Chapter 2: Range Cards
You bring two pairs of socks, a thermos, and the strong suspicion that you are about to be murdered in a scenic location.
At 04:55 the compound is blue-black and silent, the mountain a darker shape against the dark. Your breath smokes. You stand by the motor pool gate in your borrowed KorTac softshell, feeling like an extra in a war film, and you are about to decide this was a joke when the shadow of the guard hut detaches itself and becomes a man.
"Guten Morgen," König says. He's in full field gear: the hood down over his face, a ghillie scarf, a rifle case over one shoulder that looks like a guitar case for a much more serious band. He holds out a headlamp. "For the path. It is steep."
"You invited a translator up a mountain at five in the morning."
"Ja." A pause. "There is a reason."
"Is it a good reason?"
He thinks about it. You like that he thinks about it.
"I think," he says. "But I am not always right about what is a good reason."
The path is a goat track switchbacking up through larch and then scrub pine, and he goes first without being asked, testing loose stones with his boot, holding back branches so they don't snap into your face. He doesn't talk. You find you don't mind. There's a rhythm to walking behind him: the creak of his pack, his breath, the occasional low "Vorsicht" when the path drops away. Twice he stops and waits without turning around, as if he can hear the exact moment you need to stop, and once he puts his hand out flat behind him without a word, palm up, and you take it and he pulls you up a rock step like you weigh nothing.
He lets go immediately. You think about it for the next three hundred metres.
By the time you reach the hide, the sky in the east is going the colour of weak tea. The hide is a scrape in the hillside roofed with netting and turf, big enough for two people lying down. Below, the valley is still filled with cloud like milk in a bowl, and out of the cloud on the far side rises the target range, a scattering of steel plates on the opposite slope eight hundred metres away.
"The Polish team shoots today," König says. "Their spotter has no German. I have no Polish. The radio..." He makes a gesture that conveys the KorTac radio budget with real contempt. "Captain Wrona asked if I could correct their marksmen from here. I said yes. Then I thought, I cannot correct anyone in Polish. Then I thought..."
"Of me."
"Of you." He looks at the turf. "I could have asked the major to assign you. That would be the normal way. But then you would have to come. I wanted it to be a thing you could say no to."
You stand there in the cold with your two pairs of socks on and let that land.
"So you left a note," you say. "On a range card. With no flower."
"I thought the flower would be..." He searches. "Unfair pressure."
"König." You can't help it; you're grinning. "That's the most considerate ambush anyone has ever planned for me."
It works better than it has any right to. König lies prone behind the spotting scope with the patience of geology, and every time a Polish marksman on the lower firing line takes a shot, he murmurs the correction to you in German, and you key the radio and give it to their spotter in Polish. Hold one mil left. Wind's cycling, wait for the grass to lie down. Your elevation's good, your breathing is not.
That last one you translate more diplomatically. He catches it.
"You softened it," he says. Not accusing. Curious.
"Your breathing could be calmer," you say. "That's what I said. Wrona's men are proud. You tell a proud man his breathing is bad over an open channel, he spends the next shot proving he can breathe, and he misses."
He's quiet. The scope doesn't move.
"I used to do courts," you say, because the silence is the kind that invites things. "Criminal trials, mostly. When you interpret in court you speak in the first person. Not 'he says he took the money.' 'I took the money.' You become them, for a sentence. You learn very fast that how you carry someone's words decides how a room hears them."
"Why did you stop?"
There was a man, a Polish lorry driver in a Viennese courtroom, who had hit a cyclist in the rain. When you voiced his statement you had to say, in the first person, I didn't see her, I didn't see her, I didn't see her, nine times, because he said it nine times, and you couldn't leave any out. You went home and couldn't stop saying it.
"I got tired of saying sorry for things I didn't do," you tell König. "Now I mostly translate logistics annexes. Nobody cries over fuel tables."
He takes a long, slow breath, and on the far slope a plate rings like a bell as the Polish marksman finally hits it. You key the radio. "Trafienie." Hit.
"I joined the army because of my mother," König says.
You look at him. He keeps his eye on the scope.
"I was very big. Always. At home in Graz, people looked. They still look. My mother thought if I was going to be looked at, I should be looked at for something." The hood moves; maybe a smile under it. "She thought soldiers do not have to talk. She was right about that. Snipers talk least of all."
"And the hood?"
"When I wear it, they look at the hood." He shrugs, which in the hide means a shift of turf. "Not at me. It is easier. People decide I am frightening. Then they leave me alone and I can do my job."
"Does it bother you? Them deciding you're frightening?"
"Sometimes I am frightening." Plainly. "That is part of the job too."
You think about him at the back of the briefing room with his arms folded and his eyes on the table, and about the shallow dent in your shelf.
"You're not frightening," you say. "You broke a shelf with your head and apologised to my stapler."
The noise he makes is muffled by the fabric, but it's unmistakably a laugh this time, full and startled, as if it surprised him on the way out. Down on the firing line, a Polish voice on the radio asks why the Austrian is laughing. You tell them he's pleased with their grouping. It's the first lie you've told all morning, and you don't feel bad about it at all.
At ten they break for the Polish team to rotate. König sits up, pulls a flask from his pack and two tin cups, and pours you something that turns out to be tea with an alarming quantity of rum in it.
"For the cold," he says.
"It's ten in the morning."
"It is cold at ten in the morning."
You drink it. It's wonderful. The cloud has burned off the valley and the whole range is laid out, white peaks going on into Italy, the larches below turning gold. On the turf between you there's a little cluster of purple, the same gentians he brought you on Monday.
"This is where you pick them," you say.
"Ja. On the way up. Every morning I come here to sit and watch the wind before the others come." He touches one of the flowers with a gloved fingertip, very gently, the way you'd touch a sleeping animal. "In the second week you were here, you said something in the canteen. To the Slovak lieutenant. You did not know I could hear."
You rack your memory. You talk a lot in the canteen; it's the only place on base where people speak to you as a person and not a function. "What did I say?"
"He asked if you liked it here. You said the mountains are beautiful but the building has no colour. Everything is grey or green or black. You said you missed flowers. Your grandmother had a garden, in Kraków, and you missed it." His voice is so quiet you have to lean in. "I thought: I can fix this one thing. There is no colour in the building. But there is colour on the mountain. I walk past it every day."
You set your cup down because your hand isn't steady.
"So you climbed fifteen hundred metres every morning," you say, "to put colour on my desk."
"I climb anyway." Gruff, embarrassed. "I only had to bend down."
You want, abruptly and with total clarity, to see his face again. Not by accident in a dark office. On purpose, in daylight, with him choosing it. You don't ask. You've seen what being looked at costs him. So you do the other thing you're good at: you give him the words back carefully, so he knows you caught every one.
"Nobody's ever bent down for me before," you say. "Thank you."
He doesn't answer. But he turns his head, and through the eyeholes his eyes stay on yours for a long moment, and his hand on the turf moves an inch toward your hand and stops just short, close enough that you can feel the cold coming off the leather of his glove.
Neither of you closes the inch. It sits there between you, the most important distance on the mountain.
Then the radio crackles, and it isn't the Polish line.
"König." Horangi's voice, far too cheerful for a secure channel. "Major's looking for the translator. Which is weird, because I told him she was sick, and then I looked out the window with the big binoculars and guess where she isn't. Is she sick on the north ridge, buddy? Are you treating her? Should I tell the whole canteen you're making house calls?"
The inch closes. Not toward you. König's hand pulls back into his lap, slow and deliberate, and you watch him go behind the hood the way you'd watch a door shut.
"I will take you down," he says, in English now, flat and formal. "Now. Before the next relay."
"König, he's just being an idiot..."
"Ja." He's already packing the scope. "But he is an idiot with a very loud voice. And you will have to sit in that building with them. I will not make you the joke."
He walks you down. He holds the branches. He offers his hand at the rock step, and lets go immediately. At the gate he says, "Danke für heute," and walks away toward the barracks without once looking back.
On Thursday there is no flower on your desk. On Friday, nothing. On Saturday, the paper cup by your monitor is empty and dry, and someone has stuck a Post-it on your door in Horangi's handwriting: Bro I think I messed up.