Savage Summit by Jennifer Jordan

Author:Jennifer Jordan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

Weeks later Terry Tullis made his way to Kurt’s hospital bed in Innsbruck, where he was recovering from surgery to remove three frostbitten fingers on his right hand. When Kurt turned and saw who was there, he cried, “Oh, Terry, you’ve come,” Tullis remembered, tears filling his eyes telling the story. “I think it was a relief to him that I’d come to see him. Without a shotgun.” But he’d come to offer solace, not shame, which Diemberger gratefully accepted.

Terry believes that K2 would have been Julie’s last Himalayan adventure. “I think she would have settled back in here and become as she was before, just a straightforward mother, loving the garden, getting out in the sun, teaching handicapped children, walking the dog. In fact, she was a very normal lady. It was just this sort of aberration that she had,” he said, laughing at the understatement of her fascination and passion for high-altitude mountains.

When asked years later why he and Willi Bauer survived and the others did not, Diemberger said that his experience taught him to conserve his energy. “They were also very fat and very slow,” Jim Curran said less kindly but nonetheless accurately. Curran’s loss of his dear friend Al Rouse remains a raw wound, and the jovial, gentle man bows his head in grief when he relives that awful summer. “Al was built like a Greyhound. Kurt and Willi were big, big men, and I think they just carried enough reserves to stick it out for that time. I think Kurt has the perfect survivor’s physique and also fantastic willpower. Stubborn, stubborn old bastard just stuck it out and refused to give in.”

While Wanda Rutkiewicz did not condemn Diemberger for leaving Mrowka behind, she did question whether he treated the Polish woman differently because they were not climbing partners: “Julie was important to Kurt, but Mrowka had been an intruder endangering their lives.” Wanda wished, at the very least, that he had been able to admit to his own human frailty, even perhaps a clouded judgment. “After K2, Kurt could not say, ‘Maybe I did not behave as I should have, but I couldn’t think about the others; I had to save my own life.’ But he never did, and I have this irrational bad feeling about him; it’s irrational because I cannot judge him. I survived. I’m alive.”

As she speaks of her sister, Zita Palau Latham’s British-controlled emotions spill over when she thinks, not about how Julie died, but of what her sister is missing.

“She would have loved to be a grandmother,” Zita says, pausing to let a horribly loose cough rumble through her tiny body, one gnarled hand holding onto her chest, the other keeping her cigarette aloft so that the ash doesn’t fall on the velvet settee. It sounds like a freight train moving through a rickety covered bridge with a thousand loose boards. When she can again speak, with her eyes red from the effort and the emotion, she says, “She would have been so proud of Chris and Lindsay.

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