You don’t have to go, I say.
No, he says. But I should. I’ve overstepped my place, and I feel miserable. My life is enough of a shambles without this on my conscience.
His hand has still not moved away from mine.
When I was twenty I would have insisted, I would have grabbed him in my arms—back then I thought that was the answer to everything.
If I tell you I agree, I say to him, I don’t want you to think that it’s because I’m sorry.
His eyes now are soft and brown and a little wet.
I mean it, Karel. Whether you know it or not, you’ve made this week bearable for me.
I hope that’s true, he says and pats my hand. His soft palm rests on my fingers.
Then he closes his eyes and says, Jozef and Gaspar tried to teach me to climb once. Have I told you that? We all went to the Dolomites one summer. It was a disaster. I got up on the rock, and I couldn’t move. I almost died, just twelve meters off the ground on the easiest crag in Italy, because my arms and legs began to shake. They had to lower me down on a rope, with Gaspar holding me around my waist. I cried. Eighteen years old and I cried like a baby. They were kind about it, they always were, but I knew I was different from them. We all knew it.
He looks at the sheer cliffs across the valley, maybe thinking, as I am, about how there’s not a single one Jozef hasn’t scampered up and down and sideways.
I grip his hand and tell him something I have never told anyone. Not even Jozef. It is a secret I keep so close I rarely admit it to myself. Why shouldn’t I tell Karel now? I have been ready to give him much more of myself, and this time here, in our meadow—the last of our time together—seems right for secrets.
I did a terrible thing, I say. You remember after Gaspar died? What an awful state Jozef was in?
I remember, Karel says.
And so I tell him.
The year after Gaspar died, Jozef and I moved to a tiny flat in the middle of Ljubljana. I taught art, and Jozef took a job as an instructor at the Alpine Club. He hated it. But that year nothing made him happy. He had lost several toes to frostbite; he could only walk with a cane at first, and he could not hold the construction jobs he loved. And of course he missed Gaspar—Gaspar who had taught him to climb, who had taken him in when Jozef fled their father. But more than anything he missed the mountains, and what he did there. Every night he wept. Some weekends he could not rouse himself from bed.
I was gentle with him. I told him always how glad I was that he was alive. I told him we could live a happy life together. I even told him he might climb again—it seemed an easy lie, a way to pacify him. I believed—I knew—that in the end, Jozef would come to the same conclusion I already had: that climbing was too dangerous, the cost of failure there too high.
But then he met Hugo, who worships him, and made him want to love himself again. Jozef bought special shoes; he taught himself to lose the cane. Then he and Hugo started hiking together. One day I came home and found Jozef putting up his climbing holds on the wall of our living room.
I have to try, he told me.
I told myself that, surely, physically, he wasn’t ready.
But one weekend, not two months later, he told me: he and Hugo were going to try an easy route on Triglav. The north wall of Triglav is 1,200 meters high, and sheer. No route there is easy.
I went hysterical. Jozef, in his way, tried to calm me by reassuring me of his prowess, his belief. This is when he told me how my love keeps him alive. How he climbs to me.
Finally I made him angry. He shouted, Do you only want to love half a man? Became that is what I am. You knew who I was when you fell in love with me.
1 didn’t understand, I said. I didn’t know.
You decide, he said, walking out the door. You can have me as the man I am, or not at all.
We barely spoke, and that weekend he and Hugo packed their gear and drove to the mountains. And he survived Triglav—not only that, he and Hugo did well, putting up a new variation. When Jozef came home I embraced him, told him I was sorry. I was—I couldn’t be without him, as miserable and frightened as he made me. And anyway Jozef was jubilant, his old self again.
I can’t help who I am, he told me. I can’t, Ani.
We made love again and again that night, and it was when we lay together afterward that he told me he was thinking again about the Himalayas.
Now I tell Karel, That was when I started poking holes in his condoms.
Karel looks at me, and then again out over the meadow, doing math.
He says, You were pregnant when Jozef left for Makalu.
Yes.
He squeezes my hand. I’m sorry, he whispers.
I thought he would stop, I say. But then the solos started. The baby only made things worse.
I am crying now, and can’t say any more. Karel rubs my hand. I pull him into an embrace.
And it happens, it happens.
After a few minutes in his arms, I stop my crying. I look at Karel’s face. The way his mouth doesn’t know quite how to hold itself, the way his mind is torn between concern and wanting. He is such a good man—like his brother would be, if his brother was not crazy.
Karel’s hands slide to my hips, and we hold each other. I take one of his hands in between both of mine and press it between our bodies. I caress his palm with my thumbs. I am used to rough skin, like sandpaper, to bandages and chalk and torn nails. Not this hand which seems to join with mine.
And then I am closer, and Karel is closer, and he is touching my face with all the wonder and sweetness that I have wished for. He bends forward and kisses my forehead; his beard is soft on the bridge of my nose. I close my eyes and listen for Stane’s footsteps coming up the path, but the air is still, the whole valley silent.
The thought of my son should stop me, but no: I am putting my arms around Karel’s waist, lifting my face to his. I am a woman, it seems, who can kiss a man not her husband while within earshot of her son.
Karel’s face is large in front of mine, his hips pushing in close. I take off his glasses and tuck them into the pocket of his jacket. My hands slip underneath the jacket, and I feel his back, smooth under his thin shirt. He kisses well, more forcefully than I would have guessed. He places one large, warm hand flat on my belly. I am making sounds in my throat, the way I do when I kiss Jozef.
Because it is what I must do, I try to stop myself, to think of my husband:
Jozef walks into the meadow. He retreated from the climb after all, they helicoptered him out, and here he is, just home. He sees us. Karel’s hands are under my blouse, at the small of my back. Jozef’s face falls into shock, then pain, and I can see that he thinks: I fought for this. I stayed alive to see this. Karel is kissing my jaw, under my ear. Jozef shouts, My wife, my brother—
But this seems too much like vengeance, too much like I am kissing Karel in anger, which is not what I feel at all.
So I imagine my husband in love with me: Jozef, ten years younger, walks into the café. His beard is too big for his face, and the corners of his eyes crinkle up when he smiles at me—as though he recognizes me, as though he is surprised to see such an old friend in a place like this.
Karel’s arms are tightening around my waist, pulling me close to him, and up on the balls of my feet. I am stretching my mouth wide against his.
Jozef. I wake in the night after giving birth to Stane, only to see Jozef sitting awake in the corner; he smiles tenderly at me and asks if I would like some water. He holds the glass to my lips and then kisses me and strokes my hair. I love you, he whispers, runs his rough finger across my cheek. I love our son.
Karel puts his hands under my bottom and lifts me onto the rock. I curl my calves around his legs. He nuzzles the space where my blouse is open.
Love me, Jozef says. As long as you love me I will be all right.
Right now his hands are on rock, his lungs ache, he tastes blood.
Death, then. Think of death—death, after all, has given us
permission. So here: Jozef moaning into my neck in the hospital. Papa’s eyes red with loss and rage. And here: Gaspar’s casket, my shocked husband hobbling to it with a cane, putting his hand on the lid, as though something is inside it. Here is Gaspar’s wispy blond girlfriend, arriving suddenly from Dresden, knowing no one and latching on to me in her grief. We were engaged, she says to me, her voice so thin it must hurt her to say any words at all. She says, We hadn’t told anyone, we were waiting till he came back to announce it. There’s Papa in a chair, head in his hand, Karel’s hands on his shoulders. Across the room Jozef embraces other climbers, some flown in from Russia and America. Two Sherpas are here from Nepal. None of the wives or girlfriends look at each other except in sideways glances, mistaken turns. We listen to the men we love so much say over and over, At least he died doing what he loved. I keep my arm around Gaspar’s German girl, knowing what she thinks, what all the women think: if Gaspar died doing what he loved, he would have died at home, he would have died inside her. These brave men are cowards, that is what I think. I look around the room, a little drunk from a flask Karel brought, the girl snuffling into my shoulder, and I know—for the first time I know—tonight is only a rehearsal.
My husband, alive, does not stop me. But Jozef dead and gone—this is what makes me pull away from Karel.
Love does not keep me faithful.
But shame does.
I’m sorry, Karel says, breath rasping.
I shake my head and slide away from him. No, I say, angry now. No. We both did this.
He nods twice, quickly, and rubs his jaw as though I have hurt it.
We have both agreed on a course, but there is still wildness in the air, that thing which is so easily called up between us but so difficult to dispel. I walk to the edge of the meadow and back again, to calm myself more than anything else. Karel stands next to the rocks, hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped. I want to tell him not to feel bad, but for now I cannot go closer.
Over the curve of the hill, a curl of dust rises: a car driving slowly toward the house. I look at Karel. We stand side by side on the hilltop and try to see who it could be—we can barely see the road from the meadow, only glimpses through gaps in the trees. The trail of dust slows and begins to billow, and then for a moment we see a van, marked on the side with the 24ur emblem.
Something has happened, I say.
We hurry back down the path. I try to prepare myself. Today is summit day, and that is all the news people care about: they don’t ever think about how, if Jozef makes the top, he still has to climb down, half dead. But maybe something else has happened. I tell myself: Hugo wouldn’t inform the media before me. But I have been gone for an hour, and there are many people at base camp, all with satellite phones.
I do not believe it, but of course in my heart I do: I broke my promise. I kissed Karel and Jozef has died.
I am almost running when I emerge from the woods onto the road. The van is parked twenty or thirty meters away. I walk to it, and this is what I see:
A cameraman and a newswoman are standing next to the Roman wall, right in front of one of the tall crumbling pillars, three meters high. And clinging to the stone, at the level of their heads, is Stane. I hear one of the newspeople say, loudly, so Stane can hear too, He’s his father’s boy, look at that.
Stane is climbing. Not the clambering up tree trunks I’ve seen him do. The newswoman was right.
He has been taught.
Stane grips the rock the right way, locking his thumbs over the tops of his fingers, keeping his balance out away from the rock, suddenly lying sideways, leaning away from a crevice while his feet push the other way. By the time I reach him he has touched the top of the pillar, and when he does this he emits a laugh, the squeak of delight I know so well.
The newspeople applaud, and the cameraman moves in, and Stane takes one hand off the rock to wave.
The newswoman is saying something about a new generation, and that’s when I force my way past her. I put my hands on Stane’s waist and pull him off the pillar. He’s heavier than he used to be, but I catch most of his weight, even though it nearly knocks me over.
Turn the cameras off, I say. Get out of here.
The camera swivels to me. The newswoman asks if I have any words about Jozef’s success today. All of the nation is watching, she says. We’re all very proud.
I turn and walk back to the house, Stane shocked in my arms. I am so angry I can barely see. I pass Karel, just coming out of the trees, and I say, Get rid of them.
Mama, put me down, Stane says. Put me down.
I set him down and then swat him twice on the behind, hard. The newspeople can see us, but I don’t care. I pull Stane along by the arm. He’s wriggling and trying to escape, without knowing why or where to go. I can’t help it. I tug him off the road, down the slope, into the trees out of sight. There I swat him again, and again, enough so that he stops struggling and begins to cry. Enough so that he knows.
Then I kneel and put my arms around him. Stane smells of little-boy sweat and pine needles. He tries once again to pull away, but then he sees me crying, and this hurts him more than the spanking. I hold him to me, my quivering son.
He is a man, eyes crinkling like his father’s, smiling at a girl in a café. He is calling a name into swirling snow, screaming wind, alone.
Mama, he says. It’s okay, I was only climbing.
I tell him, You mustn’t, Stane.
I am holding him as an infant, handing him for the first time to Jozef. Jozef’s face falls into pieces when he takes his newborn son—when he looks up again at me, for the first time as a father. And I know: my husband will never climb again, he will never risk anything, now that he has seen his darling boy. I shake and throb inside and think I might die from love. I watch Stane in his father’s arms and I think, My sweet boy, do you know what you have done? You have given me your father back. You’ve saved us. You’ve saved me.
You mustn’t, I say into Stane’s ear. I shake him with each word.
You mustn’t ever.
In the Event
AT A LITTLE PAST ONE IN THE MORNING, AN HOUR AFTER identifying their bodies at the morgue downtown, Danny pulled his truck into the drive at Tom and Brynn’s house. Their narrow Victorian was dark except for the glowing living-room window—a babysitter was inside, watching Colin, their three-year-old son. Danny had talked to the babysitter for a few minutes from the morgue, told her he’d be right there—but then he’d taken the longest route from downtown he could find. He’d stopped twice at gas station pay phones, trying to raise his girlfriend Kim, to tell her the news, but Kim had never answered.
Danny shut off the truck. The poor babysitter had started sobbing during his call; by now she was probably freaked out of her mind. Danny’s hands on the wheel seemed to weigh tons. He thought about circling the block a couple more times—he was pretty damn well freaked out himself, wasn’t he? Or he could just drive off—he wasn’t far from the 1–70 on-ramp. He could drive from Columbus to fucking Alaska without letting up on the gas.
Then a shadow pushed aside the living room curtain, looking out at the drive. He was caught.
A woman maybe ten years older than Danny met him at the door—the babysitter’s mother. She wore a short hairdo that might look good on a movie star, but which made her look just like what she was: a parent of a teenager, thick and square and gray at the temples, trying too hard. Behind her mother the babysitter huddled on the couch, holding herself as if her stomach hurt, her eyes so red Danny’s started to burn in sympathy. After he’d introduced himself both mother and daughter gave him the once-over. He’d been rehearsing with the band when the police called—he was wearing week-old clothes and reeked of cigarette smoke. His hair was out of its ponytail.
I’m so sorry, the woman told him.
I’ll be all right, he said, surprised that his voice was even working—or that he would say something so bizarre as that.
Do you need someone here?
The woman looked relieved.
The babysitter said, thickly, Can I look at him one more time?
So the three of them stood in the doorway to Colin’s room. Just last week Brynn had glued glow-in-the-dark stars and moons across the ceiling and walls; they barely picked up a shine from the streetlight outside. The room seemed vast this way, without walls.
Colin was asleep, his covers kicked off his bare legs, his face turned to the wall. He was practically naked, sleeping in tiny underpants. Danny forced himself not to look away—as he’d always done when Brynn laid Colin out on the floor for a diaper change. Or like he’d done last week, when Tom had made a big production of Show Danny what a big boy you are, show him you can use the potty, and they’d all crowded into the bathroom to watch Colin do his thing, his face screwed tight, like he was threading a needle. You did a good job, Danny told him afterward, and Colin had looked up from washing his hands and said, Yes, I did, as though he didn’t have pants with cartoon bears on them still drooping around his ankles.
Danny thought about walking into the room, pulling the boy’s covers back up, but he didn’t. Colin was almost three; three-year-olds were messy, and a lot of the times naked. He had no more place for shame, not now.
The babysitter started to whimper.
Shh, Danny said, and quickly motioned them back to the living room.
There he assured them once again that they could leave—and they did, but only after Danny fumbled for his wallet, and both mother and daughter said No! in unison, almost angrily.
When they were gone, Danny stood for a little while in the kitchen, on the opposite side of the house from Colin’s room. It was the only place in the house that wasn’t filled with the too-sweet odor of a small child—instead he could smell chili, pancakes, the omelets Tom cooked for everyone on weekends. The smell reminded Danny he hadn’t eaten since lunchtime—that he was so hungry he was dizzy. But the thought of rooting through Tom and Brynn’s leftovers made him feel like the most horrible piece of shit on earth.
We're in Trouble Page 9
