You Think That's Bad (28 page)

And each time I returned with a body so devastated it never fully restored itself. Agnieszka told her girlfriends that she called my first weeks back the Famine Zombie Weeks. My vertebrae and hipbones were anatomy lessons. I was able to focus on emotional issues only when she put a hand on each side of my face and redirected my gaze into her eyes.

At our airport reunions, after her relief and joy, I'd see her anger at what I'd done to myself flood through her like a third revelation.

I'd met her at a faux-English pub in Warsaw. Most of us met our wives at one climbers' drinking hole or another. But I'd had good timing: it turned out she'd just come from a co-worker's retirement party at which she'd heard him joke about the number of years he'd worked at his bureau—more than she'd been alive—and then estimate the actual number of staff meetings he'd attended and evaluations he'd filed. A horrified silence had settled over the party, she said, and she'd decided then and there to quit. The pub had been the first one she'd encountered. When she asked what I did, I told her I climbed the highest mountains in the world in the winter. We went home together that same night.

She had some idea what she was getting herself into, she told me that first night while we spooned and she smoothed her hands together along my erection. Her brother had been a rock climber and mountaineer.

I'd failed to pursue the subject because she'd by then fitted me into her with a tenderness and calm I'd previously associated only with the afterlife. “Shhh,” she whispered at the force of my response. “Look.” And she brought her mouth around to mine. She meant, “Look how comprehensively we've merged.” She didn't have to tell me: I was already so confounded that for an hour after she fell asleep I perched naked on her chest of drawers peering down at her like a traveler who'd found water on Mars.

As a child I'd been such an aberration in inwardness and appearance that my classmates had christened me the White Crow. My first years of schooling had been traumatic and I withdrew from any social situation in which I felt maligned. Climbing had been my way out. My aptitude for math and science had won me some recognition and I'd been invited to join the geology section of the Young Pioneers, and the field trips to the mountains had begun there. There I learned about rope and free climbing, about weather and snow conditions. But I still was valued only for what I
could
do:
my mentor on those trips used to say that our relationship thrived on my achievements.

I'd been three hours late for our first dinner together and Agnieszka had already eaten and gone about her evening. She warmed up my portion after I arrived. “You aren't angry?” I asked. “You've already eaten?”

“Why would I be angry?” she answered, looking up from her book. “And why wouldn't I have eaten?”

She told me the first time I left for an eight-thousand-meter mountain that she wasn't going to become one of those women her brother's friends used to pity: the climber's girlfriend, left moping at home. On the radio telephone from Annapurna I complimented her on her poise when we'd kissed goodbye. She said, “You should have seen me once you were out of sight.”

And now what does she have? She and Wanda are home alone most of the time in Mielec. Mielec is famous as the place in southern Poland where hope goes to expire. “Is it
so
bad?” her mother asked, before she first came to visit, and Agnieszka found she couldn't bring herself to answer. “It's astonishing that you grew up here,” she likes to tell me. “Or maybe it's not.” At town meetings, after the first three hours on economic growth we sometimes get to the fouled water table or the air pollution.

Mielec had a big Jewish community, which of course was wiped out in the war. It features the largest aviation factory in Poland, where we both work. For tourists, there's the minor basilica of Matthew the Evangelist, which is ugly. For football we have FKS Stal Mielec, a perennial third-division also-ran. We have a sister city in the Ukraine that I'm told is every bit as demoralizing. There's a water park. Potholes aren't the problem they used to be. And around our three-room house, we have enough land fenced off for a kitchen garden and a pygmy orchard.

In Islamabad we were informed about the extra expense of the bond that had to be posted for the possibility of a helicopter rescue,
which was particularly maddening since we'd be operating nearly the entire time above a helicopter's ceiling. It's no wonder so many teams press on for the summits even in insanely dangerous circumstances, given that each year the cost of climbing in the Himalayas becomes more and more prohibitive. The highest mountains are now lucrative commercial concerns. On our last day in the city Kolesniak showed us our expedition's revised bank account, which was a disheartening sight. We now had enough to get to the mountain and climb it, though not enough, technically, to get back home.

We'd chosen the Kinshofer Route on the mountain's Diamir Face, which meant a longer trek across the glaciers to our Base Camp. At the little town where we hired our porters the usual gaggle assembled outside our hotel, some having walked from villages fifty kilometers away, and Kolesniak did the selecting by eye. He said he used to check all candidates with a stethoscope but then discovered that most had blood-curdling noises coming from their lungs and others apparently had no hearts in their chests. From there we all jounced for six hours along a muddy and narrow road through brilliant light. At curves along the Indus Gorge the lead driver would stop and beckon us all out to look over the edge, down the cliffs to the river below. At one hairpin he kept gesturing into a ravine whose drop was so severe that none of us would look.

Besides Kolesniak, Jacek, and myself, Poland's banner is held aloft by Nowakowski and Leszek, two old campaigners, and Bieniek, a late replacement none of us know very well. Nowakowski's the sort of legend who on one seven-mile hike into a Base Camp stunned all of those who hadn't been able to maintain his pace by producing an entire watermelon from his backpack to share upon arrival. They call him Filthy N because he refuses to wash even weeks after an expedition has ended. A woman he once tried to pick up in a bar at first refused to believe the smell was his. Only the year before Leszek had all the amputations on his right hand, and with his damaged toes couldn't entertain hopes of a summit, though he thought he might get as far as seven thousand meters,
depending upon how his older frostbitten areas held up at altitude. He claimed that nearly all of his preparation was psychological, by which he meant last-minute parties, all-night binges, and as much sex as the women around him would allow. On his last night in Warsaw he threw up over the balcony onto a pizza delivery boy and then tumbled over the railing to follow. The boxes broke his fall.

Poor Bieniek seems not to know what to make of us. He's a quiet young man whose wrist alarm features a digital recording of his son's voice, wishing him a good morning and exhorting him to come back safely.

Jacek I got to know in the Young Pioneers. We both suffered from childhood asthma, not unusual for climbers, perhaps because lungs stressed by the affliction become better conditioned to process oxygen later in life. We instantly became adept at egging each other on when it came to risks. On one of the field trips we celebrated his sixteenth birthday by abandoning the bus that was supposed to return us to the city, to see if we could walk back through the forests. We arrived five days later, having survived on berries and two loaves of bread. We'd asked a friend to tell our poor parents we'd gone camping.

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.