You Think That's Bad

by Jim Shepard

  The civil court found him guilty of homicide, but the canonical court condemned him for heresy and sodomy alone, the latter being known as the cause of earthquakes, plagues, and famine. On 25 October he received pronouncement of sentence: he would be hanged, and then burned. His two accomplices, Henriet and myself, would be burned and then hanged. Afterward the Inquisitor asked if he wished to be reincorporated into the Church and restored to participation in the Sacraments. He answered in the affirmative. He requested of the court that since he and his servants together had committed the crimes for which they were condemned, they might be permitted to suffer punishment at the same hour, so that he, the chief cause of their perfidy, could console and admonish them and provide an example of how to die well, and perhaps thereby be a partial cause of their salvation. This request was granted. He further asked for a general procession, that the public might view their contrition, and, when this was agreed, that on the sides of the wagon transporting them would be hung paintings he’d commissioned of late, depicting classical scenes of farewell. And the court, in concluding its proceedings, was pleased to grant this final request.

  We ask all who read this to judge us with the charity we might not otherwise deserve. We were brushed by our lord’s divine impatience and, like driven horses, risked in his wagers. Now our share is only the lash. Tomorrow’s morning has been chosen for the consummation of our sentences, the site a meadow close above the main bridge over the Loire, where the trees are often adorned with the hanged.

  Where is the region of that law beyond the law? No one makes his way there with impunity. I’ve filled sheet after sheet in a box at my feet. I conclude a final page by candlelight while Henriet weeps and will not speak and refuses my consoling touch. He rubs his back as my mother did. He will not read any further pages I put before him.

  But I write this for him. And my eyes will be on only him as our arms are lashed around the heavy stakes to our back, and his gaze remains on lord de Rais. He will hang his head and close his eyes as he does when the greatest extremity is upon him. And lord de Rais’s final moments will manifest themselves before us. He will die first, and in view of his contrition the court has decreed that his body be taken from the flames before it bursts and buried in the church he has chosen. In his last moments he will be a model of piety, exhorting us to keep faith throughout what follows. Barely burned, his body will be laid out on the finest linen by four noble ladies, two of whom watched us through that peephole so many months ago, and carried in solemn procession to his interment. We will watch the procession go. We will be isolated in our agonies as the bundles are lit below us. We will be burned to cinders and our ashes scattered.

  And God will come to know our secrets. At our immolation He’ll appear to us and pour His gold out at our feet. And His grace that we kicked away will become like a tower on which we might stand. And His grace will raise us to such a height that we might glimpse the men we aspired to be. And His grace like the heat of the sun will burn away the men we have become.

  Poland Is Watching

  We haven’t spoken in three days and haven’t stretched out in two, and that’s forty-four hours we’ve been braced back to back, holding our tent poles, one hand low and the other high, to keep them from snapping in the wind. They’re supposed to be titanium but at Camp 3 they went off like rifle shots in the night and these are jerry-rigged spares. The winds are topping 130 kilometers an hour. The temperature has dropped to 49 below. We’re wearing three layers of fleece, one of Gore-Tex, down bodysuits, insulated climbing shells, and even our overgaiters, with gloves inside gloves inside mittens, and headcaps inside balaclavas inside hoods. I’ve been unable to interrupt the clatter of my teeth. Jacek’s breathing sounds like someone blowing bubbles through a straw. Bieniek has long since given himself over to a kind of stupefaction. We store the radio batteries in our underwear and load them only when we need to call Base Camp. Once we’re finished, getting them back through all the layers takes ten minutes. Then we just grip one another and hold on until our testicles warm the battery casings. The casings conduct the cold with exceptional efficiency.

  We’re at Camp 4 and only 1,000 meters below the summit, but the summit’s 8,126 meters high and in the winter at this altitude everything is sandblasted by the jet stream and the cold.

  Because of that, the peak is called Nanga Parbat: Sanskrit for “Naked Mountain.” When the sky is not storming, it sounds like a giant’s flapping bed sheets as hard as he can. When it is, the turbine sound of the howl makes even shouting pointless. During those periods we’re reduced to hand signals with mittens.

  We’ve been on the mountain for twenty-seven days. Our sponsors have shelled out big money not for attempts but for results. Our team members, strung out along the various camps below, are spent. Our wives back home are miserable. Our children are frightened. Poland is watching.

  If we descend we won’t have the physical reserves to return. If we continue upward we’ll be ascending without being able to make out our hands at arm’s length. If we decide to wait out the storm, they’ll find us once it’s over, like everything else in the tent, from our sunscreen to our cameras: frozen solid and cascaded with frost.

  This mountain is a widow maker in the summer, when the weather’s as good as it gets. It’s famous for the kind of ice and rock slides that in 1841 were big enough to dam the Indus, sitting at its feet. The first great mountaineer to set foot up here, the Englishman A. F. Mummery, along with his entire expedition, was never heard from again. Twenty-six climbers were killed before even the first summer summit was achieved. There have been twelve winter attempts since. None have succeeded.

  There’s a song we sing in bars: “Who does winter mountaineering? We do winter mountaineering!” We are the Poles. The first winter attempt here was a joint Anglo/Polish expedition in 1988. Then the Brits came to their senses and dropped out. The Italians partnered with us for a little while as well, and have the casualties to prove it. Only the Poles have persevered.

  And attempt number 13 is in deep trouble. For the last three days we’ve been hunkered down in an air raid of wind. Camp 4 amounts to a small trench for the tent, chopped into a cornice of snow as hard as concrete. We’re now in the seventh day, and we need to be back in Base Camp by the middle of the month, after which, as Kolesniak likes to put it, the winds really get going.

  Kolesniak got started like the rest of us, as a schoolboy running around local crags and picking up whatever he could in terms of technique here and there. Afternoon larks turned into weekend excursions and then long holidays away from home. Now he’s so famous that kids can buy a snakes-and-ladders board game of his K2 climb. He’s one of the central figures in the golden decade of Polish Himalayan mountaineering, having summited ten 8,000-meter peaks, including Everest twice. Once everyone and his brother started climbing such peaks, he began proselytizing for what he called a true Alpine style, which involved refusing to benefit from the work of other teams, even if it meant ignoring ropes that lay fixed beside your route or declining to take shelter in unused tents. On Gasherbrum IV he forbade his team to follow a Japanese expedition’s footsteps in the deep snow. It was a short transition from that to winter mountaineering.

  Soviet restrictions on travel throughout the postwar period ensured that Poles missed out on the first ascents of all the highest peaks, leaving us with mountains so small they lacked even year-round snow, but we solved the problem by resorting to the unthinkable: climbing in winter. In 1959 Zawada electrified everyone by ascending a staggering number of connected peaks in nineteen days of continuous climbing. Kolesniak, still a boy then, snuck into one of his lectures in a packed five-thousand-seat auditorium, and Zawada displayed a slide of a towering rock face in a sleet storm and told the audience, “Show me how you climb in this and I’ll tell you what you’re worth.”

  It was Zawada who first conceived of attempting Everest in winter, once travel restrictions were lifted, and Zawada who led the expedition that succeed
ed. He lived to see Lhotse and Annapurna and Dhaulagiri fall as well. By then the world was calling us the Ice Warriors and the Pope was sending him climbing advice. Industries hired top climbers during the summers to paint their smokestacks: easy work that paid like state ministries.

  And Nanga Parbat remained the reef on which all Polish shipping ran aground. In 1997 Pankiewiez and Trzymiel clawed to within three hundred meters of the top before their frostbite became so dire they could no longer press on. Duszkiewicz in 2008 reached through a blizzard what he thought was the summit only to find once back in Base Camp that he’d stopped to celebrate on a rise eighty meters lower.

  And now here we are. For three years each of us has hoarded and sacrificed and trained for the right to earn this chance. We have flown five thousand kilometers and caravanned by truck and foot hundreds of kilometers more and ascended seven thousand meters in altitude and squandered tens of thousands of euros on permits and porters’ fees and equipment. “Let’s go, girls,” Kolesniak has shouted whenever anything has gone wrong. “You’re not going to grow the balls you need sitting around complaining.”

  And as Agnieszka never tires of pointing out, we’re not the only ones who have sacrificed. Her father, on the occasion of our daughter’s seventh birthday, sat me down and walked us both glumly through the state of my finances, and once he finished her mother, waiting beside him, then asked how on earth, if I loved her daughter and granddaughter as much as I claimed, I could justify what I was doing. In the other room Agnieszka made a loud snorting sound.

  I answered that I didn’t justify what I was doing. Nine expeditions in the course of a seven-year marriage meant that I’d been away more than at home. For five consecutive years I’d missed my daughter’s birthday. This birthday I’d been able to make because our climbing permits had fallen through.

  And each time I returned with a body so devastated it never fully restored itself. Agnieszka told her girlfriends that she called my first weeks back the Famine Zombie Weeks. My vertebrae and hipbones were anatomy lessons. I was able to focus on emotional issues only when she put a hand on each side of my face and redirected my gaze into her eyes.

  At our airport reunions, after her relief and joy, I’d see her anger at what I’d done to myself flood through her like a third revelation.

  I’d met her at a faux-English pub in Warsaw. Most of us met our wives at one climbers’ drinking hole or another. But I’d had good timing: it turned out she’d just come from a co-worker’s retirement party at which she’d heard him joke about the number of years he’d worked at his bureau—more than she’d been alive—and then estimate the actual number of staff meetings he’d attended and evaluations he’d filed. A horrified silence had settled over the party, she said, and she’d decided then and there to quit. The pub had been the first one she’d encountered. When she asked what I did, I told her I climbed the highest mountains in the world in the winter. We went home together that same night.

  She had some idea what she was getting herself into, she told me that first night while we spooned and she smoothed her hands together along my erection. Her brother had been a rock climber and mountaineer.

  I’d failed to pursue the subject because she’d by then fitted me into her with a tenderness and calm I’d previously associated only with the afterlife. “Shhh,” she whispered at the force of my response. “Look.” And she brought her mouth around to mine. She meant, “Look how comprehensively we’ve merged.” She didn’t have to tell me: I was already so confounded that for an hour after she fell asleep I perched naked on her chest of drawers peering down at her like a traveler who’d found water on Mars.

  As a child I’d been such an aberration in inwardness and appearance that my classmates had christened me the White Crow. My first years of schooling had been traumatic and I withdrew from any social situation in which I felt maligned. Climbing had been my way out. My aptitude for math and science had won me some recognition and I’d been invited to join the geology section of the Young Pioneers, and the field trips to the mountains had begun there. There I learned about rope and free climbing, about weather and snow conditions. But I still was valued only for what I could do: my mentor on those trips used to say that our relationship thrived on my achievements.

  I’d been three hours late for our first dinner together and Agnieszka had already eaten and gone about her evening. She warmed up my portion after I arrived. “You aren’t angry?” I asked. “You’ve already eaten?”

  “Why would I be angry?” she answered, looking up from her book. “And why wouldn’t I have eaten?”

  She told me the first time I left for an eight-thousand-meter mountain that she wasn’t going to become one of those women her brother’s friends used to pity: the climber’s girlfriend, left moping at home. On the radio telephone from Annapurna I complimented her on her poise when we’d kissed goodbye. She said, “You should have seen me once you were out of sight.”

  And now what does she have? She and Wanda are home alone most of the time in Mielec. Mielec is famous as the place in southern Poland where hope goes to expire. “Is it so bad?” her mother asked, before she first came to visit, and Agnieszka found she couldn’t bring herself to answer. “It’s astonishing that you grew up here,” she likes to tell me. “Or maybe it’s not.” At town meetings, after the first three hours on economic growth we sometimes get to the fouled water table or the air pollution.

  Mielec had a big Jewish community, which of course was wiped out in the war. It features the largest aviation factory in Poland, where we both work. For tourists, there’s the minor basilica of Matthew the Evangelist, which is ugly. For football we have FKS Stal Mielec, a perennial third-division also-ran. We have a sister city in the Ukraine that I’m told is every bit as demoralizing. There’s a water park. Potholes aren’t the problem they used to be. And around our three-room house, we have enough land fenced off for a kitchen garden and a pygmy orchard.

  In Islamabad we were informed about the extra expense of the bond that had to be posted for the possibility of a helicopter rescue, which was particularly maddening since we’d be operating nearly the entire time above a helicopter’s ceiling. It’s no wonder so many teams press on for the summits even in insanely dangerous circumstances, given that each year the cost of climbing in the Himalayas becomes more and more prohibitive. The highest mountains are now lucrative commercial concerns. On our last day in the city Kolesniak showed us our expedition’s revised bank account, which was a disheartening sight. We now had enough to get to the mountain and climb it, though not enough, technically, to get back home.

  We’d chosen the Kinshofer Route on the mountain’s Diamir Face, which meant a longer trek across the glaciers to our Base Camp. At the little town where we hired our porters the usual gaggle assembled outside our hotel, some having walked from villages fifty kilometers away, and Kolesniak did the selecting by eye. He said he used to check all candidates with a stethoscope but then discovered that most had blood-curdling noises coming from their lungs and others apparently had no hearts in their chests. From there we all jounced for six hours along a muddy and narrow road through brilliant light. At curves along the Indus Gorge the lead driver would stop and beckon us all out to look over the edge, down the cliffs to the river below. At one hairpin he kept gesturing into a ravine whose drop was so severe that none of us would look.

  Besides Kolesniak, Jacek, and myself, Poland’s banner is held aloft by Nowakowski and Leszek, two old campaigners, and Bieniek, a late replacement none of us know very well. Nowakowski’s the sort of legend who on one seven-mile hike into a Base Camp stunned all of those who hadn’t been able to maintain his pace by producing an entire watermelon from his backpack to share upon arrival. They call him Filthy N because he refuses to wash even weeks after an expedition has ended. A woman he once tried to pick up in a bar at first refused to believe the smell was his. Only the year before Leszek had all the amputations on his right hand, and with his damaged toes couldn’t ent
ertain hopes of a summit, though he thought he might get as far as seven thousand meters, depending upon how his older frostbitten areas held up at altitude. He claimed that nearly all of his preparation was psychological, by which he meant last-minute parties, all-night binges, and as much sex as the women around him would allow. On his last night in Warsaw he threw up over the balcony onto a pizza delivery boy and then tumbled over the railing to follow. The boxes broke his fall.

  Poor Bieniek seems not to know what to make of us. He’s a quiet young man whose wrist alarm features a digital recording of his son’s voice, wishing him a good morning and exhorting him to come back safely.

  Jacek I got to know in the Young Pioneers. We both suffered from childhood asthma, not unusual for climbers, perhaps because lungs stressed by the affliction become better conditioned to process oxygen later in life. We instantly became adept at egging each other on when it came to risks. On one of the field trips we celebrated his sixteenth birthday by abandoning the bus that was supposed to return us to the city, to see if we could walk back through the forests. We arrived five days later, having survived on berries and two loaves of bread. We’d asked a friend to tell our poor parents we’d gone camping.