The path angled vertiginously across the scree.
She was glad when they reached the shoulder and Bruno stopped to hoist her bag to his other side.
‘Thank you for carrying my stuff.’
‘It’s steep. You’re pretty strong.’
She was pleased by this. Turning back to look at the way they had climbed, Mair’s breath was taken away again. Below them lay the station and the little green train, like a child’s toy, winding its way back down to the valley. Across the saddle the giant peaks now seemed close enough to reach out and touch.
Bruno pointed. ‘Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger,’ he said.
The face presented to them by the mountain called the Eiger was a black pyramid of concave rock rising sheer for thousands of feet. The sight of it made Mair shiver.
‘That’s the Nordwand,’ Bruno said. ‘North face.’
‘At Lamayuru you told me about Rainer attempting to climb that.’
‘Yes. His guide was my grandfather. They both came very close to death, and their survival forged a friendship.’
They stood shoulder to shoulder, staring across at the rock wall.
‘Come,’ Bruno said at length. ‘It’s not far from here.’
Downhill now, at an angle, winding deeper into a remote landscape of empty air over rolling turf with a pile as velvety as the finest Kashmir carpet. Far down in the valley Mair could see clusters of chalets and the glint of traffic on threadlike roads.
They scrambled over a ridge and a tiny lake of extreme blue appeared just below them, set like a sapphire in a green ring of ground. At the opposite bank, on a broad wedge of land, a small cabin stood among the flowers. There were four windows, two by two, each with a window box spilling scarlet geraniums.
In the doorway, Bruno bowed. He seemed more Swiss here in his own setting.
‘Welcome,’ he said again.
The cabin was constructed of logs, and there was a low pitched roof of wooden shingles. The eaves projected a long way all round, and in the shade at the front there was a wooden platform with two benches, one on either side of the door. To the left-hand side there was a flat wall of logs, stacked with such intricate attention that it would have been difficult to slide a finger between the cut faces.
Inside there were wide wooden floorboards and a square metal stove. At the windows were red and white gingham curtains and on a solid wooden table stood a blue jug of flowers.
‘It’s quite primitive,’ Bruno said. ‘Lake water, earth closet, candles or oil lamps. I’ve rigged solar panels on the roof, though. They heat a small hot-water tank for washing. I could make it more comfortable, of course, but I rather like it as it is.’
‘Don’t change it too much. It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen,’ Mair said.
To her surprise, he smiled with pleasure. It was the first time this afternoon that she had seen him do so.
‘Do you think so? My father used to bring me here every summer. It’s just a shepherd’s hut, really.’
He showed her the way up a ladder through a trapdoor in the corner of the beamed ceiling. Up here two small rooms were separated by a rough plank wall. Mair’s had a single mattress on the floor, made up with white sheets and a patchwork quilt. There was a faded rag rug, and a row of wooden pegs on the wall, nothing more. The window was at knee height. She was touched to see a pale blue towel laid on the quilt, neatly folded with one corner doubled back. Bruno had prepared a welcome for his guest.
He withdrew his head from the trapdoor and she unpacked her few things and hung them on the pegs. As she climbed down again she glimpsed his room. There were piles of books, another single mattress, hardly more clothes on his row of pegs than she had brought with her for a stay of three days. It was clear that he lived simply.
Downstairs Bruno showed her out to the neat kitchen with its stone sink and modern bottled-gas cooker. A row of pots and enamel plates and two glasses stood on a wooden shelf. Outside in a lean-to was the lavatory. A tiny porthole cut in the door gave a circular view of a clenched fist of ice and snow high on the Nordwand.
A kettle whistled on the gas and Bruno made tea. Looking around her, Mair noticed a wind-up radio, a laptop computer. On a shelf of new-looking wood there was a photograph of Lotus in a Perspex frame. Her hair blew off her face like a cloud of white candyfloss. Bruno’s gaze slid across it.
‘Most days I walk down to the station buffet the way we came,’ he said. ‘My friend Christoph’s the boss there. I drink an espresso and read the newspaper and they let me charge my phone and computer.’
They carried their cups outside and took a bench each.
Mair stretched out her legs and rested her head against warm, splintery wood. The snow and ice walls glittered in the crystal air. With so much space around her she had the luxurious sense
that there was infinite time to ask all the questions that simmered in her head.
In his new, hesitant way Bruno told her about his life in the cabin.
‘When I first came up here there was still snow on the ground. I’d wake up to find chamois and hare prints passing the door. I’d put on my skis and follow them as far as I could. If I’m in a hurry, I walk as far as the station and get the train on down to the village you came through to buy food and pick up emails, but there
is
no hurry. I keep a bike at the station so I usually cycle or even walk all the way there and back again. It only takes a couple of hours. At the … beginning, after she died, I’d walk and walk, from dawn until dark. As fast and as far as I could, until I was ready to drop. As if I could ever walk away from what happened. I realised, in the end, that that was what I was trying to do. It’s better now I know that much.’
Mair nodded, full of sorrow and sympathy.
Her impulse was to jump up and hold him in her arms, but she resisted it. Bruno was tough, even though he spoke with such raw frankness. He didn’t need her mothering.
They drank their tea and watched birds gliding over the ridge.
After a while he said, ‘I collected this from my sister, when I knew you were coming. She lives in Bern.’ He brought out a big album with heavy black boards split and frayed at the corners. He turned pages until he found what he was looking for.
‘This is Rainer Stamm, with my grandfather, in 1937.’
It was a deckle-edged black-and-white photograph of two men wearing breeches with braces and flannel shirts. They were standing in front of what appeared to be a station halt somewhere in the mountains. Both of them were smoking, smiling, squinting a little against strong sunlight.
Mair looked for a long time.
The pin-up. Caroline’s words.
‘He was rather handsome, wasn’t he?’ she said.
‘Prita was only married to him for a matter of weeks before he died, but she never took up with another man in Switzerland, or India, as far as I know. She told me once that the European ladies in Srinagar adored him.’
Remembering the picture of Nerys, in a moment of high happiness, Mair thought,
maybe
.
Quite possibly Grandma had been one of those ladies. It was wartime. There would have been the opportunity, after all – she knew from
Hope and the Glory of God
that missionaries were often away in the field. She found herself hoping that Nerys had indeed stolen some romantic moments with the pin-up. It would have given her some wicked, glamorous memories to help her through the Welsh years of chapel, village politics, and being the preacher’s wife that must have followed. Mair had never envied her grandmother’s way of life, or her mother’s.
‘Would you like some more tea?’ Bruno’s voice made her jump.
‘Yes, please.’ She smiled.
Later, while Bruno was frying potatoes and schnitzel, she leafed through the other Becker family pictures. In two or three Prita was a small upright figure, at the end of the line or standing a little apart. What must it have been like for her, she wondered, an Indian widow so far from home? But Mrs Stamm had an indomitable look. She was a survivor.
They ate facing each other at the wooden table, yellow-lit by an oil lamp.
‘You’re a good cook,’ she said appreciatively.
‘Karen didn’t like cooking. It’s strange to be making food for someone other than myself up here.’ Mair listened to the silence that seeped around them. ‘Strange but good,’ he added. ‘Thank you for coming all this way.’
Afterwards they took glasses of schnapps out to their benches. The sky faded from royal blue to infinite darkness, with the mountains radiating spectral light.
‘We drank all that cognac at Lamayuru,’ she said deliberately.
She didn’t want to remind him but neither did she want there to be topics they had to steer away from. But he seemed relieved to remember the place. He had spent a lot of time alone recently and she guessed that the words came more easily out of doors, looking ahead into the darkness, than face to face in the lamplight.
He said, ‘I remember everything we talked about. And the food they gave us, and the faces of the drivers sitting opposite, and the snow when we went out to the yard.’
Cold snapped suddenly out of the silence and drove them back inside the cabin.
‘I go to bed very early,’ he said awkwardly. She knew that he needed solitude.
Lying on her mattress, listening to the cabin creaking around her ears, Mair thought that this could be one of the most romantic places in the world, including the lake at Srinagar. The creaking wood even echoed the protests of
Solomon and Sheba
as it sank lower in the water. This sapphire lake was a miniature of the other, reflecting its own shimmering peaks. Even the wild flowers splashed the same colours as her grandmother’s shawl.
She had a strange sense of time tucking inside itself, folding, dovetailing with minute precision.
On the other side of the plank wall Bruno was absolutely silent. He didn’t clear his throat or turn over. She thought he must be lying on his back too, staring up towards the old beams.
Soon she slept.
There was a delicious smell of coffee and frying bacon.
She yawned her way down the ladder.
‘Eggs with your bacon?’ Bruno asked, holding up a wooden spatula. He brushed aside her protests, saying that they were going walking and she would need to fuel up.
‘If you want to go higher into the hills, of course?’ he added. It struck her that he was uncertain of her response, but that
he wanted to please her. The realisation made her skin prickle as if it had become electrostatic.
They set off from the hut, uphill along a high mountain path, then negotiating a moraine ridge. Bruno pointed to the chains of peaks and named each one for her. He also began to tell her what else he knew about Rainer Stamm.
The mystery of his disappearance or death had never been solved although the official explanation, that he had skidded off a Kashmir mountain road when Prita and the child were already aboard ship on their way to Europe, had enabled his wife – eventually – to inherit his estate. He had left everything he had to her, including a house in Interlaken.
‘There is another story, though,’ Bruno said.
‘Go on.’ Mair was panting for breath and it was much easier to listen than try to talk.
‘In 1945 there was an attempt by a Swiss-American climbing team to conquer Nanga Parbat.’
‘Nanga Parbat again?’
Tinley and his ancient uncle, smoking
bidis
in the graveyard at Leh and waiting while she read the inscriptions. She had discovered the memorial to Cambridge mathematician Matthew Forbes, lost in an avalanche on the mountain.
‘Exactly. Again.’
Mair glanced back over her shoulder, towards the wall of the Eiger.
‘There were three Western names on the climbing permit for that ’forty-five expedition. Two Americans and a Swiss by the name of Martin Brunner.’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, Brunner was killed. He had gone up with one of the sherpas to recce a higher camp and there was a storm. The sherpa eventually made it back to rejoin the Americans, but Brunner had been injured in a fall and couldn’t down-climb. I tracked down the expedition report in the annals of the American Mountaineering Association, so I know the details.’
Bruno walked at the same sure pace, uphill or down,
whatever the ground. Mair had to watch where she placed her feet and it was a moment before she was able to ask, ‘Why were you so interested in this Martin Brunner?’
He glanced at her, enjoying keeping her in suspense. The hesitancy in his voice had disappeared as they talked more. He was a good storyteller.
‘Because he didn’t exist. There are no Swiss records of a climber by that name. His details on the permit are false, too. They don’t relate to anyone.’
‘I see. Do I?’
Bruno raised an eyebrow. ‘Come on. You can guess.’
‘Brunner was really Rainer Stamm?’
‘I can’t prove it, but I believe so. My grandfather was guide to the Forbes family as well as Rainer, and he said that Rainer always promised Matthew’s father that he’d go back and claim Nanga Parbat in the boy’s honour. In the end it wasn’t climbed until 1953, by Hermann Buhl, just a few weeks after you British knocked off Everest.’
‘But why under a false identity?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know. Shall we stop here and have something to eat?’
Mair had begun to think they would walk all day but, to her relief, he led the way to a flat-topped rock. She sank down, resting her chin on her knees to marvel at the view. Bruno handed her a chunk of bread, some mountain cheese and an apple. The simple food tasted wonderful.
‘Rainer would have had his reasons for the assumed identity and for faking his own death. He was a magician as well as a mountaineer. An illusionist.’
‘Ah, I know about
that
.’ Mair laughed. ‘Because I looked him up too. It was confusing.’
Bruno was staring across to the black rock face where Rainer’s life had been saved by Victor Becker.
Mair thought, That same man was perhaps my grandmother’s lover, certainly her good friend. Her sense of time’s intricate dovetailing grew even stronger. She murmured, ‘It’s sad, isn’t
it? Rainer was newly married, he was performing some kind of disappearing trick with his own life, and then he actually disappeared trying to claim Nanga Parbat in memory of a boy who had already died on the mountain. I do know that for years afterwards my grandmother was waiting and hoping for news of him.’