Short Stories: Five Decades (99 page)

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 over 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.

“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 …?”