by Simon Mawer
“Why not?”
“I wasn’t being serious…”
“But why not? It gives you a chance, doesn’t it? Fifty-fifty.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake — ”
“Why not? There’s that book, isn’t there? What was it called? The Dice Man. The guy who decided everything by the throw of a dice?”
“It’s die. Singular’s a die.”'
“Seems more appropriate. Let’s do it.”
“Do what?”
“Toss a coin.”
“Jamie, it was a joke — ”
“But let’s do it.”
I didn’t know whether he was serious or not. He was a mad bugger at times, shot through with a streak of anger and a seam of recklessness. “For God’s sake! What about Ruth?”
“But she’ll not know. She’ll never know. It’ll be a secret just between the two of us. You scared of doing it?”
“I’m not scared; it’s just fucking silly. How can you toss for a woman?”
He searched in the pocket of his britches and found a coin. “Why not? Why the hell not?”
So we did. We settled ourselves to the ridiculous game like two drunks around a table. I suppose we were drunk really, high on the drug of emotion and tension, nervous of the morning and the climb ahead.
I’ve often thought back to that moment and tried to decipher what it meant. I think that I took it like that, as nothing more than a game. I thought that what happened wouldn’t count in the final balance of things, that whatever there was between us would still be settled by human love and jealousy and prejudice. There was even a part of me that rehearsed how I would tell this story to Eve, how we would laugh together at the image of Jamie holding the coin out in the pale light of his headlamp, as though to demonstrate that everything was aboveboard. “You ready?”
“Jamie, this is ridiculous — ”
“You ready?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m ready. Whatever you say.”
“This is serious, youth. Whoever loses gets out…”
“For God’s sake, just get on with it.”
He flicked the coin. For a brief moment light flickered from its surfaces as it spun in the space between us. Then he snatched it from the air and held out his fist. “You call.”
I looked at him. In the torchlight I could see the anxiety in his expression, a tension that was greater than in any climb. “This is crazy, Jamie.”
“Just call.”
“Let things take their course, man.”
“Call, fuck you! Call!”
I thought he might hit me. For a moment I thought we might have a barroom brawl up there on the narrow ledge of the Swallow’s Nest. I was on the Eiger with a madman. Which was more dangerous, the mountain or the guy I was tied to with a rope? “Tails,” I said resignedly. “Seeing as that’s what we’re after. Tails.”
He didn’t laugh at the joke. He just opened his fingers and showed the coin lying there in his palm with the allegorical figure of Lady Helvetia, the patron saint of bankers, uppermost.
“I hope you’re happy together,” I muttered.
After that we curled up and tried to sleep. We slept fitfully, the sleep of the damned, drawn out with dreams and nightmares into a kind of torture. I woke to the rattle of Jamie’s alarm clock and his swearing and cussing in the darkness.
“What time is it?”
I peered at my watch. The luminous numbers were bright from the light that they had absorbed during the day. “Almost four.”
“Where’s my torch?”
He snapped it on, casting a puddle of light into the dark. Exposed on our tiny ledge, we were enclosed by the fateful whisper of vapor. “Shit, we’re in cloud.”
“Mist.”
“Is that a good sign?”
“I suppose it means it’s cold.”
Cold was good. Cold cemented loose stones into the ice and reduced the stone-fall. Cold cements joints. We flexed our hands and elbows and knees. The demons of the evening before had retreated, but they were there in the background laughing at us. We melted snow and made tea. We ate some biscuits and chocolate. Our breath measured the chill in clouds of vapor that swirled like cigarette smoke in the light of our headlamps. We packed our things away and sorted out the ropes.
“All right, Rob?”
I held my hand up against the glare of his headlamp. He looked like a miner standing in the darkness of a tunnel, his eyes bright white and his face darkened with shadow and stubble. Beyond him was a pale slope of ice. Nothing more. There was no depth to our surroundings, no exposure. “Ready when you are.”
We put on our packs and looked around to make sure that nothing had been left. “Let’s go.” Jamie edged leftward out onto the ice, his lamp creating a pale womb of light around him, his crampons scraping on rock and then cutting into the hard névé of the first ice field. Ax and hammer swung in a growing rhythm as he warmed up. He moved up, running out the rope smoothly, moving with the ease of someone strolling up a hillside, his figure growing dim until it was little more than an opalescent blur in the mist above.
“I’ll get an ice screw in here,” he called down. “Just for form.”
An ice screw; a nice screw. One of his hackneyed jokes. The whole world was still. I heard the metallic click as he clipped a carabiner into the screw, and then the rhythmic chopping recommenced and he moved on up. I loved him; I hated him. I loved the sureness of his movements, the stubborn skills he showed, the courage of four o’clock in the morning when the spirits are lowest; and I hated him for loving Ruth. In the cold light of morning, there was no doubt in my mind: she loved him and only him. I was just a game for her.
He belayed in the middle of the ice field on a pair of screws. I climbed up to him and led through. As I reached the top of the ice, dawn seeped around the Northeast Flank of the Face. The mist began to thin. We could see the features around us, the vertical pillars and walls, the ice fields hanging like dirty washing on a line, all of these structures sketched out in the dissolving mist. Far above was a silver-blue sky. The air was cold.
“Fantastic day!” Jamie called as he led on past me. “Fantastic day!”
Access from the first to the second ice field is cut off by a band of rock. The Ice Hose is meant to provide the link, but it was no more than a smear that year. He fiddled around a bit trying to find a way up. His crampons grated on the rock. I looked directly upward at the underside of his boots and imagined him coming off and down toward me, the talons on his feet like an eagle’s. He scraped and scratched rightward and found the cold comfort of ice. “Fucking steep,” he muttered. The casual obscenities of the workingman: they give a kind of satisfaction, the way that doing something hard and physical does — no thought, no reason, just the dull fact of action. He belayed precariously and brought me up. The ice was more or less continuous now, and the ax and hammer bit home. There was little talk between us, just the unexpressed feeling that we had work to do, and quickly. You deliberately put yourself in an idiotic position, and then you work as fast and as efficiently as possible to get yourself out of it. You taunt danger and step aside.
I edged past Jamie. From far below came the sounds of another world: the first train grinding up through the meadows toward Kleine Scheidegg, the ringing of cowbells, and then a mournful echo like the cry of a cow in pain: the sound of the alpenhorn from outside the Bellevue Hotel.
I balanced on up to the rim of the second ice field to a sudden change of perspective, a sudden opening, the great thousand-foot sweep of gray ice running upward above me to the foot of blackened, rotting cliffs. The ice was pitted with gravel. The aspect was almost industrial, like some hideous mine, abandoned and dilapidated, strewn with the bits of its decay — a quarry, an ancient quarry, haunted by ghosts. Over to the left and high above us, the rock of the Flatiron jutted out of the ice like the bow of a battleship.
Jamie joined me, and we contemplated the future together. “It’s huge,” I muttered stupidly.
&nb
sp; “Of course it’s huge. That’s the whole point of this route. Let’s get on with it.”
For all its expanse the ice field was an oppressive place. We tiptoed up it, banging in ice pitons occasionally, aware of the fragility of our bodies and our skulls. This was the firing line. This was like stepping over the parapet and making your way across no-man’s-land. We crept up quietly to avoid being noticed by snipers. We wondered whether to move together and decided against it just because of the size of the place, the exposure, the vastness of the cliffs above.
The first stone came past with a mere whisper. It was so subdued that for a second I wondered what it was. “Don’t look up!” Jamie shouted. I was belayed in the middle of the slope, and Jamie was below me, moving up fast, almost like a soldier trying to get into a shell hole before the next missile. A second and a third stone came down, small explosions of anger. Something glanced off my helmet just as he reached me.
“Christ!”
“What is it?”
“Nothing. Just a stone. Tiny.”
“Just don’t look up.”
It was the randomness that terrified. In climbing, little is random: the rock is a puzzle set in three dimensions. It rarely changes. You can judge yourself against it. There are those who fail and those who succeed. But in the stone-fall of the Eiger there is none of this. There is only pure untrammeled chance, the vagaries of luck, the casting of dice.
“Best keep moving,” Jamie said and went on, almost running up the slope, pausing only to slam in an ice piton. Just for form’s sake.
The stone hit him two pitches later, when we had another five hundred feet to go, when it was just beginning to feel endless, a kind of torment, a rack on which we were strung like torture victims. I glanced up to see how he was going, and there were sudden black marks against the sky above him. He shouted something and flattened himself against the filthy ice, and I heard him give a cry that was half pain and half expletive. He didn’t fall. I’d have held him had he fallen — he had a couple of ice pitons in, and he wasn’t far above the top one and anyway the angle wasn’t steep, just about fifty-five degrees — but somehow he managed to stay on. When the stones had passed and I could glance up safely, there he was, hunched against the snow.
Panic fluttered inside me. “Jamie? Jamie! You okay?”
“Fuck and shit” I heard him say. Something like that. Cursing the gods of the mountain.
“Where did it hit you?”
“Face.”
“Is it bad? Can you belay me? I’ll come up.”
He moved. There was the hammering of metal on metal, and after a while, working like a slave, swearing and cursing like a slave, he began to pull in the rope. When I reached him, he had blood down one side of his face and an ugly broken bruise over his eye. “I think it glanced off the rim of my helmet.”
I examined the wound and looked in his eyes to see him looking back from far away. “How do you feel?”
“I’ll be all right.”
“You sure?”
“We’re not going down, if that’s what you mean. We’d better get on, get out of the line of fire.”
“There’s nothing coming down at the moment.”
“That’s what they all say — ”
“ — shortly before they get hit.”
He laughed wryly and closed his eyes for a moment.
“Hey, are you okay, Jamie?”
He took a deep breath. “Come on, Rob,” he whispered. “For fuck’s sake, let’s get a move on.”
So, after a moment’s hesitation, we went on up, rope length after rope length, two soldiers crawling across no-man’s-land under the eyes of snipers, our passage marked by spots of blood from Jamie’s injury and the claw marks of our crampon points. When finally we gained the foot of the cliffs at the top of the ice field, we felt that we had won a battle. But it was only a skirmish: the war would continue for a long while yet. I rummaged through my sack and found the first-aid kit that Ruth had put together. I cleaned Jamie’s cut as best I could and stuck a bandage across it, then got out the camera and took a picture or two. “You look like something just walked out of Stalingrad,” I told him. He grinned from beneath his helmet, like a soldier who has got away with it so far.
The traverse leftward along the top of the ice field toward the Flatiron seemed interminable. We chopped sideways like crabs, finding the best line around rock outcrops, occasionally descending, occasionally slipping, sometimes glancing down and seeing the great sweep of ice below us, and below that the abstract, inaccessible meadows — Elysian fields, warm in the distant sunlight. I glanced at my watch. The early start had eroded, and it was approaching midday by the time we reached the rocks at the foot of the Flatiron. I belayed while Jamie scratched and bridged his way up a shallow groove at the side of the buttress. It was an untidy blend of rock and ice, the kind of hard mixed climbing that you might find on Ben Nevis. At the top was slabby rock leading up to a steep wall and a sheltered ledge. We paused there, at the Death Bivouac, where the first climbers to attempt the Face, the Germans Mehringer and Sedlmayer, had sat and frozen to death. “Bloody graveyard,” Jamie muttered as he picked over the place. There were pegs in the rock, bits of rope, a crushed tin, bits of frozen orange peel — all the fragments that mark the passage and temporary residence of man, like a Stone Age midden that might delight archaeologists. A few steps down there was even the stain of excrement in the snow. Above us were the great barriers of cliff that shut off the upper part of the Face.
Now that the sun had hit the higher cliffs, more stones were coming down, funneled into the Spider above us and down the spout of the third ice field. Despite its ghoulish name, Death Bivouac was a sanctuary of a kind, protected by the cliff overhead. We sat and ate some chocolate and looked at the view, the plunging spaces down to the chalets of Alpiglen. The hotel at Kleine Scheidegg was in the sun now — everything was in the sun except the mile of rock and ice that we were climbing. The sound of the train could be heard, as well as the mournful gong of cowbells. Away to the right, six thousand feet below us, were the buildings of Grindelwald, scattered like grains of coarse salt on a green baize cloth. There was the temptation to wait, to waste the afternoon secure in this spurious safety. I pulled out the camera and took photographs. The wide-angle lens: Jamie at Death Bivouac, his forehead bandaged and a grimy streak of blood below his eye. That photo. He glanced at his watch. “Better get a move on.”
Reluctantly we moved off the Flatiron to the edge of the ice field. The ice was canted thirty degrees off the vertical, steeper than a roof, steeper than seemed reasonable. Below it was empty space. On the far side, a great cliff of gray rock rose up like the side of a cathedral, split by the deep diagonal gash of the Ramp, which is the key to the whole route.
I hesitated on the margin of the ice, looking back at Jamie. “Is it safe?” I called stupidly.
“Of course it’s not fucking safe,” he shouted back. “Where do you think we are: in a supermarket? You want me to lead? I’ll take over if you want.”
It was a challenge, far more than mere banter on a British crag, something underscored with the matters that stood between us. “No thanks.”
“Then get a fucking move on.”
I edged out into the line of stone-fall. My helmet felt as thin as an eggshell. I didn’t dare look up, in the same way that a child closes its eyes against fear: the object of your fear doesn’t vanish, but not seeing it makes you feel better. Ax and hammer swinging, I chopped across the ice, crabbing leftward, glancing across toward the refuge on the far side: the rock wall, the piton in place, the sham security of the fact that people had passed here before, some fifty of them since the first ascent in 1938. Chips of ice sprayed up into my face and skittered down the slope below. My feet skidded and scraped.
Finally I gained rock and the shelter of the cliff. Jamie followed me across. Things slithered down the ice beneath him and shot out into space — bits of ice, bits of the mountain — but he moved toward me w
ith disturbing speed, as though things like height and space didn’t matter, and indeed they don’t, being nothing more than the constructs of the mind and contributing nothing rational to the difficulty of climbing at all. He reached me and passed by, making a downward traverse to the foot of the Ramp. He was quick, confident, assured, as though this were a natural place to be, a place where he could move at will, as though gravity was a dimension that did not concern him, as though the matter of Ruth didn’t exist.
“Okay,” he called out. “There are pegs in place here. The whole fucking mountain is bristling with them. I should think it deflects compasses.”
Throughout that afternoon, we climbed up the Ramp. It was narrow and awkward, a place of shadows and security even at the hard pitches, a gash cut into the mountain in which you can hide. The climbing was intricate and compelling, and for the moment Ruth was a distant figure in both our minds, as small and insignificant as the tiny train that crawled up the line from Grindelwald to Kleine Scheidegg far below us. Imagine looking out of the window of an aircraft. That high.
The afternoon sun had come around the West Flank and spread its light and some fragile warmth around me as I led up the narrow funnel of ice at the top of the Ramp. “We’re okay,” I cried down. “We’ve cracked it. We’ve bloody well cracked the bugger.” Something like that; the blind expletives that come with exhaustion.
We climbed out to the right, where the architecture of the mountain deteriorates into ledges and steps, a shambles of broken fragments and rubble like the bombed ruins of a building. The Brittle Ledges. No poetry about that name, just plain fact, the mountain crumbling to pieces beneath our boots. There was a final steep, precarious pitch, which Jamie led with minimal protection, and then we edged around to the right, with three thousand feet of air beyond the edge and old rope to show us the way, and found our next bivouac site. It was a wide, safe ledge hung with ancient ropes and rusting pitons and bathed in the evening sunlight. We melted snow and laid out our sleeping bags while the sun set over the mountains in a gory mess of red and orange and grimy black. Jamie seemed distracted and clumsy.