The Ice Soldier

by Paul Watkins

  Along with a bundle of paper, I was surprised to see two small cigars drop into the snow. Quickly, I picked them up. “I hope you’ve got some matches,” I said.

  Stanley’s eyes were fixed on the cigars. “How thoughtful,” he said, with such sincerity that he seemed ready to take back every rotten thing he’d ever said about his uncle. Stanley rummaged in his pocket and his hand emerged with a bashed-up yellow box of Swan Vestas. Hesitantly, he shook the box, and we were both relieved to hear the rustle of matches inside. He tossed them to me and I handed him the poems, on which the handwritten ink had blurred like the colored paper of a litmus test.

  “I think you should be the one to read them,” I said.

  Stanley shrugged. “I’ll do my best.”

  I lowered myself onto the coffin, ready as an audience of one.

  While Stanley glanced through the poems, I cut the ends of the cigars with my knife and then, with my jacket pulled up over my head and both cigars clenched between my teeth, carefully scraped the red heads of the matches against the ragged striking paper on the side of the box. The first two blew out before they even reached the cigar, so I struck three of them at once, and soon a blue haze of tobacco smoke was wafting out from under my soggy woolen tent.

  I shrugged my jacket back over my shoulders and held one of the cigars out to Stanley. “Which poems did he choose?” I asked. “Or did he write them himself?”

  Stanley seemed to be frozen, just staring at the paper.

  From far away across the glacier came the rumbling thunder of another avalanche.

  “Stan,” I said quietly, still holding out the cigar.

  “He never climbed it.”

  “Climbed what?” The smoke pinched at my eyes.

  “This!” He jammed his heel into the snow. “This rock!” Then he plucked the cigar from between my fingers, and in the moment when he set it between his teeth, I was startled by how much he looked like his uncle.

  I, in turn, snatched the paper from his hand and began to read.

  “My Dear Boys,” the letter began. “By now, if all has gone well, you will be on the top of Carton’s Rock. And so, I hope, will I. I am glad to have made it at last, in body if not in spirit. I could not have done it without you. I mean this literally, as I must now confess to you that your first ascent of my mountain is mine as well.”

  I raised my head from the letter. The sun poured into my eyes, the full shield of its blaze against my face. The shadows of ridges, invisible before, now cast themselves across the chalk-white fields below.

  Stanley lay on his back, eyes closed, laughing quietly.

  “What’s so bloody funny?” I shouted.

  He just shook his head and laughed again.

  When my eyes returned to the pages, shards of sunlight remained branded on my sight.

  The letter went on to explain how Carton and his guide, Santorelli, had come within sight of the rock on their third day of trekking across the glacier. Shortly afterwards, a blizzard had come down upon them. As they pressed on, hoping to find some shelter from the storm, the ground gave way beneath Santorelli and he fell into a crevasse. The rope held, and Carton had the presence of mind to fall upon his ice ax, which prevented him from being dragged down into the crevasse as well.

  “But this,” wrote Carton, “was where our luck ran out.”

  Earlier in the day, Carton had removed his rope in order to adjust his clothing. He had retied the knot himself, and it was this knot which now gave way. The rope slipped from his waist and Santorelli tumbled into the abyss that lay beneath.

  “It was then that a nightmare began for me which has never truly ended,” wrote Carton. “I have never spoken about it, or written it down until now.”

  According to the letter, Carton had wandered for what he later calculated to be twelve days, although at the time he had lost track of how long he had been gone. He had only a small amount of food and the bedroll that was tied over one shoulder with which to keep warm. He survived by digging holes and hiding inside them, out of the wind. He discovered that laying his dark red handkerchief out on the ground would melt the snow beneath, and he could squeeze the water from the handkerchief into his mouth. Eventually, he stumbled back into the village of Palladino. At first, he was too exhausted to make clear what had happened. It was only hours after, as he lay in the warmth of a bed, that he conceived of the lie he told to the people of Palladino and later the world.

  “I had to make something of it,” he explained, “for Santorelli’s sake as well as for my own. To justify his death and my own suffering. As soon as I could speak, I told them we had been to the top and that the accident took place on the way down. By the time I was strong enough to return to England, the story had already spread. From then on it was done and could never be undone. The legend took on a life of its own, and I found I could no longer live without it. In the years ahead, of all the lies I told to keep the legend and myself alive, the one that troubled me the most was saying I had glimpsed the view that you have now before you. I hope it is as beautiful as I have let the world believe. You are the first to know the truth, and what you do now with that truth I leave entirely in your hands. With great affection, your friend, Henry Carton.”

  My first instinct as to what would happen now was that Stanley and I should pitch the coffin off the ridge and send it falling thousands of feet into the rubble of avalanche debris below. In fact, I wondered why Stanley had not already done this.

  But Stanley was still lying there, still laughing, as if the spirit of Carton had leapt inside his head and it was Carton, not Stanley, whose mocking croak I heard from underneath the plume of cigar smoke.

  “Well?” I asked.

  The laughter wheezed into silence. Stanley returned to a sitting position. “Well what?”

  “Are you going to tell me what you’re finding so hilarious?”

  Stanley held out his hands, palms up. “We’re here!”

  “So what? I’m damned if I’ll let him get away with this.”

  “He already has gotten away with it.” He reached across and slapped the side of the coffin, which resounded with a hollow boom. “Isn’t that right, Uncle?”

  “As soon as we get back to Palladino, I’m going to tell them the truth about your uncle.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Stanley. “He is past caring now.”

  “But don’t you care?” I asked.

  Stanley raised himself to a sitting position and removed the well-chewed cigar from his mouth. “Don’t you see? We made it. That’s all that matters now!” He reached across, took the letter from my hand, then slowly crumpled the pages and threw them off the precipice.

  For a long time, we did not speak.

  We went back to puffing our cigars, the soft incense of the tobacco smoke rising into the clear sky.

  It was Stanley who broke the silence. “You do with the knowledge what you want,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, the matter is closed.”

  It was not closed for me, but there was nothing more to say.

  Our journey down the mountain and back across the glacier survives in my memory as a semiconscious march through night and day and on again into the night. Sleep and waking merged. The last of our rations were finished off by the end of the first day of the descent. From then on, we were permanently hungry.

  Now and then, I turned to look back at Carton’s Rock, which vanished into the glacier like a ship sinking into a calm ocean. Then it was gone, as if it had never existed. I turned again and plodded on.

  We barely spoke, Stanley and I. Partly it was because we were too tired. Partly it was because we had nothing to say. And what little we could have said would have ended in an argument. I was still bitter about Carton’s deceit, and Stanley’s ability to take it as a joke only served to make me angry at him, too. In my exhausted mind, the two became conspirators. I wanted to accuse him of this treachery. I wanted to blame someone who could still be blamed and give a damn about it.

&n
bsp; That anger was the only thing which kept me going.

  As our strength began to fail, we cast away pieces of our gear, leaving the glacier strewn with mess kits, tent pegs, binoculars, and shreds of filthy clothing.

  To keep ourselves moving, we advanced across the glacier in short stages, choosing some feature of the land in front of us—an outcrop of rock, a dip in the ice where a shadow had collected, or even some imagined wrinkle in the distant snow, appearing like a mirage to Stanley or to me but not to both. Then one would follow the other, like a blind man following his dog. Sometimes these stages lasted only minutes, sometimes hours. They allowed us to trick our minds away from the total distance we knew we had to cross. Gladly we duped each other and ourselves as the eye-cutting brightness of day gave way to the gunmetal blue of night.

  We sang to keep a rhythm in our march, coughing out old hymns we never knew our minds had stored away. In the frost-tinseled air, our chapped lips split and bled and the words of those hymns formed on the salty metal of our blood.

  I drifted in and out of dreams so vivid that while I sat beside my father in his garden, drinking tea, or gorged on bread and strawberry jam in some nameless empty space inside my head or ran my finger down the trench of Darcey Kidder’s spine out in the middle of St. Vernon’s moonlit playing fields, all the pain in my twisted knees would go. Nor did I feel the shriek of sunburn on my cheeks and nose, or the dull thump of frostbite in the blackened skin of my fingertips and ears. Then the daydreams would vanish, like birds flushed from tall grass, leaving me again inside the stubborn, plodding carcass of my body.

  Other times, my crumbling brain delivered to the light behind my eyes half-finished arguments from years before, or conversations I might have had but didn’t. And these I battled through, fists clenched with indignation at the arrogance of words which had never been spoken.

  Hunger twisted in us, tying knots in our intestines and untying them again. Menus appeared before us and we read them out, slobbering words lost in bubbles of spit and gnawing on the emptiness of air.

  One evening, in a hollow in the snow, we found the bones of some small animal, brought there perhaps by some hunting bird to eat in peace. We sucked the rotten marrow from the yellowed sticks of bone, turned back to back to hide from each other the things we had become.

  When we finally staggered down off the glacier, I was so lost inside my head with thoughts of what I would tell the world about the liar Henry Carton, I barely grasped that we were safe again. The return journey had taken us five days, although I could not have reckoned it at the time. It seemed to me I had spent my whole existence out there on the ice, and the flowers in the meadow of the San Rafaele woods all seemed to belong to the memories of someone else’s life.

  We arrived in Palladino just as a group of local mountaineers, headed by Salvatore Santorelli, were in their final stage of preparation before heading out to try to recover our bodies.

  Helen was there. News had reached her in London that Stanley and I were long overdue, and she had flown down to help in the rescue.

  My thoughts were so sluggish that I walked right past her without recognizing who she was. Even when I did realize, my mind was so jumbled that seeing her in Palladino, which should have taken me by surprise, only merged into the haze of shock that I was also here, and that the journey was over at last.

  She, along with the entire population of the village and one lone photojournalist from a small newspaper based down the road in Domodossola, welcomed us with the stunned happiness accorded those who have been given up for dead.

  We stood by the fountain. People were whirling around us. Faces loomed into view, smiling and chattering in Italian and broken English. Music blared out of the café. Children shrieked and dodged among the grown-ups. A bottle of wine was put in my hand. Then the bottle of wine was taken away and I found myself holding a fist-sized piece of cheese. A woman with pale green eyes kissed me on one filthy cheek, and then I was empty-handed again. I turned to say something to Stanley, but he was not there.

  Then I saw him sitting with Helen on a bench across the road. They hugged and she began crying. She brushed the back of her hand down the side of his face, as if to wipe away the scorched red of his sunburned skin. He took her hands in his and kissed them.

  The photographer from Domodossola appeared in front of me and held up his camera, asking if he could take my picture.

  I nodded and made a halfhearted attempt to stand up straight.

  When he had moved on, I turned and washed my face in the clear water of the fountain. The cold brought me back to my senses. I stood and felt droplets trickling down my back. I realized then that I was standing just where Carton had stood when he had had his own picture taken after coming down from the glacier. I also realized, because I felt it myself, how lonely he must have been. It was not only at this place, surrounded by all these people, but on the ice. The terrible, bone-hollowing fear of dying out there alone. Until this moment, I had not grasped the weight of that solitude, and the burden that he must have carried for the rest of his life after that.

  Seeing Stanley and Helen together, locked in whispers and embracing, I understood suddenly why Carton had taken his own life. As much as Stanley had needed Carton, all the while pretending to loathe him, Carton had needed his nephew. Carton had tried to shield his devotion behind a screen of bluster and family obligation, but the truth had been easy to see. Upon the arrival of Helen Paradise, and the realization that she was not like the other women who had drifted through Stanley’s life, Carton had known that the bond between him and his nephew was about to break. With that, and all the suffering his daily life entailed, Carton’s reason for living had expired like the magazine subscriptions in his club.

  Despite the popularity, or lack of it, which had dominated his life, Carton had been a lonely man. The loneliness had followed him everywhere, like a black dog skulking in his shadow.

  He must have known that no one would understand such loneliness, not in the million-faced whirlwind of the city or even here, in this tiny Italian village. On the glacier’s ice, there were no lights of cozy fires, no sound of church bells in the distance. There was only the angry sun or the blind eye of the moon, enough to make a person feel as if he’d been marooned on an empty planet, that all the people he had ever met were only dreams, and that he was alone and had always been alone.

  Only now did I know how he had felt. Standing now where Carton had once stood, I realized that I could not tell the secret he had shared with us. Nor, in my mind, was he diminished by the truth he had revealed in his letter. For me, he had simply changed into a different kind of hero.

  AFTER SEVERAL DAYS SPENT recovering in a hospital in Domodossola, we returned to London.

  By the time we arrived, Stanley and Helen were engaged.

  Descending from the train at Victoria Station, Stanley and I were surprised to see a newspaper headline announcing that the Rocket Men had perished.

  “A slight exaggeration,” said Stanley.

  “But only slight,” I added.

  Exaggeration though it was, we soon discovered that the news of our deaths had spread more quickly than the news of our having survived. Some of the papers had already printed our obituaries, and a number of bookmakers had already paid off those who’d bet on our not returning home.

  The first thing I did after saying good-bye to Helen and Stanley was jump in a cab and head straight for St. Vernon’s. I didn’t stop at the school, however. Instead, I had the cabbie drop me off at Darcey Kidder’s house.

  After rapping my knuckles on the door, I stood back. It was only then that I gave any thought to how disheveled I must look. I just had time to claw my hair roughly into shape before the door opened and I found myself looking not at Darcey Kidder but at a man about my own age, with a bottle of beer in his hand.

  He was wearing a collarless shirt whose untucked ends trailed down around his knees. He was also barefoot, smart wool trouser cuffs draped across his toes.
“Can I help you with something?” he asked.

  “I was looking for Darcey Kidder,” I stammered. “Perhaps I’ve got the wrong house.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “She’s gone, I’m afraid.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yes. Moved out. I’m the new tenant.”

  “Did she leave a forwarding address?” I stammered.

  He shrugged. “Not with me, she didn’t.”

  Walking back across the fields, I thought about the looks on the faces of Higgins and Houseman when I told them about this. I wondered what my own face looked like, too. The feeling of such a missed opportunity is like no other feeling in the world. All other regrets seem trivial beside it, and you find yourself wondering if you might have another life someday, and you swear that if you do, you’ll never make the same mistake again.

  The next day, after discovering from the St. Vernon’s registrar that Darcey had “left no instructions to have her address forwarded to members of the staff,” there was nothing for me to do but try to set aside my disappointment and lose myself in the many interviews that lay ahead. Most of these took place in the cramped space of the Montague Banquet Room, where I experienced the same uneasiness at being surrounded by so many people as I had felt when I’d returned from my first trip to the Alps.

  The first chance I got, I caught a train down to Stroud and then walked home along tree-shaded lanes.

  My father was waiting for me. That first evening home, in front of the wheezing coal fire, I told him everything I could. When I had finished talking, he went up to the mantelpiece and took down the medal in its box.

  “You have earned this more than once,” he said. Then he closed the box and handed it to me, and he said nothing when I threw it in the fire, as if he had known all along what should be done.