The world beyond the ridgetop was a wall of gray cloud. One could look down to the left or the right at a forty-five-degree angle and see only gray. From the mist came loud moos and the clatter of cowbells. The American was too frightened to move.
She had felt cheerful on the sheltered concrete of the viewing platform, relaxed on the broad stairway with its sturdy bannister, and well enough on the roadlike path that looped behind the reassuring mass of the restaurant. The narrowing, roughening, and horizon-lowering that had turned that path into this trail had been gradual. Now its quality of teetering in space made her want to get on her knees and crawl.
The ground, composed of loose grit and softball-size rocks, was visibly wet. Her German friend Vroni was already twenty yards ahead.
Crouching to lower her center of gravity, Julia took three short steps and halted. She cocked her wrists to catch herself if she fell, and stood up half straight. Time to decelerate and deepen her breathing. “Slow down!” she called out.
Vroni turned on a dime and came back, bounding like a chamois. She stood before Julia, casually shifting her weight around, her beanie pushed back over her hazelnut hair, her questioning eyes an opaque brown. For all the exertion and the cold, her skin tone was even and yellowish, like a chain-smoker’s, although she wasn’t one. She rolled her own cigarettes to save money; this took time, and couldn’t be done non-stop, so the spots on her teeth did not entirely match her eyes.
The pink, patrician Julia, with her irreproachably healthy life style, swayed stiffly in an awkward squat, red-cheeked and trembling. She flattered herself that she liked to leap and romp, but that was only on even surfaces such as lawns and sandy beaches, where the appropriate animal comparison would be to a clumsy calf. For reasons of her own (osteopenia), she romped where it was safe to fall down. There being no courage without fear, she preferred activities that entailed neither. She routinely wore a helmet and gloves when riding a bicycle, and she had recently refused a ride in a glamorous classic car because it lacked shoulder belts and headrests. Just the other day, she had given her cowardice a workout on a Ferris wheel in Thun. When the gondola commenced to rise, she had slid to the floor and hugged its central pillar. By the third revolution, however, she was back on her seat, reassured that the bolt attaching her gondola to the wheel (there were countless bolts in the wheel to allow it to be dismantled for transport, but only the one above the gondola seemed to hold her life in its hands) was an inch and a half in diameter and smooth, without visible rust.
The ridge that she and Vroni were on now was literally the ground—a well-trodden promenade through a pasture, thick with footprints. She made a vain attempt to justify her poor attitude toward the perfect safety of (here she looked around, mentally checking her notes) the vertiginously inclined planes at whose apex she perched, flanked by a surging, abyssal void. “In the mountains one time with Wolfgang—” she began.
Immediately Vroni’s expression turned skeptical. She, of course, knew Wolfgang, a man from a verdant river valley among low hills, where elderly people took long strolls with their wheeled walkers and tiny children rode bicycles. “Wolfgang!” she scoffed.
Each could contextualize nearly anything the other said, because they had lived for many years in the same small town in Bavaria. They knew dozens, if not hundreds, of people in common; they knew each other’s professors, exes, friends, and favored bartenders. Vroni’s husband, a provincial snob and devoted reader of Casanova, had been known as such to Julia—and liable to flirt with her, despite his friendship with Wolfgang—long before Vroni came on the scene.
“I tried to get him to walk a trail like this,” Julia insisted, “and he was, like, No way! Because on a steep hill where it’s grass instead of rocks, when you trip, there’s nothing to break your fall. You just keep sliding all the way to the bottom!”
“That’s not true,” Vroni said. “A person who’s rolling is conical and top-heavy. I could fling myself down this mountain right now, and I’d just roll in a little circle and stop with my head pointing downhill. Want me to show you?” She stood at the edge of the trail, looking eagerly downward.
Julia said no, firmly.
But the claim was plausible enough, and Vroni’s faith in it seemed based in experience. The peak they were on, the Niesen, was famous for resembling a pyramid when viewed from Lake Thun, and Julia had assumed that if she slipped she would slide five thousand feet down its slick ramps, to be impaled by spiky larch branches. Accepting now that she would come to rest near the trail and be helped to her feet by Vroni, she stood up straight.
She rotated a hundred and eighty degrees on her axis to admire the restaurant behind her. A gust of wind rudely shoved a shred of cloud in front of it, so she turned back to Vroni. It was mid-July, eight o’clock in the morning, and the temperature on the summit was slightly above freezing. Mountains of jagged stone and permafrost lay to the south behind a vast shroud of droplets, obscuring the still rising sun.
The women were ill-prepared for the cold—Julia because she hadn’t expected it, and Vroni because she’d known it wouldn’t last. Thus Julia was conspicuous in a brand-new, radiantly cerulean zippered hoodie bearing the mountain’s logo, a bargain in the gift shop at thirty francs, about half what she would have imagined paying for a sweatshirt in Switzerland. Vroni wore a flimsy cotton cardigan over a silk shirt of indeterminate color. It might have been off-white once, or a dim yellow, stained by washing in rusty water. The rotting silk gaped open at the seams. Julia assumed that Vroni had found it in the trash after a flea market. Her little backpack had been inherited from her children—brand-name hiking gear adorably miniaturized, with many zippers—because the German government helped her pay for school supplies. There was nothing in it now but smoking equipment and a canteen.
It occurred to Julia that she had a small blanket with her. It was a castoff from her parents, decades old, a membership premium from the American Legion in navy-blue fleece with the embroidered slogan “Freedom Is Not Free.” It was a prized possession, among the most useful items she’d ever owned, like the towel that galactic hitchhikers are advised to take along by “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Since she always kept it in the bottom of her day pack, she had forgotten all about it. She handed it to Vroni, who wrapped it around her shoulders like a shawl.
Vroni was poor. Her drab, conservative home village in the plains southeast of Regensburg had lost its train station before she was born. Its surroundings were, by Bavarian standards, exceptionally flat. She had migrated at the age of eighteen to their picturesque and desirable university town the way an American runaway might fetch up in an R.V. encampment in the desert. She had studied ethnography, consciously broadening her horizons. Her field studies had taken her to Central Asia.
Julia was better off, a freelance translator of internal communications for suppliers to the automotive industry, who did occasional literary translation projects in her spare time. She had not saved up to come to the Niesen; she had qualified for a literary-translating conference in Thun and, when she realized that the organizers had booked her a double room, had invited Vroni to join her. The closest Julia had ever come to field work in the East was an excursion to Prague, where she’d gotten into a stilted conversation about work with some cleaners.
Their minds were very different. Julia read fiction and talked about the news, while Vroni read classics of societal analysis (a favorite was Marilyn Strathern’s “The Gender of the Gift”) and talked about her own life. Vroni seemed to Julia never to have consumed a mass medium of any kind. She had no internet at home, for the sake of the children. When she needed to look something up, she went to her office.
Julia had longed to be an educated mother like Vroni, but there was never a serviceable father in view, so she had limited herself to being educated, first as an autodidact—via unsystematic reading of primary material, the classic works of fiction and philosophy—and then by moving to Germany, where knowledge could be acquired tuition-free. She began too late. She’d misapprehended the nature of ivory-tower research, choosing secondary sources that had been disregarded in their own fields for decades. She would never be taken seriously as an academic. But she had been cautious around her inadequate boyfriends and had never once had a pregnancy scare, so that was something.
“Pregnancy scare” was a term impossible to connect with Vroni, who had carelessly gotten pregnant at age twenty-two and married the Casanova expert. She easily obtained scholarships for her interesting and useful research. The family received hundreds of euros per child per month from the state, no strings attached, and it was much more than they needed. They shared a small apartment heated with firewood stolen from the municipal forest. When the heap of cash in the cigar box on the kitchen table had attained a value of forty thousand euros, they’d given it to Julia, who had deposited it in her bank account as though it were an interest-free private loan. Then Vroni and the louche aficionado of Enlightenment sexual mores found a large house so historic that the state would pay them to renovate it, and Julia returned the money to them for use as a down payment.
Through three more pregnancies and her husband’s impregnation of three other women with five additional children, Vroni remained happily married, and she was married to him to this day. Of course, people would tell her to leave that libertinage-loving slob, and she’d stop talking to them, regarding them henceforth as ignorant bigots. He might be off getting some random person pregnant after a night out, but meanwhile she was avidly seducing a hot exchange student or banging the next-door neighbor. They were an attentive, caring team, kind to every child that arose. The other moms were nothing special, Vroni said, but it was so much fun, having babies around that weren’t her responsibility, like having grandchildren. Her own children had stopped being pliant angels long ago, but the darling babies kept pouring in, tirelessly fed and diapered by the vain dandy.
Julia’s opinion of Vroni’s husband was checkered, to say the least. She rather hated him and felt sure that he would one day leave Vroni—the only parent involved who had a job—and demand alimony.
Vroni maintained that her form of marriage had been accepted in many times and places, and that her husband was not as unusual as one might think. All the children were brilliant and beautiful, and soon enough they were independent, cooking for themselves and making their own arrangements, although they could not be prevailed upon to clean anything, ever. But they were such good children, peacefully playing amid the disorder while she opened a bottle of wine, rolled cigarettes, and reviewed the events of the day with the willfully unemployed lover of all things Venetian.
How different Vroni would have been as a penniless rebel with brains who was born American, Julia thought. The penniless American rebels she knew were undereducated and desperate, turning to irrational notions after their meagre baccalaureates, and the stress of their lives made them sick, no matter how little they smoked and drank. The Germans were like Vroni, rebelling by failing to finish their job training (in Vroni’s case, a doctorate), so that they had to learn new trades. Vroni had become a packaging designer. Every morning she commuted twenty minutes by train to a cosmetics factory, where she came up with new ways of folding cardboard, but only until noon; the job was part time.
Julia walked with her head high, at a normal pace, confident now that the slope beside her would serve as a safety net like the one that enfolded Vroni—the German welfare state. Vroni pulled the blanket close, trapping her warmth in its one-person free world.
The day grew brighter, and Julia began to take stock of the flower situation, which was hard-core. The pastures were scattered with gentians. Their vivid, indelible blue (a person had to be careful not to sit on them) reminded her of something a famous war reporter she knew had told her—that deep in Afghanistan, guarded by difficult terrain and hostile clans, there are mountains so rich in lapis lazuli that they sparkle blue in sunlight. Walking the rugged, uneven trail, she told Vroni this story. It was one she especially liked because no one she told it to had ever believed it. The faithful consisted only of her and the reporter.
But why wouldn’t it be true? A diamond mine in South Africa a hundred years ago was a bunch of guys finding diamonds like Easter eggs on the ground. The hawksbill sea turtles with their valuable, beautiful shells used to come ashore in crowds of forty thousand. Rivers back then sometimes held more delicious salmon than they held water. Why shouldn’t there be semiprecious mountains hidden in remote and inaccessible tribal lands? Why were people so adamant about the superiority of today’s world? She sketched her views on the subject while Vroni walked ahead.
Vroni agreed that the world was a two-edged sword. She didn’t believe in the blue mountains, either. She showed Julia some anemones that had gone to seed, pointing out that the flower in bloom is just like a pretty poppy, but once the petals fall it becomes an alien-looking gray pompom. This was why sea anemones were called anemones! It made sense! They crouched to admire the mute flowers that had given their name to animals in the ocean. The clouds ascending skyward on waves of thermals suddenly parted like a curtain. A majestic rocky peak appeared, outlined in blazing snow.
They stood to watch. The curtain closed again. Continuing along the ridge, which was no longer crowned by the trail in an unnerving way but rose next to it, they saw that a certain pair of flattish, dry rocks would be good for sitting on. Julia unpacked their picnic, turning around again and again to scan the enormous display of clouds, mountains, wildflowers, and sun. The light of day arrived on the ridge. All was transfigured, silver and gold. Droplets lay on the leaves like jewels. A thousand hues of green quivered in the breeze, the tiny leaves of meadow plants dappling one another with their shade. Vroni rolled a cigarette and, more than half an hour later, rolled a second one, stowing her leavings in an antique portable ashtray made of metal and leather. And so they passed the time while the earth turned and the sun climbed, warming the air.
Once, years earlier, Vroni had related—while painting her high-walled kitchen with the aid of a stepladder on a table—an anecdote so magnificent that Julia still retailed its highlights to other friends, as though summarizing the plot of a movie. In essence, as Julia remembered it, Vroni had been walking decorously, part of a group of ethnographers headed to a remote Kazakh archeological site, when a venomous snake flung itself out of the underbrush and bit her in the shin. Everyone agreed that this was a freakish event and not her fault. At first, her colleagues assumed that she could walk back to town, but soon they were carrying her. When she passed out, they began to run. She awoke in the hospital, near death. The professor who had been leading the excursion sat by her bed, drenched in tears, holding her cold hand. She asked Vroni for contact information for her parents.
“No!” Vroni cried, adrenaline coursing through her. “They’re the last people on earth I want to see!” She had gone to university to get away from their narrow-minded world of religious prejudice, which she regarded as incipiently fascist, like all systems that consign the living to damnation. She indicated that, rather than entertain her professor while she was dying, much less her parents, husband, or children, she would like to be alone with Aslan, a local shepherd, whose voice could be heard clearly through the door. The professor was visibly perturbed. Vroni could read her mind, which was thinking, We’ve been here for all of, what, four days, and already you want to die in the arms of your unethical relationship with the subject of my field work? Vroni traced the end of her serious chance at an academic career to that moment when she hurt the sad professor’s feelings. Her very vitality—surviving the lethal snake bite; having Aslan lock the door behind him while they got it on; refusing the amputation of her leg, which recovered fully—suggested to her colleagues that she might be an indestructible subhuman, or at least sub-academic.
On the mountain, Vroni and Julia told stories about washed-out bridges, snow bridges, snowstorms, rainstorms, walking on highways, hiking at night, man-eating stray dogs in Greece, a dog named Gelert who passed as a saint, and the Irish monk St. Gall, who returned Christianity to Europe from its western fringes, where it had been driven by invading Central Asians, a topic that died on the vine, having been gravely misrecollected by Julia. Vroni was visibly bored. She talked about the resurgence of bride kidnapping after the fall of the Soviet Union. Nowadays the practice took the form of orchestrated rape, she said, but, before seventy years of Communism, it had been a relatively benign tradition. A man who couldn’t afford to buy his girlfriend would steal her, and everyone was happy except her parents, who had fed her for fifteen years for nothing.
The herd of hungry young polled beef cattle that had greeted them through the mist was moving closer, munching audibly amid the din of bells. Vroni suggested that they continue walking along the ridge and take the trail down the mountain, instead of riding the funicular.
Julia had her doubts, partly because she was wearing sneakers, and partly because she had bought them both round-trip funicular tickets. She was not as poor as Vroni, but she was not rich enough to waste expensive tickets.
They agreed to wait and see if some hikers coming the other way might be prepared to report on conditions down below.
When a pair finally arrived, clad in bright rain gear with walking sticks, their boots told the whole story: the mud on the trail was ankle deep and slippery. The men soon moved on toward the restaurant, intent on eating lunch and then putting miles behind them, with the long descent ahead.
Julia and Vroni strolled back along the ridge, through frequent flashes of sunshine. They came around an outcropping to find the cattle herd loudly blocking the trail. Clang, ding, thump, munch, moo, a dense throng of lunks.
“I bet you know how to make them move,” Julia optimistically assured Vroni. There was no question that Vroni, a child of a rural area filled with similar animals, had more expertise in the livestock realm. She dispatched herself to clear a path.
To Julia’s surprise, she walked right up to a brawny steer’s shoulder and attempted to push it off the trail as though it were a pygmy goat. It pushed back with its nose, knocking her off her feet. She landed softly on her rear and elbows and immediately stood up again, laughing. But the beast was half wild. Vroni was too small to play its pushing game. It would win.
Instead the women moved uphill from the blocked trail, sidling along just below the ridgeline, well away from the massive cattle, which they hoped would stay put.
They stood on tiptoe to peer over the top, which was adorned with tufts of grass like a fringe. Just beyond their noses was a sheer drop of thousands of feet. Two shining lakes and three big cities nestled in broad valleys below. They watched as cloud curtains opened and closed.
Julia said, “This is so pretty.” She thought, This is life at its best. To be touched by fear, but not afraid in the least. This is what Americans are looking for when they obsessively watch horror movies and war videos: the sublime! Compulsively walking the valley of the shadow of death, when fear can dwell amid clouds and flowers.
Vroni was racing toward the restaurant like a snow leopard to get them a table before the lunch rush. Julia envied her. She would have felt so much smarter if she’d stayed in America, without highly educated friends who intimidated her. By rights she should have gotten an associate’s degree in hospitality management in Cincinnati, and taken up bloviating about NIMBYs, kinbaku, and “socialism” (the American name for progressive taxation), after meals of CBD gummies that she needed for her pain. But she loved her life. She wondered why she hadn’t shared her insight about the sublime with Vroni. Because it was dumb and naïve? How could feelings be dumb? Where was this sneaking sense of doom and nullity coming from? From the clouds? The cold? The eerie view over the ridge, seeing the land of counterpane through a screen of flowers, inches from death? That had to be it. The fear hormones were still acting on her, but she wasn’t looking at beauty anymore. She was alone on the trail, watching her step, imagining how bored Vroni would have been by her revelation.
She had read somewhere that it’s impossible to feel fear when your hands are holding something warm. Freedom may not be free, but hot chocolate in a vortex of terror is five francs, tops. She bought herself a hot chocolate at the restaurant. Vroni said she didn’t want anything.
“There’s something I want to say,” Vroni said, after they sat down. “I’m sick and tired of you.” She unwrapped the blanket from her shoulders and wadded it up, like worthless trash, to hand it back to Julia.
Julia gulped, coughed, and said, “What?”
“I feel as if I know nothing about you, but you keep wanting to get closer, demanding more. You’re possessive and judgmental, but you act like I’m in charge, like with those cattle just now. Our conversations are so superficial. I want to have real friends. I’ve tried with you. I’m a polite person, so I know I’m surprising you, but I don’t think we should see each other again. I’ve been wanting to say this to you for a long time, almost twenty years. Something about your making me come here makes it easy.” Vroni gestured toward the emptiness beyond the windows. “I wish you all good things, but I don’t want to know what ‘good’ means to you.” She waited for a reaction. Then she took off her cap to comb out her dull, dusty mane with dirty fingers stained brown, killing time with desultory self-care as though unobserved. She tucked her hair up again and took a swig of water from the canteen in her bag.
Julia stared. Had Vroni lost her marbles? Was this what people were asking for when they complained about being ghosted—an explicit jilting, rich in memorable detail? If Vroni’s independent, pragmatic mind differed greatly from her own, as she sincerely believed it did and had always found to be a big plus, it might never be possible for her to comprehend what Vroni had just said. Or anything else, either. The whole world might be functionally a hallucination—that was what cognitive neuroscience said. A hallucination with pointy tentacles.
She held her hot chocolate with both hands and said nothing for a good long while before asking, “Are you going straight home?”
Vroni plunked a five-franc coin on the table and said, “Buy yourself another hot chocolate.”
She clomped away toward the exit, shedding mud as she went.
Julia later saw her napping on a lounger outside, but she didn’t try to wake her. She returned by train to the room in Thun, where there was no trace of her former friend, who hadn’t even packed a change of clothes. Vroni’s toothbrush was a disposable one from the hotel reception. She had vanished, propelled by repressed hatred. Who knew.
But Vroni appears happier than ever now, and when Julia sees her around town she is cheered by the lasting conviction that she has absolutely no idea what is going on in anybody’s little pea brain. She once had a whole theory about Vroni, but that’s over. What was Vroni’s rejection of her all about? Vroni ignores her, and Julia will never know.
Wolfgang thinks that Vroni always had a screw loose. He says he wouldn’t roll down a grassy mountain if you paid him. ♦
