He was under the snow for two hours. When his face was finally cleared, it was blue and he was unconscious but the guides revived him with a breathing tube even as he still lay trapped. And when someone covered his face with a hat to keep the snow from falling into his mouth and eyes, he shouted for it to be taken away, that he wanted air and light.
He was hurried home on a litter and spent the next two days recovering. I fed him oxtail soup, his favorite. His injuries seemed slight. He asked about Ruth. He answered our questions about how he felt but related nothing of the experience. When we spoke in private he peered at me strangely and looked away. On the third night, when I put out the lamp, he seemed suddenly upset and asked not to be left alone. “You’re not alone,” I said. “I’m right here.” He cried out for our mother and began a horrible rattling in his throat, at which he clawed, and I flew down the stairs to get her. By the time we returned he was dead.
The doctor called in another doctor, who called in a third. Each tramped slush through our house and drank coffee while they hypothesized and my mother trailed from room to room in their wake, tidying and weeping until she could barely stand. Their final opinion was contentious but two favored delayed shock as the cause of death. The third held forth on the keys to survival in such a situation, the most important being the moral and physical strength of the victim. He was thrown bodily out of the house by my father.
The inquiry into the tragedy held that the group leaders — the schoolmistress and her dead assistant — were blameless, but the parents of the children swept away decided otherwise, and within a year the miserable and ostracized schoolmistress was forced to resign her post.
How could our mother have survived such a thing? She had always seemed to carry within herself some quality of calm against which adverse circumstances contended in vain, but in this case she couldn’t purge her rage at the selfishness of those whose blitheness had put the less foolhardy at risk. She received little support from my father, who refused to assign blame, so she took to calling our home “our miserable little kingdom,” and at the dinner table mounting what questions she could as if blank with fatigue.
By May, scraps from the two missing children poked through the spring melt like budding plants, and in the course of a day or two a glove, a scarf, and a ski pole turned up. Renewed digging recovered one of the little girls, her body face-down, her arms extended downhill, her back broken and her legs splayed up and over it.
Our mother talked to everyone she considered knowledgeable about the nature of what had happened, and why. From as early as we could remember, she’d always gathered information of one kind or another. I’d never known anyone with a more hospitable mind. My sister often complained that no one could spend any time in our mother’s company without learning something. She was the sort of woman who recorded items of interest in a journal kept in her bedroom, and she joked to our father when teased about it that it represented a store of observations that would someday be more systematically confirmed as scientific research. Why did one snowfall of a given depth produce avalanches when another did not? Why was the period of maximum danger those few hours immediately following the storm? Why might any number of people cross a slope in safety only to have another member of their party set the disaster in motion? She remembered from childhood a horrible avalanche in her grandmother’s village: a bridge and four houses had been destroyed and a nine-year-old boy entombed in his bed, still clutching his cherished stuffed horse.
She spent more time with me as her preoccupation intensified. There was no one else. Her daughter had grown into a long, thin adult with a glum capacity for overwork and no interest in the business of the world. We had few visitors, but if one overstayed his welcome my sister would twist her hair and wonder audibly, as if interrogating herself, “Why doesn’t he leave? Why doesn’t he leave?”
Early one morning I found my mother on my bed. When she saw I was awake, she remarked that Willi’s shoulders had been so broad that it made him appear shorter than he was. “And mine, too,” I said. “And yours, too,” she smiled. Somewhere far away a dog was barking as if beside itself with alarm.
I told her I thought I might have started the avalanche. She said, “You didn’t start the avalanche.” I told her I might have, though I hadn’t yet explained how. She reminded me of the farmers’ old saying that they didn’t make the hay, that the sun made the hay.
“I think I made the avalanche,” she finally suggested. When I asked what she was talking about, she wondered if I remembered the Oberlanders’ tale of the cowherd whose mother thought he’d gone astray and, enraged by having been offered only spoiled milk by his new wife, called on ice from the mountain above to come bury them both and all of their cows.
How old was I then? Seventeen. But even someone that young can be shocked by his own paralysis in the face of need. My mother sat on my bed picking her heart to pieces and I suffered at the spectacle and accepted her caresses and wept along with her and fell back asleep comforted, never offering my own account of what might have happened, whether or not it would have helped. The subject was dropped. And that morning more than anything else is what’s driven me to avalanche research.
Bucher’s a good Christian but even he gave up the long ski down to services after a few weeks, and instead we spend our Sabbaths admiring the early-morning calm of the mountains. The sun peeps over the sentinel peaks behind us and the entire snow-covered world becomes a radiance thrown back at the sky. The only sounds are those we make. On our trips to Davos for supplies, Bader and I for a few months held a mock competition for the affections of an Alsatian widow, who negotiated the burden of her sexual magnetism with an appealing modesty. Then, in February, I slipped on an ice sheet outside a bakery and bounced down two flights of steps. “So much for the surviving Eckel brother,” Ruth Lindner said in response from across the street.
What was she doing in Davos? She’d trained as a teacher and been reassigned to a new school district. How did she like teaching? She hoped the change of scene would help. What did her parents make of the move? They’d been against it, but lately she’d felt home was more like prison. We arranged to meet for coffee the following weekend, and back at the hut the group made much of my announcement of my withdrawal from the Alsatian sweepstakes.
I’d lost track of Ruth after Willi’s memorial service. My last words to her had been “I blame myself,” and her response had been, “I blame everyone.” Then she’d gone on holiday to her maternal grandparents’ farm near Merligen. That visit had extended itself, and my two letters to that address were returned unopened. When I’d pressed her father for an explanation, he said that the postmaster must have found them undeliverable. When I’d protested that he was the postmaster, he lost his temper. My parents had been no more help. Her few friends claimed to be equally mystified.