Refiner's Fire (48 page)

When morning arose in a blaze, Marshall and Gaston, entranced and enraptured, progressed upward amid swirls of ice and fresh snow. Between them was Gastons dark purple rope. Four times, Gaston fell into newly covered crevasses. Marshall was pulled to the edge as if by a team of panicked horses, but he always dug his crampons into the singing ice and arched himself over his ice axe, digging deep into the pure white until he ground to a stop while Gaston hung tensely in the middle of the crevass, slowly spinning, looking above to see if Marshall would hurtle over the blue edge into a shared death. Then Marshall would belay Gaston and rig a Bilgiri, pulling him up rapidly. Gaston was so rugged that he insisted on forging ahead despite the falls. They traveled thin cornices in slow-paced agony, chests aching, mouths burnt by subzero air. Sometimes a hundred yards took an hour. The atmosphere was in attack and warred to break their momentum. But they continued past delicate white edges and over brittle constructions of ice, until they reached the summit of Mont Blanc. After a circling and dizzy look at the green world gone afire below them, they started for the Vallee Blanche.

They had to cross a spine of ice so thin that it was necessary to cut not the customary steps but handholds, so that they could hang on either side. Marshall suggested that if they both fell, they would balance out. “Don't be a fool,” said Gaston, indicating the thin ice wall between them. “The rope would be severed immediately. We are moving across a knife.” But they managed to negotiate even this upturned blade of ice and arrive at the Vallee Blanche.

They commenced their glissade, perhaps the longest ever, for the extreme and sudden cold had flattened the rills and laced over the gaps of the valley, into which they slid as fast as skiers, leaving two three-line tracks. Balanced on ice axes and heels, they fell through couloirs of virgin snow. Curtains of white leaped up behind them. They willingly flew off cliffs, landing in the snow, getting up again, sliding downward until their great hour was finished and they slammed into the forest of ice in the Bergschrund. Somewhere in the upright glittering mass, Metzner had his hut.

In the valley, Lydia made the rounds of pastel tents and documented with her Leica the gentle goings-on of the
Souverain.
Then she threw away her film and joined a group of red-collared Savoyards on a trout hunt in the stopped pools of the rivers upper tributaries. They dashed and splashed about, catching the trout in their hands with great glee. At night tents glowed from the braziers within. Lydia found a family with whom she took up residence. They made punches of purple wine and mountain flowers in ice. Only when the moon covered the valley like a bright inner lid of a sarcophagus did she glance at the mountain walls where Marshall was making his way.

After days of searching the Bergschrund, Marshall and Gaston had run out of food. They gnawed the ice for water. At night in their frail one-man tents they nearly froze, and they spent the cold days in fear and trances. The air slit their lungs like a sword as they climbed with crampons, ice axes, and ice screws, up and down the Bergschrund, finding not a trace of Metzner or his camp. There had been much shifting of the glacier. Gaston said that he had undoubtedly been buried.

“In fifty years his body will be thrown out at the base of the Mer de Glace, and they will say, ‘Here is the professor who perished in the
Souverain
half a century ago.' ”

They started the descent. Gaston kept falling into hidden crevasses, but Marshall had become so experienced at rapid belaying that he allowed Gaston to drop only a foot or so. He was shocked beyond speech when Gaston angrily ordered him to be less efficient, saying, “Let me fall five or ten meters without interruption. I like it.” Because Gaston had to work with his hands to place ice screws when they went up steep walls in the undulating surface, the tips of his fingers began to turn black. Both he and Marshall worried about their feet, which they had not felt in a long time, but Gaston said that if there were no pain, there was probably some hope—a paradox which startled Marshall from an icy reverie in which he had concluded that his life was not quite his own, his history was growing suspiciously powerful in its influence on his present, and coincidences were too many. His origins pulled hard, and he wondered if he were caught in an elaborate bittersweet play, the esthetics of which were formed around inevitability.

Halfway down and halfway through his thoughts he bumped hard up against Gaston. Preoccupied, he had been following the rope like a Chard Ox. His face stung, and he had nearly knocked Gaston into a deep crevass. Gaston neither reprimanded nor thanked him, but simply stared down. Marshall saw too, and even in the cold a chill ran along his spine. Hanging on a climbing rope 150 feet down from the lip of the chasm and 500 feet from the almost imperceptible ice-blue plates at the bottom was a dead man. His hands were frozen onto the rope, which he had gripped just above his head so that his arms were arched symmetrically. His face was upturned toward the light. He spun around gently.

Gaston retreated about twenty feet and hammered both his and Marshall's axes into the snow until the heads were a few inches above the surface and a foot apart. He took the rope and secured its center with an ice piton in back of the axes. He passed the ends through the carabiner hole at the top of each axe, and threw them over the crevass edge. He fixed one end of an auxiliary rope to an ice screw, and threw it over the edge next to the other ropes. He then rigged a bunch of slings, dropped his pack, and linked onto the two ropes. “Bilgiri,” he said to Marshall, who nodded. “It was easy before, but here it will be fifty meters—not so easy. You will have to read the ropes carefully.”

Gaston rappelled off the ice walls until he was deep in a world as blue as the sides of a high barrier reef. In a short time he was close to the body. Certainly Metzner, it was an old man clad in bright orange. His hair was white, and his wide-open eyes were blue.

T
HE RIVERS
ran wild in his last summer before university in Leningrad. Even in late July one could feel the autumn, though the heat continued tenaciously. Trout and wild ducks shared deep circuitous pools caught behind white frothing falls. Pines and firs of green and blue-green waved in the wind as clouds passed above. Woodsmen drank wine that they had hidden, and lay on the steep pine-needled banks, faces to the sun.

Several hundred miles south, beyond her fathers massive forests, Katrina Perlé was beginning her walks to a cathedral full of wheat. And in the forests themselves, in a small village of exiles, Lev dreamed of women, or rather, of one. He did not yet know her, but she was sandy-haired and blue-eyed, and looked as though her coloring were perpetually of the beaches in August. Though the village of malcontents was only a bitter speck amid an ocean of forests, he carelessly envisioned deeds of heroism for the sake of this woman whom he loved. He was young enough not to know that sometimes heroes live while those that they would protect die.

His father was a doctor, in whose view Lev's unrelenting patriotism and romanticism were wild idiocies bred by isolation in the forests and rebellion against the cynical dissidents there suffering at manual labor, against the disaffection of the father himself. He did not know that the enthusiasm of his son, and of countless other sons, would be necessary for survival in the years to come, and that the collective senses of a whole nation are always infinitely better attuned to the future than the senses of any individual—this in itself a strong argument against the dictator he detested.

Deep in nature, they thought feverish political thoughts—which was especially foolish in light of their ineffectual histories; they were (as was everyone in Russia at the time) failures. One reason for Lev's painfully naïve political raptures was that he was not really political. He preferred, for example, to ride logs down the river.

He would go to the chutes in morning, and when the loggers had put together a raft of ten or twenty bound logs he would leap on and ride faster and faster until he was dancing with the rolling wood, holding the chains as he was dipped into the cold current a dozen times a minute. In the baylet below his house he would fly clear of the logs, swim quickly to the bank, and make his way homeward through the green bushes, his clothes steaming as he took berries on the run.

But one day in the beginning of September he had to leave for Leningrad. That morning he bathed outside in the shower they had made by hanging a canvas bucket from a pine branch. He was eighteen, and thought that he was a folly grown man. Quietly resigned, his mother knew better.

She fixed his breakfast. The father too was about to leave, for the little hospital. Lev glanced at a suitcase he had packed the night before. He was so frightened that he almost shook. Then they stood at the doorway; his father embraced him; his mother embraced him; and their incipient tears vanished in laughter when they discovered that he had forgotten to put on his boots.

He did not know it, but he would never see them again, and the woods were to become so lost and far-away in time and geography that they would seem like a fairy tale.

He came to the wooden steps, with the newly polished boots. His mother bent down to kiss him as he put them on. His father said, “I have to go now. I'll be late,” and touched him on the head.

His mother said, “We'll see you at Christmas. It's only three months or so.” She had been wearing a gray dress with a gold clasp—things from the city. The flies beat against the screen; his father disappeared down a pine-clad path; and he pulled on the boots.

T
HIRTY-FIVE YEARS
later, a lean man with silver hair bent down to remove his boots. A life of war had engulfed him completely, made him a soldier, brought him to Palestine, given him the rank of general. He had seen many wars and many campaigns—the Russian Army; a transfer to the Naval Infantry riding horses and fighting across the forests; capture; escape; the partisans; and then the search for Katrina, which had led him to Palestine. There he fought the British until '48; the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Syrians in '48; the Egyptians in '56; all three again in '67; and then for years and years in the War of Attrition he had divided his attentions between his command and general staff work.

He had never remarried. Nor had he fathered any children, and as if to underscore the waste, his mistress had left when he retired from the regular Army. But many things kept him busy. Half of the time he looked after a brigade on the Northern Front, and in the other half he worked with the foresters, also in the North, as they tended the miraculous plantations of pine which had reforested Galilee and the foothills of the Lebanon. They traversed the valleys, armed not only with axes and saws but with rifles and machine guns, and they trimmed and cut silently, as perhaps he would have done in Russia had he not sought out Katrina.

He was a strange man—devoted, cynical, terribly strong despite the grave fault which split him apart from real life, usually cheerful, but sometimes deeply sad, and forever refreshed by the sight of even little forests and young trees in their second and third decades. He knew the terrain in the North as well or better than any man. While coursing the forests there as a soldier or woodsman, he frequently thought of Katrina Perlé.

How perfect it had been in Leningrad, discovering that they both were provincial and that they were always drawn softly outside themselves to the world of green. They fell in love and rambled about the gardens and the dirty railway sidings—where they found several things to their liking. It was quiet when there was no work. Small pine seedlings had sprung up in the cinder bed. Amassed ties in great resinous piles were sweet and fragrant. Blue sky was visible down the line. The tracks formed a continuous ribbon which they knew touched at the heart of their province. And the heart of their province was light green, as the wind passed over it flawlessly.

For Lev it was hard and purifying to stay in tents or shacks below Har Meron, lost in the trees with old and speechless Moroccans beaten down since birth, who wore soft slippers of carpet, and rags about their heads as they silently padded through the forests. They looked like Chinese; their faces were windswept brown; their eyes sparkled and said that they had survived: nothing else. In fourteen-hour days they cut and trimmed and burnt—the volume of their work monumental, their feel for the terrain equally startling.

At night when they returned in dim light to cabins or army tents, it was most difficult. Lev's hands were at rest and he had nothing to do but stare past the blinding lantern at trees which ringed the camp. These trees were as perfect and beautiful as always, these tall squeaking cedars, and the pines which had a white sound in the wind. The Moroccans and Turcomans and Kurds plucked their stringed instruments while the tea was allowed to boil in battered aluminum kettles as thin and delicate as foil.

Beyond, in the trees, her memory took shape. A passionate, genuine, loyal love was minted one day in a Polish forest on the side of a mountain, when the world was white and snow had begun to fall, and they could hear the continuous rumble of artillery a hundred miles away like summer thunder speaking to them in their shelter amid the pines and cedars. In the trees, in the trees the two bands had moved together silently in cautious recognition, and then Katrina had knelt as the snow came down and war-weary faces peered from aside the brown trunks.

And sometimes he thought that he was dreaming, and then he did dream. In the forests of Northern Galilee, the faces of the other woodsmen, the slightly oriental cast of their eyes, the dry orange fire, the weapons on the ground or over shoulders, the black tea, the dark vaults above the flames ending in ravishing unseen stars, the alertness for terror in the woods, the sound of artillery on the Golan constant and like the sea, and the clear colors and perfect air which enwrapped them as if in crystal were part of the continuing wave of men at war in the primal forests, fighting over the earths surface from beginning to end.