Graham Joyce: The Silent Land

It was snowing again. Gentle six-pointed flakes from a picture book, settling on her jacket sleeve. The mountain air prickled with ice and the savour of pine resin. Zoe pulled the air into her lungs, feeling the cracking cold of it before letting go. And when the mountain horn seemed to nod and sigh back at her, she almost thought she could die in that place, and happily.

If there are few moments in life that come as clear and as pure as ice, when the mountain breathed back at her, Zoe knew that she had trapped one such moment and that it could never be taken away. Everywhere was snow and silence. Snow and silence; the complete arrest of life; a rehearsal and a pre-echo of death.

But her breath was warm and it said no to that. She pointed her skis down the hill. They looked like weird talons of brilliant red and gold in the powder snow as she waited, ready to swoop. I am alive. I am an eagle. Several hundred metres below lay the dark outline of Saint-Bernard-en-Haut, their Pyrenean resort village; across to the west, the irregular humps and horns of the mountain range. The sun was up now; in a few minutes there would be more skiers to break the eerie morning spell. But right now they had the powder and the morning entirely to themselves.

There was a whisper behind her. It was the effortless track of Jake’s skis as he came over the ridge and caught up with her.

He cruised to an elegant stop beside her. In contrast to her fashionable ski suit of lilac and white he wore black, and the morning sun burst on his bulbous black sunglasses in an iridescent flare. He stood still, sharing the moment with her. She fancied she could see his breath rising from him like a faint oyster-coloured mist. He took off his sunglasses and blinked back at her. Jake had close-cropped black hair and baby-blue peepers that she’d fallen in love with instantly, even if his large ears had taken her a little longer. A single, enormous snowflake floated onto his eyelashes.

Jake fractured the silence with a whoop of pure pleasure. ‘Whooo-hooooo!!!!’ He held his ski poles aloft and offered his dancing arse to the mountain. The sound of his shriek echoed around the crags, a celebration and a violation of nature all at the same time.

‘You shouldn’t do that. You don’t show the mountain your arsehole, arsehole,’ Zoe said.

‘Why not, arsehole?’

‘I don’t know why, arsehole. I just said it.’

‘Couldn’t help myself. This is perfection.’

It was. It was flawless. Immaculate, shrink-wrapped perfection on sticks.

‘You ready to go?’ she asked.

‘Yep. Let’s do it.’

Zoe was the more accomplished skier of the two. Jake could be faster, but in a reckless way, skiing right at the razor edge of his ability. She could always thrash him over a distance. To ski down to the village without a pause would take fifteen minutes. An hour and a half to get up on the combination of chair- and drag lifts, and fifteen minutes to get down. They’d got up early to beat the holiday-making hordes for this first run of the morning. Because this—the tranquillity, the silence, the undisturbed powder and the eerie feeling of proximity to an eagle’s flight—was what it was all about.

Jake hit the west side of the steep but broad slope and she took the east, carving matching parallel tracks through the fresh snow. Her skis whispered to the powder in thrilling intimacy as she plunged down the slope. Just the sound coming from her own skis was like having some creature or supernatural being racing behind her, trying to speak a story into her ear.

But at the edge of the slope, near the curtain of trees, she felt a small slab of snow slip from underneath her. It was like she’d been bucked, so she took the fall-line to recover her balance. Before she’d dropped three hundred metres the whisper of her skis was displaced by a rumble.

Zoe saw at the periphery of her vision that Jake had come to a halt at the side of the piste and was looking back up the slope. Irritated by the false start they’d made, she etched a few turns before skidding to a halt and turning to look back at her husband. The rumble became louder. There was a pillar of what looked like grey smoke unfurling in silky banners at the head of the slope, like the heraldry of snow armies. It was beautiful. It made her smile.

Then her smile iced over. Jake was speeding straight towards her like a dart. His face was rubberised and he mouthed something as he flew at her.

‘Get to the side! To the side!’

She knew now that it was an avalanche. Jake slowed,batting at her with his ski pole. ‘Get into the trees! Hang on to a tree!’

The rumbling had become a roaring in her ears, drowning Jake’s words. She pushed herself down the fall-line, scrambling for traction, trying to accelerate away from the roaring cloud breaking behind her like a tsunami at sea. Jagged black cracks appeared in the snow in front of her. She angled her skis towards the side of the slope, heading for the trees, but it was too late. She saw Jake’s black suit go bundling past her like clothes in a laundrette as he was turned by the great mass of smoke and snow. Then she too was punched off her feet and carried through the air, twisting, spinning, turning in the white-out. She remembered something about spreading her arms around her head. For a few moments it was like being agitated inside a washing machine, turned head over heels a few times, until at last she was dumped heavily in a rib-cracking fall. Then there came a chattering noise, like the amplified jaws of a million termites chewing on wood. The noise itself filled her ears and muffled everything, and then there was silence, and the total whiteness faded to grey, and then to black.

Total silence, total darkness.

She tried to move but couldn’t. Then she felt herself choking, because her mouth and her nostrils were packed with snow. She hawked some snow out of her throat. She felt the snow trickling cold at the back of her nasal passage. She coughed again and was able to gasp a lungful of air.

If she had expected to come round in the whiteness of snow, everything was black. She could breathe, but could barely move. She flexed her fingers inside her leather ski gauntlets. There was micro-movement. She sensed her hands were locked in position about twenty or thirty centimetres in front of her face. Her fingers were splayed wide inside the gauntlets. She tried to wriggle her fingers but nothing would move beyond that micro-flexing inside the glove. She stuck out her tongue and felt cold air.

She heaved her body with no result; and instantly descended into a panic in which she was hyperventilating and feeling the booming of her own heart. Then it occurred to her that she might have only a pocket of trapped air to depend on, and so she slowed her breathing right down. She told herself to be calm.

You’re in a snow tomb , be calm.