Can a whole valley be cursed?
The photos of our expedition to the Maudit are spread out here before me on an open map of the Val d’Anniviers. The way Augustin is smiling into the camera belies how awfully wrong things went. If only we’d kept to our original plan of going to Italy after our ascent of the Zinalrothorn, Augustin would still be alive. Why did he have to die, while I was able to get back down? But we could never have foreseen this.
I’m not unique in attributing superhuman inspiration to the mountains I climb. All over the world, numerous mountains slumber with spiritual relevance, and entire religions have evolved at their foothills. The Olympus in Greece. Mount Sinai in Egypt. Mount Taranaki in New Zealand. Mount Fuji in Japan. But the Maudit is different. Augustin and I both knew it. The Maudit wasn’t slumbering. It was alert, restless. And hostile. Like a soul embittered by an ancient and unimaginable event.
It didn’t want us there.
And it isn’t going to go away.
God, please let Claire be okay.
8
September 24, 2018—private notes
Pressure behind my face is gone. Feel much better. Canceled my appointment with the speech therapist anyway because I don’t dare remove the bandages.
Worried sick all day about Claire. Searched AT5 and Parool for reports about the AMC. Didn’t find anything. They say no news is good news. But man, the doubts. So I ended up sending an email only now. Got one of those out of office replies, with the attached adrenaline rush of false hope. Why do people even install those frickin’ things? Anyway, the bits and bytes say she can be reached during office hours and will respond to my email ASAP. So I’ll have to wait.
S. surprisingly cheery today. We didn’t talk about it. You’d think it would be practically inevitable, right? Sometimes he seems to pretend the whole thing never happened. It’s refreshing, in a way. It offers a glimmer of hope about how our life together could be when all of this is over. That I’ve managed to overcome my shame and am now talking with him definitely helps to restore normality. Conversations are exhausting with the constant delay of having to type everything on a touchscreen. Worse, Sam stopped reading my messages—he was playing them. He downloaded one of those stupid speech apps that make me sound like Stephen Hawking. When I said I loathed hearing myself like that, he installed the voice of Schiphol Airport’s announcer lady. I think that nudged me to give in and finally open my mouth.
No pain now, but pretty high on a double dose of antidepressants and muscle relaxants. Feels like it tones it down, or that I’m at least more on top of it now. Let’s hope I can keep on top of it. For good.
September 25, 2018
Why isn’t she emailing me??? Not knowing is driving me crazy!
9
September 26, 2018
Disturbing developments.
Finally got a reply, but it came from the office administration. They wrote that, as of now, due to personal circumstances, Dr. Claire Stein would be unavailable for giving treatment and that her patients will be referred to other, “equally qualified” psychiatrists. My Monday session is scheduled with one Dr. Han Freriks. Wham. Just like that. No explanations. I finally got up the nerve to call Claire, but her phone didn’t even ring. I immediately got a recording saying the number was out of service.
I should be relieved. My worst fears have turned out to be unfounded, but this doesn’t bode well. The Maudit saw her when the mask had been unwound. Stop kidding yourself believing there’s no connection between what happened in her office three days ago and the fact that Claire has suddenly canceled all of her appointments.
So what did it do to her? I’m scared even to think about it.
“Something’s up,” Sam said, loading the dishes into the dishwasher after dinner. “You’re being weird. Has anything happened?”
Apparently, you can’t deceive the one who really loves you. I obviously can’t tell Sam about Claire, because I don’t want to scare him more than necessary. But fortunately I had something else on hand, so I wasn’t forced to lie. Not blatantly, at least.
“I read the letter from Augustin’s parents,” I said. “It’s in German. You can read it too, if you want. And I think you should, actually. There’s something in it that’s pretty weird.”
That much was true, at least. I hadn’t wanted to read the letter until now, afraid that it would be too painful. Can’t tell the Labers the truth about their son anyway. But you want to give them something. Some sort of narrative. So I opened it last night and read what they had wanted to tell me.
Uwe and Bettine Laber were divorced on good terms, Augustin once told me, but it appears that she’s kept her married name. I’ve never met either of them, but they both seem to be nice people. Their grief is enormous, and they have many questions about the last days of their son’s life. Seeing as the Police Cantonale couldn’t give them a body, they had at least wanted to have a place to mourn.
“So they went to Switzerland,” I said to Sam, after getting the letter. “And guess what, they were lied to! Get this.” I showed him a passage that I’d highlighted with a yellow marker. “They say they visited the glacier where the authorities told them the accident had happened. ‘Man k?nnte sogar mit dem Auto hin, am Stausee Moiry entlang.’ So they say they could get there all the way by car. The weather was ‘wundersch?n,’ the glacier was sparkling in the sunlight. Incredible, the things we went through up there. And incredible that their Augustin is still up there, in the mountains he loved so much . . .”
At first, Sam didn’t understand what that meant, because he wasn’t familiar with the region’s geography.
“Not only did the authorities send them to the wrong glacier, but to a completely different valley. The Moiry glacier lies in a branch of the Val d’Anniviers, if you take the road up from Grimentz past the reservoir. That’s the Stausee they’re talking about. The Maudit’s glacier, where it actually happened, is much smaller and lies in a secondary valley, much higher up and invisible from Grimentz. And absolutely impossible to reach by car. Remember how hard it was for us to even find the entrance to the valley?”
“Yeah . . . but wouldn’t it make sense then that they’d send his folks to a different place? At least that way they can mourn without, like, falling off a rock or somethin’.”
I gazed at him in disbelief. “But then why would they lie to them about where their son’s body really is?”