You Think That's Bad (14 page)

How could our mother have survived such a thing? She 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 at the dinner table mounting what questions she could 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 face-down, 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 another 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
?”

Early one 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.

I told her I thought I might have started the avalanche. She said, “You didn't start the avalanche.” I told her I might have, though I hadn't yet explained how. She reminded me of the farmers' old saying that
they
didn't make the hay, that the sun made the hay.

“I think
I
made the avalanche,” she finally suggested. When I asked what she was talking about, she wondered if I remembered the Oberlanders' tale of the cowherd whose mother thought he'd gone astray and, enraged by having been offered only spoiled milk by his new wife, called on ice from the mountain above to come bury them both and all of their cows.

How old was I then? Seventeen. But even someone that young can be shocked by his own paralysis in the face of need. My mother sat on my bed picking her heart to pieces and I suffered at the spectacle and accepted her caresses and wept along with her and fell back asleep comforted, never offering my own account of what might have happened, whether or not it would have helped. The subject was dropped. And that morning more than anything else is what's driven me to avalanche research.

Bucher's a good Christian but even he gave up the long ski down to services after a few weeks, and instead we spend our Sabbaths admiring the early-morning calm of the mountains. The sun peeps over the sentinel peaks behind us and the entire snow-covered world becomes a radiance thrown back at the sky. The only sounds are those we make. On our trips to Davos for supplies, Bader and I for a few months held a mock competition for the affections of an Alsatian widow, who negotiated the burden of her sexual magnetism with an appealing modesty. Then, in February, I slipped on an ice sheet outside a bakery and bounced down two
flights of steps. “So much for the surviving Eckel brother,” Ruth Lindner said in response from across the street.

What was she doing in Davos? She'd trained as a teacher and been reassigned to a new school district. How did she like teaching? She hoped the change of scene would help. What did her parents make of the move? They'd been against it, but lately she'd felt home was more like prison. We arranged to meet for coffee the following weekend, and back at the hut the group made much of my announcement of my withdrawal from the Alsatian sweepstakes.

I'd lost track of Ruth after Willi's memorial service. My last words to her had been “I blame myself,” and her response had been, “I blame everyone.” Then she'd gone on holiday to her maternal grandparents' farm near Merligen. That visit had extended itself, and my two letters to that address were returned unopened. When I'd pressed her father for an explanation, he said that the postmaster must have found them undeliverable. When I'd protested that he was the postmaster, he lost his temper. My parents had been no more help. Her few friends claimed to be equally mystified.

Over coffee she asked how I was finding Davos and then moved on to Willi: his poor grades and how he liked to present himself as indisposed to exertion indoors, and how outside he had no time for anything except his skis. She became misty-eyed. She asked if he'd ever told me that the high summits were like giants at their windows looking down at us.

“No,” I said. She wore a beeswax-and-aloe mixture on her lips to protect them, and the effect was like a ceramic glaze I longed to test with my finger.

“He told me that,” she said, pleased.

She asked if I remembered a winter camping trip some of our classmates had taken a month before the Sport Week outing. I told her I remembered it better than she imagined. I'd worked up the courage to ask if she was going and she'd said no, so I'd dropped out. Later I discovered that both she and Willi had gone.

“Had that always been the plan?” I wanted to know, pained even after all these years.

“I need you to listen,” she told me.

“What do you suppose I'm doing?” I answered.

“This is not easy for me,” she went on to say.

“Does it seem so for me?” I asked.

She told me that the first afternoon they'd pitched camp in a little squall of butterflies blown above the snowline by an updraft. That night a full moon had risen above their tents and their breath vapor had frozen onto the canvas above them. It had broken off in a sheet when in the predawn stillness she'd lifted the flap to slip into Willi's tent.

“I don't need to hear this,” I told her. But it was as if I'd claimed I did. She said that once they'd shed their clothes and embraced inside his sleeping sack, she'd felt the way she had years earlier during an electrical storm when her hair had lifted itself into the air and her hands, holding a rake, had sung like a kettle with the discharge.

We sat across from each other and our coffees. Why does anyone choose one brother and not another? I wanted to ask.

“You have his facial expressions,” she said instead.

“Twins are like that,” I answered.

“He told your mother when he got back,” she added, addressing my silence. That part of the story seemed to affect her most of all.

“Told her what?” I asked.

“That we were in love,” she said.

A truck outside the window ground its gears. “And you got pregnant,” I suggested.

“And I got pregnant,” she said. She seemed to be considering our hands.

Carousers clattering skis and poles came and went. “Did my mother find out?” I wanted to know.

“I assume she guessed,” Ruth said.

“I have to get back,” I told her.

At the door, while I bundled against the weather, she said she was sorry, and had so much more to tell me. She asked if I would see her again. When at first I didn't respond, she removed one of my mittens and placed my hand against her cheek. But she already knew what I wanted. She already knew what I felt. It was as if there'd never been any point in pretending otherwise.

The position in which she left me brought to mind the subject that Haefeli insists should be absorbing our every waking moment. The American W. A. Bentley was the first to have photographed snow crystals, having recorded over six thousand different forms before conceding that he'd only scratched the surface, given the number of types that must exist. Such crystals are formed when water vapor in the cooling air condenses onto particulate matter in the atmosphere and then freezes, the ice particles growing as more vapor attaches itself in a process called sublimation: that small miracle, Bader reminds us, as we dig cores, in which a substance transforms itself from gas to solid without having passed through its liquid state. The variations in design are as infinite as the conditions that govern the crystals' development, but each as it reaches the ground is subject to a change of environment: from having been a separate entity, it becomes a minute part of the mass and begins to undergo a series of changes in its nature, all of which will reflect on the stability of the area of which it's a part. When new snow alights, its crystals interlock by means of their fine branches and spikes, but the strength of this cohesion is undermined by destructive metamorphism as the branches and spikes regress under the pressure of rising temperatures or the snow's weight. It was Professor Paulcke of Innsbruck who first observed a particular kind of degraded crystal that because of its shape constituted a noncohesive mass in the snow cover: such crystals were excessively fragile and ran like loose pebbles; they formed, wherever they were
found, a hugely unstable base for the other layers above. He called them “depth hoar” or “swim-snow.” My mother recorded the same phenomenon in her journals and called it “sugar snow” because it refused to bond even when squeezed tightly in the hand. Haefeli loved the term. A stratum of such crystals is like a layer of ball bearings under the tons of more recently fallen snow on a slope, requiring only the slightest jar to set the mass in motion.

We spend the afternoon, after my coffee with Ruth, cutting blocks of snow out of various slopes and tapping the tops to test the frequency of layer fracture and collapse. Bader wears an out-sized dinner jacket over his cardigan, claiming it's the only material he's discovered to which snow doesn't cling. He looks as young as I do, in his beardlessness reminding everyone of a cleric or a shepherd. Before Professor Niggli found him, he'd lived a life circumscribed by the peaks at either end of his valley.

I'm teased for being love-struck because of my silence, then teased further for failing to react. But throughout the day, my heart roams in and out of my chest as though tethered to its own misery. Of course my mother knew—that was the source of her Oberlander remark—and in my newly reconfigured map of that time, everyone knew everything, except Willi's endlessly oblivious brother. Had she had the baby? Of course, but how could I have left without asking if she'd had the baby?

“I need to go back down,” I finally told Haefeli as we hiked back from a northeastern ice wall. We'd been sampling under a nine-meter cornice.

“Not right now you don't,” he answered.

“Now he's pouting,” Bucher informed the group, half an hour later.

“What are you going to settle today?” Haefeli wants to know once we're all back in the hut for the night. The sun's a vermilion line along the western ridge. “Are you going to go down there and profess your undying love? Haul her back up here for your wedding night?”

He's working by lantern light on what he calls a penetrometer: a pointed steel tube a meter long for measuring the firmness of strata. He has the two virtues perhaps most important to such a place as this: presence of mind and affability. In his own casual way he combines for us the functions of priest, guide, and hotelier. Once, during a rockfall in a narrow gully, he stepped between me and a head-sized stone that appeared out of the snowcloud, and deflected it with the handle of his shovel much like a cricketer bats a ball.

“Go if you have to,” he finally tells me later that night, in exasperation, into the frigid darkness above our hammocks and blankets. “Go. Go. Go. God knows we don't need you up here.”

Of course it occurs to me only as I finally reach Davos the next morning that she's in school and will be for most of the day. I have little money to spare but waste some anyway on coffee and a sweet roll to get in out of the cold. The lunch rush comes and goes. My nose to the window, I man the chair farthest from the door with the unsettled vacancy of an old dog left home alone.

At the awaited hour I'm outside her school, the dismissal bell ringing, and shouting and happy children stream past, looking no different than we were. “What are you doing here?” she wants to know. Somehow she's come out another door and come up to me from behind.

“So you had the baby?” I ask.

“This is my supervisor, Frau Döring,” she tells me.

Frau Döring and I exchange greetings, and she appears to be hoping that whatever I'd just asked will be repeated.

“This is the brother of my late fiancée,” Ruth informs her. It's as if the world's been filled with unexpectedly painful things.

Once back at the coffee shop she asks, “Why do you think you're so in love with me? What is it that you think you love?”

“You never answered about the baby,” I tell her.

She looks at me, gauging my reaction, and makes a let's-get-on-with-it face.

“You gave it to an orphanage,” I tell her. “Some convent or other. The Sisters of Perpetual Help.”