The Long Night

The dispatcher's voice in Kasia's ear was calm, and she clung to it the way she clung to the rope.

Helicopter: not possible. Cloud on the summit, no visibility, wind gusting past anything a pilot could fight. A ground team would start from the Italian side as soon as the cable car could carry them. It would take hours.

"How many hours?" Kasia asked, and the dispatcher, who was kind enough not to lie, said, "We will come as fast as the mountain lets us."

So they waited.

Time in the vertical world does not pass the way it does on the ground. It thickens. Minutes become stones that Tomek had to lift one at a time. The freezing rain soaked through his jacket, through his gloves, into the marrow of him, and the harness, which had been a comfortable friend for twelve years of climbing, became an instrument of slow cruelty, cutting at his thighs, squeezing the blood from his legs.

He did the things the mountain-rescue courses had taught him. He pushed his knees against the loop of his foot-sling. He clenched and unclenched his fingers. He wiggled his toes inside boots that felt like they were filled with wet cement. Every ten minutes he shouted up, and every ten minutes Kasia shouted down, and the sound of her voice was the only warm thing in the universe.

"Tell me something," he called, somewhere past three in the morning.

"What?"

"Anything. Tell me what we're doing in April."

There was a silence, and then, over the wind, a small wet sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. "In April," Kasia said, "we are going to Tatra. We are going to climb something easy and stupid. And then we are going to eat pierogi until we fall asleep in the grass."

"Ruskie or meat?"

"Both. Don't be ridiculous."

He was crying, he realized, though the tears froze before they reached his chin. He told her about the first time he had seen her, chalk to the elbows, swearing at a route in three languages. He told her that he had bought a ring in August and had been carrying it in the lid of his rucksack for six weeks, waiting for a summit that would be worthy of it. He had been planning to ask her at the top of the Tooth.

She did not answer for a long moment.

"Then you'd better live," Kasia said at last, in a voice that shook like a rope under load, "because I am not saying yes to a man who dies before he finishes the question."

He laughed. It hurt. It was the best thing that had happened all night.

But the cold kept climbing him. By four he could no longer feel his hands. By five he had begun to drift, his thoughts sliding sideways, the fog turning into a warm gray blanket he wanted very badly to pull over his head. Only her voice kept dragging him back: "Tomek. Tomek! Say something. Say the name of the road we live on. Say it!"

"Zielna," he whispered, and the wind took it.