Summit: A Novel

by Harry Farthing

  Even as he said the word “family,” Josef’s eyes flicked at Pfeiffer who instantly cut back into the conversation.

  “On the subject of flags, I have had these prepared. I think they will work well.”

  Opening the package set on the table, Pfeiffer took out two new, small flags. He carefully unfolded them, smoothing each one out. The first was a red triangle, a swastika within its white central circle, the second, a black square with the two white sig runes of the SS. From one side of each flag hung two white strings of cloth tape, which Pfeiffer pointed out to the reichsführer.

  “I have had the two flags sewn and sized so they can be tied one above the other on Obergefreiter Becker’s ice axe when he places it on the summit. As already mentioned, I have ensured that he is fully trained in the use of the Leica thirty-five-millimeter camera so that he can properly record this glorious moment for us to present to the world. What a photograph that will be.”

  “Yes,” Himmler responded as if slowly tasting every word of Pfeiffer’s explanation. He fixed his stare once again on Josef. “If we meet again, you will be the man who first climbed Mount Everest, a German hero. No longer the traitor and criminal you are today. That’s quite a thought, wouldn’t you say?”

  Josef said nothing in reply as Himmler reached back inside his jacket to retrieve his fountain pen. Taking the operation file, he wrote something across the back of a piece of paper. Folding it, he passed it to Pfeiffer.

  The younger SS officer read the note while Himmler got up from the table and left, saying nothing more. Pfeiffer carefully put the piece of paper into a pocket, refolded the two flags, and, with a forced smile, said, “Good. Becker, do you have any questions?”

  “Yes, only one.”

  “Tell me.”

  “What is ‘Sisyphus’?”

  “Not what, Becker, but who. Sisyphus is a character from Greek mythology. You would do well to read about him before you set off. You will soon understand why it is such an appropriate code name for this operation.”

  35

  The Khumbu Hotel, Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal

  June 8, 2009

  10:30 a.m.

  Quinn stepped up into the passenger seat of the decrepit old Land Rover, sharp pains stabbing his spine. Wincing within the tight bandage that bound his midriff like a corset, he sat forward on the edge of the ripped grey seat, hands pulling on the vehicle’s old metal dash to avoid any contact between his beaten back and its disintegrating foam and protruding metal frame.

  Babu Sonam, the president of the Nepal Sherpa Climbers organization, got into the driver’s side and tried to start the old four-by-four. It was reluctant, needing five attempts before it finally wheezed into life with a triumphant fart of sooty black smoke to further pollute Kathmandu’s air. Gunning the engine before it could change its mind, Sonam immediately thrust the vehicle out into the road saying as he did so, “Dawa is at the Sagarmatha Zonal Hospital, not the Bir that treated you.”

  The old Sherpa spoke in a clear, fluent English that surprised Quinn.

  “He is still in a coma. He was very severely beaten. If he had not been found so soon, he would have died where they left him.” Sonam concentrated for a moment on grinding the reluctant Land Rover into another gear before he could continue. “The surgeons had to remove his spleen to save him. One of his lungs was punctured, a kidney ruptured, many ribs and both a knee and an ankle badly broken. I think what was done to him is called ‘kneecapping’ where you come from. Well, that is what my cousin says. He was a Gurkha in your British Army for many years. When Dawa comes out of the coma, his recovery will take a very long time. Maybe one day he will walk again, but he will never return to Everest. His climbing days are over.”

  Quinn slowly processed the information as the Land Rover bullied its way through the dense Kathmandu traffic. “Who’s paying the medical bills? They must be huge,” he asked.

  “Part of it will come under the public health care system, and our organization will try to cover the rest. We can’t do it really; we don’t have the money, but we will seek donations from the many foreign climbers that Dawa has worked with over the years. I know they will be generous. Dawa Sherpa has the respect of many people.” With a look of obvious concern, he added, “It is his future after the hospital that will be more difficult. He has a wife and three children. He will also have to help his brother Pemba’s wife and young son. How can he do this if he is unable to work the high mountains? It’s all he has ever done.”

  Quinn looked out through the scratched, yellowed side window of the noisy vehicle. Against the news of Dawa’s wounds, the stacked bare-brick buildings, the spiders’ webs of exposed cabling, the speeding cars and motorcycles, the jay-walkers all struck him as even more dangerous and precarious than normal. For the first time, he truly felt the fragility and violence of trying to survive in that ramshackle city, day in, day out. He thought back to the attack that he had suffered, shuddering a little at what he had done with the ice screw to defend himself. “Have you heard anything about the two who attacked us? I assume that they—”

  “No. No. No. Nothing at all,” Sonam answered briskly, before Quinn could even finish his sentence. Swallowing twice, the old Sherpa stopped talking, suddenly becoming very intent on the road ahead.

  They traveled on in silence, Quinn’s back and ribs howling in protest at every pothole and lurching traffic-light stop until they reached the chaotic forecourt of the hospital. Leaving the Land Rover double-parked without hesitation, Sonam showed Quinn inside to the hospital’s waiting room. It was crowded, sweaty, hot. Rows of grubby orange plastic seats were filled with bloodied men looking dazed, pregnant women contracting and shrieking, and small children holding their stomachs and whimpering. While Sonam signed them in, Quinn absorbed the collective misery around him, awaiting anesthetic and debridement; it reeked of pain and infection. His beaten back throbbed in sympathy with them all.

  A nurse finally appeared to lead them deep into the hospital’s sweltering, shadowy warren. At the door to Dawa’s room, Quinn met the Sherpa’s tiny wife. He towered over her. Through tearstained, bloodshot eyes rimmed in smudged kohl, she looked pleadingly up at him, bringing her hands together with a meek, “Namaste.”

  Quinn repeated the gesture in return, adding, “I am so sorry,” unaware if she even spoke English. When she opened the door for him to come into the room, the sight within spiked tears into his eyes. It was not at all what he expected. He had prepared himself for the “coma” of Hollywood movies, anticipating a perfect person lying gently asleep, hands neatly arranged over crisp white sheets, a discreet bank of life-support machines bleeping confirmation of a regular stability.

  Dawa’s coma was nothing like that. It was tormented, tortured. He appeared trapped beneath a thin ice of consciousness, desperately trying to break up through to stop himself from drowning in a hideous, accelerating nightmare. His broken body twisted and writhed amidst a network of plastic tubes through which raced small trains of amber fluids and feathery clots of blood. Snippets of words, pleading sounds emerged from a clear plastic oxygen mask, the viciously swollen face behind it almost unrecognizable. Occasionally his whole body would violently jerk up from the bed. Although unconscious, he screamed from the pain.

  The sight shattered Quinn. He wanted to run from it, to instantly get out of the room.

  Unable to control himself, he pushed backward only to find his way to the door blocked by Sonam.

  “I know it is difficult to see, Mr. Quinn, but you must stay and talk to him. The doctors say that he might respond to familiar voices. It could, at least, help to calm him. He has been with you a lot over the past months on the mountain, in fact, with you many times on the mountains. Please try, Mr. Quinn, please try.”

  Ashamed of his flight instinct, Quinn steeled himself, pulled up a chair and sat. Dawa’s wife moved in behind him. He heard a faint humming noise begin,
her chant of “Om mani padme hum,” while he struggled to find anything to say. His tongue suddenly tied, his few clumsily chosen words sounded trivial and inappropriate to the scene in front of him. Only by closing his eyes and telling himself to “Concentrate. Concentrate. Concentrate,” could he start properly.

  Gradually, Quinn got into his stride as he talked about the climbs the two of them had been on together, about the moments they had shared, the people they both knew, the summits they had stood on. He continued to talk about England. About the places he had lived. About the pubs he had frequented. About the women who had given up on him ever loving them more than he loved the mountains.

  He even talked about the motorcycle he owned. The Sherpas always loved to hear about that. Even though it was nearly thirty years old and had over forty thousand miles on it, to them it was fascinating: 150cc was a super-bike to them, 1000cc unimaginable. He described the old BMW to Dawa once more. He told him about the trips he had made on it, his words riding it again to Scotland, to France, to Switzerland, to Austria. On arrival, he parked it and described the mountains climbed, the foods eaten, the wines drunk, the languages spoken, the friends made.

  His voice went on and on, soft and low, reciting a never-ending mantra of his life while Dawa’s wife’s faster buzz of incantation played its continual, higher harmony.

  A gentle touch on Quinn’s shoulder interrupted him.

  “Mr. Quinn, I am sorry, but we must go now. It is Pemba’s funeral soon,” Sonam whispered.

  Quinn looked at his old Rolex Explorer. He had lost all track of time.

  It was a shock to see that he had been talking for two hours. He was surprised also to find that his face was wet with tears.

  He took off the watch. Its metal bracelet folded in on itself, reducing it to a tight lump of steel in the palm of his hand, solid and warm as he clenched it. He recalled his late father giving it to him on the day of his twenty-first birthday. He’d wanted one ever since he’d seen it advertised in those National Geographics in that library so long before. It was the best present he’d ever received.

  Quinn turned to Dawa’s tiny wife and handed her the watch. “Sell it,” he said simply as he closed her small, hennaed hands around it.

  She looked quizzically at Sonam, and after he said something in Sherpali, she looked back up at Quinn and murmured, “Thuchi che, Quinn-baba.”

  Quinn nodded and turned back to look again at Dawa. He was slightly more at ease now. His movements were slower, his breathing more regular. Perhaps the talking really had calmed him.

  “Get well, my friend. Get well,” he said, leaning close into the Sherpa.

  Dawa’s face turned very slightly to his, his bruised and swollen eyelids prizing themselves slightly open.

  The bloodshot eyes within the gummy slits fixed for a moment on Quinn. From beneath the plastic oxygen mask came a single word, “Axe.”

  The eyes closed only to flicker open again as Dawa said, “Ang … Noru.”

  The Sherpa sank back into unconsciousness.

  Quinn turned to Sonam. “Who is Ang Noru?”

  Sonam shrugged and obviously asked the same question of Dawa’s wife in Sherpali.

  She responded instantly with a screeching howl of sound, a wail that rose and fell without break, as if her whole explanation consisted of one convoluted word of pain. Then she started crying, crying uncontrollably, heavy tears cascading down her face onto her hands, bathing Quinn’s watch that she had pulled up tight to her sobbing mouth.

  Sonam paraphrased her desperate response. “She says Ang Noru was Dawa’s great-uncle on his mother’s side, a tiger taken by the mountain demon long ago. She says that it is bad karma that Dawa should speak of him now. It means that the tiger has returned to feed Dawa to the same devil.”

  Quinn could only stare at the small, trembling woman, shocked and confused by her sudden outburst of lyrical mysticism. He tried to say something more to calm her, but at a loss for any real words, could only clasp his hands around hers, saying, “I’m sure he’ll be okay.” Leaving with Sonam, Neil Quinn wondered how that could possibly be true.

  36

  Steamship Gneisenau, Port of Venice, Italy

  March 2, 1939

  3:45 p.m. (Ora Italiana)

  From the top deck, Josef observed the SS Gneisenau’s roster assemble. On the wharf below, black cars and carriages shuttled to and from the distant arches of the Port of Venice railway station like beetles. With every arrival, another group of passengers would emerge, momentarily uniting to take their first excited look at the great steamship until the unexpected chill of the easterly wind pushed them quickly into the offices of Norddeutscher Lloyd.

  Josef had been on board since the morning. The day before, Pfeiffer had delivered him to Professor Schmidt in Munich, departing with a pat of a leather-gloved hand on the side of his face to reinforce his final words. “You know the rules, Josef Becker: summit or die in the attempt. Those are the only circumstances that will let your family live. Good luck. I will await the news of your success.”

  Left alone with the professor, the corpulent man was quick to establish his own complicity in the threats of Operation Sisyphus. “Soldier, mountain guide, smuggler, prisoner, whatever it is you really are, let us be clear about one thing from the start. If you go missing at any time during our long journey ahead, I am instructed to telegram the information directly to Obersturmführer Pfeiffer. We are both aware of what instructions will be given as regards your mother and sisters should you not return. You should know that it has taken me three years to organize this expedition, the last ten to earn the trust and respect of the superiors who now reward me with its leadership. I will do everything in my power to assist Operation Sisyphus, and you in return will do nothing to jeopardize the opportunity I have been given.”

  During the preparations for the departure of the 1939 Combined German Universities Himalayan Expedition on the night train to Venice, Schmidt had introduced Josef to the rest of the assembled team, describing him as a noncommissioned army mountain guide assigned to the expedition by the reichsführer-SS. He pompously embellished Josef’s cover story by saying it was a clear demonstration of the esteem in which the reichsführer held both him and his expedition, before warning there could be no further discussion of Becker’s role with anyone as any military presence on a civilian expedition was classified. Soon after the train departed, Josef excused himself to sleep, silently irritated by the group’s boisterous braggadocio; the loudmouthed Schmidt always at the center of the selection of smug, self-satisfied students from elite Nazi families. Josef didn’t think there looked to be a climber amongst them.

  He slept well despite the sleeper carriage’s cramped cot but awoke early to a misty Italian dawn, feeling anxious for his family yet unable to remember the details of the dream that caused it. Trying to shake off his anxiety, Josef watched the passing flatlands of the Veneto emerge into another day, envying the freedom of the farmers already tending the wide tracts of land. With a heavy heart, he mourned simpler days when he too worked in the high pastures and climbed for amusement, not mercy.

  The train reached Venice at 9:00 a.m. precisely. With all the equipment on board by lunchtime and the rest of the day to enjoy before the ship set sail, Schmidt loudly invited the team to visit the watery city with him. Under his breath he said to Josef, “You, on the other hand, will remain on board until we leave port.” Josef didn’t care; he was glad to be free of them. He unpacked and then set off to explore the ship, the first he had ever been on, finally settling against that rail on the highest deck to smoke and watch the preparations to sail.

  His last cigarette finished, Josef grabbed the polished brass handle of the door to return inside.

  Opening it, he found his path blocked by a woman. Seemingly a few years younger than him, she was wearing a long, dark blue coat with a bright scarf tied over her glossy, dark brow
n hair. On a thin leather strap around her neck hung a silver Leica camera.

  The surprise of the girl’s beauty combined with the shock of seeing a camera identical to the one that he had been supplied with for his mission stopped Josef in his tracks. Unable to pass, his thoughts returned from a momentary recall of being relentlessly drilled in photographic techniques at Wewelsburg to consider the gentle contours of the face before him, the soft curls pushing forward from the red and gold silk scarf, the jade green of the eyes looking back.

  Moving aside to let him enter, the girl said in Italian, “È freddo là fuori?”

  Josef stepped inside, missing the question but excusing himself in German as he entered.

  “I asked you if it was cold outside,” she replied, switching to fluent German. She smiled as she spoke, thinking to herself that he had a kind, handsome face, but one that looked tired, heavy with cares.

  Her eyes met Josef’s, pulling his glance into hers for a split second. “Yes … it is,” he replied, rendered unsure of himself by the girl’s scrutiny.

  He could feel the details of her face—the long eyelashes, the gentle downward curve of the bright eyes, the fuller upward sweep of her mouth—etching themselves into his brain as she responded, “Good. Then I must make the most of it. I think the cold is going to be one of the things I will miss most where I am going.”

  “And where are you going?”

  “Hyderabad, India.”

  “That’s a long way away from Germany.”

  “It is,” she replied, a little pensively at first before seeming to remind herself of something happier, “but it is for the best. My father is building a factory there with an English business partner. We are moving there permanently so that he can supervise its operation. Hopefully the light is good enough for me to take some last photographs to remind me of chilly old Europe?”