Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“I see you,” he said, bending to unlock his bindings, “but I won’t tell a soul.”

Constance gave a final, self-conscious pat to the icy crystals on her parka. “I only fell four times all afternoon,” she said.

“Up there, tomorrow”—he made a gesture of his head toward the mountain—“you’ll crash all day.”

“I didn’t say I was going up there.” Constance buckled her skis together and started to swing them up to her shoulder. Pritchard reached over and took them from her. “I can carry my own skis,” she said.

“Don’t be sturdy. American girls are always being sturdy about inessential points.” He made a big V out of the two pairs of skis on his shoulders, and they started walking, their boots crunching on the stained, hard snow of the road. The lights came on in the town, pale in the fading light. The postman passed them, pulling his sled with his big dog yoked beside him. Six children in snowsuits on a linked whip of sleds came sliding down out of a steep side street and overturned in front of them in a fountain of laughter. A big brown horse with his belly clipped to keep the ice from forming there slowly pulled three huge logs toward the station. Old men in pale-blue parkas passed them and said “ Grüezi ,” and a maid from one of the houses up the hill shot out on a little sled, holding a milk can between her knees as she rocketed around the turns. They were playing a French waltz over at the skating rink, and the music mingled with the laughter of the children and the bells on the horse’s bridle and the distant, old-fashioned clanging of the gong at the railroad station, announcing a train’s departure.

“Departure,” the station bell said, insistent among the other sounds.

There was a booming noise far off in the hills, and Constance looked up, puzzled. “What’s that?” she asked.

“Mortars,” said Pritchard. “It snowed last night, and the patrols have been out all day firing at the overhangs. For the avalanches.”

There was another shot, low and echoing, and they stopped and listened. “Like old times,” Pritchard said as they started walking again. “Like the good old war.”

“Oh,” said Constance, feeling delicate, because she had never heard guns before. “The war. Were you in it?”

“A little.” He grinned. “I had a little war.”

“Doing what?”

“Night fighter,” he said, shifting the yoke of skis a little on his shoulders. “I flew an ugly black plane across an ugly black sky. That’s the wonderful thing about the Swiss—the only thing they shoot is snow.”

“Night fighter,” Constance said vaguely. She had been only twelve years old when the war ended, and it was all jumbled and remote in her memory. It was like hearing about the graduating class two generations before you in school. People were always referring to names and dates and events that they expected you to recognize, but which you could never quite get straight. “Night fighter. What was that?”

“We flew interceptor missions over France,” Pritchard said. “We’d fly on the deck to avoid the radar and flak, and hang around airfields making the Hun miserable, waiting for planes to come in slow, with their wheels down.”

“Oh, I remember now,” Constance said firmly. “You’re the ones who ate carrots. For night vision.”

Pritchard laughed. “For publication we ate carrots,” he said. “Actually, we used radar. We’d locate them on the screen and fire when we saw the exhaust flares. Give me a radar screen over a carrot any day.”

“Did you shoot down many planes?” Constance asked, wondering if she sounded morbid.

“ Grüezi ,” Pritchard said to the owner of a pension who was standing in front of his door looking up at the sky to see if it was going to snow that night. “Twenty centimetres by morning. Powder.”

“You think?” the man said, looking doubtfully at the evening sky.

“I guarantee,” Pritchard said.

“You’re very polite,” the man said, smiling. “You must come to Switzerland more often.” He went into his pension , closing the door behind him.

“A couple,” Pritchard said carelessly. “We shot down a couple. Should I tell you how brave I was?”

“You look so young,” Constance said.

“I’m thirty,” said Pritchard. “How old do you have to be to shoot down a plane? Especially poor, lumbering transports, running out of gas, full of clerks and rear-echelon types, wiping their glasses and being sorry the airplane was never invented.”

In the hills, there was the flat sound of the mortars again. Constance wished they’d stop. “You don’t look thirty,” she said to Pritchard.

“I’ve led a simple and salutary life. Here,” he said. They were in front of one of the smaller hotels, and he put the skis in the rack and jammed the poles into the snow beside them. “Let’s go in here and get a simple and salutary cup of tea.”

“Well,” said Constance, “I really—”

“Make the letter two pages shorter tonight, and more intense.” He took her elbow gently, barely touching it, as he guided her toward the door. “And polish your hair some other night.”

They went into the bar and sat down at a heavy, carefully carved wood table. There were no other skiers in the bar—just some village men sitting under the chamois antlers on the wall, quietly playing cards on felt cloths and drinking coffee out of small stemmed glasses.

“I told you,” Pritchard said, taking off his scarf. “This country is being overrun by the Swiss.”

The waitress came over, and Pritchard ordered, in German.

“What did you ask for?” Constance asked, because she could tell it wasn’t only tea.

“Tea and lemon and black rum,” said Pritchard.

“Do you think I ought to have rum?” she asked doubtfully.

“Everybody in the whole world should have rum,” he said. “It will keep you from committing suicide in the twilight.”

“You speak German, don’t you?”

“I speak all the dead languages of Europe,” he said. “German, French, Italian, and English. I was carefully educated for a world of interchangeable currency.” He sat back, rubbing the knuckles of one hand against the palm of the other, to warm them. His head was leaning against the wood-panelled wall and he was smiling at her and she couldn’t tell whether she was uncomfortable or not. “Let me hear you say ‘Hi-ho, Silver.’”

“What?” she asked, puzzled.

“Isn’t that what people say in America? I want to perfect my accent for the next invasion,” he said.

“They stopped that,” she said, thinking, My, he’s a jumpy boy, I wonder what happened to him to make him that way. “They don’t say it any more. It’s out of date.”

“All the best things go out of date so quickly in your country,” he said regretfully. “Observe the Swiss.” He gestured with his head toward where the men were playing. “That game has been going on since 1910,” he said. “Living among the Swiss is so placid. It’s like living alongside a lake. Many people can’t stand it, of course. You remember that joke about the Swiss in that film about Vienna?”

“No,” Constance said. “What film?” This is the first time, she thought, I’ve ever called a movie a film. I must be careful.

“One of the characters says, ‘The Swiss haven’t had a war in a hundred and fifty years and what have they produced? The cuckoo clock.’ I don’t know.” Pritchard shrugged. “Maybe it’s better to live in a country that invents the cuckoo clock than one that invents radar. Time is nothing serious to a cuckoo clock. A little toy that makes a silly, artificial sound every half hour. For people who invent radar, time is ominous, because it’s the difference between the altitude of a plane and the location of the battery that’s going to bring it down. It’s an invention for people who are suspicious and are thinking of ambush. Here’s your tea. As you see, I’m making a serious effort to amuse you, because I’ve been watching you for five days and you give the impression of a girl who cries herself to sleep several times a week.”