“It was raining, too,” Jacek added, holding up the sleeve of his sweater. “This is still wet.”
“Wanda complains that they come back a wreck and we have to fit our lives to their schedules,” Agnieszka said. “She always says, ‘Why should we? He never fits his into ours.’ ”
“And first they’re unbelievably full of themselves — they did just conquer the world — and then they’re depressed,” Krystyna said. “At parties I’ll hear the women with their big eyes asking them how they do it, and I want to grab their faces and say, ‘The question is, how do I do it?’ ”
“Who wants another drink?” Jacek asked.
She went on to say that she’d begun to realize how many people this mountain had killed only by listening to our other friends talk about it. Then she’d broken down and done some Internet research, after which she wished she hadn’t.
“High altitudes aren’t as dangerous as everyone makes them out to be,” Jacek told her. “You could just as easily get killed crossing the road.”
“Yeah,” Krystyna said. “If you painted yourself black and crossed on moonless nights.”
“I liked the old days when they were out of touch for weeks,” Agnieszka said. “At least then you could manage your anger and fear and go about your life.”
“It’s not like we don’t take every precaution,” Jacek told her.
“Well, there’s a relief,” she answered. “That should prevent the avalanches and blizzards and oxygen starvation and cold.”
Jacek reminded his wife that he’d shown her the entry he’d made in his notebook on Annapurna: “It’s high time that I stopped this kind of Russian roulette and starting thinking of someone other than myself.” And then she pointed out that after finishing that entry, he’d left for the summit.
Locating the Polish tents in a large encampment is always easy: they’re the ones still lit and noisy at four a.m., the ones rising up out of a sea of bottles. At this time of year, though, we had the glacier to ourselves. We set up next to the windblown remains of an unsuccessful Japanese expedition from the summer before. At 3,500 meters there was already sixty centimeters of new snow. Inside the main tent, Kolesniak hung smoked meats and salamis he’d brought from home. As the interior warmed up the salamis dripped fat on whoever was beneath them.
The camp was centered on a glacier forested with ice towers. Every so often we’d kick up out of the snow an old tent peg or film canister. In the areas surrounding our doorways, cleared down to the ice, crevasses opened and shut slowly, like giant clams. The whole assembly was drifting away from the mountain a few inches a day with the movement of the glacier.
The shortened days made everything harder. By three the sun was behind the ridge and the temperature fell off the scale. Fingers became wood blocks and noses clogged with frost. We huddled in our tents eating pasta and salami, with loaves of chapati that were full of sand that the local monopolist leavened into the flour to increase its weight. The sherpas requested the water we drained from our pasta and drank it from small wooden bowls they pulled from their coats. When not working Kolesniak read to us aloud from something entitled Reign of Blood, about Idi Amin’s dictatorship. From this we learned that Amin kept his ex-wives’ severed heads in his kitchen freezer in order to keep his current wife in line.
We believe in acclimatizing by working hard and stressing the body. Only multiple ascents at these altitudes can teach you how you’re really doing; the first few times, every sensation feels abnormal, and the body is sustaining such a beating that it’s hard to judge how poorly it’s adjusting. To get to Camp 1, at 5,500 meters, we had to negotiate a maze of ice falls. We left on schedule at midnight, the advance team having already pressed on ahead, with Kolesniak, as leader, bringing up the rear to better follow the progress of the entire group spread out ahead of him.
Telephone reception is now much better than it used to be, so even in the high valleys blackout periods last days rather than weeks, and Agnieszka had managed to get through to me at the Base Camp before our first acclimatizing climb. She worked me like a strop while I turned to the tent wall and strove to ignore the jeers and jokes from Kolesniak and Nowakowski.
She said she was happy it had gone well so far, but I could hear in her voice the steeliness that derived from the extent to which she’d already disappointed herself. I asked after everything at home and she said that the night before she’d been to a dinner party at which all of the wives had wondered what it was like to love someone so often away and always at risk of never returning. She said she got so fed up that she finally started answering, “Why? Have people died doing that?” She said it was worse than when she met climbers and they asked if she climbed, and then seemed to believe she couldn’t register the change in their expressions when she answered.
“Are you there?” she asked.
“Oh, you left me at home with the baby and the dishes and the window sash that needs fixing,” Kolesniak sang out in his stupid falsetto.
“The boys are having a time of it, are they?” she asked.
“We’re going up to Camp 1 in a few hours,” I explained.
“So you need your rest,” she said.
“I’m fine,” I told her.
She said that after we’d said goodbye this time, upon leaving the airport she’d merged onto the highway in the wrong direction and then had thought to herself, Who cares? She’d gone thirty kilometers before Wanda’s complaining had allowed her to summon enough energy to turn around. When I didn’t respond, she added she sometimes felt superfluous and uninvolved with my concerns, but then realized that was only because she was superfluous and uninvolved with my concerns.
“We were talking about this maybe being the last trip for a while,” I told her. “Jacek and me.”
“You’re addicts,” she said. “Krystyna and I decided that the night you left. A trip like this is about the loss of your ability to control the dose.”
“I’m lonely,” Kolesniak sang while he stripped excess weight from his pack. “Here in my bed with only my zucchini.” He opened his hood and stretched wide its collar to show me again the tattoo on his neck in English: Love Is Pain.
“I’ll think of something,” I told her.
“Oh, you’re resourceful when it comes to things like raising money for climbing,” Agnieszka said. “It’s in everyday life that you’re not so clever.”
“I never claimed I was clever,” I told her. “I only know I want to be with you.”
“Who in their right mind tries to build a relationship with a high-altitude winter mountaineer?” she asked. “I mean, when you’re with me you seem to understand words like ‘love’ and ‘commitment.’ ”
“They mean more to me now than they ever did,” I told her.
“I signed up for this,” she said. “But what about people who didn’t? Like Wanda?”