The Fall (40 page)

So we went on: a traverse leftward and then up a chimney and upward over broken ledges. An old fixed rope hung down the so-called
Difficult Crack. The crack was easy enough, like a climb in the Ogwen Valley, no more than Severe. At the top, at the foot
of the Rote Fluh (the Red Wall) we paused again to look. Below us the ground fell away to distant meadows, where there was
sunshine and warmth, and a vast slanting wedge of shadow — a mile of darkness cast down the hillside by the mountain itself.
The incongruous sound of cowbells drifted up in the afternoon air. We could see the railway track descending toward the little
station of Alpiglen and then, far below to the right, in the very bottom of the valley, the buildings of Grindelwald. Directly
above us was the Red Wall. It isn’t red: it’s only a pallid flesh color, streaked and stained like dirt in grazed skin. From
a distance it seems a tiny feature in the whole Face, a mere blemish; yet it rose vertically above us now for almost a thousand
feet. You try to fix your own dimensions. You try and get things in some kind of perspective — the Red Wall alone is the height
of the Orion Face of Ben Nevis, but it is a mere plague spot on the face of the Ogre.

“No one else around,” Jamie said with satisfaction. “
Wir
are
allein!”

“Is that a good thing?”

“It means we won’t have to fight over a bivvy site with a bunch of Krauts.”

“It might mean that everyone else thinks the Face is out of condition.”

He shrugged. “Looks okay to me.” We turned back to the business of the climb, edging leftward beneath the Rote Fluh toward
the center of the Face. There were pegs crammed into cracks, bunches of old, used slings, and then a rope in place, hanging
in swags across a stretch of blank slab. The exposure was sudden and dramatic. The rock hung down in a smooth curtain, pale
and compact; beneath it there was nothing — space, a void, a vertiginous emptiness.

“This the Hinterstoisser Traverse?”

“Must be.”

We paused on the brink and contemplated it. You can’t avoid it. You can’t avoid the story any more than you can avoid the
traverse itself. In the summer of 1936, Andreas Hinterstoisser had tiptoed across this smooth slab, tensioning on a rope to
balance, pulling sideways on the few holds that he found. It was the key pitch to get out from under the Rote Fluh and into
the center of the Face, the crux of the route that he was prospecting with his three companions. On the far side he fixed
the rope, and the others — Edi Rainer, Willy Angerer, Toni Kurz — followed across easily, using the rope as a handrail. Then they
retrieved the rope and pushed on upward. Three days later, when they were retreating in a storm with one of their number injured,
they might have reversed this pitch had they left the rope in place. As it was, they couldn’t. As it was, they died.

“Kurz — he dead.” And Rainer and Angerer and Hinterstoisser. And Sedlmayer and Mehringer. And fifty others. The Face is a playground
and a cemetery and a memorial. Its history is an obituary.

I clipped into one of the pegs and belayed Jamie while he climbed down and grabbed the fixed rope. “What’s it look like?”

“Fairly good.” He swung out and down, his boots scuffing against the rock as he pulled himself along. It took only a few minutes
to reach the other side and belay. The rope sagged like an old washing line beneath my weight when I followed. I envisaged
it snapping; I wondered about its age; I wondered about how hard the pitch would have been to climb free; I wondered why I
was there. Jamie grinned at me as I came across. “Piece of piss, eh, Dewar?” He was tempting the gods that rule the place,
and I wished he wouldn’t. They are pagan, Nordic gods, and they kill without compunction.

Beyond the traverse, a short chimney led up to a bivouac site: the Swallow’s Nest, perched beneath the eaves of the mountain.
Out of the shadows of the Rote Fluh, we were in the warmth of the afternoon sunshine. There was a fugitive sensation of safety
and contentment. We could take our helmets off and rub our heads and sit in comfort to look at the view. We could brew a cup
of tea and prepare for supper. We could smile around at the place — the plunging spaces, the shabby gray scaffolding of the
mountain, the small splinters of rock that we kicked from beneath our feet — and, despite everything, feel a little bit in love
with it and with each other. There is something old-fashioned about climbing. It lets in emotions that one does not readily
admit to any longer: companionship, commitment, even love. I wondered how Jamie’s father would have felt if he could have
seen the two of us there, sitting at the Swallow’s Nest, one third of the way up the Eigerwand. For an ephemeral moment, I
thought about how much I loved Jamie and Ruth and Eve and the whole world.

We had some food, and when it was dark we shined a flashlight in the direction of the lights of Kleine Scheidegg, hoping that
Ruth would see us and know that we were okay, but whether there was an answering light we couldn’t be sure. Then Jamie turned
to me. He’d been thinking about her, just as I had. I suppose he’d been trying to find the right moment. It was easier in
the dark. “About Ruth.”

I swallowed something. “What about her?”

He was silent for a moment, hunched in his down jacket, smoking a cigarette. Apart from the soughing of the wind, there was
no sound up there on our stony ledge. Then he touched me. In the darkness he put out his hand and touched me on the shoulder
almost as if to confirm the fact of my presence there on the ledge beside him. Perhaps he was even trying to comfort me, although
surely it was he who needed comfort. And I felt like a child again, as we had been all those years ago with Bethan around
the back of the garden shed. I felt the sympathy in his touch, the sympathy in his look, as though he were a parent to me.
“Are you in love with her?”

“Yes, I suppose I am.”

“And what about Eve?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, Jamie. Eve as well. I just don’t know.”

He nodded thoughtfully, silent for a while as he drew on his cigarette. The small point of fire flared. “We’ve been through
a lot together, haven’t we?”

“Sure.”

“Bethan, that bastard in the quarry, things like that…”

“The Aussies.”

He laughed. “The Aussies. The one who fancied me, what was her name?”

“Kerry.”

“Kerry. And now this.”

“Maybe we’ve shared too much.”

“Maybe. Shared my mother in a way, haven’t we?” I watched the red fire of his cigarette in the darkness.

“You know how I found out about you and her?”

“Jamie, it’s long over — ”

“We had a row. I can’t even remember what is was about. Maybe about one of her boyfriends. God knows. Shortly after you’d
come up to London and we’d been to that party. You remember? And I asked her straight out about you, and she brandished it
in my face. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I’ve had Robert. Yes, we’ve been lovers. Are you jealous or something?’”

He scuffed his feet in the stones on the ledge. I couldn’t see him clearly, just the movement of his shadow. He picked up
a stone and tossed it over the edge, like someone tossing a pebble into a well and listening for the sound of it hitting the
water. But here there was nothing. No sound, nothing. “I
was
jealous,” he went on. “Jealous of both of you. Jealous that you had both been closer to each other than I ever could be.”

He paused again. He sounded confused. I wondered whether he was even in a fit state to be climbing this bloody mountain. I
felt that I had to say something, anything to placate the gods of his unhappiness. “I was just a kid, Jamie. And she was lonely…”

He turned to me, just his shadow in the luminous darkness of that frozen ledge. “And now Ruth. Now I’m expected to share Ruth
with you.” His voice was no more than a whisper above the sound of the wind. “First you take my mother, and now you’re taking
Ruth.”

“Taking
her? It was what she wanted, for God’s sake. All three of us wanted it.”

In the faint backwash of light from the sky, I could see him shaking his head. He drew on his cigarette and stared out into
the darkness. When he spoke again his tone was bewildered: “You practically own me, Rob, you know that?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Jamie. I own precious little. A comprehensive collection of scratched Rolling Stones records,
and a few books stolen from University College library. That’s about it.” I paused. There was something hugely absurd about
having this conversation perched up there under the eaves of the mountain, absurd and dangerous. I wanted the conversation
to go away, but it wouldn’t any more than Jamie would go away. I was stuck here on the ledge with him, for better or for worse,
for richer for poorer, until death, possibly, did us part. “We could toss for her,” I suggested. It was a joke, a hammer to
break the tension, a clumsy weapon.

“Why not?”

“I wasn’t being serious…”

“But why not? It gives you a chance, doesn’t it? Fifty-fifty.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake — ”

“Why not? There’s that book, isn’t there? What was it called?
The Dice Man.
The guy who decided everything by the throw of a dice?”

“It’s
die.
Singular’s a
die
.”
'

“Seems more appropriate. Let’s do it.”

“Do what?”

“Toss a coin.”

“Jamie, it was a joke — ”

“But let’s do it.”

I didn’t know whether he was serious or not. He was a mad bugger at times, shot through with a streak of anger and a seam
of recklessness. “For God’s sake! What about Ruth?”

“But she’ll not know. She’ll never know. It’ll be a secret just between the two of us. You scared of doing it?”

“I’m not scared; it’s just fucking silly. How can you toss for a woman?”

He searched in the pocket of his britches and found a coin. “Why not? Why the hell not?”

So we did. We settled ourselves to the ridiculous game like two drunks around a table. I suppose we
were
drunk really, high on the drug of emotion and tension, nervous of the morning and the climb ahead.

I’ve often thought back to that moment and tried to decipher what it meant. I think that I took it like that, as nothing more
than a game. I thought that what happened wouldn’t count in the final balance of things, that whatever there was between us
would still be settled by human love and jealousy and prejudice. There was even a part of me that rehearsed how I would tell
this story to Eve, how we would laugh together at the image of Jamie holding the coin out in the pale light of his headlamp,
as though to demonstrate that everything was aboveboard. “You ready?”

“Jamie, this is ridiculous — ”

“You ready?”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m ready. Whatever you say.”

“This is serious, youth. Whoever loses gets out…”

“For God’s sake, just get on with it.”

He flicked the coin. For a brief moment light flickered from its surfaces as it spun in the space between us. Then he snatched
it from the air and held out his fist. “You call.”

I looked at him. In the torchlight I could see the anxiety in his expression, a tension that was greater than in any climb.
“This is crazy, Jamie.”

“Just call.”

“Let things take their course, man.”

“Call, fuck you! Call!”

I thought he might hit me. For a moment I thought we might have a barroom brawl up there on the narrow ledge of the Swallow’s
Nest. I was on the Eiger with a madman. Which was more dangerous, the mountain or the guy I was tied to with a rope? “Tails,”
I said resignedly. “Seeing as that’s what we’re after. Tails.”

He didn’t laugh at the joke. He just opened his fingers and showed the coin lying there in his palm with the allegorical figure
of Lady Helvetia, the patron saint of bankers, uppermost.

“I hope you’re happy together,” I muttered.

After that we curled up and tried to sleep. We slept fitfully, the sleep of the damned, drawn out with dreams and nightmares
into a kind of torture. I woke to the rattle of Jamie’s alarm clock and his swearing and cussing in the darkness.

“What time is it?”

I peered at my watch. The luminous numbers were bright from the light that they had absorbed during the day. “Almost four.”

“Where’s my torch?”

He snapped it on, casting a puddle of light into the dark. Exposed on our tiny ledge, we were enclosed by the fateful whisper
of vapor. “Shit, we’re in cloud.”

“Mist.”

“Is that a good sign?”

“I suppose it means it’s cold.”

Cold was good. Cold cemented loose stones into the ice and reduced the stone-fall. Cold cements joints. We flexed our hands
and elbows and knees. The demons of the evening before had retreated, but they were there in the background laughing at us.
We melted snow and made tea. We ate some biscuits and chocolate. Our breath measured the chill in clouds of vapor that swirled
like cigarette smoke in the light of our headlamps. We packed our things away and sorted out the ropes.

“All right, Rob?”

I held my hand up against the glare of his headlamp. He looked like a miner standing in the darkness of a tunnel, his eyes
bright white and his face darkened with shadow and stubble. Beyond him was a pale slope of ice. Nothing more. There was no
depth to our surroundings, no exposure. “Ready when you are.”