“Then you’ll remember old Ernesto the drunkard and his wife. Were you there when it happened? ”
Mother of God, help me, I thought.
“No, should I have been?”
“That’s odd then: it was all over the papers when they found her buried in the cellar.”
“I was away at military college at the time: I only heard about it later.” “At military academy? They must have sent you there young then. It was about 1892 or 1893. She was a cousin on my mother’s side. But if your father was a wine merchant he must have been a member of the Guild.” “The Guild? ”
“The Guild. Surely you know about that affair? The Guild of San Salvatore: all the wine-trade people were in it. They were making wine out of horse-beans with logwood and sulphuric acid. A lot of them went to jail when people started dying from it. The whole of Italy must have heard of it.” He got up. “Here, let’s put another log on the fire, shall we? It’s perishing cold in here.”
In fact, far from being perishing cold, the interior of the hut was like a Turkish bath. I divined now what the game was: to force me to open my flying jacket and reveal the uniform underneath, without the risk of being put on a charge of insubordination if he simply ordered me to open it and I turned out to be an Italian officer after all. It was a cunning ruse: inside my flying overalls I was already beginning to feel little rivulets of sweat trickling down my body. Agorda stuck another couple of logs on the blazing fire, sending a blast of sparks up the chimney. He turned to me.
“Tenente, wouldn’t you like to remove that flying suit? You’ll catch a chill sitting there in damp leather.”
In the end I tried to gain some relief from the stifling heat by removing my overall trousers and belt. I was wearing field-grey breeches and puttees which I hoped would look indeterminate-coloured enough in their sweat-soaked state to pass for Italian uniform. As I placed them on the table the Sergeant took the belt and the holster attached to it and removed the pistol inside. “Where did you get this Steyr pistol, Tenente?”
“I picked it upon the Isonzo last year and decided to keep it. It’s better than our issue.” This was nonsense and he must have known it: the 9mm Steyr pistol must have been one of the most substandard military firearms ever devised. I only carried mine because regulations required it—and to put a bullet through my head if need be to escape death by fire. He examined it.
“Nice piece of work. But these overalls—did you capture them from the Austrians as well? Ours are black, not brown, and they have a fur lining. I know because we had to go up last month to bring down the body of one of our fliers. But don’t you want to take the jacket off?”
“No, no thank you. These jackets have to dry on the body, otherwise they get stiff.” I realised that if I did not make my escape now it would soon be too late. “Sergente, I must go outside—you understand.”
“Ah yes, the latrine’s out along the path there. I’ve kept it swept of snow.”
I made my way out into the air. Its chill was like a slap in the face after the smothering warmth inside the rifugio. It was snowing again and beginning to get dark. I looked about me in the swirling flakes, knowing full well that several keen pairs of eyes were watching my every move from inside the hut. Damn it! The skis had been locked away in a shed. I would have to find some other means of escape. I made my way to the rickety privy and shut the door. It was a sheet-metal box like an enlarged biscuit tin perched precariously on a creaking wooden frame above a slope of snow falling away to invisibility in the murk below. What was I to do? Only the back of the privy was invisible from the hut. I tried the back wall, above the board with a hole in it which served as the seat. A sheet of tinplate was loose. Slowly and carefully I worked it free and pulled it out. Snowflakes came pouring in through the gap. It was about a metre and a half long by perhaps three-quarters of a metre across. It might be worth a try. I placed it on the seat, stood on it and bent the front edge upwards to make a crude toboggan. I had my leather gauntlets in my pockets, so I put them on to save my hands from being cut to pieces by the edge of the metal. It seemed like suicide: for all I knew the slope below might run down into the darkness, then turn into a five-hundred-metre sheer drop. I stood on the seat holding the makeshift sledge in front of me, trying to nerve myself to jump. Suddenly the door rattled.
“Tenente, are you in there? Open this door and come out with your hands above your head or I shoot at the count of ten. Uno, due, tre . . .” I quickly said the Act of Contrition—then launched myself into space.
The belly-landing on the filthy snow beneath knocked the breath out of me, and I almost rolled over with the tin sheet on top of me. There were shouts from above, and lights, then pistol shots as I hurtled away into the dusk down a near-vertical ice-slope. But luck was with me. An unknown distance later I came to an abrupt halt in a snowdrift among trees. I quickly abandoned the toboggan and floundered away among the trees on foot. Voices could be heard further up the mountainside, but that was the last I saw of them.
I have no idea where or how long I wandered that night. I had left the compass behind and it was snowing again while the cloud had come down, so I could only wade through drifts and scramble along up rock-faces and down ice-slopes in the hope that instinct was leading me towards the Austrian lines. This went on until near dawn the next morning, when the first light revealed me traversing my way down a high north slope across a steep snowfield above a forest. I was worn out and utterly, hopelessly lost, all sense of direction gone. I paused to regain my breath, knee-deep in the rotten grainy snow of last winter. I realised suddenly that something was wrong, even if at first I put it down to the light-headedness of exhaustion: I had stopped walking, but I was still moving perceptibly downhill. I tried desperately to scramble sideways on to firm snow. Too late. I went over, then was buried by the sliding white mass, then surfaced for a moment, then went under again like a swimmer being swept over a weir. Stifled, tumbled, rolled over and over, I lost all sense of where I was in the grinding, roaring smother.
At last all was still, and I knew that I was dead: buried metres deep by the avalanche. It seemed strange that sensation should still persist after death. I wondered when they would come for me, whoever they were who acted as doorkeepers for this world beyond. I suppose that I could have lain like that for minutes or for hours: I have no idea. I remember that my first thought as I peered through snow-clogged eyes was that, whether they were angels or devils, neither type of attendant in the next world had ever been described to me as wearing puttees. I looked up. A dim shape stood over me. For some reason I spoke in Italian.
“Who are you? Take me with you.”
The mysterious being spoke at last. The accent was broad Tyrolean.
“Warum sprechen Sie Italienisch? Wir sind Osterreichern.”
They sent patrols up all that day and the next, even called aircraft up from Bruneck to join the search. But the snow had been heavy that night up in the high Dolomites, and in any case after my wanderings I had very little idea where Toth and the wreck of the aeroplane might be. It was a particularly savage winter in the Alps that year. A record ten metres of snow fell on the Marmolada in December. By January 1917 the wretched troops in the line had declared an unofficial armistice in order to fight for sheer survival against the weather. Tens of thousands perished in avalanches, swept away and never seen again. Sentries froze to blocks of ice in their rock-bound eyries while entire companies were buried without trace in a few minutes by the terrible blizzards that raged along the mountain ridges. By the time the spring came Zugsfuhrer-Feldpilot Zoltan Toth and the wreck of the aeroplane Hansa-Brandenburg CI number 26.74, Zoska, must have been buried metres deep in that unknown glacier.