The Crossway Read online

  ‘He saw me, Max.’

  Max jumped to his feet and shuffled towards the abbey. Then he turned round and shuffled towards the school. Then he turned a third time and sat down.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  He began to giggle.

  ‘Will you be in trouble?’

  He kept giggling. ‘The abbot is always looking for an excuse to excommunicate me.’

  Next day we left the abbey together, still tiptoeing for fear of Pélissier. It was Sunday morning, eight o’clock, and the town was not yet awake. Carnival remains were strewn over the streets: ribbons and bottles and cannon-blasts of glitter. As I walked away, I looked back to see Max standing on the abbey steps. Then he waved, waved, and was gone.

  I felt no safer as I entered the forested valley south of Saint-Maurice. There was something hostile about the snowbound landscape, unmarred by any sign of life. Hiking trails threaded the forest, and in summer these trails would have been the best of the pilgrimage: a shaded walkway above the River Rhône. In winter the powder on the paths was smooth, but the ground below was uneven, and I kept losing my footing. Soon I was wading through drifts – up to my thighs, my waist in snow. My boots split, my soles peeled, and though I had been travelling for forty days, I seemed little fitter than the first week.

  A road and a railway line chased each other up the western flank of the valley. The railway was the St Bernard Express to Orsières, the last town before the pass. Above the track, the Scots pines were layered with snow like lace on a dark table. I walked on the opposite flank, but a few times I looked left and saw the train weaving a striped candy cane through the trees.

  That afternoon I came to a mound of snow as tall as a house. I had never seen this before: the wake of an avalanche. It furrowed the face of the valley and then ploughed into the river a hundred metres below. There was no route round, so I went over on hand and knee. The powder on top was fresh, just two or three centimetres, meaning the avalanche was recent – last night or perhaps this morning. Beneath were chunks of ice with raw edges, branches shorn from trees, and snowpack solid as rubble. I crawled slowly, unbalanced by my rucksack, and toppled over every few metres like a clown in a slapstick show.

  It took an hour to cover less than a kilometre of ruptured ground.

  Somebody wearing a fluorescent waistcoat was standing on the far side of the barrow. When I clambered off, he ran towards me. The track was not safe, he shouted, the mountain unstable. Then he stopped shouting and his mouth hung open. Crouched low, breathing hard, trousers and jacket stuffed with snow – it must have looked as though I was pulling myself free from the avalanche.

  ‘You are alive?’ he asked. ‘My God, you are alive?’

  At Martigny the Rhône turned east, the road turning with it. The St Bernard Express went south, however, taking a curved course along a tributary called the Drance. The Via Francigena went south as well, climbing to the Italian border.

  Next day I began walking on the west of the valley, but by midmorning I needed to cross over. When my path branched, I took the lower route down to the Drance. Although the route was cordoned off, the tape was loose, the knots undone, and I passed by without thinking.

  Half an hour later I arrived at the water. There was more tape here, tying up a wooden footbridge. It was obvious why: the bridge’s arch had cracked and its deck gaped wide.

  My limbs were rigid with cold and my thoughts racing with frustration, so I jogged on the spot and tried to think of a plan. I needed to reach Orsières before the end of the day, and still had several hundred metres to climb. The channel was too deep to ford, the current too fast, and the only other footbridge was three or four kilometres off course. There were boulders above the waterline, yet too few to stepping-stone across. However, as I stared at my map, the gap in the deck taunted me. Surely it was close enough to jump?

  Ducking the tape, I moved onto the bridge. The wood was planed with ice, and my boots stuttered for grip. I slipped once, once more, snatching at the handrail to keep upright, but after four paces the planking gave way and I plunged into the Drance.

  As I fell, the weight on my shoulders pulled me back, rucksack smacking flat against the deck. I reached for the handrail, but it slid from my grip, fingers skimming off the rail, the balusters, the slatted deck. I reached out a second time, and the handrail came loose.

  The stream was so cold that it skinned the tissue from my shins. Hamstrings tense and spasming. Thighs barbed with thorns. Penis stinging, gone numb. And a smell like stainless steel that was water a few degrees above freezing.

  When my hips tipped off the bridge, my whole body wheeled round, legs swinging behind me, chest levering forwards. The weight of my rucksack pivoted, and rather than pulling me back, it threw me face-first into the Drance. But I did not sink. Instead, I hung there half-submerged.

  It took a moment to understand what had happened. My rucksack was hitched on a kink in the balusters, its straps holding me above the torrent.

  I was saved. I was stuck.

  The bridge’s wooden piers were still intact, and after splashing around for some footing, I dug my left knee into the girders, raised my right hand onto the trestle, one, two, three, lift – and I was out of the water. Then I hauled myself off the deck and onto the bank. For a while I tried to get warm by doing press-ups, but my arms were lame and I could do nothing except lie on my rucksack, gulping and heaving and feeling very ashamed.

  The whole incident happened too fast for fear. Afterwards all I experienced was a desperate desire to try again. A short distance back the railway cut the valley on a bridge of poured concrete, and once I had changed from my soaking clothes, I scrambled up the path and dropped to the track.

  Trains approached the bridge via a tunnel, its mouth in shadow. I could see nothing through the darkness, and though I listened for a few minutes, I heard only the urging of the rapids below. So I decided to risk it.

  Stepping onto the bridge, I experienced that strange vertigo caused not by height, but by a sense of smallness. It was windy here, the air pressing at my legs, my pack, tugging my eyelids and blurring the forest scenery. The mountains were blurred too, like folded lengths of fabric, each pleat a gully and every crease a crest of white. The course was narrow, and if I set my sight on a fixed point – the workman’s hut on the other bank – the gauge tapered to a single line.

  A quarter of the way over, the track flexed. I wondered if this was the wind, but no, the metal was straining under an enormous load. Watching the rails tremor and pulse, I thought I could hear my heartbeat – th-th-thump, th-th-thump, th-th-thump – but then I realized the sound was coming from the tunnel.

  I walked faster, counting the sleepers ahead, not daring to look round. Midway over, the tracks began vibrating. The trackbed was vibrating too, and the bridge’s concrete arches. I started running, feet shambling in the snow, as the sound from the tunnel grew louder and louder. Soon I could not hear the wind, could not hear the rapids. Soon I could hear nothing but a heartbeat amplified a hundred times. TH-TH-THUMP, TH-TH-THUMP, TH-TH-THUMP.

  Three-quarters of the way over, the riverbank rushed up to meet the bridge. By this point I was sprinting. Off the rails and off the sleepers, off the ballast and off the parapet and crash through the doorway of the workman’s hut.

  The train swept past, a red-and-white streamer with a cartoon St Bernard on the side. Two children, twin brothers, gazed from one of the windows, wearing blue blazers with striped bands, like naval cadets. Sitting up from the floor, I tried to salute them, but already the train was gone.

  Fr Jean-Michel’s hair was grey and his face dented into a frown. As we sat together in the Orsières presbytery, he asked the standard questions – Where was I from? How long had I been walking? Why alone? Why in winter? – without listening to my answers. Something was wrong, but I could not work out what.

  ‘And Rome, you arrive in Rome when?’

  ‘Easter.’

  ‘For the new pope.’

>   ‘The new pope?’

  ‘We must have a pope for Easter.’

  I opened my mouth, closed it.

  He went on: ‘The Pope has resigned, you understand?’

  ‘Pope Benedict?’

  ‘He is not the pope any more.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’

  Fr Jean-Michel told me what he could. Benedict was old, he said, and weak, and the problems in the Church were too much for one man. Previous popes had resigned – not recently – in the fifteenth century. It was an act of courage, of humility . . . His voice trailed off and he began to examine his coffee cup. After a minute’s silence he asked if I was following the Via Francigena. I talked about leaving Canterbury six weeks ago, crossing the Champagne vineyards and the plains of southern Marne, the hills of the Haute-Saône and the mountains of the Jura, and then circling round Lake Geneva and into the Alps.

  The dented frown became deeper. ‘And tomorrow you take the bus?’

  ‘Tomorrow the pass.’

  Fr Jean-Michel shook his head. ‘There’s no path for hikers. If you fall, if you lose your way – it’s too dangerous.’

  ‘I can use the ski route.’

  ‘You have skis? You have a guide?’

  ‘Most pilgrims walk without a guide.’

  ‘In April, May, summer – certainly – but not in February. We’ve never had a pilgrim in February, my whole time at the parish. Tonight you will sleep in the refuge. Tomorrow, the bus.’

  Perhaps it was true that, since the Via Francigena’s revival, nobody had completed the route in winter. However, prior to the opening of the tunnel, travellers had no choice. Medieval pilgrims used the Great Saint Bernard Pass throughout the year, with thousands making the journey in the snow. That is what I told Fr Jean-Michel.

  The dent softened. ‘Wilderness – you know this word?’

  ‘Where Christ fasted?’

  ‘Where he was tempted. Where he spoke to the devil.’ The priest stood up. ‘Now it is Lent. Now we are in the wilderness.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘But when Lent is finished, we will have a new pope. And you will be his first pilgrim!’

  The presbytery’s ski gear was stored in an outhouse. Fr Jean-Michel let me borrow a pair of snowshoes on two conditions. First, I must leave them at the parish on the other side of the pass. Second, if the weather closed in before Bourg-Saint-Bernard, I must turn back.

  The refuge was next door. Downstairs I found a kitchen and a dining room, upstairs an attic covered in rugs. Previous pilgrims had patched the ceiling with messages: good-luck letters, scraps of poetry, postcards and doodles and the first psalm from the Song of Ascents copied out in red crayon: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.

  I emptied my rucksack onto the dining table, looking for things to throw away. Among the rubbish I noticed a postcard of St Bernard, kneeling beneath the Virgin; a wintry scene drawn in blue biro, with a prayer written beneath; and three or four grubby sweets – all that remained of the handful given to me at the École Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-la-Salle on a mild Epiphany morning 781 kilometres ago. I buttoned the gifts into my breast pocket and repacked the rucksack.

  Tomorrow would be the hardest day of the pilgrimage. The pass was twenty-six kilometres from Orsières and fifteen hundred metres higher. And Fr Jean-Michel was right: it would not be safe to attempt the final ascent in poor conditions. But, even though the careless confidence of those early weeks had been punctured by a growing sense of danger, I knew that I would have a go anyway. Something stronger than me was pushing this pilgrimage forwards. The day’s near-misses had been a reminder of what. Bridges, train tracks, sudden accidents: these were the images that had disturbed my mind during the dark nights of the depression.

  As I unrolled my sleeping bag, I thought back to that time. Back twenty months, to a Friday at the end of May, when spring scrubbed clean the London streets.

  That evening I walked home from work and closed my bedroom door. The room was not big: eight steps long, six steps wide, with a bed occupying much of the floor. Books were piled by the wall, and a picture hung over the doorway, showing a sailing boat on a calm blue sea. The window let in the noise; the curtain let in the light.

  For the next few days I did not leave the room, but stayed inside, emptying out my life. From here every commitment I could think of was cancelled. Train tickets and theatre tickets. Birthday parties and house parties. An essay I was commissioned to write, a conference I was expected to attend, a pair of summer holidays and the interviews for a scholarship to America – I couldn’t come, couldn’t reschedule, couldn’t explain. I wanted nothing to fix me to the future, a clear run at the horizon. You see, at some point that summer I hoped to kill myself.

  The weekend was spent daydreaming – violent dreams from which I struggled to shake myself. Most were suicide fantasies: now opening my wrists in a bath, now tipping head-first from a rooftop, now jumping into the traffic, now falling, now falling. The rest were memories I had tried to bury, of a boy laid out on sleepers, left hand come loose, blinking the blood away. Yet it was not the dreams that troubled me, but the sensation of dreaming. Any movement in my mind was a slender, searing pain. I could not place the pain, as with a headache or wound, for it edged the limits of my awareness and made tender the space that I saw when I closed my eyes.

  On Tuesday I went to the doctor. I told her that I felt defeated, and that this feeling of defeat was so overwhelming it made dying seem the simplest way to surrender.

  The doctor sat on a yellow exercise ball. When she nodded, her whole body bounced.

  I left the surgery with a prescription for antidepressants and a list of psychiatrists to visit. Over the following weeks I took assessments for depression and anxiety, for bipolar disorder and suicide risk. Each time I had to explain how my thoughts stung and reeled, how they hurt me, how they hurt.

  Now, lying in the Orsières refuge and waiting for sleep, I thought about the months following the breakdown. What I remembered most clearly was a sense of stunned isolation, though in fact I was rarely alone. I worked in the largest open-plan office in London. I lived with my best friend, our flat midway between a crossroads and a railway. Our bathroom had a view of Victoria Coach Station, and all summer the pavements were busy with men and women about my age, dressed in sunglasses and wellies, taking coaches to Glastonbury or Latitude or a dozen other festivals. If the windows were open, I could hear their voices, their laughter.

  Even after the drugs started working, the fantasies remained, but now I was helpless to realize them, my will made weak and fitful. Instead I kept to the flat, kept to my room. Eight steps long. Six steps wide. Curtain that let in the light.

  I never took up those cancelled commitments. Ambitions, responsibilities – I let them all slide. The days were provisional, the future felt only as pressure, smothering any plans. But, after hiking to Canterbury, I began to believe that, if I made it to Jerusalem, then I would be well. This was the wager driving me through the winter. I could not turn round, or even slow down, for I feared returning to that room and those wrecking daydreams. I could only push on, push on, push on – until I walked free from the past. Yet I carried those memories with me, like the rucksack on my shoulders, the burden on my back. And the farther I hiked from home, the heavier they weighed me down.

  There was a tiny shrine in the corner of the refuge: three candles, a rosary with plastic beads, and a carving of the Virgin Mary, gathered on a tea tray. I was too nervous to sleep, so I lit one of the candles and sat in front of the shrine.

  As the flame cast its colour onto the ceiling, I read the names on the pilgrims’ letters: Luca and Laurent, Hanna and Martijn, Ana and Judith and Jetta and Mark, Stef, Stéphane, Thomas, Simon, Marianna, Federica, Élisabeth and Eva. I wondered who travelled this route because they were lonely, or lost, or wanted to learn what they believed. Who was recovering from an illness, or seeking pena
nce for past sins, or trying to mend what medicine could not cure. And I wondered if these were really the same reason, and we all walked in search of a miracle.

  Closing my eyes, I could still see the candle, fluttering in the darkness, enfolding me with light.

  I left the refuge at dawn. There was a church opposite the presbytery with granite columns vaulting the roof. The only colour came from a pair of lancet windows in the apse, their glass like an illuminated manuscript, and from an icon in the north transept showing a young man in loose robes, his right hand held up, held open. The gesture was not a blessing, but something simpler, a wave maybe, or a warning. Stand back. Stay where you are. His left hand carried a martyr’s palm, the branch thin as a quill. Bienheureux Maurice Tornay, read the sign, 1910–1949.

  A door led through to a one-room museum, where I learnt the rest of the story.

  Maurice Tornay was born in a hamlet near Orsières and baptized here in the Église Saint-Nicolas. The seventh of eight children, he was a restless, impulsive boy. On first hearing the legend of St Maurice, the Theban legionary, he promised his mother that he too would die for Christ, just like his namesake saint.

  The boy spent each summer caring for the family’s flock of sheep, but at fifteen he was sent to school at the Abbey of St Maurice. That year a French nun called Thérèse of Lisieux was canonized, having died of tuberculosis aged twenty-four. A memoir written during her sickness, The Story of a Soul, became a bestseller, and Maurice was bewitched by the book, writing: ‘Death is the happiest day of our lives [. . .] our arrival in our true homeland.’

  There were pictures of Maurice’s schooldays on the panels in the museum. They showed a grinning boy with buck teeth and bottlecap glasses standing in the middle of his class photo, wearing a stiff collar, a striped tie and the peaked cap awarded by the Society of Swiss Students. There were also collections of relics in the cabinets around the room. One cabinet held a watch chain with no watch, a Latin exercise book with split pins and the peaked cap from the photograph, trimmed in a coppery thread that might once have been gold-plate.