Tim Parks - Rapids

In the chalet, Vince opened the two windows and lay on the bed. His head aches. There was no way to shade out the light. He had left the phone to charge in the car. Closing his eyes, it suddenly occurred to him that there was an obvious purpose to this empty week. I must think about Gloria. I must give time to it. Real time. Not the few confused minutes before falling asleep. I must go at it as a task, a job.

For seven silent hours then, Vince lay on the bed in the chalet and told himself the story of his marriage. He remembered first meetings, holidays. He tried to list presents, to recall decisions, the cars they had owned, her father’s death, the miscarriage after Louise. He remembered Gloria’s sporting achievements, her body, her brusque but loving ways. She was loving, he thought, despite the austere, hurried meals, despite the Saturday morning cleaning. He remembered a way she had of dressing too lightly, of insisting they sleep with the window open, he remembered her fortitude when the first company he worked for had failed and there were mortgage payments and her father was ill. She had been solid then. She was never frightened of life. He remembered her laugh, her loud raucous laugh. She was taken from me, he said to himself at last, before there was time to understand, before I could prepare. I didn’t sit by her bed. Perhaps it was a love story, he decided. In its own way. He tried to remember Christmases and dinners and discussions about Louise, about schools. He felt better. He stood up and switched on the radio. There was a small digital set on the counter. He brought it back to the bed and lay down again. The problem is not the past, he decided, but what to do next. He was surprised by this sudden clarity. What a strange night last night! He pressed the search button looking for a station in English. Reception wasn’t good. The mountains no doubt. I haven’t eaten for twenty — four hours, he thought. He remembered Roland trying to break his piece of stale bread. At last a woman’s stern voice was talking about Iraq, about an election, an international disagreement, a plot to kill someone. Gloria would listen to two or three news bulletins one right after the other. Vince had always thought there was something disturbing about this attachment to chronicle. To return to the Berlin summit, the woman was saying— her accent was American— the three men who have chained themselves to the railing outside the Reichstag, now claim to have a bomb that they will explode if the police try to remove them. Vince got up, went out to the car, turned on the phone and texted a message to his daughter. Thinking of you, he wrote. It was lovely to be on holiday together.

Was it possible though? In the same internet café where he had bought the whisky, Vince studied a photo on the Guardian website. He has written to all his closest colleagues apologising for his absence, giving generic instructions, promising that he will be in the office on Saturday morning and will work through the weekend. The three men are wearing masks. Willing to Die to Wake Up the World, is the headline. Their spokesman speaks three languages fluently. No one knows who they are. The police have cleared the area. How can they sleep? Vince wonders. Or piss or shit? The masks are bags of white linen with holes for eyes and mouth. A strategy to prevent the police putting pressure on them through relatives, the article surmises. The temperature is in the mid — thirties. They are in full sunlight. Vince recognises the Reichstag with its pompous monu — mentality. He has visited the city more than once. But what he is looking at very closely is the exposed wrist of one of the men where it is handcuffed to the railing. This man seems to have a familiar build. Or perhaps not. He presses the ‘back’ button to return to the Waterworld site where Mandy has already posted four sets of twenty pictures. The quality is good. Here you are folks! she has written. Our mythical Community Experience! Vince searches for one of Clive and clicks to enlarge. The instructor is photographed face — on in his yellow boat, paddle held across his blue buoyancy aid. It’s a fine face, lit up somehow, the eyes glinting, the beard giving an impression of vigour, a secretive smile playing round the lips. Vince tries to find some distinguishing mark on the exposed wrist and forearm, but it’s hopeless. A tattoo or a scar would do it. The red boat just poking into the background must be Michela’s, he thinks. Or my own perhaps. He glances at one or two of the other pictures. Although there is loud music in the café, it’s strange the silence that gathers around these images. Max doffing his straw hat. Caroline balancing the singing hamster on her head. Vince returns to the Guardian. He checks all related articles. They have the latest figures on global warming, speed of temperature rise, glacier retreat. There is a map predicting flooding, shaded in different colours to suggest possible dates. Holland gone mid — century. The Po valley gone. World in state of denial, a psychologist writes, like a party on a riverboat drifting towards Niagara. Odd he used that metaphor. Can it really be Clive? Vince goes back to the photo. The three men have small coloured backpacks. Ready to blow themselves up, is the caption.

Vince checks his mail again, then spends the day repeating last Thursday’s walk up on the glacier. He takes the chair — lift above Sand in Taufers, finds the path, bends his back to it. He has put on his walking shoes. Making the trip alone, he gradually becomes aware, all around him, of the same silence that emanated from those photographs, the silence of voices that are no longer there. All my life has a kind of silence to it, he reflects, these days. He remembers Clive’s uncomfortable apology to Adam. It’s a noisy silence. I don’t think I can get through the whole summer like this, Michela had said. Vince stops to straighten his shoulders and look around. He had imagined she was referring to the heat. I didn’t pay attention. Same with Gloria. And it’s hot again now on the steep slope. The views are awesome. The peaks rise up one after another, quivering, immense and blue, but mainly bereft of snow. Perhaps we can feel a new tenderness for the landscape, now that we know we are killing it. Further down the valley there are cowbells clanging. Every time an animal moves, tiny, far below, a bell clangs in Vince’s mind. It must drive them mad. And across the wide air that separates him from a further slope comes the tinkle of children laughing. Some party or other. Vince listens, he picks out the distant figures. This is the silence of the mountains. Does Michela know what is happening? he wonders. How will she react? There were a hundred thousand, the Guardian said, at Sunday’s demonstration. It won’t be Clive.

Long before he reached the top, Vince was aware of speeding up, of marching more purposefully. He wants to get to Katrin Hofstetter’s death marker. On the way, he has seen three or four other memorials. Why didn’t I see them last time? Now he comes across a small iron cross driven into a boulder and the name of a young man, Karl Langer. There’s no photo, but a plastic rose has been fixed to the cross with a piece of wire. It’s the girl’s photo that draws me. Vince is aware that he has become hypersensitive to everything, and aware that it won’t last. I should enjoy it, this intensity.

The high ridge where the glacier begins is a strange mix of heat and cold. The sun is burning his forehead and the grainy ice freezing his feet. Then he can’t find the photo where he thought it must be. It’s irritating. He stands aside to let a group of German hikers pass in the opposite direction. Only four days and I’ve forgotten. Grüss Gott,a stout woman says. Grüss Gott. Eventually he finds the memorial twenty yards further on, facing west from a low wall of rock. 1999 she died. The thirty — first of August. How strange. And what a little miracle of technology to seal a photo so well it can survive the winter blizzards, the summer sun! The face is not quite as he remembered it. She’s prettier, happier, the hair wavier, brushed forward on one shoulder. Katrin Hofstetter: 19.1.1979—3i.8.i999.Vince imagines her eyes staring west into the sunset when the world around is all desert, when hikers no longer pass by, the planet is quite dead, and for the first time it occurs to him that those men chained to the railing in Berlin are not, perhaps, completely mad. Dyers and Hilson and the others will be in some committee meeting now. Much of the money the bank deals with is oil money. Inevitably. Glancing round to check that the path is quiet, Vince takes out his wallet, removes an ID photo of his wife and, without looking at it, lets it drop into the glassy crack between glacial ice and rock wall beneath the little memorial. In company, the dead may visit him less often.