The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Castor goes skiing for two weeks in December and January, when the weather is at its coldest, to Kleine Scheidegg, a windswept pass at the foot of the Jungfrau in the Bernese Oberland, 2,061 metres above sea level, with views of the terrible north face of the Eiger and the Mönch. She has skied before, I never have. It is –15°C, the pistes are frozen and iced over. We don’t even consider hiring a skiing instructor, she knows how to snowplough down a slope, braking hard, never allowing herself to be carried away; she is so careful that if by chance she finds herself on a sheer slope, she looks as though she is going up rather than down. The same cannot be said for me, I get carried away on the black ice, hurtling downhill at top speed; neither able nor knowing how to turn, stopping myself by crashing head first into a pine tree, splitting my forehead in the process and bleeding profusely. Back then, people used long wooden skis – mine were 2.2 metres. The following day, we hired an instructor and I began to learn in earnest.

  I can say that later I became an able, fearless skier, undaunted by sheer, even vertical slopes, capable of skiing anywhere. My fondest memories of that trip are of the nights and days – common in December and January – when it snowed without let-up and we were forced to stay indoors, in the modest rooms of the Kleine Scheidegg hotel. Lying side by side on the bed reading vast novels that seemed written for just such an occasion, such as Road to Calvary by Aleksei Tolstoy – the very talented offspring of an impoverished branch of the dynasty of the great Lev Nikolaievich – which I devoured with passion: it is an epic, thrilling account of the Russo-German war, the Bolshevik revolution, the pitiless struggle against the White Russians and their defeat. Or The Eyes of Reason, a sweeping, subtle tale by East German writer Stefan Heym about the influence on hearts and minds of the Communist putsch of 1948, the Prague Coup. Our long vacations were divided between utterly insane forced marches, systematically crisscrossing a country, a province or a city, and studious hours or days spent reading. Castor was an avid reader, and I spent many hours reading by her side, not only when it was snowing, but also in the blazing noon-day sun. I remember reading Moby Dick on the terrace of a hotel, on a rocky outcrop south of Paestum. On the day of our departure, I could not tear myself away from Melville’s description of the Indian Ocean’s ‘endless swathes of blue upon the yellow sea’. Faced with what I believed to be a perfect metaphor, nothing seemed to matter; I wanted to go on reading, and we had a terrible scene.

  Our first summer holidays were spectacular: in spite of the willingness on all our parts, adapting to this new life and its restrictive living arrangements had been difficult for me, and it was taking its toll on my body, which now struck back, inflicting on me a very painful bout of furunculosis – boils – the likes of which I had not suffered since the maquis in Cantal. The trip we had organized was complicated: first the Swiss mountains, so that I could recover my health and strength, then a brief stopover in Milan with Castor’s sister Hélène de Beauvoir, who was married to a cultural attaché, Lionel de Roulet, whose every word dripped with some secondary, slightly pompous significance. Our adventure was to continue via Trieste, Croatia, along the Dalmatian coast to Dubrovnik, then back up via Sarajevo across the great Serbian plain, Ljubljana and Slovenia, crossing into Italy at Tarvisio, then back to Switzerland, and all of it depending on the weather and the time available. I was the one driving the Simca Aronde and as we left Paris on Route Nationale 6, my posture behind the wheel was decidedly lopsided, because a red patch on my left shoulder blade that I had decided to ignore had just erupted into a three-headed carbuncle and I was in terrible pain. The monstrous abscess exploded at about eleven o’clock that night, just as we were coming into Tournus, where we stopped. With boiling water, cotton wool and compresses, the delightful Castor spent a greater part of the night mopping up the pus that welled up as soon as pressure was applied. The pain became bearable and then eased; when I could finally look up into her pure face of a woman in love, filled with despair and tender compassion, it reminded me of Giotto’s women in the Scrovegni Chapel frescoes in Padua.

  The following day, as we headed towards Switzerland, I felt no pain and assumed that I was cured. Being ill did not figure in my plans and certainly not in Castor’s: taking out the Swiss Army map that she could read like a high-ranking officer, she began to plot the following day’s route: a hike that would take eight hours – and that only if we were in peak condition – from one mountain pass to the next in the grand cirque overlooking Grindelwald, facing the daunting sweep of peaks rising to more than 4,000 metres, among them the Mönch, the Eiger and the Jungfrau. Our goal was an isolated refuge in a magnificent landscape; we were both excited and set off at a fast clip wearing espadrilles, with no protective creams or potions for our lips or faces, no cover for our exposed heads. My three-headed carbuncle was nothing but a bizarre memory and I was astonished at my body’s ability to heal itself, scorning my bad blood and the staphylococcus aureus still lying in wait: scorning it, that is, until a second boil erupted two-thirds of the way through our hike, on my knee, the worst possible place. The pain was excruciating, the boil swelled and expanded quickly and two heads appeared; we were miles from anywhere and had no medication, no first-aid kit. Nothing could be done, it was ‘march or die’. Sunburn exacerbated the fever from the carbuncle, I moved painfully, limping as I walked; Castor, who was also red as a beetroot, sunburnt and sweating, shuffled like a sleepwalker, her eyes glazed. Dusk took us by surprise, we lost our way and did not finally make it to the shelter until midnight where, miraculously, we found a group of well-equipped Swiss climbers who took pity on us, scolded us, gave us soothing creams, fed me analgesics and gave Castor some food. I didn’t eat, my temperature was almost 40°, and the vicious carbuncle, its maturation probably accelerated by our long hike, burst in a liberating geyser. When we reached Milan, a Lombard doctor prescribed a heavy dose of antibiotics as the only cure, but I suffered a relapse in Mostar, with a high fever, and I was treated in a hospital in Sarajevo. After that, the trip went smoothly. I was inured, cured, my initiation into the Sartre family was complete.

  It is night, we are driving along a narrow, pitted road through dense, dark forest taking a short cut Castor spotted on the map as we were driving north in Yugoslavia. I am at the wheel. In the beam from the headlights, hares bound suddenly across the road. There seem to be hundreds of them. In an effort to avoid them, I slow the car each time, swerving dangerously. I kill only three – something of a feat. I stop the car. We get out and go back to look for victims; the Aronde is spattered with blood. In the rare villages we come upon, we give them to the first people we encounter. I like hares, I respect them, they are noble animals. I learned by heart the children’s story by the Argentinian poet Silvina Ocampo, La liebre dorada [The Golden Hare], which I have used as an epigraph to this book. If there is any truth to metempsychosis and if I were given the choice, I would unhesitatingly choose to come back as a hare. In Shoah, there are two shots that are fleeting but crucial to me, though there is latency of a fraction of a second before we clearly see what the camera sees: a hare, its fur the colour of the earth, sitting by the barbed-wire fence at Birkenau extermination camp. Over this first image is a voiceover, it is Rudolf Vrba, one of the heroes of the film, an unrivalled hero since he managed to escape this accursed place filled with ashes. But the hare is cunning and, as Vrba speaks, we see the animal flatten his back, hunker down and crawl under the barbed wire. He too escapes. There is no killing in Auschwitz-Birkenau now, not even of animals; all forms of hunting are forbidden. No one keeps count of the hares, but there are a lot of them and I like to think that many of my people chose, as I would, to come back as hares.

  Since then, a passion for high mountains has run in my veins. Something for which, all my life, I have given thanks to Castor. The following summer we started out again in Switzerland, but instead of the Bernese Oberland, the Jungfrau and the Eiger, we headed for the mountains of the Valais, Zermatt, the Mont Cervin (Matterhorn), Mont Rose, peaks
with mythological names such as Pollux and Castor, white shrouded twins that rise to more than 4,000 metres. We stayed at the Hotel Mont Rose – or rather Monte Rosa since the soft snowy peaks of the enchanting and deadly massif are as much Italian as they are Swiss. The Hotel Monte Rosa, which was, unsurprisingly, pink, was a large, squat building in the centre of Zermatt, whose noble rooms had balconies dramatically overlooking the soaring, misshapen pyramid of the Matterhorn, a petrified blade of stone that looks as if it would eviscerate the heavens but deviates from its line, its upper third twisting, as in the final stage of seppuku, in an attempt to inflict a fatal wound. Stepping into the hotel behind Castor, I was entranced, amazed by the place’s codified opulence that resembled an English gentleman’s club: the intimate bars with sofas and benches upholstered in red, smoking-rooms, libraries. I quickly realized there was no reason to be amazed since it had been the fathers – the grandfathers and great-grandfathers – of the Battle of Britain pilots, those ‘long-haired boys’, who in the nineteenth century had invented mountaineering in the Alps and in the early twentieth century in the Himalayas.

  One name remains forever linked to the dark, heroic legend of the conquest of Everest, that of George Mallory. He and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine, were spotted for the last time at 12.50 p.m. on 8 June 1924, moving steadily towards the summit. No one knows whether they ever reached it. The frozen body of Mallory was discovered in 1999 at 8,290 metres on the north face of the highest mountain in the world. Mallory, the son of a clergyman, weary of constantly being asked, ‘Why do you want to climb Mt Everest?’, opted for the simplest, the truest, the greatest answer: ‘Because it’s there.’ Everest would not be conquered until twenty-nine years after his death. Curiously, the conqueror’s name was Hillary – not Richard, but Edmund. George Mallory’s youngest brother, Trafford-Leigh Mallory, fought with the RAF in both world wars, was a veteran pilot in the Battle of Britain in 1940, and in 1943, just before the Normandy landings, he was named commander-in-chief of the Allied Expeditionary Air Force. In August 1944, with Normandy liberated, he was appointed to what was to be the most strategic role, commander–in-chief of South East Asia Command (SEAC). Despite adverse weather conditions, he decided to set off without delay for the SEAC headquarters in Ceylon, taking his wife and the senior officers with him. They never reached Asia. Ironically, Trafford joined George in the eternal snows: caught up in a storm, his plane crashed into the Mont Blanc massif on the slopes of Mont Maudit. There were no survivors.

  I spent happy evenings browsing the third-floor library of the Hotel Monte Rosa, avidly reading English stiff-upper-lip tales of the conquest and attempted conquest of the highest peaks in the world, of the Himalayas, as I have mentioned, but also of the Alps, in particular the Matterhorn with even more brusque gratitude for their local guides – the Swiss Sherpas – who risked and often lost their lives for these lords of Albion, some of whom also suffered and died, fearless pioneers scaling vertiginous rockfaces that no man had dared attempt before. Even today, I can give the date when the Swiss north face of the Matterhorn was first conquered (14 July 1865) and the first ascent, three days later, by the Italian south face, as well as the names of those who took part – those who died and those who survived. But I also know the dates of the conquests in the Mont Blanc massif, the Bernese Oberland, the Himalayas and even the Andes, all the way to Monte Fitz Roy in Argentina; I know the names of the eponymous conquerors whose names now grace the most perilous routes, gorges and spurs, I also know the names of those who perished and the circumstances in which they disappeared.

  From the hotel in Kleine Scheidegg, where we had stayed the previous winter, it is possible, in summer and with a telescope, to watch climbers roped together struggling up the terrible, hostile, forbidding north face of the Eiger – the name means ‘Ogre’. Unlike the Matterhorn, which so fascinated the British, the north face of the Eiger mainly attracted German mountaineers who, after a succession of cruel tragedies, finally succeeded in conquering it in 1938, sixty-three years after the great Edward Whymper reached the summit of the twisted pyramid in Zermatt. For Whymper too there was tragedy, coming immediately after his victory, when five of those in his climbing party died on the descent; only he and two Swiss guides – Peter Taugwalder and his son, also Peter Taugwalder – survived. I read almost everything there was to read about the north face of the Eiger, either in the Hotel Monte Rosa or in the hotel in Kleine Scheidegg. About the Death Bivouac at the summit of the third ice field, the Hinterstoisser Traverse, the Traverse of the Gods, the White Spider, the Schwieriger Riss or Difficult Crack, the Stollenloch or Thief’s Hole – via which the rescue team tried in vain to reach Bavarian climber Toni Kurz.

  But what I did not know in the early 1950s as I sat next to Castor reading the story of the first successful ascent by two teams – Austrians Heinrich Harrer and Fritz Kasparek and Germans Anderl Heckmair and Ludwig Vörg – rivals at the beginning, knowing nothing about each other, but deciding to band together when they met up at the Death Bivouac, what I did not know was that in 1959 I would spend hours in Paris with Heinrich Harrer, talking to him, questioning him about the years he spent in Tibet as tutor to the Dalai Lama. The interview took place just as the Dalai Lama, together with a group of young monks aged about twelve and a number of elderly lamas, fled the Potala Palace in Lhasa under cover of a sandstorm as Chinese General Tan Kuan-San’s troops invaded Tibet. Hélène Lazareff, wife of Pierre, founder and editor of Elle, had asked me to write a feature on what she believed was a historic event. This was the first time I had written for Elle. I knew nothing about Tibet, Buddhism or the Dalai Lama, but I avidly read Seven Years in Tibet by the conqueror of the Eiger, which had been published five years earlier. There was no possible way I could go there, nor could I join the Dalai Lama’s cortège as it made its way across the Himalayas and through the jungles of Tibet, playing hide and seek with the Chinese airforce. It was easier to bring Heinrich Harrer to Paris and ask him my questions. I read other, older and rarer books, a number of monographs, I studied photographs and left the rest to my imagination. My long, in-depth article appeared in issue 696 of Elle on 27 April 1959. I was, and on rereading it forty-eight years later I still am, proud of this visionary article in which everything was at once totally invented and absolutely true. Thinking back on the years 1958–9, which were crucial in my life as you will see, I now realize that Shoah was prefigured in that meticulously documented yet not documentary article, so profoundly empathetic that the twenty-four-year-old Dalai Lama comes alive to every reader:

  Stock-still on his white pony, wearing the simple purple tunic of a monk, unadorned, seemingly impervious to events, the Dalai Lama, the fourteenth reincarnation of the living Buddha, for the last time looks over the holy city and on Potala, his palace. It is nothing, barely a breath, barely a shadow in his handsome godlike eye, but something, for an instant, has troubled the exceptional impassivity of the Buddha’s face… The shadow of a sigh of the Asian man-god at the mountain pass of Gompste La on the scale of western emotions rivals the blast of Roland’s Oliphaunt horn at Roncevaux or where Boabdil, the young Muslim king of Granada, fainted at the Moor’s last sigh where he wept ‘like a woman’ when the Catholic King Ferdinand hounded him from the city he loved so well.

  I had good reason to be proud. In 1997, the French philosopher Jean-François Revel and his son Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk and friend and interpreter to the Dalai Lama who gave up what would have been a brilliant career as a molecular biologist, jointly published a conversation entitled The Monk and the Philosopher. In their introduction, Revel wrote: ‘While for a long time, information about Tibet was hard to come by, it was not non-existent. As early as 1959, Claude Lanzmann, the future director of Shoah, one of the great masterpieces of cinema and of contemporary history, wrote in the pages of Elle, then the flagship of intelligent women’s magazines, an article entitled “The Secret Life of the Dalai Lama” in the very year in which the lama was forced into exile
in order to escape slavery and perhaps even death.’

  At forty-five, Simone de Beauvoir was rational; Castor, however, was madder than I was and it was she who won out. Refusing the gentle – or lazy – itineraries I suggested, she decided that we were sufficiently acclimatized to embark on a long trek, a hike from Zermatt to the Theodul Pass, the boundary between the Swiss and the Italian sides of the Matterhorn, taking the cable car down to Breuil-Cervinia in Italy, where we would spend the night, and return the following day via the same cable car, to the Theodul Pass. At that point, depending on how we felt, we could either take the Swiss cable car back or descend the Theodul glacier on foot, across the high ice fields and steep rutted meadows, plunging down into the valley and the paths – which to tired muscles seemed endless – leading to Zermatt, a distant, constantly disappearing mirage on the horizon. The weather promised to be ‘magnificent’ and so it proved. We set off at sunrise like true mountaineers, but wearing espadrilles once again and carrying no creams or ointments, nor anything to cover our heads. The first part of the ascent went well, I wept with love before Castor’s headstrong courage, her steady pace, the forbidding majesty of the Matterhorn, which constantly revealed new and beautiful facets as the sun, arcing around it, flared on the rockfaces and the crests, throwing others into shadow. It began to get hot, I decided to expose my back, my chest, my arms, my shoulders to the heavenly body’s life-giving rays. My legs were already bare, as I was wearing only a pair of lightweight shorts. I forgot to mention that neither Castor nor I were wearing what were popularly called ‘sunglasses’, I am not even sure that we knew such things existed. All our wisdom was contained in two aluminium flasks attached to my belt, which jangled softly like the bells on the cows we passed in the high mountain pastures. The ascent between Zermatt (1,600 metres) and the Theodul Pass (3,301 metres) is spectacular. We had planned to stop at the Gandegghütte (3,029 metres) for lunch. But the slope was sheer, tiredness crept up on us as it does in the mountains and our hopes of reaching the cabin, which we had glimpsed a dozen times, were constantly disappointed. We finally arrived, famished, red as peonies, bathed in sweat. What a haven – the window-boxes of geraniums on the terrace, that feast, the exquisite white wine – a humble Fendant Les Murettes, which I will remember to my last breath! I readily exhorted my love to drink with me and the droplets of sweat that pearled on her upper lip so moved me that I devoutly drank them down. We drank, we ate, the sun wheeled in the sky, we dusted ourselves down and prepared to set off again, oblivious to the fact we were embarking on the most difficult stretch, a long hike across the Theodul glacier more than 3,000 metres above sea level, while the sun faded and the temperature quickly dropped just as the glacier rose steeply, the air becoming rarefied, our espadrilles damp and slippery.