The Winter Session at Silberkamm

• Chapter 1 The Fading Express
• Chapter 2 Letters of Admission
• Chapter 3 Above the Timberline
• Chapter 4 The Great Quadrangle
• Chapter 5 Dust and Latin Epigrams
• Chapter 6 The Bursar's Ledger
• Chapter 7 Echoes in the Lecture Hall
• Chapter 8 The First Snowfall
• Chapter 9 Shadows in the Library
• Chapter 10 A Telegram from Vienna
• Chapter 11 Whispers in the Refectory
• Chapter 12 The Avalanche at White Pass
• Chapter 13 Cut Off from the World
• Chapter 14 Kerosene and Midnight Oil
• Chapter 15 The Frozen Observatory
• Chapter 16 An Unofficial Curriculum
• Chapter 17 Footprints in the Drift
• Chapter 18 The Dean's Secret
• Chapter 19 Voices in the Corridor
• Chapter 20 Cracks in the Glacier
• Chapter 21 A Confession of Failure
• Chapter 22 The Winter Solstice
• Chapter 23 The Bell Tower Vigil
• Chapter 24 Clearing the Path
• Chapter 25 The Thaw at Silberkamm
• Chapter 26 Departures and Beginnings

The Arlberg Orient Express was dying. Or perhaps it was only the decade that was dying, slipping away into the gray, rain-streaked valleys of the Vorarlberg like grease down a kitchen sink. Through the double-paned glass of the third-class compartment, the world had lost its color, reduced to a charcoal sketch of sodden larch forests and jagged, slate-colored peaks that sliced into a low, weeping sky. It was late October in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-eight, and the great economic engine of Europe was humming a low, anxious tune that sounded remarkably like a death rattle.

Margarethe Becker pressed her forehead against the cool glass, ignoring the greasy smudge her temple left behind. Her wool cap, knitted by her grandmother from coarse, undyed sheep’s wool that still smelled faintly of lanolin and wet pasture, did little to keep out the draft that whistled through the worn brass window fittings. She was nineteen years old, her hands were red and chapped from a youth spent scrubbing flagstones in a Linz orphanage, and her entire worldly wealth lay in a battered wicker suitcase beneath her feet, secured with two turns of hemp rope.

Inside that suitcase, tucked beneath three darned flannel blouses and a single pair of sensible leather shoes, was a heavy envelope of cream-colored parchment. It was addressed to her in an elegant, spidery calligraphy that seemed to belong to another century entirely. To Miss M. Becker, it read, Scholarship Candidate for the Winter Session. It was signed by the Registrar of the Silberkamm Institute, an institution she had never heard of until a retired schoolmaster in Upper Austria had noticed her uncanny ability to translate Virgil without a lexicon and submitted her name to a charity fund in Vienna.

The carriage shuddered violently as the locomotive began its grueling ascent toward the high passes. Opposite Margarethe sat an elderly priest whose cassock was shiny with age and soup stains, his head nodding in a rhythmic, somnolent dance with the clack-clack of the steel rails. Next to him, a commercial traveler in a cheap oilskin coat slept with his mouth open, his breath smelling faintly of stale beer and cheap tobacco. They were travelers of the lower margins, people who smelled of coal smoke and cabbage, destined for the small, damp towns of the foothills where life was lived in shades of brown.

For three days, Margarethe had ridden the rails westward, watching the flat, industrious landscapes of her childhood give way to the terrifying, vertical geometry of the Alps. She felt small, almost microscopic, beneath the weight of these mountains. In Linz, the world had boundaries; here, the earth seemed to have risen up in revolt against the sky, frozen mid-gesture in an act of monumental violence.

The train hissed to a halt at a small, wayside station where the platform was nothing more than a strip of packed gravel. Through the steam that rose from the engine’s underbelly, Margarethe saw a wooden sign painted in peeling black letters: Bludenz. This was the junction. From here, the main line continued toward the glittering, decadent playground of Zurich and Paris, while a narrow-gauge branch line crawled up into the high, dead-end valleys where the Silberkamm lay hidden.

She dragged her wicker suitcase down the corridor of the carriage, her boots clattering on the iron plates between the cars. The air outside was shockingly cold, a sharp, metallic draft that tasted of pine resin and ice. It was a different kind of air than she had ever breathed before—it didn't linger in the lungs but seemed to pierce them like small needles.

"Silberkamm?" she asked a railway guard whose mustache was frosted white with condensation. He looked at her wicker suitcase, her home-knit cap, and the cheap, thin wool of her coat, and shook his head with a grunt that might have been pity or merely irritation. He pointed with a gloved thumb toward a small, single-carriage train that stood on a siding, its small boiler puffing a weak, gray plume of smoke into the mountain mist.

Two carriages ahead, in the wood-paneled comfort of a first-class compartment that smelled of roasted coffee and expensive Turkish tobacco, Dr. Hugo von Althof was also watching the rain. He did not press his forehead against the glass; he knew precisely how much coal dust settled on the exterior of the Arlberg Express during a three-hour run, and he had no desire to ruin his charcoal-gray wool coat, tailored in Vienna before the war when tailors still used real English cloth.

Hugo was forty-two, though his hair, silvered at the temples like the birch forests of his native Styria, made him look older. His hands were long, pale, and unblemished by manual labor, the hands of a man who had spent twenty years turning the pages of rare Greek folios and writing monographs on the minor elegiac poets of the late Roman Empire. He was returning to the Silberkamm for his ninth winter session, and the prospect filled him with a weariness so profound it felt like a physical weight behind his breastbone.

"Another year, Althof," a voice murmured from the opposite corner of the compartment.

Dr. Stefan Korda, the institute’s lecturer in natural philosophy, was polishing his spectacles with a silk handkerchief. Korda was a small, round man with the industrious air of a badger, his waistcoat pockets always bristling with slide rules, pocket barometers, and small brass instruments of doubtful utility.

"Another year," Hugo agreed, his voice dry. "Though 'year' is perhaps too generous a term. It is a hibernation. A ten-month exile in a stone box surrounded by adolescent boys who would rather be skiing and scholarship girls who believe that a knowledge of Latin grammar will somehow prevent them from becoming governesses."

Korda chuckled, a dry, rattling sound. "You are remarkably cheerful today, Hugo. Is it the weather or the prospect of the Dean's opening address? I hear he has purchased a new set of Latin dictionaries from Leipzig. He intends to make the study of the Punic Wars compulsory for the preparatory class."

"The Dean is a man who believes that if one yells loud enough in Latin, the twentieth century will simply go away," Hugo said, leaning back against the plush leather headrest. "He does not realize that the twentieth century has already arrived, and it has brought machine guns and inflation with it. Our endowment is worth exactly one-third of what it was in nineteen hundred and fourteen. The roof of the library leaks over the medieval theology section, and the cook has informed me that we will be eating turnip soup three times a week by January."

"A healthy diet for the intellect," Korda said, adjusting his spectacles. "It keeps the blood from pooling in the stomach. But tell me, did you see the list of this year's scholarship students? There is a girl from Linz. The daughter of a railway clerk who died in the typhus epidemic of eighteen. Her papers were forwarded by old Father Gregor. He swears she can read Greek prose at sight."

Hugo closed his eyes. "Father Gregor is an idealist who lives in a parish with three hundred souls and five hundred cows. To him, anyone who does not stutter when reading the liturgy is a genius. The girls are always the worst, Stefan. They have that terrible, desperate earnestness of the self-taught. They memorize everything because they are terrified of being sent back to the laundry or the dairy. They have no style, no sense of rhythm. They treat the language of Cicero as if it were a bookkeeping ledger."

The train gave a violent lurch as it cleared the switchback, the squeal of the brakes echoing off the stone walls of a deep cutting. Hugo opened his eyes and looked out at the valley below. It was disappearing into the twilight, the small chalets of the peasants looking like dropped tinderboxes on the vast, dark slopes of the mountain.

Above them, invisible behind the heavy mantle of cloud, lay the Silberkamm. The mountain itself was a monstrous tooth of limestone, seven thousand feet above the sea, its upper ridges perpetually choked with ice. Nestled on a narrow shelf of rock just below the timberline was the college—a former Benedictine monastery that had been converted into an educational retreat for the sons of the Austrian and German elite who required "character development" in a climate where the air was too cold for vice.

"We should change," Korda said, rising and reaching for his leather portmanteau. "The branch line is always damp. If we do not secure the seats near the stove, we shall have stiff knees before we reach the pass."

Hugo did not move immediately. He watched a single drop of rain trace a jagged, erratic path down the glass, hesitant and slow, before it was suddenly swept away by a gust of wind as the train entered the shadow of the mountain. He felt a sudden, irrational desire to stay on the express, to let it carry him past the junction, through the tunnels, down into the warm, olive-scented valleys of Lombardy, or to the muddy canals of Venice—anywhere where the ground was flat and the air did not smell of impending snow.

Instead, he stood up, adjusted his hat in the small mirror above the seat, and picked up his leather briefcase, heavy with the uncorrected examination papers of thirty young men who believed that the ablative absolute was a form of medieval torture.

The branch-line train was indeed cold. It consisted of a small tank locomotive and two wooden carriages that looked as though they had been salvaged from a scrap heap in the previous century. The seats were slatted pine, worn smooth by generations of peasants, hunters, and students, and the single iron stove in the center of the carriage threw off more soot than heat.

Margarethe sat near the door, her hands tucked into her sleeves to keep them from turning blue. The carriage was nearly empty, save for two farmers in rough loden capes who spoke in a thick, incomprehensible mountain dialect, and three young men in expensive sports jackets who sat at the far end, their loud, confident voices filling the damp air.

They were students, she realized with a small flutter of anxiety in her throat. They wore the small, colored caps of the Austrian student corps—though without the duel-slashed cheeks that were common in the universities of Vienna or Graz—and their leather boots were brand new, smelling of expensive dubbin. They spoke of ski runs, of girls they had met in Salzburg during the summer, and of the various ways one could smuggle schnapps past the porter’s lodge at the Silberkamm.

"Old Althof is on the train," one of them said, a tall, fair-haired boy with a small mole on his chin. "I saw him at the junction. He looked as though he had just come from a funeral. His own, most likely."

"He always looks like that," another replied, laughing. "My father says Althof hasn't written a new lecture since nineteen hundred and twelve. He just changes the dates on his notes so we think he's keeping up with the excavations in Asia Minor."

"He’ll be in a worse mood than usual this term," the third said, leaning forward. "The Dean has cut the library budget again. They’re using the coal allowance to heat the main hall, which means Althof’s study will be like a meat locker. He’ll make us translate Seneca just to keep his own fingers warm."

Margarethe listened, her eyes fixed on her wicker suitcase. These were the boys she would be competing against. They spoke of the professors as if they were old, slightly troublesome servants, and of the college as if it were a winter resort where they were occasionally required to read a book. They had no idea what it was like to have to account for every groschen spent on ink, or to study by the light of a single tallow candle because the orphanage master begrudged the cost of paraffin.

The train crawled upward, the engine panting like a dying beast as the grade steepened. The pine forests closed in around them, the trees tall, black, and silent, their branches drooping under the weight of an early, wet snow that had begun to fall in the higher altitudes. The rain had stopped, replaced by large, heavy flakes that stuck to the window panes like white feathers.

Through the glass, Margarethe could see the road that wound alongside the tracks—a narrow, stony track that was already turning into a canal of gray mud. A single horse-drawn cart was struggling up the slope, the driver wrapped in a sack, his whip cracking uselessly over the wet flanks of his horse. The world was shrinking, the horizon drawing closer and closer until there was nothing left but the black forest, the white snow, and the steady, rhythmic chug of the engine.

She reached into her coat pocket and touched the letter again. The parchment was slightly damp now, limp from the moisture in the air. The Silberkamm Institute, the letter said, offers to those of proven industry and intellectual promise an environment free from the distractions of the modern age, where the mind may be tempered like steel in the solitude of the high Alps.

It sounded like a temple. Or a prison.

Hugo von Althof sat three rows behind the students, his hat pulled low over his eyes to discourage conversation. Stefan Korda had already fallen asleep, his chin resting on his chest, a small book on thermodynamics slipping from his limp fingers.

Hugo knew the three boys at the end of the carriage. They were the sons of industrial barons from the Ruhr and Viennese bankers who had survived the inflation by buying up real estate. They were not stupid, but they possessed the peculiar, Teflon-like indifference of their class; nothing he could teach them about the fall of Rome or the lyric poetry of Horace would ever stick to them. They would graduate, they would enter their fathers' firms, they would marry girls from good families, and they would remember their time at the Silberkamm as a pleasant, chilly interlude before the real business of making money began.

And then there was the girl.

He had noticed her at the junction, standing on the gravel platform with her ridiculous wicker suitcase. She was too thin, her coat was too short in the sleeves, and she had the distinctive, pale complexion of someone who had grown up in an industrial city where the coal smoke never quite cleared from the streets.

She was currently staring out the window, her hands clenched in her lap. He could see the profile of her face—a sharp, straight nose, a stubborn chin, and eyes that were too large for her face, dark and intense under her cheap wool cap. She looked like a creature that had been captured in the woods and placed in a cage, waiting for the first opportunity to bite the hand that offered her food.

"A scholarship student," Hugo murmured to himself.

They were a new addition to the Silberkamm, a concession to the modern world forced upon the trustees by the Ministry of Education in Vienna in exchange for a continuation of the state grant. Each year, three or four of them were admitted, selected from the poorest provinces of the republic. They were supposed to act as a "leaven" to the wealthy diletantes, a reminder of the virtues of hard work and republican equality.

In reality, they were social outcasts from the day they arrived. They could not afford the ski gear, the expensive wool sweaters, or the tea and cakes at the village café. They lived in the small, unheated rooms under the eaves of the old monastery, where the wind whistled through the slates, and they worked as library assistants, laboratory cleaners, and clerks to pay for their keep. Most of them left after a single session, their health broken by the cold or their spirits crushed by the quiet, polite contempt of their classmates.

Hugo felt a sudden, sharp pang of irritation. Why did they come? Did they really believe that the world had changed so much since the war that a diploma from the Silberkamm would make them equals to the sons of the Krupps and the Rothschilds? The old world was dead, certainly, but the new one was not a republic of letters; it was a machine that ground up the weak and the poor just as efficiently as the old empires had, only with better ledger books.

He closed his eyes again, but the image of the girl's face remained behind his eyelids—pale, stubborn, and entirely unprepared for the mountain that was waiting for her.

The engine gave a long, mournful whistle that echoed off the unseen peaks. The train was slowing down, its wheels grinding against the sanding gear as it approached the end of the line. The air in the carriage grew even colder, the draft from the floorboards smelling of wet iron and horse manure.

They had reached the station of Silberkamm-Dorf, the last outpost of the valley before the road ended and the trail began.

The station was nothing more than a wooden shed and a water tank, half-buried under a fresh drift of snow. When Margarethe stepped down from the carriage, the snow came up to her ankles, filling her shoes with an instant, biting chill. She gasped, her breath rising in a thick, white cloud that was immediately torn away by the wind.

The three students were already off the train, their leather suitcases being loaded onto a horse-drawn sleigh by a man in a heavy loden coat. They climbed into the back of the sleigh, wrapping themselves in thick bear-skin robes, their laughter ringing out clearly in the thin, quiet air.

"Are you for the college, miss?"

Margarethe turned. A man with a face like a dried apple, wearing a greasy leather cap and a coat that smelled of wet horse, was standing beside her. He had a small wooden handcart with him, its wheels fitted with crude iron runners.

"Yes," she said, her voice shaking slightly from the cold. "Margarethe Becker. I have a scholarship."

The man looked at her wicker suitcase, then at her shoes. "You can put your bag in the cart," he said, his dialect so thick she could barely understand him. "But you’ll have to walk. The horse has enough to do with the baggage and the gentlemen's trunks."

"I can walk," Margarethe said quickly. "It's not far, is it?"

The man spat a dark stream of tobacco juice into the snow. "Three miles. All up. If the wind stays behind us, we’ll be there before the lamps are lit. If it turns, we won't."

He turned without waiting for an answer and began to push the cart up the narrow, snow-covered track that disappeared into the pine forest. Margarethe grabbed her wicker suitcase—deciding it was safer in her hands than on the open cart—and followed him, her thin leather shoes slipping on the icy stones beneath the snow.

A few yards behind her, she heard the soft clop-clop of horses and the creak of harness leather. The sleigh carrying the three students slid past her, its runners hissing softly in the fresh snow. One of the boys looked down at her as they passed, his eyes curious and slightly amused, before he pulled his fur collar higher around his chin and turned back to his companions.

Behind the sleigh, walking with long, slow, deliberate strides that suggested years of practice on mountain trails, came the two professors. The smaller one, Dr. Korda, was carrying a leather satchel and breathing heavily, his spectacles fogged with sweat. The taller one—the man with the silver temples and the elegant gray coat—walked with his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed on the path ahead.

He did not look at Margarethe as he passed her, but he adjusted his pace so that he remained a dozen yards behind her, his steady, rhythmic footsteps serving as a sort of metronome in the silence of the forest.

The climb was relentless. Within twenty minutes, Margarethe’s thighs were burning and her breath came in ragged, sobbing gasps. The snow was falling faster now, large, wet flakes that stuck to her eyelashes and blurred her vision. Her wool cap was soaked through, the cold water dripping down the back of her neck, and her hands, clutching the rough hemp rope of her suitcase, had lost all feeling.

She looked up, but there was nothing to see but the endless, black trunks of the pines and the white veil of the snow. The mountain seemed to have swallowed them, shutting out the rest of the world, leaving only this narrow, frozen path that led up into the clouds.

"Don't stop, girl," a voice said from behind her.

She turned her head, her breath catching in her throat. The tall professor was standing just a few feet away, his face pale and expressionless under his wet hat.

"If you stop," he said, his voice quiet but perfectly clear above the sighing of the wind in the pines, "your sweat will freeze, and you will not make the gate before the first frostbite sets in. Keep your head down and look at the heels of the man ahead of you. Do not look at the top. The top does not exist until you are there."

Margarethe did not answer. She was too tired to speak, too cold to thank him or to resent his tone, which was that of a man instructing a dull-witted beast of burden. But she did as he said. She lowered her chin, fixed her eyes on the wet leather boots of the cart-driver ahead of her, and forced her feet to move, one after the other, into the white, silent drift.

The Arlberg Express was miles behind them now, rushing toward the warm valleys of the west, its bright lights and heated carriages already nothing more than a memory of a world they had left behind. Above them, in the gray, frozen twilight of the Silberkamm, the first lanterns of the college were being lit, tiny, yellow sparks in the vast, indifferent face of the mountain.

The great iron stove in the cellar of the administrative wing was the only part of the Silberkamm Institute that did not sleep during the transition between the autumn vacation and the winter term. It was a massive, subterranean furnace of Bohemian cast iron, resembling a squat, multi-limbed deity that demanded a constant sacrifice of split larch-wood and heavy briquettes of Prussian anthracite. Beside its glowing iron flanks sat Herr Kroll, the college porter, whose responsibilities extended from the sorting of the mail to the discrete disposal of empty schnapps bottles smuggled in by the sons of Silesian coal barons.

With a pair of iron tongs that had grown thin from decades of scraping against coal grates, Kroll reached into a wooden bin and tossed another block of fuel into the furnace. The draft roared, a deep, hollow stomach-rumble that vibrated through the limestone foundations of the old monastery. The warmth in the cellar was thick, dry, and smelled of coal dust, wet wool, and the sour yeast of Kroll’s afternoon beer. It was the only room in the entire three-story complex where a person could sit in their shirtsleeves without their breath turning to frost.

On a long pine table beneath a single carbon-filament bulb, the correspondence of the Silberkamm lay sorted into three uneven piles.

The first pile, the tallest by far, consisted of the thick, heavy envelopes containing the registration renewals and tuition drafts for the seventy-five young gentlemen whose families still possessed the means to pay the institute’s exorbitant fees in Swiss francs or British gold. These letters bore postmarks from Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and occasionally Zurich or London. They were sealed with expensive wax, and their contents were uniform: polite, slightly anxious notes from fathers who hoped that another winter of alpine isolation would cure their sons of their expensive habits, their socialist tendencies, or their failures in the gymnasium examinations.

The second pile was much smaller, containing perhaps a dozen thin envelopes of cheap gray paper. These were the applications for the three scholarship vacancies—letters that had arrived over the preceding six months from the forgotten corners of the newly partitioned republics. They were written in faded ink, often on lined schoolbook paper, and filled with the desperate, pedantic recommendations of village priests and provincial schoolmasters who believed, with a touching and outdated faith, that the Silberkamm was still a temple of pure German scholarship rather than a sanitarium for the idle rich.

The third pile consisted of a single envelope, which Herr Kroll now picked up and turned over in his rough, grease-stained fingers.

The envelope was made of a heavy, cream-colored linen parchment that had survived the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with its quality undiminished. On the front, written in a hand that had spent forty years tracing the curves of Greek uncials, was the name of Dr. Hugo von Althof. On the back was the seal of the Institute: a single, stylised pine tree rising from a bed of rocks, surrounded by the motto In Altioribus Veritas—In the Higher Places, Truth.

Kroll spat onto the stone floor, his saliva evaporating instantly with a tiny hiss. He knew the contents of that envelope without opening it. It was the annual appointment letter, signed by the Dean, renewing Althof’s contract for another winter session at a salary that had been halved twice since the inflation of nineteen hundred and twenty-three. It was a formality, of course; Althof had nowhere else to go, and the college had no one else who could teach the advanced syntax of the Attic dialects for the price of a cold room and three bowls of turnip soup a day. Yet every year, the letter was sent, and every year, it remained on the table until Althof arrived to claim it with his pale, aristocratic fingers.

High above the cellar, in the cold, drafty expanse of the library, the Dean of the Silberkamm, Dr. Augustus von Rademacher, was drafting his own copy of the letters of admission.

The library was a long, barrel-vaulted room that had once been the scriptorium of the monks. Its walls were lined with dark oak shelves that held ten thousand volumes of theology, classical philology, and natural history, most of them bound in pigskin that had turned the color of old lard. The air was so dry that the leather covers cracked if they were opened too quickly, and the temperature was kept just above freezing to prevent the growth of mildew—a policy that also served the secondary purpose of keeping the students from lingering over their reading when they should have been in the lecture halls.

The Dean sat at a massive desk of black oak, his hands encased in fingerless wool gloves that allowed him to hold his fountain pen without losing his grip. He was a tall, skeletal man with a beard like a frozen waterfall, his eyes perpetually squinting behind thick, wire-rimmed spectacles as if he were trying to read a illegible palimpsest in a dark room.

"The girl from Linz," he said, his voice a dry rustle that sounded like dry leaves sliding down a slate roof. "You have examined her papers, Korda?"

Dr. Stefan Korda, who was sitting on the edge of a library ladder with his legs dangling, nodded. He was still wearing his traveling coat, though he had unbuttoned it to allow the cold air of the library to dry the sweat of their climb from the station.

"Her translations of the Aeneid are quite remarkable, Augustus," Korda said, tapping his pocket barometer with an absent nail. "She has none of the usual provincial clumsiness. She understands the rhythm of the hexameter. More importantly, she does not seem to have been infected by the modern pedagogical theories that are currently ruining the schools in Vienna. She still believes that grammar is a moral duty."

"A rare virtue in a female," the Dean murmured, his pen scratching across the parchment. "And her father?"

"A railway clerk. Deceased. There is no money, of course. The regional charity administration in Upper Austria has agreed to pay for her train fare and her laundry, provided we waive the tuition and boarding fees. It is a charity case, Augustus. A pure charity case."

"The Ministry demands it," Rademacher said, his pen pausing for a fraction of a second before continuing its steady, rhythmic crawl. "If we do not accept at least two scholarship students from the public academies this year, they will withdraw our exemption from the municipal property tax. The tax on the forest lands alone would ruin us before the first snow melts. We must have our leaven, Stefan. Even if the leaven smells of the orphanage."

He finished the letter, signed his name with a swift, aggressive flourish, and blotted the ink with a piece of gray felt.

"And Althof?" Korda asked, leaning back against the ladder. "Have you given him the Greek class again?"

"Of course," the Dean said, without looking up. "Who else would take them? The boys find him terrifying, which is useful for discipline, and the girl will find him impossible, which will keep her from becoming too arrogant. Althof is a luxury we can still afford because he has no market value elsewhere. The universities in Germany are full of young men who fought in the trenches and want to teach nothing but the sociology of the state. They have no use for a man who spent the war in a Swiss library writing a concordance to the fragments of Bacchylides."

"He is unhappy," Korda remarked.

"Unhappiness is the natural state of a philologist," the Dean replied, gathering the letters into a neat stack. "It gives them that necessary edge of malice that makes their footnotes so readable. If Althof were happy, he would write poetry, and we have enough bad poetry in Austria already. Go down to Kroll, Stefan. Tell him to have the rooms under the west gable prepared for the scholarship candidates. And tell him to turn off the heat in the south wing. We do not need to warm the guest rooms until the boys from Frankfurt arrive on the morning coach."

Margarethe’s room was indeed under the west gable, at the end of a long, stone corridor that smelled of cabbage and floor wax.

It was a small, wedge-shaped chamber where the ceiling sloped down so sharply that she could only stand upright near the door. The furniture consisted of a narrow iron cot with a straw-stuffed mattress, a single three-legged stool, a pine washstand with a cracked basin, and a small iron stove that looked as though it had not seen a hot coal since the turn of the century.

A single window, no larger than a carriage portal, looked out over the great quadrangle of the college. Through the frosted glass, she could see the dark, vertical mass of the mountain rising behind the slate roofs of the dormitories, its upper slopes lost in the gray swirl of the evening snowstorm. The wind hissed through the cracks in the wooden window frame, a thin, high note that sounded like someone blowing across the top of an empty bottle.

She sat on the edge of the cot, her knees pulled up to her chest, her hands wrapped in her wet wool cap. She had not yet unpacked her wicker suitcase. It sat by the door, still bound with its hemp rope, looking like a discarded parcel that had been left behind by a previous tenant.

Her letter of admission lay open on her knees.

She had read it so many times during the long journey from Linz that she knew every line, every turn of the secretary’s pen, every curl of the Dean's signature. You are hereby informed, it said, that your application for the Winter Session has been accepted under the terms of the Josephin Foundation. You will be expected to perform twenty hours of service weekly in the library or the administrative offices, in exchange for which you will receive lodging in the student quarters and access to all lectures and seminars of the preparatory and advanced classes.

It had seemed like a miracle when it arrived in the small, damp basement office of the orphanage. To the headmistress, it was a convenient way to rid herself of a girl who had grown too old for the state allowance and whose presence in the laundry was a constant reminder of a world that lay outside the municipal boundaries. To Margarethe, it was a key to a world she had only ever seen through the glass of the bookstore windows in the Landstrasse—a world of leather-bound books, silent study halls, and people who spoke of the past as if it were a country they had visited during the summer holidays.

Now, sitting in the cold room under the roof, she felt the first cold touch of doubt.

The silence of the mountain was not like the silence of the city after the factories closed. In Linz, there was always the distant hum of the railway yards, the clank of the shunting engines, the occasional shout of a drunken worker in the street below. Here, the silence was absolute, heavy, and cold, broken only by the dry hiss of the snow against the glass and the occasional creak of the old timber rafters above her head.

There was a light tap at the door.

Margarethe started, her heart jumping into her throat. She stood up quickly, smoothing down her skirt with her chapped hands, and opened the door.

A woman was standing in the corridor. She was middle-aged, with a wide, flat face that looked as though it had been carved from a turnip, and she wore a heavy blue apron over a black wool dress. In her hand, she held a single candle in a tin holder and a small loaf of dark rye bread.

"You're the girl from Linz," the woman said, her voice dry and flat, with the short, clipped vowels of the Tyrolean valleys. "I'm Frau Gasser. I look after the linen and the girls' corridor. If you have any washing, it goes in the wicker basket at the end of the hall on Wednesdays. Don't leave your shoes out; the rats in the wainscot will chew the leather if they're greasy."

"Thank you," Margarethe said, her voice sounding small and thin in the stone corridor. "Can I... is there any wood for the stove?"

Frau Gasser looked past her into the room, her eyes resting on the small iron stove in the corner. She gave a short, humorless grunt.

"The wood allowance for the scholarship rooms is two logs a day," she said. "You'll get them in the morning when the boy brings the water. If you want more, you'll have to speak to Herr Kroll, but he doesn't give wood to people who don't have Swiss francs in their pockets. You'd better stay in bed if you're cold. The blankets are under the mattress."

She handed the loaf of bread to Margarethe, her fingers rough and cold against Margarethe’s skin.

"The dining hall is closed tonight," she added. "The kitchen doesn't start cooking until tomorrow breakfast. There's water in the pump in the courtyard, if it isn't frozen yet. If it is, you'll have to melt snow in your basin."

She turned to go, her heavy wooden-soled shoes clattering on the flagstones.

"Frau Gasser?" Margarethe called after her.

The woman stopped, her candle casting long, trembling shadows against the white plaster of the walls.

"The... the professors," Margarethe said, hesitating. "The one who walked up behind us. The tall one with the gray hair. Who is he?"

"That's Dr. Althof," Frau Gasser said, without turning around. "The Latin master. Don't go near his study if you can help it. He has a temper like an old dog that's been kicked too many times, and he doesn't like girls in his classes. He says they have no business with the classics."

She disappeared down the stairs, the yellow light of her candle fading until there was nothing left but the smell of tallow smoke and the cold, gray dark of the corridor.

In his study on the second floor of the main building, Dr. Hugo von Althof was also looking at his letter of admission.

His room was larger than Margarethe’s, but it was scarcely warmer. The walls were covered with bookshelves that rose to the ceiling, filled with his personal library—thousands of volumes of classical literature, history, and philology that he had collected over thirty years of wandering through the universities of Central Europe. A large Persian rug, worn thin in the center where his desk chair sat, covered the pine floorboards, and a small green-shaded lamp cast a pool of soft, yellow light over his writing table.

He had not yet unpacked his bags. His leather portmanteau lay open on the sofa, his shirts and books still packed in neat, professional rows.

He held the Dean's letter in his hand, his eyes scanning the elegant, spidery script with a look of cold amusement.

...and we are pleased to offer you the position of Senior Lecturer in Classical Languages for the Winter Session of 1928-1929, at a stipend of eight hundred schillings per term, payable in three installments, subject to the usual deductions for board and library maintenance...

Eight hundred schillings.

Before the war, eight hundred schillings—or rather, its equivalent in imperial crowns—would have paid for a winter in Florence, two suits of English tweed, and a box of real Havana cigars. Now, it was barely enough to buy a new pair of winter boots and a sack of flour from the valley. The "deductions for board" would cover the turnip soup and the gray bread, and the "library maintenance" was simply a polite term for the money the Dean spent on his own collection of Latin dictionaries.

He tossed the letter onto the desk, where it slid across the polished wood and came to rest against a small, bronze bust of Marcus Aurelius.

"A hibernation," he murmured, his fingers tracing the cold metal of the emperor's beard. "A winter of grammar and chilblains."

There was a soft knock at his door, and Stefan Korda entered without waiting for an invitation. He was carrying a bottle of plum brandy and two small glass tumblers.

"I took this from Kroll's office while he was stoking the furnace," Korda said, his face red with triumph. "The old thief has three cases of it hidden behind the coal bin. He thinks we don't know he's selling it to the preparatory class for five francs a bottle."

He set the glasses on the desk and poured a generous measure of the clear, fragrant spirit into each.

"To the winter session," Korda said, raising his glass. "May the snow be light, the students quiet, and the Dean's speeches short."

Hugo took his glass and sipped the brandy. It was strong and rough, burning his throat with an instant, fiery heat that seemed to clear the smell of coal smoke from his head.

"The Dean has signed the girl from Linz," Hugo said, setting his glass down. "He told me she is to be my assistant in the library. She will be dusting the Latin folios on Tuesdays and Thursdays."

Korda laughed, his small eyes wrinkling behind his spectacles.

"He has a sense of humor, our Augustus. He knows how much you love the young ladies of the republic. But be careful, Hugo. She looks as though she has a temper of her own. Did you see her eyes on the road? She looked at you as if you were a gendarme who had just stolen her purse."

"She has the look of a martyr," Hugo said, leaning back in his chair. "They are always the most troublesome. They think that because they have suffered, they have a right to be stupid. They believe that their poverty is a sort of intellectual credential, as if the Latin grammar were easier to learn if your shoes have holes in them."

"She translated the Aeneid for Father Gregor," Korda remarked. "Without a dictionary."

"Anyone can translate the Aeneid if they have a good memory and no sense of poetry," Hugo said, his voice dry. "The Germans have been doing it for three centuries. They turn Virgil into a school inspector and his shepherds into Prussian civil servants. I would rather she had never read a line of him. It is always harder to unlearn a bad translation than to learn a new language from the beginning."

He stood up, walked to the window, and looked out into the darkness.

The storm had increased in intensity, the wind howling around the stone corners of the old monastery like a lost animal. The lights of the village in the valley below had disappeared, swallowed up by the heavy, white curtain of the drift. They were cut off now; the road would be impassable by midnight, and the train would not return to the junction until the tracks were cleared by the rotary plow from Bludenz—a process that often took three or four days in early winter.

"We are in the box, Stefan," Hugo said, his voice quiet. "The lid is down."

"It is a very comfortable box," Korda said, reaching for the bottle of brandy. "As long as the grease holds out and Kroll doesn't find his missing bottles."

"It is a prison," Hugo said. "Only the prisoners are required to pay for their own chains."

He looked down at his desk, where the bronze Marcus Aurelius stared back at him with his blind, bronze eyes, indifferent to the wind, the snow, and the small, desperate ambitions of the people who had come to his mountain to die.