The Fall

by Simon Mawer

  “What’ll we do, Jamie?” I asked.

  He didn’t take his eyes from the binoculars. “Looks a piece of piss, doesn’t it?”

  “About Ruth, I mean.”

  “Of course, if the weather holds up, technically the thing is precisely that: a piece of piss. Technically”'

  “I asked about Ruth.”

  “The second fact is that seen from down here it’s foreshortened. What you’ve got to bear in mind is that the Northeast Face of the Ben would fit into that little number about four times. That’s four times. So if you do the Orion Face in a day, then doing this is going to take you four days.”

  “Jamie.”

  He looked around from his binoculars. “Mathematically speaking. The third point, of course, is that the weather won’t hold up for four days in a row. It probably won’t hold up for three. Not unless we’re bloody lucky. Now let’s go and climb the fucking thing, Rob.”

  So we had some breakfast and packed our gear. Ruth watched us silently as we went over what we would take and what we would leave. You want to take everything, just in case, but you have to compromise — only so much rope, only so many carabiners and pitons and ice screws, only so much fuel and so much food and so much water. Everything measured out, the sacks put on to feel their weight, sleeping bags argued over, one stove left behind, one entire meal abandoned.

  Later that morning, the three of us took the mountain train up to Kleine Scheidegg. On the train there were mothers with their babies, old men and women in their retirement, and young men and women in the first years of their parenthood. Our rucksacks jammed the aisle, and the Japanese smiled and nodded as though somehow they understood. Jamie stared out the window, trying to see up the hillside where bits of the Face could be seen through the trees. “We should have walked,” he said. “We should be out on the hill.”

  At Kleine Scheidegg Station, we clambered out among the holiday crowd. There was a young man with an alpenhorn on the steps of the hotel. People stood beside him to have their pictures taken. Occasionally, as long as the price was right, he put the horn to his mouth and blew a few notes. “Like a cow in labor,” Jamie remarked. There was a coin-operated telescope through which you could peer at the North Face, but at the moment there was no notice to tell the watchers that there were climbers in action. For the moment the greatest public stage in the whole theater of climbing was empty.

  The tourists headed for the cafés and the souvenir shops. We picked up our sacks and set off to walk up the final stretch of the line to Eigergletscher. Ruth would come with us and then go back down to the bunkhouse at Kleine Scheidegg to wait. “Just a day or two,” Jamie said. “Or three,” he added, knowing that it might be four or five, but if it were any more than that, then it would be forever.

  The sky had that hard enamel blue that altitude gives it, a blue that promised what the forecast had claimed: three days of settled weather, maybe four. Enough. We said our farewells on the narrow platform as one of the trains dragged itself up and into the tunnel that burrows through the bowels of the mountain. Tourists stared out of the windows at us. “Now don’t you cry,” Jamie told Ruth.

  “I wasn’t,” she replied.

  He smiled a bitter little smile. “We should be well into the Ramp by midday tomorrow. And we’ll probably bivvy again before the Traverse of the Gods. Then we’ll climb out the next day. See you back down here Thursday evening. Day after tomorrow. Could be late.”

  What did she feel? Impossible to tell from her expression. She gave each of us a kiss and then turned back to go and get something from her bag. Her camera, that battered Nikon that had accompanied her to Egypt and Libya and the Aïr. “A photo of the conquering heroes,” she said with an ironic downturn of her mouth, and we stood there self-consciously for a moment while she aimed the lens. The shutter fired, once, twice, three times, a patter of metal leaves. She gave a little smile and tucked the camera away.

  “You ready, Rob?” Jamie asked.

  I agreed that I was, as ready as I’d ever be, and we turned away from her and went up the path that leads from the platform around to the shoulder of the ridge. Just before we turned the corner into the shadow of the Face, I glanced back. I’d made a bet with myself whether she’d still be there. I reckoned that she wouldn’t be, that she would have shrugged her shoulders and gone back to the café. But she was still standing there when I looked, and when she saw me glancing around she waved. The gesture seemed almost hieratic, a mixture of farewell and blessing.

  It was cold in the shadow of the North Face, the deep cold of a place that has never seen the sun. I trudged along behind Jamie. Below us the meadows sloped steeply down to the chalets of Alpiglen. Above us rose the ragged vertical mile of snow and ice and rock that was the Eigerwand. On its far side the Northeast Ridge was touched with sunlight, but the whole concave precipice of the Face itself was in shadow. Tamed by foreshortening, it leaned back almost in welcome, like an old whore who knows her business and wants to make things as easy as possible at first because the real experience, the actual seduction, the caresses and the climax, will not be as pleasurable as it might seem at the start.

  There were some walkers on the path in front of us — a young couple with their two children. They stopped and watched as we branched off for the foot of the wall. The adults pointed and talked to each other and explained to the kids. They were telling a kind of fairy tale no doubt, of heroes going off to pit themselves against the Ogre. One of the children waved. Perhaps he had been prompted by his parents. I raised a hand in acknowledgment, and the essential irrationality of the whole undertaking crowded in on me. That little family would stroll down to Alpiglen in the sunshine and catch the train back to the town far below. They’d return to their hotel, have dinner in comfort, sleep the sleep of the just. Their lives would not be any less fulfilled for not having climbed the Eigerwand. I felt a mixture of emotion, the logic of fear and the illogic of an absurd ebullience, as though there was nothing difficult ahead of us, no pain, no fear, nothing that would not succumb to Jamie’s ability and my own brand of stubbornness. And Ruth was suddenly nowhere. It was going to be a piece of piss, Dewar.

  At the first snow slope the going became easier, and we began kicking our way up toward the first pillar and the first rocks. The family group had fallen into proportion now, a cluster of tiny and irrelevant figures behind and below, creatures of another world. Ahead were the rising tiers of shattered rock and the swaths of white. We went on up, kicking steps in the old snow and pausing occasionally to get our breath, while the meadows fell below us. Without fuss, without any drama, the Face enveloped us, took us into its embrace, wrapped its cold arms around us, while the breeze whispered to us treacherous murmurs of reassurance.

  “Over here!” Jamie called. He had found a boot. It was an old and wrinkled boot, a relic of some distant and nameless disaster.

  It seemed to give him immense pleasure, this boot. “Ist ein Boot!” he exclaimed in a ghastly German accent.

  “I think Boot is boat.”

  “Ist ein Boot von Bergführer tot!” he cried. The idea — the boot of a dead mountain guide — seemed to bring him some kind of delight. For a moment he toyed with the idea of keeping his trophy — “Perhaps ist der Boot von Hinterstoisser” — but I convinced him to throw it away. As we continued, we came across other relics: old slings, a rusted tin can, an abandoned glove, an ancient canvas rucksack. We were on a haunted mountainside; we were surrounded by ghosts and tripping over their possessions.

  At the Entry Chimney we put on helmets. The climbing was deceptively enjoyable and straightforward. “You okay, Dewar?” Jamie called down. “V Diff all right for you?” The ledges were littered with fragments of rock. There were stretches of scree up which we slithered and struggled. The Shattered Pillar passed easily, as well as the runnels and gullies that lead upward. Everywhere there were the signs, the rusted pitons, the slings of bleached and brittle rope abandoned by climbers rappelling off the Face. Eventual
ly we reached the tunnel window, a metal shutter sunk into the rock through which you could escape into the troglodyte world of Swiss railways. Below our heels, empty space had appeared, unfolding itself out of green alpine meadows like a clever piece of trickery.

  Jamie stood on the ledge and looked around with a thoughtful expression. “This is it,” he said. “This is where he turned back.”

  He meant his father. I tried to picture Guy Matthewson there on that scrappy ledge, his nailed boots crunching over the shards of rock, thrilling to the situation and no doubt disappointed that he couldn’t continue. Who had his companion been? A fellow Englishman? A German? What had held them back? It would have been the second ascent if he had been successful. Perhaps his partner wasn’t up to it. Perhaps the weather was too uncertain. Or did they just look upward at the rising tiers of rock above them, at the runnels of ice and the dark grooves going on and on above their heads, and think that it was beyond them? Climbing is all in the head, Jamie used to say. Most of it anyway. But not here, not on the face of the Ogre.

  Jamie shrugged and patted me on the shoulder, as though I were a kid, as though we were kids together once more and there was no Ruth. “Come on, lad.”

  So we went on: a traverse leftward and then up a chimney and upward over broken ledges. An old fixed rope hung down the so-called Difficult Crack. The crack was easy enough, like a climb in the Ogwen Valley, no more than Severe. At the top, at the foot of the Rote Fluh (the Red Wall) we paused again to look. Below us the ground fell away to distant meadows, where there was sunshine and warmth, and a vast slanting wedge of shadow — a mile of darkness cast down the hillside by the mountain itself. The incongruous sound of cowbells drifted up in the afternoon air. We could see the railway track descending toward the little station of Alpiglen and then, far below to the right, in the very bottom of the valley, the buildings of Grindelwald. Directly above us was the Red Wall. It isn’t red: it’s only a pallid flesh color, streaked and stained like dirt in grazed skin. From a distance it seems a tiny feature in the whole Face, a mere blemish; yet it rose vertically above us now for almost a thousand feet. You try to fix your own dimensions. You try and get things in some kind of perspective — the Red Wall alone is the height of the Orion Face of Ben Nevis, but it is a mere plague spot on the face of the Ogre.

  “No one else around,” Jamie said with satisfaction. “Wir are allein!”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “It means we won’t have to fight over a bivvy site with a bunch of Krauts.”

  “It might mean that everyone else thinks the Face is out of condition.”

  He shrugged. “Looks okay to me.” We turned back to the business of the climb, edging leftward beneath the Rote Fluh toward the center of the Face. There were pegs crammed into cracks, bunches of old, used slings, and then a rope in place, hanging in swags across a stretch of blank slab. The exposure was sudden and dramatic. The rock hung down in a smooth curtain, pale and compact; beneath it there was nothing — space, a void, a vertiginous emptiness.

  “This the Hinterstoisser Traverse?”

  “Must be.”

  We paused on the brink and contemplated it. You can’t avoid it. You can’t avoid the story any more than you can avoid the traverse itself. In the summer of 1936, Andreas Hinterstoisser had tiptoed across this smooth slab, tensioning on a rope to balance, pulling sideways on the few holds that he found. It was the key pitch to get out from under the Rote Fluh and into the center of the Face, the crux of the route that he was prospecting with his three companions. On the far side he fixed the rope, and the others — Edi Rainer, Willy Angerer, Toni Kurz — followed across easily, using the rope as a handrail. Then they retrieved the rope and pushed on upward. Three days later, when they were retreating in a storm with one of their number injured, they might have reversed this pitch had they left the rope in place. As it was, they couldn’t. As it was, they died.

  “Kurz — he dead.” And Rainer and Angerer and Hinterstoisser. And Sedlmayer and Mehringer. And fifty others. The Face is a playground and a cemetery and a memorial. Its history is an obituary.

  I clipped into one of the pegs and belayed Jamie while he climbed down and grabbed the fixed rope. “What’s it look like?”

  “Fairly good.” He swung out and down, his boots scuffing against the rock as he pulled himself along. It took only a few minutes to reach the other side and belay. The rope sagged like an old washing line beneath my weight when I followed. I envisaged it snapping; I wondered about its age; I wondered about how hard the pitch would have been to climb free; I wondered why I was there. Jamie grinned at me as I came across. “Piece of piss, eh, Dewar?” He was tempting the gods that rule the place, and I wished he wouldn’t. They are pagan, Nordic gods, and they kill without compunction.

  Beyond the traverse, a short chimney led up to a bivouac site: the Swallow’s Nest, perched beneath the eaves of the mountain. Out of the shadows of the Rote Fluh, we were in the warmth of the afternoon sunshine. There was a fugitive sensation of safety and contentment. We could take our helmets off and rub our heads and sit in comfort to look at the view. We could brew a cup of tea and prepare for supper. We could smile around at the place — the plunging spaces, the shabby gray scaffolding of the mountain, the small splinters of rock that we kicked from beneath our feet — and, despite everything, feel a little bit in love with it and with each other. There is something old-fashioned about climbing. It lets in emotions that one does not readily admit to any longer: companionship, commitment, even love. I wondered how Jamie’s father would have felt if he could have seen the two of us there, sitting at the Swallow’s Nest, one third of the way up the Eigerwand. For an ephemeral moment, I thought about how much I loved Jamie and Ruth and Eve and the whole world.

  We had some food, and when it was dark we shined a flashlight in the direction of the lights of Kleine Scheidegg, hoping that Ruth would see us and know that we were okay, but whether there was an answering light we couldn’t be sure. Then Jamie turned to me. He’d been thinking about her, just as I had. I suppose he’d been trying to find the right moment. It was easier in the dark. “About Ruth.”

  I swallowed something. “What about her?”

  He was silent for a moment, hunched in his down jacket, smoking a cigarette. Apart from the soughing of the wind, there was no sound up there on our stony ledge. Then he touched me. In the darkness he put out his hand and touched me on the shoulder almost as if to confirm the fact of my presence there on the ledge beside him. Perhaps he was even trying to comfort me, although surely it was he who needed comfort. And I felt like a child again, as we had been all those years ago with Bethan around the back of the garden shed. I felt the sympathy in his touch, the sympathy in his look, as though he were a parent to me. “Are you in love with her?”

  “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  “And what about Eve?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, Jamie. Eve as well. I just don’t know.”

  He nodded thoughtfully, silent for a while as he drew on his cigarette. The small point of fire flared. “We’ve been through a lot together, haven’t we?”

  “Sure.”

  “Bethan, that bastard in the quarry, things like that…”

  “The Aussies.”

  He laughed. “The Aussies. The one who fancied me, what was her name?”

  “Kerry.”

  “Kerry. And now this.”

  “Maybe we’ve shared too much.”

  “Maybe. Shared my mother in a way, haven’t we?” I watched the red fire of his cigarette in the darkness.

  “You know how I found out about you and her?”

  “Jamie, it’s long over — ”

  “We had a row. I can’t even remember what is was about. Maybe about one of her boyfriends. God knows. Shortly after you’d come up to London and we’d been to that party. You remember? And I asked her straight out about you, and she brandished it in my face. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I’ve had Robert. Yes, we�
�ve been lovers. Are you jealous or something?’”

  He scuffed his feet in the stones on the ledge. I couldn’t see him clearly, just the movement of his shadow. He picked up a stone and tossed it over the edge, like someone tossing a pebble into a well and listening for the sound of it hitting the water. But here there was nothing. No sound, nothing. “I was jealous,” he went on. “Jealous of both of you. Jealous that you had both been closer to each other than I ever could be.”

  He paused again. He sounded confused. I wondered whether he was even in a fit state to be climbing this bloody mountain. I felt that I had to say something, anything to placate the gods of his unhappiness. “I was just a kid, Jamie. And she was lonely…”

  He turned to me, just his shadow in the luminous darkness of that frozen ledge. “And now Ruth. Now I’m expected to share Ruth with you.” His voice was no more than a whisper above the sound of the wind. “First you take my mother, and now you’re taking Ruth.”

  “Taking her? It was what she wanted, for God’s sake. All three of us wanted it.”

  In the faint backwash of light from the sky, I could see him shaking his head. He drew on his cigarette and stared out into the darkness. When he spoke again his tone was bewildered: “You practically own me, Rob, you know that?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Jamie. I own precious little. A comprehensive collection of scratched Rolling Stones records, and a few books stolen from University College library. That’s about it.” I paused. There was something hugely absurd about having this conversation perched up there under the eaves of the mountain, absurd and dangerous. I wanted the conversation to go away, but it wouldn’t any more than Jamie would go away. I was stuck here on the ledge with him, for better or for worse, for richer for poorer, until death, possibly, did us part. “We could toss for her,” I suggested. It was a joke, a hammer to break the tension, a clumsy weapon.