The Last Chairlift

39. WENGEN

While Ronald Reagan was preaching the doctrine of American exceptionalism, the snowshoer and I went to Switzerland. My mother and Molly met us in Wengen. The little Barlows were still skiing, albeit more cautiously—they were in their seventies, almost in their eighties. Wengen was their idea; they were always looking for new places to ski, in Austria or Switzerland, and they invited us to join them. My mom and Molly loved skiing in Europe; Elliot and I felt the same way about winter hiking and snowshoeing. Wengen, in the Bernese Alps, was new to all of us—not even the little Barlows had been there before.

Elliot Barlow and I were at home with being first-timers in Wengen. We still felt like newcomers in New York. Whereas Nora tried to insert herself among the activists at ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Mr. Barlow and I weren’t cut out to be activists—no more than we were to be real New Yorkers. The snowshoer said she was “too small” and she spoke “too quietly” to be an activist. “I’m just an advocate of activists,” Elliot Barlow said; she always put herself down.

Some ACT UP members questioned Nora’s participation in the group, especially at the demonstrations. “We’re not a comedy club—we’re not in this for the laughs,” one of the ACT UP guys told Nora. The way Nora affected a crowd, including people who agreed with her, was a problem. For the most part, Em would keep her distance from the ACT UP demonstrations. What could a pantomimist do at a demonstration? Em was increasingly concerned about Nora’s effect on crowds, even at the Gallows.

To many ACT UP members, Nora would find it necessary to repeat herself. “I’m not always funny, you know—I’m not just funny,” Nora kept saying. In 1987, ACT UP was only getting started. I was just out of it; I didn’t notice the earliest ACT UP demonstrations, but Nora did. Nora was cut out to be a shit-disturber; for a New Hampshire girl, Nora seemed like a real New Yorker. I’ll always be a New Hampshire boy.

Nora was pissed that President Reagan was still badgering Congress to bring back God to America’s classrooms; the gay boys were dying in droves, but the president cared more about a moment of silence in public schools than he did about AIDS. In 1987, it was Reagan’s silence about AIDS that led ACT UP to join forces with those guys who thought up the SILENCE=DEATH poster—an all-black poster with a pink triangle, right side up. SILENCE=DEATH was in white caps, under the triangle. That poster became the image for ACT UP; there would be T-shirts later. Nora tried to persuade the Gallows to let their bartenders wear SILENCE=DEATH T-shirts, but the dickless management said the comedy club wasn’t into single-issue politics. The Gallows Lounge would allow Nora and Em to wear the T-shirts, but Em didn’t like the way Nora looked in a T-shirt—not in public. A T-shirt made Nora’s boobs appear to be protesting something all by themselves. In the SILENCE=DEATH T-shirt, the pink triangle was at a weird angle above Nora’s boobs, pointed at her throat. There would be more poster art from the people who created SILENCE=DEATH. You may remember their AIDSGATE poster—Reagan with a green face and the pink eyes of a laboratory rat. If that poster was a T-shirt, I never saw Nora wear it.

In 1988, Nora would be one of the ACT UP women who protested a misleading article published in Cosmopolitan magazine, where a doctor purported that penis-to-vagina transmission of HIV was virtually impossible. The doctor turned out to be a psychiatrist; he wouldn’t take back what he’d said. More than a hundred women protested in front of the Hearst building. “Say no to Cosmo!” they were saying. Some women held signs: YES, THE COSMO GIRL CAN GET AIDS! Nora was disappointed there were no arrests, but she got to be on television. Em would write she was relieved that Nora wore more than a T-shirt on TV.

“It’s January, Em—everyone is wearing more than a T-shirt,” I wrote her back. Em continued to keep her distance from ACT UP, but Nora was proud to be part of it, and Mr. Barlow’s business as a copy editor was branching out. Not only did publishers of crime fiction and thrillers want her to work for them, but other publishers were interested in her, too. The snowshoer would soon be the freelance copy editor she wanted to be. Nora was the only born shit-disturber among us. Em was afraid Nora would get arrested. We both imagined Nora might fight back, if she ever got arrested.

Time stops in ski resorts; you lose track of it when you’re there. In Wengen, in the late 1980s, you wouldn’t know there was an AIDS pandemic or that people were getting arrested. Elliot and I never learned our way around Wengen; we were lost or confused the whole time. To begin with, it wasn’t just Wengen; snowshoers were increasingly unwelcome at ski resorts everywhere. Mr. Barlow and I got the hairy eyeball from skiers when we were carrying our snowshoes around the village. My mom and the little Barlows were not so secretly heartened to see ski resorts shunning snowshoers. “You and Elliot should just rent some skis and ski with us, sweetie,” my mother not so sweetly said.

An old stationmaster in Wengen told Elliot Barlow to take the train to Interlaken; he thought there were trails for snowshoeing near one of the lakes. A younger stationmaster in Wengen contradicted his colleague. The snowshoer was advised to take the Wengernalpbahn to Kleine Scheidegg; the Wengernalp train was a rack-and-pinion railway. From Kleine Scheidegg, you could transfer to the train to Jungfraujoch. The best snowshoeing was “oben,” a ski patroller told Elliot—“above” meant Kleine Scheidegg, where you could snowshoe above the tree line, or you could take a second train to Jungfraujoch, the highest station. We could see the Jungfrau from our hotel in Wengen. “Obenan,” another ski patroller said to the snowshoer—“at the top.” There were electric locomotives on the slowly moving cog railway trains. You could climb up the mountain alongside the train track, one of the ski patrollers suggested, halfheartedly.

The snowshoer had looked closely at the cogwheel railroad; the sides of the railway bed looked a little narrow for snowshoeing, she thought. What if a train was passing? What if there were tunnels or bridges? Someone climbing up the railway bed would be better off in hiking boots, the snowshoer said. I knew this was her way of telling me not to snowshoe alongside the train track.

“The ski patrollers don’t want snowshoers on the piste, not on the lower slopes,” the little English teacher told me, although not one of the patrollers had actually said this.

I’d brought the novel I was writing to Wengen and I was finishing a difficult chapter. I thought I would write in the mornings in my hotel room, imagining I would meet up with Mr. Barlow for some snowshoeing in the afternoons. The cog railway complicated our plans to meet up in the middle of the day.

“You have to take two trains to get to Jungfraujoch, and it’ll be much colder up there,” the snowshoer said. I knew what she wanted—more working out, less time on a train. She would take the train from Wengen to Kleine Scheidegg, just one train. It took only about thirty minutes to get there—the snowshoeing there would be “gut genug,” Elliot had decided. My German was rudimentary, but I knew the words for “good enough.”

The skiers made their own plans; where they were skiing, they would take ski lifts, not trains. I knew how my mom and Molly skied; they were in their sixties, but they still skied hard. Those two would start out skiing with the little Barlows—just a couple of warm-up runs. Then my mother and Molly would go off by themselves; they would find more challenging terrain, leaving the little Barlows to ski alone. John and Susan Barlow had told us they liked to ski on the gentler slopes. There was a train station and a gondola lift station in the village of Wengen; the stations were an easy walk from our hotel. At night, we would all meet for dinner in the hotel restaurant. But I wasn’t paying attention to the lay of the land.

Our first full day in Wengen, everyone else made their plans and went off without me. I wrote all morning in my hotel room and finished the difficult chapter. I could go snowshoeing the next day, I was thinking. I put on my hiking boots and walked the wrong way—to the gondola lift station, not the train station. Then I had trouble understanding the stationmaster; either my German was awful or his Swiss German was hard for me, or both. I was hiking “oben”—if nothing else, the above word was understood. I would not walk on the train track but beside it. There were two stations between Wengen and the Kleine Scheidegg station. The stationmaster seemed to doubt I would get as far as Kleine Scheidegg—it was already the early afternoon. I think it was clear that I intended to take the train back to Wengen, but the reason why was beyond my bad German. At one or another station above Wengen, I would take the train down. You’re not doing your knees a favor by hiking or snowshoeing down a mountain, but I couldn’t explain this in German.

It was my first day hiking at altitude—I took it easy. What would be the harm of skiing with my mother? I was thinking. My determination not to ski was waning. Weren’t the necessary rebellions of childhood and adolescence behind us? I’d asked the snowshoer. We could make my mom and the little Barlows so happy, if we skied with them. And the way ski resorts were treating snowshoers, it would be less of a hassle to go skiing. “I know, I know—and, in spite of ourselves, we do know how to ski,” Elliot Barlow had said, sighing.

“It’s your parents’ genre you don’t like, not their skiing—not anymore,” I reminded the pretty Mr. Barlow. She really did love her parents—just not their writing—but it wasn’t my intention to make her feel guilty for not skiing. It was something the snowshoer and I kept talking about. We’d made our point about the kind of exercise we preferred, but it wouldn’t kill us to ski occasionally—would it?

The passing trains had blown the powdery snow off the railway bed. In the deeper snow, a footpath emerged and disappeared; for short stretches, the snow on the path was trodden down by hikers. There was a bridge, a narrow crossing, where I hoped I wouldn’t meet a train. I don’t remember a tunnel; I would have been afraid to enter a tunnel. Off one side of the cog railroad was a mountainside—a snow-covered forest, with glacial peaks above the timberline. Off the other side of the train line, I caught glimpses of skiers; occasionally, I could hear the skiers’ voices, but I couldn’t see them. They were ghost skiers. The railroad ran parallel to the piste. This hike is pointless—I could be skiing, I was thinking. Yet the climb felt good. It was an unseasonably warm day; the sun was hot. I was peeling off layers of clothes as I climbed, stuffing the clothes in my backpack. A train passed, without alarm or incident—I had plenty of room to get out of the way.

The stationmaster at the Allmend station greeted me cordially. As expected, but in a friendly fashion, he told me to “aufpassen” (to “watch out”) for the Zug. (A Zug is a train.) I had a small map with me. The stationmaster was a helpful fellow; he volunteered to show me where my climb would get steeper. The next station was almost as high as Kleine Scheidegg, the stationmaster was explaining. “Lawine!” the stationmaster suddenly exclaimed, interrupting himself. In ski resorts in Austria and Switzerland, I’d learned the avalanche word. The stationmaster saw it before I did. A cap of icy snow broke free of the glacier above the forest; the snow made a whooshing sound, descending through the trees. We saw whole trees swept down the mountainside in the rush of snow. We were in no danger at the Allmend station. We watched the avalanche pass below us, at a right angle to the railway line. We couldn’t see if the avalanche had enough momentum to cross the train tracks, or where it might have come in contact with a passing train—closer to Wengen than to the Allmend station, we could only guess. The stationmaster ran to his radio, inside the station. When he reappeared, he was pointing down the track toward Wengen; he spoke so quickly, I could understand only the Zug word. The avalanche had hit a train—I understood that much. I started jogging down the mountain; the railway bed was flattest between the two lines of track. My knees would feel it, but the altitude didn’t affect me as much going down. I felt pretty sure that no one I knew would be on the train. Elliot Barlow was snowshoeing at Kleine Scheidegg; she wouldn’t be taking a train back to Wengen till the end of the afternoon.

I was a late arrival at the scene of the accident. The avalanche had knocked three passenger cars off the train track. When I got there, most of the passengers had been evacuated from the derailed cars; there were more rescuers around than victims. The half-buried cars had fallen on their sides, where they slid down the railroad embankment, stopping on the ski slope. Skiers on the piste were the first rescuers on hand. The toppled train cars were visible from Wengen. Some villagers had hiked up the ski slope to help the skiers trapped inside the partially buried cars. There was a lot of bleeding, from facial cuts—from the flying skis. I saw blood in the snow, and lacerations on the faces of skiers who’d been cut by the sharp edges of the skis inside the derailed cars. I climbed up one of the cars lying on its side, just to be certain there was no one inside. Most of the train windows that were pressed against the snow of the ski slope were unbroken. I could see more broken windows on the sides of the train cars facing the sky. I was wondering if the first rescuers needed to break the windows to get inside; perhaps the train doors could be opened only from inside.

I heard the hysterical child, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Not surprisingly, he was screaming in German. They were the last family to be rescued from the passenger cars that had been tipped over and half-buried, but the boy seemed to be saying there were more people in need of rescuing—more children, from what I could understand of the kid’s German. The boy kept repeating the same things. A short, declarative sentence was easy to understand. “Man muss ihnen helfen!” the boy cried and cried; he was six or seven. His parents could not console him; the father had an ugly gash on the bridge of his nose, from a flying ski. “Someone should help them!” the boy had declared.

A rescuer was climbing out of a train car—the middle car, the one the kid kept pointing to. “Niemand… niemand…” the rescuer was repeating. “Nobody… nobody…”

The other sentences the kid kept screaming were longer or garbled together, or both. I could make out the Fenster word, meaning window, and something about “ihre kleinen Gesichter” (“their little faces”), which made me imagine children’s faces.

The poor parents, I was thinking; they had to carry their skis and poles, and the child’s skis and poles. And the father with the gashed and bleeding nose had to drag his hysterical son away from the wrecked train. They could have put on their skis and skied to the village, but the boy was too upset to ski. I watched the family slipping and sliding their way down the ski slope toward Wengen. The poor kid would have nightmares all night, I was imagining.

A medical emergency helicopter had landed on the piste. A pregnant woman on a stretcher was carried from the toppled train cars to the helicopter. She was being airlifted to a hospital near Interlaken. This was only a precaution, one of the rescuers explained to me; while the woman showed no signs of miscarrying, she’d been shaken up in the avalanche and she was frightened. When I got back to my hotel room, the news of the avalanche in Wengen was already on TV. It wasn’t difficult to understand that no one was killed and there were no serious injuries. I even understood the human-interest part of the story: the pregnant woman and her unborn child were going to be okay. The news on television had been easier to understand than the hysterical boy.

My mom and Molly had a good day skiing. When they skied back to Wengen at the end of the day, they went right by the half-buried, derailed cars, wondering what had happened to the train. The snowshoer had heard about the avalanche; her train back to Wengen from Kleine Scheidegg was delayed. The derailed cars would be lying in the snow overnight, but someone had to move the locomotive and check the cogs between the rails.

My mother and Molly and I were sitting at our table in the hotel restaurant; we’d been wondering where Elliot and the little Barlows were when Elliot came to our table. She was alone, and she wouldn’t sit down. Her parents had not returned to the hotel from skiing. “At their age, they usually stop skiing before the end of the day—I should have gone skiing with them,” the little snowshoer said. She was agitated, and my mom tried to reassure her that everything was all right. The little Barlows were very social; they loved talking to strangers. They’d probably met some skiers their own age; they were just having a beer or a glass of wine, my mother was saying, when the family with the hysterical child came into the hotel restaurant. The mother and father were discussing the bandage on his nose, but they stopped talking when they saw me; they recognized me from the scene of the accident, politely greeting me in their reserved way. The boy also recognized me. The kid had calmed down, but he kept staring at me—as if he had more to say. “Germans,” the snowshoer quietly said. Her German was so good, she could identify accents from incidental conversation. The German family was seated at an adjacent table, where a dinner roll captured the boy’s attention; for the moment, he stopped staring at me.

I kept my voice down when I was telling Molly and my mom the drama of the German family at the site where the avalanche hit the train, both because I didn’t want the German family to know I was talking about them and to entice Elliot Barlow to sit down with us at our table. The snowshoer was interested in the story; she finally sat down. “Man muss ihnen helfen!” I was whispering—telling them what the hysterical German kid kept repeating.

“Someone should help them!” Elliot had whispered back, translating for my mother and Molly.

“The boy thought there were people left behind on the train?” Molly asked me; she also whispered.

“The boy said something about ‘their little faces’—it sounded like ‘ihre kleinen Gesichter,’ if I heard him right,” I told the snowshoer, who was looking straight at the boy.

“Did he mean children’s faces, sweetie?” my mom whispered to me.

That was when the German boy stopped playing around with the dinner roll. The kid was looking in our direction when he suddenly stared at the pretty Mr. Barlow, as if transfixed by her little face. This time, the kid was not hysterical; he was calm but trembling when he stood (without the dinner roll) beside his family’s table, pointing to the snowshoer. “Ihre kleinen Gesichter waren wie ihr Gesicht!” the German boy said.

“Their little faces were like her face!” the little English teacher translated for us. “He means like my face,” Elliot added, though what the boy meant was perfectly clear.

“Ich habe ihre kleinen Gesichter am Fenster gesehen,” the boy was babbling to Mr. Barlow.

“I saw their little faces in the window,” the little English teacher translated for us.

“Unter dem Zug!” the child cried assertively—as if no one had been listening to him. From the shocked expressions on his parents’ faces, they hadn’t. Elliot Barlow was taken aback.

“Under the train!” the little English teacher translated for us. She was standing again; she approached the boy at the German family’s table. I heard the Kinder word (the word for children) in what the snowshoer asked the kid.

“Nein!” the boy said immediately, before he began to babble. He said more about the “Gesichter”—exactly what about the faces was hard for me to understand.

“They were not children’s faces—the small faces were the faces of two old people, a man and a woman who were under the train,” the snowshoer said to us. We could see she was crying. The German boy’s mother and father were talking to her, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying, or what Elliot Barlow said back to them; only the Eltern word, the word for parents, was clear.

The snowshoer was still crying when she explained everything to my mom and Molly and me. The German boy’s mother and father hadn’t understood what their hysterical son was saying. The little faces the child saw were outside the train, not inside it. The victims who’d been left behind weren’t in the derailed train—they were under it. “I think your son saw my parents,” the little English teacher had told the German boy’s mother and father. It was what the snowshoer had said about the little Barlows before: they were thriller writers, drawn to disasters.

Elliot and I left Molly and my mom, and the German family, in the hotel restaurant. The two policemen met us in the lobby, after we’d put on our snowshoeing clothes. As Mr. Barlow had requested, the cops came with two extra flashlights for us. It seemed we waited forever for the two policemen to arrive. By the time the cops came to the hotel, Elliot and I had a pretty good grasp of the little Barlows’ story; between us, we’d worked out the plot of what we imagined had befallen the writing team. The little English teacher and I were, respectively, a veteran reader of fiction and a dedicated fiction writer. Elliot imagined that his parents had decided to call it a day in the middle of the afternoon. They had been skiing back to Wengen; they were near the base of the mountain, a little above the gondola lift station, when they must have seen the start of the avalanche, when the mass of descending snow was still above the tree line. From the little Barlows’ perspective—on the ski slope, with the railroad embankment between them and the avalanche—maybe it seemed safe to take a closer look. “Are you thinking they would have sidestepped up the embankment on their skis?” I asked Elliot.

“Not them. They would never let me sidestep—even as a child, I had to herringbone uphill,” the snowshoer said. We imagined the little Barlows skiing off-piste, herringboning up the embankment, to get a better view of the avalanche on the other side of the cog railroad tracks—the thriller writers, drawn to disasters. “And then the train came, blocking their view of how much momentum the avalanche had maintained, coming through the trees,” the snowshoer said. Elliot and I imagined we’d visualized everything, except for seeing their little faces pressed against the window of the train that crushed them—dragging the little Barlows down the embankment, back to the ski slope. It was hard to visualize that part.

My mother had wanted Molly to go with us. “You two should take Molly with you—she’s an old ski patroller; she’s seen her share of accidents,” my mom had said.

It wasn’t that the snowshoer didn’t want Molly to come with us, but Elliot didn’t like my mother to be left alone—my mom would worry more, alone, the little English teacher thought. “This isn’t a rescue, Ray—I’m not hopeful of saving them. I think this is a done deal,” the snowshoer said.

“I’ve seen some done deals, Elliot—the done deals are the worst ones,” the night groomer tried to tell her. At first, Elliot wouldn’t listen, but I kept begging her to take Molly with us.

By the time the two policemen got to the lobby, my mom and Molly—not to mention the German family—had finished their dinner and were waiting in the lobby with us. The ski patroller had already changed into her ski clothes. “I asked the police to bring only two extra flashlights,” Elliot told Molly, who just patted her backpack. The snowcat operator was used to carrying her own flashlight. “I guess the ski patroller is coming with us, Adam,” the snowshoer said. My mother didn’t stop hugging the pretty Mr. Barlow until the cops came. The cop who did the talking told us to call him Werner. The silent policeman didn’t tell us his name.

It was cold; the hard-packed snow on the piste was dry and made a squeaky sound under our boots. We couldn’t keep up with the ski patroller; even in her sixties, Molly got to the derailed cars first. She knew the little Barlows were under the middle car; she’d climbed the car and lowered herself inside before we arrived at the wreck. On our trudge uphill, the snowshoer reiterated to the policemen the plot of his parents’ death. The logic of the doomed thriller writers, when it came to avalanches, was clearly contrary to common sense, the little English teacher was telling the cops as we climbed. Werner, who’d seen the movie of The Kiss in Düsseldorf, deferred to the snowshoer. The little Barlows were experienced skiers; they should have been wary of avalanches, not drawn to take a closer look. Yet Elliot’s parents were also experienced thriller writers; I thought I heard Elliot say to Werner that her parents were done in by their disaster genes, which I took to mean their writer genes (or words to that effect).

“Was denkst du?” I heard Werner ask his silent partner. (“What do you think?” he’d asked the nonspeaking cop.)

“Möglich,” the one-word policeman replied. (“Possible,” the minimalist cop had answered.)

We saw only the ski patroller’s head and shoulders in the open door of the middle car. From the look on Molly’s face, she’d found what she was looking for; the snowshoer had imagined everything truly. “You shouldn’t see them, Elliot,” Molly told her.

“I should have been skiing with them, Molly—I have to see them,” the snowshoer said. The little Barlows had been afraid that AIDS would be the death of their gay son—later, of their trans daughter. During the AIDS pandemic, we were so afraid of the death of loved ones we imagined were vulnerable; there was a kind of forgetting or relaxing about all the other things that could kill us.

It wasn’t that seeing their little faces pressed against the window of the train was worse than anything Elliot had imagined, although it was. And when we were all inside the train car, with our flashlights on their frozen faces, no one said (in English or in German) that the little Barlows hadn’t suffered, for they surely had—if only for a few seconds. They’d died quickly; it wasn’t that.

What would stay with the snowshoer was reflected in their little faces in those few terrible seconds: the thriller writers’ recognition of the enormity of their miscalculation—how the writing team had failed to imagine a force of nature as capable of catastrophic damage as criminal or political intrigue. I saw only their fear of pain, or their actual but quickly passing pain, in the little Barlows’ faces. I saw how their little noses were flattened against the window, and how their skin was whitened by the cold—as if their freezing blood had turned them the whitish gray of ice. But the little English teacher would read more into her parents’ expressions than I could see. What the snowshoer saw had eluded me; she’d seen “a kind of crazy rapture, or at least relief,” in their frozen faces, the snowshoer would later say. I saw no such rapture in the little Barlows’ shocked expressions, but the little English teacher would later tell me what I’d missed. She’d seen (or had imagined) “the intense joy, or at least relief,” parents feel when they know their children will outlive them. In the case of Elliot’s parents, their rapture came from knowing that their only child would not predecease them or die with them. “For once, they were happy that I wasn’t skiing with them,” the snowshoer would say.

That frigid night, in the derailed car, we didn’t talk much more than the policeman I’ll call Möglich, because the one-word cop never divulged his name and “möglich” was all he’d said so far. In the freezing-cold car, our breathing fogged up the window where the snowshoer knelt and cried. The two policemen were patient with the pretty Mr. Barlow, who took her time saying goodbye to her parents. Their little faces were disappearing in the foggy window, which their loving daughter wiped clear with her ski glove.

“We should tell Ray—she’ll be worrying more, as the time goes by,” the ski patroller finally said.

“We’ll tell her together, Molly,” the snowshoer said. I watched them go down the mountain; even holding hands, those two knew how to walk on snow.

“You should go skiing with your mom, Kid,” Molly had told me, before she and Elliot left me at the avalanche site with the two policemen. The cops wanted to double-check their EINTRITT VERBOTEN business, the KEEP OUT signs and the battery-powered lights in the area of the accident the police had cordoned off.

In my bad German, I tried to tell Werner and Möglich my thoughts. If the pretty Mr. Barlow had been skiing with her parents, she might have prevented them from climbing the embankment to get a better look at the avalanche. On the other hand, childhood was the truest teacher. As a child, the snowshoer had been taught to herringbone uphill; she might have herringboned up the embankment after them, or she would have led the way.

Werner didn’t express his opinion. “Was denkst du?” Werner asked Möglich, as we were starting down the mountain—as if there was any doubt about what Möglich thought.

I imagined it was a fait accompli what Möglich would say. On matters of mayhem, whether they were man-made or elements of nature, the one-word policeman was a man of experience. “Möglich,” Möglich said, after a thoughtful pause—pretending he had to think about it. Of course, everything was possible. Wasn’t that usually the safest thing to say? And more than beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I was thinking, when I looked back—up the nighttime mountain—at the wrecked train, lying in the snow.

In the garish brightness of the battery-operated lights, the derailed train cars had a sepulchral glow. In the enveloping dark, there was no evidence of a railroad or the railway embankment—only the ascending ski slope, rising into a vast darkness. To someone seeing the avalanche site from this perspective, and for the first time, the derailed cars looked like a train that fell from heaven. The derailed train looked like a tomb, a holy shrine—not only because the little Barlows lay dead and buried under it. That frigid night, the wrecked train struck me as a sepulcher to all souls lost or killed in transit—as one day we all would be, I thought.

“Okay, I’ll ski with her—I’ll ask her to ski with me, I promise!” I shouted down the mountain, to those two contrasting figures. The seeming giantess, who was Molly, had her arm wrapped around the shoulders of the apparent child, who was the pretty Mr. Barlow. I could hear their voices, but they didn’t hear me; those two were talking up a storm. For the moment, I’d forgotten I was going down the piste with the Swiss policemen.

“Sagen Sie das bitte noch einmal,” Werner politely said. (“Please say that again.”) I saw that the ski patroller and the snowshoer were almost back to the village; the lights of Wengen shone brightly below us. We were close enough to town that I thought I could make out the lights of our hotel—we would be there, in just a few minutes. In my bad German, there wasn’t enough time for me to tell the Swiss policemen the story of what it meant for me to ski with my mother.

“Meine Mutter…” I began, in German. I told them how she’d taught me to ski, but how much I hated skiing, and then I stopped skiing with her. Now I believed I should ski with her, I said, but God knows what a mess I made of this (in German) or if the Swiss cops could understand me.

By now I knew that Werner wouldn’t tell me his opinion, if he ever expressed one. “Was denkst du?” Werner asked Möglich again. By now I knew this was their routine, and I was tired of it. From the mother-and-son story I’d described—no matter how briefly, or how badly—the possible word simply didn’t apply.

If Möglich replied with the möglich word, that would just be bullshit, I was thinking, but the taciturn policeman surprised me. Möglich spoke in English; he’d heard enough of my bad German to doubt my capabilities at speaking or understanding his language. “With our mothers, we are always alone,” Möglich told me. I realize that this sounds like a translation. In German, what Möglich meant might have been clearer. But what he said was clear enough, and it still sounds true to me.

“There were two women with you, the big one and the small one who spoke German—which one was your mother?” Werner asked me. Taking his cue from Möglich, Werner was also speaking English.

Before I could answer Werner, Möglich interrupted us. The formerly one-word cop had become quite talkative. “There are three women with him, counting the one back at the hotel,” Möglich pointed out to his partner. We were in Wengen, in the village; we were almost back at the hotel. Before I could tell them who my mom was, Werner wanted to know what Möglich thought.

“Was denkst du?” Werner asked Möglich.

This time, there was no hesitation. Möglich didn’t need or pretend to think about it. “You’re a lucky man—those three women love you,” the Swiss policeman said. “But the one back at the hotel loves you the most—you should ski with that one,” Möglich said.

“Ja, you should ski with her,” Werner said, taking his cue from Möglich yet again. Thus it was decided: I would learn to ski, once more. You are never over your childhood, not until you are under the train—unter dem Zug.