You Think That's Bad

Poland Is Watching

We haven’t spoken in three days and haven’t stretched out in two, and that’s forty-four hours we’ve been braced back to back, holding our tent poles, one hand low and the other high, to keep them from snapping in the wind. They’re supposed to be titanium but at Camp 3 they went off like rifle shots in the night and these are jerry-rigged spares. The winds are topping 130 kilometers an hour. The temperature has dropped to 49 below. We’re wearing three layers of fleece, one of Gore-Tex, down bodysuits, insulated climbing shells, and even our overgaiters, with gloves inside gloves inside mittens, and headcaps inside balaclavas inside hoods. I’ve been unable to interrupt the clatter of my teeth. Jacek’s breathing sounds like someone blowing bubbles through a straw. Bieniek has long since given himself over to a kind of stupefaction. We store the radio batteries in our underwear and load them only when we need to call Base Camp. Once we’re finished, getting them back through all the layers takes ten minutes. Then we just grip one another and hold on until our testicles warm the battery casings. The casings conduct the cold with exceptional efficiency.

We’re at Camp 4 and only 1,000 meters below the summit, but the summit’s 8,126 meters high and in the winter at this altitude everything is sandblasted by the jet stream and the cold.

Because of that, the peak is called Nanga Parbat: Sanskrit for “Naked Mountain.” When the sky is not storming, it sounds like a giant’s flapping bed sheets as hard as he can. When it is, the turbine sound of the howl makes even shouting pointless. During those periods we’re reduced to hand signals with mittens.

We’ve been on the mountain for twenty-seven days. Our sponsors have shelled out big money not for attempts but for results. Our team members, strung out along the various camps below, are spent. Our wives back home are miserable. Our children are frightened. Poland is watching.

If we descend we won’t have the physical reserves to return. If we continue upward we’ll be ascending without being able to make out our hands at arm’s length. If we decide to wait out the storm, they’ll find us once it’s over, like everything else in the tent, from our sunscreen to our cameras: frozen solid and cascaded with frost.

This mountain is a widow maker in the summer, when the weather’s as good as it gets. It’s famous for the kind of ice and rock slides that in 1841 were big enough to dam the Indus, sitting at its feet. The first great mountaineer to set foot up here, the Englishman A. F. Mummery, along with his entire expedition, was never heard from again. Twenty-six climbers were killed before even the first summer summit was achieved. There have been twelve winter attempts since. None have succeeded.

There’s a song we sing in bars: “Who does winter mountaineering? We do winter mountaineering!” We are the Poles. The first winter attempt here was a joint Anglo/Polish expedition in 1988. Then the Brits came to their senses and dropped out. The Italians partnered with us for a little while as well, and have the casualties to prove it. Only the Poles have persevered.

And attempt number 13 is in deep trouble. For the last three days we’ve been hunkered down in an air raid of wind. Camp 4 amounts to a small trench for the tent, chopped into a cornice of snow as hard as concrete. We’re now in the seventh day, and we need to be back in Base Camp by the middle of the month, after which, as Kolesniak likes to put it, the winds really get going.

Kolesniak got started like the rest of us, as a schoolboy running around local crags and picking up whatever he could in terms of technique here and there. Afternoon larks turned into weekend excursions and then long holidays away from home. Now he’s so famous that kids can buy a snakes-and-ladders board game of his K2 climb. He’s one of the central figures in the golden decade of Polish Himalayan mountaineering, having summited ten 8,000-meter peaks, including Everest twice. Once everyone and his brother started climbing such peaks, he began proselytizing for what he called a true Alpine style, which involved refusing to benefit from the work of other teams, even if it meant ignoring ropes that lay fixed beside your route or declining to take shelter in unused tents. On Gasherbrum IV he forbade his team to follow a Japanese expedition’s footsteps in the deep snow. It was a short transition from that to winter mountaineering.

Soviet restrictions on travel throughout the postwar period ensured that Poles missed out on the first ascents of all the highest peaks, leaving us with mountains so small they lacked even year-round snow, but we solved the problem by resorting to the unthinkable: climbing in winter. In 1959 Zawada electrified everyone by ascending a staggering number of connected peaks in nineteen days of continuous climbing. Kolesniak, still a boy then, snuck into one of his lectures in a packed five-thousand-seat auditorium, and Zawada displayed a slide of a towering rock face in a sleet storm and told the audience, “Show me how you climb in this and I’ll tell you what you’re worth.”

It was Zawada who first conceived of attempting Everest in winter, once travel restrictions were lifted, and Zawada who led the expedition that succeeded. He lived to see Lhotse and Annapurna and Dhaulagiri fall as well. By then the world was calling us the Ice Warriors and the Pope was sending him climbing advice. Industries hired top climbers during the summers to paint their smokestacks: easy work that paid like state ministries.

And Nanga Parbat remained the reef on which all Polish shipping ran aground. In 1997 Pankiewiez and Trzymiel clawed to within three hundred meters of the top before their frostbite became so dire they could no longer press on. Duszkiewicz in 2008 reached through a blizzard what he thought was the summit only to find once back in Base Camp that he’d stopped to celebrate on a rise eighty meters lower.

And now here we are. For three years each of us has hoarded and sacrificed and trained for the right to earn this chance. We have flown five thousand kilometers and caravanned by truck and foot hundreds of kilometers more and ascended seven thousand meters in altitude and squandered tens of thousands of euros on permits and porters’ fees and equipment. “Let’s go, girls,” Kolesniak has shouted whenever anything has gone wrong. “You’re not going to grow the balls you need sitting around complaining.”

And as Agnieszka never tires of pointing out, we’re not the only ones who have sacrificed. Her father, on the occasion of our daughter’s seventh birthday, sat me down and walked us both glumly through the state of my finances, and once he finished her mother, waiting beside him, then asked how on earth, if I loved her daughter and granddaughter as much as I claimed, I could justify what I was doing. In the other room Agnieszka made a loud snorting sound.

I answered that I didn’t justify what I was doing. Nine expeditions in the course of a seven-year marriage meant that I’d been away more than at home. For five consecutive years I’d missed my daughter’s birthday. This birthday I’d been able to make because our climbing permits had fallen through.

And each time I returned with a body so devastated it never fully restored itself. Agnieszka told her girlfriends that she called my first weeks back the Famine Zombie Weeks. My vertebrae and hipbones were anatomy lessons. I was able to focus on emotional issues only when she put a hand on each side of my face and redirected my gaze into her eyes.

At our airport reunions, after her relief and joy, I’d see her anger at what I’d done to myself flood through her like a third revelation.

I’d met her at a faux-English pub in Warsaw. Most of us met our wives at one climbers’ drinking hole or another. But I’d had good timing: it turned out she’d just come from a co-worker’s retirement party at which she’d heard him joke about the number of years he’d worked at his bureau — more than she’d been alive — and then estimate the actual number of staff meetings he’d attended and evaluations he’d filed. A horrified silence had settled over the party, she said, and she’d decided then and there to quit. The pub had been the first one she’d encountered. When she asked what I did, I told her I climbed the highest mountains in the world in the winter. We went home together that same night.

She had some idea what she was getting herself into, she told me that first night while we spooned and she smoothed her hands together along my erection. Her brother had been a rock climber and mountaineer.

I’d failed to pursue the subject because she’d by then fitted me into her with a tenderness and calm I’d previously associated only with the afterlife. “Shhh,” she whispered at the force of my response. “Look.” And she brought her mouth around to mine. She meant, “Look how comprehensively we’ve merged.” She didn’t have to tell me: I was already so confounded that for an hour after she fell asleep I perched naked on her chest of drawers peering down at her like a traveler who’d found water on Mars.

As a child I’d been such an aberration in inwardness and appearance that my classmates had christened me the White Crow. My first years of schooling had been traumatic and I withdrew from any social situation in which I felt maligned. Climbing had been my way out. My aptitude for math and science had won me some recognition and I’d been invited to join the geology section of the Young Pioneers, and the field trips to the mountains had begun there. There I learned about rope and free climbing, about weather and snow conditions. But I still was valued only for what I could do: my mentor on those trips used to say that our relationship thrived on my achievements.

I’d been three hours late for our first dinner together and Agnieszka had already eaten and gone about her evening. She warmed up my portion after I arrived. “You aren’t angry?” I asked. “You’ve already eaten?”

“Why would I be angry?” she answered, looking up from her book. “And why wouldn’t I have eaten?”

She told me the first time I left for an eight-thousand-meter mountain that she wasn’t going to become one of those women her brother’s friends used to pity: the climber’s girlfriend, left moping at home. On the radio telephone from Annapurna I complimented her on her poise when we’d kissed goodbye. She said, “You should have seen me once you were out of sight.”

And now what does she have? She and Wanda are home alone most of the time in Mielec. Mielec is famous as the place in southern Poland where hope goes to expire. “Is it so bad?” her mother asked, before she first came to visit, and Agnieszka found she couldn’t bring herself to answer. “It’s astonishing that you grew up here,” she likes to tell me. “Or maybe it’s not.” At town meetings, after the first three hours on economic growth we sometimes get to the fouled water table or the air pollution.

Mielec had a big Jewish community, which of course was wiped out in the war. It features the largest aviation factory in Poland, where we both work. For tourists, there’s the minor basilica of Matthew the Evangelist, which is ugly. For football we have FKS Stal Mielec, a perennial third-division also-ran. We have a sister city in the Ukraine that I’m told is every bit as demoralizing. There’s a water park. Potholes aren’t the problem they used to be. And around our three-room house, we have enough land fenced off for a kitchen garden and a pygmy orchard.

In Islamabad we were informed about the extra expense of the bond that had to be posted for the possibility of a helicopter rescue, which was particularly maddening since we’d be operating nearly the entire time above a helicopter’s ceiling. It’s no wonder so many teams press on for the summits even in insanely dangerous circumstances, given that each year the cost of climbing in the Himalayas becomes more and more prohibitive. The highest mountains are now lucrative commercial concerns. On our last day in the city Kolesniak showed us our expedition’s revised bank account, which was a disheartening sight. We now had enough to get to the mountain and climb it, though not enough, technically, to get back home.

We’d chosen the Kinshofer Route on the mountain’s Diamir Face, which meant a longer trek across the glaciers to our Base Camp. At the little town where we hired our porters the usual gaggle assembled outside our hotel, some having walked from villages fifty kilometers away, and Kolesniak did the selecting by eye. He said he used to check all candidates with a stethoscope but then discovered that most had blood-curdling noises coming from their lungs and others apparently had no hearts in their chests. From there we all jounced for six hours along a muddy and narrow road through brilliant light. At curves along the Indus Gorge the lead driver would stop and beckon us all out to look over the edge, down the cliffs to the river below. At one hairpin he kept gesturing into a ravine whose drop was so severe that none of us would look.

Besides Kolesniak, Jacek, and myself, Poland’s banner is held aloft by Nowakowski and Leszek, two old campaigners, and Bieniek, a late replacement none of us know very well. Nowakowski’s the sort of legend who on one seven-mile hike into a Base Camp stunned all of those who hadn’t been able to maintain his pace by producing an entire watermelon from his backpack to share upon arrival. They call him Filthy N because he refuses to wash even weeks after an expedition has ended. A woman he once tried to pick up in a bar at first refused to believe the smell was his. Only the year before Leszek had all the amputations on his right hand, and with his damaged toes couldn’t entertain hopes of a summit, though he thought he might get as far as seven thousand meters, depending upon how his older frostbitten areas held up at altitude. He claimed that nearly all of his preparation was psychological, by which he meant last-minute parties, all-night binges, and as much sex as the women around him would allow. On his last night in Warsaw he threw up over the balcony onto a pizza delivery boy and then tumbled over the railing to follow. The boxes broke his fall.

Poor Bieniek seems not to know what to make of us. He’s a quiet young man whose wrist alarm features a digital recording of his son’s voice, wishing him a good morning and exhorting him to come back safely.

Jacek I got to know in the Young Pioneers. We both suffered from childhood asthma, not unusual for climbers, perhaps because lungs stressed by the affliction become better conditioned to process oxygen later in life. We instantly became adept at egging each other on when it came to risks. On one of the field trips we celebrated his sixteenth birthday by abandoning the bus that was supposed to return us to the city, to see if we could walk back through the forests. We arrived five days later, having survived on berries and two loaves of bread. We’d asked a friend to tell our poor parents we’d gone camping.

Above eight thousand meters in winter everyone needs to be technically proficient and emotionally unflappable. Jacek started climbing chairs and tables when he was fifteen months old and is ingenious with gigantic spatial puzzles like ice falls, and once totaled his brand-new car in a drainage ditch and simply climbed out and continued to the party on foot. His friends noticed the trauma only when they realized at the end of the night that he couldn’t lift a broken left arm.

His wife, Krystyna, was even less happy than Agnieszka about having been relocated to Mielec. The official story was that he was taking a position as coach for the local ski program, which, though the pay was miserable, would allow him to maintain his training schedule, but she knew better. “Mustn’t split up the boys,” she often groused when the four of us met at a pub. The night before we flew to Islamabad, she complained that he had commitments everywhere and, to top it off, had just agreed to serve as a cameraman on an expedition immediately after Nanga Parbat, despite having no experience whatsoever with high-end video cameras. “You know what his motto is?” she asked. “ ‘No time no time no time.’ If you ask him if he wants some eggs, he’ll answer, ‘No time no time no time.’ ” She said he’d given so many interviews across the country for the last two weeks that after he finally got home and fell into their bed he told her he needed to go on this expedition as a rest. She’d thrown all of his clothes out into the street.

“It was raining, too,” Jacek added, holding up the sleeve of his sweater. “This is still wet.”

“Wanda complains that they come back a wreck and we have to fit our lives to their schedules,” Agnieszka said. “She always says, ‘Why should we? He never fits his into ours.’ ”

“And first they’re unbelievably full of themselves — they did just conquer the world — and then they’re depressed,” Krystyna said. “At parties I’ll hear the women with their big eyes asking them how they do it, and I want to grab their faces and say, ‘The question is, how do I do it?’ ”

“Who wants another drink?” Jacek asked.

She went on to say that she’d begun to realize how many people this mountain had killed only by listening to our other friends talk about it. Then she’d broken down and done some Internet research, after which she wished she hadn’t.

“High altitudes aren’t as dangerous as everyone makes them out to be,” Jacek told her. “You could just as easily get killed crossing the road.”

“Yeah,” Krystyna said. “If you painted yourself black and crossed on moonless nights.”

“I liked the old days when they were out of touch for weeks,” Agnieszka said. “At least then you could manage your anger and fear and go about your life.”

“It’s not like we don’t take every precaution,” Jacek told her.

“Well, there’s a relief,” she answered. “That should prevent the avalanches and blizzards and oxygen starvation and cold.”

Jacek reminded his wife that he’d shown her the entry he’d made in his notebook on Annapurna: “It’s high time that I stopped this kind of Russian roulette and starting thinking of someone other than myself.” And then she pointed out that after finishing that entry, he’d left for the summit.

Locating the Polish tents in a large encampment is always easy: they’re the ones still lit and noisy at four a.m., the ones rising up out of a sea of bottles. At this time of year, though, we had the glacier to ourselves. We set up next to the windblown remains of an unsuccessful Japanese expedition from the summer before. At 3,500 meters there was already sixty centimeters of new snow. Inside the main tent, Kolesniak hung smoked meats and salamis he’d brought from home. As the interior warmed up the salamis dripped fat on whoever was beneath them.

The camp was centered on a glacier forested with ice towers. Every so often we’d kick up out of the snow an old tent peg or film canister. In the areas surrounding our doorways, cleared down to the ice, crevasses opened and shut slowly, like giant clams. The whole assembly was drifting away from the mountain a few inches a day with the movement of the glacier.

The shortened days made everything harder. By three the sun was behind the ridge and the temperature fell off the scale. Fingers became wood blocks and noses clogged with frost. We huddled in our tents eating pasta and salami, with loaves of chapati that were full of sand that the local monopolist leavened into the flour to increase its weight. The sherpas requested the water we drained from our pasta and drank it from small wooden bowls they pulled from their coats. When not working Kolesniak read to us aloud from something entitled Reign of Blood, about Idi Amin’s dictatorship. From this we learned that Amin kept his ex-wives’ severed heads in his kitchen freezer in order to keep his current wife in line.

We believe in acclimatizing by working hard and stressing the body. Only multiple ascents at these altitudes can teach you how you’re really doing; the first few times, every sensation feels abnormal, and the body is sustaining such a beating that it’s hard to judge how poorly it’s adjusting. To get to Camp 1, at 5,500 meters, we had to negotiate a maze of ice falls. We left on schedule at midnight, the advance team having already pressed on ahead, with Kolesniak, as leader, bringing up the rear to better follow the progress of the entire group spread out ahead of him.

Telephone reception is now much better than it used to be, so even in the high valleys blackout periods last days rather than weeks, and Agnieszka had managed to get through to me at the Base Camp before our first acclimatizing climb. She worked me like a strop while I turned to the tent wall and strove to ignore the jeers and jokes from Kolesniak and Nowakowski.

She said she was happy it had gone well so far, but I could hear in her voice the steeliness that derived from the extent to which she’d already disappointed herself. I asked after everything at home and she said that the night before she’d been to a dinner party at which all of the wives had wondered what it was like to love someone so often away and always at risk of never returning. She said she got so fed up that she finally started answering, “Why? Have people died doing that?” She said it was worse than when she met climbers and they asked if she climbed, and then seemed to believe she couldn’t register the change in their expressions when she answered.

“Are you there?” she asked.

“Oh, you left me at home with the baby and the dishes and the window sash that needs fixing,” Kolesniak sang out in his stupid falsetto.

“The boys are having a time of it, are they?” she asked.

“We’re going up to Camp 1 in a few hours,” I explained.

“So you need your rest,” she said.

“I’m fine,” I told her.

She said that after we’d said goodbye this time, upon leaving the airport she’d merged onto the highway in the wrong direction and then had thought to herself, Who cares? She’d gone thirty kilometers before Wanda’s complaining had allowed her to summon enough energy to turn around. When I didn’t respond, she added she sometimes felt superfluous and uninvolved with my concerns, but then realized that was only because she was superfluous and uninvolved with my concerns.

“We were talking about this maybe being the last trip for a while,” I told her. “Jacek and me.”

“You’re addicts,” she said. “Krystyna and I decided that the night you left. A trip like this is about the loss of your ability to control the dose.”

“I’m lonely,” Kolesniak sang while he stripped excess weight from his pack. “Here in my bed with only my zucchini.” He opened his hood and stretched wide its collar to show me again the tattoo on his neck in English: Love Is Pain.

“I’ll think of something,” I told her.

“Oh, you’re resourceful when it comes to things like raising money for climbing,” Agnieszka said. “It’s in everyday life that you’re not so clever.”

“I never claimed I was clever,” I told her. “I only know I want to be with you.”

“Who in their right mind tries to build a relationship with a high-altitude winter mountaineer?” she asked. “I mean, when you’re with me you seem to understand words like ‘love’ and ‘commitment.’ ”

“They mean more to me now than they ever did,” I told her.

“I signed up for this,” she said. “But what about people who didn’t? Like Wanda?”

“This trip’s different,” I finally told her.

“I know,” she said. “The more people a mountain’s killed, the bigger deal it is to climb it.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I told her.

“What would happen in Formula 1 racing if one out of every twenty-five drivers died?” she asked. “How long would it take people to put a stop to it?”

“If you can’t live with what I’m doing, then I won’t do it,” I told her. “If it comes to that.”

“Let me lay it out for you so you can think about it,” she said. “If you felt about me the way I feel about you, you would stop climbing. Period.”

“Let’s go, Chief,” Kolesniak said, giving my shoulder a shove. “Coffee klatch is over.”

“I have to go,” I told her.

“Of course you do,” she said. “Listen to me: you come home alive.”

“I will,” I said.

“I love you,” she said. Then she hung up.

Nanga Parbat is the world’s ninth-tallest mountain, its summit at nearly the cruising altitude of commercial airlines. Passengers on flights from Islamabad to Beijing fly past it, not over it. It appears as a pyramid in the sky above an ocean of cloud. It has three faces: the Rakhiot, the Diamir, and the Rupal. The Rupal features the highest known precipice in the world: an ice wall of some five thousand meters. The Diamir, considered the climbable face, involves an ice fall known as Death Alley and, above that, a couloir pitched at seventy degrees and rising one thousand meters to the crest of a northwestern ridge. We dug Camp 2 into the top of that ridge before clouds and snow reduced visibility to zero.

Inside the tents with the stoves operating the temperature was twenty below. We could only imagine the temperature outside. It was so crowded that everyone had to lie still for one of us to accomplish anything. In that kind of storm everyone bunked with whomever they found themselves beside in line, and so Kolesniak, Bieniek, and I took turns every few hours to go outside and loosen the heavy accumulations straining the sides of the tent. Once he was settled Bieniek struggled with his camera, which was refusing to work because of the cold. Kolesniak told stories of the catastrophic Central Peak expedition of ’75: the immeasurable winds that shredded their tent from around them and blew melon-sized rocks into the air, the same windstorm that on the other side of the ridge severed their teammates’ tent moorings and swept their entire camp off the edge of a drop that fell a vertical mile.

Bieniek’s wrist alarm went off and his little boy wished him another good morning. He then mentioned he was lucky to be here, having on his last trip overreached on a belay and fallen thirty feet and landed on his side on rock. He’d impacted with such force that his heart had come out of its casing.

“You know what they say,” Kolesniak said from the darkness on the other side of the tent. “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”

Bieniek went on to add that at first his boy told him he was the only one in his grade with a cool dad, but before the last two trips he’d been inconsolable at the airport and Bieniek had finally told his wife that maybe if these trips were injuring someone he loved, he should stop them.

“What’d she say to that?” I asked.

“She blew up,” he answered, a little sheepishly. “She said they’d already been injuring someone I loved.”

Kolesniak said his gesture toward family responsibility had been to buy a life-insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London. He said his wife had told him now that he had a grandchild, he’d finally find out what it was like to hold a baby.

The snow’s weight made the tent’s sides an embrace. We augered out more space by crossing our arms and twisting our torsos. Then Kolesniak enforced some quiet, since we had to be up at two a.m. for the next push. Before I fell asleep I could hear him eating jam from a little jar with a spoon.

Mielec is known as the Aviation City mostly because of the factory the Germans built during the war. It cranked out Heinkel 111s and 117s until the Allies bombed it flat. Then the Soviets rebuilt it and it cranked out MiGs. When you played in the vacant lots you were always finding unexploded artillery shells. You’d set them on a wall and try to detonate them by banging their firing pins with a rock. I only heard of it working once, and the triumphant artilleryman lost both his hands and his eyesight. The unexploded ordnance from the Allied bombers was buried more deeply, but was live enough that kids for blocks around would show up and watch when the town was digging a utilities line.

Whenever he heard the construction equipment, my father knew where to find me and would come from work to pull me out of the crowd. He repaired clocks in a street kiosk and everyone said he had golden hands when it came to fixing things. He gave me tasks, too, repairing simpler mechanical objects like rat traps or hand drills, and when I succeeded our time together went smoothly and when I failed it seemed to color the rest of our day. He told my mother that his impatience with his own children bothered him. She told him that she had enough to worry about. And when I somehow stripped the gears of a coffee grinder, he spent an hour trying to undo the damage and then gave up. On the streetcar home he remarked to himself that he wished he lived in a climbing hut in the Alps, one of those tiny shacks with a bed that lowered from the wall, where you saw another human being only on the occasional weekend.

For people like me, winter mountaineering is just ordinary life with the polite layers shorn away. Jacek likes to say that reunions like this with old friends are the only way to recharge our spirits. No one sees you with greater clarity than your teammates above eight thousand meters. And still they risk their lives to bring you safely down.

They say whatever your worst memory is, you see it again most often right before sleep. I climb because once I go back down, the world while I recover is easier for me. Agnieszka’s eyes and mouth become again my garden and our entangled sleep my chair in the sun.

Kolesniak had us up by two and under way by three. The expedition climbed in siege style, with fixed camps en route stocked with bivouac gear and food and fuel. Each climb to set up a camp and return was itself a mini-expedition and furthered our acclimatization. We stepped out into darkness and blowing snow and fell into line, and up above could see bobbing lights and black figures already ascending a steep belt of rock. Above the rock the route was hard ice under unconsolidated snow that by dawn had gotten very deep: Jacek, in the lead, was up to his chest in powder, working his arms in a breast stroke to clear the space ahead. At sunrise Nowakowski took over, leading us up a serac of blue opalescent ice and then tunneling into a mass of overhanging snow that pummeled down on the rest of us. By the time my turn came I had to kneel into the deep drifts above me on the slope in order to compress them to provide traction for my crampons. In the sun and working hard we were almost warmed. We were grateful for the relative calm. Even the plumes from the summit crest were diminished.

On a flat spot atop the Kinshofer Step we erected Camp 3 and collapsed and ate. Most of us could barely move. From above, Camp 1’s orange tents in the snow looked like something in a petri dish. The wind picked up. Cirrus clouds traversed to the northeast, a reliable sign of approaching trouble. When at a distance of forty kilometers Masherbrum was curtained by dark clouds, that was our meteorological alarm bell: at the speed the storm was moving we’d have just enough time to get down to Camp 2. We descended in a stew of white with snow crystals spiraling up around us.

I rode out the storm with Nowakowski and Leszek. Condensation froze into ice sheets on the tent walls and then shook off onto our heads. Leszek discussed what a bitch it had been to lose a third of his toes and four of his fingers. He’d tried to cook breakfast for friends and kept dropping the frying pan. A young woman had exclaimed to him at a party, “You’re still climbing? With no fingers?” and he said he’d told her to go back to her television: that was her life. His was a little different. While he spoke he organized and reorganized each of our packs. His unhurried attention to detail made him intolerable at sea level but at altitude kept him alive.

By late the next morning the storm had passed and another was blowing in. We left Leszek at Camp 2 and ascended back to Camp 3. By the time we arrived powder avalanches resembling cumulus clouds were being blown off the mountain at right angles by the wind.

We used our knives to cut chunks of snow for tea. The snow fell continuously all day with increasing intensity. We peered out of doorways into what looked like a milky vapor. In the lee of the wind, the snowbanks rebuilt themselves with alarming speed. We were all suffering variously from the cold. Nowakowski’s toes were dark blue. The nail of Kolesniak’s index finger was missing but he said the finger hurt, which was a good sign. Everyone was queasy, the fluid loss through breathing at altitude having wiped out our body salts. Our heads were metal doors that somebody was kicking with hobnailed boots. We shared our last big meal, a banquet of sardines and powdered potatoes and soup. Kolesniak poured the sardine oil onto his split fingertips to soothe them. Leszek reported by radio from below that his tent was getting buried so deeply that when he went outside there were no traces of the guy lines.

We were at that stage of the expedition in which home had begun to seem imaginary. Trying to plan meant wading in one’s head through a murky and drugged marsh. If some of us were going to press on to Camp 4 and then the summit, we would have to go soon. Our luck, such as it was, wouldn’t hold out much longer. A mountain like this was the apex of however many gigantic river valleys, all of which in winter were storm machines, sending their masses of evaporated water up its slopes at high speeds. The next morning made our decisions for us. Kolesniak’s headaches were so bad he could barely see. Nowakowski reported that he’d started to spit up blood. They both had to shed altitude, and quickly. They’d wait for us at Camp 2 or maybe even Camp 1. Jacek, Bieniek, and I would be the ones going up.

The four of us husbands and wives had stayed at that pub until five in the morning. We hadn’t even had enough cash to pay the bill, so Agnieszka and Krystyna promised to return the next day to settle up. “Where we’re going to get the money, I don’t know,” Agnieszka complained once the unhappy bartender finally left us alone.

The flight to Islamabad was leaving at eleven. Krystyna had taken to drawing patterns in the condensation rings on the table in order to manage her frustration, and Agnieszka every so often ran her hand through my hair, feathering it back and holding my eyes with hers.

“It’s just so weird to watch the world celebrate their selfishness,” Krystyna said. “I can’t tell you how many times some interviewer has said that there’s not an ounce of compromise in him.”

Jacek raised a glass in a bittersweet toast to himself.

“They all believe some version of ‘Hey, I’m doing something unbelievably dangerous here; all you have to do is look after the house and kid,’ ” she went on. She seemed so worn out with sadness that she was unable to look at him.

“At some point, the wife begins to get it,” Agnieszka said, her arms at her side. I could feel the absence of her hand from my hair. “Being away all the time just isn’t that hard for them.”

“Leaving you is the worst thing I do,” I said.

“Is it?” she said. She sounded genuinely touched that I thought this might be the case. “You know, you sign on for the ride, but then you wonder how long the ride can continue.”

“I have to piss,” Jacek said morosely.

“I never thought we’d be together this long,” Agnieszka explained. “I thought we’d either separate or you’d get killed.”

“Teresa Nelec always used to tell me that being a winter mountaineer’s wife meant always being ready for the funeral,” Krystyna said. “She told me that when her daughter was three, she asked why so many women came over to stay with her and cry. That was her reward for all the weeks he was off in Chad or the Himalayas and she was home with a baby and no car and no money.”

Jacek staggered off to the bathroom. The three of us just sat there. I helped Krystyna with her condensation rings.

“You always say you want to stop climbing, but on your own terms,” she told him once he returned. “And those terms always turn out to be one more gigantic mountain.”

“You know, when climber friends ask what you’re up to, everyone says, ‘Oh, I’m leaving for this’ or ‘I’m getting ready for that,’ ” Jacek said. “If you tell them, ‘Oh, I’m getting a job’ or ‘I’m just going to spend some time with the wife,’ you can actually see the respect leave their faces.” He looked at Agnieszka, who looked back.

“And it’s not an experience you intend to repeat,” she said.

Krystyna drove us home since she seemed the least drunk. I thought but didn’t say that the mountains seemed to us another chance, our attempt to understand ourselves and exorcise those aspects we detested. To become the sort of person we could begin to respect.

Back in our house we looked in on the babysitter, asleep with Wanda, and I negotiated my way to the bathroom with my pants unbuttoned and soon found myself on my back in the tub, where I conceived of other insights it would be important to impart to Agnieszka. Mountaineering was the only life for which I was fit. I understood her despair: we spent every particle of energy we had to get off the mountain alive and return to our homes, then couldn’t wait to go back. We returned to be nursed back to health so we could dally in our marriages and resume our fund-raising. The difference between us and addicts was that you never got us to admit that anything was wrong with what we loved to do.

Agnieszka appeared and shut the door behind her as if she’d heard me. She’d thrown on her gray sleeping shirt and shed her pants. She put a hand on each side of the tub and leaned over me. “Every morning when you were gone, Wanda and I would take down the calendar and cross out the previous day’s date,” she whispered. “Until we got to the day we were going to the airport.”

“You’re not wearing any bottoms,” I said. I sounded appreciative.

“I would cry, too, if I were you,” she whispered, and she pushed me back when I tried to get up and climbed on top of me in the tub. “When I think of the ten million things that could have happened instead of my meeting you,” she whispered, and I grew in her hands and she put me inside her. In her bedroom Wanda cried out in her sleep, and we both stilled for a moment. Then Agnieszka started moving again. “I can’t live without being part of the debate,” she finally whispered, easing us up and down. “With my options being either to support the team’s decisions or leave.”

“I love you so much,” I told her.

“I know. We should talk about that more,” she said. And then she lowered her face to me. We woke an hour before we had to get to the airport, only because Wanda was stirring in her bedroom again and calling for us.

After any prolonged stay above five thousand meters, the body begins to consume itself. Conditioning deteriorates. Fat disappears and muscle tissue follows. With each moment of acclimatization at altitude, strength decreases. Waking in Camp 4 is like waking in prison after having done something awful the night before. The wind seems to be ramming the tent’s nylon walls. I struggle to my knees and Jacek follows. We step out into the maelstrom.

The tent is buffeting as furiously as white water rapids. The sky is clear but to the south the clouds form a wall rolling slowly toward us. When all of that air and moisture hits the base of the mountain it will have nowhere to go but up. And as it does so it will accelerate.

Back in the tent we take final stock of the situation. We’ve now been on this mountain for twenty-eight days and have endured winter storms for twenty-two of them. Water vapor has begun to freeze solid even among the down feathers of the sleeping bags. At some point we lost the will to keep clearing the entrance, and snow has been slowly pouring in like sand through an hourglass. Every so often one of us takes a gloveful and eats it. A filling in one of my molars has cracked. But a needling pain in my fingertips suggests that my capillaries are still functioning.

Jacek loads his batteries back into the radio and calls the other camps. There’s no answer from Camp 2, and from Camp 1 Kolesniak sings out “I’m so lonely without my zucchini!” and then goes silent. The batteries are already coated with frost. The moisture’s probably done the thing in.

Bieniek has not moved since we awoke and we decide to consult with him later. Our thinking has slowed down. At altitude you imagine you’re thinking clearly, but you’re not. Urgency disappears. Sometimes you mistake the intention of acting for the act itself. Climbers have had the notion of hooking on to a belaying rope and then have stepped free-fall out into space.

Above us we can hear the white noise of the gigantic air masses splitting around the peak. Crystals continue to spatter on the nylon over our heads. We try to work it out: the tendency when this close to the summit is to expend your last bits of energy to get there. But once on the summit you still have to climb back down, with only the shortest of pauses in which to recover.

“I can do it,” Jacek says. And it’s as if he’s speaking for me. The plan becomes to go up and get back to the tent by nightfall. We’ll leave at three the next morning to get as far as possible before daybreak. We immediately set about trimming gear weight, so desperate to lose ounces that we tear labels from our clothing. We even leave the foil space blanket, which hardly weighs a thing. This activity exhausts us and after two or three actions we have to stop for a count of ten to draw some breath.

We need to wake at one to get out of the tent by three. The wind is gone but we’re still shocked by the cold. Night and winter this high are like outer space. The other mountains below look like whitecaps on the ocean.

After so much time in the tent, it’s like learning to walk again. Jacek takes the lead on ice so hard our picks ring off it as if it were a bell. We pant in the insubstantial air. For eight hours we traverse pinnacles and chop through cornices. On the ice walls we get our feet secure with the front points of the crampons and then move the ice axes and reverse the process. Every few minutes we rest, leaning into the slope, heads on arms.

Then Jacek gives out a cry up ahead and I see that there’s nothing above him; he’s swung a leg over a summit crest so narrow that he has to straddle it like a horse. I climb up behind him and we pull ourselves forward with our hands, right legs dangling down the mountain’s north face and left legs the south. My boot punches through a cornice to provide a porthole view six thousand meters down. Jacek’s babbling something but I can’t make out what. I’m just relieved the wind is manageable.

Even at this time of day — is it noon? — the sky above is indigo, fading into a pink upper atmosphere.

We have to descend nearly immediately if we’re going to reach the tent before sunset. It takes some minutes to communicate that to Jacek by shaking his shoulder and shouting into his ear. We dismount the crest and belay one another downward as if negotiating a ladder, taking turns as anchors with our ice axes. If we start sliding in the shape we’re in, we won’t be able to stop. At some points the slope is so steep that we can’t see the wall below us from above. Spindrift burns our faces. A cloud mist leaves us in a half-light, like a waking dream. But an hour after darkness we manage to grope back into the tent and fall asleep instantly, one atop the other.

We wake to Bieniek’s alarm. His little boy is muffled under all of the layers. The boy repeats his good morning until we dig out his father’s wrist and turn him off.

We shake Bieniek and ask how he’s doing but he doesn’t answer. There are ice crystals in his hair. His nose and cheeks are brown. We ask more questions and he follows our movement with his eyes, though otherwise no longer seems present.

Once we’re sufficiently revived we make some tea with the last of the gas in the stove. There’s so little air in the tent that the flame is a small blue halo above the burner.

We shouldn’t start this late in the day, but we have to leave nonetheless. We assemble what bivouac gear we can for the likelihood that we’ll spend the night out in the snow. Jacek climbs from the tent as I put a farewell hand to Bieniek’s shoulder. His half of the tent is caved in. I touch a glove to his face and he doesn’t stir, but when I remove it he asks for water. While I pour him a cup, he says, “It’s quiet out. You could go down.” I ask if he can stand and he doesn’t answer. He no longer seems to be breathing. I lean in close, and listen, then set the cup on his chest and climb out myself.

Jacek leads on the way down. During a rest break in an ice gully he tells me to keep an eye on him, because he’s starting to hallucinate again.

The storm blows in while we descend. Every few feet I’m surprised to find I’m still moving. It’s impossible to belay each other in these conditions but the alternative is to sit down and die. On less steep stretches I’m frightened by momentary blackouts from which I emerge after apparently having proceeded five or six paces.

During another rest break Jacek informs me he can’t breathe properly and asks if his lips are blue. Our boots hang out into space off the ledge on which we’re sitting. The wind is such that it looks like we’re kicking with them.

I tell him not so blue. The process begun in the tents is accelerating with the strain of all this agonized work: his lungs are filling with fluid, drowning the alveoli that absorb the oxygen.

We keep plodding downward. Finally in the starlight I can feel how close we’ve come to the edge of a giant balcony and I force us to stop. We dig a shallow snow cave in a languid stupor and then spoon inside it, taking turns on the warmer side. Even only this much lower, the air feels richer and full of oxygen, a pleasure to breathe.

The storm gets worse. A dull thundering rolls down from the summit pyramid. One of Wanda’s gestures sticks in my memory and I worry it like a puzzle. As my way of rejecting the notion that no more messages will get through, and that home has become an imaginary thing, I compose what I’m going to say to Agnieszka by way of apology.

The morning after our first night together, she told me that her brother had died climbing. When she went through his things, his assets turned out to be his equipment, most of which was left on the mountain. He’d always told her not to worry about the trip they were discussing; the next trip was the one that was going to prove dangerous. She told me this on the living room floor, her legs still wrapped around me. She was weeping and I was inside her. I analogized the intimacy in electrical terms, thinking we formed a complete circuit. After she pulled away from our kiss she said she still didn’t accept that he was gone. That she’d told herself, toward the end of his memorial service, he still had five minutes to turn up.

We should have been talking about all of this. But there’d only ever been time to discuss what had happened since I was gone, and where I was going next.

The hand that was clutching Jacek to my chest seems to have disappeared. I hold the glove up to the darkness but the fingers refuse to move.

He asks for some water and then doesn’t drink what I pass him. He recites my name and then, some hours later, Krystyna’s, until we pass beyond words some time during the night. We doze and wake and the difference seems hard to parse. When my eyes refocus there’s a strange shimmer all around us, as if the light is coming off the surface of the snow itself.

Agnieszka! I want to tell her. The mountains have brought us together, as well. They’ve always been the authors of our development. They’ve allowed us to see what no other human beings have ever seen. They’ve siphoned away the warmth, down to our core and beyond, as payment. They’ve left you and our child the notion, never correct, that you were alone all along. They’ve ensured that we’ve progressed this far, and no farther, when constructing our connections to this wild and beautiful earth.