The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (3 page)

It might be 1939 but this high up we have no heat and only kerosene lanterns for light. Our facilities are not good. Our budget is laughable. We’re engaged in a kind of research for which there are few precedents. But as Bader also likes to say, a spirit of discovery and a saving capacity for brandy in the early afternoon drives us on.

We encounter more than our share of mockery down in Davos, since your average burgher is only somewhat impressed by the notion of the complexities of snow. But together we’re now approaching the completion of a monumental work of three years: our
Snow and Its Metamorphism
, with its sections on crystallography, snow mechanics, and variations in snow cover. My mother has written that the instant it appears, she must have a copy. I’ve told her I’ll deliver it myself.

Like all pioneers we’ve endured our share of embarrassment. Bader for a time insisted on measuring the hardness of any snow-pack by firing a revolver into it, and his method was only discredited after we’d wasted an afternoon hunting for his test rounds in the snow. And on All Hallows’ Eve we shoveled the accumulation from our roof and started an avalanche that all the way down in Davos destroyed the church on the outskirts of town.

I’m hardly the only one excessively invested in our success. Haefeli at the age of eighteen lost his father in what he calls a Scale Five avalanche. As to be distinguished from, say, his Scale One or Two type, which obliterates the odd house each winter but otherwise goes unnoticed.

His Scale Five was an airborne avalanche in Glärnisch that dropped down the steeper slopes above his town with its blast
clouds mushrooming out on both sides. His father had sent him to check their rabbit traps on a higher forested slope and had stayed behind to start the cooking pot. The avalanche dropped five thousand vertical feet in under a mile and crossed the valley floor with such velocity that it exploded upward two hundred feet on the opposite hillside, uprooting spruces and alders there with such force that they pinwheeled through the air. The snow cloud afterward obscured the sun. It took ten minutes to settle while Haefeli skied frantically down into the debris. Throughout the next days’ search for survivors, there were still atmospheric effects from the amount of snow concussed into the upper atmosphere.

The rescuers found that even concrete-reinforced buildings had been pile driven flat. When he finally located a neighbor’s three-story stone house, he mistook it for a terrazzo floor.

Fifty-two homes were gone. Seventeen people were dug out of a meetinghouse the following spring, huddled together in a circle facing inward. Four hundred yards from the path of the snow, the air blast had blown the cupola off a convent tower.

But I had my own problems when it came to a good night’s sleep.

When I was a child it was general practice for Swiss schools around the Christmas holidays to have a Sport Week, during which we all hiked to mountain huts to ski. My brother, Willi, and I were nothing but agony for our harried teachers every step up the mountains and back. He was a devotee of whanging the rope tows once the class hit an especially steep and slippery part of the hillside. I did creative things with graupel or whatever other sorts of ice pellets I could collect from under roof eaves or along creek beds.

We were both in secondary school and sixteen. I’d selected the science stream and was groping my way into physics and chemistry, while he’d chosen the literary life and went about fracturing Latin and Greek. Even then, he’d surprised me: When had he
become interested in Latin and Greek? But given the kind of brothers we were, the question never arose.

I claimed to be interested in university; he didn’t. We had a father to whom such things mattered: he called us his happy imbeciles, took pride in our skiing, and liked to say with a kind of amiability during family meals that we could do what we pleased as long as it reflected well on him.

He styled himself an Alpine guide, though considering how he dressed when in town, he might as well have been the village mayor. He wore a watch fob and a homburg. He always spoke as though a stroke of fate had left him in the business of helping Englishmen scale ice cliffs, and claimed to be content only at altitudes over eleven thousand feet, but we knew him to be unhappy even there. The sole thing that seemed to please him was his weakness for homemade medicines. Willi considered him reproachful but carried on with whatever he wished, secure in our mother’s support. I followed his moods minutely, even as disinterest emanated from him like a vapor. We had one elder sister who found all of this distasteful and whose response was to do her chores but otherwise keep to her room, awaiting romances that arrived every few months via subscription.

His self-absorption left Willi impatient with experts. On our summer trek on the Eiger glacier the year before, we’d been matched for International Brotherhood Week with a hiking group from Chamonix. They spoke no German and we spoke no French, so only the teachers could converse. The French teacher at one point brought the group to a halt by cautioning us that any noise where we stood could topple the ice seracs looming above us.

Willi and I had been on glaciers since we were eight. While everyone watched, he scaled the most dangerous-looking of the seracs and, having established his balance at the top, shouted loud enough to have brought down the Eiger’s north face. “What’s
French for ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about’?” he called to our teacher as he climbed back down.

We were to base our day around one of the ski huts above Kleine Scheidegg. The village itself, on a high pass, consists of three hotels for skiers and climbers and the train station and some maintenance buildings serving the Jungfraubahn, but our group managed to lose one of our classmates there anyway—one of those boys from the remote highlands where a cowherd might spend the entire summer in a hut, with his cows and family separated only by a waist-high divider—and by the time he was located we were already an hour behind schedule. We were led by one of the schoolmistresses who held a ski instructor’s certificate and her assistant, a twenty-year-old engineering student named Jenny. They had as their responsibility fourteen boys and ten girls.

The ski run to which we were headed was, in summer, a steep climb along the edge of a dark forest broken by occasional sunlit clearings, before the trees thinned out and there were meadows where miniature butterflies wavered on willow herbs and moss campion. Above those meadows sheep and goats found their upland pastures. Above that were only rocks and the occasional ibex. There was an escarpment above the rocks that was ideal for wind-sheltered forts. We’d discovered it on our ninth birthday. Willi said it was one of those rare places where nothing could be grown or sold: one of those places the world had produced exclusively for someone’s happiness. In winter storms the wind piled snow onto it, the cornices overhanging the mountain’s flanks below. And the night before our Sport Week outing, there’d been strong westerly winds and heavy accumulation on the eastern slopes. Avalanche warning bulletins had been sent to the hotels an hour after our departure.

We spread ourselves out around the bowl of the main slope. Some of us had climbed in chaps for greater waterproofing and were still shedding them and checking our bindings when our
schoolmistress led the others down into the bowl. The postmaster’s daughter, Ruth Lindner, of whom Willi and I both retained fantasies, waited behind with us while we horsed about, setting her hands atop her poles in a counterfeit of patience. She had red hair and pale smooth skin and a habit, when laughing with us, of lowering her eyes to our mouths in a way that we found impossibly stirring.

The skiers who’d set off were already slaloming a hundred yards below. We’d been taught from the cradle that in winter, however much we thought we knew, there were always places where our ignorance and bad luck could destroy us. A heavy new snow mass above and an unstable bowl below: this was the sort of circumstance in which our father would have said: If you’re uncertain, back away.

“Race you,” I said. “
Race
me?” Willi answered. And he nosed his ski tips out over the bowl edge. “See if you can stay on your feet,” I teased, above him, and flumphed my uphill ski down into a drift.

There was a deep cutting sound like shears through heavy fabric. The snowfield split all the way across the bowl, and the entire slab, a quarter of a mile across, broke free, taking Willi with it. He was enveloped immediately. Ruth shrieked. I helped her pole herself farther back out of the bowl. The tons of snow roaring down caught the skiers below and carried them all away. One little girl managed to remain upright on a cascading wave but then she too was upended and buried, the clouds of snowdust obscuring everything else.

Guides climbing up from the hotels spread the alarm and already had the rescue under way when Ruth and I reached the debris field. The digging went on for thirty-six hours and fifteen of our classmates, including Willi and the schoolmistress, were uncovered alive. The young assistant, Jenny, and seven others were dug out as corpses. Two were still missing when the last of their family members stopped digging three weeks later.

My brother had been fifteen feet deep at the very back edge of the run-out. They found him with the sounding rod used for locating the road after heavy snowfalls. He’d managed to get his arm over his face and survived because of the resulting air pocket. A shattered ski tip near the surface had aided in his location. One of the rescuers who dug him out kept using the old saying “Such a terrible child!” for the difficulties they were encountering with the shocking density of the snow mass once it had packed in on itself. We called for Willi to not lose heart, not even sure if he was down there. Ruth dug beside me and I was taken aback by the grandeur of her panic and misery. “
Help
us,” she cried at one point, as if I weren’t digging as furiously as the rest.

He was under the snow for two hours. When his face was finally cleared, it was blue and he was unconscious but the guides revived him with a breathing tube even as he still lay trapped. And when someone covered his face with a hat to keep the snow from falling into his mouth and eyes, he shouted for it to be taken away, that he wanted air and light.

He was hurried home on a litter and spent the next two days recovering. I fed him oxtail soup, his favorite. His injuries seemed slight. He asked about Ruth. He answered our questions about how he felt but related nothing of the experience. When I questioned him in private he peered at me strangely and looked away. On the third night when we put out the lamp he seemed suddenly upset and asked not to be left alone. I said, “You’re not alone; I’m right here.” He cried out for our mother and began a horrible rattling in his throat, at which he clawed. I flew down the stair-steps to get her. By the time we returned he was dead.

The doctor called in another doctor, who called in a third. Each tramped slush through our house and drank coffee while he hypothesized and my mother trailed from room to room in his wake, tidying and weeping until she could barely stand. Their final opinion was contentious but two of the three favored delayed shock as the cause of death. The third held forth on the keys to
survival in such a situation, one being the moral and physical strength of the victim. He was thrown bodily out of the house by my father.

How should our mother have survived such a thing? The inquiry into the tragedy held that the group leaders—the schoolmistress and dead Jenny—were blameless, but the parents of the children swept away decided otherwise, and within a year the miserable and ostracized schoolmistress was forced to resign her post.

Our mother had always seemed to carry within herself some quality of calm against which adverse circumstances contended in vain, but in this case she couldn’t purge her rage at the selfishness of those whose blitheness had put the less foolhardy at risk. She received little support from my father, who refused to assign blame, so she took to calling our home “our miserable little kingdom,” and mounting what questions she could at the dinner table as if blank with fatigue.

By May, scraps from the two missing children poked through the spring melt like budding plants, and in the course of a day or two a glove, a scarf, and a ski pole turned up. Renewed digging recovered one of the little girls, her body facedown, her arms extended downhill, her back broken, and her legs splayed up and over it.

Our mother talked to everyone she considered knowledgeable about the nature of what had happened, and why. From as early as we could remember, she’d always gathered information of one kind or another. I’d never known anyone with a more hospitable mind. My sister often complained that no one could spend any time in our mother’s company without learning something. She was the sort of woman who recorded items of interest in a journal kept in her bedroom, and she joked to our father when teased about it that it represented a store of observations that would someday be more systematically confirmed as scientific research. Why did one snowfall of a given depth produce avalanches when
another did not? Why was the period of maximum danger those few hours immediately following the storm? Why might any number of people cross a slope in safety only to have some other member of their party set the disaster in motion? She remembered from childhood a horrible avalanche in her grandmother’s village: a bridge and four houses had been destroyed and a nine-year-old boy entombed in his bed, still clutching his cherished stuffed horse.

She spent more time with me as her preoccupation intensified. There was no one else. Her daughter had grown into a long, thin adult with a glum capacity for overwork and no interest in the business of the world. We had few visitors, but if one overstayed his welcome my sister would twist her hair and wonder audibly, as if interrogating herself, “Why doesn’t he leave? Why doesn’t he leave?”

One early morning I found my mother on my bed. When she saw I was awake, she remarked that Willi’s shoulders had been so broad that it made him appear shorter than he was. “And mine, too,” I said. “And yours, too,” she smiled. Somewhere far away a dog was barking as if beside itself with alarm.