Short Stories: Five Decades (98 page)

“What business?” the girl asked.

“I’m a diamond merchant,” Robert said. “I buy and sell diamonds.”

“That’s the sort of man I’d like to meet,” the girl said. “Somebody awash with diamonds. But unmarried.”

“Barbara!” the Philadelphian said.

“I deal mostly in industrial diamonds,” Robert said. “It’s not exactly the same thing.”

“Even so,” the girl said.

“Barbara,” the Philadelphian said, “pretend you’re a lady.”

“If you can’t speak candidly to a fellow American,” the girl said, “who can you speak candidly to?” She looked out the Plexiglas window of the cabin. “Oh, dear,” she said, “it’s a perfect monster of a mountain, isn’t it? I’m in a
fever
of terror.” She turned and regarded Robert carefully. “You
do
look like a Frenchman,” she said. “Terribly polished. You’re definitely
sure
you’re married?”

“Barbara,” the Philadelphian said forlornly.

Robert laughed and Mac and the other Americans laughed and the girl smiled under her fuzzy hat, amused at her own clowning and pleased at the reaction she was getting. The other people in the car, who could not understand English, smiled good-naturedly at the laughter, happy, even though they were not in on the joke, to be the witnesses of this youthful gaiety.

Then, through the laughter, Robert heard a man’s voice nearby, saying, in quiet tones of cold distaste, “Schaut euch diese dummen amerikanischen Gesichter an! Und diese Leute bilden sich ein, sie wären berufen, die Welt zu regieren.”

Robert had learned German as a child, from his Alsatian grandparents, and he understood what he had just heard, but he forced himself not to turn around to see who had said it. His years of temper, he liked to believe, were behind him, and if nobody else in the cabin had overheard the voice or understood the words that had been spoken, he was not going to be the one to force the issue. He was here to enjoy himself and he didn’t feel like getting into a fight or dragging Mac and the other youngsters into one. Long ago, he had learned the wisdom of playing deaf when he heard things like that, or worse. If some bastard of a German wanted to say, “Look at those stupid American faces. And these are the people who think they have been chosen to rule the world,” it made very little real difference to anybody, and a grown-up man ignored it if he could. So he didn’t look to see who had said it, because he knew that if he picked out the man, he wouldn’t be able to let it go. This way, as an anonymous, though hateful voice, he could let it slide, along with many of the other things that Germans had said during his lifetime.

The effort of not looking was difficult, though, and he closed his eyes, angry with himself for being so disturbed by a scrap of overheard malice like this. It had been a perfect holiday up to now and it would be foolish to let it be shadowed, even briefly, by a random voice in a crowd. If you came to Switzerland to ski, Robert told himself, you had to expect to find some Germans. Though each year now there were more and more of them, massive, prosperous-looking men and sulky-looking women with the suspicious eyes of people who believe they are in danger of being cheated. Men and women both pushed more than was necessary in the lift lines, with a kind of impersonal egotism, a racial, unquestioning assumption of precedence. When they skied, they did it grimly, in large groups, as if under military orders. At night, when they relaxed in the bars and
stublis
, their merriment was more difficult to tolerate than their dedicated daytime gloom and Junker arrogance. They sat in red-faced platoons, drinking gallons of beer, volleying out great bursts of heavy laughter and roaring glee-club arrangements of students’ drinking songs. Robert had not yet heard them sing the Horst Wessel song, but he noticed that they had long ago stopped pretending that they were Swiss or Austrian or that they had been born in the Alsace. Somehow, to the sport of skiing, which is, above all, individual and light and an exercise in grace, the Germans seemed to bring the notion of the herd. Once or twice, when he had been trampled in the teleferique station, he had shown some of his distaste to Mac, but Mac, who was far from being a fool under his puppy-fullback exterior, had said, “The trick is to isolate them, lad. It’s only when they’re in groups that they get on your nerves. I’ve been in Germany for three years and I’ve met a lot of good fellows and some
smashing
girls.”

Robert had agreed that Mac was probably right. Deep in his heart, he wanted to believe that Mac was right. Before and during the war the problem of the Germans had occupied so much of his waking life, that V-E Day had seemed to him a personal liberation from them, a kind of graduation ceremony from a school in which he had been forced to spend long years, trying to solve a single, boring, painful problem. He had reasoned himself into believing that their defeat had returned the Germans to rationality. So, along with the relief he felt because he no longer ran the risk of being killed by them, there was the almost as intense relief that he no longer had especially to
think
about them.

Once the war was over, he had advocated reestablishing normal relations with the Germans as quickly as possible, both as good politics and simple humanity. He drank German beer and even bought a Volkswagen, although if it were up to him, given the taste for catastrophe that was latent in the German soul, he would not equip the German Army with the hydrogen bomb. In the course of his business he had very few dealings with Germans and it was only here, in this village in the Graubunden, where their presence was becoming so much more visible each year, that the
idea
of Germans disturbed him any more. But he loved the village and the thought of abandoning his yearly vacation there because of the prevalence of license plates from Munich and Dusseldorf was repugnant to him. Maybe, he thought, from now on he would come at a different time, in January, instead of late in February. Late February and early March was the German season, when the sun was warmer and shone until six o’clock in the evening. The Germans were sun gluttons and could be seen all over the hills, stripped to the waist, sitting on rocks, eating their picnic lunches, greedily absorbing each precious ray of sunlight. It was as though they came from a country perpetually covered in mist, like the planet Venus, and had to soak up as much brightness and life as possible in the short periods of their holidays to be able to endure the harshness and gloom of their homeland and the conduct of the other inhabitants of Venus for the rest of the year.

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.