The Fall (44 page)

In the late evening the cloud grew luminous with a pearly sunlight. There were rents in the vapor, and for precious minutes
I could see down to the ground. It was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope: a glimpse of green fields and dark
trees far, far away; the snake path of the railway; a cluster of buildings throwing long shadows. For those few minutes, I
felt an absurd optimism, as though merely seeing the ground might somehow get me off this place. But optimism faded when the
sun died. In the darkness I flashed my light in the direction of the buildings, the six long flashes of the distress signal,
but I doubted that anyone would notice such a feeble point of light up there among the cloud that swathed the Face. Hopelessness
was as tangible as the cold. I pulled my balaclava over my nose and mouth and tucked my hands into my armpits and hunched
against the rock as though it might give me some protection, but the mountain seemed to draw the heat out of me as though
it were hungry for the stuff, so that I had the feeling of sitting on a great void, a heat sink into which all the warmth
in the world was being sucked.

Throughout that night I wandered along borderlines between waking and sleeping, between sleep and unconsciousness — which is
sleep’s deadly sister — between life and death. I dreamed. Where dreams ended and hallucinations began was not clear. I struggled
through a fantastic landscape of pinnacle and precipice. Sometimes I was with Jamie, and sometimes, somewhere around about
two in the morning, I was with Caroline. She was younger than I knew her, as young as Ruth. Maybe she
was
Ruth. And then she was Eve, naked beside me. And then she was Jamie, and Eve, and Ruth, and we were walking (gravity was
suspended) up the easy pathways of the Eiger, laughing and tripping and falling, and picking ourselves up unhurt.

“You silly fucker,” Jamie said, and there was affection in his tone.

I emerged from my dreams to shadowy precipices and the whisper of cloud around my ledge and the sensation that, if only I
could concentrate, I might recapture that vanished dream-happiness. I dozed fitfully, and by morning I couldn’t feel my left
foot, nor the toes of my right.

The cloud around me was thinner, torn apart by the breeze, cut open by knives of sunlight that flashed across in front of
me but never touched me with their fire. I shivered and hunched and no longer thought much about anything, neither death nor
survival, neither hope nor despair. Why was I there, dying on a sloping ledge among a scattering of scree and icy rock the
color of slate? Why was I still conscious? I didn’t have the answer to any of these questions. Life was a faint warmth in
the middle of a pile of dying embers. I dozed and shivered and dreamed, and some abstract part of me knew that my life was
ebbing away.

I heard the helicopter sometime during that morning. It was a metallic muttering out on the edge of awareness, the sound coming
and going with the wind. I had to strain to hear it at first, had to persuade myself what is was, and then what it might be
doing. I only cared with half my mind. The other half stumbled along behind, thinking of my discomforts, my pain, the need
for sleep, the need for comfort. The sound came and went, ringing in my ears like tinnitus, sometimes there and sometimes
only a kind of illusion. Then I saw down through a gash in the cloud, and there it was far below me, chuttering and jerking,
dodging toward the Face. I waited and wondered.

And then, quite suddenly, without my knowing where it had come from, the helicopter was there, just near me. The concussion
of the machine’s rotors flogged the air all around me. The fuselage was there, bloodred and sterile white, standing away from
the Face and glaring at me with a bulbous Perspex eye. I looked back into its gaze. The machine bucked and pitched in the
swirling air. Inside the plastic bowl there was a figure, like a tadpole embryo trapped inside the glutinous jelly of its
egg. The figure waved and I waved back, like a child. From the open door, a helmeted crew member with a vast metallic mouth
shouted at me above the racket of the engine: “INJURED?”

Hope came slowly, like a kind of warmth, and with it the return of fear.

“YOU — INJURED?” the voice asked again.

I shouted words against the noise and pointed to my leg. “Broken!” I yelled. I suddenly had strength, the strength of fear
and panic. “Broken! I can’t fucking stand on it!” But of course my words were feeble, paltry things that couldn’t cross the
gulf between us, couldn’t beat against the hammering of that engine and the thrashing of the rotors.

The figure at the open doorway grinned and waved back and gave a thumbs-up sign and then made a swirling movement with his
hand. Abruptly the helicopter lurched away and chuttered off into the distance. “No!” I shouted after it. “No, don’t leave
me! For Christ’s sake, don’t leave me!”

But the machine had gone. Alone on my ledge and afraid once more, I wept.

Wind spilled over the West Ridge into the hollow of the Face. Clouds materialized and vanished. I willed them to disperse.
I harbored the illusion that the immediate future of the weather was under my control if only I could learn the trick. If
I could only work out how, the whole world was mine to redesign as I wished. I looked at my watch and noted the time and decided
that I could speed things up or slow things down at will. I’d tried to gather my things together. I was going home. I wasn’t
sure how or when, but as long as I could keep the weather good, I knew I was going home. Pain crept out of the shadows and
showed itself in the bright light of consciousness, but I could stifle that. If I could command the clouds, surely I could
control pain.

The helicopter came back two hours later. This time it rose up toward me and went up above and rattled overhead, two hundred
feet directly overhead, the spinning disk of its rotors reaching out as though to touch the rock. Bits spun down around me — fragments
of ice, swirls of snow, bits of rock. I saw the white cross of Switzerland and a figure hanging from the machine like a corpse
from a gibbet. The rotors flogged the carpet of the air around me, and the figure grew larger and larger until it was a hanging
man mere yards away. He held a ski pole toward me, fishing.

“English?” he shouted above the engine racket.

“Yes.”

“You have anchor?”

“Yes.”

“Take the pole. Pull me in. Okay? You hold me while I release. Okay? You got that? You hold me, okay? Then I clip on.”

It took a moment. He was talking all the time, not to me but into the microphone of his walkie-talkie, a rapid German counterpoint
to our crude, shouted English. He swung in, and I grabbed the pole and pulled him onto my ledge. For a moment he floundered
across me while I clung onto him. I would never let him go. I would hold him to me and love him dearly until the end of time.
He grabbed at one of my slings, released the helicopter cable, and then clipped himself on.
“Gott sei Dank,”
he muttered in relief.

The helicopter moved away, hammering above our heads and dropping down to our level. It circled around in front of us, turning
in that strange dragonfly manner, nose dipped and wings blurring.

“You may let me go now,” the man said.

I held him tight.

“You may let me go!”

I released him reluctantly, as though I might lose him even now. He clambered to his feet, pulling on one of the slings as
though he trusted it not to come out. “Siegfried,” he said, holding out his hand to me. He looked ridiculously young — a blond
even younger than me. “You call me Sigi.”

We shook hands solemnly, as though at a business meeting. “I’m Robert. Thanks for coming.”

Sigi frowned. “You are hurt, Robert?”

“My leg. I think it’s broken.”

“Pain?”

“Less than yesterday. I can’t feel my foot.”

He examined the offending leg for a while, his fingers pressing through my gaiters so that I screamed in agony. “Only your
leg?” He straightened up and stared into my eyes as though hoping to find the truth there.

“Only my leg.”

“So.” He rummaged in his rucksack and pulled out a plastic ampoule. “I give you a shot for the pain,” he said. He tugged at
my britches and exposed some pale flesh. “It will stop your hurt.” For a moment I thought he said
heart.
I thought it would stop my heart, snatch life from me at the very moment when I had regained hope. I felt a moment’s ridiculous
panic as the needle went in, but Sigi was unconcerned. Apparently he was used to killing people, used to speaking calmly with
them as they died. He was checking the pitons that held us to the rock, glancing around at the plunging precipices, at the
walls and cliffs above us, at the space below.

“You are alone?” he asked. It seemed a stupid question, as though there might be others just hiding somewhere around the corner.

“Sure I’m alone.”

“Where is your friend?”

My mind stalled.
“My friend?”

“Where is he? Did he fall?”

“Jamie? No. He climbed out on his own. Didn’t he call you out?”

“He
left
you?” He looked puzzled. “He went
solo?”

“Wasn’t it he who called you out? Hasn’t he got down?”

“It was your girl,” he explained. “Your girl said you had an accident. It was your girl you must thank.”

So where the hell was Jamie? Whereabouts was he on this fucking mountain? I shouted at my rescuer as though shouting would
make him understand the importance of the question: “Where in Christ’s name
is
he?”

Sigi shrugged. “We will see.” There was, it seemed, nothing more to be said. A quick search in his rucksack brought out a
thermos. He poured warm tea and fed me pieces of chocolate. “We keep your blood sugar up a bit, no?”

I ate the chocolate greedily, thinking of Jamie, thinking of Ruth, of survival and death, of jealousy and envy. Whatever it
was that he had injected into me was having its effect. My heart still beat, but pain was retreating fast, like a landscape
being left behind by a speeding car. Where the hell was Jamie?

“The chopper comes back in one hour,” Sigi said. He used the word
chopper.
Maybe he had seen too many films. “When it comes you go first.
Gut?”

“Okay,” I agreed. “Sounds fine to me.” But where was Jamie? This might be salvation, but it was salvation only for me. Where
in God’s name was Jamie?

“But first we do something for your leg perhaps.” He crouched awkwardly and unstrapped the ice ax from my leg and pulled splints
from his rucksack. “How did you fall?”

“Avalanched. We were climbing out through lousy weather, and I was hit by an avalanche.”

“Too bad.”

“You can say that again.”

He glanced up. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“I say that again?”

I managed a laugh. “An expression. Just an English expression. It means that I agree.”

He nodded and smiled. When he had finished splinting my leg, he began arranging things, helping me strap into a harness, tying
my rucksack on, bundling things away, tidying up the ledge, speaking occasionally into the radio. I had no idea what had happened
to my leg. If there was pain, it was something that affected someone else.

“Now we get ready,” he said.

“Ready?”

“For the chopper.” He grinned. “I do not know if we succeed with this. We try for the first time.”

“The
first time?”

“Ja.
Is interesting, no?”

“That’s one way of describing it.”

He arranged me on the ledge, facing outward, perched over the void, held by a single piton. Then he stood over me, talking
into the radio; the radio chattered back at him, a furious, electronic voice.

“The wind is over limits,” Sigi said, with disappointment in his voice.

Only the wind? I thought. We waited. The clouds poured into the face, and the wind swirled around against us. I peered down
into the funnel of the Spider. Below the ice there was nothing until the fields at the bottom, so far away as to be like a
landscape seen from an aircraft. When the clouds parted for a moment, I could see the buildings of Kleine Scheidegg, the hotel,
the railway station, and what looked like crowds gathering. A rescue on the Eiger: good for the tourist trade. The helicopter
was circling around far from the Face, over the green slopes of Alpiglen.