by Jeff Long
In fact the fire had struck just a few days before his scheduled departure for Nepal. Instead of cancelling the trip or at least postponing his flight, Arnold had left his family in tents in the middle of town. I later learned that his wife had salvaged enough to get the bakery running again, and that the scandalized villagers had made a point of buying from her. That ended the day Arnold returned. Though he remained the only baker in Ehrwald, but the villagers found other bakers in the valley.
One evening Arnold pulled out the latest Alpinismus and broke the bad news. Fritz had gone missing on his way to solo Tirisch Mir in Pakistan, and was presumed dead. A year later I was asked to visit a glacier where a Canadian expedition had spied a body crumpled into a TV-sized ball in the ice. My job would be using garden shears to collect some fingers and the lower jaw for identification. To my relief, the idea was scrapped before I left.
Knowing Fritz’s larger-than-life nature, Arnold and I hoped his disappearance was just theater. We discussed what would happen if it were true. Just before catching our flight home in 1974, Fritz had taken me with him to the Nepalese ministry and obtained a permit for Makalu in 1977. Back at the Kathmandu Guesthouse, (aka the Guestmandu Cathouse for its free love hippies,) Arnold, and a Slovenian scientist and alpinist named Matija Malizec jumped at the chance for a re-do. Now, minus Fritz to lead, it seemed the expedition was over with.
As the years went by, my bit part in Arnold’s battle with the village came into better focus. In taking the masonry job, I had unwittingly violated a rigid master/apprentice system dating back centuries. In effect the whole country was unionized, and suddenly Ehrwald found itself host to a Wild West cowboy stealing jobs. I had long hair, didn’t attend Mass, wore blue jeans, barely spoke German, couldn’t yodel, and cadged my money (translation, didn’t buy locally.)
Worst of all, I was a living souvenir from a mountain range made legendary by Reinhold Messner, silently confirming Arnold’s never-ending Himalayan adventure. His drunken smack talk was actually part of a calculated counter-offensive. I was Arnold’s answer to the village’s excommunication. So long as I was there, he had a nightly excuse to revisit heights they would never know, and to demand the respect due a master alpinist.
And so they got rid of me. One morning Arnold grabbed me from the construction site. He was grim and angry. The police were on their way to arrest me for a lapsed visa. I checked my passport, and it was still good for one more day. I had been planning to take the train to the nearby border that afternoon and get the visa re-upped. But the writing was on the wall. A symbol for Arnold’s dignity, I was now a symbol for his exile. I jammed my gear into a duffle just as the police arrived at the front door of the shop. While Krystal welcomed them, Arnold snuck me out the back and down to the station. “Adios,” I said. He had taught me how to cuss in German. I was teaching him some Spanish for his trip to Colorado and Yosemite.
Summer arrived. Arnold made it to the States. We had a great road trip, and had perfect weather for Washington’s Column. Then Arnold had to return to his bakery and me to my trowel. “Adios,” he said. A couple of months later the funeral card arrived. Arnold was gone.
On the spur of the moment, I took over Fritz’s Makalu permit. I was much too young and foolish to lead an expedition, but it seemed better to try than see it disintegrate. Two of the ’74 expedition, Matija, and Rodney Korich, joined my ragtag bunch. The South Face had been climbed by then, so we went around the corner to the West Face. We made a game try, got bombed with rock fall, and made our exit.
Matija came to the States for a visit, and we corresponded until the mid-90s. His letters stopped. A little later I went to Bosnia as an election monitor with OSCE. Only recently did I get word that Matija was executed by Serbs in Bosnia. Matija, Arnold, Fritz, and others: these are some of the ghosts I try to keep alive.
The Virgins of Imst
Ten years before I wandered into the village of Imst for a few month’s work in the mill, a Yugoslav had found a lover like the one I did, and the huge mountain to the east had sheltered a dead saint in a cave. Because those Austrian Alps breed such precise echoes, it still seems perfectly natural that the Yugoslav and I were so much alike. Poor, foreign and naive, we also shared a vulnerability to our similar lovers who lived and dreamed with parallel abandon below the nearby mountain.
Matija was his name. Catholic as a rosary bead, he was nevertheless a strapping 20th century heathen, tall and bashful, but unafraid. Among other things he was a climber, though in a village tucked at the back of a Tyrolean valley hugged by steep green meadows and steeper mountain walls, the mere fact that he mountaineered held no special rank. Most of the local menfolk were or had been, too.
As alpinists go, the climbers of Imst have always been a mediocre breed, congenitally cautious, saddled with more pride than skill. They climb together, practice rescue missions together, drink, quarrel and yodel, tease each other’s wives, and above all obscure their mutual failings as climbers, acting exactly like the neighbors they are. What distinguished Matija that summer was that he was the finest climber Imst had ever seen.
And yet, as the story came to me, you could never have guessed he had an extraordinary skill, he was so ridiculously humble. The moment he was in public his dark eyes locked onto the cobblestones. He had the habit of blushing at his accent, and was mutely diligent at the lumber mill where he held a summer job. I had the same job, I climbed, I kept to myself, and like Matija ate my supper at the cheapest inn in town, the Hoffhaus. When a group of local men would arrive for an evening of red wine and tall tales, I’d wolf down my cheese noodles and meat and timidly exit. As I closed the oak door behind me, their pipe smoke would billow in the thick, lazy domain.
Erika was his love, or came to be towards the end of the summer, coltish and wildly attractive. She was blessed with roan gold hair and a Swiss model’s legs. Barely twenty, Erika had already located each and every beauty mark her archangel had hidden on her body, which is to say that her life was an uncomplicated task. She preened herself in an old-fashioned, lusty sort of way and was desired just as simply.
That summer Erika was still a virgin. She didn’t act like one with her ribald coquetries and even more suspicious melancholies, but the villagers knew. This daughter was still a pure creature. Having grown up among such a wise alpine bourgeoisie, Erika had not failed to learn the price of certain commodities, the value of certain flowers. She knew just what she wanted out of life and thought she’d figured out how to get them... a big white house with an old tile oven, new furniture, a view of the lake, a cat, and maybe later some children. But for all her deliberateness Erika was young and susceptible to less articulate needs. One August night when the moon was ripe and you could practically hear the chamois rustling on the clefts, Erika lost her plotting innocence.
I should tell this story the way it was told to me, but that’s not enough. Matija may not have had humble black eyes, Erika may not have connived with her virginity so deviously, and it may not have been August when she invited him to her window. But it went something like that; a soft knock at the garden window, the starched linen curtains were drawn aside, and there stood Erika, her nightgown a solid white in the silver night. I had such an affair with a girl named Crystal, a midnight adventure that was repeated through the coming two months.
On the first night she opened the window, before she could whisper even a word of greeting or restraint, without the slightest chance of cunning, her gown fell open and for a moment struck me blind. Erika, like Crystal, as virgin as dew, was no doubt frightened by her accidental nakedness, perhaps even angry with Matija for being so enchanted by it. And then she drew him in and closed the window. There seemed to be nothing else to do.
Erika wanted Matija no more than Crystal really wanted me, but we were, the Yugoslav and I, both young and momentary, good for a secret. In that constricted Tyrolean universe where every shadow had a name, the people I called my friends were friendly, the lover was loving, but there was
a limit. Unaware of our poetry, Matija and I succumbed, like images in a mirror, to the Austrian midnight and its innocences. From what I remember of the story, Matija was twenty-one, too.
The spring before Matija arrived in Imst two young bucks from Innsbruck, ‘rock gymnasts,’ as the Imsters secretly disparaged them, attempted to climb the large, rotten wall of rock that sits high above the town to the east. This wall forms the geometrically clean face of a mountain called Sonnenspitze, or Sun Mountain, named for its peak which marks the sun’s first appearance and very last shining. At the center of the wall, Sun Wall, a cave mouth forms a perfect dark O. Nowadays it’s known as the Virgin’s Hole.
No one in Imst had ever given much thought to what might lay in the cave because the Sun Wall had all the earmarks of the edge of the world. Sharp and chaotic, its rock is more treacherous than rotten coral. I once bouldered near the base of the Sun Wall and found the holds as large as they were worthless, so fragile that a wrong breath, much less a wrong move, would fracture the rock. It was unforgiving, just left unclimbed, and yet when the two boys from Innsbruck showed up there was a sudden embarrassed furor. This was, after all, a local mountain. It was felt that the rock gymnasts should go monkey around on their own walls. The sentiment went unheeded.
The two Innsbruckers came prepared. Expecting difficulties, they laid siege to the wall in American big-wall fashion, spending days and days on the vertical face, sleeping in hammocks at night. Finally after a week of strenuous acrobatics, with the whole village suffering their minute progress hour by hour, the two boys reached the cave.
Storm clouds had been blossoming all morning, so there was some question about whether the young climbers would weather it out or descend. The climbers of Imst began to prepare a full blown rescue of the two boys. Knowing the Imsters as I do, I doubt there was much solemnity as the locals stomped around the town square in their knickers and boots, hefting big packs and draping bandoliers of musical pitons and coils of rope over their shoulders with sweeping flourish. To this day I can’t figure out how they were going to rescue the boys. They certainly weren’t about to climb up to them, and the wall was so overhung they couldn’t have lowered down. For all their strutting around, in the end they were as helpless before the storm as the two boys were. After a fair amount of festive posturing the group set off to wait and see what would happen.
As it turned out, the two Innsbruck climbers had noticed the storm, too, then measured its severity against their dwindling food supply and decided to reverse direction without further ado. Their descent turned into one of those small epic tragedies for which the Alps are notorious.
The storm struck. All through the night the two young men battled their way downwards, blown by the wind and anointed by gentle, soaking snowflakes. Their exhaustion was compounded by the delicacy of the wall which required just as much care as their gingerly made ascent had.
Not long before dawn, one of the climbers lost his grip on the ropes and fell to his death. The other boy continued down, orchestrating the rappel with bleak uncertainty. Hours later, nearly dead, he lowered himself into the very center of the now somber Imst rescue team. In spite of his horrible journey back to earth, the boy feverishly insisted on relating a remarkable discovery.
There was, he swore to God, a body up in that impossible cave. Without headlamps, and because of the storm, the boys hadn’t investigated any closer, but both of them had seen the unmistakable contours of a woman’s body. She was white as pine, nude and impeccably preserved. According to the exhausted young climber, she’d had long black hair, and extending from the cold shadows he’d seen a half open hand, palm up. The boy was utterly convinced that she was beautiful, perhaps due to the beckoning hand and her awesome solitude. Then, the boy sobbed, they had descended.
Father Weissbrod’s pulpit had served him as a podium on more than a few occasions in his forty-eight years as the pastor of Imst. From it he rarely hesitated to scold adulterers and liars, or warn against various political sympathies, once going so far as to compose a sermon on inflation and the Volkswagen. The aging priest was bored. It has been a quarter of a century since the last war, twenty-seven tedious years of blessing sinners and herds of healthy cattle and leading invocations to the Holy Spirit on behalf of Imster small fry as they departed for regional ski meets. On the first Sunday after the disaster on Sun Wall, Father Weissbrod electrified his parish with some news of his own. He had made a discovery.
“The pure are like God,” I once heard the old priest postulate. “He draws them to his breast and makes them little gods.” In a more educated church this pagan sentiment, that God makes mini-gods, would have cocked more than a few eyebrows, but there in Imst it was taken as part and parcel of the gospel. Ten years before I sat in church and heard the shaggy-headed priest, he scanned his congregation and, with forgotten drama, revealed something to the effect that papal evidence spoke of a certain immortal woman.
More than 1,000 years ago, the body of Mary Magdalene disappeared from its resting place in the convent at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue, and legend had it that the prostitute-turned-saint had been assumed into Heaven. This was given increasing credence over the centuries as Mary Magdalene visited such locations as Chartres and Le Puy, always manifesting herself in the form of lifelike statues. True or not, several churches owe their existence to her divine appearances, for which an enduring human faith or gullibility may take credit.
Barely three days had passed since the two boys from Innsbruck had descended from the cave on Sonnenspitze, when Father Weissbrod revealed in great detail who the woman in the mountain really was. “She is, God bless us, the saint.” He expected more skepticism than he got. There were a few slow witted scowls, but aside from these the Imsters immediately embraced the miraculous corpse of Mary Magdalene. Suddenly Imst had a purpose beyond its crops and cattle. Out of the great blue, Imst had a naked saint.
It must have seemed a raw injustice to Erika in that twentieth summer of her life when the young men, all of whom she’d known since childhood, callously fell in love with the saint lodged high within the Sun Wall. There were four or five highly eligible men in Erika’s realm, but just as she was familiar with who they were, they were familiar with Erika. They’d been tormented by her hot and cold charms long enough to understand her virginity, and rather than pursue another season of fruitless competition for her attentions, they turned their thoughts to the wall and unfamiliar chastity.
With inch-long beards in the style of a famous South Tyrolean climber, or mustaches fashionably cropped, the young men took to congregating in the town square, there to mull over the geological citadel that had begun to loom in their dreams. Tirelessly they discussed methods of reaching the woman in the stone.
Purity has odd rhythms. The distressing thing about that ‘summer of the saint,’ as Imsters still refer to it, was that the bachelors, one and all and all at the same time, turned into spiritual bridegrooms of the mysterious female. Against the unreachable beauty which the corpse in the cave represented to those stallions of Imst, Erika didn’t stand a chance. Like austere pilgrims, her former suitors suddenly abandoned Erika. When she leaned provocatively across the glass counter top at the bakery she worked for, the young men’s eyes celibately scanned the rows of bread, the pastries dusted with sugar, their own hands... surveying everything but that languorous cleavage which no one had touched yet.
Unfortunately for Erika, the woman in the cave was untouched, too, with the difference that the saint had become equated with an innocence so vast and grave that every male could aspire to be worthy of it. Ignorant of the fractures in Erika’s twentieth year, nonchalant about the lady in the mountain, Matija was noticed one day by a lonely, lovely girl who hungered with a vengeance.
Matija, shy and unadorned, had his small pretensions. I was told, for instance, that he shaved daily with an open razor just before his evening supper, and that he wore white T-shirts more religiously than an American. He preferred black
bread over white, a taste I shared with him, even though in Austrian circles black bread is considered pauper’s food. Not without a touch of pride, Matija used to wear a wool hat from Plancia, his hometown, whenever he was outdoors, even at the lumber mill where sweat and sawdust eventually discolored it. Sometimes he would run home from work, a long-legged canter that seemed much too ambitious in the eyes of the Imsters.
“What are you training for?”
And he’d stop, puzzled. “I’m just running.”
The villagers would grin and continue strolling along, leaving behind a suddenly baffled Yugoslav. My blue jeans came under similar scrutiny, I know, and my dislike for climbing with a helmet. Small idiosyncrasies operated as borders, and where there were borders there was inevitable trespass.
To the locals it was bad enough to have two lads from nearby Innsbruck almost bag the neighborhood wall, but it was downright spooky to see a Yugoslav make a shambles of the neighborhood climbs. In the course of three weekends and a national holiday, the transient systematically demolished every existing route on and around Imst, then in the following two months invented previously unthinkable lines up vertical faces and smooth slabs. The only thing that prevented him from making a second attempt on the Sun Wall and its Virgin Hole was that no one was bold enough to accompany him. A full decade later I contemplated the face myself, but it just didn’t seem worth the danger.
The face is a massive trap spring-loaded with bands of decayed schist and roofs that are propped to collapse, all oft punctuated by falling rocks that whistle from out of nowhere. For a climber this kind of senseless risk is marginally seductive. So, as horrified as the locals were, they couldn’t help but debate ways of unlocking the wall. There had to be a way. They talked all summer.
“See the voyeur?” Matija may have asked Erika late one night, as I once asked Crystal. A small gray mouse, archetypal with pink ears and round beads for eyes, continued staring back at the two naked creatures in its room. With amused solemnity Matija would have kissed Erika just as insistently as I kissed Crystal, and later, after healthily climaxing, we dropped off to sleep, not meaning to, but captured by our own warmth. It was dangerous to fall asleep because I had to be gone well before the morning turned light. But this one night we indulged ourselves. Hours later, just before dawn, there was a loud snap in the darkness.