Daphne Kalotay
Three Times Two
Originally published in Copper Nickel
It was a bed, not the mountain, that would cast its hex on the hikers that August, but they did not know that yet. There were six of them—three couples—and so far the one thing they all agreed was that it was an ugly mountain.
Massive and brown, with trails lined by scrappy, wilting foliage. No berries or butterflies. Only occasional birdsong. Markus, a mathematics post-doc, had been the one to plan this year’s holiday and perhaps felt accountable. He kept joking to Lynn, his girlfriend who was visiting from America, that they must be on the wrong mountain entirely, since this wasn’t how the guidebook described it.
Already his twin sister, Bettina, had mentioned last year’s mountain, which had been so much nicer. And despite the occasional cool patch of forest or brilliant view of another mountain’s crimped peaks, the trail also led to things like dried-out dung of unknown origin, or the rotting carcass of some field mouse or badger.
The mountain even had an ugly-sounding name, which Lynn kept forgetting, because she didn’t speak German. But she knew it was ugly because Markus and his friends said it was. They were Austrian, and to them the mountain’s brutishness seemed a consequence of its being across the border, in Germany.
This was a long time ago; they were still in their twenties. Lynn was living in Boston, completing a PhD in Philosophy at a university that wasn’t Harvard. Though she had yet to defend her dissertation, she had just accepted a lectureship at a college in the suburbs.
She and the two other girlfriends walked together behind their men, chatting, wondering if the mountain might improve. Maybe it was some biological instinct that had them grouping off by gender. But it was also a matter of courtesy. Bettina and the third girl always made a point of speaking in English, so that Lynn could join in.
A few meters ahead, their boyfriends were a handsome sight, three young healthy men with square shoulders and light brown hair, lugging their packs on their backs. Markus was the tallest, with the broadest shoulders and messiest hair. His school friend Wolfgang was thinner and always wore wire-rimmed spectacles. Bruno, the clarinetist whom Bettina had been dating for three years, was whistling, which he often did, and which made people think of him as a jolly sort of fellow, which in fact he was. His whistling seemed to lead them forward, up the mountain.
—
Later, when he was in his mid-thirties, Wolfy would try to write a poem about it. The cool mountain air and the dark black night. He was taking a poetry class for fun, taught by the friend of a former lover, and found himself intrigued by terza rima. Clever, the way the interlocking rhymes turned three-line stanzas into a linked chain. He had been in America for a decade then, working in Silicon Valley, and the class on poetic form appealed to his mathematical side.
But the poem sounded strange, and he did not show it to anyone.
—
Not knowing the language or the city, Lynn had felt at a loss the moment she stepped foot in Vienna. En route with Markus to the apartment on Something-strasse, she quickly saw that she looked like a tourist in her loose American clothing, and wondered if Markus noticed. The physical qualities she knew he loved—her large round plump breasts, the very Americanness of her braces-straightened teeth and her long hair full of blond highlights—seemed crass and excessive in this city of prim, cobbled streets. The women were thin-boned and neatly dressed, like Bettina, who had the same greenish-brown eyes and sandy complexion as her brother and whose wispy hair and slightly crooked teeth managed to look, on her, chic. Lynn, with her cleavage visible at the V of her tee shirt, felt freakish. Also, she had been apart from Markus for over a month by then, and at first they were awkward together. When she told comical anecdotes of her job tutoring high school students, Markus had looked increasingly perturbed and would not laugh.
The reason he didn’t laugh was that he could not stand to picture Lynn having fun without him. But she didn’t know that, and neither, actually, did he. So she had gone and cried in the shower, while Markus busied himself with preparations for the hike.
Bettina had witnessed these painful stirrings with only slight surprise. She knew well her brother’s delicate ego and casual cruelty. They shared the small apartment their parents had bought for them, and she had on numerous occasions—even in the few weeks since her brother’s return—observed how he was with women. Sometimes she even felt she knew what he was thinking.
Not that she could read his mind. Fraternal twins, they shared no secret language or telepathy, but they had been paired together all their lives. Twinhood simply meant that Bettina’s fight for attention, for privacy, for recognition, for affection, for sustenance of every kind, had begun much earlier than for most siblings. In the womb.
—
A third or so of the way up the trail, they rested in a patch of shade, eating the lunches they had packed—another world ago, those grey dawn hours before the train ride and bus trip and trudging up from the mountain base.
There were sandwiches (liverwurst pressed between crusty white bread) and hard-boiled eggs, and little runty-looking apples. The pines gave off a faint, bitter scent. Bettina, peeling one of the eggs, recalled her dream.
“I was at a house”—she said it in English, for Lynn—“where there was a doll that could talk. I had just to play a record-player, and the doll’s mouth moved, and she spoke.”
Markus, seated beside her on a wedge of rock, told her it wasn’t a dream. “We went there. The doll museum. Aunt Carolina took us.” He took a bite from one of the sandwiches, and crumbs fell around him. When Bettina asked why he remembered it if she didn’t, Markus gave a shrug that suggested this was only natural.
Bettina couldn’t help frowning. “Aunt Caro must have taken you and not me.” The dream seemed less charming now that Markus had inserted himself into it.
“There were two talking dolls,” Markus continued, “and a gramophone for their voices.”
Bettina looked down at the boiled egg, to prevent her face from revealing that in her dream, too, there had been not one, but two, dolls. A blonde and a brunette. But only the blonde had spoken.
Bruno, passing around a big plastic bottle of lime soda, asked why she would suddenly dream of the doll so many years later. Everyone mused aloud while Bettina’s cheeks grew hot; it seemed to her suddenly quite obvious that the doll must symbolize, blatantly, a child.
But the others were already debating dream interpretation. Wolfgang’s girlfriend—the latest in a never-ending series—owned a book on the subject. She was a wispy thing, a few years younger than the others. Apparently the only bit she recalled from the book was that broken teeth signified death.
Wolfy wanted her to feel comfortable with his friends and had been making sure to give her lots of pecks on the cheek and drape his arm around her. They had been together less than two months and had slept together a handful of times. He suspected she viewed the invitation to the hike as a step forward in their romance. Really these days on the trail were a way for Wolfy to uphold his role as boyfriend while having a convenient excuse not to have sex.
Next to her, Lynn sat cross-legged, so that she wouldn’t have to look at her hiking shoes. Like her big curvy American body, and not knowing German, the shoes embarrassed her. More like padded hi-top sneakers, they were a bright magenta color, with thick waffle soles and fat neon yellow laces. Markus and the others had old-fashioned stiff brown leather boots.
Wolfgang’s girlfriend asked how it was that Lynn and Markus happened to have met.
“We were both lost,” Lynn told her, and Markus, looking somewhat imperial on his slab of rock, said, “I had a meeting but was in the incorrect building. Lynn was trying to find where her professor was giving a lecture.”
The girl brightened. “At Harvard?”
“No,” Lynn said, “at Markus’ school. MIT.” Where Markus had a post-doctoral fellowship. Though Lynn’s school (not MIT, either) was perfectly respectable, on this trip it too seemed to have become a shortcoming. On the connecting flight from Frankfurt, the woman next to her had become excited the moment she heard “Boston” and “PhD”—and then looked disappointed when Lynn corrected her.
“I asked Markus for directions,” Lynn said now, “and then we stood talking for an hour.” Soon they were spending all their time together. Markus’ fellowship was supposed to continue for a second year, but the funding wasn’t renewed and his visa could not be extended. Frantically he had searched for some other post, but nothing had panned out. When the university in Vienna made an offer, he accepted.
Lynn had considered dropping out of her program to follow him. She pictured a quaint Viennese apartment in the center of the city, and a job teaching English as a Second Language, or whatever menial employment an ABD in Philosophy might secure.
But Markus hadn’t asked her to come with him. Which hurt her feelings but was also something of a relief.
—
It was five or so in the afternoon when they at last spotted the guesthouse. The faint clanging of cowbells grew louder as they wound their way out of the forest. On the grassy plateau the hollow jangling sounded like the call of some enchanted species. Cows moved slowly about the broad green pasture, occasionally releasing a disaffected-sounding groan. The bells hung like medals from their necks.
It was cooler here, out in the open. Bettina found the wool pullover she always brought on hikes and tied her bandana around her neck like a scarf. She was a month pregnant and felt things more extremely now.
She had not told anyone her news. The pregnancy was unplanned, and she was still deciding how she felt about it.
The guesthouse was a chalet complete with a pike roof, ginger-breading, and window boxes crowded with yellow flowers. The proprietors, a nervous-looking couple of middle age, pointed them toward a path that led to a vista they absolutely must see—now, quick, before the sun began to set.
Lynn, aware of new blisters blooming inside the magenta sneaker-boots, wanted to rest. But dutifully she and the others followed a tree-lined path to a breezy ledge where there was, indeed, a view. Distant cliff walls blushed in the slant sun and took on the subdued colors of a bruise. The wind made everything feel colder. Lynn had pulled on the V-necked sweater she had borrowed from Markus, which was somehow both too large and too tight across her chest. Markus took out an identical one in a darker gray, while Bruno pulled on a windbreaker. Wolfgang wrapped his arms around his girlfriend, pulling her close.
The view, it was agreed, was not as good as last year’s mountain. Lynn, in her best deadpan voice, said she would try not to feel cheated—but it came out sounding less like a joke than a grim truth.
Bruno said it was one more strike against Germany. Many German cities, he reminded them, teemed with unexploded ordnance from World War Two. “Buried underground,” he said as the group turned away from the view to head back to the inn. “All these bombs, and they built right over them.”
Allied bombs and grenades, five, ten thousand of them. Bruno was still explaining as they arrived back at the guesthouse, where the nervous-looking wife was dusting the outside windowsills. The other guests—loud jolly red-faced Germans seated at a long picnic table on the patio—had already settled in and begun their drinking.
Thousands of tons of buried bombs, Bruno said. Who knew what might set one off.
—
The poor wife seemed to be dusting or sweeping some floor or surface the entire duration of our stay, Lynn would write in a letter to her mother from at the airport five days later. Funny how easily facts and emotions could be flattened, neutered. The letter would reduce the weekend to yet another comic anecdote. Only after she had mailed it did Lynn understand what she had done—belittled her own experience—and wish she could take the letter back.
—
Their reservation had been made for six people, but when the nervous-looking wife showed them to their room, there was just one big square bunk bed.
Made of wood, it reminded Wolfy of the floating dock he and his cousins used to dive from in summer. On each bunk a flat futon-like mattress was rolled like a scroll against the wall.
Lynn said, “German way to ensure there’s no hanky-panky?”
“Ah, but if we were in France”—Markus slung his backpack down to the floor—“it would be a ménage a… six.”
Wolfy, grateful for this communal bed where only the merest cuddle could take place, kicked off his hiking shoes, pulled off his dusty socks and took his sandals from his pack. The first two times with his new girlfriend had been in the missionary position, but the third time she had been on top, which Wolfy never liked, the way the breasts hung in his line of vision. It had taken him a long time to climax, and to do so he had resorted to fantasies that, afterward, deeply shamed him. Only on the fourth occasion, when his erection had failed completely, had he dared to ask her to use her hand instead, so that he could close his eyes and take refuge in his imagination.
—
There was an outdoor shower—a big wooden box around a high tap—they took turns at. Lynn wanted Markus to join her there, to have a brief moment alone together. Maybe that would make things feel less “off.” Also it would give her a moment to tell him, in private, about the lectureship.
She had meant to tell him ever since arriving. But each time they were alone she found she didn’t want to ruin the moment by introducing thoughts of the future. “How about a shower?” she said now, smiling in a way she hoped he would understand.
“You go ahead.” Markus unrolled the mattress on the bottom bunk, so that he could flop on top of it and let out a dramatic sigh.
Lynn blamed the awful magenta sneaker-boots, and having forgotten to bring a sweater. Otherwise she would not seem so ridiculous, and Markus would still want to be with her.
Really she knew it wasn’t that simple. From the moment he accepted the Vienna post, Markus had been quietly dialing down his love. That was why she had taken the lectureship. It had seemed a way to save the both of them: Markus would not have to admit that he no longer loved her, and she would not have to feel she had been left behind.
But first she would have to tell him.
—
They ate dinner out on the patio, under the stars, and wrapped themselves in heavy blankets when the air grew cold. Then they moved inside, where the room smelled of woodsmoke, and the nervous husband brought them a tray of little shots of schnapps, each a different flavor.
At the other side of the room, the Germans had joined two big tables together and were singing loudly. Bettina and the others looked at them with envy. They could never be like that. They were Viennese, correct and culturally proud, if old-fashioned. Their idea of a wild time was, for instance, the New Year’s Eve when at midnight they had danced a minuet instead of a waltz.
But they had fun sipping the schnapps, guessing which fruit was which. They even ordered more of the plum one, because Wolfgang’s girlfriend said it was lucky. She instructed everyone to make a silent wish.
Bettina wished for clarity about the baby situation—that she would know what she wanted to do.
Lynn wished Markus would love her the way he used to.
Wolfy wished for what he knew he could not have.
They raised their glasses and drank. Lynn was still wearing Markus’ sweater and pushed the sleeves up, feeling warm and rosy from the schnapps. When Bruno asked what classes she would be taking come fall, she told him that at this point she was just finishing her dissertation.
“Might you come here, then?”
Lynn felt herself shift in her seat. “Well, no, because I’ve accepted a lectureship.”
“At Harvard?” Bruno perked up.
“No, a college outside Boston.” She said it casually, but already saw from Markus’ face that she had made a terrible mistake. She felt her own face reddening as she told them about the job offer, that these positions were hard to come by and that the lectureship would greatly help her future prospects.
Markus appeared to be gritting his teeth. Lynn wondered if it were possible that he had, unbeknownst to her, intended to ask her to join him here. Or perhaps his tense jaw was due to her having announced her news in front of his friends, instead of in private.
When the others moved over to the big stone fireplace, Lynn lingered behind with Markus, her face burning.
“When did you take this job?” His voice was loud enough that surely the innkeeper-wife, sweeping the floor a few tables away, could hear. When had the offer come, and when had she planned to tell him? Etcetera. No pause between the sentences, as though Lynn weren’t meant to answer.
And in fact, when she opened her mouth to speak, Markus cut in. “Why are you even here?” He stomped off to the other room, as if unable to be near her.
—
On the big smushy sofa in front of the fireplace, Wolfy was polishing his spectacles with the bottom of his shirt. He nudged himself over to make space for Markus, who slouched into the cushions in a bodily pout. When Markus crossed his arms, one elbow lightly brushed against Wolfy’s. At the warm surge that swept through him, Wolfy pulled his arm away.
He had always found Markus handsome, but then, who didn’t? Many a time Wolfy had tried to reassure himself this way. Other times he was certain everyone must know what he felt. Now, as Bruno continued to explain to them something about the opera house in Barcelona, Wolfy felt another awful surge, and stared into the fire.
The first time he ever felt such a surge was as a child on a sailboat where another boy, a teenager with curling blond hair, had smiled at him—no more than that—and his body did something it hadn’t done before. Then there was a boy at camp he couldn’t stop looking at. After that came the fantasies. But in moments like this, when the shivers came, he pushed them away.
Even so, he could not help wondering if Markus’s arm might again accidentally brush against his.
—
Dregs of the schnapps stained the bottoms of the little glasses. Lynn sat alone at the thick wooden table, shifting from guilt and despair to anger and petty regret: at spending the precious funds to come here, and at having bothered to wax her bikini line. It was one thing to have a bad time on a vacation, quite another to know that it ought to have been wonderful, and that it was only you—the two of you together—who had rubbed out that possibility.
And now here she was, nowhere to escape to, because she was stuck on a mountain.
A fucking mountain!
Had she been truly alone, she would have allowed herself the indulgence of tears. But the Germans were right there, joking and singing, and the innkeeper-wife was dusting the bookshelf across from her. The rest of her group was over by the fireplace, where Bruno, perhaps in effort to keep up with the Germans, had ordered another pitcher of beer. The pain of her aloneness was all the worse for being surrounded by so many other people.
She left the table and went to the rented room. Under the yellow light of the too-bright bulb, she opened her backpack and found the journal in which she had intended to record her daily adventures but had yet to write a word.
On the big square wooden bunk bed, the rolled-out mattress was flattened from so many past bodies. Lynn covered it with one of the sheets, tucking the edges underneath. Then she lay on her stomach, opened the journal, and in messy script wrote encouraging words to herself. Soon she had filled an entire page. She was well into the second page when Markus came in.
She looked up at him, not caring if he saw her tears. But it was the journal he had noticed.
“What are you writing?” As though the act of writing, in a moment of heartache, were an affront.
Lynn leaned over the notebook to shield it, then realized how it must look: as if there were something meaningful written there, something secret, something about him—when really there was just the one bland sentence, again and again. This will soon be over.
She would keep that notebook long after other diaries and letters and postcards had been tossed away. She wanted proof that her heart had been broken, and that she had survived.
—
And how did they decide where, on that bed, each of them would lie?
It wasn’t a decision so much as the fact that Lynn had already fallen asleep on the bottom bunk, and that Wolfgang’s girlfriend, concerned that she would need to pee during the night, didn’t want to climb the ladder in the dark. She lay down next to Lynn, leaving space for Wolfgang on her other side.
Bettina pulled herself up to the top bunk, exhausted in a deep, pressing way that was utterly new to her. With the last of her energy, she scooched over to make room for Bruno.
But he had drunk nearly the entire pitcher of beer all by himself and was too drunk to manage the ladder. He plunged heavily onto the bottom bunk, next to Wolfy’s girlfriend, and immediately began snoring.
Bettina, too tired to care, heard her brother sigh, and felt the bedposts creak as he hoisted himself up. He lay next to her, heavy and still, and even as she drifted toward sleep she felt sorry for him; she had witnessed his anticipation in the weeks leading up to Lynn’s arrival, had seen his face glow whenever he spoke of her. No wonder he was hurt.
As everyone slumbered, Wolfy pulled on a clean tee shirt and pajama bottoms and stood staring at the bed. He took a deep breath, removed his glasses, and climbed up.
Everything was blurry, and he had to squint to find the light switch, leaning precariously to flick it off. Since Markus was lying on his back, Wolfy turned his body away from him, facing out. But he could still smell the eucalyptus scent of Markus’ soap.
His skin tingled. He tried not to inhale the scent, not to feel the heat from Markus’s body. He tried to think instead of unpleasant things, like his poor girlfriend trapped next to snoring Bruno. He felt sorry for her, for the inevitable letdown that lay ahead. Because it would be only so long, he knew—a month or two more, probably—until his specific physical requests would become a problem. There were only so many times, he knew from experience, that he could do certain things, or reject intercourse altogether, until a woman began to take personally his unwillingness to look at her face or the front of her body. Until her disappointment became palpable, and Wolfy would experience another type of guilt—not at who he was, but at the hurt he had caused some poor woman to feel.
—
Wolfgang’s girlfriend was one of those people who in their sleep spread out like a starfish. Lynn, facing the wall, felt a leg, and then a full-fledged kick that shoved her own leg over. Then an arm flopped itself across her face. Lynn didn’t care. She wasn’t sleeping anyway. Each time the girl flung her limbs around, gradually rotating, diagonally, across the mattress, Lynn told herself it would be over soon.
Up top, Wolfy was still wide awake. Even when he at last managed to doze, it was a half-sleep, aware all the while of Markus. And when the opaque glow of dawn began to show itself, Wolfy drifted into a terrible, wonderful dream.
He was with Markus in an enormous bed, their bodies moving together.
He awoke with his cotton pants stretched tight. Behind him, breaths faint from sleep. He realized that Markus had spooned against him, one heavy arm around his torso. The shallow breaths were warm against his neck. And against his buttocks Wolfy felt the firm pressure of another man’s morning erection.
It happened so swiftly. Even as he tried to shift his hips away, there came the pulsing rush—the swell and surge and the horror of it.
—
The morning sky was cloudy, the air oddly cool. The Germans were already outside at the big picnic table, drinking tall mugs of beer. The nervous wife was sweeping the entranceway, apologizing for dirt that Bettina, rushing to breakfast to stave her nausea, couldn’t see.
Lynn, who had woken to find herself lightly pinned down by Wolfgang’s girlfriend, was last out. Stepping onto the terrace, she noted the eerie stillness of the air and heard the proprietress saying something to her.
She shook her head. “I don’t speak German.” One more of her failures.
“Ah, right, you are American.” The proprietress asked where Lynn had come from.
“Harvard!” If nothing else, she would live up to this woman’s expectations. She hurried to the table where her group was already eating their fruit and muesli.
“Your eyes look strange,” Wolfgang said. “You are allergic?”
Lynn reached up and touched her puffy her eyelids. “It’s because Markus made me cry.”
Markus, looking pleased to be bestowed such power, leaned over to kiss her cheek.
Lynn accepted the kiss but envied the others—Bettina and Bruno so firmly in the hold of their relationship that they did not even need to speak to each other, and Wolfgang and his girlfriend in the bloom of new love. Thinking of the long climb ahead, she said,
“Maybe I’ll stay here today. I have a book to read. I can join you on the way back down.”
Immediately she saw that Markus had taken the suggestion as another rejection. He pulled away as Bruno asked, “You do not want to reach the top?”
“My shoes are no good.” She gestured at the magenta sneakers.
“Maybe I’ll stay here too,” Bettina said, to show solidarity with Lynn, and because her morning queasiness was surprisingly worse this morning. “It’s so cloudy—will there even be a view?”
Wolfgang said, “But we weren’t going to come back this way, remember?” The innkeepers had told them about a return route that went straight to the base camp, where they could rent a cabin for the night.
And so the six of them dragged themselves up the dusty trail. Markus and Bruno were at the head, Markus storming forward as if the entire enterprise were pointless now that Lynn had taken a job in America. A few strides behind them, Wolfgang and his girlfriend walked side by side, and then came Bettina and Lynn.
Bettina watched her brother march angrily ahead. Next to him, as if he weren’t a bit hung over, Bruno was whistling an aria from l’Italiana in Algeri. As the melody spun through the air, a strange and terrible thought came to Bettina. It was that she did not love Bruno.
This thought came to her so swiftly, so clearly, she stopped, and heard Lynn ask if she was all right. Yes, she said, even as she wondered how she had spent three years with him already. It seemed obvious now that her affection had only to do with their shared love of music and friends in common, not to mention the perk of having Bruno’s apartment to go to when she needed a break from her brother. In fact, the more she thought of it, as they continued along the path, the more it seemed to her that she did not even really like him. The qualities she had once admired—his constant cheerfulness, and the way he seemed to know, or have an opinion about, basically everything—suddenly seemed irksome.
By late morning the path had narrowed, each switchback sharper than the last. Every so often they passed hikers already making their descent. One was limping. Some had scrapes where brambles or sharp stones had scratched them. Some shook their heads and laughed: “Sure you want to keep going?”
Wolfgang’s girlfriend called out, “I think Lynn had the right idea, to stay at the inn!”
Next to her, Wolfy watched Markus stomp ahead. In bed, he had known the very second Markus awoke—because Markus pulled away as if having touched a hot coal.
More hikers were coming down now. One had a bloody knee. Trailing at the back with Lynn, Bettina called out, “We can still turn back!” She wished she were at the inn, napping on the big square bed.
Yet they continued on, even as another batch of battered hikers descended. “What an awful mountain!” they all joked, to make it seem less true.
Higher and higher they climbed, until the morning’s guesthouse seemed like something from a long time ago, the big square bunk bed no more than a strange dream.
—
The final stretch of the trail was very steep. “Orthogonal,” Markus and Wolfgang joked. Bars like handles had been attached at some of the tricky places, to help hikers haul themselves up.
Wolfy stayed close to his girlfriend in case she stumbled. It seemed to him the expedition had become something more than a mere hike—a dangerous quest, or perhaps a punishment. They continued to climb, not really talking any more, too out of breath to do more than place one foot after the other. Bruno had quit his whistling. They had to pay attention to where they stepped; some stretches were little more than ledges of stone like shallow stairs. There was even a sort of rope ladder near the top.
When at last they reached the summit, the sky had filled with clouds.
Markus dropped his pack, raised his hands above his head and bellowed into the air, a theatrical howl—but in the expanse of gray it sounded more like a lone wail. Then he plunked himself down and leaned his elbows on his knees. Lynn sat down beside him, and the others flopped down where they were, except for Bettina, who gingerly took a seat next to Lynn and immediately began rummaging through her pack for something to eat.
“You’re looking in your sack,” Bruno said, “when you should be looking at the view!”
Bettina raised her eyebrows. “What view?”
Everyone laughed, because what else could they do? No view, just a world stuffed with cotton batting. Bettina was relieved to find in her bag a package of biscuits.
We are in the clouds. If you said it that way, Lynn thought, it sounded mysterious, ethereal, rather than just cold and gray.
With pocketknives they sliced dry sausage and peeled more of the little runty apples. Triangles of cheese wrapped in foil were passed around. Like in those children’s tales Lynn used to read, where the hunchback would be tested by a sorcerer disguised as an old woman asking to share his lunch. I have just some stale bread and a thermos of beer, but you’re welcome to it. Lynn too felt humble, unworthy, there on the cold gray peak. An American girl who had waxed her bikini line yet hadn’t thought to pack a sweater. Perhaps she too was being tested—how long could she stand the rebuff of this boyfriend who no longer loved her.
Bruno was telling them about trepanation. He had seen a documentary in which a man trepanned his own skull.
“And filmed it himself at the same time!” Markus said, in German. He had spoken only German all morning.
“He used a dentist’s drill,” Bruno explained, “straight into the frontal lobe.”
Bettina, finishing off the last of the biscuits, looked into the thick wall of clouds and knew she would leave him. The thought frightened her. Because she also knew that she would keep the baby.
The man drilled the hole, Bruno said, to achieve a “higher consciousness.”
She would end things as soon as they were back in Vienna. No point in waiting. All that mattered was that she could raise this new being with pure love. She hadn’t known, before, that she could feel this way.
“A sort of lobotomy,” Bruno said, “But in ancient times it was to rid the patient of evil spirits.”
Markus said something in German, then—something that made everyone laugh.
“Markus,” Lynn said, her patience gone, “please stop being a prick.”
Markus stared at her.
“How about acting civil until we get off of this mountain,” she said, “and then I can take my leave?”
To her surprise, Markus did not frown, or turn away, or stomp off. He knelt down and took her hands in his. Head bowed, he took an audible breath, then looked up.
“Lynn, please don’t take that job. You could stay here with me. We could live together.”
Lynn was aware of the others watching. She was aware that Markus was asking her to stay with him—and also that he had not, in his phrasing, asked her. He had made no clear statement of desire. Which seemed to her a symptom of some larger problem. Something unsolvable.
She considered saying something prudent: Let’s discuss this in private. Instead she gave a small but clear shake of her head.
For a moment Markus just knelt there. Then he stood and stepped away. Standing apart from the others, he brought his hands to his face.
Slowly, quietly, everyone began to speak. Murmurs. They finished eating, and stood and stretched. Wolfy looked over at Markus, and it seemed that he was crying.
Wolfy went to him, then, and touched his shoulder.
Markus flung Wolfy’s arm from his. “Leave me alone, you faggot!”
The words echoed in the sky. For a moment Wolfy could not move. But his feet took him back to where his girlfriend waited. He touched her elbow. “Let’s go.”
But she was squinting at him. And even after they had pulled their rucksacks up over their shoulders, and were heading down the mountain, she seemed to look at him differently.
—
First there were more of those handlebars, and then an incline of dusty pebbles that rolled underfoot. Lynn, in her magenta sneaker-boots, slid and slid, and sometimes fell, feeling all the more a stupid tourist. Markus, at the head of the file, never stopped to ask if she was alright.
Soon they were all quite dusty, their shins a chalky white. Wolfy, hanging back in self-imposed exile, thought of the invisible dust the German innkeeper-wife had been constantly sweeping. It had seemed like obsessive compulsion, but now he wondered if there had been something there, something none of them could see. Perhaps she only sensed it, the tracked-in dirt of so many guests. Perhaps that was what made her so anxious. So many filthy thoughts.
Bettina, slip-sliding behind Lynn, didn’t mind the dust. Each pebbly, rolling, tripping step brought them closer to the base camp, and bus ride, and train, and then home, where she could begin her new life.
Bruno, ahead of her, pebble-surfing behind Markus, kept up his whistling, as if to insist to the world that they all were absolutely fine. Bettina winced to hear it. She envied Lynn with her puffy-from-crying eyes, and Markus so upset he could not speak—that they could feel so strongly for one another, become upset over each other that way. It seemed a crime that Bettina had never felt that strongly about Bruno. No great anger or sadness or desperate longing.
She did not know, yet, that she and Bruno would fight passionately for many years ahead. Long litigations, loud vituperations, a fervent sparring over their son. In fact, their fighting would be more impassioned than their romance ever had been.
As for her brother, when, one day long after the hike, Bettina mentioned the mountain to him, Markus (who had by then married, to a woman a decade younger) claimed to recall only two things: that the view from the peak was a disappointment, and that he had not been kind.
—
Lynn had been married for over a decade when she told her husband about the hike.
Not that she had purposely withheld it from him. She rarely had reason to recall it. When she did, it was with the understanding that she had been as bad as Markus—too prideful to state her wishes or speak the truth.
She and her husband were looking at a map of Germany with friends who had been cycling through Bavaria. “I just remembered this awful hiking trip.” She pointed to a section of the map—“Somewhere here”—and looked for the mountain with the ugly-sounding name.
Her husband pointed at a mountain that wasn’t the right one.
“No, that’s not it.” Her eyes searched the map. Perhaps they hadn’t been so close to the border after all. Perhaps it was further west.
She bent closer, searching for a name she recognized. She even borrowed her friend’s reading glasses. But it seemed the mountain had disappeared.
—
“There was this giant bunk bed,” Wolfy told the man with whom he would spend the final thirty-four years of his life. “The kind you see in those lodges.”
They were sipping wine on Wolfy’s patio. He was in his mid-forties by then but had never told anyone about the hike. Now he described the sound of cowbells greeting them when they emerged from the woods, and the shimmery dew on the grass the next morning, and his feelings for his friend. “I wrote a poem about it,” he confessed, and told of the poetry class taught by the friend of his former lover.
Though the hour was late, he went to his desk and found what he had written. It was still there where he had hidden it years ago, in a folder at the back of the bottom drawer.
With the typed-up poem on his lap, he settled next to his new friend, and together they read it aloud to each other.
