Laura Furman - The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

“Go if you have to,” he finally tells me later that night, in exasperation, into the frigid darkness above our hammocks and blankets. “Go. Go. Go. God knows we don’t need you up here.”

Of course it occurs to me only as I finally reach Davos the next morning that she’s in school, and that she’ll be in school for most of the day. I have little money to spare but waste some of it anyway on coffee and a sweet roll to get in out of the cold. The lunch rush comes and goes. I man the chair farthest from the door, a nose to the window with the unsettled vacancy of an old dog left home alone.

At the awaited hour I’m outside her school, the dismissal bell ringing, and shouting and happy children stream past, looking no different than we did. “What are you doing here?” she wants to know. Somehow she’s come out another door and come up to me from behind.

“So you had the baby?” I ask.

“This is my supervisor, Frau Döring,” she tells me.

Frau Döring and I exchange greetings. Frau Döring appears to be hoping that whatever I’d just asked will be repeated.

“This is the brother of my late fiancé,” Ruth informs her. It’s as if the world’s been filled with unexpectedly painful things.

Once back at the coffee shop she asks, “Why do you think you’re so in love with me? What is it that you think you love?”

“You never answered about the baby,” I tell her.

She looks at me, gauging my reaction. She makes a let’s-get-on-with-it face.

“You gave it to an orphanage,” I tell her. “Some convent or other. The Sisters of Perpetual Help.”

She continues to consider me. I’m not weeping, but I might as well be.

“What is it you want?” she finally asks. “You want me to say that you’re as nice a boy as Willi?”

She adds after a silence, “I always thought of you as the sort of boy who pinned the periodic table over his bed, instead of pictures of girls from magazines.” An older couple at an adjacent table has grown quiet, eavesdropping.

“I thought about you more than Willi did,” I finally tell her. “That camping trip when you were with him, I thought about you more than he did.”

It angers her, and that’s at least something between us.

The eavesdropping couple resumes its conversation.

She talks a little about her work. She notes the way her loneliness has been exacerbated by her fondness for children. At least here she slept better, though. Maybe that’s what relocation was: a balm for the fainthearted.

“You said you had more to tell me,” I remind her.

She puts a hand around my coffee cup. “I’ve always liked you,” she says. “I’ll put the question to you. Do you think you were Willi’s equal?”

She’s sympathetic and tender and would sleep with me if she weren’t sure it would lead to further tediousness. She’d like to help but she’s also sure of the justice of this injustice, the way the English believe the poor to be poor and the rich rich because God has decreed it so.

“You’re not really still unable to get over this, are you?” she asks.

“What we’re doing on the mountain is more important than any of this,” I tell her, and she’s relieved to hear it.

“How’s your mother?” she wants to know.

Outside she turns and steps close and presses her mouth to my cheek and then lets it drift across my lips. “There’s no reason for us to stay angry with one another,” she says, as though confiding with my mouth. The couple from the adjacent table emerge, fixing their collars and hats, and excuse themselves to get by.

My mother and I had both dealt with our devastation in the months after Willi’s death by devoting our free time to the library at Lauterbrunnen. We seemed to have arrived at this attempted solution independently. We went mostly after chores on Saturdays. Sometimes I’d take the bus and discover, having arrived, that my father had driven my mother in the car. Sometimes I’d search for a book in the card catalog and discover that she’d already signed it out and was leafing through it on the other side of the reading room. There was very little written, then, about the properties of snow, and we were continually driven back to geographies and histories of the high Alps, there to glean what we could. We encountered Strabo’s accounts of passes subject to the collapse of whole snow mountains above them that swept his companions into abysmal chasms: passes he listed as “places beyond remedy.” We found Polybius’s account of Hannibal’s having had to witness the eruption of a slope that took with it his entire vanguard. Saint Bernard’s of having stepped out of a chapel to relieve himself when his fellow pilgrims inside were scoured away by a roaring river of snow, and his prayer, having been saved downslope in the branches of a pine, that the Lord restore him to his brethren so he might instruct them not to venture into this place of torment. One rain-swept early evening my mother set before me a memoir of one of Napoleon’s generals relating an anecdote of a drummer boy swept into a gorge who drummed for several days in the hope of attracting rescue before he finally fell silent. The librarians, intrigued by our industry and single-mindedness, helped out with sources. We read how in ancient days avalanches were so omnipotent and incontestable that they were understood to be diabolic weapons of the powers of darkness. How else to explain an entire village smashed flat while a china cupboard with its contents remained undamaged? A single pine left upright on the roof of a pastor’s house, as if it had grown there? A house so shattered that one of the children had been found in a meadow three miles away, tucked up into her bed as if by human hands? Each of these stories caused my mother pain. Each of them drove us on.

If one house was spared and others were destroyed, it was because that house had been favored by the spirits: when I first came across that claim, I closed the book and circled the library before returning to it. And those spirits rode astride such calamities as they thundered down the slope. Erstfeld’s town history recorded a spinster blown from her house who, still in her rocking chair, negotiated a wave of snow into the center of her village, and who, as she was giving thanks to Providence for her life, was carried to a clearing by her enraged neighbors, surrounded by a pyre, and burned alive.

How was my mother? I answered Ruth before I left to return to my hut mates. My mother wasn’t doing so well. My mother, like everyone else in this drama, seemed determined to blame herself. My mother used to believe that we all could call the thunder down onto anyone’s head whenever we wanted.

“You’re just like Willi,” Ruth said in response, after a moment. And it was the first time that I saw something in her look like the admiration he must have enjoyed.

Those were the sorts of histories, reiterated for Haefeli and Bucher, that went a long way toward ensuring my success when I interviewed to join the group. Haefeli believes there’s much to be learned from such narratives, particularly when the phenomena described seem confirmed elsewhere. He collects his own and recounts them for us when he’s in the mood, once we’re swinging in our hammocks in the dark. They’re especially compelling when we reflect that we’re hearing them in an area that’s itself an avalanche zone. “I think our friend Eckel wants to be blown out of his hammock,” Bader complains about my appetite for them.

As a compromise, Haefeli promises us just one more for the time being. A sixteenth-century avalanche in Davos, just below us, was recorded to have generated such force that it smashed through the ice of the lake-measured at two feet in thickness-and scattered an abundance of fish killed by the concussion out onto the snow. But then he can’t resist adding two more: one of a porter he knew, an Austrian, who stepped momentarily off his line of ascent to adjust a shoulder harness and saw his three companions blasted out of their skis by a snow cloud moving with such velocity that its sound seemed to follow it. And another of an infamous pass called Drostobel, above Klosters, that came to be known as a death trap because of an extraordinarily large and steep catchment area that fed into a single gully. Drostobel, the French liked to say, was German for “your fate hurtles down at you.”