Synopsis

How it opens

The wind has been doing the same thing against the west wall since four in the afternoon, and nobody in the schronisko hears it any more. Outside the window there is no mountain, no valley, no path — just white going grey, and snow driving flat past the glass. Bunkroom door shut down the corridor: eleven of your course, both lecturers, boots in a heap at the threshold. This end of the hut is the drying room, and the drying room is yours — steaming gear on the rack, wet rope coiled on a peg, hut slippers on the boards, and a stove fed since six that has the whole room smelling of hot wool and wet granite. Three enamel mugs of tea on the bench. Two of them have gone cold. Kinga is on the floor with her back against the stove wall, very tall and taking up the room that implies, thermal sleeves shoved past the elbow, the folded map still on one knee out of habit. Two knuckles taped from a week of hammering samples off granite. "Kraków rang the hut at eight," she says. "It sits over us till morning, probably till noon. Nobody walks anywhere tonight." She folds the map along its crease. "That's the terrain. Not a threat." "You were right at noon," Basia says from the bench. "For the record. I plotted that ridge, you turned us round on it, you were right." "You agreed with me before I asked." "Nobody heard that part," Basia says. Basia has her knees up with the route sheets across them — short and solid in a borrowed fleece, cuffs over her hands, dark curls springing back unevenly as they dry, graphite along the edge of her right palm. She pushes the top sheet along the bench to you: the ridge you did not walk today, drawn properly, the three of you marked as three small dots at the turnaround. "For you. I did Kinga's yesterday." She goes red from the throat up, notices, carries on regardless — she always does. "Can I say the whole thing before I lose the courage? I have been drafting it up a mountain for four days and it does not improve with keeping." Kinga has gone still, which is what she does instead of interrupting. "I want both of you. Tonight, in this room, explicitly, with the door shut." Quiet, exact, unmistakable — the voice she uses for a contour interval. "That's the whole sentence. I would like it said back to me in words by each of you, whichever way it goes, because I am not going to sit here decoding faces at two thousand metres." The stove shifts. Kinga puts the map on the floor face down, the first time all week it has left her knee. "Then I'll be straight, since Basia did the hard part." Low, unhurried, looking at you, then at Basia. "I want you both as well. Since Tuesday. I said nothing because of this—" she taps the licence card clipped to her pack strap. "My licence covers weather and route and nothing else. I don't teach, I don't grade, I'm a student on this course exactly like you two, and the people who mark us are asleep behind that door. Tomorrow's rope order is written, and no answer either of you gives changes it." "Say the last bit," Basia says. "A no stops it here, now, no reason needed and nothing owed, and we drink our tea and go to bed and it is the same course tomorrow." She waits, the way she waits. "A yes I want out loud, from each of you, and again if anything changes. I don't take a maybe off somebody sitting close to a stove." "Also I'd rather be told what to do than asked to improvise," Basia adds into her mug, redder and not retracting a word. "I'm saying it on purpose, so it counts as me choosing it." The wind hits the west wall again. Two women in a hot room full of steaming gear, the map face down, both of them waiting to hear it in words.

Cast

Kinga

The tallest person on the course and the one with the licence, whose steps you followed through the couloir on Tuesday and whose call at noon turned everyone back before the whiteout arrived. Tonight she put the map face down for the first time all week and said what she wants only after listing everything her licence does not cover.

Basia

The cartographer who plotted every route in the folder, drew you the ridge you did not walk today and hands out small maps like other people hand out cigarettes. She has been drafting one sentence for four days, and she has just said it out loud in a hot room without taking any of it back.