The Breath of the Sun

by Rachel Fellman

  The trick to ice climbing is to be at home on the ice. This advice will make more sense to those of us who have lived in bad homes, but it applies to everyone. You must see the ice as a place you can negotiate. You advance upon it with a hammer in one hand and an adze in another, like a proper builder; you loop and screw your ropes with care, and you don’t stumble around the stairs when you’ve been drinking, and you try not to offend. A thousand-foot fall of stiff white ice, run through with blue and green, may look intimidating, but you must remember that it is a place where people can live.

  Although I took lead for the whole Step without even considering it, Disaine was always behind me, perhaps even a little too close, spidering along the wall with her legs and ass clenched tight, shouting quick little words up at the sky or down at the ground. She was used to the axe’s vibration, which tunes and exhausts the muscles. She knew the motion of a turning screw, deftly spun with a strong hand, and she even knew what it was like to nap in a sleeping bag suspended from a high anchor, fifty and a hundred feet into the air, with the weight of her whole body pressing down onto feet that found no purchase in the sack of cloth and fur.

  We were three days on that cliff. This is the real danger of the mountain: exhaustion. Attain the Step and you heave yourself over its edge to find another stretch of snow, greater than the last, with the span not of a mountainside but of a tournament field, a mile of land, a country. The land below you is shrinking even as the land above seems to grow, so that the mountain seems a planet in itself, gathering itself to strike at the sun that shines on its naked peak. The land above the snowline is hard as the bone of a nose lost to frostbite, and the sun there is small and bare.

  But first you must climb the cliff. Each footfall is vital there, each harsh pin of the crampon. It is as if all the internal motions of the body are under your direct control, all focused on that punch of ice: dig, and stick with the adze, and breathe. Breath is all you’ve got. Your blood moves, but you know the cost of every pulse of the heart, feel every blot of blood in fingers hot with exertion: hot cores in frozen skin. You sleep in your bag because you know you have to, but although you are exhausted, you don’t want to sleep. You want to be alert, to survey the cold blue snow and the blackness past it, to look out for your safety. Bad homes.

  There is no intimacy like the intimacy of climbing, lying back to back in a tent, knowing each other’s bodies in extreme exertion, seeing the same views. It won’t make friends of you, but it links you for good, and that can be painful. I still know Saon, the one of us I know the least, more intimately than my in-laws or Dracani — even though my understanding of her is little more than a glimpse of a scarred hand caressing the white stones of a piano or a die, a generous lip smoking or drinking tea. These memories are so weak that they have fragmented. Yet I can still close my eyes and feel Saon’s tentative feet a yard above me on the mountain. I can make her body tug and strain at the rope we share.

  Disaine faltered only once, on the third day, but she faltered badly. I had just placed a screw and threaded her rope through it, but not yet fastened it, and in the same instant that my hand tightened on the rope, her crampon slipped backwards and out of the ice. I didn’t know what had happened. All I knew was that the rope was taut in my hand, and I was pulled from my own grip on the ice by the force of it, and then the two of us were dangling together from a single screw.

  In the fierce and creaking suddenness of that moment, I looked down at her, gray woolen mask distorted by her open mouth and puffed out by her scream. She was attached to the rope by her harness, I only by the force of my hands. Finally I was able to summon the power to slam my left crampon into the ice, and though there was a swift lash of force, I was able to bring myself under control and yell to Disaine to do the same. She was still drawing a little closer, a little further, from me, gray-stiff and pendulum-still, such that she seemed to grow and shrink rather than move.

  “Hit the ice!”

  Her shoulders slumped. She was resigned, and in my own memory I saw what she was seeing: the dwindling blue of the sky, the swaying ice.

  “Hit the wall, Disaine! Hit the wall!”

  At last I seemed to get through to her; she looked up at the top of the cliff, only a hundred feet away now, and drove her adze deep into the ice, and was thus arrested. I was free-climbing by then, trying to gain as quickly as I could the precious few feet that I needed to make her harness safe, and then it was only a matter of technique.

  We made camp on the slope a hundred feet above the lip of the cliff. We would have made it sooner, but Disaine wouldn’t rest. She would stagger on until she fell down in the snow, and then get up and stagger again. I snapped at her to stay dry, and we made up the tent and lit the stove although the sun was still high. We drank tea lying in our sleeping bags, the leather of their surfaces distorted by being hung so long on cliffside hooks, and then Disaine said, “Did you bring my diary?”

  “There are a few things we didn’t bring, Disaine. Shotglasses, firearms, livestock.”

  “I want my diary,” she said, though she seemed half-sunk in sleep and in the fuzz of her pillow. I had not seen her face in three days, and it seemed as naked as if it were shaven.

  “Surely you can make a note and write it later,” I said. The warmth of my sleeping bag, with its smell of sweat and fur, was a spicy balm — but my own skin was frozen, and the heat could work only a little way into it. I was worried about the rest of my nose, and I wondered in a blurry half-connection why Disaine had lost these particular fingers.

  “No — to read.”

  “I’m sorry. They were so heavy.”

  “Okay,” she said, and buried her face in the fur of the bag, and inhaled deeply. She was shaking, I saw, a delicate blur of motion, from weakness or resurrected fear, and I put my arm over her — out of the heat of the bag, into the ice around us — and drew her close. I let her put her nose against me, and breathe into my neck, and for a little while I was mother to her, as I have never been mother to anyone.

  We slept the rest of the day and into the night, until our faces felt heavy and gummy. I was more tired than I thought I ever could be, and every time I woke up to the passive glitter of the objects in the tent, I felt calm, and I let myself vanish again into the active glitter of dreams.

  I woke up for good before her, to darkness and the repetitive creak of the tentpoles. The wind was flowing down the mountain, and I felt like an unlikely little packet of blood in the middle of a vast cold wilderness — both secure, embedded as I was in the tent, and very fragile. Behind me, the stove hissed and dripped with the snow that snuck into the tent’s seams, and beside me Disaine slept deeply. I no longer felt afraid. I felt awake, and I needed to read something.

  I wonder that so many writers have spoken of reading as a pleasure. For me it has always been a compulsion, and I don’t say that in the vaguely boastful way that some people speak of such compulsions: “Oh, I had to do it, or I would die.” No. You would not die. You would find something else to do, some other way to soothe the anxiety and the pain and the boredom of life — some other imagination machine, one that makes the mind flow more freely or loosens its stoppers. You would find some other way to slick the mind with little rainbows.

  But it is a compulsion. It fills our moments. There is no purity to a mind that is always reading; there is only the little panic of quiet, and the soothing hum of words. To use words to seek a kind of cleanliness is absurd. They are the opposite of that; every word is a dirty word.

  When I was a child I would read books in snatches, at random. It was safer that way — I wasn’t allowed Southern books, both because they were Southern and because they were too easy an escape from my parents’ anger. Running along the surface of a borrowed book, I might plunge at any time into a hidden crevasse and thus become unreachable to them. So I read when I could. Half the time, if I went back and finished the book, I was disappointed anyway.

  Today that strikes me as a very Holoh way to d
o things. We don’t write, you see. We can, and we use pen and paper for our business transactions, wedding-contracts and the like, but all our poetry and ideas and our holy thoughts are in our heads. There are no cracks or keyholes in the head, unless things have already gone so wrong that there are no holy thoughts left anyway. We can’t be forced out of our heads, either, unless ditto. And that has an allure for a people who’ve lost as much as us.

  To read at random is to read as if you were thinking. It is the closest thing to calling up a line of poetry that you’ve memorized. And I still find that it’s a good way to work through a novel or a book of poetry or even an informative book. One repeats some parts, but if a book is worth reading it is worth repetition, and it helps you to clear the false cartilage of structure. I am always over-tempted to stretch the skin of a story over that cartilage, however deformed the result may be. Structure is the great southern vice.6

  * * *

  6 I love you.

  * * *

  When I wrote Twelve Miles, I tried to write like a southerner of the modern type, clean and stylish, with mathematical curves. I thought I wanted to write this sort of thing, though happily I never achieved it:

  The mountain was clean and it was white. The darkness dissolved in the morning and the light dissolved at night; there were no lines there. Ahead of me, Daila was a furry shape in the half-light, seeming to burrow up the mountain rather than to ascend it. The other two were just behind. I stamped my right foot, then my left, and began to follow him up.

  While if I had been a real “person with history,” which is what “Holoh” means, I would have written this:

  The drifting light on the blue snow, and

  The blaze of dark fur against the white thigh of the snow, and

  The water inside my body moving out my mouth at the sun, and

  Friends ahead of me, thinking things I didn’t know, and

  The prospect of falling

  I don’t know how to fit you into this story, Otile. Even though you are the only person in the book who is solid before me now, who baked the piece of bread in my belly, who sat opposite me studying the elements of blood while I wrote the part about the cliff — and who touched my ankle with yours, bony pulse to bony pulse — you are only a ghost in my book. You are a ghost in my book, as Courer and Disaine are ghosts outside of it. I don’t know why writing is like that.

  I could write of your face, which is always swathed like a climber’s face in silk and wool, because it is very cold here at the school and we do not move much as we study the movement of others, the joints of their bodies and the shredding of their muscles. But your face will blur under my pen, because I see it too well to reduce it to an emblem, a stamp. I could write of your small hard hands, the way you always take mine in yours when we go out in the city, because I’m always looking around at the storm of little lights that cities are made of. I could even write about your mouth, your incredible and incredulous mouth, hard and firm, with no blurring at the edge of the lips. It’s a miraculous mouth, because curses pour from it, and information, and complaints, and the little seizures of my body, soft and hard and fiery things. And your mouth never closes, my love — not when you are working, not when I am writing, not even in my imagination.

  But there — you see? Still a ghost. The parts of a body, independent of each other. I try to describe you and I only dismember you. You cannot put someone into a book until they are gone. And I’m not ready for you to be gone. I want to lie forever in your flowered lap, my body of God.7

  * * *

  7 Damn.

  * * *

  We put the suits on when Disaine awoke. As we screwed on the wrist seals of the gloves and donned the helmets, we felt a rising elation, a leavetaking of the surroundings. Our faces were naked inside of the helmets, and we could see each other properly again. The weight of our packs was much less. Everything now was not white-white, but shades of brown, an amber or a sepia most soothing to the eye. The warm apple-brown of nostalgia.

  And suddenly it was very easy to climb. The oxygen exhilarated us, and the taut pressure against our bodies was a comfort. Whether we progressed over snow marred by stone or stone marred by snow, or over great ridges of broken ice, or whether we climbed a cliff (struggling against the stiff suits and the jagged granite), we looked at it all as if it were a sort of fiction. A fiction with marvelous descriptions, yes, that blew up like fireworks and smelled of euphemistic sulphur, and that gave a realistic feedback to the hand in the sugary snow, to the fingers clutching the sharp line of the ice axe. But a fiction nonetheless.

  And we were lucky with the weather. Normally, you won’t climb to twenty thousand feet on the mountain without getting storm-stuck at least once, but we made it there and higher, and then higher, even to twenty-five, before we had to spend our first few formless days amidst the thick flapping of the tent, within a wall of snow. We were conducted up to the bodies of my friends as if along a shining road, and I was reminded again of the Holoh poet Hasna Boen:

  The path of snow is broad and deep

  The path to the top of the mountain, illuminated by the sun

  The path white-yellow, dazzling

  The path that has depth, that has thought

  The path that we cannot tread.

  “Why not?” asked Disaine in the tent one night, after I recited this to her.

  “Because it’s an ideal, and the moment we sink our feet into it, it’s not an ideal anymore. It ceases to be the perfect path.”

  “He was very preoccupied with that?”

  “It’s a metaphor for writing poetry, I think.”

  “No shit. But he wrote it.”

  “Well, he said it. That wasn’t supposed to count.” I spoke with a hardness that I didn’t feel.

  “Well, if only that were true,” she said, rather wistfully. “If only words you only say didn’t count. But those hurt more, because they dissolve, and they only leave the hole. I’d want all words to be permanent, if I could. So you could look them up, and be sure of what you did and didn’t do to people.”

  “Oh my God, I’d kill myself if that were true.”

  She said nothing more, but lay still, watching the red folds of the tent moving above her helmeted head.

  Saon’s was the first body we found.

  I was not sure that I expected to find anything, even though I was also certain that we would. There are as many routes up the mountain as there are straight lines on an imagined plane, and there was no particular reason, given the drift of our feet and the drift of the wind, why I should ever see those two corpses on the mountain — any more than I might have spotted the same friends, living, amidst the image-noise of the city. But there she was.

  We saw her from a long way off. Anything human stands out there, a scrap of landscape artificially knotted into order, a bend in the world.

  We were at a point now past the mountain’s hardscrabble beginnings, where it starts to lengthen, to deepen, to disintegrate into steep gullies and long hard ridges crested by perfect curves of snow. On a cloudy day in the village, you cannot see the mountain above this point. In fact, we were in the clouds themselves, gray sticky droplets that clung to our helmets. We stopped often to wipe the glass inside and out with thin dry cloths. It was during one of these breaks that we looked up and saw her, lying facedown and draped over a promontory. Her body was wasted to bone and skin, held together by the ice that permeated her, and by her snow-drenched gear. There was still hair on her gray skull, thin hair bleached white by the sun.

  I looked down and sighed. My first emotion was not heavy or complex. It was relief and regret — the sense that I had not wanted to see this, but now the waiting was over.

  Saon was a damp, talkative girl, one whose bony teeth were too big for her mouth and always pushed her lips out or open. She had a personality like packed spice, dense and hot, and climbed her own way, very unlike Daila (who spurred you like a horse) or Courer (so light on the rope, barely seeking to make he
r presence known). She died of a swelling in the brain, which we didn’t recognize until too late — because Holoh don’t get altitude sickness, because she kept staggering forward so brightly almost to the end, her voice growing ever more rapid and rasping, more and more herself as her brain swelled against its boundaries. She had every symptom, the fever, the weakness, the headache — everything but the languor, that urge to sit down in the snow and nurse the headache along until the brain freezes in the skull. Perhaps for someone like Saon, to be active was to be still; it took a greater effort not to move.

  To reach her, we would need to climb along a rough cliff; she was twenty feet or so to the side of the ridge we were ascending. Disaine said, “Do we need to go to her at all?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Then let’s not.”

  “It seems wrong,” I said. The wind was stirring her hair, and I wondered how many locks and strands of that hair — once dark and so thick that she could walk about the village topless on warm days, the strands pressing to her sweating skin — were lying even now on various parts of the mountain, having fallen from that poor skull with its scattering of flesh. It spoke to Saon’s attachment to that flesh, I thought, that she had any left now. It was as if her very bones had clung to it, as if her muscle was attached more tenaciously and with stickier stuff than other people’s, and all because of that woman, such an athlete and such a beauty, who had delighted in making people uncomfortable, who had loved also tea and red wine and shoving things off of tables to make room for maps of the mountain. Who had loved my husband with abandon and glee. Who had never looked at me very much, and then without interest — although I had certainly looked at her, a little bit vengefully, because it never occurred to her that I might want to.