Summit: A Novel Page 3
It had never crossed Josef’s mind that anyone might be watching him. He had only gone out to make that climb because he had a free training day and was so sick and tired of looking up at the sheer rocky wall from the monotony of drill on the 1st Division parade ground. There was only one way to find out if it really was unclimbable. The very same thought he’d casually let slip to the guards that manned the red and white pole across the camp gateway as he left on his motorcycle.
Initially, Josef found the attention slightly alarming, but then, aided by the beer, he started to enjoy it. It was only when he returned to the barracks later and Gunter and Kurt sought him out that his personal spell of glory was broken.
Gunter was furious, growling at him in their Bavarian dialect, “You fool. If you let everyone see you can climb like that then they will always be watching. You know what that will mean for you, for all three of us, sooner or later? I already told you buying that damn motorcycle was a mistake—too obvious that you were making extra money—but now this? You need to get back into the shadows, my boy, or we will all be taking the long fall, not just you.”
Three days later, to potentially make matters worse, a small box was delivered to Josef by Generalmajor Ganzler’s adjutant. A handwritten note from Ganzler himself accompanied it:
To the finest climber in Bavaria. Bravo! Your first ascent of the Waxenstein wall has inspired the entire regiment. Yet more proof that the Gebirgsjäger are the finest mountain troops in the world. Wear this with pride—you are worthy of it!
Josef never mentioned it to Gunter and Kurt, suspending the silver regimental ring that Ganzler had awarded him on the cord of his army identification tag, out of sight.
Thinking about it again, Josef reached down into the collar of his shirt and felt for the cord to pull the ring up into his fingers. He touched its relief of a single edelweiss flower to bring him luck.
Almost immediately a light briefly flashed in the rainy darkness below. It reappeared to split into two narrow beams that began to intermittently twist and turn within the black of the woods. Through the beating rain, Josef heard bursts of an engine revving frantically accompanied by the helical whine of tires spinning for grip.
They were arriving.
5
Letting his lucky ring fall back beneath his shirt, Josef clenched his fist and thumped backward three times on the door, alerting the other two that it was time. He felt the door move, opening inward a crack. Without turning, Josef quietly said, “The truck is coming up the hill.”
“Usual drill, Josef,” Gunter’s voice rasped in whispered reply. “Check the driver; seven-two-four, remember? Then get the travelers inside as quickly as you can. There will be nine. As little noise as possible. Don’t forget to cover your face.”
The three-ton Opel truck burst from between the trees out into the rain. A flash of lightning, higher up the hill, illuminated its driver wrestling with the steering wheel, trying to gain as much momentum as possible to make a fast, splashing loop around the clearing before the mud and wet grass could catch the truck’s wheels and stop it from turning back down the hill. Tires spinning, windshield wipers beating frantically, a jet of grey smoke thrusting from its exhaust, the dark vehicle almost toppled over onto its side before it came to a rest, facing back down the hill at the edge of the woods, engine running.
Josef pulled his scarf up over his nose and felt his heavy, studded mountain boots squash into the wet mud as he stepped out from the doorway to run down to it. At the mountain soldier’s approach, a shadowed head hidden beneath a black fedora leaned from the truck window.
“Are you a true German?” the driver instantly demanded.
Josef knew the routine.
“Yes, I am blond like Hitler—seven—slim like Göring—two—and strong like Goebbels—four.” He shouted the answer back quickly, projecting his voice up through the scarf and the rain to be heard over the loud engine. The joke was easy to remember; it was Gunter’s favorite, but he had to be careful to insert the numbers correctly as they were different every time. Even as he spoke, the driver stroked the accelerator, keeping the engine’s revs up, primed to immediately escape if a single word or number of the response was wrong.
“How many travelers are you expecting?”
“Nine.”
Satisfied with Josef’s replies, the driver quickly turned off the engine and stepped down from the cab. Without looking Josef in the eye, he shook his hand and together they splashed around to the double cargo doors at the rear. A hidden colleague from the other side of the cab met them there, the two of them unfastening the rear cargo doors and pulling them open. Inside, Becker saw nothing but a wall of stacked wooden crates that gave off an overpowering smell of goat’s cheese.
The driver pulled himself up onto the edge of the truck body and started pushing at the lowest row of boxes. A small opening appeared. Taking an electric light out of his pocket, the man removed his hat to push his head and shoulders deep into the little tunnel. There was a brief flash of illumination and voices from within before the driver awkwardly backed himself out again. A moment later, a worn cardboard suitcase jerkily slid its way out of the opening. Following it came the black form of a thin man, squeezing himself out from between the crates on his stomach.
The driver’s partner helped the man down from the back of the truck, his feet dropping heavily into the sodden ground. He had difficulty standing, still bent and stiff from the cramped confinement of his journey. With a groan, he reached up and held his forehead. Josef thought he must have knocked it during the truck’s violent arrival but he could see no blood. Gradually the man straightened himself up, but when he pulled his hand away from his bruised head, his tired, lined face reacted with horror at the sight of the Wehrmacht insignia on Josef’s uniform. He tried to say something, a stutter of fear overwhelming any words.
The driver instantly motioned him to be silent, saying through clenched teeth, “I told you they would be soldiers. It’s not important. You need to get moving. We haven’t got all night.”
Josef nodded in agreement, pointing the man up the hill to the cowshed, its opened door now edged in yellow from a lamp lit within.
The small man didn’t move, as if stuck in the mud. Oblivious to the heavy rain pouring onto his thin hair and overcoat, he was completely paralyzed by the sight of the eagle and the swastika on the front of Josef’s field cap.
“But you … you … you are a Nazi soldier?” he finally said in a Viennese accent, shaking his head in disbelief.
Josef put an index finger up to his covered mouth. “No questions. You need to be quiet from now on. I am here to take you over the hills. Just go up to that building. We will talk inside.”
The man tried to say something more but then refrained, visibly diminishing as if the rain were shrinking him. Hanging his head, he pulled his feet from the wet mud and lifted his pathetic suitcase to slog his way up the sodden hill. The man walked slowly despite the downpour, a figure of meek surrender to whatever fate he now imagined awaited him within that shadowy farm building.
Josef watched him go, shaking his head in disbelief at the fugitive’s light leather dress shoes and thin, black cotton overcoat. They would be soaked through before he even made it to the building. It was going to be a long, cold night for that man, for them all, in fact.
6
Over the next five minutes, Josef watched eight more frightened faces burrow out from within the packing cases. They were all Austrian Jews. Josef had heard that since the Anschluss at the end of March, life was now as difficult for them there as it had been for many years in Germany. In fact most of their transports were Austrian now; the majority of German Jews that could leave had already gone.
Of the nine that evening, two were children: girls, one of about six or seven, the other slightly older, ten or eleven, perhaps. Of the adults, four men and three women, only two were elderly, in their six
ties or more. Josef was relieved to see they were still quite mobile. It was the old ones who were always the most difficult to get over the mountains. He wondered if it was an extended family group, but he couldn’t be sure. He knew nothing about them. It was Gunter who dealt with the details of each run over the hills. Josef only knew the coded phrase for the driver and the number to expect. He had been told to expect nine, to tell the driver it was nine, and nine it now was.
We must go.
Josef briefly shook the hand of the driver again then watched the truck silently roll away, the driver letting gravity pull it back toward the trees where its engine coughed into life. The sight and sound of the departing truck left Josef with a momentary spasm of loneliness that he had to fight to shake off as he hurried to catch up with the group filing up the hill to the cowshed.
When he reached them, the youngest child shied away from him, slipping and falling sideways out of the line. Josef stepped forward to help her up, but one of the men, possibly her father, got to her first.
“Don’t touch her, German,” he spat at Josef, stepping in front of him and wrenching the little girl up from the wet ground. Back onto her feet, the child, covered with a thick scum of soil, started to cry, beating at the man with tiny, clenched fists.
In response she was tugged forward roughly, without regard to the fact that one of her feet had emerged shoeless from the sucking ground. This made her cry even more, her screams becoming so hysterical that Josef instantly pushed past the man to snatch the struggling girl up under one arm. Clamping his other hand over the little girl’s mouth, he hissed at the man, “Get her shoe and follow me quickly!”
Josef ran with her up the slope toward the cowshed, the tiny, muddy girl flexing and coiling in his grip like an earthworm in the beak of a bird until he could thrust her in through the doorway. Released inside, she started wailing again.
“Shut up!” Kurt shouted from the back of the shed, breaking his customary reticence to speak. It did no good until one of the Jewish women arrived to seize the little girl, telling her to be quiet and pulling the child tightly into her wet clothes to smother her sobs.
The remainder of the group entered the simple stone building. When the man handed back her shoe the girl turned to him and, taking the shoe, lashed out at him with its muddy heel, starting to howl all over again.
A different, rougher voice commanded, “Silence her. Immediately,” prompting the woman to say forcefully, “Ilsa Rosenberg, that’s enough,” and clamp her own hand over the distraught child’s mouth.
The Jews clustered, fearful of the dark silhouettes before them. Gunter Schirnhoffer was deliberately standing in front of a kerosene lamp set in an alcove in the rear wall of the shed, his long shadow slicing into the dirt floor at their feet. Kurt Müller was crouched to his right, also in outline, hunched over, angling his own masked face downward, using the light of the lamp to cut a tent canvas into long thin strips with a hunting knife. Its razor-sharp edge caught the reflection of the yellow light as it scythed through the material. On his other side were two mules, already in harnesses, shuffling from side to side in one of the cow-milking stalls, twitchy and skittish at all the disturbance.
Josef quickly moved alongside Kurt and squatted down into the shadows as Gunter began to address the new arrivals.
“You must all listen to me very carefully.”
Standing in a wide-eyed semicircle before him, the travelers did as they were told.
“There is no time for long speeches or even for me to repeat myself. We are three. We are neither your enemies nor your friends. You will never know our names or see our faces. We are dressed as soldiers, but to you we are simply mountain guides who will lead you into Switzerland. All you need to think about is that you are just ten kilometers away from freedom.”
The Jews looked at each other, nervously excited at the thought of such proximity to escape, until Gunter broke the spell with his customary warning.
“But, mark my words, they are not easy kilometers. We will be going over the border on an old smugglers’ track. It is long, always steep, at places narrow, and difficult. At the top, if you fall, you will have time to wish you were dead before you hit the ground.”
Gunter paused for effect.
“Follow our steps, and make them your own,” he then continued. “We are good climbers. We know the way like the backs of our hands, even in the dark. We will help you as much as we can. You will need to grit your teeth and suffer in silence. For the oldest or the smallest—you choose—we have two mules to carry you at the beginning, but the mules can’t do the final section over the rocks. At that point everyone will be on their own feet. Let me look at them.”
The nine were momentarily confused, forcing Gunter to raise his voice.
“I have already said that I don’t want to have to repeat myself. Each of you, show me your feet, your shoes. I need to see what you have got on your feet.”
The Jews looked at each other again, this time quizzically, until one lifted his leg and pushed forward a foot. The others followed his example as Gunter took the lamp from the wall behind him to look along the row of thin, smooth-soled shoes and low, leather ankle boots caked in wet mud that were now pointing at him.
“Scheisse!” he swore. “As always. Every time I tell him they must send you in boots, in something heavy, and every time it is like this. It is a bad night out there. The ground will be very wet. There will be fresh snow higher up. Scheisse! These shoes are useless. Each of you must take two strips of canvas from that man there.”
Gunter pointed to Kurt, who was sheathing his knife, gesturing him to throw a strip of the cut canvas, which he caught in one hand. Holding it out in front of him, he began to twist the length of material tightly. “Watch what I am doing. Twist the strips tight like this until they make a cord, and then bind them around your feet. It will help your feet grip, protect them a little. Adults, help the children. They need to be tied tightly.”
He turned to point to a corner of the shed. “You will find some long sticks and blankets there. Adults take one of each, and two extra blankets for the children. Keep them rolled up for now to keep them dry. You will need them higher on the hill when we move above the rain into the snow. It is going to get cold up there. When it does, you must keep moving your fingers and your toes all the time to keep the blood flowing, like this.” He held out one hand, rapidly opening and closing his fingers in demonstration. “The sticks will help you keep your balance. If you have brought anything that you can’t carry on your back then you will leave it behind—but not here. We will throw it into the woods on the way up the hill.”
The group remained motionless, rendered mute by the brisk instructions, equally afraid of the coarse soldier in front of them and the unknown journey ahead. Ilsa, the little girl who had fallen into the mud, was quiet now, instead staring intently at Josef, concentrating every hatred her small mind could conceive onto his hidden face. He winked at her in return as Gunter told him and Kurt to help the travelers get ready. The girl snapped her head away with a grimace of disgust.
While the three mountain troopers worked to ready the Jews for the arduous journey ahead, Gunter continued to brief them. “Once we leave this hut, there is to be no talking, no lights, no flames, no cigarettes, nothing but walking. We will go at a slow but even pace. We will stop every thirty minutes for five minutes. Every hour we will stop for ten more. You cannot stop in between, or we will take too long. On the top of the ridge is a small chapel. There we can stop for a longer rest, to warm up and prepare for the final, most difficult section. The entire journey will take about six to seven hours if you do as I say. If you have any questions, save them. There is nothing more that is helpful for you to know. Just concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, and take comfort in the fact that we are paid much less if we don’t get all nine of you to the other side. We will go in five minutes.”
The Summit of Mount Everest—29,029 feet
May 26, 2009
2:41 p.m.
The dead camera terminated the summit-photo farce.
Quinn burned with a fury at the whole performance but it gave him no warmth.
The cold was biting hard now.
As he zipped the small silver camera back into an inside pocket of his thick down suit, he imagined instead just flinging it off the summit. He visualized it spinning out into the wispy air and then plummeting ten thousand feet straight down into Sarron’s thick skull. Although the thought was faintly pleasing, he ordered himself to stop wasting precious energy, and time, on nonsense.
Pushing into the layers of fabric around his wrist, Quinn sought the familiar face of his battered Rolex. It was nearly 2:45 p.m., Chinese time, a little past midday if you used the more logical Nepali time zone for exactly the same place, the border of the two countries meeting as they did beneath his feet. It was hovering on being the latest that you would want to be up there but not crazy. Still, they needed to get going.
Helping the semiconscious Nelson Tate Junior back down from the very top, Quinn sat him on the snow and went to work again, trying to prepare him for a fighting chance at the descent.
There wasn’t much more that could be done for the boy’s fingers. That would have to come later at a lower camp and, when it did, it was going to be excruciatingly painful. No, for now it was all about mobility, about just being able to put one foot in front of the other.