Beneath the Mountain: A Novel

Prologue

That’s how it always is. In the ice, first you hear the voice of the Beast, then you die.

There were seracs and chasms identical to those in which I now found myself, full of mountaineers and rock climbers who had lost their strength, their reason, and finally their lives because of that voice.

Part of my mind, the animal part that knew what terror was because it had lived in terror for millions of years, understood what the Beast was hissing.

Two words: Get out.

I wasn’t prepared for the voice of the Beast.

I needed something familiar, something human, to tear me from the stark solitude of the ice. I raised my eyes beyond the edges of the crevasse, searching for the red outline of Dolomite Mountain Rescue’s EC135. But the sky was empty, wide open, the blue of it blinding.

That’s what made me fall apart.

I started rocking back and forth, my breathing rapid, my blood drained of any energy. Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, I was alone in the presence of God.

And God was roaring: Get out.

At two nineteen p.m. on that damned September 15, a voice emerged from the ice, and it wasn’t the voice of the Beast. It was Manny’s voice. His red uniform stood out in all that white, and he was repeating my name, over and over, as the pulley slowly lowered him toward me.

Fifteen feet.

Five.

His hands and eyes searched for wounds that would explain my behavior. His questions: a hundred whats and a thousand whys I couldn’t answer. The voice of the Beast was too loud. It was devouring me.

Don’t you hear it? I murmured. The Beast, the . . .

The Beast, I’d have liked to tell him, that ancient thing of ice, couldn’t stand the idea of a warm heart buried in its depths. My warm heart. And his.

And now it was two twenty-two.

The expression of surprise on Manny’s face turning to pure terror. The pulley cable lifting him like a puppet. Manny being jerked upward. The rumble of the helicopter’s turbines becoming a strangled cry.

At last.

God’s scream. The avalanche wiping out the sky.

Get out!

That was when I saw. When I was alone again, beyond time and space, I saw.

The darkness.

Total darkness. But I didn’t die. Oh, no. The Beast mocked me. It let me live. The Beast that was now whispering, You will stay with me forever, forever . . .

It wasn’t lying.

Part of me is still there.

But, as my daughter Clara would have said with a smile, that wasn’t the z at the end of the rainbow. It wasn’t the end of my story. On the contrary.

It was only the beginning.

One word, nine letters: Beginning. Five letters: Beast.

Six letters: Horror.

(We Are) the Road Crew

In life, as in art, there’s only one thing that matters: the facts. To know all the facts about Evi, Kurt, Markus and the night of April 28, 1985, you have to know everything there is to know about me. Because this isn’t just about 1985 and the Bletterbach killings, it isn’t just about Evi, Kurt, and Markus, it’s also about Salinger, Annelise, and Clara.

Everything’s connected.

* * *

Up until two twenty-two p.m. on September 15, 2013, in other words, up until the moment when the Beast almost killed me, I’d been defined as fifty percent of a rising star in a field, documentary filmmaking, that tends to produce not so much stars as tiny meteors and a lot of hot air.

Mike McMellan, the other fifty percent of the star in question, liked to say that if we’d been shooting stars on a collision course with the planet called Total Failure, we’d have had the privilege of disappearing in the kind of burst of heat reserved for heroes. After the third beer, I declared myself in agreement with him. If nothing else, it was a good excuse for a toast.

Mike wasn’t just my partner. He was also the best friend you could possibly have the luck to meet. He was an irritating smartass, as egocentric as—or even more than—a black hole, obsessive to an unbearable degree, and gifted with the ability to focus on a single subject like a canary on amphetamines. But he was also the one true artist I had ever known.

It was Mike who realized, when we were still only the semi-talented, least cool pair in the whole of the New York Film Academy (the directors’ course for Mike, the screenwriters’ course for yours truly), that if we pursued our Hollywood ambitions, we’d get our asses kicked and end up as embittered and verbose as the dreaded Professor (Call me Gerry) Calhoun, the ex-hippie who’d taken more taken pleasure than anyone else in pulling our first timid creations to pieces.

It was truly a magic moment—a flash of enlightenment that would modify the course of our lives, maybe a bit less epic than a Sam Peckinpah movie (Let’s go, William Holden says in The Wild Bunch, to which Ernest Borgnine replies, Why not?), given that when it happened, we were nibbling on French fries in a McDonald’s with our morale below our feet—but once-in-a-lifetime all the same. Believe me.

Fuck Hollywood, Salinger, Mike had said. People are hungry for reality, not CGI. The only way we can surf this fucking zeitgeist is to forget fiction and devote ourselves to good old-fashioned reality. Satisfaction guaranteed.

I raised an eyebrow. Zeitgeist?

You’re the Kraut, partner.

My mother was of German descent, but don’t worry, I really didn’t feel picked on by Mike. After all, I’d grown up in Brooklyn, whereas he was from the fucking Midwest.

Genealogical considerations aside, what Mike was trying to say on that damp November day so many years ago was that I should throw away my (seriously bad) screenplays and join him in making documentaries. Taking moments and enlarging and transforming them into a narrative that travels smoothly from point a to point z according to the gospel of the late Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (who was to stories what Jim Morrison was to paranoia).

What a mess.

Mike, I snorted, "there’s only one category of people worse than those who want to make it big in movies: documentary makers. They own collections of National Geographic going back to 1800. Many of them have ancestors who died looking for the source of the Nile. They have cashmere scarves and tattoos. They’re assholes, but liberal assholes, and that’s why they feel absolved of every sin. Last, but by no means least, they have families rolling in money who subsidize their world safaris."

Salinger, sometimes you’re really . . . Mike shook his head. Just stop right there and listen to me. We need a subject. A strong subject for a documentary that’ll break the bank. Something that people already know, something familiar, but that the two of us will show in a new way, different than how they’ve ever seen it. Rack your brains, think and . . .

Believe it or not, it was at that moment that two losers discovered they could transform even the weirdest of pumpkins into a golden coach. Because yes. I had it.

I don’t know how and I don’t know why, while Mike was staring at me with that serial killer face of his, while a million reasons to reject his suggestion were crowding in on me, I felt a gigantic explosion in my brain. An absurd idea. Mad. Incandescent. An idea so stupid, it might just work.

What was more electrifying, powerful, and sexy than rock ’n’ roll?

It was a religion for millions of people. A blast of energy that brought the generations together. Who hadn’t heard of Elvis, Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Nirvana, Metallica, and the whole glittering caravan of the one true revolution of the twentieth century?

Easy, wasn’t it?

No.

Because rock was also big, tall, black-clad bodybuilders who looked like double-door wardrobes, had the eyes of pit bull terriers, and were paid to get rid of sweethearts like us. Something they would gladly have done even for free.

The first time we tried to put our idea into practice (Bruce Springsteen in a pre-tour warm-up gig at a venue down in the Village) I got off lightly with a few shoves and a couple of bruises. Mike not so much. Half of his face resembled the Scottish flag. The cherry on the cake was that we almost got ourselves arrested. Springsteen was followed by concerts by the White Stripes, Michael Stipe, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Neil Young, and the Black Eyed Peas, who were at the height of their fame at the time.

We collected a fair number of bruises, but not much material. The temptation to drop the whole thing was strong.

It was at this point that the God of Rock looked down on us, saw our pathetic efforts to pay tribute to him, and with a benevolent eye showed us the way to success.

* * *

In mid-April I managed to get us both hired setting up a stage in Battery Park. Not for just any band, but for the most controversial, diabolical, and reviled band of all time. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Kiss.

We worked like brave, conscientious little ants, and then, as the workforce was leaving, we hid in a heap of garbage. As silent as snipers. When the first dark sedan cars arrived, Mike pressed record. We were in seventh heaven. This was our big opportunity. And naturally, everything happened very fast.

Gene Simmons emerged from a limousine as long as an ocean liner, stretched, and gave orders to his lackeys to drop the leash of his beloved four-legged friend. No sooner was it free than the demonic-looking snow-white poodle started to bark in our direction like one of Robert Johnson’s hounds of hell (And the day keeps on reminding me, there’s a hellhound on my trail. / Hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail). In two bounds, the dog was on me. It was aiming for the jugular, the bastard. That ball of fur wanted to kill me.

I screamed.

And something like twelve thousand brutes who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Hall of Fame for cutthroats grabbed us, kicked us and dragged us toward the exit, threatening to throw us in the ocean. But they didn’t do so. They left us black and blue, beaten and tired on a bench surrounded by trash, reflecting on how we’d been reduced to Wile E. Coyote condition. We stayed there, unable to accept defeat, listening to the echo of the concert as it wound down. Once the encores had finished, we watched as the crowd dispersed and, just as we were about to go back to our mouse hole, while four big guys with Hells Angels beards and faces like convicts started loading crates and amplifiers onto the band’s trucks, at that precise moment, the God of Rock winked down from Valhalla and showed me the way.

Mike, I whispered. We got it wrong. If we want to make a documentary about rock, the real rock, we have to position our cameras on the other side of the stage. The other side, partner. Those guys are the real rock. And I added with a grin, There’s no copyright on their image.

Those guys.

The roadies. The ones who do the dirty work. The ones who load the trucks, drive them from one side of the country to the other, unload them, set up the stage, prepare the equipment, wait for the end of the show with their arms folded, and then once more, as the poem says, Miles to go before I sleep.

Oh, yeah.

Mike, I have to say, was incredible. With a lot of flattery, holding out prospects of money and free publicity, he persuaded a very bored tour manager to give us permission to do a bit of filming. The roadies, not at all used to so much attention, took us under their wing. Not only that: it was they who persuaded the managers and lawyers to let us follow them around (them, not the band—that was the trump card that convinced them) for the rest of the tour.

That’s how Born to Sweat: Road Crew, The Hidden Side of Rock ’n’ Roll was born.

We worked our asses off, believe me. Six weeks of madness, migraines, terrible hangovers, and sweat, at the end of which we had destroyed two cameras, developed various fast food addictions and a twisted calf (I had clambered onto the roof of a trailer that turned out to be as crumbly as a cracker—and I was sober, I swear), and learned twelve different ways of saying fuck you.

The editing lasted a summer. A summer of sweltering heat without air conditioning, spent endlessly arguing in front of a monitor that was melting, and by the beginning of September 2003 (a magical year if ever there was one), not only had we finished our documentary, we were actually pleased with it. We showed it to a producer named Smith who had reluctantly granted us five—and only five—minutes. Believe it or not, it only took three.

A factual series, ruled Mr. Smith, supreme emperor of the network. Twelve episodes. Twenty-five minutes each. I want it for the beginning of November. Can you do it?

Smiles and handshakes. Finally, a stinking bus took us back home. Stunned and a little dazed, we looked on Wikipedia to find out what the hell a factual series was. The answer: a mixture of drama and documentary. In other words, we had less than two months to re-edit everything from scratch and create our factual series. Impossible?

No joke.

December 1 that year, Road Crew went on the air. It was a hit.

Suddenly our names were on everyone’s lips. Professor Calhoun had a photograph taken awarding us what looked like an abomination created by Dalí, but which was in fact a prize to honor deserving students. I emphasize: deserving. The blogs were talking about Road Crew, the press was talking about Road Crew.

It wasn’t all roses, though.

Maddie Grady of the New Yorker cut us down to size with a blunt axe. A 5,000-word article that had me beating my brains out for months. According to G.Q., we were misogynists. According to Life, we were misanthropes. According to Vogue, we embodied the redemption of Generation X. And that really got us down.

Some internet nerds started targeting us, with close readings of our work that in terms of prolixity and pedantry could have given the Encyclopaedia Britannica a run for its money.

Rumors started circulating, also on the internet, the cradle of fucking virtual democracy, rumors that were a mixture of the ridiculous and the disturbing. According to those in the know, Mike and I did heroin, speedball, cocaine, amphetamines. The roadies had taught us all of the hundred and one sins of Sodom. During the shooting one of us had died (Mike, it says here you’re dead. No, it says one of us is dead, why should it be me? Have you taken a look at your face, partner?).

My favorite, though, was this one: we had gotten a groupie named Pam pregnant (have you noticed that groupies are always called Pam?) and had made her miscarry during a satanic ritual taught to us by Jimmy Page.

In March of the following year, 2004, Mr. Smith got us to sign a contract for a second season of Road Crew. We had the whole world in our hands. Then, just before leaving for the shoot, something happened that surprised everyone, me most of all.

I fell in love.

* * *

And, strange to say, it was all thanks to Call me Gerry Calhoun. He had arranged a special screening of the first episode of Road Crew followed by a mandatory debate for his students. Debate reeked of an ambush, but Mike (who may have hoped to get his revenge on our old teacher and the world at large) had insisted on accepting and I’d meekly followed suit, as I always did when Mike got something into his head.

The girl who found her way into my heart was sitting in the third row, half-hidden by a guy who looked like Mark Chapman and weighed around three hundred pounds (a fan from the blogosphere, I immediately assumed), in Calhoun’s fearsome Lecture Room 13, the one that some students of the New York Film Academy called the Fight Club.

At the end of the screening, the fat guy was the first to have his say. What he said in a speech that lasted thirty-five minutes can be summed up as: What a crock of shit! Then, satisfied, he wiped away a thread of foam, sat down, and crossed his arms, with an expression of defiance on his pizza face.

I was about to retaliate with a long (very long) series of not very PC remarks about smartass fat guys when the impossible happened. The blonde girl asked permission to speak and Calhoun, relieved, granted it to her. She stood up (she was really pretty) and said, in a very strong German accent, "I’d like to ask you. What’s the exact word for Neid?"

I burst out laughing and mentally thanked my dear Mutti for her insistence on teaching me her mother tongue. Suddenly, I saw those hours spent flagellating my tongue against my teeth, aspirating vowels and rounding my rs as if I had a cracked fan in my mouth, in a completely different light.

Mein liebes Fräulein, I began, bathing in the sound of eyes popping like champagne corks among that mass of horny students (including the fat guy). Sie sollten nicht fragen, wie wir ‘Neid’ sagen, sondern wie wir ‘Idiot’ sagen.

My dear young lady, you shouldn’t ask how we say envy, but how we say idiot.

Her name was Annelise.

She was nineteen years old and she’d been in the United States for little more than a month, for a short course. Annelise was neither German nor Austrian nor even Swiss. She came from a tiny province in the north of Italy where most of the population spoke German. It was a strange place was Alto Adige, or Südtirol.

The night before I left for the tour, we made love to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, which reconciled me at least a little with the Boss. The next morning was tough. I didn’t think I would ever see her again. I was wrong. My sweet Annelise, born amid the Alps eight thousand kilometers from the Big Apple, transformed her short course into a student visa. I know it seems crazy, but you have to believe me. She loved me, and I loved her. In 2007, in a little restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen, as Mike and I were preparing to shoot the third (and, we had vowed, last) season of Road Crew, I asked Annelise to marry me. She accepted with such joy that I did a not very manly thing and burst into tears.

What more could I have wanted?

2008.

Because in 2008, while Mike and I, exhausted, were taking a break after the broadcast of the third season of our fuck-tual series, on a mild May day, in a hospital in New Jersey immersed in greenery, my daughter Clara was born. And then: fragrant mountains of diapers, baby food decorating clothes and walls, but above all hours and hours spent watching Clara learning to get to know the world. And then there were Mike’s visits with his current girlfriend (they lasted from two to four weeks, the longest a month and a half, but then she had been Miss July), during which he tried every which way to teach my daughter his name before Clara could even utter the word Mamma.

In the summer of 2009, I met Annelise’s parents, Werner and Herta Mair. We didn’t know then that the tiredness that Herta gave as an excuse for her dizziness and pallor was an advanced stage of cancer. She died a few months later, at the end of the year. Annelise didn’t want me to go with her to the funeral.

The years 2010 and 2011 were beautiful and frustrating. Beautiful: Clara climbing everywhere, Clara asking what’s this? in three different languages (the third, Italian, Annelise was teaching me, too, and I liked it a lot, a student motivated by a teacher I found very sexy), Clara simply growing. Frustrating? Of course. Because at the end of 2011, after presenting Mr. Smith with something like a hundred thousand different projects (all rejected), we began shooting the fourth season of Road Crew. The one we had sworn we would never make.

Nothing went right. The magic was gone and we knew it. The fourth season of Road Crew is a long, unhappy lament to the end of an era. But the public, as generations of copywriters know, loves feeling sad. Our ratings were better than for the three previous seasons. Even the New Yorker praised us, calling it the story of a waking dream that crumbles.

So Mike and I once again found ourselves exhausted and apathetic. Depressed. The work we considered the worst in our career was being praised to the skies even by those who only a little while earlier had treated us like lepers. That was why, in December 2012, I accepted Annelise’s suggestion to spend a few months in her native village, a little place called Siebenhoch in Alto Adige/Südtirol, Italy. Far from everything and everybody.

A good idea.

The Heroes of the Mountain

The photographs that Annelise had shown me of Siebenhoch didn’t do justice to that little village clinging up there at an altitude of 1,400 meters. Yes, the windows with the geraniums were there, the streets narrow enough to keep warm in, the snow-capped mountains and the forests all around. Just like a picture postcard. But in the flesh it was . . . different.

Magnificent.

I loved the little church surrounded by a cemetery that didn’t make you think about death but about the eternal rest spoken of in prayers. I loved the pointed roofs of the houses, the well-tended flower beds, the streets free from cracks. I loved the frequently incomprehensible dialect that twisted the language of my mother (and, for all intents and purposes, of my childhood) into a dissonant, off-color dialokt.

I even loved the Despar supermarket slumbering in a clearing torn by force from the vegetation, the interweaving of local and national roads, just as I loved the mule tracks half-buried by the tracery of beeches, bracken and red firs.

I loved my wife’s expression every time she showed me something new. A smile that made her seem like the little girl who had, I imagined, walked along these streets, run through these woods, played with snowballs, and then, once grown, had crossed the ocean to end up in my arms.

What else?

I loved speck, especially the matured kind that my father-in-law brought home without ever revealing where he’d procured such a delicacy—certainly not in what he called the tourist shops—and canederli cooked at least forty different ways. I devoured pies, strudels, and lots of other things. I put on eight pounds and didn’t feel even slightly guilty.

The house we occupied belonged to Annelise’s father, Werner. It was on the western border of Siebenhoch (assuming that a village with a population of seven hundred could be said to have a border) at the point where the mountain rose to touch the sky. On the upper floor were two bedrooms, a study, and a bathroom. On the ground floor, a kitchen, a cubbyhole, and what Annelise called the living room, although living room was a bit of an understatement. It was huge, with a table in the middle and furniture of beech and Swiss pine that Werner had built with his own hands. The light came from two large windows that looked out onto a meadow, and from the first light of day I would put an armchair there for the pleasure of taking in the majesty of the space—the mountains and the greenery (which when we arrived were laden with a compact blanket of snow).

It was while I was sitting in that armchair on February 25 that I saw a helicopter cut across the sky over Siebenhoch. It was painted a beautiful bright red. I thought about it all night. By February 26, the helicopter had turned into an idea.

An obsession.

By the 27th, I had realized that I needed to talk to somebody about it.

Somebody who knew. Somebody who would understand.

On the 28th, I did so.

* * *

Werner Mair lived a few kilometers from us as the crow flies, in a place with very few comforts that local people called Welshboden.

He was a severe man who rarely smiled (a magical occurrence that only Clara could easily provoke), with white hair sparse over his temples, penetrating sky-blue eyes tending to gray, a thin nose, and lines like scars.

He was pushing eighty, but in magnificent physical shape. I found him busy chopping wood in his shirtsleeves, even though the temperature was a degree or two below zero.

As soon as he saw me coming, he propped his axe against a rack and greeted me. I switched off the engine and got out of the car. The air was sparkling and pure. I breathed in deeply.

More firewood, Werner?

He held out his hand. There’s never enough. And the cold keeps you young. Would you like a coffee?

We went inside and sat down by the fire. Through the smell of the smoke, there filtered a pleasant fragrance of resin.

Werner made the espresso (he made a mountain variant of Italian-style coffee: a tiny amount as black as tar that kept you awake for weeks), sat down, took an ashtray from a little cabinet, and winked at me.

Werner told me he had quit smoking the day Herta gave birth to Annelise. But after the death of his wife, perhaps out of boredom or perhaps (I suspected) out of nostalgia, he had taken up the habit again. Surreptitiously, because if Annelise had seen him with a cigarette in his hand she would have flayed him alive. Even though I felt guilty about encouraging him with my company (and my discretion), at that moment, as Werner lit a match with his thumbnail, my father-in-law’s tobacco dependence was convenient for me. There’s nothing better for having a man-to-man chat than sharing a bit of tobacco.

I relaxed. We exchanged small talk. The weather, Clara. Annelise, New York. We smoked. We drank the coffee and a glass of Welshboden water to take away the bitterness.

At last I came out with it.

I saw a helicopter, I began. A red one.

Werner looked straight through me. And you’re wondering what it’d look like on TV, right?

Right.

That helicopter wouldn’t make a hole on the screen. It would shatter it.

Werner shook the ash from his cigarette onto the floor. Did you ever have one of those ideas that change your life?

I thought of Mike.

I thought of Annelise. And Clara.

I wouldn’t be here otherwise, I said.

I was younger when I had mine. It didn’t happen by chance, it was born out of grief. It’s never a good thing for ideas to come out of grief, Jeremiah. But it happens and you can’t do anything about it. Ideas come to you, and that’s it. Some go away and others take root. Like plants. And like plants they grow and grow. They have lives of their own. Werner broke off, examined the embers of his cigarette, and threw it in the fire. How much time do you have?

Whatever we need, I replied.

"Nix. Wrong. You have the time your wife and daughter have granted you. A man must always think first of his family. Always."

Right, I said, and I think I blushed a little.

Anyway, if you want to hear this story, it won’t take long. You see that photograph?

He indicated a framed snapshot, hanging below the crucifix. Werner went over to it and brushed it with his fingertips. Like many mountain people, he was missing a few phalanges, in his case the first of the little finger and ring finger of his right hand.

The black-and-white photograph showed five young men. The one on the left, an unruly lock of hair falling over his forehead and a rucksack on his back, was Werner.

We took that in 1950. I don’t remember the month. But I remember them. And I also remember the laughter. That’s one thing that doesn’t fade as you get older. You forget birthdays and anniversaries. You forget faces. Luckily, you also forget the pain, the suffering. But the laughter of that time, when you’re not yet a man but you’re not a child anymore either . . . that stays inside you.

Even though I’d seen a good few springs less than he had, I understood what Werner was trying to tell me. I doubted, though, that his memory was failing. Werner belonged to a race of mountain people forged in steel. In spite of his white hair and the lines on his face, it was impossible for me to think of him as an old man.

Life’s hard down there in Siebenhoch. School in the morning, down in the valley, then afternoon till night breaking your back in the fields, in the pastures, in the woods or in the stables. I was lucky because my father, Annelise’s grandfather, had survived the collapse of the mine, whereas many of my friends didn’t have their fathers, and growing up without a father in Südtirol in those years was no picnic.

I can imagine.

Imagine, maybe, Werner replied without taking his eyes off the photograph. But I doubt you can really understand it. Have you ever gone hungry?

I’d once been robbed by a junkie who’d pointed a syringe at my throat, and a close friend of mine had been stabbed on his way back from a concert in Madison Square Garden, but no, I’d never gone hungry.

So I didn’t reply.

We were young and carefree, in other words, we were happy. The thing we liked most was climbing mountains. An expression that was a mixture of sadness and irony crossed his face, then immediately disappeared. In those days, mountaineering was something for foreigners and dreamers. Not a respectable sport like today. In some ways, we were pioneers, you know? With time, mountaineering has turned into tourism, and today tourism is the main source of income throughout Alto Adige.

It was true. Everywhere there were hotels and restaurants, and cable cars to ease the ascent to the mountain peaks. In winter, the tourists concentrated in the skiing areas, and in summer, they devoted themselves to excursions in the woods. I couldn’t blame them: as soon as the weather changed and the snow melted, I was planning to buy sturdy shoes and, with the excuse of taking Clara to get a little fresh air, to see if this boy from Brooklyn could compete with the local mountain men.

Without tourism, Werner went on, the Alto Adige would be a poor province, inhabited only by aging peasants, and Siebenhoch would no longer exist, that’s for sure.

That would be sad.

Very sad. But it didn’t happen like that. He blinked. "Anyway, for people at that time, especially people around here, going into the mountains meant going to work in the mountains. Taking the cows to pasture, cutting firewood. Cultivating. That was the mountains. For us, on the other hand, it was fun. But we were careless. Too careless. We had competitions to see who could climb the steepest rock face, we timed each other, we defied the bad weather. And our equipment? Werner gave himself a slap on the thigh. Ropes made of hemp. You know what it’s like to fall when you’re tied to a rope made of hemp?"

I haven’t the slightest idea.

Hemp isn’t elastic. If you fall with modern ropes, the ones made of nylon and God knows what else, it’s almost amusing. They stretch and absorb your weight. Hemp is another story. You risk being crippled for life. Or worse. And on top of that, the climbing spikes, the hammers, and all the rest were handmade by the village blacksmith. Iron is fragile, extremely fragile, and expensive. But we didn’t have cinemas, we didn’t have cars. We’d been brought up to save every last cent. And we were really happy to use the money for our climbing expeditions. Werner cleared his throat. We felt immortal.

But you weren’t, were you?

Nobody is. A few months after we took that photograph, there was an accident. Four of us went up Croda dei Toni—have you ever been there? In Belluno dialect, it means ‘crown of thunder,’ because when it rains and lightning comes down it’s a sight to give you goose bumps. It’s a beautiful place. But that doesn’t make death less bitter. Death is death, and nothing else matters.

I read it on his face. He was thinking about Herta, who had died with a monster in her brain, devouring her. I respected his silence until he felt ready to continue with his story.

"Three of them didn’t make it. I survived only because I was lucky. Josef died in my arms, while I screamed and screamed, begging for help. But even if someone had heard me, you know how many kilometers there were between