The Fall (45 page)

“What happens if they can’t get in?” I asked.

Sigi shrugged. “If we cannot get off we do
abseil.
Maybe they get someone down to us from the summit. Maybe we get down on the, how do you say?
Bügeleisen?”

“Flatiron.”

“Right. It is easier there. Let us hope it is not necessary.”

We waited. Time, the relative dimension, played its trick of moving at different speeds simultaneously: the wait seemed interminable,
and yet the precious daylight hours sped by. What was happening? The helicopter stuttered away into the distance and alighted
like an insect at the Männlichen Station, which lies beyond and above Kleine Scheidegg. Were they refueling? I think perhaps
I prayed, but exactly to what I am not sure. I thought about Jamie, of course. I thought about Ruth, and I thought about Eve.
Somehow I needed Eve at that moment. She was detached from all this, cynical about it, an atheist confronted with the religion
of climbing. And I was fast losing my own faith.

Sigi was talking to the radio again, communing with salvation. We watched the helicopter take off again. I remember the elevation
of hope like a physical sensation, as though I was being tossed high into the air, a transport. “Is it coming?” I asked. “Is
it coming?” It might have been ecstasy, orgasm.

“Maybe. The wind is less, but with less wind the cloud comes down maybe.”

“Let’s hope not.”

Whether my prayers were answered or not I have no means of telling; one never does. But the wind must have dropped, for suddenly
the helicopter rose up toward the Face, coming closer and closer until it was directly above us, bucking and rocking in the
wind. A shower of spindrift and ice came down. The racket was all around us, and Sigi was shouting into his radio in rapid,
staccato German. A cable descended, a thread that swirled in the downdraft from the rotor blades, a hairline between life
and death. Sigi leaned forward and fished with his ridiculous ski pole.
“Lose,”
he called.
“Lose.”
Some part of me, stunned with morphine and remote from all this, realized that he was calling for slack — “Loose, loose,” he
was saying.

And then he had fished the cable. He pulled it toward us. “Release!” he shouted to me. “Release!”

I fumbled at the single carabiner that held me. Somehow I snapped it open and unclipped it. For a dreadful moment I was detached
from everything, sliding forward into space off our perch, tied neither to the mountain nor to the stuttering helicopter.
And then Sigi had clipped the cable onto my harness and was shouting
“Gehen wir!
Let’s go!” and the cable sprung tight and I was snatched into the void, spinning up under the red underbelly of the helicopter
as it tilted away from the rock. I saw down. I saw down onto my miserable little ledge, with its chaos of slings and rope
and Sigi standing there waving. Besides that detritus of climbing and that solitary rescuer, something else was left behind
on that ledge, something less substantial: my love, precarious at best, of the whole business of mountaineering.

The cable whirred me upward. The ledge shrank so that it was no longer a discernible feature of the mountain, just a blemish
on the gray fortress cliffs above the Traverse of the Gods. I saw the runnels and gullies below it, the great diagonal slash
of the Ramp and the nameless cliffs beneath, down to the gray scree and the green fields where the cattle grazed. I felt no
fear. This was surrender, and surrender is beyond fear. The red belly of the helicopter came nearer, and then hands were grabbing
me and I was being bundled into the rattling coffin of the fuselage.

“Is
gut,
no?” someone yelled above the racket of the engine. “Is
gut?”

“Is very good,” I cried as they lifted me onto a stretcher and arranged my legs. “What about Sigi?”

“We get him. Or maybe we leave him to climb down.” There was raucous laughter at the idea.

Memory gives little away beyond the sensations of sound and movement, the hands lifting me, the rattle of the helicopter.
A few moments later and the winch was whirring again and Sigi’s face appeared at the lip of the door, grinning and shouting.
I couldn’t even hear what he said. I was barely aware of the motion of climb and descent and a leaden return to earth. I was
half drugged, exhausted, let down by the sudden collapse of adrenaline. People leaned over me. Ruth’s face was pinned among
them like a rag hung on a line. She was in tears. “Where’s Jamie?” she kept saying. “Where’s Jamie?” There was the thrashing
sound of rain and wind, a clap of thunder.

Lights and faces and the clatter of feet on concrete, and the helicopter lifting off again, pitching and shuddering in the
wind. There was a steep descent down into the valley, down into the warmth of morphine-induced sleep.

I
DREAMED.
Of hybrid beasts that were Ruth and Jamie, Eve and Eiger. I knew terror and contentment, as well as the third member of the
triangle, metamorphosis, one thing transformed into another: fear into happiness, pain into ecstasy, ignorance into profound
knowledge. I awoke to a white room and a view out of the window of forested slopes and lowering clouds, the color, exactly,
of a bruise. Rain was running down the windowpane. There was the dyspeptic grumble of thunder somewhere on the floor above.

“Where am I?”

A nurse looked up. “You are awake,” she said, which wasn’t exactly answering my question. She was doing something at my feet.
The blanket was raised over my leg by some sort of cage. “Where am I?” Fragments of the last few days came back to me, sensations
mainly: the cold and the noise of wind, a sense of desolation, hurrying the dreams away.

“You are in hospital.”

“Obviously.”

“Interlaken.”

Then memory came crowding back, a convulsion of memory, of noise and motion and fear. “Where is my friend?”

“Freund?”

“Yes. Where is he?”

She shrugged. I watched her work for a moment. Above me, like an exclamation mark in the sterile room, was a stand holding
an intravenous drip. The tube snaked down and into my arm. “What have they done?”

“I will get the doctor.”

“Tell me what they’ve done. I want to know what they’ve done.”

She straightened up, a lumpish girl who, in another era, would have tended cows on some Swiss pasture. She frowned at not
knowing the English. “They have tried to make your leg good. And your…” She shrugged helplessly.
“Zehen.”

“My what?”

“The fingers of your foot.”

“My toes?”

“You have frozen.”

The doctor came shortly afterward. He was almost fluent in English, a small, dark man who seemed faintly amused by the things
he found around him. “My brave almost conqueror of the Eigerwand,” he greeted me.

“What happened to my friend?” I asked.

“They found him on the West Flank.”

“Found him?”

“Oh, he is living,” he said with a laugh, as though survival was some kind of joke. “He was living and coming down. He had
made
Biwak.”

“Bivouac?”

“Coming down, he had made bivouac on the west side. He is all right. He is very brave.” The doctor smiled. “The newspapers
say so. Some of them.”

Jealousy crawled like vermin through my mind. I confess to impure thoughts, about death and survival, about revenge and retribution.
I didn’t admit it at the time, of course — not even to myself. “My foot hurts,” I said.

“We have taken away the morphine. If it gets too bad…” I liked the morphine. I liked the comfort and the dreams. “About your
foot,” the doctor was saying. “We will have to wait and see. We are treating the condition — it is important that you do not
smoke — and we will just see how it goes.” He pulled the blanket and sheet aside to show my foot inside its cage. It was swollen
and discolored and blistered, the toes like rotting vegetables.

“Christ alive!”

“Perhaps it is not as bad as it looks. It is difficult to tell at the early stages. You are lucky that they got you off when
they did. The weather has closed right down. You would still be up there now…”

“What’ll happen?”

He shrugged, Gallic rather than German. “We will see. The only real cure for frostbite is time. You were unlucky. The break
affected the blood circulation in the foot, which did not help. But now you are perhaps in good hands.”

“Will I lose toes?”

“That we will see with time.”

“Time?”

“Weeks. Maybe as much as eight.”

“Two months!
For Christ’s sake! And my leg?”

“Oh, the fracture is nothing. For the moment we have immobilized, but once the edema in the foot is down we can set the leg.
Here we mend fractured legs like dentists fill teeth.” It was a practiced joke. He had said it to hundreds, maybe thousands
of skiing casualties.

Jamie came that afternoon, together with Ruth. He looked rough — his face battered by ultraviolet and frost, his chin smeared
with a four-day growth of stubble, his expression wary and suspicious. They stood at the foot of the bed and asked how the
hell I was and thanked God I was okay and that kind of thing.

I felt the aftershock of fear translated fluently into anger. “You left me, Jamie,” I said. “You fucking abandoned me to complete
the fucking route.”

“I was going for help, Rob. You know that.”

I couldn’t control what was inside me. It was like the anger of a little child, the stuff that comes up from inside you without
your being able to control it, like vomit. “You deserted me. You just up and left me.”

He shook his head. “I had an epic climbing out, I can tell you; I fucked up on the descent. It was almost dark, and I went
too far over to the left and ended up buggering around on the upper part of the glacier. And then I was avalanched and had
to bivvy in a crevasse, for God’s sake…”

As Sigi had said, it was Ruth who had called out the rescue. She’d seen my light on the face, the six long flashes, the distress
signal that we’d mentioned to her in passing almost as though it was a joke, something that happened to other people. There’d
been a gap in the cloud, and she’d been looking up and she saw the light.

“If they hadn’t got you off then, you’d still be up there,” Jamie said. “They’d be bringing your body down next week. Ruth
saved your life, Rob.”

She smiled wryly. “Thanks,” I said to her, not finding much else to say. She came around the bed and bent down toward me and
kissed me on the cheek.
“Cariad,”
she said. For some reason that I couldn’t fathom, I resented her. I had seen her standing naked against the lake and the
hills. I had held her in my arms. I had loved her. Unexpressed emotion changes into something else, is that it? Love into
hate, gratitude into resentment.

We talked around the whole thing for a bit, going around in circles that were bent and distorted and deformed; then we fell
silent, all three aware that something, some bond that held us together as a trio, had snapped. Like a rope. Survival had
destroyed us more surely than the spinning of some bloody silly coin. I wondered if she knew. I wondered if he had told her,
or would tell her.

“Well, at least Jamie climbed the bloody Face,” I said.

“So would you have, Rob. You can’t fight an avalanche. Think what would have happened if one like that had hit me afterward.”

“They’d be scraping you off the scree at the bottom.”

“They’d be putting me in bags.”

We laughed, but there was nothing there any longer, no shared laughter, no shared affection — we just laughed at the same time.
He had left me, that’s what I felt, and no amount of reasoning could alter the fact.

Later, a couple of the rescue team came to visit, Sigi and the helicopter pilot. Sigi grinned like a little boy. “We were
lucky,”

he said. “You don’t know how lucky. Ueli here thought he wouldn’t get back to us.”

Ueli smiled and nodded.
“Der wind. Stark, stark,”
he kept saying, while making movements with his hand, like a child playing at aeroplanes.

“He thought the weather would close us in,” Sigi explained. “You imagine down rope from that place in a storm? With your leg?
You imagine…”