp III, tired as he is, where
they will feed him soup and put him beneath three eiderdowns. Later they will take him to base camp and thaw his lifeless fingers in warm water; they will call him brave and gallant though he has failed. Then they will leave the mountain and pass down to verdant country: the alpine flowers, the rare butterflies, the rhododendron forests. The first shave and hot bath in Kalimpong; the steamer home. Finally England, greener than he remembered.
Then Ashley will write to say: Meet me when my train comes in and we shall walk in Regent’s Park. I’ll be sunburnt still and I’ll have a cough, but meet me in Regent’s Park and we’ll walk again in the French gardens. We will sit by the water and you will tell me what you have done these years. Then I’ll know why I wasn’t taken by Empress Redoubt or by this mountain or by you. And I can live in England green and rolling, and never wish for anything but what I have.
Ashley wipes the snow from his face. He has crumpled against the mountainside and cannot rise. He does not feel the cold so much now, only great weakness. The speck quivers in the distance, a hundred yards down the snow slope, the only shape in a surge of white. The third climber is waving at Ashley, growing closer all the time. He will be here soon.
Ashley cannot make himself go. In crazed thirst he stuffs a palmful of snow into his mouth, but the taste is sandy and he gags and spits it out, nearly choking. He begins to curse and moan. He knows well what is happening to him, but he can do nothing about it. A fine bloody waste, he thinks. A stupid fucking waste. He looks down to his right hand, now a bare white claw, the mitten and underglove lost somewhere behind. Perhaps his teeth will shatter frozen.
Ashley begins to limp down the slope, leaning against the mountainside for support. His clenched hand drags a faint track in the snow. You can’t break me, Ashley thinks. You can do anything you like, but you can’t break me.
THE KEY
The librarian drives on through the hills, the road swerving downward, the sea coming in and out of view. My breathing has slowed and I begin to feel calmer. I ask if the old woman might be buried in this area. The librarian shrugs.
—I have no idea. There’s a cemetery in the village. It’s pretty small, but it’s on the way. We can stop by if you want.
The librarian switches on the radio. We turn onto a dirt road and I ask if I can send a text on his cell phone.
—It’s to France, I add, but I’ll pay you for it. It’s important or I wouldn’t ask—
—Don’t worry about it.
The librarian hands me his phone. I switch the input language to English, typing a quick message to Mireille. We approach a farmhouse on a hill and the librarian suddenly slows down, pulling into a muddy driveway.
—I’m going to ask about the old woman, he says. Everyone knows everyone here.
A farmer in orange coveralls sees us and walks down the driveway. The librarian gets out of the car. Through the windshield I watch them talking, the farmer pulling off his baseball cap to wipe his brow. The farmer glances at me for a moment, then looks back at the librarian.
Suddenly the librarian’s phone vibrates, the display flashing green. I pick it up from the cupholder and look at the number. The country code is 33. I answer the phone. The connection is weak, Mireille’s voice coming in and out.
—Why haven’t you written me back? I was worried—
—I’m out in the middle of nowhere. I can barely hear you.
—You’re still in Iceland?
—Yeah, but I’ve found something. I’m getting close—
Mireille sighs. —Listen Tristan, I know I’ve been saying the wrong things, telling you to come back for the wrong reasons. It was a mistake—
Her voice wavers as the phone loses reception. I try to talk back until I’m practically yelling, but I don’t think she can hear me. Suddenly her voice returns.
—Meeting you in the bar, and sharing my grandfather’s house, and finding those letters. I should have let myself care about you, even if it was dangerous. But now you’re making the mistake, because you’re staying away. I want you Tristan, but you have to want me too.
—I do.
—Then come back tonight. It doesn’t matter what it costs you. You don’t need anything once you’re here.
—I can’t get there tonight. I’m too far out in the country.
—Tomorrow then. I’ll meet you at the airport—
Her voice goes out again. I speak loudly into the phone.
—The line’s breaking up. But I’ll come as soon as I can.
—Demain, she corrects me. Please Tristan, just find a way. I’ll be waiting—
She says something I can’t understand. The line beeps and goes dead. I try calling her back, but the call diverts to a message in Icelandic. I put the phone back in the cupholder, wiping my face with my hands. Outside the farmer is pointing and sweeping his arm as he talks, apparently giving directions. Finally the librarian waves his thanks and gets back into the car.
—I don’t know, the librarian says, if that farmer and I were talking about the same woman. He said her name was Östberg, that could be a Swedish name.
The librarian smiles and cocks his head a little, looking amused. He starts the engine and swivels the car around in a three-point turn. We start back down the road, gravel pinging against the car’s chassis.
—He said the old woman’s still alive.
—Alive?
—According to him she lives about ten kilometers away, at the next fjord to the north.
I sit up in my seat, almost yelling in protest.
—It’s impossible. She’d have died decades ago.
—Maybe. But Östberg sounds familiar—
I shake my head, feeling the nausea sweeping back.
—There’s no way. If she was in her seventies thirty years ago, she’d be more than a hundred now. It doesn’t make sense.
The librarian shrugs. —He said she’s very old. Anyway, it’s not far from here. We might as well find out for ourselves.
—It must be someone else.
The librarian turns onto a dirt road, shifting into a low gear. The path is an old tractor trail cluttered with huge rocks. We lurch slowly over the bumps, the suspension creaking. My arm is still shaking.
—Don’t worry, the librarian says. We’re almost there.
The road curves through valleys and drops back sharply to the sea. I lower the window a crack, watching the white swells cresting offshore.
I can’t focus on any single thought. I imagine the mad forces that might have conspired to produce all this, the arcane weaving of threads that ends with me on a dirt road in Iceland. It was impossible. It required the gathering of whole constellations, a harvest of countless stars funneled into a single cup and rolled out, a pair of sixes, a million times in perfect succession.
But it had happened. Already I’d seen the proof of it and held it in my hands. And it happened again every moment, for surely the meeting of any two souls required the same arithmetic. If it seemed improbable, maybe that was only my own narrowness of vision. Mireille said there might not be an end to this. But if I could reach an ending, was it possible that the veil would be lifted, that I’d rise to a higher vantage point and see something utterly simple, the purest design of all?
The car dips into a steep fjord. The narrow inlet is flanked by dark mountains, below these a black sand beach, the waves foaming white against the shore. The librarian points down the fjord.
—There.
The house is poised along the finger of water, the windows flush with the ebbing sea. Its cream-colored plastic cladding is immaculate. There is a neat flower garden, a wooden porch. A small waterfall spouts down the sheer cliff behind the house, gushing into a stream that skirts the property. The crags above are sheathed in mist.
We turn onto a smooth gravel driveway and the car stops jerking. The front door of the house swings open. Someone has seen us approaching.
An elderly woman comes out onto the porch, her forearms tucked into her apron. She does not smile or g
reet us. The librarian parks the car and turns to me.
—Do you want me to come with you?
—I might need a translator.
We get out of the car. The librarian introduces himself to the old woman. The conversation is brief and halting. The old woman walks into the house, leaving the door open behind her.
—She’s the caretaker, the librarian says. She’s invited us in.
The living room is sparely furnished and impeccably clean. We hang our coats on a rack and sit at a dining table. The librarian talks with the caretaker for some time, his hands folded awkwardly in his lap. Suddenly the caretaker addresses me in English. She has an accent I can’t place.
—I’m sorry, she says, I thought you spoke Icelandic. Would you like coffee?
The woman goes into the kitchen and returns with two cups of coffee and a plate of stale cookies. I gulp down the sour coffee, cracking the hard cookies with my molars. The librarian and the caretaker are still talking. She turns to me.
—I understand you’ve come to see Ms. Östberg. But she’s resting at the moment. I wondered if you could come back another time?
I tell the caretaker that it would be difficult to return, because I don’t live in this country and have no place to stay nearby. Then I explain that I’m seeking information about a woman named Imogen Soames-Andersson. The caretaker looks at me, and if she has ever heard the name her face does not reveal it.
—I don’t know the name, she says, but Ms. Östberg might be able to help you. Perhaps I could wake her. It would be a shame for you to miss her, since you’ve come so far. We seldom have visitors.
The caretaker excuses herself and goes down the hall. The librarian turns to me, his eyes large and shining.
—I don’t think you should go in there. Even if it’s really her, you’ll never get the money. Let’s get out of here—
The caretaker comes back into the room.
—Ms. Östberg is awake. You can see her now, but she’d prefer if you spoke in her bedroom.
I stand, glancing at the librarian, but he only shakes his head slightly, a strange expression on his face.