by Irwin Shaw
“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.
“Yes,” Robert said. “Just about.” He wished his father and mother would leave him alone. He was all right now. His leg was in plaster and he wasn’t dead and in three months, the doctor said, he’d be walking again, and he wanted to forget everything that had happened last night in the forest.
“So,” Robert’s mother said, “he was a man of about twenty-five, with a white cap and blue eyes.” She picked up the phone and asked for the ski school.
Robert’s father lit a cigarette and went over to the window and looked out. It was snowing. It had been snowing since midnight, heavily, and the lifts weren’t running today because a driving wind had sprung up with the snow and there was danger of avalanches up on top.
“Did you talk to the farmer who picked me up?” Robert asked.
“Yes,” said his father. “He said you were a very brave little boy. He also said that if he hadn’t found you, you couldn’t have gone on more than another fifty meters. I gave him two hundred francs. Swiss.”
“Sssh,” Robert’s mother said. She had the connection with the ski school now. “This is Mrs. Rosenthal again. Yes, thank you, he’s doing as well as can be expected,” she said, in her precise, melodious French. “We’ve been talking to him and there’s one aspect of his story that’s a little strange. He says a man stopped and helped him take off his skis last night after he’d broken his leg, and promised to go to the ski school and leave the skis there and ask for a sled to be sent to bring him down. We’d like to know if, in fact, the man did come into the office and report the accident. It would have been somewhere around six o’clock.” She listened for a moment, her face tense. “I see,” she said. She listened again. “No,” she said, “we don’t know his name. My son says he was about twenty-five years old, with blue eyes and a white cap. Wait a minute. I’ll ask.” She turned to Robert. “Robert,” she said, “what kind of skis did you have? They’re going to look and see if they’re out front in the rack.”
“Attenhoffer’s,” Robert said. “One meter seventy. And they have my initials in red up on the tips.”
“Attenhoffer’s,” his mother repeated over the phone. “And they have his initials on them. R.R., in red. Thank you. I’ll wait.”
Robert’s father came back from the window, dousing his cigarette in an ashtray. Underneath the holiday tan of his skin, his face looked weary and sick. “Robert,” he said, with a rueful smile, “you must learn to be a little more careful. You are my only male heir and there is very little chance that I shall produce another.”
“Yes, Papa,” Robert said. “I’ll be careful.”
His mother waved impatiently at them to be quiet and listened again at the telephone. “Thank you,” she said. “Please call me if you hear anything.” She hung up. “No,” she said to Robert’s father, “the skis aren’t there.”
“It can’t be possible,” Robert’s father said, “that a man would leave a little boy to freeze to death just to steal a pair of skis.”
“I’d like to get my hands on him,” Robert’s mother said. “Just for ten minutes. Robert, darling, think hard. Did he seem … well … did he seem normal?”
“He seemed all right,” Robert said. “I suppose.”
“Was there any other thing about him that you noticed? Think hard. Anything that would help us find him. It’s not only for us, Robert. If there’s a man in this town who would do something like that to you, it’s important that people know about him, before he does something even worse to other boys …”
“Mama,” Robert said, feeling close to tears under the insistence of his mother’s questioning, “I told you just the way it was. Everything. I’m not lying, Mama.”
“What did he sound like, Robert?” his mother said. “Did he have a low voice, a high voice, did he sound like us, as though he lived in Paris, did he sound like any of your teachers, did he sound like the other people from around here, did he …?”
“Oh …” Robert said, remembering.
“What is it? What do you want to say?” his mother said sharply.
“I had to speak German to him,” Robert said. Until now, with the pain and the morphine, it hadn’t occurred to him to mention that.
“What do you mean you had to speak German to him?”
“I started to speak to him in French and he didn’t understand. We spoke in German.”
His father and mother exchanged glances. Then his mother said, gently, “Was it real German? Or was it Swiss-German? You know the difference, don’t you?”
“Of course,” Robert said. One of his father’s parlor tricks was giving imitations of Swiss friends in Paris speaking in French and then in Swiss-German. Robert had a good ear for languages, and aside from having heard his Alsatian grandparents speaking German since he was an infant, he was studying German literature in school and knew long passages of Goethe and Schiller and Heine by heart. “It was German, all right,” he said.
There was silence in the room. His father went over to the window again and looked out at the snow falling in a soft blurred curtain outside. “I knew,” his father said quietly, “that it couldn’t just have been for the skis.”
In the end, his father won out. His mother wanted to go to the police and get them to try to find the man, even though his father pointed out that there were perhaps ten thousand skiers in the town for the holidays, a good percentage of them German-speaking and blue-eyed, and trainloads a
rriving and departing five times a day. Robert’s father was sure that the man had left the very night Robert had broken his leg, although all during the rest of his stay in the town, Mr. Rosenthal prowled along the snowy streets and in and out of bars searching among the faces for one that answered Robert’s description of the man on the mountain. But he said it would do no good to go to the police and might do harm, because once the story got out there would be plenty of people to complain that this was just another hysterical Jewish fantasy of invented injury. “There’re plenty of Nazis in Switzerland, of all nationalities,” Robert’s father told his mother, in the course of an argument that lasted weeks, “and this will just give them more ammunition, they’ll be able to say, ‘See, wherever the Jews go they start trouble.’”
Robert’s mother, who was made of sterner stuff than her husband, and who had relatives in Germany who smuggled out disturbing letters to her, wanted justice at any cost, but after a while even she saw the hopelessness of pushing the matter any further. Four weeks after the accident, when Robert could finally be moved, as she sat beside her son in the ambulance that was to take them both to Geneva and then on to Paris, she said, in a dead voice, holding Robert’s hand, “Soon, we must leave Europe. I cannot stand to live any more on a continent where things like this are permitted to happen.”
Much later, during the war, after Mr. Rosenthal had died in Occupied France and Robert and his mother and sister were in America, a friend of Robert’s, who had also done a lot of skiing in Europe, heard the story of the man in the white cap, and told Robert he was almost sure he recognized the man from the description Robert gave of him. It was a ski instructor from Garmisch, or maybe from Obersdorf or Freudenstadt, who had a couple of rich Austrian clients with whom he toured each winter from one ski station to another. The friend didn’t know the man’s name, and the one time Robert had been in Garmisch, it had been with French troops in the closing days of the war, and of course nobody was skiing then.
Now the man was standing just three feet from him, his face, on the other side of the pretty Italian woman, framed by straight black lines of skis, his eyes looking coolly, with insolent amusement, but without recognition, at Robert, from under the almost albino eyelashes. He was approaching fifty now and his face was fleshy but hard and healthy, with a thin, set mouth that gave a sense of control and self-discipline to his expression.
Robert hated him. He hated him for the attempted murder of a fourteen-year-old boy in 1938; he hated him for the acts that he must have condoned or collaborated in during the war; he hated him for his father’s disappearance and his mother’s exile; he hated him for what he had said about the pretty little American girl in the lambskin hat; he hated him for the confident impudence of his glance and the healthy, untouched robustness of his face and neck; he hated him because he could look directly into the eyes of a man he had tried to kill and not recognize him; he hated him because he was here, bringing the idea of death and shamefully unconsummated vengeance into this silvery holiday bubble climbing the placid air of a kindly, welcoming country.
And most of all he hated the man in the white cap because the man betrayed and made a sour joke of the precariously achieved peace that Robert had built for himself, with his wife, his children, his job, his comfortable, easygoing, generously forgetful Americanism, since the war.
The German deprived him of his sense of normalcy. Living with a wife and three children in a clean, cheerful house was not normal; having your name in the telephone directory was not normal; lifting your hat to your neighbor and paying your bills was not normal; obeying the law and depending upon the protection of the police was not normal. The German sent him back through the years to an older and truer normality—murder, blood, flight, conspiracy, pillage, and ruins. For a while Robert had deceived himself into believing that the nature of everyday could change. The German in the crowded cabin had now put him to rights. Meeting the German had been an accident, but the accident had revealed what was permanent and nonaccidental in his life and the life of the people around him.
Mac was saying something to him, and the girl in the lambskin hat was singing an American song in a soft, small voice, but he didn’t hear what Mac was saying and the words of the song made no sense to him. He had turned away from looking at the German and was looking at the steep stone face of the mountain, now almost obscured by a swirling cloud, and he was trying to figure out how he could get rid of Mac, escape the young Americans, follow the German, get him alone, and kill him.
He had no intention of making it a duel. He did not intend to give the man a chance to fight for his life. It was punishment he was after, not a symbol of honor. He remembered other stories of men who had been in concentration camps during the war who had suddenly confronted their torturers later on and had turned them in to the authorities and had the satisfaction of witnessing their execution. But whom could he turn the German over to—the Swiss police? For what crime that would fit into what criminal code?
Or he could do what an ex-prisoner had done in Budapest three or four years after the war, when he had met one of his jailers on a bridge over the Danube and had simply picked the man up and thrown him into the water and watched him drown. The ex-prisoner had explained who he was and who the drowned man was and had been let off and had been treated as a hero. But Switzerland was not Hungary, the Danube was far away, the war had finished a long time ago.
No, what he had to do was follow the man, stay with him, surprise him alone somewhere on the slopes, contrive a murder that would look like an accident, be out of the country before anyone asked any questions, divulge nothing to anyone, leave the body, if possible, in an isolated place where the snow would cover it and where it would not be found till the farmers drove their herds high up into the mountains for the summer pasturage. And he had to do it swiftly, before the man realized that he was the object of any special attention on Robert’s part, before he started to wonder about the American on his tracks, before the process of memory began its work and the face of the skinny fourteen-year-old boy on the dark mountain in 1938 began to emerge from the avenging face of the grown man.
Robert had never killed a man. During the war, he had been assigned by the American Army as part of a liaison team to a French division, and while he had been shot at often enough, he had never fired a gun after arriving in Europe. When the war was over, he had been secretly thankful that he had been spared the necessity of killing. Now he understood—he was not to be spared; his war was not over.
“Say, Robert …” It was Mac’s voice finally breaking through into his consciousness. “What’s the matter? I’ve been talking to you for thirty seconds and you haven’t heard a word I said. Are you sick? You look awfully queer, lad.”
“I’m all right,” Robert said. “I have a little headache. That’s all. Maybe I’d better eat something, get something warm to drink. You go ahead down by yourself.”
“Of course not,” Mac said. “I’ll wait for you.”
“Don’t be silly,” Robert said, trying to keep his tone natural and friendly.
“You’ll lose the Contessa. Actually, I don’t feel much like skiing any more today. The weather’s turned lousy.” He gestured at the cloud that was enveloping them. “You can’t see a thing. I’ll probably take the lift back down.…”
“Hey, you’re beginning to worry me,” Mac said anxiously. “I’ll stick with you. You want me to take you to a doctor?”
“Leave me alone, please, Mac,” Robert said. He had to get rid of Mac and if it meant hurting his feelings now, he’d make it up to him some way, but later. “When I get one of these headaches I prefer being alone.”
“You’re sure now?” Mac asked.
“I’m sure.”
“Okay. See you at the hotel for tea?”
“Yes,” Robert said. After murder, Robert thought, I always have a good tea. He prayed that the Italian girl would put her skis on immediately and move off quickly once they got to the top, so that Mac wo
uld be gone before Robert had to start off after the man in the white cap.
The cabin was swinging over the last pylon now and slowing down to come into the station. The passengers were stirring a bit, arranging clothes, testing bindings, in preparation for the descent. Robert stole a quick glance at the German. The woman with him was knotting a silk scarf around his throat, with little wifely gestures. She had the face of a cook. Neither she nor the man looked in Robert’s direction. I will face the problem of the woman when I come to it, Robert thought.
The cabin came to a stop and the skiers began to disembark. Robert was close to the door and was one of the first people out. Without looking back, he walked swiftly out of the station and into the shifting grayness of the mountaintop. One side of the mountain dropped off in a sheer, rocky face next to the station and Robert went over and stood on the edge, looking out. If the German, for any reason, happened to come over near him to admire the view or to judge the condition of the piste of the Kaisergarten, which had to be entered some distance farther on, but which cut back under the cliff much lower down, where the slope became more gradual, there was a possibility that one quick move on Robert’s part would send the man crashing down to the rocks some hundred meters below, and the whole thing would be over. Robert turned and faced the exit of the station, searching in the crowd of brightly dressed skiers for the white cap.
He saw Mac come out with the Italian girl. He was talking to her and carrying her skis and the girl was smiling warmly. Mac waved at Robert and then knelt to help the girl put on her skis. Robert took a deep breath. Mac, at least, was out of the way. And the American group had decided to have lunch on top and had gone into the restaurant near the station.
The white cap was not to be seen. The German and the woman had not yet come out. There was nothing unusual about that. People often waxed their skis in the station, where it was warm, or took time to go to the toilets downstairs before setting out on their runs. It was all to the good. The longer the German took, the fewer people there would be hanging around to notice Robert when he set out after him.