Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“I saw you at Stowe,” Robert confessed. “At Christmas.”

“Oh, that’s where,” she said. “I saw you ski. Oh, my, you’re silky. ”

Mac broke into a loud laugh at this description of Robert’s skiing style.

“Don’t mind my friend,” Robert said, enjoying the girl’s admiration. “He’s a coarse soldier who is trying to beat the mountain to its knees by brute strength.”

“Say,” the girl said, looking a little puzzled. “You have a funny little way of talking. Are you American?”

“Well, yes,” Robert said. “I am now. I was born in France.”

“Oh, that explains it,” the girl said. “You were born among the crags.”

“I was born in Paris,” Robert said.

“Do you live there now?”

“I live in New York,” Robert said.

“Are you married?” The girl asked anxiously.

“Barbara,” the Philadelphian protested, “behave yourself.”

“I just asked the man a simple, friendly question,” the girl protested. “Do you mind, monsieur?”

“Not at all.”

“ Are you married?”

“Yes,” Robert said.

“He has three children,” Mac added helpfully. “The oldest one is going to run for president at the next election.”

“Oh, isn’t that too bad,” the girl said. “I set myself a goal on this trip. I was going to meet one unmarried Frenchman.”

“I’m sure you’ll manage it,” Robert said.

“Where is your wife? Now?” the girl said.

“In New York.”

“Pregnant,” Mac said, more helpful than ever.

“And she lets you run off and ski all alone like this?” the girl asked incredulously.

“Yes,” Robert said. “Actually, I’m in Europe on business, and I sneaked off ten days.”

“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.