by Jim Shepard
Above eight thousand meters in winter everyone needs to be technically proficient and emotionally unflappable. Jacek started climbing chairs and tables when he was fifteen months old and is ingenious with gigantic spatial puzzles like ice falls, and once totaled his brand-new car in a drainage ditch and simply climbed out and continued to the party on foot. His friends noticed the trauma only when they realized at the end of the night that he couldn’t lift a broken left arm.
His wife, Krystyna, was even less happy than Agnieszka about having been relocated to Mielec. The official story was that he was taking a position as coach for the local ski program, which, though the pay was miserable, would allow him to maintain his training schedule, but she knew better. “Mustn’t split up the boys,” she often groused when the four of us met at a pub. The night before we flew to Islamabad, she complained that he had commitments everywhere and, to top it off, had just agreed to serve as a cameraman on an expedition immediately after Nanga Parbat, despite having no experience whatsoever with high-end video cameras. “You know what his motto is?” she asked. “ ‘No time no time no time.’ If you ask him if he wants some eggs, he’ll answer, ‘No time no time no time.’ ” She said he’d given so many interviews across the country for the last two weeks that after he finally got home and fell into their bed he told her he needed to go on this expedition as a rest. She’d thrown all of his clothes out into the street.
“It was raining, too,” Jacek added, holding up the sleeve of his sweater. “This is still wet.”
“Wanda complains that they come back a wreck and we have to fit our lives to their schedules,” Agnieszka said. “She always says, ‘Why should we? He never fits his into ours.’ ”
“And first they’re unbelievably full of themselves—they did just conquer the world—and then they’re depressed,” Krystyna said. “At parties I’ll hear the women with their big eyes asking them how they do it, and I want to grab their faces and say, ‘The question is, how do I do it?’ ”
“Who wants another drink?” Jacek asked.
She went on to say that she’d begun to realize how many people this mountain had killed only by listening to our other friends talk about it. Then she’d broken down and done some Internet research, after which she wished she hadn’t.
“High altitudes aren’t as dangerous as everyone makes them out to be,” Jacek told her. “You could just as easily get killed crossing the road.”
“Yeah,” Krystyna said. “If you painted yourself black and crossed on moonless nights.”
“I liked the old days when they were out of touch for weeks,” Agnieszka said. “At least then you could manage your anger and fear and go about your life.”
“It’s not like we don’t take every precaution,” Jacek told her.
“Well, there’s a relief,” she answered. “That should prevent the avalanches and blizzards and oxygen starvation and cold.”
Jacek reminded his wife that he’d shown her the entry he’d made in his notebook on Annapurna: “It’s high time that I stopped this kind of Russian roulette and starting thinking of someone other than myself.” And then she pointed out that after finishing that entry, he’d left for the summit.
Locating the Polish tents in a large encampment is always easy: they’re the ones still lit and noisy at four a.m., the ones rising up out of a sea of bottles. At this time of year, though, we had the glacier to ourselves. We set up next to the windblown remains of an unsuccessful Japanese expedition from the summer before. At 3,500 meters there was already sixty centimeters of new snow. Inside the main tent, Kolesniak hung smoked meats and salamis he’d brought from home. As the interior warmed up the salamis dripped fat on whoever was beneath them.
The camp was centered on a glacier forested with ice towers. Every so often we’d kick up out of the snow an old tent peg or film canister. In the areas surrounding our doorways, cleared down to the ice, crevasses opened and shut slowly, like giant clams. The whole assembly was drifting away from the mountain a few inches a day with the movement of the glacier.
The shortened days made everything harder. By three the sun was behind the ridge and the temperature fell off the scale. Fingers became wood blocks and noses clogged with frost. We huddled in our tents eating pasta and salami, with loaves of chapati that were full of sand that the local monopolist leavened into the flour to increase its weight. The sherpas requested the water we drained from our pasta and drank it from small wooden bowls they pulled from their coats. When not working Kolesniak read to us aloud from something entitled Reign of Blood, about Idi Amin’s dictatorship. From this we learned that Amin kept his ex-wives’ severed heads in his kitchen freezer in order to keep his current wife in line.
We believe in acclimatizing by working hard and stressing the body. Only multiple ascents at these altitudes can teach you how you’re really doing; the first few times, every sensation feels abnormal, and the body is sustaining such a beating that it’s hard to judge how poorly it’s adjusting. To get to Camp 1, at 5,500 meters, we had to negotiate a maze of ice falls. We left on schedule at midnight, the advance team having already pressed on ahead, with Kolesniak, as leader, bringing up the rear to better follow the progress of the entire group spread out ahead of him.
Telephone reception is now much better than it used to be, so even in the high valleys blackout periods last days rather than weeks, and Agnieszka had managed to get through to me at the Base Camp before our first acclimatizing climb. She worked me like a strop while I turned to the tent wall and strove to ignore the jeers and jokes from Kolesniak and Nowakowski.
She said she was happy it had gone well so far, but I could hear in her voice the steeliness that derived from the extent to which she’d already disappointed herself. I asked after everything at home and she said that the night before she’d been to a dinner party at which all of the wives had wondered what it was like to love someone so often away and always at risk of never returning. She said she got so fed up that she finally started answering, “Why? Have people died doing that?” She said it was worse than when she met climbers and they asked if she climbed, and then seemed to believe she couldn’t register the change in their expressions when she answered.
“Are you there?” she asked.
“Oh, you left me at home with the baby and the dishes and the window sash that needs fixing,” Kolesniak sang out in his stupid falsetto.
“The boys are having a time of it, are they?” she asked.
“We’re going up to Camp 1 in a few hours,” I explained.
“So you need your rest,” she said.
“I’m fine,” I told her.
She said that after we’d said goodbye this time, upon leaving the airport she’d merged onto the highway in the wrong direction and then had thought to herself, Who cares? She’d gone thirty kilometers before Wanda’s complaining had allowed her to summon enough energy to turn around. When I didn’t respond, she added she sometimes felt superfluous and uninvolved with my concerns, but then realized that was only because she was superfluous and uninvolved with my concerns.
“We were talking about this maybe being the last trip for a while,” I told her. “Jacek and me.”
“You’re addicts,” she said. “Krystyna and I decided that the night you left. A trip like this is about the loss of your ability to control the dose.”
“I’m lonely,” Kolesniak sang while he stripped excess weight from his pack. “Here in my bed with only my zucchini.” He opened his hood and stretched wide its collar to show me again the tattoo on his neck in English: Love Is Pain.
“I’ll think of something,” I told her.
“Oh, you’re resourceful when it comes to things like raising money for climbing,” Agnieszka said. “It’s in everyday life that you’re not so clever.”
“I never claimed I was clever,” I told her. “I only know I want to be with you.”
“Who in their right mind tries to build a relationship with a high-altitude winter mountaineer?”
she asked. “I mean, when you’re with me you seem to understand words like ‘love’ and ‘commitment.’ ”
“They mean more to me now than they ever did,” I told her.
“I signed up for this,” she said. “But what about people who didn’t? Like Wanda?”
“This trip’s different,” I finally told her.
“I know,” she said. “The more people a mountain’s killed, the bigger deal it is to climb it.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I told her.
“What would happen in Formula 1 racing if one out of every twenty-five drivers died?” she asked. “How long would it take people to put a stop to it?”
“If you can’t live with what I’m doing, then I won’t do it,” I told her. “If it comes to that.”
“Let me lay it out for you so you can think about it,” she said. “If you felt about me the way I feel about you, you would stop climbing. Period.”
“Let’s go, Chief,” Kolesniak said, giving my shoulder a shove. “Coffee klatch is over.”
“I have to go,” I told her.
“Of course you do,” she said. “Listen to me: you come home alive.”
“I will,” I said.
“I love you,” she said. Then she hung up.
Nanga Parbat is the world’s ninth-tallest mountain, its summit at nearly the cruising altitude of commercial airlines. Passengers on flights from Islamabad to Beijing fly past it, not over it. It appears as a pyramid in the sky above an ocean of cloud. It has three faces: the Rakhiot, the Diamir, and the Rupal. The Rupal features the highest known precipice in the world: an ice wall of some five thousand meters. The Diamir, considered the climbable face, involves an ice fall known as Death Alley and, above that, a couloir pitched at seventy degrees and rising one thousand meters to the crest of a northwestern ridge. We dug Camp 2 into the top of that ridge before clouds and snow reduced visibility to zero.
Inside the tents with the stoves operating the temperature was twenty below. We could only imagine the temperature outside. It was so crowded that everyone had to lie still for one of us to accomplish anything. In that kind of storm everyone bunked with whomever they found themselves beside in line, and so Kolesniak, Bieniek, and I took turns every few hours to go outside and loosen the heavy accumulations straining the sides of the tent. Once he was settled Bieniek struggled with his camera, which was refusing to work because of the cold. Kolesniak told stories of the catastrophic Central Peak expedition of ’75: the immeasurable winds that shredded their tent from around them and blew melon-sized rocks into the air, the same windstorm that on the other side of the ridge severed their teammates’ tent moorings and swept their entire camp off the edge of a drop that fell a vertical mile.
Bieniek’s wrist alarm went off and his little boy wished him another good morning. He then mentioned he was lucky to be here, having on his last trip overreached on a belay and fallen thirty feet and landed on his side on rock. He’d impacted with such force that his heart had come out of its casing.
“You know what they say,” Kolesniak said from the darkness on the other side of the tent. “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”
Bieniek went on to add that at first his boy told him he was the only one in his grade with a cool dad, but before the last two trips he’d been inconsolable at the airport and Bieniek had finally told his wife that maybe if these trips were injuring someone he loved, he should stop them.
“What’d she say to that?” I asked.
“She blew up,” he answered, a little sheepishly. “She said they’d already been injuring someone I loved.”
Kolesniak said his gesture toward family responsibility had been to buy a life-insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London. He said his wife had told him now that he had a grandchild, he’d finally find out what it was like to hold a baby.
The snow’s weight made the tent’s sides an embrace. We augered out more space by crossing our arms and twisting our torsos. Then Kolesniak enforced some quiet, since we had to be up at two a.m. for the next push. Before I fell asleep I could hear him eating jam from a little jar with a spoon.
Mielec is known as the Aviation City mostly because of the factory the Germans built during the war. It cranked out Heinkel 111s and 117s until the Allies bombed it flat. Then the Soviets rebuilt it and it cranked out MiGs. When you played in the vacant lots you were always finding unexploded artillery shells. You’d set them on a wall and try to detonate them by banging their firing pins with a rock. I only heard of it working once, and the triumphant artilleryman lost both his hands and his eyesight. The unexploded ordnance from the Allied bombers was buried more deeply, but was live enough that kids for blocks around would show up and watch when the town was digging a utilities line.
Whenever he heard the construction equipment, my father knew where to find me and would come from work to pull me out of the crowd. He repaired clocks in a street kiosk and everyone said he had golden hands when it came to fixing things. He gave me tasks, too, repairing simpler mechanical objects like rat traps or hand drills, and when I succeeded our time together went smoothly and when I failed it seemed to color the rest of our day. He told my mother that his impatience with his own children bothered him. She told him that she had enough to worry about. And when I somehow stripped the gears of a coffee grinder, he spent an hour trying to undo the damage and then gave up. On the streetcar home he remarked to himself that he wished he lived in a climbing hut in the Alps, one of those tiny shacks with a bed that lowered from the wall, where you saw another human being only on the occasional weekend.
For people like me, winter mountaineering is just ordinary life with the polite layers shorn away. Jacek likes to say that reunions like this with old friends are the only way to recharge our spirits. No one sees you with greater clarity than your teammates above eight thousand meters. And still they risk their lives to bring you safely down.
They say whatever your worst memory is, you see it again most often right before sleep. I climb because once I go back down, the world while I recover is easier for me. Agnieszka’s eyes and mouth become again my garden and our entangled sleep my chair in the sun.
Kolesniak had us up by two and under way by three. The expedition climbed in siege style, with fixed camps en route stocked with bivouac gear and food and fuel. Each climb to set up a camp and return was itself a mini-expedition and furthered our acclimatization. We stepped out into darkness and blowing snow and fell into line, and up above could see bobbing lights and black figures already ascending a steep belt of rock. Above the rock the route was hard ice under unconsolidated snow that by dawn had gotten very deep: Jacek, in the lead, was up to his chest in powder, working his arms in a breast stroke to clear the space ahead. At sunrise Nowakowski took over, leading us up a serac of blue opalescent ice and then tunneling into a mass of overhanging snow that pummeled down on the rest of us. By the time my turn came I had to kneel into the deep drifts above me on the slope in order to compress them to provide traction for my crampons. In the sun and working hard we were almost warmed. We were grateful for the relative calm. Even the plumes from the summit crest were diminished.
On a flat spot atop the Kinshofer Step we erected Camp 3 and collapsed and ate. Most of us could barely move. From above, Camp 1’s orange tents in the snow looked like something in a petri dish. The wind picked up. Cirrus clouds traversed to the northeast, a reliable sign of approaching trouble. When at a distance of forty kilometers Masherbrum was curtained by dark clouds, that was our meteorological alarm bell: at the speed the storm was moving we’d have just enough time to get down to Camp 2. We descended in a stew of white with snow crystals spiraling up around us.
I rode out the storm with Nowakowski and Leszek. Condensation froze into ice sheets on the tent walls and then shook off onto our heads. Leszek discussed what a bitch it had been to lose a third of his toes and four of his fingers. He’d tried to cook breakfast for friends and kept dropping the f
rying pan. A young woman had exclaimed to him at a party, “You’re still climbing? With no fingers?” and he said he’d told her to go back to her television: that was her life. His was a little different. While he spoke he organized and reorganized each of our packs. His unhurried attention to detail made him intolerable at sea level but at altitude kept him alive.
By late the next morning the storm had passed and another was blowing in. We left Leszek at Camp 2 and ascended back to Camp 3. By the time we arrived powder avalanches resembling cumulus clouds were being blown off the mountain at right angles by the wind.
We used our knives to cut chunks of snow for tea. The snow fell continuously all day with increasing intensity. We peered out of doorways into what looked like a milky vapor. In the lee of the wind, the snowbanks rebuilt themselves with alarming speed. We were all suffering variously from the cold. Nowakowski’s toes were dark blue. The nail of Kolesniak’s index finger was missing but he said the finger hurt, which was a good sign. Everyone was queasy, the fluid loss through breathing at altitude having wiped out our body salts. Our heads were metal doors that somebody was kicking with hobnailed boots. We shared our last big meal, a banquet of sardines and powdered potatoes and soup. Kolesniak poured the sardine oil onto his split fingertips to soothe them. Leszek reported by radio from below that his tent was getting buried so deeply that when he went outside there were no traces of the guy lines.
We were at that stage of the expedition in which home had begun to seem imaginary. Trying to plan meant wading in one’s head through a murky and drugged marsh. If some of us were going to press on to Camp 4 and then the summit, we would have to go soon. Our luck, such as it was, wouldn’t hold out much longer. A mountain like this was the apex of however many gigantic river valleys, all of which in winter were storm machines, sending their masses of evaporated water up its slopes at high speeds. The next morning made our decisions for us. Kolesniak’s headaches were so bad he could barely see. Nowakowski reported that he’d started to spit up blood. They both had to shed altitude, and quickly. They’d wait for us at Camp 2 or maybe even Camp 1. Jacek, Bieniek, and I would be the ones going up.