A Soldier of the Great War (80 page)

"He knows, anyway, that it's impossible. He's on the fissure where it bends left. The traverse that leads to him is the hardest section of the route. By the time we got to him it would be too late. But it wouldn't matter anyway, because even were he alive he
would have to be lowered off route, and even if he made it down he'd be right over the Austrian trenches. He says that he knows exactly where he is, and that no bolts or natural belay points are below him."

"He's lying," Alessandro said. "If he knows where he is, then he's got to know that there's a good line of bolts going all the way down. I know the face of the Schattenhorn. He's right on the line of retreat."

"Why would he lie?"

"Because he thinks that anyone who would come after him would be killed."

"He's right, and the major has forbidden it."

"May I see through the field glasses?"

Visible in the shadows was the familiar crack that rose almost a thousand meters, and by the light of the receding flares Alessandro followed it to the high traverse that he knew, and then to the ledge beyond, where the wounded climber was now in his second night, if he was still alive. "Too bad," Alessandro said. "
I'm
not going to get him."

"The cold will take him if it hasn't already," the officer said. "Last night we asked if he wanted a priest, and he declined. We thought, what kind of last rites could he have in the blinking of candles through the dark, but that wasn't the reason he declined. He started signaling us again after a while, and we could hardly believe it."

"Believe what?" Alessandro asked.

"He wanted a rabbi. Can you imagine, a Jew in the Alpini? He's lost."

 

A
S
A
LESSANDRO
made his way in the mist over a vast snowfield, he imagined that the army would not even bother to send him to Stella Maris but would just put him up against a wall and shoot him. It mattered little. Given the circumstances, his state of prac
tice in climbing, and the enemy gunfire, the army would never have the opportunity.

The circle would be closed, except for Luciana, who would remain, and bear children who would be as strong as colts. They would think of the war as a fairy tale or a dream. Alessandro and everyone else would be ghosts—mute images in photographs that people soon did not see even when they were looking at them.

Though he was weighed down by 250 meters of
abseil tope,
and other equipment, he moved fast across the snowfield. He had discarded the Alpini jacket for just a sweater, but his pace kept him warm. In gaps in the mist that whistled past him he saw what he thought to be an Austrian patrol moving slowly across his path, headed down-slope, far enough away to look no bigger than rifle bullets. They would appear for a moment in the clear, and then vanish.

To avoid them he had merely to veer to the right and allow them to continue left, but he was in a hurry and he welcomed the collision. He drew the pistol he had used in the observation post. Without altering his pace, he walked toward them. When they saw him, they stopped. They were confused, because he was alone, heavily burdened, moving fast, and making no attempt to conceal himself, and as he drew closer they saw that he had no rifle.

They thought he might be one of them, or perhaps a mad neutral—an Indonesian or a Peruvian trudging through a war zone on a winter night—and they weren't alarmed, because they were four, with rifles, and he was one, without.

"Hallo! Hallo!" they called. Then, when he didn't answer and he kept coming, they looked at each other, in their fur hoods and embroidered cloaks, and almost as one they decided that they had better shoot him.

The second their bodies made the characteristic motion of unslinging a rifle, a slight displacement of the hip, quickly rectified, Alessandro raised the pistol and began to fire.

They scattered so fast down the hill that by the time he crossed their tracks they were already far away. They threw themselves onto the snow and began shooting in his direction, but he was hidden by clouds, and when the clouds dissipated, his dark silhouette was almost impossible to find against the black sky, for all it did was cut out the stars.

He reached the wall at eleven. Rather than hesitate in the cold he removed the pistol belt, tied a harness around his legs and waist, positioned his equipment, had some chocolate and a sip of water, and put on his gloves, wool-lined deerskin thin and supple enough to give him a feel for the rock. Hoping that the floor and the ledges of the thousand-meter fissure he was about to ascend would be relatively free of snow, he began to climb.

Weeks and months are needed to accustom oneself to climbing. Otherwise, much energy is lost in clinging to the rock, maintaining too sure a hold, trying not to be too stiff, and worrying. After a while a climber warms to the mountains and can accomplish with little effort those things that once took all he had, for height gradually loses its meaning. Standing on the edge of a two-thousand-meter precipice becomes no less comfortable than sitting in a wicker chair on Capri, for it is possible to acquire some of the self-possession that enables mountain goats to stand for hours on a tiny ledge above an abyss.

Alessandro was thrown into this state of mind almost immediately. Though it was cold and the patches of snow over which he had to crawl rustled like glass beads, he was warm. The faster he went, the warmer he got. His face was hot, and the inside of his gloves were wet.

It was dark and he could see very little above him, but he could see just far enough to make his way rapidly on rock that seemed comfortable, solid, and familiar. Only when he had to use his ice axe to cross a patch of hard snow that slid away into the air and was too compacted for step-kicking did he realize that he had not been
thinking, and for a moment, as if he were awakening from a dream, he began to re-evaluate his chances and to imagine that he would be able to bring Rafi down. He drove the axe into snow that glowed faintly in starlight, and sank back into the all-encompassing pleasure whence he had come, with no thought or hope, but only movement and daring.

 

L
ONG BEFORE
the war, Alessandro and Rafi had devised a system of self-belay for solo climbing. Had he been able to take his time he might have used it all the way up, but because he had to reach Rafi as soon as possible and wanted to be as far as he could be above the guns by dawn he would use it only on the most difficult and exposed parts of the route.

The climber would climb unprotected until he felt in need of a belay. He would then drive a pin into the rock and attach to it a specially rigged carabiner with two loops of tape stretching perpendicularly from the center of the gate to the closure, and to the shaft of the carabiner directly opposite. The rope would run between the loop of tape where it fastened to the shaft, and the point where the gate rested against the shaft. Were the climber to fall, the rope would break the lower tape, set the carabiner in the proper position, and allow the gate to close. In the absence of a fall a sharp pull from above would break the same tape, move the rope past the gate, and position the second loop of tape on the eye of the piton so that one more pull would break it and free the carabiner. The second tape would always be properly aligned because the climber's knapsack and ropes, hanging from the carabiner on a short runner, would provide resistance and righting force.

With the breaking of the second tape the gate would close and the climber could retrieve everything but the piton left in the rock. He was limited solely by the number of pitons he could carry, but he could climb only five meters from each belay, because a fall of
more than ten meters would either pull out the piton, snap the rope, or break the climber's back.

Alessandro ascended rapidly on wide ledges remarkably free of snow. It was so dark that he could hardly see what was below him, and, robbed of vertiginous detail both by lack of light and by the fog that seemed to keep him always at ground level, he went extremely fast. Before the war, he had called this kind of climbing the unthinking ascent. With the illusion of upward momentum the climber is concerned with nothing but the next hold, and does not need holds as solid as he might were he to rest on them.

Alessandro climbed like this for more than three hundred meters, talking to himself freely, discarding holds as soon as he had them, breathing ferociously, and forgoing rest when he reached a safe gallery or runway along the fissure. Instead, he would race to the end, where he would begin to climb again, still out of breath.

He halted at the beginning of the hardest part of the route, what he and Rafi had called the upside down funnel. Here the fissure stopped sloping to the left and went straight up for fifty meters before it resumed its slanting run. For forty meters of its rise the crack was not too difficult. It was the right size for chimneying and it had thousands of step-like ledges. The first ten meters where the route became vertical, however, were open on the left, and funnel-shaped.

This required perfect placement of hands and feet, great strength, and height. Rafi, who was much taller than Alessandro, had done it in the lead, well belayed, in broad daylight, with neither ice nor snow. Even then, it had been difficult.

After shedding his knapsack and rope, Alessandro took out his hammer and tested a large piton that had already been driven into the rock. Then he set up his self-belay, tied himself in, and turned to the open funnel.

The other side was encrusted with ice. He was sure he would fail. On the other hand, Rafi had led it twice before, and Alessan
dro had seconded. His arms, stomach, and thighs had ached, but he hadn't fallen.

He began with care and deliberation. The holds were narrow, some were blocked by ice, and he soon reached the point where gravity was pulling him backward, off the side of the funnel. Though he tried to control them, all his muscles were quivering as if he were in a fit. Five more seconds and he would drop off the mountain. If his rope held, he might live, but his ribs would probably be smashed. Even were he uninjured, he might not be able to climb back up, and would hang at the end of the rope until he died.

Two seconds passed. He was about to accept the worst. He looked up. Just beyond his reach above him was the eye of a piton. Someone had done the funnel more mechanically than he and Rafi had done it. The piton was driven straight up. Alessandro had no way of knowing if it would hold—he could hardly even see it—but he had nothing else.

In the last second he took a deep breath to stop the trembling. The price for that was that he could not possibly hold his position. Without a sound, he began to pivot from the rock, with his foothold the fulcrum. He had begun to fall, but he had an instant, a fraction of a second, to convert the fall to a leap, and he did.

He screamed, which relaxed his lungs and gave him more flexibility. His right hand caught the piton. Both his upward momentum and the marginal benefit of grasping the outside of the piton provided just enough time for looping his middle finger through the piton's eye.

For a moment he found himself hanging by a finger. This, of course, could not be prolonged, and he curled his entire body, like an inchworm recoiling upon its invisible thread, to push his legs toward the opposite side of the funnel.

His feet slammed against the rock and dislodged an icicle that fell away without a sound, and he fell back, again hanging by a
finger. Once more, he doubled up and thrust out his legs. This time he found a hold below the piton, grasped it with his left hand, and used it to push himself out.

His feet made solid contact with the other side of the funnel. The icicle had formed because it was rooted in the angle of a ledge almost big enough to sit on. Here, Alessandro's nailed boots were solidly jammed.

Not daring to let go of the piton, he nonetheless began to walk up the wall with his left hand. "When he found a hold with enough resistance he released his grip on the piton and reached out with his right hand. He used the muscles in his abdomen to raise himself, pushing hard against the wall ahead of him even though it was mostly covered with smooth ice.

Finally, when he was positioned at a forty-five-degree angle, he found a ledge that had a little indentation in it. He grasped it with his right hand, and with his left he found a crack and jammed in three fingers. Then he swung his feet back to the wall he had been holding, and scrambled until they were placed in a knob in the rock, after which he began to go straight up the shaft.

 

A
T DAWN
, as the clouds were lifting and illuminated windblown coronas of snow were lashing against the blue, he reached Rafi's partner, who was hanging from the rope and swaying slightly in the wind. Alessandro could see neither his face nor his hands. The only human thing about him was one boot that pointed out into the air. He had covered his head to keep warm, and the hood was dusted with snow.

If Alessandro cut the rope the body would be smashed against the ledges and might disappear in the river that ran adjacent to the base of the cliff. If he didn't, it would hang in the air for months until the rope rotted or was severed as it rubbed against the rock when the corpse moved in the wind. Then, when it hit ledges or
the ground, it would break apart. The prospects for recovery, no matter how slight, were better now, and might allow a woman in Padua or Verona to be comforted, or an old man in Milan to end his days in peace. Alessandro unfolded his single-bladed pocket knife and cut the rope in eight strokes. The body fell away with no sound whatsoever. First it had been there, a meter below him, and then it was gone.

By the time he reached Rafi, the light was bright. Rafi was completely still, curled into a fetal position, his back pressed against the rock, his knapsack placed over his side as a makeshift blanket.

Alessandro walked on his knees along the ledge. He bent down next to Rafi, and uncovered his face.

"Rafi," he said, shaking him, but Rafi's eyes stayed shut.

With shaking, frostbitten hands, Alessandro took a tiny flask of grappa from his pack, unscrewed the cap, and brought the neck close to Rafis lips, thinking that the fire of the grappa might wake him. "Rafi," he pleaded, rubbing his hand against Rafis cold cheeks.