With the winter that was so severe? With the lengthening days? Or maybe the night the Drance overflowed its banks? The Bise that howled through the valley? I can talk about transhumance, when the stock are led up the mountain and the jingling goes on forever. Or the erection of the monument to the hiker who simply stepped off the ridge last year (was it last year?). A lifetime’s experience, they said, how could something like that even happen?
I can tell you. I’ve seen it all. Hurriedly he wedged one foot after the other into the snow, following the prints of those who had gone before him. I’ll be home for dinner, he thought, leaning on his walking stick, and the ice fell away under his boots. It had nothing to do with experience. It could have been the hiker before or the one after, but he was the one who toppled into the abyss. The next day they found him, his eyes already picked out. Shall I start there? Or shall I start with them? Look at them there in the distance, the determination with which they’re ascending me. They’ve just bought cheese at Follebin, and Sonny is still barking at them from the end of his chain, the way he does when he’s smelt fox cubs in the distance and spots them creeping towards the fishermen’s baskets on the shore of the lake, lines in the motionless water, which has thawed again after being frozen for the first time in decades.
How long since I’ve seen any people. The winter months are always the loneliest. The marmots are jammed in together dozing, chests touching, one on top of the other like a skein of thread that shrinks and expands inside me. The Alpine chough has descended to the valley, where it, like the ptarmigans, has to get by on the last berries until the insects reappear. I owe the peace to these animals. If not for them, I wouldn’t get a moment’s rest all winter. With bad luck even longer. Some six months of the year, as long as the marmots are asleep.
White gold, they call us, the estate agents and the promotional experts, the shareholders and the board members. I know their jargon by now. I’ve seen it wreak havoc around me and I too came within a hair’s breadth of falling prey to snow fever, succumbing to the swish and swoosh of the slalom, the fibreglass splintering everywhere, the bare strips where conifers have been felled, the baubles and T-bars dangling over my face in the wind. Not to mention the smell of sweaty feet and splash mats, the lost gloves or the drunk Brits trying to spell their names on me with their cocks: Henr . . . Over and over again every night, those cannons, big as jet engines, constantly sprinkling me, followed by snow groomers that tan me smooth as leather. In the morning the early birds greet me with surprised exuberance. How peaceful and promising I look! As if the boarding-house maid has changed the sheets here too. Yes, every winter, as soon as “The Doors of the Sun” have opened again, I realize how lucky I am. It’s extraordinarily peaceful; I’m spared wrappers and racket, lovebirds and louts.
Ah, I could spend days talking about how time flew by here. How I once felt nothing but the névé thawing and freezing on my skin. In the summer, the water always wove a different path down my body. But there they are again: the couple. I can see his little beanie looming up behind the hill. He hasn’t even pulled it down over his ears. Silly boy, it’s much too hot for a hat like that, even wearing it like a skullcap.
As if he can hear me, he takes it off and puts it in the pocket of his fleece jacket. He’s tense. You can tell from the way he smooths down his hair, his jittery smile. When he looks at her, his eyes betray him.
Are you okay? she asks.
Perfect, he says. Why d’you ask?
Because you happen to be limping?
Oh, he blurts, really?
She’s right. He’s started walking differently. Just now he was putting more weight on his foot. Now he’s overcompensating, trying to turn his sole so the arch doesn’t touch the ground. Why did he insist on playing the macho yesterday? I hear him think.
Yesterday, when they went for a walk around the Lac des Plagnes. The spot where the stretch of asphalt ends and the unsealed road comes to a gravel car park. Starting point for the paths that curl up left and right to the Tavaneuse and the refuge. They’d gone there to have lunch by the water in one of the two small bistros that were only open in the afternoon. The menu hadn’t been changed for years and they let themselves be talked into the local speciality: pan-fried trout that’s full of bones and hard to eat. They shared a carafe of rosé, which he drank most of, and before returning to the chalet, they decided to go for a walk around the lake. When they were at the most distant point—where the sun appeared again between the peaks—he said, Let’s go for a dip.
He was slightly tipsy and basically joking, but as she immediately declared him mad, he stuck to his guns.
That’s meltwater, she said, i.e. ice cold.
The sun will keep us warm, he said, and it soon turned into one of those things that unavoidably get bigger than they were ever meant to be.
If you ask me, you’re not even allowed to swim in it, she said, but he’d already taken off his shoes and his T-shirt, encouraged by the smirk on her face.
He didn’t have a clue what he was getting himself into until he ventured a first foot into the water. I can still feel the shiver pass through him when he thinks of how I pierced him. The frost that immediately spread through his body. He lost all sensation in his limbs and puffed loudly. She burst out laughing at his exaggerated movements and there was no way back. He waded deeper into the lake: through the algae, the moss, the mud and the reeds. When the water was just above his knees, he called out that he was going to do it.
You’re too chicken—and on hearing those words he clenched his teeth and let himself fall forwards into the water.
Even before he was properly submerged, he was scrambling back up onto his feet. Shivering from head to toe, he thrashed back through the water and up onto the bank. Dazed, he gasped for breath as she approached cautiously and started patting him dry with his own T-shirt. Through his wet hair, he saw the surprise in her eyes, and why would he do something so stupid if not for that look? The sun sank below the ridge and he put his clothes back on with his teeth chattering. Together they walked home and it was only later that evening that he noticed the blood in his sock where a reed had penetrated deep into his foot.
Why does he call it an act of desperation?
Wistfully, he stares at her back. She knows the mountains and walks ahead of him as an imperturbable guide. At a derelict shed the path splits. She says that one of the two routes is shorter, but hesitates. When he offers to look it up on his phone, she decides briskly that they have to go left.
Otherwise I can have a quick look, he suggests again, but she’s already moved on.
It’s normally half an hour to the chapel. We can stop there and eat something.
He nods and obediently jolts along behind her. He sees this as her world. He’s only a visitor. For about three weeks now she’s been completely alone in the chalet her grandfather built here on what was then a bare hill. Without wheels or Wi-Fi, she lives to the rhythm of the sun: reading, cooking, looking and clicking the shutter when the light dictates. Spending those weeks at home by himself, he’d noticed she had no need for contact. He hardly heard from her and didn’t understand how she did it, how she could be so absorbed by this world of simplicity and solitude. For him it was all new. The city’s where he feels at home. His thoughts skip to the rhythm of traffic lights. It nourishes him. Just as he is an organism, the metropolis is one too, and the codependency first became clear to him here and now because of his relationship with her, and hers with me, the mountain.
Not that he was a complete novice when it came to nature. He’d kayaked on the Lesse and gone camping with friends on the Kempens Plateau. Even if he’d always maintained a certain reserve towards the things that surrounded him. More than once he caught himself thinking things like: I don’t trust that grass. Or, when an insect came too close: I respect nature, but it has to have a little respect for me too.
Of course, this was partly a pose, a way of relating to the unknown. It was a role he’d embraced over the years and dropped here in an attempt to impress her.
Being so moved by this environment was a welcome side effect. He hadn’t expected to be overwhelmed when the temperature fell or rose from one moment to the next. For all that it was easy to be happy when he forgot the weariness in his legs, a casual glimpse of a ravine was terrifying because of the pull of the depths.
He often only realizes these things when she stops, as she occasionally does to look through the lens of her cumbersome camera. Then he knows that he will be left to his own resources for a few minutes and peers at the surroundings, more than ever, with her eyes: the little springs that emerge like thoughts out of nowhere; the lichen that draws its picturesque colours out of the rock. How he loves the way the distant snow emphasizes the height of the mountains, the peaks shooting up as unexpectedly as flames, only to be veiled and enclosed.
While she inserts a new roll of film, he breathes deeply of the scent of the flowers and of the dung from the cows that graze freely along the path, so imposing he always gives them a wide berth. She can never resist feeding them, their abrasive tongues feeling her hand like fingers groping in the dark for a light switch.
Is this real life? he wonders, and I can feel how much he’d like to wrap his arm around her shoulders. Why is he too scared to do it? He’s done it so many times before. Why does he see the two of them as a boulder he has to roll up the mountain? Or is that the problem? That I’m coming between them.
Look at him walking behind her as if shadowing her. When she turns her head to the left, he does the same. Now and then she looks back, wondering if he’s still following. She looks at his foot and he averts his eyes. She sighs.
We should’ve seen the chapel by now, she says.
He hasn’t heard properly.
The chapel, we should already be there.
Yes, he says calmly, we took the other path.
How do you mean?
I saw it back there on my phone, he confesses.
And you didn’t say anything?
It’s not as if it makes any difference . . .
But you still found it important enough to verify?
Why is she so angry all of a sudden? She knows him after all. She knows he can’t resist checking things . . .
The sound of their feet squishing in and out of the marshy ground is suddenly much more noticeable.
Shall we have lunch here somewhere? he asks, knowing that nothing makes her happier than food.
A little further along they find a suitable rock. He pulls the cheese and the half a loaf of wholemeal out of his backpack and they start wolfing it down immediately. From what he saw on his phone he thinks they’re now well over halfway. In the end they’ll have climbed just over a kilometre. But it’s worth it: on a clear day you can easily see past Mont Blanc from my peak, forty kilometres away.
Is it still far? he asks.
A bit over half, she says, and eats a quarter of an apple.
We’re not halfway until we’re at the top of course, he says, and eats the edges of cheese she’s left, which taste strong, almost pungent. Then he kindly offers her the end of the loaf.
Even before swallowing his last mouthful, he’s got the papers and tobacco pouch in his hands. He pulls a few threads off the larger tangle, spreads them out over the paper and uses his thumb and index finger to roll first one side over and then the other. He licks the cigarette shut and gives the bottom a flick with a nail. Silently they watch the smoke slowly dissolve in the landscape.
Shall I carry the camera for a while? he asks.
No, she says, it’s fine.
When he’s not there, she has to carry it herself too . . .
Who does she remind me of? That’s the question that’s been bothering me the whole time. It’s almost as if she’s always been here and yet I can’t quite place her. One year supplants the other. Layer by layer the memories are pressed together, hardening like sedimentary rock. Yet another season, the cows ascending, the sun darkening the wood of the houses, the winter burying the village under snow, the farmers becoming scarcer, the frenzy with which one new house after the other is plonked down, to then stand empty, in the meadows the insatiable bees going from flower to flower to flower to flower.
Cautiously the young man takes a last drag on his cigarette. The smoke is hot as he draws it through his mouth and into his throat, and he discreetly shoots the butt away behind him. With lunch eaten, the backpack hardly weighs anything. He swings it up over his shoulder, but sees her hesitating as he’s about to leave.
I’m afraid we’re not going to make it to the top, she says.
He hears the words but doesn’t seem to understand.
But according to the app it’s less than an hour, he says. The sun doesn’t set until seven?
That’s not the problem according to her. It’s the weather, which is turning, and she points out a thick mass of clouds between two mountains in the distance. They don’t look the least bit threatening. He hadn’t even noticed them.
If they come this way, we’ll be in trouble.
Really? he asks as if he doesn’t want to accept it.
Yep, in den Bergen ist immer Vorsicht geboten, she laughs.
But just a little further, he says in a tone that is now imploring, maybe they’ll blow past.
It’s not what they do or don’t do, it’s the danger of what they might do.
Otherwise we can climb to where the paths join up again? Then we can take the shortest route back?
Reluctantly she agrees and, as she takes the lead again, a certain uneasiness rises within him. Why doesn’t she want to go to the summit with him? Doesn’t she want to round this memory off with a happy conclusion? Conquering the mountain together?
Is it possible he hates her? he suddenly wonders. Can a person really succeed in hating someone they just claimed to love deeply?
Ah, humans . . . All that seeing, hearing, tasting and thinking, the reactions and judgements they’re so in thrall to. Look at them now, walking on in silence, whirling around on the gale of their own reactivity, surrounded by this awe-inspiring landscape, wide and timeless, yet lost in the no man’s land of their own neurosis.
Doggedly she keeps putting one foot in front of the other, and it’s clear that she only wants to climb higher to get back down again as fast as possible. He follows in her footsteps and sees in the corner of an eye the approaching clouds. One more night, he thinks, and I’ll be on my way back home. He’ll catch the bus from the village square to the spa that is connected in turn by rail to the city, where he’ll spend the night waiting for his flight home. He perks himself up with the thought that in less than forty-eight hours he’ll have command of his own feelings again.
They reach the fork sooner than expected and she’s visibly relieved. The sun has disappeared behind the bank of clouds and is highlighting its dark border in the sky. The air is getting moister. He tastes the difference with every breath. Quite nearby, the path leading up disappears over a ridge, but she’s already turned back downhill when he calls her to a halt. He doesn’t want to say goodbye to the view yet, knowing it could be the last time.
Can I just pop up there for a moment? he asks. Just to see what’s behind that ridge?
She sighs, but before she’s had time to object, he’s sprinted on.
Back in a sec, he calls.
The higher he climbs, the faster the temperature drops and although he knows it’s little more than a kilometre to the top, he too realizes it’s pointless when the phenomenal panorama he’d hoped to see from the ridge for doesn’t reveal itself. The fog has thickened and the top of the mountain is veiled in white.
Stay there, she calls, totally Caspar David Friedrich.
The young man obeys, more than familiar by now with the process they have to go through: putting down the backpack, picking up the camera, measuring the light, calculating and adjusting the diaphragm and shutter speed, deciding the composition; then the directing starts. He follows her instructions to the point of exhaustion. He has to look up or down, mustn’t smile, has to stop frowning, raise his chin, relax his face, look straight at the camera and keep his lips pressed together. While she controls and captures his body, he uses the only freedom he has left. In every photo he’s thinking angry thoughts in the vain hope an observant viewer might see the rage in his eyes.
One more, she calls, as he hears a stone rolling behind him.
He turns, only to discover it’s not a stone at all. The crunching sound is coming from a little further away and he can see a shape in the fog. Slowly it comes closer and when he makes out the V-shaped horns, he realizes it must be an animal. He is delighted and wants to let her know, but turning back he sees she’s completely vanished, swallowed by the fog.
Come here, he tries, whispering as loudly as he can. It’s a goat. There’s a goat here!
Hesitantly, he goes down on his haunches so he can take off his pack without any all-too-extravagant movements. He unzips the front pocket and pulls out her small point-and-shoot camera. In the distance he seems to hear her voice, but the content of what she’s saying disappears in the still thickening fog. Wanting to record this scene for her, he squeezes one eye shut and peers through the small viewfinder with the other. Like a sniper he searches for his target with the crosshairs. In the white expanse in front of him he sees the black animal with the white head looking straight at him, its two horns cutting through the mist. Both believe they’re invisible to the other and yet they feel each other’s gaze. They look each other in the eye—how can they not—and he lowers the camera in dismay. The startled chamois disappears out of sight with a single bound.
Only now does he realize that the fog has completely engulfed him. The worn path under his feet reassures him and he follows the bare trail down—cautiously, because he can only see a few steps ahead.
Together with the fog, a certain calm seems to have descended over him. He doesn’t even notice when he passes the fork. Without realizing, he takes the shortest path, and it’s only after a few minutes that I hear him call her name for the first time. There is no response. He descends further and calls a second time. Again he doesn’t hear anything.
Not funny! he yells after the third time.
Cheerfully he continues his trek down and it’s only a hundred metres lower, when the Chapel of Saint Theodore rises in the distance, that he starts to worry. Is she playing tricks on him and following along behind? Why else wouldn’t she react? Or does he not hear her calling him? She wouldn’t just go back down without him? The questions erode his good spirits. Is he really supposed to turn back now and search for her up higher, repeating her name until he hears something? Or is she down there waiting for him behind the chapel wall? If not, maybe he should say a few prayers there to that saint, the bishop of the Alps. He smiles at this strange thought, but when he reaches the chapel there’s no one in sight. Did they pass each other without noticing?
He’ll wait here, he thinks, but his pace doesn’t slow. On the contrary. Maybe he wants to carry on until he finds a better reference point? The dairy in the valley? Or will he descend out of the fog in the hope of finding her there? His strategy pays off and the lower he goes the greater the visibility. He can see the valley and where the path widens he speeds up again. Now he starts running, almost letting himself fall down the mountainside, like meltwater gaining momentum. With a little luck, I’ll just catch the bus, he thinks. In the week she’ll stay on here in the mountains, I’ll get over her. All he has to do is reach Geneva today. While waiting for the next flight, he’ll wander the city. He will sit on a bench by the lake to rest. Next to him, a small boy fiddling with the Velcro of his shoes. Across from them, on the grass, a group of homeless people are lounging around and trying to sell colourful ashtrays made from old soft-drink cans. In the background a fountain will spurt up to unnecessary heights and none of this will make any impression on him at all. Not the power of the water, the fluttering rainbow flag or the old-fashioned steamboat now serving as a restaurant. It will all glide by, like the roller skaters or cyclists on the promenade. The sun will slowly disappear behind the mountains she is still wandering. He will decide to never contact her again—until he finds a short blond hair on his jumper, and it all starts over again from the beginning.
