The Ice Soldier

by Paul Watkins

  “Why ever not? Is there something wrong with it?” He inspected the apple, as if to find half a worm dangling from the part he had bitten.

  “Just … please.” I had no idea why I’d suddenly become so sensitive to this noise, but I knew for certain that I could no longer tolerate it.

  “You need to get some rest, William.” My father leaned forward and tossed the apple into the fireplace.

  We both watched sparks fly up from the place where it landed among the glowing coals. And then there was no sound except the hiss of its juices turning to steam.

  THAT NIGHT, LYING IN BED, I thought back to the old recruiting poster at the Stroud station—the confident and blissful smile on the face of that officer heading home from the war after he had Done His Bit. In a silly way that man, that drawing of a man, had become my hero during the war. I wanted to wear that same contented smile and to be sure, as he was sure, that all he had endured would trouble him no longer when he at last reached home again.

  The difference was that the drawing of the man never did reach home. He lived in that exquisite in-between place, when the hope of returning to all that was familiar and secure was close enough to grasp but had not yet been grasped. What that man never had to learn was that the image of home which he had clung to when he was away could not be found. The smells and sounds were the same. The colors of the flowers in the hedgerows which he passed by, having walked because there were no taxis, were all as he remembered them. Everything was there, except the most important part. This was the part that had convinced him to go on living when it seemed as if everything around him was dead. That part was missing.

  I wish I could have seen a picture of that man after he reached home and was lying back in his bed, so unused to its softness that he would end up sleeping on the floor, wrapped in his greatcoat, as I did. I wish I could have seen the look on that man’s face as he lay there, having realized that the reason the all-important part of home could not be found was that it had never existed at all. Instead, he found a place where people forced him back into a past he was trying to forget. They reminded him of squandered opportunities, not understanding that the one great opportunity, to be alive, was something he could no longer take for granted as they did.

  I waited until I could hear my father snoring in his bed; then I went out and pissed on his roses.

  THREE

  WHEN I CAME DOWN for breakfast the next morning, my father was at the stove, frying up eggs and humming “Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer.” He wore his best white shirt and suit trousers. His braces hung down the backs of his legs and his suit jacket hung on a chair beside his spit-shined shoes. When he heard me come into the room, he looked at me over his shoulder and smiled. “Coming to chapel?”

  “How many times have you asked me that and when have I ever said anything but no?”

  He chuckled. “Just wearing you down, I suppose. I’m like one of those missionaries, you see. The ones they send off to live among the cannibals. I just keep making a nuisance of myself until eventually you’ll give in just to shut me up.”

  “Or I could roast you and eat you.” I yawned, helping myself to a mug of tea.

  “I expect you would find me a bit chewy. I’m a little past my prime.” He took some tomatoes out from the broiler and tinned beans from a pot on the stove, loaded them onto the plates of sausages and eggs. He set one in front of me and the other in front of himself.

  I reached behind me to the cutlery drawer, feeling sleep-cramped muscles stretching in my back. I fished out some knives and forks and handed one set to my father.

  As we tucked into our breakfasts, the strange events of yesterday seemed far behind me.

  The church bells started ringing, long hollow notes which echoed out across the rooftops of the town.

  Although he had eaten only a few mouthfuls, my father set down his knife and fork. “Right, I’m off,” he said. He dabbed a handkerchief against his mouth and stood up from the table. “You can have the rest of mine, if you want. You stay here and read the paper, while I go and pray for your sins,” he added as he pulled on his jacket.

  “That’s good of you,” I replied.

  He swiped an apple from the bowl on the windowsill, tossed it in the air, and caught it in his palm with a satisfying slap. “That business last night,” he said. “Better now?”

  I nodded. “I don’t know what it was.”

  My father stepped out into the street and pulled the door behind him. His route to the church took him right past the kitchen window, down the path on which cows were herded to the market. When I was a child, I used to press my face to the diamond-shaped glass panes, each one held in place by dull strips of lead, and watch the cows bring their wet black noses up to the window as they passed. Now I saw my father striding by, the uneven view through the panes making his body seem improperly assembled. The kitchen window was open and I could hear the sound of his footsteps. I was leaning forward to tap on the glass and give him another smile before he headed off to sit among the somber pews of the church when he lifted the apple to his mouth and took a bite.

  I froze, and in that moment I was no longer reaching out towards the window, no longer in the kitchen of my father’s house on a quiet Sunday morning.

  AS IF GLIMPSED from the crust of a meteor falling to earth, I saw the craggy vastness of the Alps with its elephant skin of glaciers, bared teeth of rock, and blinding sheets of snow. Now, coming closer, I could make out the Dragone mountains. Below them, tucked in a luminously green valley, lay the town of Palladino, its jumbled shingle rooftops patched with yellow moss. Beside the town, a shimmering lake reflected the blue sky. From there, I focused to a narrow stripe of trail which climbed up to the treeless hills. There, high on that trail, five figures were moving slowly forward, bent low with the weight of their packs.

  One of those figures was me.

  Tumbling now into the shell of my body, I saw through my own sweat-stung eyes and felt the burden of my pack and heard the shuffle of our boots across the stony ground.

  We were moving single-file up the customs house road. On one side of the narrow dirt track was a steep drop down towards the Palladino Valley. On other other side, beyond a wide stretch of boulder-strewn ground, was a lake formed by runoff water from the Langua del Dragone glacier. On the far side of the lake, the glacier itself reared up out of the water, scabbed with dirt and glowing blue inside. Somewhere out there, hidden from view by the rise of the glacier, was Carton’s Rock.

  It had taken us most of the day to climb the steep road from the meadow where we had landed by parachute just before dawn. As soon as we hit the ground, we gathered up our chutes, located the drop canisters, and sorted out our gear. Within twenty minutes, we were on the move.

  It was late afternoon before we cleared the last switchback of the mountain path and emerged onto level ground. Here, the boulder fields of glacial moraine extended to the glacier itself. The path continued along the edge of a lake in which great chunks of ice drifted with the dignity of swans across the silty green water.

  We stopped to catch our breath. It had been a hard walk carrying so much gear, but the higher we climbed, the safer we felt. Even though none of us had been to this part of the Alps before, the shape of the terrain and what it demanded of us was so familiar that I began to feel as if we had somehow leapfrogged time itself, returning to those days before the war when the most complicated thing in our lives, and the only thing that truly mattered, was being up on the high ground, doing exactly what we were doing now.

  As the shadows of the afternoon began to stretch towards evening, the wind picked up, as it always seemed to at the end of the day in the mountains. Turning our backs on the glacier, we sat down against a wall of rock. There, sheltered from the chilling breeze, we brewed up tea on a paraffin stove. The straps of our rucksacks were dark with sweat and the treads of our boots clogged with grit from the path. Some of the Greenland wax rainproofing had rubbed off my anorak and onto my hands,
making them smell of beeswax. I took off my wool cap and let the sweat cool in my hair.

  Each of us was lost in thought as we stared out across the vast expanse of snowy mountaintops. The valleys which separated these peaks from one another were hidden from view. They seemed not to exist at all. It looked as if the world had shrugged, closing in upon itself like an accordion, swallowing the greener world below and leaving only the jagged tips.

  I allowed myself a moment of congratulation for having brought us together again. I felt genuinely sorry for Stanley, that he had somehow gotten himself so tangled up in his stubbornness and in that silly feuding with his uncle that he had missed out on this great adventure.

  Until now, we had climbed for what it brought to us personally. Even in our little group, which mattered to me more than any other bond of friendship, there was a necessary solitude. No matter that we would soon be roped together, depending on one another’s movements for our very survival, there were moments when it was just you and the mountain. And then, sometimes, the stabbing of your cramponed boots and the swinging of your ice ax became so focused that it was no longer just you and the mountain. It was just you. As if you and the mountain were the same thing. As if you were climbing some part of yourself. How little sense that made to people who had not felt it, and yet how real it was. How undeniable. But now that selfishness, if this was what it could be called, had been set aside. Knowing that lives would be saved by this mission, the purpose of our being here was richer than at any other time up in the mountains.

  As the deep breaths of our exertion slowly returned to normal, we sipped our tea and nibbled on dry army biscuits.

  Soon the sun would dip behind the mountains. Then the light would fade quickly. I planned for us to get as far as the abandoned customs house, spend the night there, and then head out across the ice at dawn on the following day. Since we were still too low to have a view of Carton’s Rock, I would not feel secure about our route until I had our objective in sight.

  It was time to move again. Our cooling sweat had begun to chill us. We packed away the stove, flicked the last drops of cold tea out of our tin mugs, and shouldered our rucksacks.

  About five minutes later, just as I was wondering when we would come in sight of the customs house, I heard the first gunshot.

  At first, I did not believe it was a gun. In that fraction of a second before I realized we had come under fire, I thought it was ice cracking somewhere out on the glacier.

  I turned to see that Whistler had fallen. Part of me was trying to believe that he had simply slipped, but then I noticed that he was lying facedown, not moving, his pack spilled open and his neatly labeled bags of clothing and food about his shoulders. Only then did I understand what had happened.

  We tumbled into the ditches, Sugden and Forbes on the side closest to the slope and Armstrong and I on the side nearest the lake.

  “It came from out there.” Armstrong gestured towards the dusty ground between us and the lake. Somewhere, behind one of those boulders, hid the man who had shot Whistler.

  We both looked back to where Whistler lay on the road. He still had not moved.

  On the other side of the road, I saw Sugden’s face appear and then disappear as he ducked out of sight.

  Beside me, Armstrong checked his gun. It was a modified Enfield which he had used in his duties as a sniper in the hedgerows of Normandy. The wooden stock had been cut down to reduce its weight, and the telescopic sight was wrapped with a strip of burlap for camouflage.

  Carefully I raised my head until I could see over the edge of the ditch. Then I lifted my binoculars and scanned the lichen-crusted boulders, looking from rock to rock, searching for movement. Tufts of white cotton grass swayed in the breeze. Miniature tornadoes of dust spun along the water’s edge.

  “No luck?” whispered Armstrong.

  I lowered the binoculars and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. “Nothing yet.”

  “Where the hell did he come from?” asked Armstrong. “They told us there wouldn’t be anybody up here.” Armstrong crouched beside me, rifle laid across his thighs. The paint-splash camouflage pattern on his Dennison smock made him seem like a shadow in this world of earth and stone.

  I returned to scanning the ground beyond. In the instant I raised the binoculars above the rim of the ditch, I saw movement. A helmeted figure carrying a rifle swept past like a ghost among the rocks. He was there for only an instant. Then he was gone behind a large stone which stood about knee-high and whose top was as smooth and flat as a table. “He’s on the move,” I whispered. My mouth had gone bone dry.

  Then came the faint grating sound of Armstrong chambering a bullet in his rifle.

  “Take a look,” I whispered.

  Armstrong set aside his gun and peered through the binoculars.

  “Do you see the big flat rock?” I asked.

  “Got it,” he replied.

  “He’s behind that.”

  Armstrong handed me back the binoculars, then took up his rifle and adjusted the range on his sights. “Tell me when he shows his face.”

  I went back to staring through the sweat-smeared lenses. My teeth were gritted so tightly that I thought they would crack. Every muscle in my body was clenched. My eyes ached from staring.

  Then I saw him again. The sniper had crawled around to the side of the rock. His sharply angled helmet was covered with dried mud. If he stayed still, I could barely make him out.

  “I’ve got him now,” I whispered to Armstrong. “He’s on the right-hand side of the rock.”

  Slowly Armstrong raised his gun and eased the barrel forward between two stones which lay across the top of the ditch.

  I slid down until my head was at the level of his boots, watching as he dug his toes into the ground to brace himself. I could hear his breathing.

  Armstrong wiped the sweat of his palm on his jump smock. His breathing changed. It became deeper and heavier, almost like that of a man asleep. But his eyes were open, cheek resting against the oiled red-brown wood of the gun stock.

  I drank all the water in my canteen, even the gritty dregs which always lurked at the bottom, before refilling it in the milky-silted runoff in the ditch. Then I pressed my hands against my face and rubbed the dirt from my eyebrows. I felt exhausted and we had not yet even set out across the glacier. I thought about Whistler. I wondered if he was still alive and was just lying motionless until the shooting stopped. I had an image of him down in the Bull’s Cellar in Oxford, when he had just come off a day of working at the Ashmolean. Armstrong had reached across and mussed up Whistler’s hair and the dust of the library had wafted into the air, scenting the pub with the smell of antique books.

  Then a sharp, crunching crack scattered the gentle picture from my head.

  AND IT WAS IN this moment that I returned to my father’s kitchen, fingers still outstretched to tap upon the glass. But my father was gone. The sound of his biting into the apple, which had somehow brought to life that memory, still echoed in my head. I had no idea how long I had been standing there. The clarity of that memory had been so sharp that for a moment I could not be sure which was real.

  For a while, I just sat at the table, while the sounds and smells of the house slowly filtered back into my brain, until I knew for certain where I was. Then I went upstairs and shaved and dressed, and packed my overnight bag, ready for the trip back to London. All the while, I was wondering why that day of Armstrong’s death should have returned to me after all this time of lying dormant in the catacombs of my brain.

  When my father returned from church, he found me on the doorstep, sitting on my duffel bag beside the remains of the iron rail fence which had once stood in front of the house. The railings had all been cut down during the First World War, to make use of the iron. Now only nubs of the metal remained.

  “I’ve sent for a cab,” I told him.

  “So soon?” he asked. He looked sad but not surprised.

  “I have to, I’m afraid.” I smiled w
eakly. “Too much work to do back in the city.”

  “Damn the city,” he murmured. “Damn what it does to people.”

  The cab arrived and I shook my father’s hand good-bye.

  I went to let go but he kept his grip on my palm.

  “Something’s not right with you, boy,” he said.

  “Something’s not right,” I agreed.

  The cabdriver got out of his cab and stretched. Then he put his hands in his pockets, tilted his head back, and stared up at the sky.

  “It’s to do with that medal, isn’t it?” asked my father.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “Perhaps.”

  “I wish you’d never won it!” he blurted out.

  This caught me by surprise, given how much he liked to talk about it and the fact that he kept it on display.

  “All this time,” he went on, “I’ve been trying to pretend that whatever it cost you—”

  “Cost me?”

  “Yes!” he blurted out. “Cost! Not in money perhaps, but in other things. I’m not such an old fool as I don’t know that a good number of the people who won the M.C. died winning it. It cost you all right. And I expect you’ll be paying for it, one way or another, for the rest of your life. That’s why I make so much of it. So as we can both pretend that what you did was worth it. I know you don’t like it when I bring up the subject, but how else can you know I am proud of you?” By the time he had finished, there were tears in his eyes.

  I hugged him then, which I had not done in years. I smelled the coal-tar soap he used, and the faint lemony scent of his hair oil. “Dad,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

  “Whatever for?” he asked.

  “I peed on your roses.”

  He stood back, but kept his hands resting on my shoulders. “I know that,” he said. “You’ve been peeing on them for years.”

  “You knew?”

  He shrugged. “They don’t seem to mind.”

  As the cab drove away past the cemetery, people were still emerging from the darkness of the church. The vicar stood off to one side, hands clasping a Bible to his chest, smiling at the old ladies who clustered around him, flowers pinned to their hats.