by Jeff Long
“Oh,” murmured Crystal, half rearing up with the quilt to her chest. “The stove is dropping ashes.” But it wasn’t the stove, it was her mousetrap. Our voyeur was dead. As if by design his tiny life had been given to wake us. I marked that moment as a magic one, despite the fact that while I dressed, Crystal matter-of-factly emptied the trap with the same hands she’d been touching me with, and then reset the deadly mechanism for its next victim. If only Matija and I had paid more attention to such inauspicious perceptions.
The summer of the virgin was a breathless one, unusual for the mercy it showed. It wasn’t without threats, but as if by virtue of ‘their’ saint the threats remained distant ones. The weather was unstable, for one thing, and the farmers were nervous about their crops. As it turned out, they pulled in a respectable harvest just days before the massive freeze in late September. One of the big wedging machines at the lumber mill broke down and for a while it looked like several of the workers would be laid off. Somehow a local machinist persuaded the machine to operate until the season was finished. Most threatening of all was the continuing possibility of a police investigation into the cave on Sun Wall.
Dead people have a way of turning up in the mountains. It’s not unusual for solitary mountaineers or German tourists, or sometimes a herder caught by late spring avalanches, to show up months or years after their accidents. But the discovery of the female on Sonnenspitze was different. Her location was sensational, her identity a complete mystery. She might have been an incredible suicide or the victim of a climbing murder, the police allowed, or maybe even the grisly remnants of an espionage operation during the last war. The constable sternly insisted that sooner or later he was going to get around to a full scale investigation, but he never had the opportunity.
Matija probably asked for nothing more than the covert security of Erika’s room and her touch, never taking the time to consider the indignities of tiptoeing across strawberry plants in order to crawl through a window, I know I never did. I only had thoughts for the facade Crystal and I covered ourselves with.
With my sleep cut by half it was only a matter of a fortnight or so before delirium took over. What felt like love, totally pervasive, dreamlike and warm, was in good part plain old exhaustion. The nights took on an invincible tone. It seemed that Crystal and I were surrounded in the daytime by fugitives and liars, that the deception wasn’t ours but everyone else’s.
We talked about running off to Greece and marooning ourselves on the beach of a random island, leaving Imst to stew in its suspicions. But for Crystal such talk was simply one more excitement in the overall adventure. She wasn’t about to sail off into never-never-land with an American pauper. She’d risked as much as she was going to by having me in her room. I should have guessed, but lying there with her soft body in my arms, I took her at her word. I prepared to make our escape.
Matija’s midnight love couldn’t have gone much differently. There’s a pattern to these things: darkness, whispers, a flurry of bold regrets prefaced by ‘if only,’ and dispassionate masquerades after the sun had risen. You don’t need wine to get drunk in a situation like that. Matija must have been just as disoriented as l was, consumed by the night, testing the fabric of each dawn with tired caution. I felt practically transcendent. I’d gone from being the oddball American who ate black bread and wore blue jeans to being a clandestine lover, possessing Crystal like a secret. I had, it seemed, penetrated the village.
Confident of the risks involved, trusting nothing but his nocturnal senses and his lover, Matija continued to visit Erika’s bedroom by night and turn trees into planks of lumber by day. Surely by late September he’d grown used to the prejudices of the village and had begun to understand the pride with which the lovely saint was coveted. Erika probably talked about it herself, and may on occasion have wished out loud that she, too, could have her purity back. With early snows impending, the season was nearly ended. Matija was collecting a final few schillings for his escape with Erika when love showed its true face.
Two months of midnights had passed without incident. Stealing across the stone fence, Matija dodged through the withered strawberry patch and arrived at Erika’s window. By habit he stuffed his wool hat into his jacket pocket, so there would be no chance of his forgetting it in Erika’s room, then he reached up and tapped at her window. There was no answer.
He tapped a second time. I sometimes had to repeat myself, too, while huddling in the shadows beneath Crystal’s window box. The linen curtains parted. I don’t have to imagine the nausea he felt when a bearded face, it doesn’t matter whose, appeared behind the glass. The most hideous part was that it smiled just before drawing the curtains shut again. We fled.
I’ve seen Erika. Two children and ten years have marked her beauty with slight laugh lines and a double chin, otherwise it is the same Erika. There’s no way of knowing if she regretted betraying Matija’s trust. She may never have entertained the possibility of his love in the first place. But I like to think that for part of that morning after, while she picked hot rolls and pretzels from the bins and dropped them in white sacks for the customers, she felt a twinge of sorrow. If Erika cared even that much, the village didn’t care at all.
It was by now the end of the summer and most of the laborers had returned to Yugoslavia and Italy. The mill’s owner certainly didn’t mope over the sudden disappearance of one more of his foreign workers, especially since this one had neglected to pick up his last paycheck. Such was the stuff of village jokes about foreigners.
It was four days later in the town square, while a politician from Ehrwald stubbornly touted himself with a PA system and boxes of campaign buttons, that Matija turned up once again. More precisely he was located disturbingly high overhead, hovering in the pink alpenglow on the Sun Wall. First a drowsy trombone player in the local band, then a plump Frau with late summer marigolds in one hand and a tether to her cow in the other, and then others, all the others... looked up towards the cave of their whore-turned-virgin and discerned not one black dot but two, the unfamiliar dot still several inches below their holy cave. No one could believe their eyes until it was plain that everyone was seeing the same thing. A climber was approaching their cave.
Just as stunning, the climber was alone. Soon an educated murmur had bolted through the crowd, identifying the dot as that Yugoslav, Matija. It was a safe deduction, he was the one man capable of soloing the wall. But why was he doing it? The politician continued enunciating his promises to the rapt audience without the slightest idea that, several thousand feet behind and above his makeshift podium, Matija was serenely stealing his thunder.
Those several inches separating Matija from the cave were in fact several hundred feet of treacherous stone, meaning he had a good six to ten hours more of climbing. He wouldn’t reach the cave until next day at the earliest, but to the good people of Imst it was just inches or less that separated their saint from desecration. That fear was poisonously immediate, for Matija was, ad infinitum, not of the town of Imst. He was unpredictable, an animal possessed by God knows what kind of chaotic reasoning. It’s not hard to see how tales of dragons and ogres managed to thrive in the midst of such xenophobia. No one allowed that maybe he was climbing up to see for himself, to confirm what no one else could seem to. Or maybe he was climbing to the cave simply to genuflect and continue on to the summit. No one granted him the slightest benefit of his character.
Instead, the villagers reacted with doubt and loathing. A Yugoslav, it was whispered, was capable of many things. He might push the body to the ground or ink his signature on her sacred flesh as proof that he’d been there. Alone, the animal could do anything, even foul the vulnerable corpse with his carnal touch or, if he was short of food, try to eat it.
Emergency sessions of every sort were announced; the village mayor discussed with his council and the walking club debated, and the firemen agreed that their saint was in imminent danger. While the people prayed that God would ward Matija away from their
cave, Erika kept her rosy mouth shut.
There are still a few believers in Imst who will tell you that the storm which rose up that same night is enduring proof of some miraculous element, be it saint or symbol. As the story goes, nothing from the Innsbruck weather station to old Hansjorg’s infallible prostate gland had predicted the swollen ice clouds that engulfed the stars and swallowed the upper two-thirds of the Sun Wall.
Next morning when the villagers looked through roughly melted circles on their frosty windows, they saw every house and street encased in a single, all-encompassing sheet of transparent ice. Everything had turned into a glass replica of itself, not only houses but animals too. Horses died that night, soaked with rain and then frozen solid by the terrible cold. The mountain was hidden from view by the clouds, but there wasn’t the slightest doubt that it was lacquered with a cold sheet of verglas too. Matija, it was broadly surmised, couldn’t possibly have survived.
The villagers were well satisfied with this meteorological retribution; it reinforced the sanctity of their virgin in the wall, exposing a great protector who held His hand over the small secrets of the world. Under the guise of a mass held for Matija’s dubious survival, the villagers celebrated sweet justice. Father Weissbrod could barely conduct the mass. Instead of delivering the sermon, he gave a wink that everyone understood.
For days the strangely persistent clouds hung over the mountain and its town. The Imsters stayed close to their ovens, only venturing out for precarious walks to the grocery store or to the Hoffhaus for gossip. The rescue climbers speculated with lurid detail about what condition Matija’s body would be in when they finally recovered it. As to how they would retrieve the Yugoslav’s corpse from the face, none could finally decide.
At last the weather unknotted its deathly fist. The clouds thinned, the streets thawed. Exactly five days after the Imsters had first seen Matija nearing the cave, the mountain surfaced. Everyone looked toward the wall and with a gasp saw just one solitary dot, the mouth of the cave. Fresh consternation broke out. The rescue climbers immediately set off for the base of the wall to try and find the mangled Yugoslav, his rope crystallized around his waist. He wasn’t there. Immediately four of the fastest men were dispatched to hike up the back way to the summit, where it was hoped Matija may have struggled before expiring. He wasn’t there either.
That left one last place. But suddenly it seemed all right that he was there. Matija must indeed have reached the cave, he must have died in the presence of the saint. With a spontaneous change of heart the villagers instantly preferred this version of the story, it invested the tale with a rustic integrity. Matija had turned to the eternal virgin in the cave, risked all, and reached her with his last breath. That was adoration. It was a perfectly religious ending. But it wasn’t the end.
For a week, then two weeks, the rescue climbers just couldn’t get to the cave. They tried to go down on long ropes, but the wall was too overhung, and after a few timid false starts they quit trying to climb up. At last they contacted the national rescue team in Innsbruck, which in turn sent up a helicopter. While the helicopter hovered a few meters away from the wall, a volunteer swung back and forth on the very tip of a rope tied to the struts. After a dozen misses, he finally managed to pendulum right into the cave’s mouth. Even before he scrambled to his feet inside the cave, he’d found Matija’s wool hat.
All alone in this deathly place, with the irregular thunder of rotor blades reminding him of his lifeline back to safety, the rescue man probed the gloom with his headlamp. Starting at the front of the cave, he explored back into the deepest recess. There was no Yugoslav. But deep in the rear, blanketed with shadows, lay that other body. It was well preserved, and as the Innsbruck boy had said, it was clearly female. With great reverence the man knelt down and turned the woman’s body over.
Now, having visited the museum in Vienna, I feel sorry for that rescue climber who expected a mask of unearthly beauty and found instead what is now sealed in airtight glass and labeled the Virgin of Imst. It’s still a mystery how she got up there in the first place, and a mystery, too, where Matija disappeared to. Back to Plancia, I guess.
The message of the Virgin doesn’t lie in the scars that her people carved into her face as a child, nor in the oddly delicate hand with its fingers curled just so. There’s real poignancy to those tiny white flowers woven into her black hair despite the huge brow, but the message isn’t there, either. It lies for me in that instant Matija turned the virgin saint over and found the face of a Neanderthal girl. I still miss Crystal in a way, but like Matija, I’ve realized that there’s nothing more to say.
The Ice Climber
“The ice had absorbed the memory of them.”
Author Note
We came with hubris in mind, to boldly go where we didn’t belong and trespass upon our fears. Made of the legendary Rocky Mountain Spring Water in Coors beer ads, our icefall was short and sweet, maybe sixty-feet high. It was all ours, par for the course back when Boulder’s ice climbing population numbered about twelve.
Thanks to Jeff, Mike and Greg Lowe, I owned a pair of newly invented Foot Fangs. The very look of them, space age silver with double rows of front teeth, filled me with bravado. Brimming with heroic gumption, I meant to climb a small, overhanging forest of icicles near the top.
They called my partner, Steve Mullen, “Grieve” for the joyous grief he visited on one and all. He was a jester for all seasons, the kind of guy you wanted on a big mountain. While he geared up, I took a side path to the top. The streambed lay flat as a mirror, then plunged into the shadows below. I set an overkill anchor with three ice screws, tossed a rope end down to Grieve, clipped in, and sat on the streambed. We had intended to top-rope it from the bottom, but belaying from the top was safer.
Grieve’s head soon appeared over the edge. It was my turn. I left Grieve sitting on the streambed by the anchor, sorting out coils. “Keep me tight,” I told him, “I’m going for broke.” He made a crack, something like, “Newsflash: big guy proves gravity, drops like an apple, so what.”
The rope was waiting for me at the base. I tied in, climbed to the overhang, and went to work among the icicles. Instructing myself to use a delicate touch, break no icicles, and top out with a smile, I fell.
No problem, it was all covered. Falling was built into the plan. Indeed, it was the plan. Grieve would catch me. I’d return to the ice, plant the tools, and probably fall again. But time suddenly stretched to a long, slow crawl. My body was recognizing something my mind had not caught up with. I was falling for real. A tug of the rope gave me hope, only to renege. It astonished me. Game over… on such a pipsqueak of a thing? And then, fade to black.
I woke draped in rope coils with the ice at my back and the sky at my feet. Odder still, Grieve had decided to join me. He sat propped against the ice, asleep and, stranger still, upside down. A car passed on the far side of the river shards, upside down as well.
I didn’t want to move. The morning was so peaceful and uncomplicated. Nothing hurt, yet. A little nap would be nice. A little cogitation.
Once upon a time there was a sophist named Bishop Berkeley who declared the universe was nonexistent, and that the world was whatever we conceived it to be. Nowadays he might be a novelist. Or cult leader. Or a member of the Tea Party. A bit further south in that same English countryside, a curmudgeon named Samuel Johnson thundered that the world was an objective fact. When asked to prove Berkeley was wrong, Johnson answered, “I refute him thus,” and kicked a large rock.
Call it the curse of a philosophy major. As I lay there, my only thought was this: Berkeley or Johnson? Their debate blocked all forward motion. Had I just died? Like the hanged soldier in Ambrose Bierce’s short story “Incident at Owl Bridge,” was I only imagining my survival? Or had I actually survived the fall and landed pain-free in an upside-down world? Was I gaming the system with a fiction, or had I just kicked the rock?
Grieve’s eyes fluttered open. He frowned at me from
the nest of rope on his shoulders. “Whoa,” he said. “I know,” I said. He whispered it again, “whoa.”
“Why are you like that,” he asked. He drew a semi-circle in the air. That helped. I slid sideways and the world righted itself. I was bleeding from a cut on one arm. My white T-shirt was soaked. Where had my sweater gone? There, where I had parked it on a bush while I climbed.
Stunned, we sat side by side like characters in Waiting for Godot, killing time until whatever came next came. I saw my car on the roadside, and wished it would come get me. We were starting to feel the injuries, Grieve in his knee, me in my shoulder and arm. Part of a bone had broken loose in my elbow. Our heads ached.
Meanwhile we recreated the fall. Grieve remembered that he had forgotten to clip into the anchor. When I fell, the rope had yanked him toward the edge. Anyone else would have let go. Not Grieve. Sledding on his butt, he held on, took the ride, and woke up next to me. The slice on my arm came from his crampons.
A car slowed on the road. A man and woman got out. We were saved. Grieve waved. The man lifted his camera and took a picture of us. They hopped back into their car and drove off. “Whoa,” said Grieve. “Don’t worry,” I said as much to myself as him, “that didn’t happen.”
We sat there some more. The shadows grew bluer, the snow by my boots pinker. Another car stopped. A man and woman got out, took a picture, and drove off. “Whoa”, said Grieve. I was too scared to reply.