The Ice Soldier

by Paul Watkins

  Apart from the shaggy-haired man, I was the only one in the building.

  His coal-black eyes fixed on me as I strode purposefully towards him.

  “Good morning!” I said as I came to a stop in front of the grille.

  “Giorno,” he replied, still not taking his eyes off me.

  I handed him the letter I had received from the Society of Mountain Guides in London, confirming the eight men we had engaged to help us in Palladino.

  He looked at it and slowly lifted one arm off the desk. He let his hand fall open, with one finger pointing at me. “Do you know of the guide Giacomo Santorelli?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I can’t say that I do, I’m afraid.”

  The man nodded, as if expecting this reply. “Then you can meet him now.”

  Despite the gloomy reception, I was glad that things were progressing and that I was at last able to meet one of our guides.

  He opened the door to the booth.

  I held out my hand. “William Bromley,” I said.

  He did not shake my hand but only nodded. “I am Salvatore.”

  I didn’t know if this was his last name or his first, but it was clearly the only name he was going to give me.

  Salvatore led me past the rifles to a back door, which opened out onto a narrow gravel road. On the other side of the road was a cemetery, and beyond that, across a flower-speckled field where a few sheep wandered among the dandelions, the lake’s gentle waves flashed in the sunlight.

  Salvatore opened a creaky wooden gate into the cemetery. The old wood was weathered gray and was patched, like the roof tiles, with scabs of lichen.

  “Is he down at the lake?” I asked, thinking we were taking a shortcut.

  “This way,” he said.

  We walked along a path among the crumbling gravestones. The inscriptions had worn off most of them. In front of each headstone, the ground had sunk down after the coffin below had collapsed. On the more recent graves, pictures of the dead had been printed onto small ovals of porcelain and attached to the stone. Stone angels with their eyes downcast stood among the graves, their once-fine features blurred like the faces of melting snowmen.

  Salvatore stopped and turned. “Here,” he said.

  I looked at him. “What?” I asked.

  He gestured to the grave by our feet.

  There, barely legible in the inscription on the upright slates, I read the name Giacomo Santorelli. Above the name, a face was trapped within a dish of porcelain. Its expressionless eyes stared unblinking from the stone.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “He was the guide for your Henry Carton.”

  The old story unraveled in my head, how the guide had fallen down a crevasse and the only reason Carton had survived was because the rope broke. “I thought that man was lost,” I said.

  “The grave is empty,” he replied.

  I saw now that the ground before the stone was not sunk down, indicating that no coffin lay beneath.

  “If you come back here in twenty years,” said Salvatore, “his body should appear from the glacier. That is what the scientists have told us, anyway.”

  “I know Mr. Carton spoke very highly of his guide,” I said, not knowing what else to tell him, since it seemed a bit late for offering condolences.

  “Everyone spoke well of him,” answered Salvatore. “He was the best mountaineer in this region.”

  “I’m trying to understand,” I said, as patiently as I could. “Does this somehow affect my hiring of other guides?”

  Salvatore folded his arms and looked out across the lake, squinting in the glare of sun off rippled water. “No guide will go with you,” he said, so quietly it was almost to himself.

  “Why not?” I asked. “Did you not receive a letter from the Society of Mountain Guides?”

  He nodded. “We received a letter. Yes.”

  “They told us everything had been arranged, and that guides were being brought in from several towns in the area.”

  “It was arranged, but it is not arranged anymore. The Society of Mountain Guides did not say anything in their letter about the coffin you have been dragging through our streets, or about Henry Carton being inside it. This we have learned from another Englishman who came here only a few days ago. His name—”

  “Pringle,” I said angrily. “Yes, I know who he is, but I would be happy to explain everything to the guides when they arrive.”

  Again he shook his head. “They are not arriving.”

  “Then they are already here?”

  “They are not here and they will not be here,” said Salvatore. “No guides will go with you on this journey.”

  “Do you think it is too dangerous with the coffin?” I was ready to explain my modifications to the Rocket.

  But Salvatore only smiled contemptuously. “It is very dangerous to travel in this manner, but the danger is not what offends us.”

  “I didn’t realize you were offended,” I said, trying to remain calm. “I played no part in the death of your guide.”

  Salvatore turned to face me now, still squinting, as if the paleness of my northern face was hard for him to bear. “But Carton did. Henry Carton has offended us!”

  “Many guides have died,” I told him, “and many climbers, too.”

  He breathed out harshly. “It is not the fact that the guide was killed. It is the manner of his death.”

  “The fall?”

  “The rope! It was hawser-laid rope. Do you know what that is?”

  “I know what it is,” I said.

  “Good. Then you know that a rope like this will hold the weight of five men, maybe more. A guide checks his ropes before every journey into the mountains. When a rope is frayed or stretched, it is replaced immediately. This is the same kind Santorelli used to tie himself to Carton.”

  “Perhaps the rope became frayed on their journey.”

  He let his head fall back slightly and stared at me down the length of his blunt nose. “If this is true, then why did Carton say nothing about it? In fact, when he was asked by the police, he said it had not been frayed at all, and if the rope had been stretched, they would not have used it. And what is more, Carton did not return with the rope to offer us as proof.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “Only that the story Carton told us is incorrect.”

  “A lie, you mean.”

  He shrugged. “You can give it whatever name you want.”

  A breeze blew in off the lake, making the dandelions nod out in the luminous green grass.

  “So how do you think Santorelli died?” I asked.

  “I do not know. I only know that it is not the way that Carton said.”

  “Look,” I said. “I have no more of an answer than you do, but I did not cause the death of this man and neither did my friend outside.”

  “But you travel in the name of Mr. Carton. That is the thing the guides will not accept.”

  “And what did Pringle tell you about it?” I asked, my temper flaring up. “That we were on the devil’s business?”

  “It is not what Mr. Pringle told us that matters. What matters is what we told him.”

  “Which was what?” I demanded.

  “To go away. We told him to leave us alone. We do not need the advice of another crazy Englishman!” Now Salvatore began to walk back through the cemetery, talking to me over his shoulder as he went. “We are mountain guides! If a baker puts the wrong name on a birthday cake, he can make another cake. But if a guide makes a mistake, he may lose his life and the lives of his charges. Our work is very serious. We do not listen to little men like your Mr. Pringle. He thinks he knows everything about the mountains. He is like a thousand other people who go into the hills and come back to tell us what they have learned about climbing or about themselves or about the world.”

  “What is the harm in that?”

  He turned and glared at me. “No harm at all, most of the time. The harmful ones are those wh
o believe that they have found one thing, one truth above all others, that this is the only way it can be seen from now on, that everyone else is wrong and the rest should be humiliated for seeing it differently. These people are the dangerous ones. Mr. Pringle thinks that because he knows the height of all these mountains, and a catalogue of names and dates, he is as important as the mountains themselves. And Mr. Carton, he believed that because he was the first to climb a piece of rock in whose shadow we have lived for ten thousand years, that he was somehow in possession of that rock. Of course these two men ended up hating each other, not because they are so different but because they are so much the same. If you English were not so busy despising each other, you might find the time to understand what it means to live in the mountains, not just to visit them.”

  He may have said more, but I did not hear him. I was struck by an image, not of Pringle or of Carton or even of the mountains they worshipped. It was an image of Santorelli, frozen in the glacier. I saw his body suspended in the pale blue ice. His fingers were outstretched, legs halted in the motion of a swimmer, as if the glacier had enfolded him suddenly, as in the tumble of a breaking wave. But now he lay cradled in a world removed from the ticking of clocks, from the etching of years onto his skin, from the bitterness and squabbling of those who lived on with the burden of his death.

  After what Salvatore had said, I knew that there could be no changing of his mind. From the way he talked, I knew he was speaking with the voices of everyone in this little town. Before Carton’s coffin had ever scratched and bumped its way along the Via Capozza, they had decided what to do, and it had been left to this man to put their feelings into words.

  Just as we were leaving the cemetery, I noticed three graves in a corner of the churchyard. They were newer than the graves around them, and each one carried the same inscription: QUI GIACE UN SOLDATO INGLESE, MORTO NELLA GUERRA 39–45.

  I knew immediately who they must be. My eyes blurred.

  Salvatore saw where I was looking. “In the summer of 1944,” he said, “some Germans came through here on their way into the mountains. One week later, there was shooting. Then more Germans came. When they returned, it was said that there were several dead hidden in a truck whose canvas flap was pulled down. So nobody here saw them, or knew how many there were. But the Germans gave us three English bodies to bury, and this is where we put them. We could not find any names on the bodies, so we had to write that they were sconosciuti.”

  “Their names were Charles Whistler, David Armstrong, and Winston Forbes,” I said. Tears spilled down over my cheeks, carrying the salt of old sweat to my lips, where I pushed them away with the tips of my fingers.

  “They were your friends?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I replied. “They were.”

  Salvatore did not seem surprised, as if somehow the story of Carton and his guides, and of the fighting in the mountains and the bodies of the soldati inglesi and then our arrival here the day before had all been woven into the history of this town before the events even took place.

  “Thank you for making a space for them in your churchyard,” I said.

  We walked to the side door of the cooperativo. It was cold in the shadow of the building.

  “I wish that it was not this way between us,” said Salvatore.

  I felt as if he meant it, despite everything else he had said. I stood for one thing and he stood for another. And those two things had separated us as finally as the line between the living and the dead.

  Walking around the front of the building, I found Stanley basking in the sun, heels up on the Rocket and moleskin hat pulled down over his face. He opened one eye. “All set?” he asked.

  “They won’t help us,” I told him.

  Now both eyes flicked open and he drew his heels down from the coffin. “Why on earth not?”

  I explained what Salvatore had said.

  “Jesus,” muttered Stanley.

  “I don’t think he is going to help us, either.” I took Stanley down to look at the graves.

  There was nothing for me to say. To stand before the remains of someone who, if things had played out differently, could at that moment just as easily be looking down on your own grave is not a thing which can be bracketed with words, or set right with prayers, or even wept into making sense.

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON by the time Stanley and I arrived back at our campsite in the San Rafaele woods. We were tired from dragging the coffin. The muscles of my lower back and thighs complained in the angry, thumping rhythms of my heart.

  I lit the old Primus stove and put some water on to boil for tea, of which we had very little left. Fading light showed in coppery strands through the trees. Church bells tolled the hour down in town. I heard the clop of a donkey’s hooves along the Via Capozza.

  It was a while before either of us spoke. In silence, we were both reaching the same conclusion. Either we would have to give up, and give up now, or we would have to carry the coffin ourselves, along with our food and the tent. It was, according to my map, eight kilometers across the glacier before we reached the gully up which we would need to travel to reach the base of the Dragon’s Teeth. From there, no map would tell us how far up we had to climb, as none of them were detailed enough. We would not know until we had gone that far whether the coffin could be dragged or lifted to the summit. And I had no way of knowing if, once we were on the summit, there would even be room for a coffin, let alone enough stones lying about to construct the cairn that Carton had requested. With most of the mountains I had climbed, there was barely enough room for two people to stand on the summit.

  I was afraid to speak because I was worried that Stanley would try to talk us out of it, and for the first time since I had given my word to Dr. Webb, I knew I could be talked out of it. I tried to think about what it would mean to have failed at this. I could imagine myself sitting at my father’s house, in front of the fire with one of his tin cups of tea, and hearing him say I had done the right thing and my trying to believe it was true.

  So thickly did these thoughts swirl around me that I did not feel the cool sweat on my back or the tom-tom drumming of pain in my body. I did not hear the cold wind blowing through the treetops, or even Stanley’s voice, calling to me as if from somewhere down in the valley and not from right beside me. His voice grew closer and closer until at last I heard what he was saying.

  “I’ve been trying to imagine the look on Helen’s face when we show up at Victoria Station still lugging the Rocket.”

  “I’m sure she’d understand,” I said.

  “I can think of half a dozen jokes to make about it.”

  “I expect there are jokes to be made,” I said, bracing myself for the onslaught.

  But Stanley’s face remained serious. “I think about Sugden and Pringle,” he said, “and those people down there in Palladino who would like to see us fail before we’ve even started. They will be the ones to make the jokes if we give up now. And then those jokes will be the story of our lives.”

  I listened to him, hearing the old stubbornness in his voice and remembering all the times when he had exasperated me with his bullheaded words. But now I needed to hear them. Just as when I’d jumped from that Dakota, six years and a lifetime ago, there was no way home for me except through those mountains.

  THE NEXT DAY, dragging the coffin behind us like the beasts of burden we had become, Stanley and I returned to the Via Capozza. We had agreed that there was no time to lose. The longer we stayed up in the San Rafaele woods, the more likely it was that the locals would find some reason to have us arrested.

  We stopped outside the grocery shop, which was the only provisioner in town. Splintery boxes of tomatoes, beans, and apples were set out under a tattered yellow awning.

  Stanley took up his post as coffin guard, while I went inside, my pockets stuffed with lire to buy up whatever I could.

  The shop smelled of spices, soap, and cheese.

  An old woman sat beside a counter, on which ov
al loaves of bread were stacked. Beside the loaves were bowls of olives, green and black and another tiny kind which were a vivid bluish yellow. The woman was knitting a white baby sock. As soon as she saw me, she set the knitting down beside the bread, got up, and went out the back through a curtain made of beads. The beads rattled as they fell back into place.

  A moment later, a man appeared. He was small and round-faced and wearing a shirt the same faded yellow as the awning outside. His eyes were a flat blue-gray and humorless. “Prego,” he said, and took his place behind the counter.

  “I’ve come to buy some food,” I said.

  Almost imperceptibly, he moved his head from side to side. “Non posso,” he whispered, as if he were afraid to raise his voice.

  “Is there a law against selling food to us?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “You are the mayor of this town?” I asked.

  He nodded slowly.

  “And you will not help us?” I demanded. “Not in any way at all?”

  “Mi dispiace,” he said, and looked down at his shoes.

  There was no point arguing. I turned to leave and was startled when I found myself face to face with Salvatore.

  He was wearing the same thread-pulled sweater as the day before and leather breeches polished black at the knees. This, combined with his unruly hair and shaggy beard, gave him the look of a bear masquerading unsuccessfully as a man. He was holding out a can whose yellow label said SALUBRIO; it appeared to contain a stew of chickpeas and smoked ham. “Try this,” he said. “After three or four days, you will get used to it.”