by Simon Mawer
But amid the gathering dusk and the gathered cloud, there was nothing to be seen. He might have been crazy, standing on the side of the road and pointing out nothing at all with all the conviction of a lunatic.
Invisibility brought a sense of detachment to our presence there beneath the Eiger, almost as though there were no mountains, there was no North Face to climb, there was no fear to overcome. We pitched a tent at the campsite and mooched around Grindelwald in the evening. The place was like a frontline town in the tourist war, recently abandoned by the skiers and now occupied by a different army — Japanese, mainly. To Jamie’s disgust, Ruth even bought some souvenirs — a miniature ice ax with GRINDELWALD engraved down the shaft, and a little arrangement of artificial edelweiss under a plaster model of the Eiger. “My parents will love them,” she said. “I don’t care what you say. I can just see this ax among the horse brasses over the bar.”
The next morning was no different. We dropped in at the guides’ office on the main street to get a weather report. The man behind the desk was lean and tough-looking, his face burnished by sun and wind to the color of polished oak. “Not to worry,” he said. “The forecast is gut. This weather will clear, and high pressure moves in.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Jamie said.
“You’re just a pessimist,” Ruth remarked. She was the only one keeping a sense of balance, the only one who tried to get some enjoyment out of the situation.
“You know what a pessimist is? A pessimist is someone who’s never disappointed.” Jamie smiled humorlessly at the guide. “What are conditions like on the Face? Has there been a lot of snow? What’s the freezing level? Is the whole thing going to be one big waterfall?”
The man frowned. “What face?”
“How many are there? Christ alive, who is this guy? The Nordwand, of course.”
“You are going on the Nordwand?”
“Is it out of bounds? I thought that was in the nineteen thirties.”
Ruth tugged at his sleeve. “Don’t start a row,” she said.
The guide was being pointedly polite, the way a policeman might be polite with a drunk shortly before bundling him into the back of the squad car. “You know what you’re doing, sir?” he asked.
“I’m standing here having a nice conversation with you.”
The man’s smile was like a split in a sheet of ice. “I mean are you able? We are having problems with English climbers.”
“Nothing like the problems you’re going to have with this one.”
Ruth smiled sympathetically at the guide, as though the man she had to deal with was some kind of nutcase. I suggested that Jamie shut up.
“I’m not going to shut up,” he said loudly. “What’s this guy want me to do? Sign an affidavit that we won’t expect a rescue if we get into difficulties? The North Face is a climb. They talk about it as though it’s their personal property.” He turned to the guide. “Hey, youth, have you ever climbed it?”
The man looked nonplussed. “I have been on it,” he said.
“But have you climbed it?”
“I help in rescues.” He added pointedly: “The Englishman called Brewster.”
“Sure.” Jamie’s tone was full of contempt. It worked in any language. “I’ll bet you just went up on the train and nipped out through the railway window to throw them a packet of sandwiches. The fellows that rescued Brewster were another couple of Englishmen — Bonington and Whillans.”
We pulled him toward the door.
“Have you the adequate experience?” the man called. “That is what I want to know. You have no mountains in your country.”
“Experience?” Jamie yelled back. “The North Face is nothing more than Scottish winter Grade Five. Bloody hell, the hardest rock pitches are no more than Severe. I’d like to see you on the Orion Face!”
We pushed him out. “Is he drunk?” the guide called.
“No, he’s English,” Ruth answered.
“Is that not the same thing?”
The main street was a sanctuary of trinkets and souvenirs and expensive outdoor clothing where Japanese tourist groups grazed like herds of herbivores. Ruth asked Jamie why he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, but he just ignored her. “That fucking guide probably spends all his time shepherding customers up the Mittellegi Ridge and thinking he’s at the forefront of climbing,” he complained. “Probably never leaves this bloody valley. The nearest he gets to any other mountains is when he goes to the supermarket at Interlaken.”
The cloud stayed down. We lay around the campsite and sorted out our gear and talked to a couple of climbers from Bradford who wanted to know about the Mittellegi Ridge and where they could get some decent beer. “All this lager piss,” they complained. “Gives us indigestion.”
They’d heard of Jamie, of course. “Jim Matthewson? Done a lot of new routes in Scotland, haven’t you? Didn’t you do that variation of Orion Direct?”
“The pair of us,” said Jamie.
“And what are you planning to do here?”
“The North Face.”
They sniffed and looked slightly awkward, as you might at the funeral of someone you don’t really know. “What would that be?” one of them asked. There was the careful use of the conditional tense. “The third British ascent?”
Jamie shrugged. “I don’t read record books.”
“Well, good luck,” they said.
There was a high wind and still the odd speck of sleet in the air. During the afternoon, the cloud parted to show some ragged patches of the Face, but they were out of context, like parts of a room glimpsed through a keyhole. “What about that bastard’s weather forecast?” Jamie complained.
We waited. We were bored and tightened by the tension of the coming climb and the foul weather. The mountain brooded up there behind the clouds and waited for us like the spider waiting for her prey. We laughed, we argued, we told stories and lies. We sat in the van and pored over the photos and climbed the various pitches in our minds yet again, and discussed the merits and demerits of making an early start and bivouacking on the Flat-iron, or going up to the Swallow’s Nest the afternoon before so that we could start up the ice fields as early in the morning as possible. We waited. There’s even a name for it, that listless wait for the weather to settle, a wait made brittle and bad-tempered by anxiety: Eiger-watching. There’s a name for everything: the Difficult Crack, Death Bivouac, the Traverse of the Gods, the Spider. The whole damn mountain is tied up with names, the names of the features of the Face and the names of the dead.
In the evening, Ruth played her guitar — a plangent, mournful voice singing Celtic laments — and a few of the people in the campsite came over to listen. Above us the mountain lay back beneath its blanket of cloud and slept. We went for a few beers with the Bradford climbers — Jamie showed them where you could get Dunkel and Hefeweizen — and when we got back to the van, Ruth cooked a meal of rice and beef and vegetables. We killed two bottles of overpriced Swiss wine to go on top of the beer.
“That was a great meal,” Jamie said. “What do you call it?”
“Chop suey.” She glanced in my direction. “There’s a painting called Chop Suey, do you know that, Rob? By Edward Hopper.”
“As a matter of fact — ”
“Why does he always say that?” Jamie interrupted. “As a matter of fact. As though he was a lawyer in court or something.”
I ignored him. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
“It shows a lonely lady in a Chinese restaurant.”
“I don’t think she’s on her own. I think she’s got someone with her. There are two women, one with her back to the viewer.”
Ruth smiled knowingly. We knew, that was the trouble. Ruth and I knew. That’s always the trouble with betrayal: the betrayers know so much more than the betrayed. “Maybe they were discussing a man,” she suggested. “A man whom they both love.”
We laughed, but there was something beneath the laughter, undercurrents of knowledg
e and desire. She leaned across and kissed me. Jamie didn’t seem to care. She turned and kissed him; then she kissed us both with a fine indifference. When I made a move to go, she put out her hand to stop me. “Don’t.”
So I stayed. Perhaps the whole thing was inevitable. The alcohol had something to do with it, of course. There was the promiscuity of shared tiredness and emotion, and the hot smell of our bodies. Our minds were clouded with alcohol and ideas of sexual freedom, our bodies were craving, our nerves were shredded by the wait and by the certain knowledge that hanging over us, invisible like all the best monsters, was the Eiger. Ruth laughed in the gaslight and put her arms around the two of us, accepting kisses from either. Jamie laughed too, but I couldn’t read the tone of his amusement, whether there was complicity in it or mere acquiescence.
She was wearing a T-shirt. You snatch minor things out of the swamp of memory: I remember that T-shirt, the design. It was tie-dyed, a sunburst of white and orange across a black sky. I remember how she pushed us away and crossed her arms across her belly and grabbed the hem of the shirt and dragged it over her head. “There,” she said, tossing it aside. From the waist up she was naked.
Jamie touched her. We were laughing. It was funny and shocking at the same time, seeing his hand on her breasts. There was a sense of trespass, the breathless trespass of children stepping past the signs that said PERYGL, CADWCH ALLAN — DANGER, KEEP OUT. We tiptoed into the unknown — touching, laughing, pulling apart, wondering how far this would go and where it would end. There was the pliant texture of her body and the hard edges of Jamie’s. And then the laughter died, and we were mere movement, a triangle made of sinew and muscle and bone and nerve, flexing awkwardly in the narrow space; a scalene triangle, shifting, flexing, the angles changing, but always with Ruth at the narrow point of convergence. “Yes,” I heard her say, very quietly in my ear or Jamie’s, as though she were answering one of us alone: “Yes, yes, yes.”
The next morning no one said anything. It was the silence after the fall. We sat in the van and drank coffee and ate breakfast and peered out of the windows to see what was going on up there above us, and said nothing. Clouds shifted and swirled around the invisible mountain.
“What do we do?” I asked eventually. The question was there to be answered as anyone pleased. Ruth looked from me to Jamie. He sipped his coffee and looked thoughtfully at the two of us. “Let’s go up to Eigergletscher Station and have a look at the West Flank. Get a bit of exercise.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Why not?”
Payment deferred, I think we knew that. We guessed there was something to pay. We had eaten the fruit of a particular species of the tree of knowledge, a rare and exotic species, one that is almost certainly poisonous. We wouldn’t get away unscathed. So we took the train up to Eigergletscher, and the momentary reprieve brought with it a certain lightheartedness. As the vehicle crawled up through the meadows, there was a holiday mood among the three of us, a sense of relief.
Eigergletscher Station is a brutal place, a ferroconcrete blockhouse nestling below the West Ridge of the mountain. It is the station before the tunnel, where the railway burrows into a black hole to climb up through the bowels of the mountain on its journey up to the Jungfraujoch. Directly behind the station, above the tunnel entrance, the West Flank rises up in great steps toward the summit five thousand feet above. To the left, deep in shadow, is the North Face.
That day, the cloud base was barely above the station buildings. We left the platform and went around the back of the buildings, past official signs that warned us about the dangers of the mountains, onto the mountainside itself. Cliffs rose above in a desolation of rubble and scree. The route zigzagged upward over sloping ledges and rock steps. There were cairns and a beaten path in places. Assuming everything went well with our climb, this was the way Jamie and I would come down from the summit. We paused at intervals to look around and try to get our bearings, but soon we were in cloud and bereft of all landmarks. We climbed apart, cocooned in our own worlds. At a snowfield, we paused to put on crampons.
“How much higher do we go?” Ruth asked.
Jamie shrugged. The route slanted up the snow to the foot of an icy gully. Cairns marked the way, and in places there were pitons that had been used for rappelling. The wind plucked at our sleeves as though reminding us of something. And then we found ourselves on a knife-edge ridge, peering over into the ominous darkness of the North Face, where the wind keened and no one moved. The cloud swirled past us, cold and silent, pouring into the shadows.
I looked at Ruth’s face, pinched with cold, huddled into her hood. She looked ugly like that, wasted and shriveled, like an old woman wearing a head scarf. I smiled. She smiled back, but her smile lacked conviction. We went up a bit farther before turning back and finding our way down through the murk until the roof of the station loomed out of the mist below us.
There was a feeling of relief to be off the mountain, out of the darkness of the cloud and back in a place where there were people and lights. We got something to drink at the bar, and then we walked side by side down the path below the station. The mood had changed. The Eiger has that quality. Civilization laps up to its very foot so that you can step from the desolation of the mountain into the comforts of the human world in a few paces. We went on down the path below the mountain like innocent friends out for a stroll. There was sunlight now, shafts of it breaking through the cloud. Where the path was wide enough, Ruth walked between the two of us, linking her arms through ours as though holding us together, laughing and talking as though nothing mattered. But someone was going to get damaged, perhaps all three of us. We sensed that, each in his own way. We had trespassed. There was, beneath our casual manner, the darkness of a deep hurt.
That evening, we ate supper in near silence. Jamie and I talked of the weather, the prospects, the gear we should take, where we should bivouac — all assuming that the cloud would clear and the mountain would allow us a few days of decent weather. Ruth watched us and kept that dark Welsh expression of reserve and withdrawal, like the mountains looking down on the English castles there on the coast.
“So what about us?” she asked when it seemed that we were finished, when the plates had been cleared away. “Where do we go from here?”
So we talked. It was a long, rambling, circuitous conversation, not the kind of thing you recall in clear detail, perhaps because the detail was never clear at the time. In some ways it seemed unreal. We made assertions of eternal love; we made accusations of betrayal. I remember that she wept. I had never imagined that this might be possible. A remarkable event, her pallid face streaked with tears, her eyes and nose flushed. “I want you both,” she cried. “I want you both; I love you both, and you both love me and you love each other. Can’t we leave it at that? We have something so special here. Can’t we just do what the hell we like?” I think perhaps that in her mind we were playing Arthur and Lancelot to her Guinevere. Guinevere is Welsh — Gwynhwy-far. The whole story of Arthur is Welsh, really, so I guess it suited her Celtic mysticism.
I sound cynical. Across the space of so many years it’s difficult not to be. We were children of our time, eager to draw our lives against the background of a universal love that no one had really witnessed but everyone claimed. Eventually, with nothing resolved, we dozed. When I was next aware of the world around me, the luminous hands of my watch told me that it was three o’clock.
Something was different. I listened. The figures beside me shifted in their sleep. I sensed that something had changed in the world, some factor of wind and temperature and humidity. Cautiously I slid a window open to look out.
“What’s that?” Jamie mumbled.
“Nothing. Sleep.”
Outside the van the night air was cold and dry. The cloud had vanished as completely as though it had never been there. Craning upward I could see stars, thousands of them scattered like crystals of ice across the luminous sky. And something else: a dense black wedge thrust up above us to
cut out a third of the visible universe. For the first time, I was looking at the North Face of the Eiger.
Two points of light gave some kind of perspective to the dark mass, like two lone stars in the midst of a great black nebula. They were the lights from the railway tunnel that lies buried in the heart of the mountain.
I shivered, not from cold but from anticipation and fear. There was a lot to be afraid of. There was fear for Jamie and Ruth and me. There was the irrational fear of the night and the rational fear of the Face itself. I slept in this fear, and dreams merged with memory so that when I finally awoke in daylight I was unsure what I had seen and what we had said and done and what I had dreamed. Ruth was still beside me. I touched her, as though to confirm the reality of her presence there. She moaned and turned away, presenting the long snake of her spine toward me. But where Jamie had lain there was just a mess of sheets and sleeping bags, and when I opened the door, I found that he was standing beside the van, staring up at the North Face through binoculars. Without turning, he said, “There it is.”
I pulled on some clothes and climbed out. The morning was cold and clear, brilliant with frost. I stood beside him, looking up at the Face. The features were familiar from a thousand photographs — the strata of the lower slopes, the rock bands, the slopes of white that are the ice fields, the wedge of the Flatiron standing out from the Face like the prow of a ship, and, high above all those, the funnel of white ice that is the Spider. From this angle the wall seemed to lean back from the vertical, its steepness mollified by the presence of that dimension that is always missing from the photographs — the dimension of depth. It looked almost as though it was inviting us in. A drift of vapor was wrapped around the West Ridge and across the summit rocks like a chiffon scarf around the neck of an old, raddled woman. There was a flush of dawn, pink on the summit.