by Mark Helprin
Marshall flung open the wooden shutters and a world of mountains flooded into their room—thousand-foot pitches covered in ice, vertical faces of a half a mile, white massifs in direct moonlight. They slept as one can sleep only high in the mountains, after a hard day, in pure air, in a country at peace.
7
CLOSING A curtained door behind them, they called at the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix. Because it was the beginning of an unheralded holiday about which they had heard only vague rumors in too rapid French, one man alone was in the office. He was an old veteran who observed the mountains but did not climb. He looked like a kindly baker with silver-gray hair, and would have been easily believable in a white apron instead of his dark blue suit with several enameled pins on the lapels.
They told him their needs, and he responded with the care of someone who has spent decades climbing rock walls thousands of feet above nothing. His accent was so French that it had a life of its own, and it seemed as if there were four people in the room.
“I am aware of Professor Metzner, and I can tell you that if you wait two weeks or perhaps three you can find him then in less than a day. The téléphérique goes to a point relatively near the Bergschrund. Or, if you wish, you may take a helicopter and the process will demand only an hour or two. But you will have to wait two weeks or more.”
“We can’t afford to stay for that long. Why two weeks? Are your guides that busy?”
“To the contrary, they have practically all returned to their winter professions. The season is over. You could get a dozen in no time if it were not for the Vent du Souverain. No one will go up, no one can go up, in the Souverain. The téléphériques cannot function, and conditions become absurdly dangerous, worse than the most savage day in winter. No one, except perhaps Gaston Reynelle. But I would not advise it. It is too dangerous, and though he is the greatest Alpinist in the world, he has never seen the Vent du Souverain, for the last one occurred just before the First World War. I was merely a child. Gaston was not even born. No, no, yes, yes, even his father was not born!” he said, holding up his finger, allowing Marshall to see how the sign for exclamation had originated.
“Monsieur,” said Lydia with an elevated dignity reminding the old guide of days when he had assisted on royal climbs, “please tell us about the Vent du Souverain. It is something of which we do not know.”
“They have felt it already in Zermatt and Argentière, which means that it will entrap the valley within a day. It is something from ancient times, and it arrives without much warning every half century or so. It is ... it is a rare and miraculous condition brought about by the conjunction of Arctic and African winds. They meet in the Alps, twist above the mountains, and... lutter.”
“Struggle.”
“No, more precisely...”
“Wrestle?”
“Yes, wrestle. Le combat entre les vents. (The French language is the most magnificent. It is our king. Its sounds are so beautiful that they are better than most nations, and thus synonymous with France.)
“The northern wind always subdues the one from the south. When they have stopped winding about the summits, they fall to the valley, the hot wind underneath. In the valley it becomes like summer. The fields are dry and everything is hot, as hot as the Sahara. One can hardly move... immobilité. But above!” He became excited, and, as old Frenchmen often do, proceeded to publicly amaze himself. “But above! It is unbelievably cold. Avalanches tumble into the valley and turn into rivers which boil and vaporize before they can put even a drop into the dry bed of the Arve. While the air above is clear and dense, the air below is thin and molten hot.
“Thus at night it curves into a mirror which gathers or rejects the light. Sometimes the moon appears blindingly—a hundred times its natural size—and the mountains are roofed with white. We watch then the mountains of the moon itself. Sometimes the stars shower upon us and each man and woman shudders and fears. And sometimes it is absolutely and completely black—a void.
“This occurs once in a half century, for two weeks or more. No one can come or go because of the cold in the passes. Everyone must sleep in tents. Forests of them spring up in the high meadows where the people try to catch some cool air—always to no avail. The populace is alternately gay and deeply sad. In the last Vent du Souverain my grandfather lost his life. Whereas the Swiss remain perfectly safe, the French are drawn by passion. From our meadow we saw a sphere of ruby-red fire at the summit of the Drus. My grandfather believed that it was God, and he set off at midnight across the Mer de Glace; foolish old man. He died within a wave of ice and forty years later his remains were spewed by the glacier. On his face was still an expression of wonder.
“I know of this professor of yours. He is not wise. In the Souverain, the glacier undergoes violent contractions, and becomes most dangerous.”
“And no guide will work except Gaston Reynelle?” asked Marshall.
“Perhaps not even he, though his will and determination have won him many triumphs. He has gone alone to rescue the rescue party. When just a boy, he climbed the Southwest Pillar of the Drus—the Col Bonatti—alone, at night, in winter! The other guides cannot speak to him because they become paralyzed with envy. He has no friends. When he is not in the mountains, he works in his father’s blacksmith shop—Reynelle et Fils, Rue Rebuffat, 24. Perhaps he will listen to you and, more than likely, he will venture into the Souverain, for it is his nature to be arrogant.”
Gaston Reynelle was dark and thin. His expression was so intense that his eyes burned like rays. Marshall and Lydia looked through the window of 24 Rue Rebuffat and saw Gaston in an enormous room, striking hot metal on the strong absurd face of an anvil. He sweated, and his concentration was a marvel to behold as every sinew in his body struck at the red, and sharp metallic sounds rang out amid the darkness. His face was leathern and angular, his hair curly and black. One could see by the sheer musculature of his chest and arms that he drove himself beyond his own limits.
It was stirring and pitiful to see him pounding life into the metal. They knew that he was using up his mortality rapidly and without reward. But the metal glowed before him, his brow was furrowed, and the arm wielding the flying hammer flew. At times he would sigh and breathe deeply, unaware that he was being watched. He threw out his lean arms like a ballet dancer and stretched his neck. He seemed then to be caressed by an abstract spirit.
Embarrassed to watch, they knocked on his door and went inside. He looked at them with a fiery clasping eye. His strength circled them on a beam.
“Yes? May I help you? At your service,” he said, abandoning his ecstasy at banding the expansion of metal.
“Are you Gaston Reynelle?”
“I am Gaston Reynelle. In all of France and all the world there is none better in the mountains.”
“Then we have come to the right place, for we need a guide to lead us in the Bergschrund of the Mer de Glace.”
Gaston smiled. The fire beat and echoed behind him. “Certainement!” he said. “But in no circumstances for any reason will I take such a beautiful woman into the mountains during the Souverain.”
“She can climb.”
“I will not.”
“She is skilled.”
“I will not.” He struck his iron hammer against glowing steel and sparks flew as if to underline his determination. “I will not. Women are too beautiful. I will not!”
8
LYDIA SAT sadly on the balcony of their room as Marshall and Gaston made their way toward the summit of Mont Blanc, over which they would pass to descend through the Vallee Blanche and the Bergschrund. She cried like a leaf. Even though she had urged Marshall to go without her, she disliked breaking with their practice of sharing. But it was done, and she was left to see the Vent du Souverain in the valley, while they climbed.
Chamonix was broiling and dry. Above, the snow raged and the cold air was blue. She took off her sunglasses and turned her clear face to the distant round dome of Mont Blanc. With a swe
et nearsighted stare, she gazed at it, and then rested her cheek against her bare shoulder, feeling that Marshall had left her when she loved him most. Determined to see the valley and its pastel tents in the heat of the Souverain, she wept nevertheless for being left.
Though not too well versed in technical climbing, Marshall exceeded himself early on, and Gaston was pleased as they crossed the lower glaciers and wound among the hills of ice. They traversed snowfields, pushing against the cold. They made their first camp as night fell and the stars battled above them. Lydia lay sweating in her bed, her arms outstretched for Marshall. Marshall held his own body to fend off the cold, and hallucinated images of terror and madness. Gaston, the brave one, screamed in his sleep.
When morning arose in a blaze, Marshall and Gaston, entranced and enraptured, progressed upward amid swirls of ice and fresh snow. Between them was Gastons dark purple rope. Four times, Gaston fell into newly covered crevasses. Marshall was pulled to the edge as if by a team of panicked horses, but he always dug his crampons into the singing ice and arched himself over his ice axe, digging deep into the pure white until he ground to a stop while Gaston hung tensely in the middle of the crevass, slowly spinning, looking above to see if Marshall would hurtle over the blue edge into a shared death. Then Marshall would belay Gaston and rig a Bilgiri, pulling him up rapidly. Gaston was so rugged that he insisted on forging ahead despite the falls. They traveled thin cornices in slow-paced agony, chests aching, mouths burnt by subzero air. Sometimes a hundred yards took an hour. The atmosphere was in attack and warred to break their momentum. But they continued past delicate white edges and over brittle constructions of ice, until they reached the summit of Mont Blanc. After a circling and dizzy look at the green world gone afire below them, they started for the Vallee Blanche.
They had to cross a spine of ice so thin that it was necessary to cut not the customary steps but handholds, so that they could hang on either side. Marshall suggested that if they both fell, they would balance out. “Don’t be a fool,” said Gaston, indicating the thin ice wall between them. “The rope would be severed immediately. We are moving across a knife.” But they managed to negotiate even this upturned blade of ice and arrive at the Vallee Blanche.
They commenced their glissade, perhaps the longest ever, for the extreme and sudden cold had flattened the rills and laced over the gaps of the valley, into which they slid as fast as skiers, leaving two three-line tracks. Balanced on ice axes and heels, they fell through couloirs of virgin snow. Curtains of white leaped up behind them. They willingly flew off cliffs, landing in the snow, getting up again, sliding downward until their great hour was finished and they slammed into the forest of ice in the Bergschrund. Somewhere in the upright glittering mass, Metzner had his hut.
In the valley, Lydia made the rounds of pastel tents and documented with her Leica the gentle goings-on of the Souverain. Then she threw away her film and joined a group of red-collared Savoyards on a trout hunt in the stopped pools of the rivers upper tributaries. They dashed and splashed about, catching the trout in their hands with great glee. At night tents glowed from the braziers within. Lydia found a family with whom she took up residence. They made punches of purple wine and mountain flowers in ice. Only when the moon covered the valley like a bright inner lid of a sarcophagus did she glance at the mountain walls where Marshall was making his way.
After days of searching the Bergschrund, Marshall and Gaston had run out of food. They gnawed the ice for water. At night in their frail one-man tents they nearly froze, and they spent the cold days in fear and trances. The air slit their lungs like a sword as they climbed with crampons, ice axes, and ice screws, up and down the Bergschrund, finding not a trace of Metzner or his camp. There had been much shifting of the glacier. Gaston said that he had undoubtedly been buried.
“In fifty years his body will be thrown out at the base of the Mer de Glace, and they will say, ‘Here is the professor who perished in the Souverain half a century ago.’ ”
They started the descent. Gaston kept falling into hidden crevasses, but Marshall had become so experienced at rapid belaying that he allowed Gaston to drop only a foot or so. He was shocked beyond speech when Gaston angrily ordered him to be less efficient, saying, “Let me fall five or ten meters without interruption. I like it.” Because Gaston had to work with his hands to place ice screws when they went up steep walls in the undulating surface, the tips of his fingers began to turn black. Both he and Marshall worried about their feet, which they had not felt in a long time, but Gaston said that if there were no pain, there was probably some hope—a paradox which startled Marshall from an icy reverie in which he had concluded that his life was not quite his own, his history was growing suspiciously powerful in its influence on his present, and coincidences were too many. His origins pulled hard, and he wondered if he were caught in an elaborate bittersweet play, the esthetics of which were formed around inevitability.
Halfway down and halfway through his thoughts he bumped hard up against Gaston. Preoccupied, he had been following the rope like a Chard Ox. His face stung, and he had nearly knocked Gaston into a deep crevass. Gaston neither reprimanded nor thanked him, but simply stared down. Marshall saw too, and even in the cold a chill ran along his spine. Hanging on a climbing rope 150 feet down from the lip of the chasm and 500 feet from the almost imperceptible ice-blue plates at the bottom was a dead man. His hands were frozen onto the rope, which he had gripped just above his head so that his arms were arched symmetrically. His face was upturned toward the light. He spun around gently.
Gaston retreated about twenty feet and hammered both his and Marshall’s axes into the snow until the heads were a few inches above the surface and a foot apart. He took the rope and secured its center with an ice piton in back of the axes. He passed the ends through the carabiner hole at the top of each axe, and threw them over the crevass edge. He fixed one end of an auxiliary rope to an ice screw, and threw it over the edge next to the other ropes. He then rigged a bunch of slings, dropped his pack, and linked onto the two ropes. “Bilgiri,” he said to Marshall, who nodded. “It was easy before, but here it will be fifty meters—not so easy. You will have to read the ropes carefully.”
Gaston rappelled off the ice walls until he was deep in a world as blue as the sides of a high barrier reef. In a short time he was close to the body. Certainly Metzner, it was an old man clad in bright orange. His hair was white, and his wide-open eyes were blue.
IX. SETTLEMENT OF THE DOVE
1
THE RIVERS ran wild in his last summer before university in Leningrad. Even in late July one could feel the autumn, though the heat continued tenaciously. Trout and wild ducks shared deep circuitous pools caught behind white frothing falls. Pines and firs of green and blue-green waved in the wind as clouds passed above. Woodsmen drank wine that they had hidden, and lay on the steep pine-needled banks, faces to the sun.
Several hundred miles south, beyond her fathers massive forests, Katrina Perlé was beginning her walks to a cathedral full of wheat. And in the forests themselves, in a small village of exiles, Lev dreamed of women, or rather, of one. He did not yet know her, but she was sandy-haired and blue-eyed, and looked as though her coloring were perpetually of the beaches in August. Though the village of malcontents was only a bitter speck amid an ocean of forests, he carelessly envisioned deeds of heroism for the sake of this woman whom he loved. He was young enough not to know that sometimes heroes live while those that they would protect die.
His father was a doctor, in whose view Lev’s unrelenting patriotism and romanticism were wild idiocies bred by isolation in the forests and rebellion against the cynical dissidents there suffering at manual labor, against the disaffection of the father himself. He did not know that the enthusiasm of his son, and of countless other sons, would be necessary for survival in the years to come, and that the collective senses of a whole nation are always infinitely better attuned to the future than the senses of any individual—this in itse
lf a strong argument against the dictator he detested.
Deep in nature, they thought feverish political thoughts—which was especially foolish in light of their ineffectual histories; they were (as was everyone in Russia at the time) failures. One reason for Lev’s painfully naïve political raptures was that he was not really political. He preferred, for example, to ride logs down the river.
He would go to the chutes in morning, and when the loggers had put together a raft of ten or twenty bound logs he would leap on and ride faster and faster until he was dancing with the rolling wood, holding the chains as he was dipped into the cold current a dozen times a minute. In the baylet below his house he would fly clear of the logs, swim quickly to the bank, and make his way homeward through the green bushes, his clothes steaming as he took berries on the run.
But one day in the beginning of September he had to leave for Leningrad. That morning he bathed outside in the shower they had made by hanging a canvas bucket from a pine branch. He was eighteen, and thought that he was a folly grown man. Quietly resigned, his mother knew better.
She fixed his breakfast. The father too was about to leave, for the little hospital. Lev glanced at a suitcase he had packed the night before. He was so frightened that he almost shook. Then they stood at the doorway; his father embraced him; his mother embraced him; and their incipient tears vanished in laughter when they discovered that he had forgotten to put on his boots.
He did not know it, but he would never see them again, and the woods were to become so lost and far-away in time and geography that they would seem like a fairy tale.
He came to the wooden steps, with the newly polished boots. His mother bent down to kiss him as he put them on. His father said, “I have to go now. I’ll be late,” and touched him on the head.
His mother said, “We’ll see you at Christmas. It’s only three months or so.” She had been wearing a gray dress with a gold clasp—things from the city. The flies beat against the screen; his father disappeared down a pine-clad path; and he pulled on the boots.