Stolen Pleasures (27 page)

He got up and drew aside the mistlike curtains. The train station was faintly lit, the awning rippling a little in the night wind. Out on the dark hills a few hazy lights burned through the night, miles apart. And beyond and all around, the luminous mountains. When he was inside the hotel their unseen presence warned him of his breath's impending abeyance, but now, gazing out at them, he felt his chest deepen to take in their cold breath across the distance, a vast breath as necessary to him as his own.

The day brought hikers up from the cities, way below. They came up in the small, silent trains, and wore big boots, thick socks, and knapsacks, as if bound for a climb of several days. But they roamed over the grassy hills for an hour or so and converged at the tables below the hotel's lower windows. They sat under colored umbrellas and under the windows' reflections of the mountains, and ate what appeared to be savory food. He kept a distance from them. There was room enough.

The only guests in the spacious parlor were far off, a family group playing cards at a table covered with green cloth. On the parquetry floors lay rich, red Persian rugs, and the many couches and chairs of antique beauty took up only a small space in the large room. A long and narrow glassed-in sunporch with an abundance of wicker chairs adjoined the parlor, and he paced along its length, remembering the hotel in winter, the parlor's black-and-white marble fireplace ablaze, the pleasurable jostling and agitation of the
many guests, and the hieroglyphs of distant, dark figures against the snow. He settled himself at a large table in a corner of the parlor, but all he could do was trace the glow and grain of the wood around his empty notebook.

On his way down the hall, restless, wondering if he would move on the next day, he paused before the first of several framed photographs along the wall, an early one of four climbers assembled in the photographer's studio against a backdrop of a painted mountain, all in hats and ties and heavy boots, with pots, picks, a goat. Few attempted the scaling of mountains in those years; now climbers were swarming up every mountain on earth. Farther along, he stopped before a photograph of
Der Eiger,
the mountain looming up over this hotel and over the town, miles below, a sheer, vertical face of stone. White lines were painted on the photograph, marking the ascents to the top, and at the base were the names of the fallen, preceded by white crosses. He passed along before the faces of the triumphant ones, a row of them, all young, and spent a longer time before a couple from Germany, a man and a woman, she a strongly smiling blonde and he a curly-haired handsome fellow, the kind who would take a woman along.

Then he went out, keeping apart from the many hikers who walked in a line toward Eiger as if on a pilgrimage. He strode over the lush grass, over the rise and fall of the hills, and on the crest of a hill he halted to take a look at the great stone face. Two figures were slowly, slowly, climbing. His vision lost them in an instant and it took him some time to locate them again, so small were they and at the mercy of the atmosphere, appearing and disappearing. He sat down on the grass to watch them, his hand above his
eyes to prevent the sun from playing tricks on him. The roar of an avalanche shocked him, convincing him that a mountain was collapsing, and then he saw the source of the thunder—a small fall of snow, far, far away. Somewhere he had read that the Alps had moved one hundred miles from their original location in Italy, and he wondered if the move had been centuries long, or cataclysmic, in a time when there were no human beings around to be obliterated. When his eyes began to ache from the searching, from the finding and losing of the specks that were his climbers, he returned to his room and lay down, his hand over his stone-struck eyes.

Toward twilight, when no one sat under the mountains' reflections, when they had all gone down on the trains, he went out again, strolling to higher ground over patches of tiny wildflowers that were like luminous rugs on the grass. Up near the entrance to the train tunnel that cut through stone to the top of the Jungfrau, he came to a large, heavy-wire pen where several restless dogs roved. The dogs resembled wolves, tawny with black markings, and their wild intelligent Mongol faces reminded him of the faces of nineteenth-century Russian writers. It was a comparison that amused him, and he felt light-headed over it. They paused to look into his face and into his eyes, slipped by along the fence, then returned, curious about him as he was about them. Soon in the darkening air he felt he was gazing at Gogol, at Tolstoy, at Chekhov, their faces intent on his own.

Stumbling a time or two, he made his way back down to the hotel that stood in a nimbus of its own lights. Before he went in he took a last look at the great stone. No fire burned anywhere on its enormous expanse. The climbers had made a bivouac for the
night on a ledge and were already asleep. Late in the night he was wakened by a deep wondering about the couple on the ledge. The fact of their lying on a ledge somewhere on that great stone stirred in him a concern for all persons he had ever loved. Then he slept again, and the couple was lying somewhere on the cold vastness of the night, on no ledge.

In the morning he went out under an overcast sky, before any hikers appeared. The stone was monstrous. Each sight of it failed to diminish, by repetition, the shock of it. So steep was the north side, the mountain must have been split down the very center, and the other half was a hundred miles away. The climbers were not yet halfway up the wall. Often, as before, he lost sight of them, found one again and not the other, and then found the other after losing the first. After a time he covered his eyes to rest them. If they fell, would the silence and the distance deny to him the tragicness of their end? He lowered his hand, searched again, and found one dark figure on a snowy ledge. The figure fell the instant he found it. It fell so fast he was unable to trace its fall and unable to find it on a lower ledge or at the base. Nowhere, now, was the other climber. Then both had fallen, and their mortal terror struck at his heart. With his hand on his chest he went back over the hills to the hotel.

No one was at the desk in the lobby, neither the manager nor one or the other of his assistants in their green aprons. One of them would confirm the tragedy. Somewhere, back in an office, there must be a radio voice informing everyone of the climbers' fate. Outside, the murmur of the crowd under the umbrellas and the fitful, labored music of an accordion were like the sounds the deaf make, that are unheard by them. In the parlor he found the
shy assistant passing through, the one he was convinced had been a child refugee from the Spanish Civil War.

The man smiled sadly, graciously, implying with his smile that if he did not understand Spanish at least he understood the importance of the question for the one who asked it.

With faltering German he tried to repeat the question, but a strong resistance, following disappointment, whisked away his small vocabulary. He went back to the lobby.

The manager, wearing a fine suit the same gray as his hair, was now standing at the desk, glancing through some papers. A fire wavered in the small fireplace.

“The couple on Eiger, they fell?”

The manager's brow, high, smooth for a man his age, underwent a brief overcast. “May I ask who?”

“The couple on Eiger.”

“Ah, yes, the photographs in the corridor? Only those who succeeded. Only those.”

“The couple up there now,” he said.

“There is no one climbing now.”

“Then they fell?”

“No one is climbing and no one is falling.”

Lang went up the stairs, hand on the rail, a weakness in his being from the lives lost, no matter if the climbers were only specks, motes, undulations of the atmosphere. Up in his room he sat down at the desk, opened his notebook, and wrote the first word on the first of the faint lines that he likened now to infinitely fine, blue veins.

O
N THE PLANE from New York to Phoenix, where he was to stop over for a few days to enjoy the sun before going on to the Coast, the novelist Robert Klipspringer chatted with the stewardess and with the passengers nearest him, a congressman and a manufacturer of a plastic racetrack game, all of whom had recognized him. Although he knew he erred and was engaging in a grandiose comparison, he felt that the three were cognizant of the murky and turbulent weather with which the plane was contesting as his, Klipspringer's, kind of weather, for had he not, in his novel, contended with his past as the plane with the storm? He drowsed awhile, woke to find the plane swimming in the white sunlight of the desert, and, again against his will, he likened the approach of the plane toward the myriad swimming pools of celestial blue, each in the shape of its owner's desire, to his own approach toward his rewards for that scouring of his past he had chosen to undergo. A taxi carried him and his slim suitcase to one of the larger inns and, a few minutes after his arrival, he walked out, in swim trunks and
zoris, across the rose terrazzo and lay down at the edge of the swimming pool.

He had flown East to confer with his agent and to sign a contract for the paperback publication of his latest novel—now and for six weeks past in a mighty lead over all others and acclaimed by the entire spectrum of the nation's critics—for such a spectacular sum that a small news item to that effect appeared on some front pages, and so he found the desert sun more enjoyable now than he remembered it from twelve years ago when he and his second wife had rested a day in Phoenix on a summer trek into Mexico. They had dared the trip on a morsel of advance royalties for his first novel and the meager savings from his salary as a philosophy instructor at a minor college in New York State. She had been taciturn and unloving in a motel room where the rattle of the air conditioner affixed to the window screen kept them awake all night, and, speaking only to quarrel, they had gone on into the Mexican desert where the heat stripped the recaps off their tires, vultures danced on burro carcasses beside the road, and for miles their headlights picked up a vast migration of toadlike creatures across the desert night. The convoluted misery of that marriage he had related in his novel, along with that of his first marriage. Was he exposing his back to the sun too long? He pushed up, dangled his legs in the water and rubbed his arms to spread the oil, and found beside him a young man who had been considerately waiting for him to sit up.

“No doubt you're exhausted after your Herculean efforts,” said the young man.

Klipspringer accepted a cigarette. It was the brand that he preferred, the preference stated many times in the novel. On such
a congenial basis, akin to a friendship over a decade, with his, Klipspringer's, foibles and follies and depths known, most casual encounters now began. As expected, the young man related his own past, his own life, as though over the time of their friendship he had so far failed to reveal himself to the extent that Klipspringer had done and was now in haste to attain an equality of confession. Very slender, his face fragilely handsome, his dark hair partly bleached by the resort sun, the young man revealed that he was at present employed by a socialite from the East, whom he had met in Acapulco. Inasmuch, he said, as he spoke five languages, he was to serve as her interpreter on her trip to Europe. He told of his childhood as the son of the French ambassador to Spain, of his affair in Rome, searing and extravagant, with the wife and constant leading lady of a famous Italian director, of his sojourn up in the Sierra Maestra with the forces of Fidel Castro as correspondent for a Paris daily, and of his journey through the jungles of Mexico with the great novelist J. Kruper. While imparting this last bit, which was for Klipspringer the crowning bit that gave him, the companion of Kruper, a reflected glory as tangible as his glowing tan, the young man gazed over the pool, one leg in the water, the other bent in order that his knee serve as a rest for his elbow, smoking his cigarette from languid fingers.

Never had Klipspringer met anyone who claimed even a remote acquaintance with Kruper. It was more credible to claim, instead, an acquaintance with someone who had run across someone else, an oil driller in Tampico, a seaman in Hamburg, a prospector on a desolate mountain, who claimed to have worked side by side with a man he swore was Kruper. A claim of acquaintance with Kruper
himself was not only suspect, it was an almost unforgivable undermining of the legend of that elusive man. Klipspringer, afraid that his curiosity would silence the young man, also gazed out over the pool asking at last, idly, “You say you know Kruper?”

“I'm in love with his daughter,” the young man replied.

“He has a daughter?” asked Klipspringer.

“Of course. He has three.”

“Which one?” asked Klipspringer, not wanting to ask that question but forced to by his confusion as to which question, among countless, to ask next.