The Ice Soldier

by Paul Watkins

I took the can from him, unable to disguise my confusion as to why he would be helping me now. “The gentleman says I cannot buy food here.”

  “You can buy here.” Salvatore looked past me and spoke to the mayor in words I could not understand.

  “I don’t want to cause any trouble,” I said.

  “There is no trouble,” replied Salvatore.

  I faced the shopkeeper again.

  He was holding the half-knitted baby sock, pinched between the fingertips of both hands. He nodded, to show that things had changed.

  Salvatore said he could not stay. He wished us luck and was gone.

  I loaded up the storage compartment of the Rocket with cans of beans, tinned fruit, olive oil, couscous, and cans of “Salubrio.” Having run out of prerolled English cigarettes, I bought a packet of Italian pipe tobacco, cheerfully emblazoned with an Italian soldier in full alpini mountain-trooper gear. The fact that he was still wearing a Fascist insignia on his uniform either had gone unnoticed by the manufacturers or else the tobacco had been in the shop for a very long time. We bought no wine or bread, because they took up too much space. The salesman helped me carry everything out. When that was done, I paid him.

  He folded the money away into his pocket.

  “Who is Salvatore?” I asked him. I wanted to know why his words carried so much weight in this town.

  “Salvatore Santorelli,” replied the mayor. “He is the son of the guide who led Mr. Carton to his mountain.”

  Then I understood. It was Salvatore, and he alone, who could change the minds of those in Palladino. He had suffered most, and it was he who had to show forgiveness first.

  Few gestures had meant more to me than the sight of that great bear standing before me, holding out that can of stew, as if he had punched through the two-dimensional image of who he had believed us to be before we arrived. But now that he had seen us, what had once seemed to be nothing more than madness, or Englishness, or even the work of the devil, had taken on more human faces, even if they were dirty faces like Stanley’s and mine.

  BY THE NEXT MORNING, Stanley and I had been forced to make a few rules about sleeping in the same tent.

  The first rule was that we no longer slept head to head. After inhaling each other’s bean-soup breath all night, we decided that one person would sleep towards the front of the tent, the other towards the back.

  The next rule was that although it was a good idea to remain in our bedrolls, heads peeking outside the tent, while we cooked oatmeal for breakfast, it was not a good idea for both of us to try to blow out the paraffin burner at the same time. When we did this, burning paraffin splashed in our faces and scorched off my week-old beard as well as the best part of Stanley’s eyebrows. This left him looking permanently astonished, an expression he preferred to call “alert.”

  All through the day, we packed and repacked the storage area of the Rocket, which turned out to be more difficult than we had expected because even a slight imbalance caused the coffin to tip over when moving across rough ground. By now, not only the metal runners but the sides of the Rocket, too, had received their share of bumps from gateposts and the occasional capsize, which sent the body tumbling inside. But the seams of the coffin were holding, the carrying handles and the rope rings still secure.

  I could feel the gradual strengthening of my legs and back as we hauled the coffin back and forth across the field. I was growing used to the feel of the rope around my waist and the strain against my stomach as I pulled.

  The end of the day saw us slumped on either side of the stone-ringed fireplace we had built. The wood we had gathered was damp and smoked as it burned. We added fresh pine branches now and then to keep the thing going. The green needles spat and burst into flames. A stew of beans, crumbled biscuits, and pieces of cured ham bubbled and plopped in our mess tin. We leaned forward over the fire, no longer concerned about the smoke which stained our clothes and seeped into every pore in our bodies. I was just reaching forward to lift the mess tin off the flames, since the stew was starting to burn, when Stanley asked, “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?” I replied, rummaging in my canvas sack for the plates.

  “That sound?”

  I looked among the dark shadows of the wood. I did hear something. It was a faint rattling, almost as if someone was chipping at a piece of stone, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

  “There,” said Stanley.

  I turned and saw a wagon coming up the path which led to town. It was a horse wagon but was being pulled by two men. A third man was walking behind it. Something was on the wagon, but it had been covered by a tarpaulin.

  “More visitors,” sighed Stanley.

  “Well, I don’t see Pringle,” I replied, “so that’s a good start.”

  The wagon reached the gate which separated the muddy lane from the beginning of the field.

  “Now they’re stuck,” I said, reflexively reaching my right hand to the small of my back, which hurt constantly from the effort of lifting the Rocket over the wooden barricade.

  But they weren’t stuck. The man who had been walking behind the cart stepped forward, produced a key, and undid the padlock. The two men who had been pulling the cart resumed their journey across the field and on towards the woods where we were camped.

  By now, Stanley and I had forgotten about our stew and were standing with our hands in our pockets, watching the course of the wagon.

  I felt sure they would continue on the road which led around the outside of the woods, although what good that might do them I had no idea, since it only led to another gate going back into town on the other side of the forest. In their silence and their stubborn solemnity, they reminded me of pilgrims bound on some journey meaningless to all but those who made it.

  The men did not continue on around the wood. They headed straight towards us.

  “What the hell is going on?” muttered Stanley.

  When the men came to within a few feet of our campsite, they set down the long arms of the wagon and straightened their backs. They were dressed in heavy, collarless work shirts, canvas trousers, and heavy boots. They nodded in greeting, but did not smile.

  It occurred to me that in spite of the shopkeeper’s generosity and the kindness of Salvatore, enough people in Palladino still harbored resentment against us that they had decided to run us out of town and had brought along the cart to hasten our departure. But there seemed to be a few things on the cart already, hidden under the faded brick-red tarpaulin. Perhaps they were only baskets, into which our gear was to be unceremoniously heaped. There would be no point in our resisting them. We would only end up in a brawl. I felt a great weight settle on my back, as if my shoulder blades had turned to lead. I thought about the obstacles which had been thrown before us, and I did not know if these were a sign for Stanley and me to keep clambering over them and not to lose heart, or whether they were a sign that we should never have started on this voyage. At what point, I asked myself, does determination become foolishness? I wondered if that same question had passed through the mind of the guide Santorelli as he fell away into the blue-walled tomb of the glacier.

  Now the man who had been walking behind the cart came forward. He wore a knee-length oilskin coat and gray-and-white-flecked trousers. On his head was a wool cap with a small brim of the kind I had seen newsboys wearing on the street corners of London. With a swipe of his hand, he removed his cap and bowed forward in greeting, revealing a polished bald head. “Signori,” he said.

  “Good evening,” we replied.

  “I have brought you the dinner.”

  “I beg your pardon?” asked Stanley.

  “The dinner,” he repeated. “It is a gift.”

  “A gift from whom?” I asked.

  He smiled, and for a moment his big eyes closed sleepily. In that moment, he looked like a big, contented cat. “This is from the manager of the Hotel Aosta. I am Paolo Ungaretti. I am the chef of this hotel.”

  Stunned by this
announcement, I watched the two men who had been pulling the cart remove the old tarpaulin. Beneath lay a large wicker hamper. Beside it was a collapsible table and two chairs. The two men proceeded to set up the table, folding down its legs and carrying it past us to the clearing, where they made sure it stood on level ground. Then came the chairs, and the hamper, which, when opened, revealed plates and glasses, two bottles of wine, metal containers for food, and a white tablecloth. White. Here, in this world of mud and pine and shadows, it was as if they had clipped a piece of the distant glaciers and brought it down, neatly folded, to lay upon the table.

  Ungaretti removed his coat, revealing a short chef’s tunic. He tossed the coat up onto the cart and rubbed his hands together as he prepared to get down to work.

  “But why is he doing this?” I asked.

  Ungaretti pursed his lips and tilted one of his hands back and forth. “He says to me that he does not feel good about what happened between you and him when you arrive in Palladino. He says he hope you accept this for his apology.”

  “But why did he change his mind?” asked Stanley.

  “Before you come here,” said Ungaretti, “we did not like you. But when you come here, we see you are people like us. It is simple.”

  Stanley turned to me. “Do you think we should accept this?” he asked.

  Ungaretti heard the question. He looked at the congealed stew in our mess tin and gestured at it with a flick of his fingers. The look on his face showed that even to gesture at it was more than he could bear. “This was your dinner?”

  Stanley nodded.

  Ungaretti reached down to one of the metal containers he had brought and removed the lid. “I have brought for you zuppa friulana con l’orzo e basilico.” A waft of steam rose from the container, bringing with it the smell of basil, onion, and garlic.

  “I’ll just sit down here,” said Stanley, making his way to the table.

  I did the same.

  The two men, who must have been waiters in their pre–cart-pulling existence, laid the table, uncorked the wine, and even set between Stanley and me a small candle lantern.

  Above us, the wind sluiced through the treetops. The flap of our tent rustled. A solitary raindrop dabbed the white cloth on the table.

  Then, placed before us, was a soup so simple and so perfect that it almost made me cry.

  But Stanley really did cry. He was blubbering great, shameless tears, which Ungaretti seemed to find entirely appropriate and the waiters politely ignored.

  With the soup came a Tocai wine, heavy and mysterious, with layers of different flavors unfolding in our mouths.

  While we ate the soup, Ungaretti stoked up the fire with some wood that he had brought. Crouched over the crackling flames, he fried garlic in an iron pan, then added fresh rosemary leaves and arborio rice. For the next twenty minutes, he stirred the rice with a wooden spoon, adding to it splashes of beef stock from one bottle and white wine from another. He never left the fire, squinting when the smoke blew in his face and shifting on his haunches when his muscles cramped.

  The waiters watched this as if in a trance.

  Stanley and I did the same.

  When the rice was done, Ungaretti stirred in butter and shavings of Parmesan cheese. He scooped the mixture, which was a glowing yellow flecked dark-green with the rosemary, onto plates. “Risotto,” he said as he set it before us, “col ros-marino e vino blanco.”

  There were more tears from Stanley, and toasts to the waiters, who had at last begun to smile. And to Ungaretti, who received our compliments with dignified solemnity.

  The waiters broke out a bottle of grappa, and they and Ungaretti toasted us from wooden cups.

  We raised our cups to them and drank, feeling the grappa burn along the branches of our veins.

  For dessert, we ate little pastries made with honey, lemon, and bitter orange.

  Coffee was brewed on the fire, and by now we were not divided between servers and patrons. We were comrades in this odd and unforgettable occasion. The waiters inspected the Rocket. Ungaretti, seated on the back of the cart with his legs swinging gently back and forth, remembered his days as an apprentice chef at the Polídor in Paris.

  It was deep into the night when Stanley and I walked them to the gate. We watched as they disappeared down the lane, vanishing in the India-ink blackness, their course traceable only by the rattle of the cart’s wheels on the stones.

  I knew I ought to head straight to bed. But I wasn’t ready to settle down yet and decided to give the Italian tobacco a try. By the fading light of the fire, I rolled myself a smoke. No sooner had I got the thing lit, however, when Stanley banished me from the campsite, saying that if I insisted on insulting the fresh air with something so offensive I could do so someplace else. It occurred to me to mention that he still had a small supply of his own tobacco, which he could perhaps have shared. But I let it go and decided to take a walk instead, rather than listen to any more of his hacking.

  Strolling along the edge of the wood, I looked down among the shadows of Palladino. Tiny cubes of light shone from the windows of those who could not find their way into the catacombs of sleep.

  I reached the meadow where our parachutes had landed. Walking through the tall grass, soaking my boots and trouser legs with dew, I made my way to the hollow where we had hidden the silk shrouds and drop canisters by covering them with a layer of dead leaves and earth. The canisters were gone, of course; I had not expected to find them there. But it did me good to see these places again and to set them in a context other than the war.

  Heading back into the darkness, I could barely find the path that ran down the middle of the woods. Cursing at myself for not bringing a torch and for not going back the same way I had come, I stumbled along, but it wasn’t long before I realized I was lost. I was still on a path, but it was clearly not the right path. The one I had thought I was on ran straight through the forest, but this one twisted and turned, growing narrower and more rutted the farther I traveled.

  I came to a clearing and stopped. The path seemed to have petered out altogether. The darkness was so complete that I felt myself growing dizzy. A breeze hissed faintly through the branches. At that moment, something brushed against me. At first, I thought it was a branch, but when I reached up to push it aside, my hand touched something soft.

  I jumped back.

  The thing, whatever it was, hung suspended in the air in front of me.

  I backed up, and then bumped into something else, which swung away from me.

  Spinning around, I lost my balance and tripped.

  I fumbled in a pocket for my box of matches, then struck one and held it up.

  Before the flame blew out, I looked up at a pair of eyes staring glassily down upon me.

  It gave me such a shock that I cried out.

  I lit another match, and this time, as the sulphur snapped and flared, I saw it was a deer, hanging by its antlers from a rope tied to a tree branch.

  Another match, and now I saw more deer, their stomachs emptied and tongues lolling out, each one dangling just above the ground. They shifted slowly in the breeze, like abandoned marionettes.

  A moment later, I heard Stanley’s voice. Turning, I caught sight of a torch beam wobbling towards me through the trees. “Where are you?” he shouted. “Are you all right?” I called to him, and soon he was standing in front of me, out of breath, shining the torch beam around the carcasses.

  There were a dozen of them at least. They formed a wall of bone and fur around us. Here and there, I saw pale marks on the bodies where the bullets had entered, tearing away patches of fur.

  Beyond them, the blackness of the wood was complete, as if the planet ended beyond those cold bodies, shearing away into space.

  “I heard you shout,” said Stanley. His hair was full of pine needles from thrashing through the trees.

  “I got lost,” I told him. “And then I stumbled into these things.”

  “What is all this?” he asked.
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br />   “It’s a hunter’s grove.” I set my hand against one of the deer and gave it a gentle push. The rope creaked. It was the sound I had heard before. “They have to hang their kills to let the heat go out of the bodies. Then they can cut up the carcass. And since it isn’t hunting season yet, they probably wanted these things kept as far out of the way as possible.”

  Stanley shined the torch around. Light reflected off the dried and open eyes.

  It seemed like bad luck, running into this on the night before we left, but I tried to put the idea out of my head.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Stanley.

  Rather than risk getting lost again, we followed the path out to the meadow, then went around the edge of the wood until we found our camp again.

  Tucked back in my sleeping bag, I was just drifting off when Stanley nudged me.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked groggily.

  “She tried to talk me out of it, you know.”

  “Who did?” I asked. “Out of what?”

  “Helen. Out of coming on this trip with you.”

  I rubbed my hands against my cheeks, trying to wake myself. “She did? But why?”

  Stanley paused.

  I saw the silhouette of his face as he turned away from me.

  “She said she didn’t think you were lucky enough,” he said.

  I felt a constriction in my throat. “What kind of thing is that to say?” But even as I asked the question, I thought about those dead animals in the clearing and I knew exactly what kind of thing it was to say. He, too, had been thinking about luck. With all the preparation in the world, sometimes success or failure still boiled down to chance. It was the one thing you could not control, and because you could not control it, you tried to put it out of your mind as useless superstition. No matter how hard you tried, though, you couldn’t help thinking about whether luck was working for you or against you.

  “The thing is,” continued Stanley, “she was wrong.”

  Through the mesh of fingers held against my face, I breathed in the smell of our canvas house. “Why?” I asked.

  “Unlucky people don’t have meals prepared for them by proper chefs in the middle of a forest.”