The Ice Soldier (26 page)

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Authors: Paul Watkins

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BOOK: The Ice Soldier
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After what Salvatore had said, I knew that there could be no changing of his mind. From the way he talked, I knew he was speaking with the voices of everyone in this little town. Before Carton's coffin had ever scratched and bumped its way along the Via Capozza, they had decided what to do, and it had been left to this man to put their feelings into words.
Just as we were leaving the cemetery, I noticed three graves in a corner of the churchyard. They were newer than the graves around them, and each one carried the same inscription: QUI GIACE UN SOLDATO INGLESE, MORTO NELLA GUERRA 39–45.
I knew immediately who they must be. My eyes blurred.
Salvatore saw where I was looking. “In the summer of 1944,” he said, “some Germans came through here on their way into the mountains. One week later, there was shooting. Then more Germans came. When they returned, it was said that there were several dead hidden in a truck whose canvas flap was pulled down. So nobody here saw them, or knew how many there were. But the Germans gave us three English bodies to bury, and this is where we put them. We could not find any names on the bodies, so we had to write that they were
sconosciuti.”
“Their names were Charles Whistler, David Armstrong, and Winston Forbes,” I said. Tears spilled down over my cheeks, carrying the salt of old sweat to my lips, where I pushed them away with the tips of my fingers.
“They were your friends?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “They were.”
Salvatore did not seem surprised, as if somehow the story of Carton and his guides, and of the fighting in the mountains and the bodies of the
soldati inglesi
and then our arrival here the day before had all been woven into the history of this town before the events even took place.
“Thank you for making a space for them in your churchyard,” I said.
We walked to the side door of the
cooperativo.
It was cold in the shadow of the building.
“I wish that it was not this way between us,” said Salvatore.
I felt as if he meant it, despite everything else he had said. I stood for one thing and he stood for another. And those two things had separated us as finally as the line between the living and the dead.
Walking around the front of the building, I found Stanley basking in the sun, heels up on the Rocket and moleskin hat pulled down over his face. He opened one eye. “All set?” he asked.
“They won't help us,” I told him.
Now both eyes flicked open and he drew his heels down from the coffin. “Why on earth not?”
I explained what Salvatore had said.
“Jesus,” muttered Stanley.
“I don't think he is going to help us, either.” I took Stanley down to look at the graves.
There was nothing for me to say. To stand before the remains of someone who, if things had played out differently, could at that moment just as easily be looking down on your own grave is not a thing which can be bracketed with words, or set right with prayers, or even wept into making sense.
 
 
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON by the time Stanley and I arrived back at our campsite in the San Rafaele woods. We were tired from dragging the coffin. The muscles of my lower back and thighs complained in the angry, thumping rhythms of my heart.
I lit the old Primus stove and put some water on to boil for tea, of which we had very little left. Fading light showed in coppery strands through the trees. Church bells tolled the hour down in town. I heard the clop of a donkey's hooves along the Via Capozza.
It was a while before either of us spoke. In silence, we were both reaching the same conclusion. Either we would have to give up, and give up now, or we would have to carry the coffin ourselves, along with our food and the tent. It was, according to my map, eight kilometers across the glacier before we reached the gully up which we would need to travel to reach the base of the Dragon's Teeth. From there, no map would tell us how far up we had to climb, as none of them were detailed enough. We would not know until we had gone that far whether the coffin could be dragged or lifted to the summit. And I had no way of knowing if, once we were on the summit, there would even be room for a coffin, let alone enough stones lying about to construct the cairn that Carton had requested. With most of the mountains I had climbed, there was barely enough room for two people to stand on the summit.
I was afraid to speak because I was worried that Stanley would try to talk us out of it, and for the first time since I had given my word to Dr. Webb, I knew I
could
be talked out of it. I tried to think about what it would mean to have failed at this. I could imagine myself sitting at my father's house, in front of the fire with one of his tin cups of tea, and hearing him say I had done the right thing and my trying to believe it was true.
So thickly did these thoughts swirl around me that I did not feel the cool sweat on my back or the tom-tom drumming of pain in my body. I did not hear the cold wind blowing through the treetops, or even Stanley's voice, calling to me as if from somewhere down in the valley and not from right beside me. His voice grew closer and closer until at last I heard what he was saying.
“I've been trying to imagine the look on Helen's face when we show up at Victoria Station still lugging the Rocket.”
“I'm sure she'd understand,” I said.
“I can think of half a dozen jokes to make about it.”
“I expect there are jokes to be made,” I said, bracing myself for the onslaught.
But Stanley's face remained serious. “I think about Sugden and Pringle,” he said, “and those people down there in Palladino who would like to see us fail before we've even started. They will be the ones to make the jokes if we give up now. And then those jokes will be the story of our lives.”
I listened to him, hearing the old stubbornness in his voice and remembering all the times when he had exasperated me with his bullheaded words. But now I needed to hear them. Just as when I'd jumped from that Dakota, six years and a lifetime ago, there was no way home for me except through those mountains.
 
 
THE NEXT DAY, dragging the coffin behind us like the beasts of burden we had become, Stanley and I returned to the Via Capozza. We had agreed that there was no time to lose. The longer we stayed up in the San Rafaele woods, the more likely it was that the locals would find some reason to have us arrested.
We stopped outside the grocery shop, which was the only provisioner in town. Splintery boxes of tomatoes, beans, and apples were set out under a tattered yellow awning.
Stanley took up his post as coffin guard, while I went inside, my pockets stuffed with lire to buy up whatever I could.
The shop smelled of spices, soap, and cheese.
An old woman sat beside a counter, on which oval loaves of bread were stacked. Beside the loaves were bowls of olives, green and black and another tiny kind which were a vivid bluish yellow. The woman was knitting a white baby sock. As soon as she saw me, she set the knitting down beside the bread, got up, and went out the back through a curtain made of beads. The beads rattled as they fell back into place.
A moment later, a man appeared. He was small and round-faced and wearing a shirt the same faded yellow as the awning outside. His eyes were a flat blue-gray and humorless.
“Prego,”
he said, and took his place behind the counter.
“I've come to buy some food,” I said.
Almost imperceptibly, he moved his head from side to side.
“Non posso,”
he whispered, as if he were afraid to raise his voice.
“Is there a law against selling food to us?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“You are the mayor of this town?” I asked.
He nodded slowly.
“And you will not help us?” I demanded. “Not in any way at all?”
“Mi dispiace,”
he said, and looked down at his shoes.
There was no point arguing. I turned to leave and was startled when I found myself face to face with Salvatore.
He was wearing the same thread-pulled sweater as the day before and leather breeches polished black at the knees. This, combined with his unruly hair and shaggy beard, gave him the look of a bear masquerading unsuccessfully as a man. He was holding out a can whose yellow label said SALUBRIO; it appeared to contain a stew of chickpeas and smoked ham. “Try this,” he said. “After three or four days, you will get used to it.”
I took the can from him, unable to disguise my confusion as to why he would be helping me now. “The gentleman says I cannot buy food here.”
“You can buy here.” Salvatore looked past me and spoke to the mayor in words I could not understand.
“I don't want to cause any trouble,” I said.
“There is no trouble,” replied Salvatore.
I faced the shopkeeper again.
He was holding the half-knitted baby sock, pinched between the fingertips of both hands. He nodded, to show that things had changed.
Salvatore said he could not stay. He wished us luck and was gone.
I loaded up the storage compartment of the Rocket with cans of beans, tinned fruit, olive oil, couscous, and cans of “Salubrio.” Having run out of prerolled English cigarettes, I bought a packet of Italian pipe tobacco, cheerfully emblazoned with an Italian soldier in full
alpini
mountain-trooper gear. The fact that he was still wearing a Fascist insignia on his
uniform either had gone unnoticed by the manufacturers or else the tobacco had been in the shop for a very long time. We bought no wine or bread, because they took up too much space. The salesman helped me carry everything out. When that was done, I paid him.
He folded the money away into his pocket.
“Who is Salvatore?” I asked him. I wanted to know why his words carried so much weight in this town.
“Salvatore Santorelli,” replied the mayor. “He is the son of the guide who led Mr. Carton to his mountain.”
Then I understood. It was Salvatore, and he alone, who could change the minds of those in Palladino. He had suffered most, and it was he who had to show forgiveness first.
Few gestures had meant more to me than the sight of that great bear standing before me, holding out that can of stew, as if he had punched through the two-dimensional image of who he had believed us to be before we arrived. But now that he had seen us, what had once seemed to be nothing more than madness, or Englishness, or even the work of the devil, had taken on more human faces, even if they were dirty faces like Stanley's and mine.
 
 
BY THE NEXT MORNING, Stanley and I had been forced to make a few rules about sleeping in the same tent.
The first rule was that we no longer slept head to head. After inhaling each other's bean-soup breath all night, we decided that one person would sleep towards the front of the tent, the other towards the back.
The next rule was that although it was a good idea to remain in our bedrolls, heads peeking outside the tent, while we cooked oatmeal for breakfast, it was not a good idea for
both of us to try to blow out the paraffin burner at the same time. When we did this, burning paraffin splashed in our faces and scorched off my week-old beard as well as the best part of Stanley's eyebrows. This left him looking permanently astonished, an expression he preferred to call “alert.”
All through the day, we packed and repacked the storage area of the Rocket, which turned out to be more difficult than we had expected because even a slight imbalance caused the coffin to tip over when moving across rough ground. By now, not only the metal runners but the sides of the Rocket, too, had received their share of bumps from gateposts and the occasional capsize, which sent the body tumbling inside. But the seams of the coffin were holding, the carrying handles and the rope rings still secure.
I could feel the gradual strengthening of my legs and back as we hauled the coffin back and forth across the field. I was growing used to the feel of the rope around my waist and the strain against my stomach as I pulled.
The end of the day saw us slumped on either side of the stone-ringed fireplace we had built. The wood we had gathered was damp and smoked as it burned. We added fresh pine branches now and then to keep the thing going. The green needles spat and burst into flames. A stew of beans, crumbled biscuits, and pieces of cured ham bubbled and plopped in our mess tin. We leaned forward over the fire, no longer concerned about the smoke which stained our clothes and seeped into every pore in our bodies. I was just reaching forward to lift the mess tin off the flames, since the stew was starting to burn, when Stanley asked, “What's that?”
“What's what?” I replied, rummaging in my canvas sack for the plates.
“That sound?”

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