Summit: A Novel

by Harry Farthing

  Graf.

  The next photo was of a small display panel attached to a wall, the bottom left corner of a larger image showing rows of striped prisoners on parade visible above it. The white rectangle, the legend for the bigger image, showed only a phrase in German with an English translation set below.

  Sarron pulled his face in close to the computer, his nose almost touching the hot screen as he read it.

  Sarron’s twitching eyes quickly flicked to the English translation below, seeking explanation.

  The final picture was of Graf again. He was smiling back at the camera, raising his feathered hat slightly above his head as if in a salute from beyond the grave.

  Sarron’s mind exploded like an egg hitting a concrete floor.

  93

  Putrapur, Andhra Pradesh, India

  May 15, 1939

  9:30 p.m.

  Liebe Josef,

  How are you? Where are you? I wish I knew. I wonder continually.

  Today I am in a small village called Putrapur; the day after tomorrow I move on to Sihar. I would try and tell you precisely where they are but I am not really sure myself. All I know is that I have already traveled far into the dusty heart of this vast country and keep moving still. I have had no news of my parents since I left Hyderabad. My father said it must be that way.

  I never linger anywhere long even though the people beg me to stay. They are so poor, Josef. Within minutes of my arrival, they form queues of illness and injury that would make me weep if I was not so busy treating it all. Where do they all come from?

  It makes me feel like I too am climbing a mountain alone, a mountain of pain and disease. It is as big as Mount Everest. You told me once that when you climb you just take one step at a time, put one foot in front of another. I try to do the same but I have no sight of any summit. I too feel like Sisyphus …

  It is so hot here tonight. I wish I could lie next to you on the cold, cold ground where you are. Do you sleep on snow and ice now?

  It is so dry here tonight. I wish I could walk with you in the green, fresh hills of Elmau. I would like to drink from the cool spring you told me you used to visit with your family. Will we go there together one day?

  It is so sad here. I wish I could sit with you on the deck of the Gneisenau and laugh as we once did. Will I ever laugh again?

  I am a person of questions with no answers.

  I never have any answers.

  I need you.

  I can’t do this alone …

  Tears began to fall onto the paper.

  The black ink they met dissolved and ran across the page.

  Putting her pen to one side, Magda tore the note from her journal and crunched it into a ball in her hand. Holding it tightly, she stepped from the small hut out into the roar of the insects.

  In the night shadows she could see the people already gathered for the next day’s clinic. Walking through them she felt their patient suffering and let it smother her own.

  Stopping at the embers of a dying cooking fire, she dropped the paper in. It briefly flared yellow.

  The people began to stir, seeing Magda’s face illuminated by the flames. Realizing who she was, they reached out to her.

  Wiping her eyes, she turned back from the fire. There was work to do.

  Just put one foot in front of the other …

  94

  Apartment E, 57 Sukhra Path, Kathmandu, Nepal

  May 29, 2010

  11:30 a.m.

  Quinn knocked on the door of Henrietta’s apartment.

  “It’s not locked, Dawa. Sanjeev is ill today so just show yourself in,” was the immediate response from inside.

  “It’s not Dawa, Henrietta. It’s Neil Quinn.”

  “Well, you can come in also, Neil.” Quinn stepped in as Henrietta’s voice continued. “I was expecting Dawa to arrive first. I thought he should come to get his monthly money and then wait for you so that we could both talk to him about Ang Noru. I think he should know the full story.”

  Henrietta was seated in her usual chair. She looked up at Quinn over her half-moon glasses. “Well, I’m glad to see you back in Kathmandu and in one piece. I am also pleased to hear that you have finally done a half-decent Everest climb, a north-south traverse almost without supplementary oxygen. It doesn’t make you a legend, of course, but it’ll do under the circumstances.”

  She winked at him as she stood up. “I’ll make us some tea. Sit down. What took you so long to get back here?”

  Quinn put down the rucksack he was carrying, the old ice axe strapped to its side. “I holed up in Namche Bazaar for a while. I needed time to recover, and you were still locked up by the Chinese, so I thought it best to disappear until things settled down. I assume you heard from the Sherpa how I made it over the top.”

  Henrietta nodded as she walked to the small kitchen of her apartment. Filling a kettle, she shouted back above the rattle of the water. “Yes, evidently they were quite surprised to find you up there. Rather stole the thunder of their first summit of the season. One of them told me they thought you were pretty close to death, talking to yourself, seeing ghosts, covered in blood and ice. Evidently they had quite the job to get you down. I heard you wouldn’t even leave until you got your original ice axe back.”

  “Yes. Its replacement was proving to be a bit troublesome. How was your stay with the Chinese?”

  “Positively vile. It was very nearly a major diplomatic incident. Given the reason Martin Emmerich and I were there in the first place, it had to be handled with kid gloves by our chaps in the Foreign Office and their counterparts in the Bundestag. That’s why it took us nearly two weeks to get out of the country. The death of Stevens and your disappearance didn’t help matters, although I can hardly blame you for that.

  “Martin’s still here, you know. He’s at the Tiger Hotel. He wants to see you before he goes back to Germany. He’s unhappy with the result but doesn’t think that we could have done things differently. Sarron played a clever hand getting us all ousted from the Base Camp like that, but so far there seems to have been no shocking photographs of a first Nazi summit of Everest, so I guessed that none of you found what we were looking for up there. Perhaps it was all a bit of a long shot.”

  She returned with the tea set on a tray. She’d intended to put it on the small table between her armchairs, but Quinn had already covered it with items from his rucksack. Looking up at her, he said, “Henrietta, it’s not George Leigh Mallory’s handkerchief, but I brought down a few souvenirs.”

  She set the tea on another side table and looked at the lime-green oxygen cylinder from the Nelson Tate Junior summit and the medical syringe next to it.

  “Wow, finally some evidence relating to the cause of the boy’s demise,” she said. “We’ll get them looked at. Tea now?”

  She turned back to the side table and poured two cups of tea. When she returned, Quinn had replaced the cylinder and the syringe with Stevens’ red freezer bag and the old ice axe.

  She looked at the case and back at Quinn.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now I really do feel like Pandora.”

  She unzipped the red nylon cube and pulled out a plastic ice block. Setting it to one side, she lifted out Becker’s Leica, sealed within two clear plastic bags. As she turned it over in her hands, Quinn said, “I think it should live in your freezer until you tell me what we are to do with it. It needs to stay frozen.”

  Henrietta quickly replaced the camera back into the little nylon case and, holding it like a holy offering, hurriedly carried it into the kitchen. Quinn heard her freezer door slam shut on it.

  There was another knock at the door as she returned.

  “It’ll be Dawa. I’ll let him in.”

  Walking to her front door, Henrietta stretched forward to open it,
saying in a loud voice, “Hold on. I’m letting you in.”

  Before she could turn the handle, the door slammed into her face, knocking her off her feet.

  Sarron burst through it to immediately put a foot against the prostrate lady’s neck.

  Pointing a large kukri knife down at her, he screamed, “Don’t move! You either Quinn, you bastard.”

  Quinn stared back at the deep curve of the spoon-shaped knife now being raised toward him. The blade was about a foot and a half long. Kukris like it were for sale all over Kathmandu. Even if they were made for the tourists, Quinn knew that it would still be strong and sharp.

  He looked back at Sarron. He’d lost his oiled sheen. His face was lined, darkened, totally crazed.

  “Make one move, and I will hack this old hag to pieces before your fucking eyes,” he screamed at Quinn.

  Raising the curved knife above his head as if preparing to carry out his threat, he demanded, “Where’s the German’s camera?”

  “In the freezer in the kitchen—to keep it cold. Let her go, and I will give it to you.”

  “You are in no position to bargain, Quinn. Just get it and bring it out here now.”

  Quinn slowly backed into the kitchen, holding his hands up, watching Sarron intently with each step.

  The incensed man remained where he was, swaying slightly, his left eyelid trembling violently.

  Henrietta seemed to have passed out.

  Stepping into the kitchen, Quinn quickly went to the fridge, shouting as he opened the door, “I’m getting it now.”

  Without removing anything, he slammed the freezer door loudly. He stood in front of it for a second, eyes racing around the kitchen, searching for any possible weapon, a knife, a bottle, anything, but in that moment, he saw nothing suitable. Totally desperate, he grabbed a large salad bowl sitting on the draining board next to the sink.

  “Put it down, Quinn. That fucking thing is not going to save you.”

  Quinn froze, releasing the bowl. Turning around, he saw that Sarron had followed him into the kitchen.

  He took another step toward him, pointing the knife’s blade directly at Quinn’s face. “Go back to the freezer, and this time get the camera out.”

  As Quinn did so, Sarron blocked the doorway, moving slowly from side to side, drawing a figure eight in the air before him with the long blade.

  Quinn slowly passed him the freezer bag.

  Sarron stepped forward to seize it with his left hand.

  Quinn heard Henrietta moan from the main room.

  Sarron twitched, hearing it also, but his eyes remained fixed on Quinn as he shouted back, “It’s a pity you can’t see this, since you like mountaineering history so much—the tragic death of Everest guide Neil Quinn here in your very own apartment.”

  Sarron lifted his right arm, rotating the knife’s cutting edge toward Quinn, its razor-sharp blade catching the light.

  Quinn readied himself to try and dodge its fall.

  But it never came.

  Instead he fleetingly glimpsed the steel head of the old ice axe rising high above Sarron’s head before it chopped forward.

  Momentarily, the raised kukri blade hung in the air separated from Sarron’s stunned body until they both crashed to the floor.

  Quinn looked up from the geyser of crimson blood erupting from the body at his feet to see Dawa, the end of the axe’s wooden shaft still firmly clasped in his hands, its long pick wedged as far as it would go into the back of the Frenchman’s skull.

  95

  The Second Step, Northeast Ridge, Mount Everest—28,333 feet

  May 17, 1939

  5:16 p.m.

  Josef knew he was finished when he couldn’t untie the knot that linked him to the Sherpa. He tried to squeeze his brain beyond the exhaustion and the numbing cold, ordering it to tell his fingers what to do. They fumbled at the rope, but it was hopeless. It was a knot that he had tied a thousand times. No recall. Gone.

  Pushing his freezing hands back into his woolen mittens, Josef lay back, unable to respond to a faint internal command to get up and keep moving. The only thing he could do was slowly tug once more at the rigid rope tied around his middle. The effort to do even that sent him over the edge again. He drifted away to somewhere warmer, easier.

  When he returned to the swirling cold of the mountainside, Ang Noru was looking down at him, shaking him gently by the shoulders. The Sherpa’s snow goggles and blackened face beneath were encrusted with ice. His lips were trembling slightly. They moved, but no words came.

  Josef pointed to the knot. The Sherpa untied it.

  A remote thought reminded Josef of the strip of red tape with which he had marked their exit from the steep step on the way up. After their precarious, desperate struggle to climb up it, he had hammered a piton into the rock, reassuring himself that it would be an easier rappel on the descent, marking the spot for this very moment.

  He couldn’t see it anywhere. Pulling his ice-covered snow goggles down around his neck, he looked some more. Nothing. It was difficult to focus his eyes. His sight was going.

  Slowly he reached into his wind-jacket pocket and pulled out his last piton. Taking the ice axe, he tried to beat it into the rock, but the side of the axe head continually slipped off the top of the piton. Ang Noru gently took the axe from him and pounded the nail in until it could go no further.

  Josef laid back on the freezing rock, resting his head by the piton. His eyes tried to lock on its metal loop projecting from the black stone, the overexposed white snow beyond, but everything was a blur. Pushing his head against some loose snow, he imagined himself crawling into the mountainside, worming his way into the rock like the blade of the piton. It would be safe in there, away from the wind and the cold.

  He started to cough again, huge coughs that twisted his body into knots, ripped at his throat, and filled his mouth with blood. With no adrenaline left to dramatize it, no energy to panic about it, Josef finally accepted that he was dying. It was almost a relief. He lay back again and looked up at the fast cloud passing over him. A long time passed before a contradictory urge made him search his pocket for a steel carabiner. Clutching it, he pushed it onto the piton at the fourth attempt.

  Rope.

  It was there, loose and untied, between him and the Sherpa.

  He could see that Ang Noru was also now resting. It made Josef happy to see it. He needed to rest. He had done well. Josef told himself it was time to let the Sherpa go. Ang Noru was stronger. He might still make it down if alone. If he stayed with Josef, he too would surely die. While he looked at the Sherpa’s still body, Josef told himself that he must work a little more, do one last thing, and then it could be finished.

  Centimeter by centimeter, he threaded the frozen, coarse rope through the metal loop. When he faintly saw the black tape of the rope’s halfway marker, his instinct pulled the two sides of the rope together. With one hand, he tugged the doubled rope down on the carabiner. The piton that held it didn’t move. It was set into that rock for the next hundred years.

  With his feet Josef heel-kicked the rope toward the edge of the cliff. When gravity finally caught it and pulled the coils of rope away from him over the edge, Josef leaned across to pull at the Sherpa’s jacket. It was a shame to wake him, but it was time. Ang Noru awoke as if stuck with a cattle prod. He was on his feet in an instant. With a stream of apologies pouring from his lips, he reached down and pulled Josef up.

  It was a hard pull. It told Josef he was right; the Sherpa did still have strength.

  Josef unfolded upward from his icy seat, still holding the top of the doubled rope in one hand.

  He could stand.

  He could do what he had to do.

  Josef turned to look back up the mountain and stepped over the double rope that hung over the cliff. From behind him he pulled a reluctant, heavy loop of it u
p and around his right hip and over his left shoulder. Pushing his ice axe back into the straps of his rucksack, he grasped the rope in front of him with his left mitten and the rear of the rope with his right.

  Taking one last look at the Sherpa, he began to walk backward.

  At the cliff’s very edge, he stopped, leaning back over the huge void below. The rope that snaked around his body dug into his thick clothes as it took the strain. He thought for a moment about Magda and then told himself to count to nine and let go.

  He knew only one of the Jews’ names, but he remembered each of their faces as he took those last nine steps down the cliff. He saved the name he had for his ninth, final step, whispering, “Ilsa” as he released the rope.

  He thought he would fall forever, but the drop lasted only a few seconds.

  The sudden impact with the rocky ledge below snapped the bones of his lower left leg. The excruciating pain, the outline of the limb, his limb, bent strangely inward at the ankle, told him it was broken. A thought, It’s going to be much slower than you imagined, grew from the agony.

  Using his ice axe, Josef dragged himself into the little alcove that led off the ledge. Slipping out of his pack and pushing it to the side, he pulled himself around and up against the far wall. Leaning back he let the cold numb his pain, diverting his mind by replaying the climb, reversing it all the way back down to their surprising release from the valley camp. He heard again the British officer saying, “We will have to make it look like you both overpowered me when you were under my charge. The Gurkhas are honest, loyal men. I do not want to make them complicit in anything that might prejudice their futures, whatever it may do to my own.”

  The crunching sound of Ang Noru dropping from the rope onto the lip of the cave pierced the shadows within.

  On seeing his horribly twisted leg, the Sherpa instantly ducked inside to crouch alongside the German, trying to tend to it.