III
I travel to Switzerland in November, and make my way along the shores of Lake Geneva to the Jura mountains. The train passes through vineyards between Bière and Apples, in which vines have been pruned back to their stems, with just one shoot left on each plant for next spring. The train makes a request stop every few minutes; there appear to be no platforms: passengers step down onto the tracks and vanish over the fields, muffled up against the snow.
Where the slopes of Mont Tendre begin to climb from the valley, covered in diminishing ranks of conifers, stands one of the world’s newest libraries. The architects of the Jan Michalski Foundation envisaged the buildings as an extension of the forest, with concrete pillars leading up to a concrete canopy. The writers who spend time here are accommodated in ‘treehouses’ hanging from the canopy. These comfortable cabins – each designed by a different architect – are as unlike the haphazard treehouses of my childhood as the concrete columns are unlike trees. They call to mind Greenlandic homes, which perch on stilts above the permafrost.
My own cabin is coated in a steel shell, half a centimetre thick, and painted white. From its peak to its base, this metal is punched with an abstract pattern of dots and dashes. It is the only cabin facing the mountain; the four other writers staying here have a view of the Alps.
I break up my working days by exploring the forest. During the first week I begin to map the slopes in my head. The wide lanes which run around Mont Tendre for the loggers’ trucks are intersected by footpaths. These steep tracks are barely trodden; on mild days a coppery carpet of larch needles and beech leaves gleams through the snow. Stacks of logs or neat woodpiles help me to keep my bearings. Occasionally I come to a tarmac road and follow its zigzag course up or downhill for a while, taking care not to slip on black ice. The sun never reaches me when I am on these trails, and I only rarely glimpse the landscape beyond the trees. When I return to my cabin and look up towards the woods I have no sense of where I have walked.
At six o’clock each evening the lights in the library are switched off, the staff go home, the writers return to their cabins. Only one figure remains in the courtyard outside the library: a life-size man sculpted in metal. He kneels on the flagstones, looking out over the valley to the horizon where clouds reflect the lights of Lausanne. Le voleur de mots by Jaume Plensa is composed of letters, his body a mesh of capitals. They are arranged with deliberate randomness, so that they won’t spell any words in any language. Inside his skin, the thief of words is empty. During the night the sculpture is lit from below, projecting faint sans serif shadows onto the surrounding concrete.
The Foundation was built in memory of the man whose name it bears, a continuation of his life’s work in literature. As I walk the concrete paths, I think about the dedication to a loved one required to see this project to completion. It will not have been easy to plan: to erect the pillars, to cast the panels of the canopy, to engineer cables to suspend all the pods safely. Just as heavy buildings are designed to seem weightless here, so every burden is taken from a writer’s shoulders to enable them to work. My feet rarely need to touch the ground. I am using the time I have been given to finish an English translation of Greenlandic songs collected by the French anthropologist Paul-Émile Victor in the 1930s. The songs were performed at feasts, accompanied by drumming and dancing. Some were used in shamanic rituals to cast spells or cure illness. The spare, repetitive forms were never intended for the page. The singers often introduced the song by expressing a determination to tell the truth in the face of criticism, an attempt to find the right words: saying imaartiinngilanga nipaartiinngilanga or ‘I will not be silent, I will not be quiet.’
Victor was born in Geneva and grew up in the Jura. It is pure coincidence that my work on the texts he collected should bring me here. I am growing accustomed to a life parcelled into short residencies in other places. To arrive as others depart. I adapt quickly to new living arrangements and new companions – or a lack of them. I don’t mind making up a bed another writer has slept in. I travel with only my laptop and a notebook, a power adaptor, a few changes of clothes. I have learnt to operate on Arctic time, living mostly in the present. Being in a place for only a month or two to create and finish new work brings focus; as does becoming acquainted with a new landscape then leaving it behind.
At night, when the winds rush through the mountain dwelling they play an eerie tune on the cavities in the concrete, somewhere between a whistle and a bluster, and an underlying whine like a glass harmonium.
Five huge lamps shaped like clouds are suspended in the library atrium. Based on a design by Frank Gehry, they have been constructed from crumpled sheets of paper. However threatening the storms outside in a winter that is being described as Northern Europe’s darkest, the weather within the library is dormant. Paper clouds and secure sprinkler systems. It seems appropriate that the lampshades should be made from the same material as the books we read by their light.
I pick a couple of Hemingway’s novels off the shelf. I’ve heard that Papa created a style which is known as the Iceberg Effect, and I’m curious about how the metaphor manifests itself in literature. Hemingway claimed to have developed the theory in 1923, when he decided to delete the death at the end of the short story ‘Out of Season’. He saw books as a contribution to the ‘total knowledge’ passed on from one generation to the next, and yet that knowledge is sometimes best conveyed by an ellipsis. In Death in the Afternoon, he wrote: ‘If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.’
This style was influenced by Hemingway’s early experience as a journalist, which called for clear reporting without interpretation or flourishes. But his fiction is far from reportage, although he used his own experiences as an ambulance driver during World War I in the classic A Farewell to Arms, published by Scribner in 1929. Italy had entered the war on the side of the Allies in May 1915, with the aim of claiming ‘unredeemed lands’ on its border: the provinces of Trentino and the neighbouring South Tyrol, along with Trieste. The Italian Front stretched west from the Julian Alps to the Ortler Massif near the Swiss border, almost 250 miles. The landscape through which Hemingway’s characters march could be the Bernese Alps I see from my desk in the library: ‘I looked to the north at the two ranges of mountains, green and dark to the snowline and then white and lovely in the sun. Then, as the road mounted along the ridge, I saw a third range of mountains, higher snow mountains, that looked chalky white and furrowed, with strange planes, and then there were mountains far off beyond all these that you could hardly tell if you really saw them.’
Snow-line, ice-berg: Hemingway likes breaking up words.
The action of the ‘White War’ was barely covered by journalists, so inaccessible were the peaks from which Italian soldiers fought to dislodge their Austrian counterparts. In winter, the temperature sometimes fell to -40°C, and the daily snowfall reached at least 6 feet. Both sides employed new approaches in this high-altitude war, such as using cables to transport troops’ supplies to the mountain stations. The Austrian Corps of Engineers dug an entire ‘ice city’ – a complex of tunnels, camps and storerooms – out of a glacier in the Dolomites. Despite such ingenuity, snow sometimes cut off communication and led to poor supplies. Snowblindness was a danger, as were avalanches – known as the ‘White Death’, and with good reason. During December 1916, heavy snowfall followed by a sudden thaw weakened the snowpacks. On St Lucia’s Day an avalanche fell onto Austrian barrack buildings on the Gran Poz summit of Mount Marmolada, and many combatants were buried. Thousands of troops were lost that month in avalanches, some of which may have been deliberately triggered by enemy artillery fire.
After four years of war Italy was victorious at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, and in 191
9 the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye awarded the contested lands to them. Almost a century on, as glaciers retreat, reminders of the conflict are revealed. In September 2013 two young Austrian men who had been shot on the Presena glacier were found. Their comrades had buried them head-to-toe in a crevasse. A photoraph from the Office for Archaeological Finds shows the two bodies before they were lifted from the ice. The precision with which the ice has been chiselled away contrasts with the disordered bodies merged now in a single mass, the identity of skeletal arms and legs confused by twists of cloth. After the discovery of the unknown soldiers, five hundred people attended a service of memorial in Peio at which their aluminium caskets were placed in unmarked graves. The men’s bodies remind me of the spindly sculptures of Alberto Giacometti, who was born just over the border in Switzerland in 1901; he would have been the same age as these soldiers when he left home to attend the School of Fine Arts in Geneva. In sculptures such as L’Homme qui marche I (1961), which is engraved on the Swiss 100 franc banknote, Giacometti reduced his models to their sparest elements. So thin are the limbs that in places the armature can’t be distinguished from the material it supports, yet the feet are often distorted, heavily pinioned both to the ground and to each other. These figures do not feel slight, the material is rough and richly textured. Giacometti claimed he was trying to represent not human beings, but the shadows they cast.
You could hardly tell if you really saw them. Sometimes light cloud or a heat haze is sufficient to obscure the mountains, but today when I look across the valley from the library they are tinted pink by the setting sun. This weekend the snow will be gleaming on the slopes at Les Diablerets, although it has been a bad year for the ski industry in Switzerland, with predictions from the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research that snow cover will disappear from the Alps by 2100. Without a snow coating, glacier ice is directly exposed to the sun – and melts quickly.
Last summer the New York Times reported an unusual find above Les Diablerets. A ski-lift technician checking the slopes saw a clump of black rocks exposed by the glacier and went to investigate. He soon found they were not rocks. Forensic police specialists were called in, and DNA tests revealed the bodies of Marcelin and Francine Dumoulin, who had left home to feed their cattle on 15 August 1942 and been lost ever since. After their disappearance, rescue teams searched the crevasses for more than two months but found nothing. Their seven children were split up across a number of families, and over the years lost contact with each other.
Images of such sensational finds are swift to appear in the newspapers and on social media. The Tsanfleuron glacier which held the Dumoulins had moved slowly, so the mummified bodies were relatively intact. The photographer has chosen an angle that makes the mangled remains look as dignified as possible. The shoot might almost be promoting the new season of an avant-garde fashion house. Fine auburn hair is sheltered by a hood; the face is in profile, just a gaunt cheekbone visible; indistinct bundles of black cloth are pinioned in dirty ice onto which a fresh layer of snowfall is seeping. Especially poignant are the hobnailed boots, carefully laced up – Marcelin Dumoulin was a shoemaker. The limbs are set at unlikely angles. The photographer has foregrounded the items the couple had with them: a book, wrapped in cloth; a green glass bottle – no longer containing water, wine or milk – and a pocket watch. The Dumoulins are presented in the midst of their lives, with everyday possessions on them, rather than grave goods selected for the afterlife. It is ironic that bodies snatched by the glacier are often better preserved than those prepared by humanity for eternity.
The discovery was a blessing to Marceline, the Dumoulins’ daughter, now seventy-nine years old. She was only a toddler when her parents went missing, but she had climbed the glacier three times in later life, always looking for them. She told a reporter from Le Matin that it was very important to her to be able to bury her mother and father. She would not wear black: ‘I think that white would be more appropriate. It represents hope, which I never lost.’
In 1917 the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti wrote of funerals, following his experience in the White War, ‘Snow is truly a sign of mourning; I don’t know why the westerners wear black . . . Black makes me feel mystery, fear, the absolute, infinity, God, universal life; but white gives me the sense of things ending, the iciness of death.’
The glorious weather soon fades. By midweek, the grey wisps of cloud that have been drifting around the Foundation have transformed into a chill fog. As the cloud thickens I realize how isolated one can be in the hills. I stand on my balcony looking towards Mont Tendre, but even the closest trees can’t be seen. A faint smell of woodsmoke comes from the village down in the valley. Without a view, the top-of-the-world feeling soon fades. However, the disappearance of the surroundings brings me a strange calm. Instead of admiring the mountains, I turn my attention to work. Once the snowstorm blows in, I don’t go further than the courtyard where the thief of words casts his distorted shadows on the fog.
I’m not the only one keeping close. For two days the blue tit doesn’t come to the seedball I’ve hung up on my balcony. On the third morning it flickers back.
After the storm the paths in the forest are silent and free of footsteps. Snow bends the branches of the fir trees, and even the young beech twigs support at least an inch. I walk much further than I intend to, and it is a while before I realize that snow has completely obscured the paths. What I had thought was a route between trees is just a glade that leads me into a tangle of saplings so I retrace my steps, and begin again. Eventually I sense the track ascending and around a corner the slope falls away so steeply that I am almost level with the summit of the pines. I no longer know where I am. I am amused to think that after all my travels I should get lost in – Switzerland. A flurry of snow falls from a branch, and startles me. I realize that wherever one is lost, it’s not a good position to be in. Am I even on the same side of the mountain as before? I know once I reach the valley I’ll be able to find my way to the Foundation, or at least shelter, so I turn back and keep selecting descending trails. Far off I can hear a power saw whining – perhaps someone is surreptitiously collecting their Christmas tree. The sky begins to lighten and I sense I have reached the fringes of the forest. I clamber over a fallen tree trunk. The path ahead of me is little used and uncharacteristically dark where meltwater seeps across it. From the angle of the sun I try in vain to work out where in the valley I might be. A few more steps bring me to the edge of the trees, and I emerge right beside the Foundation’s pale concrete pillars.
It could be a game of Cluedo. There’s a victim but the crime has yet to be solved. The initial police report declares: ‘judging by the equipment, this was an Alpine accident going back many years’. On 20 September 1991, the day after the body is found, a criminal investigation is set in motion. The charge is against U.T. (unbekannte Täter, persons unknown), and the case is assigned to the judge responsible for all cases in which the names of those concerned begin with the letter ‘U’, Dr Günter Böhler.
A number of people were alone with the corpse before the police arrived to guard it. First, of course, someone had to discover it: this role was played by the hikers Erika and Helmut Simon. A leathery skull and skeletal shoulders emerged from a glacier in a gulley on the east ridge of the Fineilspitze. The holidaymakers used the last frame in their camera to take a photo in case the body couldn’t be found again and descended to the Similaunhütte, a nearby mountain refuge, to report it. Within hours, word spread and others climbed up to see the corpse for themselves: the chef from the refuge; the famous mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who just happened to be walking in the hills that day; Markus Pirpamer, the young man who ran the refuge, and even his father Alois, who had run it before him, now a hotelier down in the valley. A helicopter brought archaeologist Dr Konrad Spindler and forensic expert Dr Rainer Henn. Later, there was the press. The isolated slopes were unusually well-trodden.
The lower half of the body was embedded in the ice, but the glacier
melted rapidly. In the 24 hours after the body’s discovery, a further 10 centimetres was revealed. During the short hours of daylight there were several unsuccessful attempts to reclaim the corpse, which now lay in meltwater. A pneumatic chisel of the kind used by the mountain rescue service to free people from the ice was worked around the pelvis, but the tool slipped and entered the flesh, damaging it further. The ice seemed to want to reclaim the corpse and froze around it again. Although the mountaineering season was over, Pirpamer kept the Similaunhütte open as Police HQ. After four days of work in harsh blizzards, the corpse was free. It was placed in a transparent body bag within an orange recovery bag, suspended from a helicopter and flown down the mountain to the resort of Vent. There it was transferred to a wooden coffin and driven by hearse to the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Innsbruck University.
I read Konrad Spindler’s account of the days following the discovery, in which the learned professor of pre- and protohistory examined the corpse. The objects found with the body suggested it was not contemporary: a fur quiver and feathered arrows; a sloe berry; a white marble bead. There was a grand axe with copper head and yew handle; a birch-bark pannier containing charcoal wrapped in maple leaves (still green), used to carry a light carefully from one fireplace to the next. A couple of ibex bones indicative of a last meal.
What if a storm in the Sahara had not scattered dark yellow dust across Europe, covering the white snowfields and causing them to absorb the sun’s warmth? What if the fine weather that warmed the glacier had not also decided Erika and Helmut Simon to change their plans and spend a second day in the mountains? What if they had not detoured from the recommended route that September morning? The body would never have been found. It would have decayed swiftly in the sunshine, while fragments of birch bark and cinders blew away on the wind.
The Library of Ice Page 22