by Simon Mawer
I remember apologizing, as though the situation were my fault, as though I had willed the avalanche, as though it was a weakness of mine that my leg had snapped. “I’m sorry, Jamie,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
He ignored me, pulling bits of rock away from the cliff, trying to drive some pegs halfway home. Eventually he tied on and then began rifling through my rucksack to get my down jacket out. “You’ve got to keep warm and keep awake. Put your duvet on and see if you can sit down.”
I struggled into the jacket. I was like a child in an adult’s hands. Even sitting required his help, as though I hadn’t learned the trick properly. I screamed like a petulant child as he lowered me down. It was cold. My left leg was laid awkwardly across the uneven ledge. My right hung over the edge. Like a kid sitting on a windowsill, one leg cocked up to the side, the other dangling in space. I shifted myself to get more comfortable. Pain shot up through my groin, like a fire, like a sword buried deep in the marrow and turned with exquisite skill. “What’ll we do, Jamie?” I asked, when the pain had subsided a bit. “What’ll we do?” I felt like a child asking an adult for words of wisdom.
He looked down at me. I couldn’t read his expression. I think there was fear there; there was some kind of misery and some kind of pain, but the overriding expression was one of fear. He crouched down beside me. “We’ve got a choice, Rob. We could try and get you down, but that would mean four thousand feet of abseiling. I don’t know if you could manage that…”
“Or what?”
“Or you bivvy here, and I climb out and get help.”
“Leave me?” There was a treacherous bubble of panic in my chest, a tremor of fear. “Leave me alone?”
He licked his lips, like someone trying to formulate his words exactly. His lips were cracked and broken, and he seemed to have difficulty getting them to move properly. “I don’t see much alternative, Rob.”
“You’d have to climb solo. It’d be safer to descend, wouldn’t it? Abseil. Christ, Jamie, quicker, far quicker.”
“I could protect myself a bit going up. A dozen more pitches to the top…”
“Or we could both stay here.” There was pleading in my tone, the nagging of a child. “Sit it out until there’s a break in the weather. There’s Ruth. She’ll get help. They know we’re up here. We could sit it out.” Ruth was suddenly no longer the object of our conflict; she had become our savior.
“We could be here for days,” he said quietly. “We’d die. We’d die like the others, like Longhi and Sedlmayer and all of that lot. Like Toni Kurz on the end of his rope.”
“You can’t leave me, Jamie.”
But he was already going through the gear, portioning it out like a thief going through the loot after the getaway. “It’s our only hope, Rob. Our only hope. I’ll leave you all the food. And the spare gas cylinder. I’ll get help to you as quick as I can. The sooner I get on with it the better. I’ll leave the rope in place. It may help them see where you are —”
I begged. I can still hear the whine in my voice, the imprecation. Some fragment of personality that was still left loathed the sound and the person who had uttered it. “Jamie, please. For God’s sake, don’t leave me. Jamie, I beg you.”
He paused in his work. The wind howled around the edges of rock. A flurry of snow swirled into our faces. “I’m not leaving you,” he said. “I’m going to get help.”
He tried to arrange me as best he could. He slackened off the laces of my boot to allow the blood to circulate and tried to immobilize the leg, strapping my ice ax against it with nylon tape. He did that. Then he pulled the bivouac sack up around me and attempted to fit my injured leg into it. It was awkward moving around on the tiny ledge, but he tried something. “You must keep warm,” he kept saying. “You must try and keep awake and try and keep warm. Massage yourself. Hug yourself. Try and get a brew going, can you do that? Keep your liquids up, keep your fingers warm. Keep awake.”
A few minutes later I was watching him going back up the rope above me, jerking up on prusik loops, his crampons grating against the rock like bone on bone. He reached the horizon of rock and turned and looked down for a moment. “See you, youth!” he shouted. “Just hang on there.” And then he had disappeared above the lip of rock. Bits skittered down for a while — stones, chips of ice — and then they too ceased. I was alone.
The question is, what should he have done? That’s what was argued over in the press, mulled over in the bars and pubs, analyzed in climbing huts and bothies, discussed in the journals. What should Jim Matthewson, son of the good and the great and the legendary, have done? And, what if…? Always, what if? Because you don’t just judge by outcome, do you? You judge by a whole plethora of other, less clearly defined things. Under the circumstances that held at the time, what was the right thing to do? Climb up to the summit and descend the West Flank; or rappel down the whole Face below us; or just stay with me and wait.
Look, I survived. I wouldn’t be telling the story if I hadn’t. But Jamie didn’t know that at the time and neither did I, sitting in agony on my miserable little ledge of rock with pain grinding in my leg and the clouds swirling around me and the cliffs plunging down below me in precipices difficult to imagine for the non-climber. The solitude. Difficult to imagine that too. The sense of isolation, desolation. It is the closest thing to death without actually dying. That’s what I believe, anyway.
The cloud around me darkened. The wind had dropped and it was no longer snowing, but the cloud was still there, blanketing off the world. I struggled to stay alive. Trivial things matter: whether your fingers are cold, whether your boots are too tight to allow the blood to circulate. Better that you take them off so that you can massage the toes, but I couldn’t reach my foot as it was, and Jamie had left the boots on for insulation. I fiddled with the stove and managed to get it alight at the cost of taking off my gloves. My fingers stuck to the metal. You gain one thing, and you lose another. There was some snow that I could melt, but it disappeared into almost nothing and I couldn’t reach any more. I added some of my precious water, like a miser measuring out scruples, and then some soup powder, and made myself something lukewarm to drink. I fumbled some chocolate into my mouth. I lived with my fears. Pain was a constant percussion beneath the discord of my misery. When I looked at my watch, the hands seemed to have stopped. Tissot. Twenty-one jewels. Swiss-made. Time was no longer plastic: it was ice-cold rock, immovable and immutable. I wondered where Jamie was, whether he had climbed out or whether he had been forced to bivouac, or whether, silenced by the wind and hidden by the cloud, he had fallen the five thousand feet of the whole wall and lay crumpled and broken on the scree slopes at the bottom of the Face. The stone of time eroded, crystal by crystal. Time and death are the great parameters of the Eigerwand.
In the late evening the cloud grew luminous with a pearly sunlight. There were rents in the vapor, and for precious minutes I could see down to the ground. It was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope: a glimpse of green fields and dark trees far, far away; the snake path of the railway; a cluster of buildings throwing long shadows. For those few minutes, I felt an absurd optimism, as though merely seeing the ground might somehow get me off this place. But optimism faded when the sun died. In the darkness I flashed my light in the direction of the buildings, the six long flashes of the distress signal, but I doubted that anyone would notice such a feeble point of light up there among the cloud that swathed the Face. Hopelessness was as tangible as the cold. I pulled my balaclava over my nose and mouth and tucked my hands into my armpits and hunched against the rock as though it might give me some protection, but the mountain seemed to draw the heat out of me as though it were hungry for the stuff, so that I had the feeling of sitting on a great void, a heat sink into which all the warmth in the world was being sucked.
Throughout that night I wandered along borderlines between waking and sleeping, between sleep and unconsciousness — which is sleep’s deadly sister — between life and death
. I dreamed. Where dreams ended and hallucinations began was not clear. I struggled through a fantastic landscape of pinnacle and precipice. Sometimes I was with Jamie, and sometimes, somewhere around about two in the morning, I was with Caroline. She was younger than I knew her, as young as Ruth. Maybe she was Ruth. And then she was Eve, naked beside me. And then she was Jamie, and Eve, and Ruth, and we were walking (gravity was suspended) up the easy pathways of the Eiger, laughing and tripping and falling, and picking ourselves up unhurt.
“You silly fucker,” Jamie said, and there was affection in his tone.
I emerged from my dreams to shadowy precipices and the whisper of cloud around my ledge and the sensation that, if only I could concentrate, I might recapture that vanished dream-happiness. I dozed fitfully, and by morning I couldn’t feel my left foot, nor the toes of my right.
The cloud around me was thinner, torn apart by the breeze, cut open by knives of sunlight that flashed across in front of me but never touched me with their fire. I shivered and hunched and no longer thought much about anything, neither death nor survival, neither hope nor despair. Why was I there, dying on a sloping ledge among a scattering of scree and icy rock the color of slate? Why was I still conscious? I didn’t have the answer to any of these questions. Life was a faint warmth in the middle of a pile of dying embers. I dozed and shivered and dreamed, and some abstract part of me knew that my life was ebbing away.
I heard the helicopter sometime during that morning. It was a metallic muttering out on the edge of awareness, the sound coming and going with the wind. I had to strain to hear it at first, had to persuade myself what is was, and then what it might be doing. I only cared with half my mind. The other half stumbled along behind, thinking of my discomforts, my pain, the need for sleep, the need for comfort. The sound came and went, ringing in my ears like tinnitus, sometimes there and sometimes only a kind of illusion. Then I saw down through a gash in the cloud, and there it was far below me, chuttering and jerking, dodging toward the Face. I waited and wondered.
And then, quite suddenly, without my knowing where it had come from, the helicopter was there, just near me. The concussion of the machine’s rotors flogged the air all around me. The fuselage was there, bloodred and sterile white, standing away from the Face and glaring at me with a bulbous Perspex eye. I looked back into its gaze. The machine bucked and pitched in the swirling air. Inside the plastic bowl there was a figure, like a tadpole embryo trapped inside the glutinous jelly of its egg. The figure waved and I waved back, like a child. From the open door, a helmeted crew member with a vast metallic mouth shouted at me above the racket of the engine: “INJURED?”
Hope came slowly, like a kind of warmth, and with it the return of fear.
“YOU — INJURED?” the voice asked again.
I shouted words against the noise and pointed to my leg. “Broken!” I yelled. I suddenly had strength, the strength of fear and panic. “Broken! I can’t fucking stand on it!” But of course my words were feeble, paltry things that couldn’t cross the gulf between us, couldn’t beat against the hammering of that engine and the thrashing of the rotors.
The figure at the open doorway grinned and waved back and gave a thumbs-up sign and then made a swirling movement with his hand. Abruptly the helicopter lurched away and chuttered off into the distance. “No!” I shouted after it. “No, don’t leave me! For Christ’s sake, don’t leave me!”
But the machine had gone. Alone on my ledge and afraid once more, I wept.
Wind spilled over the West Ridge into the hollow of the Face. Clouds materialized and vanished. I willed them to disperse. I harbored the illusion that the immediate future of the weather was under my control if only I could learn the trick. If I could only work out how, the whole world was mine to redesign as I wished. I looked at my watch and noted the time and decided that I could speed things up or slow things down at will. I’d tried to gather my things together. I was going home. I wasn’t sure how or when, but as long as I could keep the weather good, I knew I was going home. Pain crept out of the shadows and showed itself in the bright light of consciousness, but I could stifle that. If I could command the clouds, surely I could control pain.
The helicopter came back two hours later. This time it rose up toward me and went up above and rattled overhead, two hundred feet directly overhead, the spinning disk of its rotors reaching out as though to touch the rock. Bits spun down around me — fragments of ice, swirls of snow, bits of rock. I saw the white cross of Switzerland and a figure hanging from the machine like a corpse from a gibbet. The rotors flogged the carpet of the air around me, and the figure grew larger and larger until it was a hanging man mere yards away. He held a ski pole toward me, fishing.
“English?” he shouted above the engine racket.
“Yes.”
“You have anchor?”
“Yes.”
“Take the pole. Pull me in. Okay? You hold me while I release. Okay? You got that? You hold me, okay? Then I clip on.”
It took a moment. He was talking all the time, not to me but into the microphone of his walkie-talkie, a rapid German counterpoint to our crude, shouted English. He swung in, and I grabbed the pole and pulled him onto my ledge. For a moment he floundered across me while I clung onto him. I would never let him go. I would hold him to me and love him dearly until the end of time. He grabbed at one of my slings, released the helicopter cable, and then clipped himself on. “Gott sei Dank,” he muttered in relief.
The helicopter moved away, hammering above our heads and dropping down to our level. It circled around in front of us, turning in that strange dragonfly manner, nose dipped and wings blurring.
“You may let me go now,” the man said.
I held him tight.
“You may let me go!”
I released him reluctantly, as though I might lose him even now. He clambered to his feet, pulling on one of the slings as though he trusted it not to come out. “Siegfried,” he said, holding out his hand to me. He looked ridiculously young — a blond even younger than me. “You call me Sigi.”
We shook hands solemnly, as though at a business meeting. “I’m Robert. Thanks for coming.”
Sigi frowned. “You are hurt, Robert?”
“My leg. I think it’s broken.”
“Pain?”
“Less than yesterday. I can’t feel my foot.”
He examined the offending leg for a while, his fingers pressing through my gaiters so that I screamed in agony. “Only your leg?” He straightened up and stared into my eyes as though hoping to find the truth there.
“Only my leg.”
“So.” He rummaged in his rucksack and pulled out a plastic ampoule. “I give you a shot for the pain,” he said. He tugged at my britches and exposed some pale flesh. “It will stop your hurt.” For a moment I thought he said heart. I thought it would stop my heart, snatch life from me at the very moment when I had regained hope. I felt a moment’s ridiculous panic as the needle went in, but Sigi was unconcerned. Apparently he was used to killing people, used to speaking calmly with them as they died. He was checking the pitons that held us to the rock, glancing around at the plunging precipices, at the walls and cliffs above us, at the space below.
“You are alone?” he asked. It seemed a stupid question, as though there might be others just hiding somewhere around the corner.
“Sure I’m alone.”
“Where is your friend?”
My mind stalled. “My friend?”
“Where is he? Did he fall?”
“Jamie? No. He climbed out on his own. Didn’t he call you out?”
“He left you?” He looked puzzled. “He went solo?”
“Wasn’t it he who called you out? Hasn’t he got down?”
“It was your girl,” he explained. “Your girl said you had an accident. It was your girl you must thank.”
So where the hell was Jamie? Whereabouts was he on this fucking mountain? I shouted at my rescuer as though shouting would make
him understand the importance of the question: “Where in Christ’s name is he?”
Sigi shrugged. “We will see.” There was, it seemed, nothing more to be said. A quick search in his rucksack brought out a thermos. He poured warm tea and fed me pieces of chocolate. “We keep your blood sugar up a bit, no?”
I ate the chocolate greedily, thinking of Jamie, thinking of Ruth, of survival and death, of jealousy and envy. Whatever it was that he had injected into me was having its effect. My heart still beat, but pain was retreating fast, like a landscape being left behind by a speeding car. Where the hell was Jamie?
“The chopper comes back in one hour,” Sigi said. He used the word chopper. Maybe he had seen too many films. “When it comes you go first. Gut?”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Sounds fine to me.” But where was Jamie? This might be salvation, but it was salvation only for me. Where in God’s name was Jamie?
“But first we do something for your leg perhaps.” He crouched awkwardly and unstrapped the ice ax from my leg and pulled splints from his rucksack. “How did you fall?”
“Avalanched. We were climbing out through lousy weather, and I was hit by an avalanche.”
“Too bad.”
“You can say that again.”
He glanced up. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“I say that again?”
I managed a laugh. “An expression. Just an English expression. It means that I agree.”
He nodded and smiled. When he had finished splinting my leg, he began arranging things, helping me strap into a harness, tying my rucksack on, bundling things away, tidying up the ledge, speaking occasionally into the radio. I had no idea what had happened to my leg. If there was pain, it was something that affected someone else.
“Now we get ready,” he said.
“Ready?”
“For the chopper.” He grinned. “I do not know if we succeed with this. We try for the first time.”