“It is good to test yourself,” he said. “It is often hard to do that in today’s world.”
We skied down to Galtür, mostly in better stuff than the breakable crust. A cloud covered the sun and a chilly wind was coming through the valley, so we ate indoors.
As usual in Austrian cafés the accumulated smoke was thick enough to make a nonsmoker feel like a rat in a cage designed to determine how fast lung cancer can be created through passive smoking. The menu had the standard ten Austrian lunch dishes: eight varieties of sausage, Tirolergöstel—a sort of home fries with bits of ham—and the yeast cake called Germknödel.
If we had been back in St. Anton we would have gone to a restaurant where Hans had a deal. The standard ski instructor deal is that the instructor eats and drinks for free in return for bringing his group in. If the instructor brings in good-size groups and doesn’t drink up all the restaurant’s profits, there are sometimes cash considerations. The shortcomings of this system from the point of view of the client quickly become clear. If you ski with the same instructor regularly, you eat lunch at the same place every day, which is not a spot chosen for its cuisine or its ambiance or its scenery. And his deal, not snow conditions or crowds, determines where you will ski because your instructor will choose a route that gets him to his free lunch by noon. If the client takes the instructor outside his usual territory or insists on a restaurant where the food is good, then the client is expected to pick up the Skiführer’s tab. I was buying. I ordered a bottle of wine. I did the pouring and let Hans do the drinking. When we finished the first bottle I ordered a second.
“Hiroshi Tanaka always skied with me,” Hans told me. “We understood each other. He understood the warrior spirit. He was in business, but he said that in business one must proceed as in war. One must study strategy, tactics—one must study one’s enemies as if life itself were at stake.”
“The Laundromat business isn’t like that,” I said. “What business was Hiroshi in?”
“I often think,” Hans said, “it would be good to live in a country with a war. You Americans were lucky. You had Vietnam. You could test yourself.”
“Some test,” I said.
“It is not the winning or losing—it is the personal testing. ‘Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman—a rope over an abyss.’ Did you ever hear that? … We must put ourselves to our ultimate to supersede. Ja?”
“Oh, ja,” I said, and poured out some more wine. “So you liked Hiroshi?”
“Yes. Liked and admired. He was a strong man.” Hans leaned forward and I could smell the wine on his breath even through the wine on my own. “He liked winning. But it was important that the contest be worthy. His final contest … it was worthy. Against the mountain. If he knew … he would have understood.”
“If he knew what?”
“That he was in a contest,” Hans said.
“You think that’s how he thought of it?”
“Yes. The best kind. A contest to the death.”
“What about the girl?” I asked him. “Wendy?”
“A bimbo. Ja? Good American word. Bimbo.”
“You get it on with her?”
“Look at me,” Hans said, and straightened himself. “I am very Austrian, very Aryan, ja?”
“Ja.” He was about two inches taller than me, six, one, 190 pounds, blond, with the sort of sun-squint wrinkles around his eyes that the various Marlboro men have. He also had crooked teeth with tobacco stains.
“I have all the women I have need of. So I make it a rule. No fucking of the women with the clients.”
“Never?”
“Maybe, sometimes I make a special exception.”
“With Wendy?”
“She was the kind that likes the money,” Hans said. “We meet lots of them here on the mountain. They do chasing of the gelt. Until they get married. Then they come after us to get a good fucking.” He pumped his arm, then made a dismissive gesture. “No more does that matter. I am not just a mountain guide. I have money now. I am more than this. I don’t need this.”
“So Wendy didn’t go for you?”
“She was looking at me, I know this. But Hiroshi was my friend. Did you know that he had samurai ancestors? We discussed this often. He died a samurai death.”
“And Wendy? What kind of death did she die?”
“What are you asking me?” Hans said, suddenly suspicious.
“I’ll tell you what I’m asking you. I’m asking you how come you make judgments like this based on an accident. Something fell down a mountain. Three people were standing underneath. All three ran away. On skis. One got away. Two didn’t. Good death, bad death—to me it’s bullshit. You got a rush because you came close to dying and survived. Hey, I can dig it. I’ve been there. It gives you a rush. But it was an accident. Not an act of courage or nobility.”
“To perform well when you are looking face to face at death—that is the ultimate test,” Hans said. He was angry, and surprised, that I didn’t worship him. I knew because he bunched the muscles in his neck and wrinkled his forehead. “To ski pretty on the baby slope for the girls to watch—that is nothing. To ski well when the avalanche is behind you—that is courage.”
“It was an accident. You were luckier than they were.” I shrugged. “And you’re a better skier. That’s all you can say.”
“What if it was deliberate? What if I knew it would happen and still I faced it? Would that change your mind?”
“Deliberate?”
“It does not matter. It is the act, the pure act that matters,” he said, and I didn’t know if he was clarifying the rhetorical nature of his statement or backing away from having almost confessed something. “Come. We ski.”
Once again the helicopter scared the hell out of me, and when we landed I was relieved to be on solid ground, even if it was actually a glacier, which is, technically speaking, neither ground nor solid. A glacier is formed when the winter snowfall exceeds the summer evaporation. The snow melts and when it refreezes it becomes ice. First it becomes granules called firn. The edges melt, the granules merge and recrystallize, now as a solid block of ice. Ice is normally brittle, but under great pressure it is a plastic material that flows. Not very fast, but it does flow a few centimeters a day. Slow enough for me to feel it as solid ground.
Although someone had made the mistake of reading excerpts from Nietzsche to Hans, I had to admit again that he was a good guide. He knew the mountain. As we skied, the cold, clean air and the exercise burned the alcohol out of my system. We seemed to be past the testing and he kept things at a level where I was comfortable. We avoided the crusty wind pack. It wasn’t Colorado powder, but it wasn’t tricky either, and when we stopped to look back at our tracks it made us look good. We did some cruising and we skied some steeps that looked more frightening than they were.
“You like to get some air?” he asked. “I’ll show you my favorite jump.”
“Okay,” I said. Somewhat foolishly. Getting air between your skis and the surface is fun. But it’s for kids. Kids who like to crash and burn. I’d recently seen an American kid wearing a T-shirt with a drawing in the romance comic style that showed a skier, a kid, who’d just gone off a major cliff, skis cocked up in a stylish freestyle move, poised in midair, his thought bubble saying, “Time to burn.”
“When we get to it,” he said, skating to pick up speed, “go for it!”
I didn’t go for it with quite as much enthusiasm as he did. I didn’t skate for the extra speed; I didn’t get into a tuck as early as he did. He was a bigger, better, younger skier than me. I saw the lip before he took off. It was lovely. As perfect as if it were built as a launching pad for stunts.
Hans hit it perfectly and I saw him get air. He flew.
I hit it less perfectly. And with less conviction. He had warned me. “Go for it,” he’d said. Which was something I should have done even without his warning. It is necessary to ski with complete conviction and commitment to whatever yo
u are attempting. To ski half assed is to die half assed.
What he hadn’t told me was that we were leaping a crevasse. The upper layers of a glacier are not under pressure. They are not plastic, they are brittle—and when different pieces of ice underneath flow at different rates, the surface cracks. These brittle surface layers, and therefore the crevasses that they form, are 30 to 60 meters deep. Since we are talking about a place on top of a very high alp—not an urban area with elevators, cranes, fire department rescue services, and so forth—even 100 feet is, for all practical purposes, a bottomless pit.
I didn’t feel like that figure on the T-shirt, hanging in space with time to reflect, time to act, time to burn. I felt like I was going to die.
I almost made it. I lunged forward and the tips of my skis hit the far side. Hard. Then they popped off. My momentum carried me forward and I went face-first into the snow on the edge. I grabbed at it. I dug my hands into it, even encumbered as they were with ski poles.
Then I started sliding. Then it was sheer. The dream of falling appears to be universal—it comes early and is one of the standard nightmares of childhood. Free-fall.
Thirty feet down, I landed. I landed in deep snow. I landed feet first and face second. I was wet and in deep, but I was unbroken and substantially more alive than I’d anticipated. I looked up, wiped the snow from my eyes, and spit it out of my mouth. Hans was looking down.
“I gave you fair chance,” he said.
“Fuck you, you motherfucker,” I said, in English. Then in German I asked him: “How are you going to get me out of here?”
“You guessed, didn’t you?”
“Guessed what?”
“You goaded me into admitting it,” he said, shaking his head.
“Just get me the fuck out of here.”
“But I gave you fair chance.”
“Fair chance, fine—what are you talking about?” I said, beginning to realize what he was talking about. With a sinking feeling, almost as bad as the falling feeling, but not as dramatic, it came to me that Hans was a serious wacko.
“Like I gave Hiroshi,” Hans explained. “He was a samurai. You too should die bravely.” He gave me a sincere look and started backing away.
“Wait a minute!” I yelled.
“Ja?”
I looked around me. Without a pick and crampons there was no way I was going to get out of that pit by myself. “You gotta get me out of here. I have a baby. Her mother—she’s going to worry about me. She …” I almost said that Marie knew who I was skiing with, but this Nietzsche-quoting Austrian asshole was crazed enough to go after her too. “… she doesn’t know who I went out with. But lots of other people do. Including Franz, the gendarme. And Luis at the ski school.”
“I gave you fair chance,” Hans said. As if that settled everything.
“You set Tanaka up? You set the avalanche?” I asked him, to keep him talking, to keep him there.
“Ja. I did,” he said with some pride. “So you see, it was not an accident. I was daring the fate. I was making the risk. I was testing myself. It was true courage. Not luck. Do you admit that now?”
“Sure, Hans, sure,” I said.
“Then good-bye,” he said.
“How did you set off the avalanche?”
He turned and disappeared. I yelled and yelled. But he didn’t come back.
PAST LIVES
I HAVE A PAST LIFE.
In that I am very lucky. Most people live one time, as one self. In that past life I was in a different country. I was in the embrace of discontent. Angers as obscure to me then as they are to me now drove me into constant conflict, as if conflict was both my nourishment and joy. I lived in New York City. To Europeans New York is a large part of the definition of America. But to Americans, New York is as far from America as Baghdad. I wasn’t always a Laundromat tycoon. I had other professions. The essence of them was conflict.
I also had a different family. I lived with a woman and her son, Wayne. My affections for Wayne were immense. The relief at disentwining myself from his mother was equally immense. It still astonishes me sometimes that I walked away from all of that, like a snake dumps its old skin, like a caterpillar comes out of a cocoon, and got to be something different. Wayne and I still maintain a relationship by mail. Any knowledge I have of his mother is through the son. He’s fifteen now.
I had a favorite story that I used to tell Wayne. It involved a grizzly bear and a trip to the Rockies. This was before I’d ever lived in the mountains. In this story, which can be drawn out as long as the teller likes, the storyteller, alone, unarmed, is finally cornered by the exceptionally large, especially enraged bear. There is no escape. The teller drags the story out until the impatient listener finally asks, “What did you do?” or “How did you get away?” The storyteller then says, “Nothing I could do. That bear—he done killed me.”
That was the joke. There was no way out. That crevasse—it was going to kill me.
I had actually landed on a snow bridge. It was fairly wide, but a quick exploration showed me that in either direction the only way for me to go was down. Fifty to a hundred feet further down. Even if I survived the additional fall, that was hardly the direction I want to go in. I had my Pieps. One of the rules of skiing off-piste, let alone on the glacier or in the backcountry, is to carry an avalanche beeper. It both broadcasts and listens on 457 KHz. The closer you get, the louder the signal. It’s a fairly straightforward application of a miracle of modern technology. Its major shortcoming is that it is not an air-raid siren. No one will hear it by accident. They must be looking for you and, since the effective broadcast range of the beeper is only fifty to seventy-five feet, they have to have a fair idea of where to look. Nonetheless, I turned it on. Then I looked for a way up. Up was a sheer wall. What I needed for it was very obvious and available in any mountaineering shop: pitons, a pick, crampons, rope, and other people.
This is not to say that I did not try to find a route out.
Down below, in a place I couldn’t see, I had a child—Anna Geneviève. For the first month she had been virtually an inanimate object with eyes and a mouth, her face still fetal, her expressions gnomic at best. She only cried for a reason and she could only conceive of three reasons—cold, hunger, and gas. Feed me, swaddle me, help me squeeze that stuff out. In honesty, I concluded that only a mother could love a newborn or refer to one as beautiful, and that was just as well because it was only out of motherhood, out of something innately feminine, from the bonding of breast-feeding, that anyone could give an infant the care that a newborn needed. At least, so it seemed to me from the love and patience and concentration that Marie lavished on our daughter. Who was born serious. I believe that we are born with a great deal of our nature—the obvious things like intelligence and hair color, but also temperament and capacity for laughter, energy level, hunger, greed, and aspiration. Like dogs. Anna was born so serious that I asked the doctors if this was a permanent condition. If it had been, I don’t know that we could have lived together. They assured me, several times, that no infant comes out grinning, let alone snickering, and it takes time before they learn how.
Then, after five weeks, she smiled.
Shortly thereafter some of her gurgles could be interpreted as laughter and within a week of that she was truly burbling.
I had never been suicidal. But looking backward from this now, I could see that I had some sort of need to put myself so far out on the limb or so deep into turmoil that the animal instinct to live would come out and assert itself. I didn’t need to do that anymore—not now that Anna Geneviève could laugh. So what the hell was I doing in this crevasse?
It gets cold up on the mountain. Unforgivingly cold.
Frostbite is a result of the body’s defense against hypothermia. The body withdraws the blood from the extremities to keep the core at a survival temperature. It can occur whenever the ambient temperature falls below freezing, 0°C, 32°F. Wind and wet skin hasten heat loss from the extremitie
s. I once went running on an early spring day. Deluded about the temperature by bright, enthusiastic sunshine, I just wore nylon jogging shorts. They did nothing to block the wind or protect me from the evaporation of my sweat. My dick began to freeze. It shriveled, turned white, and lost all feeling. Thank God for Marie. She treated it immediately with the warm, moist bath of her mouth. This is not an erotic memory. I remember it only as “the day my dick froze,” although freezing was so mild and treatment so prompt that there were no permanent aftereffects. Aftereffects of frostbite even following treatment, presuming there is treatment, can be as severe as infection and tissue death, requiring amputation. Lack of treatment can lead to gangrene. General hypothermia is defined as depression of the inner-climate body temperature. Mild hypothermia, like mild anything else, is not a terrible problem. Warmth, food, rest, and it goes away. Extreme hypothermia is critical and often fatal. When the body cools below 34°C (93°F) metabolic temperature control becomes unstable and, if cooling persists, is lost. That is followed by coma, cardiorespiratory failure, and then death.
I had heard of people making igloos for themselves. Tiny enclosures, the smaller the better, coffin sized, dug into the snow, which would act as insulation. But I didn’t know how long that would work. And if it did, what would I then be waiting for? I was certain that once I lay myself down to sleep I would never wake. Only movement would keep me alive. It would keep the blood circulating. So I began to try to make my way back up.
I tried to go at it methodically and slowly. Not frantically and full of panic. First I zippered all my zippers all the way up, snapped the snaps, tucked the cuffs of my jacket into the cuffs of my gloves. I loosened the buckles on my ski boots to allow maximum circulation and made sure the built-in gaiters on my pants were down over my boots and left no gap for snow to sneak in. Then I inspected the sidewalls visually, looking for a route up, a handhold or a foothold. I didn’t find one.
My skis were nowhere to be seen. The closest thing I had to tools were my ski poles. They were metal; they had points. Surely they were worth something. I began to use them, trying to uncover or carve fissures and ledges that would allow me to climb. On my first attempt, I got almost five feet up before my foothold, and then my handhold, gave way, and I slid back down.
Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 8