by Irwin Shaw
Robert smiled to himself at this tolerant concept and felt better-disposed toward everyone around him. Maybe, he thought, if I were a single man, I’d find a Bavarian girl and fall in love with her and finish the whole thing off then and there.
“I warn you, Francis,” the girl in the lambskin hat was saying, “if you do me to death on this mountain, there are three Juniors at Yale who will track you down to the ends of the earth.”
Then he heard the German voice again. “Warum haben die Amerikaner nicht genügend Verstand,” the voice said, low but distinctly, near him, the accent clearly Hochdeutsch and not Zurichois or any of the other variations of Schweizerdeutsch, “ihre dummen kleinen Nutten zu Hause zu lassen, wo sie hingehören?”
Now, he knew there was no avoiding looking and there was no avoiding doing something about it. He glanced at Mac first, to see if Mac, who understood a little German, had heard. Mac was huge and could be dangerous, and for all his easy good nature, if he had heard the man say, “Why don’t the Americans have the sense to leave their silly little whores at home where they belong?” the man was in for a beating. But Mac was still beaming placidly at the Contessa. That was all to the good, Robert thought, relieved. The Swiss police took a dim view of fighting, no matter what the provocation, and Mac, enraged, was likely to wreak terrible damage in a fight, and would more than likely wind up in jail. For an American career soldier on duty in Frankfurt, a brawl like that could have serious consequences. The worst that can happen to me, Robert thought, as he turned to find the man who had spoken, is a few hours in the pokey and a lecture from the magistrate about abusing Swiss hospitality.
Almost automatically, Robert decided that when they got to the top, he would follow the man who had spoken out of the car, tell him quietly, that he, Robert, had understood what had been said about Americans in the car, and swing immediately. I just hope, Robert thought, that whoever it is isn’t too damned large.
For a moment, Robert couldn’t pick out his opponent-to-be. There was a tall man with his back to Robert, on the other side of the Italian woman, and the voice had come from that direction. Because of the crowd, Robert could only see his head and shoulders, which were bulky and powerful under a black parka. The man had on a white cap of the kind that had been worn by the Afrika Corps during the war. The man was with a plump, hard-faced woman who was whispering earnestly to him, but not loudly enough for Robert to be able to hear what she was saying. Then the man said, crisply, in German, replying to the woman, “I don’t care how many of them understand the language. Let them understand,” and Robert knew that he had found his man.
An exhilarated tingle of anticipation ran through Robert, making his hands and arms feel tense and jumpy. He regretted that the cabin wouldn’t arrive at the top for another five minutes. Now that he had decided the fight was inevitable, he could hardly bear waiting. He stared fixedly at the man’s broad, black-nylon back, wishing the fellow would turn around so that he could see his face. He wondered if the man would go down with the first blow, if he would apologize, if he would try to use his ski poles. Robert decided to keep his own poles handy, just in case, although Mac could be depended upon to police matters thoroughly if he saw weapons being used. Deliberately Robert took off his heavy leather mittens and stuck them in his belt. The correction would be more effective with bare knuckles. He wondered, fleetingly, if the man was wearing a ring. He kept his eyes fixed on the back of the man’s neck, willing him to turn around. Then the plump woman noticed his stare. She dropped her eyes and whispered something to the man in the black parka and after several seconds, he finally turned around, pretending that it was a casual, unmotivated movement. The man looked squarely at Robert and Robert thought, If you ski long enough you meet every other skier you’ve ever known. At the same moment, he knew that it wasn’t going to be a nice simple little fist fight on the top of the mountain. He knew that somehow he was going to have to kill the man whose icy blue eyes, fringed with pale blond lashes, were staring challengingly at him from under the white peak of the Afrika Corps cap.
It was a long time ago, the winter of 1938, in the French part of Switzerland, and he was fourteen years old and the sun was setting behind another mountain and it was ten below zero and he was lying in the snow, with his foot turned in that funny, unnatural way, although the pain hadn’t really begun yet, and the eyes were looking down at him.…
He had done something foolish, and at the moment he was more worried about what his parents would say when they found out than about the broken leg. He had gone up, alone, late in the afternoon, when almost everybody else was off the mountain, and even so he hadn’t stayed on the normal piste, but had started bushwacking through the forest, searching for powder snow that hadn’t been tracked by other skiers. One ski had caught on a hidden root and he had fallen forward, hearing the sickening dry cracking sound from his right leg, even as he pitched into the snow.
Trying not to panic, he had sat up, facing in the direction of the piste, whose markers he could see some hundred meters away, through the pine forest. If any skiers happened to come by, they might just, with luck, be able to hear him if he shouted. For the moment, he did not try to crawl toward the line of poles, because when he moved a very queer feeling flickered from his ankle up his leg to the pit of his stomach, making him want to throw up.
The shadows were very long now in the forest, and only the highest peaks were rose-colored against a frozen green sky. He was beginning to feel the cold and from time to time he was shaken by acute spasms of shivering.
I’m going to die here, he thought, I’m going to die here tonight. He thought of his parents and his sister probably having tea, comfortably seated this moment in the warm dining room of the chalet two miles down the mountain, and he bit his lips to keep back the tears. They wouldn’t start to worry about him for another hour or two yet, and then when they did, and started to do something about finding him, they wouldn’t know where to begin. He had known none of the seven or eight people who had been on the lift with him on his last ride up and he hadn’t told anybody what run he was going to take. There were three different mountains, with their separate lifts, and their numberless variations of runs, that he might have taken, and finding him in the dark would be an almost hopeless task. He looked up at the sky. There were clouds moving in from the east, slowly, a black high wall, covering the already darkened sky. If it snowed that night, there was a good chance they wouldn’t even find his body before spring. He had promised his mother that no matter what happened, he would never ski alone, and he had broken the promise and this was his punishment.
Then he heard the sound of skis, coming fast, making a harsh, metallic noise on the iced snow of the piste. Before he could see the skier, he began to shout, with all the strength of his lungs, frantically, “Au secours! Au secours!”
A dark shape, going very fast, appeared high up for a second, disappeared behind a clump of trees, then shot into view much lower down, almost on a level with the place where Robert was sitting. Robert shouted wildly, hysterically, not uttering words any more, just a senseless, passionate, throat-bursting claim on the attention of the human race, represented, for this one instant at sunset on this cold mountain, by the dark, expert figure plunging swiftly, with a harsh scraping of steel edges and a whoosh of wind, toward the village below.
Then, miraculously, the figure stopped, in a swirl of snow. Robert shouted wordlessly, the sound of his voice echoing hysterically in the forest. For a moment the skier didn’t move and Robert shook with the fear that it was all a hallucination, a mirage of sight and sound, that there was no one there on the beaten snow at the edge of the forest, that he was only imagining that he was shouting, that with all the fierce effort of his throat and lungs, he was mute, unheard.
Suddenly, he couldn’t see anything any more. He had the sensation of a curtain sinking somewhere within him, of a wall of warm liquid inundating the ducts and canals of his body. He waved his hands weakly and toppled slowly ove
r in a faint.
When he came to, a man was kneeling over him, rubbing his cheeks with snow. “You heard me,” Robert said in French to the man. “I was afraid you wouldn’t hear me.”
“Ich verstehe nicht,” the man said. “Nicht parler Französisch.”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t hear me,” Robert repeated, in German.
“You are a stupid little boy,” the man said severely, in clipped, educated German. “And very lucky. I am the last man on the mountain.” He felt Robert’s ankle, his hands hard but deft. “Nice,” he said ironically, “very nice. You’re going to be in plaster for at least three months. Here—lie still. I am going to take your skis off. You will be more comfortable.” He undid the long leather thongs, working swiftly, and stood the skis up in the snow. Then he swept the snow off a stump a few yards away and got around behind Robert and put his hands under Robert’s armpits. “Relax,” he said. “Do not try to help me.” He picked Robert up.
“Luckily,” he said, “you weigh nothing. How old are you?—eleven?”
“Fourteen,” Robert said.
“What’s the matter?” the man said, laughing. “Don’t they feed you in Switzerland?”
“I’m French,” Robert said.
“Oh,” the man’s voice went flat. “French.” He half-carried, half-dragged Robert over to the stump and sat him down gently on it. “There,” he said, “at least you’re out of the snow. You won’t freeze—for the time being. Now, listen carefully. I will take your skis down with me to the ski school and I will tell them where you are and tell them to send a sled for you. They should get to you in less than an hour. Now, whom are you staying with in town?”
“My mother and father. At the Chalet Montana.”
“Good.” The man nodded. “The Chalet Montana. Do they speak German, too?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent,” the man said. “I will telephone them and tell them their foolish son has broken his leg and that the patrol is taking him to the hospital. What is your name?”
“Robert.”
“Robert what?”
“Robert Rosenthal,” Robert said. “Please don’t say I’m hurt too badly. They’ll be worried enough as it is.”
The man didn’t answer immediately. He busied himself tying Robert’s skis together and slung them over his shoulder. “Do not worry, Robert Rosenthal,” he said, “I will not worry them more than is necessary.” Abruptly, he started off, sweeping easily through the trees, his poles held in one hand, Robert’s skis balanced across his shoulders with his other hand.
His sudden departure took Robert by surprise and it was only when the man was a considerable distance away, already almost lost among the trees, that Robert realized he hadn’t thanked the man for saving his life. “Thank you,” he shouted into the growing darkness. “Thank you very much.”
The man didn’t stop and Robert never knew whether he had heard his cry of thanks or not. Because after an hour, when it was completely dark, with the stars covered by the cloud that had been moving in at sunset from the east, the patrol had not yet appeared. Robert had a watch with a radium dial. Timing himself by it, he waited exactly one hour and a half, until ten minutes past seven, and then decided that nobody was coming for him and that if he hoped to live through the night he would somehow have to crawl out of the forest and make his way down to the town by himself.
He was rigid with cold by now, and suffering from shock. His teeth were chattering in a frightening way, as though his jaws were part of an insane machine over which he had no control. There was no feeling in his fingers any more and the pain in his leg came in ever-enlarging waves of metallic throbbing. He had put up the hood of his parka and sunk his head as low down on his chest as he could, and the cloth of the parka was stiff with his frosted breath. He heard a whimpering sound somewhere around him and it was only after what seemed to him several minutes that he realized the whimpering sound was coming from him and that there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Stiffly, with exaggerated care, he tried to lift himself off the tree stump and down into the snow without putting any weight on his injured leg, but at the last moment he slipped and twisted the leg as he went down. He screamed twice and lay with his face in the snow and thought of just staying that way and forgetting the whole thing, the whole intolerable effort of remaining alive. Later on, when he was much older, he came to the conclusion that the one thing that made him keep moving was the thought of his mother and father waiting for him, with anxiety that would soon grow into terror, in the town below him.
He pulled himself along on his belly, digging at the snow in front of his face with his hands, using rocks, low-hanging branches, snow-covered roots, to help him, meter by meter, out of the forest. His watch was torn off somewhere along the way and when he finally reached the line of poles that marked the packed snow and ice of the piste he had no notion of whether it had taken him five minutes or five hours to cover the hundred meters from the place he had fallen. He lay, panting, sobbing, staring at the lights of the town far below him, knowing that he could never reach them, knowing that he had to reach them. The effort of crawling through the deep snow had warmed him again and his face was streaming with sweat, and the blood coming back into his numbed hands and feet jabbed him with a thousand needles of pain.
The lights of the town guided him now, and here and there he could see the marker poles outlined against their small, cosy Christmasy glow. It was easier going, too, on the packed snow of the piste and from time to time he managed to slide ten or fifteen meters without stopping, tobogganing on his stomach, screaming occasionally when the foot of his broken leg banged loosely against an icy bump or twisted as he went over a steep embankment to crash against a level spot below. Once he couldn’t stop himself and he fell into a swiftly rushing small stream and pulled himself out of it five minutes later with his gloves and stomach and knees soaked with icy water. And still the lights of the town seemed as far away as ever.
Finally, he felt he couldn’t move any more. He was exhausted and he had had to stop twice to vomit and the vomit had been a gush of blood. He tried to sit up, so that if the snow came that night, there would be a chance that somebody would see the top of his head sticking out of the new cover in the morning. As he was struggling to push himself erect, a shadow passed between him and the lights of the town. The shadow was very close and with his last breath he called out. Later on, the peasant who rescued him said that what he called out was “Excuse me.”
The peasant was moving hay on a big sled from one of the hill barns down to the valley, and he rolled the hay off and put Robert on instead. Then, carefully braking and taking the sled on a path that cut back and forth across the piste, he brought Robert down to the valley and the hospital.
By the time his mother and father had been notified and had reached the hospital, the doctor had given him a shot of morphine and was in the middle of setting the leg. So it wasn’t until the next morning, as he lay in the gray hospital room, sweating with pain, with his leg in traction, that he could get out any kind of coherent story and tell his parents what had happened.
“Then I saw this man skiing very fast, all alone,” Robert said, trying to speak normally, without showing how much the effort was costing him, trying to take the look of shock and agony from his parent’s set faces by pretending that his leg hardly hurt him at all, and that the whole incident was of small importance. “He heard me and came over and took off my skis and made me comfortable on a tree stump and he asked me what my name was and where my parents were staying and he said he’d go to the ski school and tell them where I was and to send a sled for me and then he’d call you at the Chalet and tell you they were bringing me down to the hospital. Then, after more than an hour, it was pitch dark already, nobody came and I decided I’d better not wait any more and I started down and I was lucky and I saw this farmer with a sled and …”
“You were very lucky,” Robert’s mother said flatly. She was a small,
neat, plump woman, with bad nerves, who was only at home in cities. She detested the cold, detested the mountains, detested the idea of her loved ones running what seemed to her the senseless risk of injury that skiing involved, and only came on these holidays because Robert and his father and sister were so passionate about the sport. Now she was white with fatigue and worry, and if Robert had not been immobilized in traction she would have had him out of the accursed mountains that morning on the train to Paris.
“Now, Robert,” his father said, “is it possible that when you hurt yourself, the pain did things to you, and that you just imagined you saw a man, and just imagined he told you he was going to call us and get you a sled from the ski school?”
“I didn’t imagine it, Papa,” Robert said. The morphine had made him feel hazy and heavy-brained and he was puzzled that his father was talking to him that way. “Why do you think I might have imagined it?”
“Because,” said his father, “nobody called us last night until ten o’clock, when the doctor telephoned from the hospital. And nobody called the ski school, either.”
“I didn’t imagine him,” Robert repeated. He was hurt that his father perhaps thought he was lying. “If he came into this room I’d know him right off. He was wearing a white cap, he was a big man with a black anarac, and he had blue eyes, they looked a little funny, because his eyelashes were almost white and from a little way off it looked as though he didn’t have any eyelashes at all.…”
“How old was he, do you think?” Robert’s father asked. “As old as I am?” Robert’s father was nearly fifty.
“No,” Robert said. “I don’t think so.”
“Was he as old as your Uncle Jules?” Robert’s father asked.