The knock on Josef’s cabin door came at 1:00 a.m. As soon as he’d unlatched it, Magda pushed into the little room.
Standing before him, eyes red as if she had been crying since the dinner, she smacked him as hard across the cheek as she could. “That’s for deceiving me.”
Pushing past Josef, she walked to the porthole of his cabin and looked out at the calm sea and the black, star-filled horizon before hanging her head and resting her hand on the pile of books and notes on Josef’s desk. “I should hate you, but I can’t, and that makes me even angrier.”
“There is no reason for you to hate me, Magda.”
“But there is. I thought you were kind and good, just a young adventurer seizing an opportunity to do what he loves. But how can you be, really, if you are accompanying a man like Schmidt on an official German expedition?”
“I can’t tell you. You know as well as I that we have both been avoiding reality to pass the time.”
“But I have no choice. Mine is one of imprisonment and death.”
“And you think you are alone in that?”
“No, I share it with everyone of my mother’s blood. Do you also want to kill me because I am a mischling, a half-Jew?”
“Of course not. It means nothing to me. It never crossed my mind.”
“Well, now it must.”
“Magda, it makes no difference to me that you are part-Jewish. I have my own problems.”
“Staying alive on a mountain is not a comparable problem.”
“Of course it’s not. You should leave now.”
Magda picked up a book from the desk, looking at its cover. Turning back to Josef, she read aloud the title as a question “Der Kampf um den Everest?”
Josef instantly reached for the book, but she pulled it back from his outstretched hand.
“Was I right after all? Is this the opportunity you are really seizing?”
Exhausted, confused, totally disarmed by the soft, proud face before him, Josef sat on the edge of his bunk and, as if betraying an old love to a new one, said simply, “Yes, I am going to climb Mount Everest.”
“But how is this even possible?”
“I shouldn’t have told you. There are lives at stake here, lives that are precious to me.”
“Am I precious to you?”
“Yes.”
Letting the book drop onto Josef’s bunk, Magda took Josef’s hand, feeling the scar of his maimed finger in hers.
“Josef, I am never wrong about people. Tell me. I’m a strong person.”
He began to talk.
Slowly, precisely, Josef’s words guided Magda up the Paznaun to the coldblooded murder of his nine charges, including a little girl called Ilsa Rosenberg whom he, Josef Becker, had personally condemned to the worst death of them all. He continued to speak, pushing through his pain and guilt, to lead Magda back down again from that snowy godforsaken ridge to captivity, to torture, to more death, and finally blackmail. He explained every detail of his subsequent preparation for Operation Sisyphus as if reading from Pfeiffer’s own file. When he had finished, he pulled his hand from hers and said, “So that is it. Now you know everything.”
Looking at him with fresh tears in her eyes, Magda could only say, “I’m so sorry, Josef.”
Josef moved away from her to the small dressing table in his cabin and took something from its top drawer.
As he turned back to her he said, “Hold out your hands. Cup them together.”
Into her trembling hands Josef placed his edelweiss ring.
“This is me. I am the edelweiss, not the swastika.”
He closed Magda’s hands around the silver ring and then, gently taking her by the wrists, said, “Just as you are holding this ring in your hands, you also now hold me, my mother, my sisters. If you drop us we die, just like my friends, just like your own kind up on that hill. Are you truly strong enough to keep us safe?”
She said nothing, then kissed him tenderly.
Pulling back, she said, “I will hold you forever.”
Kissing Josef again with a passion, she pushed him back onto the bed.
Finch’s heavy book on Everest fell to the floor with a thud.