True Summit (18 page)

The jocular tone of gallows humor bathes this nightmarish scene in the railway car in
Annapurna.

Things had to be cleaned up now; the nauseating smell drove even the natives away. Sarki and Foutharkey set to work, they opened the the door wide and with a sort of old broom made of twigs, they pushed everything onto the floor. In the midst of a whole heap of rubbish rolled an amazing number of toes of all sizes which were then swept onto the platform before the startled eyes of the natives.

In his diary, Lachenal wrote at the end of this wretched day, “I suffered something truly horrible, but after all, so much the better. Is not memory proportional to suffering?”

In a 1999 documentary about Annapurna filmed by Bernard George, Herzog looks back with a certain disdain on Lachenal's agonies. “He was obsessed with this story of his feet,” says Herzog, in measured tones. “There was a kind of obsession that was painful. It breathes in all his writings: ‘My feet, my feet, my feet.' . . .

“In climbing, one must adapt. I lost both my feet and my hands, but it didn't ruin my life.”

What was the cause of Oudot's haste in the railway car? Surprisingly, Herzog had chosen to divide the party. He, Oudot, Ichac, and Noyelle would change trains at Gorakhpur and ride to Kathmandu. Lachenal, Terray, Rébuffat, Schatz, and Couzy would proceed to Delhi. The rationale for this separation, according to Herzog, was that “I intended to make every effort possible to keep the promise I had given at the start to visit the Maharajah of Nepal.”

It was no accident that Herzog took the expedition doctor with him. By now, on July 6, all the climbers wanted nothing but to get back to France as soon as possible. Not only psychologically, but in terms of the worsening condition of Herzog's and Lachenal's feet and hands, the sooner the men could fly to France the better.

In the end, however, it would be eleven more days before the Annapurna team boarded its airplane. Those eleven days of waiting drove Lachenal deeper into fury and despair.

I
N THE CIRCUMSTANCES,
it is puzzling that Herzog would have delayed his whole team's return to France for any ceremony, no matter
how prestigious. In
Annapurna,
he devotes three and a half of the last five pages of the book to his audience with the Maharajah, which unfolds as a pageant of jewel-encrusted uniforms, of Gurkha soldiers presenting arms, and dignitaries giving formal speeches. At the climax of the ceremony, the Maharajah conferred on Herzog the country's highest military honor, the Gurkha Right Hand for valor, saying, “You are a brave man, and we welcome you here as a brave man.”

Yet the book also makes clear that attending the ceremony taxed Herzog to the limit. As he sat watching the long performance, pus and blood oozed through his bandages. Ichac whispered, “How's it going?”

“Pretty awful,” Herzog whispered back. “I don't think I can hold out much longer.”

Later, in Delhi, Oudot discovered that Herzog's feet had become infested with maggots. When he tried to use tweezers to remove them, they withdrew into holes in the man's dead flesh.

Even if Herzog felt it vital to attend the audience of the Maharajah, why could the five climbers in Delhi not have flown at once back to France?

When I interviewed her in 1999, Françoise Rébuffat gave me one answer, based on her late husband's understanding of the situation. “Herzog said at one point that his company, Kléber-Colombes, had asked him to work, to go see the Maharajah. They knew Nepal would need rubber.

“Herzog took away all the men's passports, so they couldn't go home early. No one was to get back to France before Herzog. He even insisted on being the first off the plane when it landed at Orly. This embittered Gaston.”

In fact, it was Lucien Devies who, acting in consultation with Herzog, secured tickets for a return flight on July 16. Meanwhile, in Delhi, the five climbers loitered, with nothing to do. Lachenal's diary records this ordeal by monotony, which became for him even worse than the agonies of the retreat by stretcher.

“All my comrades are dawdlers who think only about themselves, never about me,” he writes on July 8. That evening the men attended a dinner party for all the French citizens in Delhi—all fifteen
of them. “My feet felt really bad, and in addition I was sick to my stomach with colic, and at every instant I was afraid I would have to ask someone to carry me to the bathroom.”

July 9: “I changed my dressings, which were oozing [with pus] and which smelled really bad. There is a lot of rotten flesh. . . . I change positions a thousand times a day, a thousand times a night. My ass, on which I sit day and night, gives me a lot of trouble.”

July 10: “The afternoon was very slow, it seemed it would never end. Several times I asked myself what day it was. Yes, at 6:00
P.M.
, as at 3:00
P.M.
, as at 1:00
P.M.
, it was still always the 10th and to get to the 11th, it was necessary to wait half the night. And after—after that it will be the 11th, just like the 10th, with the same suffering, the same pains.”

July 11: “Bored to death. The onset of the night was very slow. Morphine.”

Appalled by the gangrene that was developing in his feet, Lachenal twice begged his companions to fetch doctors to attend to him. These native physicians were in over their heads, as they confronted the ravages of frostbite.

The doctor undid my dressing with a great deal of delicacy. He proceeded with much propriety. He sterilized his tools over an alcohol flame. He seemed a bit frightened, he didn't know what he ought to do, so he asked me. . . . In the end, he was content with covering my feet with gauze soaked in Mercurochrome and wrapping them back up again.

By July 12, on learning that the flight home was to be delayed another day, Lachenal had reached the ragged end of his patience. “Does Momo think of no one but himself?” he raged in his diary.

Finally, after the return of the Kathmandu party, Lachenal consented to one more treatment by Oudot, who amputated his last toes. “I suffered horribly. He gave me an intravenous shot of morphine, which did me little good. . . . At each attack of the scissors, the scalpel, the lancet, my big toe jumped. For me this was a huge disappointment, for I had truly believed I could keep part [of my toes].”

“Will I still be able to ski properly?” Lachenal wondered in his diary on July 15. “Tomorrow is the departure toward my wife.”

At last the 16th arrived. The men boarded the airplane, then whiled away the hours of the endless flight. Just before landing at Orly the next day, Lachenal and Herzog put fresh dressings on their wounds.

Their reception on arrival was more tumultuous than anyone had predicted. Before a wildly cheering throng, Herzog was hoisted first off the airplane, his feet and hands covered with enormous bandages. Rébuffat followed, then Couzy, then Terray, carrying Lachenal in his arms like a child. Reporters swarmed around the worn-out climbers, demanding at once the whole story of Annapurna. Herzog's mother, father, and siblings embraced him. Adéle took Lachenal's head in her hands and kissed him, tears streaming down her face.

For the French, still sunk in the humiliation of World War II, the conquest of the first 8,000-meter peak ever climbed became at once a matter of incalculable national pride. Indeed, it could be argued that no triumph of sport in the nation's history ever meant so much to its people. Nor was the glory to be short-lived. Fifty years later, Annapurna still occupies a sovereign place in the French soul.

For Herzog, the ordeal of recovery had just begun.
Annapurna
ends with the arrival at Orly, with Herzog's ringing
envoi:
“There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.” The most moving passages in
L'Autre Annapurna
concern the author's convalescence. In the end, he would spend a full year in the American hospital at Neuilly, undergoing twelve major operations and a number of skin grafts. His spirit would plummet to a bedrock despair, before the “new life” could truly commence.

Early on in his hospital stay, Herzog underwent a moment of deep horror. Surrounded by doctors, the patient lay still as nurses unwrapped the dressings on his feet. The head physician offered soothing words: “Maurice, be brave while I change this last bit of gauze.”

Suddenly Herzog heard a chorus of cries. Doctors and nurses
alike jerked back involuntarily. “They're jumping!” someone screamed. “They're jumping!”

The maggots that had infested Herzog's feet in Nepal had gorged on his dead flesh. Now, each one as thick as a pencil, at the moment of release from their prison of gauze, they leapt into the air in every direction.

Herzog could not control the tears of an utter desolation.

W
ITH THE TEAM MEMBERS
bound by their contract to publish no account of the expedition for five years after its conclusion, it would seem that Devies and Herzog had planned from the start for Herzog to write the official book. In
L'Autre Annapurna,
however, Herzog insists that this was not the case—that as he lay recuperating in the hospital, he had no notion of writing about the expedition.

In that memoir, he attributes the spark of the idea to a head nurse named Irène Kravchenko, whose blue eyes, blond hair, and “ravishing” smiles boosted the invalid's
morale. Kravchenko's beauty, writes Herzog, camouflaged “an inflexible will.” One day she let her patient know that she considered him psychologically as well as physically damaged. What he needed, she counseled, was a purpose in life.

“A purpose?” Herzog protested. “My god, what? Reading? Is that your idea?”

“Why not write?” proposed Kravchenko.

“You're joking. What about my hands?”

“You could dictate a book. Your book. Your life, your death. A new life. . . . You must do it. You
can
do it!”

Is this story disingenuous? Is it a complete fiction? How could Herzog not have planned to write the book a voracious public was already clamoring for? In its portrait of the maimed victor of Annapurna as a reluctant celebrity, the Kravchenko vignette mirrors a stance Herzog would come to perfect in his lecture appearances.

As soon as its editors could put together a story, on August 19
Paris-Match
ran its exclusive account of the expedition. The cover featured the now-famous summit photo of Herzog holding aloft the Tricolor attached to the shaft of his ice axe; inside were splashed sixteen pages of color and black-and-white photos. (These photos were credited to Ichac, although Rébuffat took the ones high on the mountain, Lachenal the summit photo.) The issue broke all the magazine's previous sales records.

On January 25, 1951, 2,500 spectators crowded into the Salle Pleyel in Paris to watch the premiere of the film Ichac had brought back from Annapurna. The audience included the president of France, Vincent Auriol, and five ministers. Herzog, holding the stumps of his hands pressed together before him, limped across the stage, with his eight teammates following in single file, to the wild applause of the congregation.

In
L'Autre Annapurna
the reluctant celebrity gives us a glimpse of the climbers nervously lingering backstage before their procession. Everyone feels intimidated by the grand occasion. His friends counsel Herzog to lead the procession on stage, but he demurs, urging they appear as a group. Terray clinches the debate: “You were the first on the summit. Here, you should be first as well. Go ahead.”

After the premiere on January 25, it would require thirty more showings of the film in Paris, and some 300 lectures and individual appearances by the climbers in other French cities, to satisfy the public's passion for details of the great adventure.

On February 17,
Paris-Match
ran another cover story on Annapurna, focusing on the film premiere at the Salle Pleyel. This time the cover photo showed a still emaciated Herzog, clean-shaven and dapper in jacket and tie, holding his truncated hands out toward the audience as he spoke into a microphone. The cover blurb announced, “Paris salutes the triumph of the conquerors of Annapurna”; then, “Herzog—his life, his struggles, his defeats, his victories.” The text hailed Herzog as “our number one national hero.” As for the film premiere and the subsequent
séances
at the Salle Pleyel, the reporter gushed about the “enormous crowd” that “every night shouts itself hoarse, crying out its pride in the conquerors of the Himalaya.”

The article devolved into a profile of Herzog. Incredibly, in six pages of adulatory prose, not once did the reporter mention Lachenal. Instead, “On June 3, 1950, at 2:00
P.M.
, Maurice Herzog marked the triumph of his tactical campaign by planting his ice axe at 8,078 meters on the summit of Annapurna.” The photos dwelt on Herzog at his parents' house in Saint-Cloud, Herzog as a young climber, Herzog front and center in a group photo with all “the greatest explorers of France.” The reporter had visited Herzog at home, surrounded by his souvenirs, including “The ‘Foca' that took, at 8,078 meters, the famous photo immortalizing the French victory, which was a cover photo of
Paris-Match.
” A caption referred to “the Foca that accompanied him to the summit.” It was as if the camera had been Herzog's only teammate on the summit, and the photo had taken itself.