At midday one of the other lift operators brought him a loaf of bread with salami and a small bottle of local spirit. Pietro thanked him and ate hungrily in the greasy atmosphere of the cabin where the oil fire smoked and spluttered. People came and went in their brightly coloured clothes, laughing to one another, and Pietro drained the last of his drink in silence. He went out again into the air and nodded to the next skier. He felt good again; for a moment he felt fine.
When he had first gone skiing, eight years earlier in the small French resort of les Houches, the job of ski-lift attendant was not one he envisaged doing. The men who did it looked red-faced and inbred; they made jokes in impenetrable local dialects, and when they laughed you could see how many of their teeth were missing.
But some bitter determination had entered Pietro’s mind in the course of his first trip to the mountains, as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy. This curious figure he now cut, lonely and silent as he tended the chair lift, was not the cheerful boy who had squeezed into the early-morning train to Gatwick. After the tearful farewell of Gloria Katz’s mother (‘How many suitcases is Gloria bringing?’ said Harry) there had been too much bustle at the airport and too little room on the plane for him to see who was there and what it was all going to be like. Then the coach took the damp motorway from Geneva. It was not until darkness fell and they began to climb that some of the children fell asleep. Pietro, his nerves sizzling from Harry Freeman’s cigarettes, went down the swaying bus, clinging to the seats as he passed. Dave Snyder reluctantly offered him a pull from his duty-free bourbon. He was sitting with his new friend Kurt Boshof, a burly, fair-haired American who had apparently skied every mountain in the United States. The two boys had overseen the loading of their own skis on to the plane, causing Pietro a moment’s panic. Was he the only person without skis? He had assumed dimly that you were given them when you got there. An address on the coach microphone by the teacher in charge, Mr Maxwell, had reassured him.
Next to Kurt and Dave, across the gangway, Gloria sat plumply asleep, exhausted by the travel, by Dave’s bourbon and her mother’s solicitude. Her head lay on Laura Heasman’s shoulder. Pietro had never seen Laura out of school before and he was at first slightly disappointed. Her legs were covered by long leather boots and a full denim skirt. She looked at him with her electrifying but ambiguous smile over Gloria’s shoulder. As they climbed, it grew colder in the bus and Laura huddled up to Gloria for warmth. Pietro offered her his jacket as he stood in the gangway, watching the eddies of snow that fell from the trees by the black, onrushing road. She smiled sleepily as she took it.
There was a fight for rooms at the hotel, with Mr Maxwell, an Englishman in his late twenties, trying to keep the children at bay while he found the best room for himself and his colleague. It was too late. Dave Snyder was already on the first-floor landing, where he and Kurt had set up camp in the largest room, overlooking the mountain. There were screeches and recriminations as the others made their claims. Harry Freeman secured a cosy twin-bedder with its own bath at the back of the hotel, while Pietro brought up their baggage. Ten minutes later Laura came in to say that she and Gloria had been given a room with two fourteen-year-old Iranian boys, but they refused to move out, unless . . . By some logic, the only solution was for her and Gloria to have Harry and Pietro’s room. Harry refused. Laura seemed upset; her lower lip trembled. Then she laughed and teased them. They still refused. Then she pleaded with all the power of her almost-womanhood, and five minutes later Pietro and Harry were bunked down with the two Iranian boys.
The next morning there was skiing. On Harry’s advice Pietro had brought his own boots made by a company called Gauner. They were dark blue with red fastenings and gave a certain pain across the instep which Pietro assumed was normal. He and Harry were in the beginners’ group, where they spent most of the morning trying to get their skis on. A laconic Frenchman called Bernard gave instruction. ‘Knees,’ he said to Pietro. ‘What does he mean, “knees”?’ said Pietro as he unplugged the snow from his ears.
It was slow and tiring work. They sweated beneath their anoraks – a gardening jacket belonging to his father in Pietro’s case, an Italian style bought at discount from the trade in Harry’s. At lunch they took the cable car up the mountain and sat outside a café. There they could see the distant figures of people skiing at impossible speeds. One man came down with his skis glued together, making only the tiniest sway of his hips as he plunged over moguls, skirted a narrow icy patch and, scorning the prepared piste, finished the run in the virgin snow beneath the chair lift. It turned out to be Dave Snyder.
Released from Bernard’s gnomic instruction, they were free in the afternoons to go where they chose. The only good thing, as Pietro remarked, was that they spent much more time coming down than going up. Dave Snyder and Kurt Boshof came down so fast each time that they spent most of their day queuing for lifts. Harry and Pietro only needed two short ascents in the whole of the afternoon. As they were clinging tight to a drag lift whose main purpose was apparently to cause bruising to the soft areas between the legs, Pietro saw an all-in-one pink ski suit coming slowly but gracefully down the mountain. He knew at once that it was Laura.
‘Has anyone seen Gloria?’ she called out as she glided past.
‘She’s still in the café,’ he called back.
‘Typical,’ laughed Laura.
‘Yes, typical,’ called Pietro, though she was already out of earshot.
That night he and Harry counted their bruises. It wasn’t the sodomy of the drag lift or the pain from hip bones blue from sudden impact on the ice so much as the fierce ache in the calves that bothered them. The showers were cold. Harry, for the first time, looked defeated.
‘I know,’ said Pietro. ‘We could ask Laura and Gloria if they’d let us use their bath.’
Gloria answered the door in her dressing gown, her hair up in a scarf. She wasn’t pleased to see them. ‘The Blazers want to use the tub,’ she called out to Laura. She hadn’t called them that for a long time. ‘I’m so tired,’ said Gloria. ‘Maybe tomorrow, OK?’
‘Tired? But you sat in the café all day,’ said Harry.
Pietro didn’t think this was the right way to get round Gloria. ‘Please, Laura,’ he called out. ‘Remember we did let you have the room.’ He thought that if he could get past the presence of Gloria in the doorway Laura’s better nature would be vulnerable. It worked, and he was able to climb into the small but hot bathtub a few minutes later.
It seemed impolite not to linger a little while and take a drink with them afterwards; he didn’t want to use them like a hotel. The next evening he took some salami and some peanuts to go with Gloria’s gin and orange. From then on the routine became established. Gloria eventually put down her book and listened to the exaggerated stories they told of what had happened during the day. Pietro sat at the foot of Laura’s bed while Laura sat tucked under the duvet, smiling seraphically as she swallowed tumblers full of gin.
On the third day things came to a head with the Gauner skiing boots. For some time Pietro had wondered whether their inventor, Herr Dr Gauner, had not been a defendant at the Nuremberg trials. As he limped down the main road of Les Houches he hid them under an old blue Peugeot and prayed never to see them again. With some hired boots and a padding of thick socks over the Gauner-inflicted weals, he made progress. By the fifth day he and Harry could navigate slopes of medium difficulty. After lunch on the terrace of the restaurant, washed down with wine from Dôle, they joined a large party of skiers that included Laura, Dave and Kurt. Harry said it was foolhardy, but Pietro reckoned the boys would have to slow down a little for the girls. Grim-faced, they exchanged curt nods and set off, leaving Gloria Katz sunbathing on the terrace.
Laura skied with minimal effort. She said she was afraid and she didn’t go fast, but on narrow tracks she could keep on turning from side to side just by swivelling her skis, which remained parallel; she never seemed to do any of the knee-bending, trunk-twisting or ank
le-flexing recommended by Bernard. Luckily Rania, a slim Saudi Arabian girl with brown eyes, fell over twice, and while Kurt and Dave were fussing over her bindings and dusting the snow from her thighs, Harry and Pietro came over the horizon, heads down, in a hectic schuss that brought them up alongside.
At the bottom, Laura looked at the pair of them panting and grimacing. ‘Look, you’re all hot,’ she laughed, not unkindly. Pietro vowed that he would one day ski with his skis so close together that not even a razor blade could be slid between them.
It was the late-afternoon hour at the bottom of the slope. The sun had gone off the mountain and the skiers were heading into cafés for tea and chocolate. Mothers stood anxiously in the fading light, calling to their errant children. The mountains, no longer a sunny playground, had begun to look cold and menacing. Pietro hoisted his skis once more on to shoulders sore from carrying them and trudged off up the village street. He breathed in the atmosphere of bustle underlaid by Alpine calm; he saw the lights coming on in the shops and chalets and thought of the hot bath and the excitement of the cocktail hour that awaited him.
On the way back to the hotel he stopped in a supermarket and bought some black olives and some cashew nuts. As he left the shop he noticed that the road was called the Chemin des Anes. Opposite his hotel he had already seen a cul-de-sac called the Impasse du Désir. What strange names these places had. ‘Dear Dad,’ he would start a postcard, ‘I am having a lovely time. I am in Thwarted Desire, Asses Way, France. Love to all. PS Would your army friend collect this place under L or H?’
Now, eight years later, when he banged his hands together in the cold and nodded silently to the skiers as they showed their passes, he thought of the extraordinary mixture they had then felt of real anguish and continuing hilarity. He remembered Harry’s generosity and the way he had laughed things away.
The mountains guarded the valley. To the west was the Marmalada, a slope with a single swooping run served by three vertiginous cable cars. The mountains merged imperceptibly across the top of Italy into the Alps; so according to the maps, the place he stood was part of the same upthrust formation as the hills that underlay les Houches.
He was connected to his former schoolboy self by a geological feature as well as by memory. In his solitary distress, he reminded himself of such physical connections. He needed to believe that places were joined to each other; that they formed one continuous world, not distinct universes. Then he might be able to believe that he had not lost touch with his former life and with himself.
IBIZA
BALEARIC ISLANDS 1966
‘I DO APPRECIATE it,’ said Pietro. It was hard to thank his father warmly enough for taking him on holiday without sounding surprised that he had agreed to it. He hadn’t yet mastered the subtle falsities of tact. ‘It’s marvellous,’ he gushed, ‘I mean it.’
‘Of course you do,’ said his father kindly.
The package to Ibiza left from Gatwick. When Pietro had gone to Italy with his mother they had flown from Heathrow, so this was the first time he had seen the thronging families of uncertain Britons preparing for abroad. He liked it much better than Heathrow. There were pretty girls of about his age, slightly over-made-up, peering out from beneath the wings of their harassed families. Their fathers gave orders in loud voices to show they weren’t nervous and their mothers talked about the price of refreshments, the whereabouts of toilets and tickets, the closeness of the hand baggage. The girls tried by their looks to disown their parents as they would later be able to on the beach and in the discothèques; Pietro felt at an advantage having only a father to shrug off.
They were in an apartment in a new block about two hundred yards back from the beach. Pietro was sharing a room with his father, which had its drawbacks for both of them. The old man’s idea of a good morning was to go to the beach early to get a favourable spot, erect a sunshade and read a book on etymology. Pietro found getting up before ten was a torture. He liked to go to the beach about eleven with a book recommended by Mr Maxwell at the US Collegiate, sunbathe for an hour, swim vigorously, open the book and close his eyes. He looked enviously at the Spanish men in their twenties with their hairy chests. He noticed how the English girls fluttered towards them and didn’t seem to mind that all the men could say was ‘Bobby Charlton, very good, Bobby Moore, very good, ha, ha.’
He was happy nevertheless. He liked not only the hot beach with its pointless games but also the town, which was responding to its northern visitors. The white buildings were cool and exotic, the people in the bars spoke little English and the beer was still cerveza. But small handcraft stalls had started to appear beneath awnings at the side of the sloping streets; local traders consulted young Europeans with tangled hair and six-string wooden guitars. They collaborated in the making of primitive jewellery with pliers, beads and strips of leather. Pietro liked the steamy shade of an outdoor restaurant at lunchtime when all the muscles were relaxed by heat and the willing waiter brought sangria and then pans full of paella which seemed indulgently sophisticated with its greasy mixture of shellfish and chicken. He smiled at his father, who nodded back over the melon.
One day Pietro got into a five-a-side game of football on the beach. A boy called Tony suggested that he come along to the discothèque that night. It was a little way out of town in a whitewashed building with stuccoed arches and red tile floors. It played mostly Spanish songs with the occasional British or American pop record. Whatever they played, it was loud enough and fast enough to pack the floor. With a pack of local cigarettes in his shirt pocket and a bottle of red wine under his belt, Pietro danced until the place closed, and still they weren’t tired.
‘Dear Harry,’ he wrote, ‘this place is great. I danced with a girl called Marsha who comes from Birmingham. Her favourite singer is Cliff Richard!! Got into a great football match against the locals. We lost 1–4. Guess who scored our goal? There are a lot of girls here. Hope you had a good time in France. I will be a changed man by next term. Tanned, suave. You won’t recognise me. Nor will Laura. Must dash. P.’
‘Dear Laura, this place is a bit crowded (package trips!) but I quite like it. Sun, sand and so on. Hope you’re having fun in California. So much discoing here I’m exhausted! See you in September. Love, Pietro.’
After dinner that night Pietro and his father walked back up the hill to the block they were staying in. It had been decided that visits to the discothèque should not be a nightly event.
Pietro undressed in the hot bedroom while his father cleaned his teeth in the slit of a bathroom at the side. The room was too small for two people and their belongings. Pietro sat on the bed, waiting for his turn in the bathroom. When he came back he found his father in bed reading a book. He climbed into his own bed, pulled up the sheet and turned off his light. He wished his father would do the same. He found their physical proximity almost unbearable. His father continued to read, the sound of regularly turning pages the only noise in the room. Outside there was a ragged sound of cicadas and dimly audible beyond that the intermittent thump of the discothèque. Another page turned. Pietro wondered what sort of earthquake or natural disaster it would take to make his father turn his light out. Please, he silently begged, just reach out your hand, just a small pressure of the fingers on the switch . . .
JERUSALEM
ISRAEL 1982
IN THE SHERUT, a shared taxi, through the surprisingly dumb and threatening suburbs of Tel Aviv, usually characterised as international city, Hilton-sur-mer, and out into the Sharon Plain, invisible under darkness except for vague swellings, no hint of abandoned tank or other mementoes left to mark the millennial argument, regular as a heartbeat, over the dry soil.
The twinkling dining room of the Jerusalem hotel, full of visitors, tourists, Americans, Germans, a few British. Someone says a kiddush and Harry places a napkin on Pietro’s head. They watch the soup growing cold on the table as other diners intone ‘Amen’. They eat the bland food and go up to their room. Although both are tired,
they find it hard to sleep. Guests are advised to leave all valuables in the hotel safe.
In the morning Daoud, the Israeli guide, arrives at the hotel. He is a man in his late forties, thickset, balding, who wears an open-neck shirt, sandals and aviator shades. He has an air of world-weariness and a deep mocking laugh that rises from his chest. He carries a leather key-fob with a metal flap that he flicks back and forth in place of worry beads. As they walk towards the old city, Daoud says, ‘OK, you want a history lesson first?’
‘Sure.’
‘How many different peoples do you think have controlled Jerusalem?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Harry. ‘Four or five.’
‘I don’t know either,’ says Daoud. ‘I can give you maybe ten to think about before we start. Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Egyptians, Syrians, Romans, Idumeans – Herod was one of them – the Christians, the Byzantine empire, the Moslems, the Turks.’
They are at the start of the via Dolorosa, the Lions’ Gate, or Stephen’s Gate, as the Christians prefer.
‘And what about the Jews?’ says Pietro.
‘I’d almost forgotten them,’ Daoud says drily. ‘And of course the Jordanians.’
Along the stations of the Cross are lamps, beads, relics, Coca-Cola, crosses, camera films, hats, pardons.
‘Hey,’ says Daoud, ‘I can fix you an egg from The Cock That Crowed.’
Beneath the Ecce Homo arch, past the second station of the Cross, Daoud explains that it was named after Pilate’s scornful words of dismissal when the captive Christ was brought to him. Under the assault of souvenir sellers and the lit signs saying ‘Gifts’, Pietro pictures the slow progress of the man beneath the heavy cross, his bare feet pressed where they now stand.