The Ice Virgin, Page 2

  That was Ajola’s speech, and Rudy hugged his neck and kissed him on his wet nose, and then he took the cat in his arms, but the cat wriggled free. ‘You’ve become too strong for me, and I certainly don’t want to use my claws on you. Just you go and climb over the mountains. I have taught you how to climb. Never believe you’re going to fall, and keep a good grip on yourself.’ And then the cat ran off, because he didn’t want to let Rudy see the grief shining in his eyes.

  The two hens were running round on the floor; one of them had lost her tail. A tourist who fancied himself a hunter had shot her tail off because he’d taken the hen for some bird of prey.

  ‘Rudy’s going over the mountains!’ said one hen.

  ‘He’s always in a hurry!’ said the other, ‘and I don’t like saying goodbye.’ And the two of them scuttled off.

  He also said goodbye to the goats, and they called out: ‘May you… may we… may… maaa!’ and it was all so sad.

  Two experienced guides from the local community were about to cross the mountains. They would be going down the other side by the Gemmi Pass. So Rudy went with them – and on foot. It was a tough trek for so little a lad, but Rudy had strength and courage which didn’t ever wane.

  The swallows flew part of the way with them. ‘We and you! You and us!’ they sang. The guides’ route took them over the fast-flowing Lütschine River which tumbles out in many little streams from the black ravine of the Grindelwald glacier. Loose tree-trunks and bits of rock served as bridge here. Now they were over by the alder thicket and beginning to go up the mountain close to where the glacier had worked loose from the mountainside. And next they went actually out onto the glacier, over blocks of ice, and out round them too. Rudy had to crawl for a little, then walk for a little. His eyes shone with pure pleasure, and in this spirit he stepped with his iron-clasped mountain-boots so firmly as though to put down markers for his movements. The black churned-up earth which the mountain stream had emptied over the glacier gave it a calcified appearance, but blue-green, glassy ice shone through nonetheless. They had to go round small pools rimmed by pressed ice-blocks, and in doing so approached a huge boulder that was swaying on the brink of a fissure in the ice. The boulder toppled over, fell, rolled down and released the echo that rang from the glacier’s deep hollow passageways.

  On up! Always they went upwards. The glacier stretched above them like a river of wildly piled-up ice masses squeezed between precipitous rocks. For a split second Rudy thought about what he’d been told, how he had lain with his mother inside one of these cold-exhaling ravines, but such thoughts quickly went away. For him it was just another story out of all the many he had heard. Every now and again, when the men thought climbing was a bit too difficult for the little chap, they extended their hands to him, but he did not become too exhausted, and on the smooth ice he stood as steadily as a chamois. Presently they came out onto rocky ground, now between moss-free stones, now in amongst low spruce trees, and then out again into green pasture, ever changing, ever new. All round rose the great snow-covered mountains, Jungfrau (the Virgin), Mönch (the Monk) and Eiger (the Ogre). Rudy had never been as high as this before, never trodden the sea of snow now opening up before him. It lay with motionless waves of snow which the wind had blown into shape out of single flakes, just as it blows the foam from the waters of the sea. Glacier after glacier hold each other by the hand, if one might say that. Each one is a glass palace for the Ice Virgin whose power and intention it is to capture and entomb.

  The sun blazed intensely down. The snow was truly dazzling and as though studded with blue-white, sparkling splinters of diamond. Innumerable insects, particularly butterflies and bees, lay dead in heaps on the snow. They had ventured too high up, or else the wind had borne them to the point where they expired in this cold. About the Wetterhorn a threatening cloud hung like a fine-woven black tuft of wool. It descended, swelling with what lurked within, a Föhn, violent in its strength were it to break loose. The impression of the whole journey, the night-camp up here, and the path going onwards, the deep mountain chasms where the water for a staggeringly long period of time had sawn through the blocks of stone, fixed itself indelibly on Rudy’s memory.

  A derelict stone building on the far side of the sea of snow provided overnight shelter. Here they found charcoal and branches of spruce, the fire they lit got going quickly, and they made up bedding for the night as comfortably as possible. The men seated themselves round the fire, smoking their tobacco and drinking the warm spicy drink they had prepared for themselves. Rudy was given his share, and then talk got underway about the mysterious creatures of the alpine country: about the strange colossal snakes in the deep lakes, about the folk who come out at night, the ghostly army which carries sleeping people through the air to the marvellous floating city of Venice, about the wild shepherd who drove his black sheep across the pasture; nobody had seen these animals, but they had heard the sound of their bells and the herd’s eerie baaing. Rudy listened with curiosity but without fear, something he simply did not know, and as he listened, he thought he caught the spectral hollow baaing. Yes, it became more and more distinct, the men heard it as well, stopped in the midst of their conversation, hearkened, and told Rudy that he must not fall asleep.

  It was a Föhn blowing up, the violent storm-wind which hurls itself from the mountains down into the valley and in its viciousness breaks trees as if they were reeds, and shifts chalets from one bank of the river to the other just as we move a chess piece.

  An hour had gone by before they said to Rudy that it had passed over. He could go to sleep now, and exhausted by the trek, he slept as if on command.

  Early in the morning they set off again. That day the sun illuminated for Rudy new mountains, new glaciers and snowfields. They were entering Canton Valais, and were on the far side of the mountain ridge you saw from Grindelwald, though still a long way from the new home. Other mountain ravines, other pastures, woods and pathways presented themselves, other houses, other people were on view. But what people were these he was seeing? They were freaks of nature: weird, fat, jaundiced faces, the neck a heavy, hideous chunk of flesh with pouches hanging out. They were creitins,* they dragged themselves wretchedly about, and looked with blank eyes at any outsiders who arrived. The women looked the most frightful of all. Were these the people of his new home?

  3. Rudy’s uncle

  In his uncle’s house, where Rudy eventually arrived, the people looked, thank God, as Rudy was accustomed to seeing them. Only one solitary creitin was here, a poor, witless lad, one of those pitiable creatures who in their poverty and loneliness are always taken in by families in Canton Valais, staying a couple of months in every household. Poor Saperli was in just this position when Rudy arrived.

  Rudy’s uncle was still an energetic huntsman and an accomplished cooper, and his wife was a small, lively person, with something of a bird’s face, eagle eyes and a long, rather downy neck. Everything was new for Rudy, clothes, customs and practicalities, even the language, but this his child’s ear soon learned to understand. It all looked so well-to-do here compared with his home at his grandfather’s. The house his uncle and aunt lived in was larger, walls decorated with chamois horns and brightly polished guns. Over the front door hung the Madonna; fresh alpine roses and a burning lamp were placed before her.

  Rudy’s uncle was, as has been said, one of the region’s most knowledgeable chamois-hunters, and also the best and most experienced mountain guide. Rudy would become the darling of this household, though in truth there was one of these already. This was an aged, blind and deaf hunting-dog who couldn’t make himself useful any longer but had formerly done so incomparably. People remembered the animal’s great abilities of earlier years, and so now he was part of the family, living with it in comfort. Rudy embraced the dog, but the dog no longer had anything to do with strangers, and this was what Rudy still was, though not for long: he soon took root in the household and in people’s hearts.

  ‘Things are no
t so bad here in Canton Valais!’ said his uncle, ‘we have chamois; they haven’t died out so soon as the ibex. It’s far better here now than in the old time. However much they say in praise of that, our own is much better. The bag’s had a hole punched in it, and fresh air has got into our shut-off valley. Something better always emerges when the old and decrepit fall,’ he said, and Uncle became really talkative when he spoke about his childhood years, which were his own father’s heyday, when Valais was, as he put it, a closed bag containing far too many sick people, pathetic creitins. ‘But then the French soldiers came along, they were real doctors, they were; straight-away they put down sickness pretty thoroughly, and sick persons too. The Frenchmen know how to give blows all right, they can deal knock-out blows of many different kinds, and their girls know how to knock you out too.’ And so saying his uncle nodded to his French-born wife and laughed. ‘The French even dealt blows to the stones so that they surrendered. They struck the Simplon Pass out of the rocks and knocked a roadway into shape right up there, so that now I can say to a three-year-old child: ‘Take a walk down into Italy, just keep to the main road!’ – and the young ’un will find his way down into Italy sure enough, just by sticking to the highway.’ And accordingly Rudy’s uncle sang a French song and shouted out: ‘Hurrah for Napoleon Bonaparte.’

  Then it was that Rudy first heard about France, about Lyons, the great city on the River Rhône, which his uncle had been to.

  It wouldn’t be many years before Rudy became a clever chamois-hunter himself, he had a real flare, said his uncle, and he taught him how to handle a gun, how to take aim and shoot. In the hunting season he took him into the mountains, getting him to drink warm chamois blood because it keeps dizziness at bay from the hunter. He taught him how to tell the time when, on the various mountainsides, the avalanches would roll, at midday or in the evening, according to how the sun cast its beams. He taught him to pay careful attention to the chamois themselves, and learn from the way they leaped, so that you fell on your feet and stood firm. And if in a mountain ravine there wasn’t support for your feet, then you had to look for supports for your elbows, and cling on tight with every muscle you had in your thigh or calf. Even the nape of the neck could hold on firmly if it were necessary. The chamois were clever, they’d position their own kind as forerunners. But the hunter has to be cleverer still and put the animals off the scent. He can deceive them too, he can hang his coat and hat on an alpenstock, and the chamois will take the clothes for the man himself. This trick his uncle played one day when he was on a hunt with Rudy.

  The mountain-path was narrow, there really wasn’t one at all; a thin ledge, it was close to the dizzying precipice. The snow was half thawed out, the stone crumbled when you trod on it, his uncle therefore lay with the whole length of his body on the ground and crawled forwards. Every stone that broke off dropped, knocking against others, then bounced and rolled again, causing many others also to bounce from rock-wall to rock-wall, before coming to a stop in the black depth below. Rudy was standing a hundred paces from his uncle, on the furthest firm pinnacle of rock, and saw coming through the air, to hover over his uncle, a powerful vulture, which with one blow from its wings would hurl the crawling worm into the precipice to turn him into carrion.

  Uncle had eyes only for the chamois which, with her young kid, was in view on the far side of the chasm. Rudy fastened his gaze on the bird, realised what it meant to do, and therefore put his hand on his gun to shoot. When the chamois sped off, Uncle fired, and the parent animal was killed with one deadly bullet, but her kid, the poor young animal, ran away, as though to show and to overcome the fact that its whole life consisted of flight from danger. The gigantic bird, terrified by the bang, opted for another route. Rudy’s uncle did not know the danger he’d been in; he heard of it first from Rudy.

  As now, in the best of spirits, they made their way home, his uncle whistling a song from his boyhood, a strange noise suddenly boomed out not far away. They looked to the side of them, they looked upwards, and there, way up on the sloping mountain ledge, the snow coverlet was heaving; it was billowing just like a stretched piece of linen when the wind gets in under it. The rippling heights above them were being smashed up as if they were marble slabs, which then burst and let loose frothing, tumbling waters, resounding all round like a muffled thunderclap. It was an avalanche which was falling, not down over Rudy and his uncle, but near them, far too near them.

  ‘Hold tight, Rudy!’ Uncle shouted, ‘as tight as you can manage!’

  And Rudy grasped the tree-trunk close to him. His uncle scrambled over him up into the branches of the tree and clung on fast, while the avalanche moved down many yards away from them. But its aftershock, the gusts of storm-wind in its train, broke up and extensively laid into all the trees and bushes as if they were dry reeds, and flung them far and wide. Rudy lay face pressed down on the ground. The tree-trunk he’d taken hold of was as if it had been sawn through and its crown hurled a good distance away. There among the broken branches lay his uncle with his head crushed. His hands were still warm, his face was quite unrecognisable. Rudy stood by him pale and trembling. This was his first experience of fear, the first moment of horror he’d faced.

  He came back in the late evening with tidings of death to a home which was now a house of mourning. Its mistress stood there without a word, without a tear, and not till the dead body was brought in did she give vent to her anguish. The poor creitin crept up to his bed; he wasn’t seen for the whole of that day. Then towards evening he came to Rudy:

  ‘Write a letter for me! Saperli doesn’t know how to write! Saperli can go with the letter to the post-office.’

  ‘A letter from you?’ asked Rudy, ‘who to?’

  ‘To the Lord Christ!’

  ‘Who do you mean by that?’

  And the half-wit, as they called the creitin, gave Rudy a pleading look, clasped his hands, and said so solemnly and piously: ‘Jesus Christ. Saperli will send him a letter, praying to him that Saperli should lie dead and not the man of this house.’

  And Rudy shook him by the hand. ‘That letter wouldn’t ever reach him! That letter wouldn’t ever give us him back.’

  Rudy found it hard to explain the impossibility to him.

  ‘Now you are the mainstay of the house!’ said Rudy’s foster-mother, and that’s what he became.

  4. Babette

  ‘Who is the best shot in Canton Valais?’ Yes, the chamois knew! ‘Watch out for Rudy!’ they’d say. ‘Who’s the best-looking shot?’ ‘Rudy, of course!’ the girls said, but they didn’t say: ‘Watch out for Rudy.’ Dutiful mothers didn’t say it either, because he nodded to them in as friendly a way as he did to the young girls. He was so cheerful and happy; his cheeks had a tan, his teeth were a healthy white, and his eyes shone coal-black. He was a handsome young man, and only twenty years old. Icy water didn’t bite him with its cold when he was swimming; he could turn himself about in the water like a fish. He could cling to rock-walls like a snail; he had first-class muscles and sinews, and showed this when jumping; the cat had been his first teacher, and the chamois next. The best mountain guide to entrust with your life was Rudy, he could have amassed an entire fortune this way. The cooper’s craft, something else his uncle had taught him, he had no interest in: his pleasure and his yearning centred on shooting chamois; this also brought in money. Rudy was a good match, they said, if only he wouldn’t set his sights above his own station. At the dance he was a dancer all the girls dreamed about; and through their waking hours, one after the other, they went about thinking of him.

  ‘He kissed me at the dance!’ said the schoolteacher’s Annette to her dearest friend, but she shouldn’t have said this – even to her dearest friend. Such a thing isn’t easy to keep to yourself; it’s like sand in a bag full of holes; it leaks out. Soon, no matter how good-natured and honourable Rudy was, everyone knew he kissed at the dance. And yet he hadn’t kissed at all the one he most wanted to have kissed.

  ‘Watch
him!’ said an old huntsman, ‘he’s kissed Annette, he’s begun with ‘A’, and now he’ll kiss his way down the whole alphabet.’

  One kiss at one dance was all as yet that gossip could relay about Rudy, but kissed Annette he had, and she was not in the least the flower of his heart.

  Down in Bex, between large walnut trees, close by a fast-flowing little mountain stream, lived the rich miller. His home was a big edifice of three storeys, with small turrets roofed with wooden shingles and studded with plates of sheet-metal which shone in both sun- and moonlight. The largest turret had for weather-vane a gleaming arrow piercing an apple, which was meant to represent Wilhelm Tell’s feat of archery. The mill had a prosperous, well-kept appearance, and lent itself to being sketched or written about, but the miller’s daughter defied being drawn or described, at least that’s what Rudy would say, and yet she stood pictured in his heart, from inside which her eyes were sending out enough beams to start a whole fire. It had all come about quite suddenly, just as the other kind of fire can make its appearance, and the extraordinary thing about it was that the miller’s daughter, the lovely Babette, had no idea of all this, she and Rudy having exchanged not so much as a couple of words.

  The miller was wealthy, and this wealth meant that Babette was placed very high to get at socially. But nothing is situated so high, said Rudy to himself, that you can’t reach it; you’ve got to climb, and you don’t fall down if you don’t think you will. This wisdom he had from his earliest home.