Discussion of the text

1. Speak of the main talking point of the story.

2. Account for the title of the story. Is it in keeping with the opening paragraph?

3. Was the situation dangerous? What contributes to the danger of the situation?

4. What war is described here? Justify your opinion.

5. Single out the thematic group of words pertaining to the description of military actions.

6. How is the tragic position of the old man accentuated?

7. The old man was old, helpless, lonely and exhausted. How is it brought home to the reader?

8. Can we guess what is in store for the old man? What is in keeping with his unhappy future?

9. Comment on the role of the American officer. Was he sympathetic for the old man?

10. The events are presented through the eyes and mind of one of the characters, who participated in the events. Does it increase the immediacy and freshness of the description?

11. How is the reader stimulated to make his own judgements?

12. The protagonists have no names. They are referred to as «the old man» and «I». What does this anonymity contribute to?

13. What means is the story built on?

 

 

In Another Country*

 

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were different ways of walking across the town through the dusk to the hospital. Two of the ways were alongside canals, but they were long. Always, though, you crossed a bridge across a canal to enter the hospital. There was a choice of three bridges. On one of them a woman sold roasted chestnuts. It was warm, standing in front of her charcoal fire, and the chestnuts were warm afterward in your pocket The hospital was very old and very beautiful, and you entered through a gate and walked across a courtyard and out a gate on the other side. There were usually funerals starting from the courtyard. Beyond the old hospital were the new brick pavilions, and there we met every afternoon and were all very polite and interested in what was the matter, and sat in the machines that were to make so much difference.

The doctor came up to the machine where I was sitting and said: “What did you like best to do before the war? Did you practise a sport?”

I said: “Yes, football.”

“Good,” he said. “You will be able to play football again better than ever.”

My knee did not bend and the leg dropped straight from the knee to the ankle without a calf, and the machine was to bend the knee and make it move as in riding a tricycle. But it did not bend yet, and instead the machine lurched when it came to the bending part. The doctor said: “That will all pass. You are a fortunate young man. You will play football again like a champion.”

In the next machine was a major who had a little hand like a baby's. He winked at me when the doctor examined his hand, which was between two leather straps that bounced up and down and flapped the stiff-fingers, and said: “And will I too play football, captain-doctor?” He had been a very great fencer, and before the war the greatest fencer in Italy.

The doctor went to his office in a back room and brought a photograph which showed a hand that had been withered almost as small as the major's, before it had taken a machine course, and after was a little larger. The major held the photograph with his good hand and looked at it very carefully.

“A wound?” he asked. “An industrial accident,” the doctor said.

“Very interesting, very interesting,” the major said, and handed it back to the doctor.

“You have confidence?”

“No,” said the major.

There were three boys who came each day who were about the same age I was. They were all three from Milan, and one of them was to be a lawyer, and one was to be a painter, and one had intended to be a soldier, and after we were finished with the machines, sometimes we walked back together to the Cafe Cova, which was next door to the Scala. We walked the short way through the communist quarter because we were four together. The people hated us because we were officers, and from a wine-shop some one called out, “A basso gli ufficiali!” as we passed. Another boy who walked with us sometimes and made us five wore a black silk handkerchief across his face because he had no nose then and his face was to be rebuilt. He had gone out to the front from the military academy and been wounded within an hour after he had gone into the front line for the first time. They rebuilt his face, but he came from a very old family and they could never get the nose exactly right. He went to South America and worked in a bank. But this was a long time ago, and then we did not any of us know how it was going to be afterward. We only knew then that there was always the war, but that we were not going to it any more.

We all had the same medals, except the boy with the black silk bandage across his face, and he had not been at the front long enough to get any medals. The tall boy with a very pale face who was to be a lawyer had been a lieutenant of Arditi and had three medals of the sort we each had only one of. He had lived a very long time with death and was a little detached. We were all a little detached, and there was nothing that held us together except that we met every afternoon at the hospital. Although, as we walked to the Cova through the tough part of town, walking in the dark, with light and singing coming out of the wine-shops, and sometimes having to walk into the street when the men and women would crowd together on the sidewalk so that we would have had to jostle them to get by, we felt held together by there being something that had happened that they, the people who disliked us, did not understand.

We ourselves all understood the Cova, where it was rich and warm and not too brightly lighted, and noisy and , smoky at certain hours, and there were always girls at the tables and the illustrated papers on a rack on the wall. The girls at the Cova were very patriotic, and I found that the most patriotic people in Italy were the cafe girls - and I believe they are still patriotic.

The boys at first were very polite about my medals and asked me what I had done to get them. I showed them the papers, which were written in very beautiful language and full of fratellanza and abnegazione, but which really said, with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I was an American. After that their manner changed a little toward me, although I was their friend against outsiders. I was a friend, but I was never really one of them after they had read the citations, because it had been different with them and they had done very different things to get their medals. I had been wounded, it was true; but we all knew that being wounded, after all, was really an accident I was never ashamed of the ribbons, though, and sometimes, after the cocktail hour, I would imagine myself having done all the things they had done to get their medals; but walking home at night through the empty streets with, the cold wind and all the shops closed, trying to keep near the street lights, I knew that I would never have done such things, and I was very much afraid to die, and often lay in bed at night by myself, afraid to die and wondering how I would be when I went back to the front again.

The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I was not a hawk, although I might seem a hawk to those who had never hunted; they, the three, knew better and so we drifted apart. But I stayed good friends with the boy who had been wounded his first day at the front, because he would never know now how he would have turned out; so he could never be accepted either, and I liked him because I thought perhaps he would not have turned out to be a hawk either.

The major, who had been the great fencer, did not believe in bravery, and spent much time while we sat in the machines correcting my grammar. He had complimented me on how I spoke Italian, and we talked together very easily. One day I had said that Italian seemed such an easy language to me that I could not take a great interest in it; everything was so easy to say. “Ah, yes,” the major said. “Why, then, do you not take up the use of grammar?” So we took up the use of grammar, and soon Italian was such a difficult language that I was afraid to talk to him until I had the grammar straight in my mind.

The major came very regularly to the hospital. I do not think he ever missed a day, although I am sure he did not believe in the machines. There was a time when none of us believed in the machines, and one day the major said it was all nonsense. The machines were new then and it was we who were to prove them. It was an idiotic idea, he said, “a theory, like another”. I had not learned my grammar, and he said I was a stupid impossible disgrace, and he was a fool to have bothered with me. He was a small man and he sat straight up in his chair with his right hand thrust into the machine and looked straight ahead at the wall while the straps thumped up and down with his fingers in them.

“What will you do when the war is over if it is over?” he asked me. “Speak grammatically!”

“I will go to the States.”

“Are you married?”

“No, but I hope to be.”

“The more of a fool you are,” he said. He seemed very angry. “A man must not marry.”

“Why, Signor Maggiore?”

“Don't call me Signor Maggiore.”

“Why must not a man marry?”

“He cannot marry. He cannot marry,” he said angrily. “If he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that. He should not place himself in a position to lose. He should find things he cannot lose.”

He spoke very angrily and bitterly, and looked straight ahead while he talked.

“But why should he necessarily lose it?”

“He'll lose it,” the major said. He was looking at the wall. Then he looked down at the machine and jerked his little hand out from between the straps and slapped it hard against his thigh. “He'll lose it,” he almost shouted. “Don't argue with me!” Then he called to the attendant who ran the machines. “Come and turn this damned thing off.”

He went back into the other room for the light treatment and the massage. Then I heard him ask the doctor if he might use his telephone and he shut the door. When he came back into the room, I was sitting in another machine. He was wearing his cape and had his cap on, and he came directly toward my machine and put his arm on my shoulder.

“I am so sorry,” he said, and patted me on the shoulder with his good hand. “I would not be rude. My wife has just died. You must forgive me.”

“Oh –” I said, feeling sick for him. “I am so sorry.” He stood there biting his lower lip. “It is very difficult,” he said. “I cannot resign myself.”

He looked straight past me and out through the window. Then he began to cry. “I am utterly unable to resign myself,” he said and choked. And then crying, his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself straight and soldierly, with tears on both his cheeks and biting his lips, he walked past the machines and out the door.

The doctor told me that the major's wife, who was very young and whom he had not married until he was definitely invalided out of the war, had died of pneumonia. She had been sick only a few days. No one expected her to die. The major did not come to the hospital for three days. Then he came at the usual hour, wearing a black band on the sleeve of his uniform. When he came back, there were large framed photographs around the wall, of all sorts of wounds before and after they had been cured by the machines. In front of the machine the major used were, three photographs of hands like his that were completely restored. I do not know where the doctor got them, I always understood we were the first to use the machines. The photographs did not make much difference to the major because he only looked out of the window.

 

*Hemingway E. Selected Stories. Moscow, 1981, pp. 83-89.

 

Discussion

1.Study the opening paragraph of the story. Com­ment on the atmosphere of emotional tension it creates. Pay attention to the definite article, the personal pronoun «we», the adverbs «always» and «any more» that serve to create the atmosphere. (See: В.А. Кухаренко. Практикум по интерпретации текста. Москва, Просвещение, 1987, pp. 10-11)

2.When does the reader understand what war is referred to and what had happened to the characters? Make a list of military and medical terms.

3.None of the three men turned out what they had intended to be. What means testify to their tragic fates?

4.Comment on the meaning of the word «detached» is charged with in the story. It goes hand in hand with the oxymoron «lived with death». Speak of its function.

5.Account for the attitude of the civilians to the wounded officers. Observe the repetition of the words «cold» and «warm» and the implied meaning they carry.

6.The American officer differed from the Italian fellow-officers, who underwent machine treatment in the hospital. How is the contrast made obvious to the reader? Find cases of simile, metaphorical periphrasis, climax.

7.Study the major's attitude to the mechanotherapy. Find cases of irony.

8.Compare the major's behaviour in the first part with that in the second part of the story. What in his behaviour and speech betrayed his nervousness?

9.Why did the major come to the hospital after his wife's death? Do you think it was not the machine treatment the major came for? Justify your opinion.

10.Prove that the title of the story is ambivalent. Show that the title can be understood in the context of the whole story. How can you interpret the title after reading the story?

11.The characters have no names. How are they referred to? What does this anonymity testify to?

12.The story has an open end: the impending fates of the characters remain unknown. Is it possible to prognosticate their future? Why?

13.Analyse the story from the point of view of:

a) contrast;

b) strong position and emotional tension.

 

JAMES B. HENDERSON

 

Scottish by birth, James B. Henderson has spent most of his life in Australia and is frequently published in Australian magazines. He has pursued a successful career as a writer, at the same time serving as a clerk, a teacher, a miner. In 1960-1963 he worked as a war correspondent in Vietnam. Henderson is best known for his short stories in which he describes the working people of Australia with true warmth and sympathy.

The story under analysis contains a realistic description of the hard life of Australian miners.

 

Fear*

 

The dirty sweat poured from his face and dripped from his nose. It stood out like small black grapes on the bent bare back and along his ribs. There was a squelching in his boots where the coal dust mixed with the perspiration.

The powerful arms and knee drove the shovel deep into the heap and the biceps bulged as he tossed the coal into the skip.

On the opposite side his mate kept pace with him, shovel for shovel, both lights bobbing up and down alternately, up and down, like parts of a machine.

As each head rose with the lift of the shovel the slender beam of light from the lamp shot into the haze of dust hanging over the skip, became diffused and lost.

Outside the narrow shafts of light was the impenetrable darkness.

The light dropped low, the shovel scraped along the floor, the light rose and the coal fell into the skip.

There was a rhythmic beat linking mate to mate.

The sounds of the shovel and the falling of coal were hemmed in by the deep darkness. It stood close up to them, like resilient folds of black velvet. The blackness retreated at each puny advance of the lamp, but flowed back immediately to bandage the thrust mark made by the rapier of light.

It was a thousand times darker than the darkest night; not merely the absence of light but a seeping something that penetrated everywhere and covered everything. Something tangible.

And Eric was afraid. Afraid for the first time in the twelve months he had worked «on the coal» as a contract miner.

The sweat that gushed from every pore was not only the measure of the weight of the shovel and the inadequate air flow, but, more than that, it was the outpouring of the fear that had been gnawing at his brain and knotting in his plexus for a long month past.

Eric and George were pinpoints of light on a blackened stage: performers without an audience.

A thousand feet above, the blazing sun wilted the leaves of the stunned box trees where the peewees lay cooling in the mud at the horse trough. The skip filled, George stood erect.

“She'll do,” and cocked his ear to listen to the roof. Eric straightened slowly, listening as he did so, listening not with ears alone but with his whole body. Listening with his finger tips.

A low sound like a gentle protesting sigh grew to a moan and built up and up and up till it thundered out, the groans of a monster in agony.

The knot in Eric's stomach tightened and his throat contracted as he crouched instinctively. He wanted to run, to run screaming, to get miles away from it, to get into the light of day. Wondrous, beautiful sun.

The awful groaning and the shroud of darkness were pressing in on him, squeezing him, making it hard to breathe.

But the bravery of cowardice held him silent and hobbled his feet as it had done for four fearsome weeks.

George looked intently at the roof.

“While she's talking to us, we know what she's doing,” he said in a loud whisper. “No danger yet awhile. When she's silent you never know, you never know.” His calm broke. “To hell with stripping pillars anyway, to hell with it! Gnawing away support that's protecting you!”

As the groaning died away to a low grinding, a new terror gripped the younger man.

He didn't want it to stop “talking”, talking to George who could understand it.

It didn't talk to him, it terrified him and yet the silence terrified him even more.

He bent his back and pushed the full skip along the rails into the darkness.

Two specks now shone in the darkness, one moving rapidly away from the groan that was turning to silence. A vivid shrieking silence! The near rumble of the skip blotted out all other noise so that he couldn't tell if the roof still talked or not.

He wanted to stop, to stop and listen. But outside lay safety, the horse-driver and rope runner to talk with, and the friendly electric light of the winch in the distance.

George wasn't scared, he knew what the roof said. Roofs had spoken to him many times before but he never liked what they said. And George was careful these days, very, very careful. He saw everything. He noticed the props bent this morning that were straight last night; the props cracked this morning that were bent last night.

As he methodically stripped slices from the pillar he saw small bursts of coal shoot out as the weight of thousands, hundreds of thousands of tons pressed down on the ever narrowing column.

And he listened. Listened as he shovelled; listened as he moved about; listened, listened.

Listened in a calm careful manner that almost drove Eric frantic.

Yet the young man knew that George's ears and eyes were his ears and eyes, and he trusted him and drew comfort from his sweaty nearness.

A terrifying comfort, but comfort.

He wanted to stay outside and talk, to keep his ears from the awful groaning and grinding, to be out of the sound of that awful silence.

But in no time he was back and the lights again bobbed up and down, up and down in unison. And they listened as they worked.

A third light joined them and for a time the matter of fact voice of the deputy seared the ends of his bleeding nerves.

The safety man walked with calm deliberation deep into the danger area, his light disappearing round a bend.

Eric wanted to yell to him, to hold him, to rush after him and pull him back.

But George was working quietly and Eric kept pace with him. And the sweat welled up and out.

Somewhere distant in the pit a shot was fired; its dull muffled reverberations, which one time would have passed unnoticed, were now the ominous voice of destruction.

He could hardly catch his breath as his diaphragm squeezed up on his heart.

The deputy's return startled him.

“There's not a prop standing. I don't know why we don’t get a fall all inside! It's about time we did, to relieve the pressure.”

Yes, that was it. A fall inside to relieve the pressure. That's what was needed. A fall.

But he didn't want a fall. The thought filled him with terror. Not a little fall nor a big fall. The groaning, grinding, moaning wasn't the voice of a child's bucketful of pebbles but the agonising cry of a million tons disturbed in its sleep, disturbed in the bed where it had rested for countless years.

And he and George and other calloused-handed miners were sweating in the darkness directly beneath nibbling, nibbling, nibbling away like white ants, and the monster was speaking its protests. Speaking to George, but not to him. As yet, to him it was a foreign tongue.

To the contract miner the measure of time is the number of skips filled, but for Eric time moved on from morning to afternoon in a welter of dirt, sweat and fear. Especially fear.

The dust-laden brattice cloth parted as he pushed his sixteenth skip through, and as it dropped behind him he felt safer immediately, as if the brattice had shut the danger behind.

Here was safety, plenty of support for the roof and the friendly hissing of the moving haulage rope.

As he turned to look back the floor beneath his feet seemed to shiver and heave; rolling clouds of dust belched out from inside; the brattice disappeared and a roaring, tearing crescendo of destructive noise careered along after the dust, overtook it and rushed ahead.

Silence swept in and took its place. Eric stood enveloped in dust, unhearing and unfeeling; unthinking; as if afraid to break the stillness.

Away inside, a hundred-ton boulder fell with a thud, the sound muted by distance and the blankets of dust.

Once again Eric knew fear. A new, more terrible fear. A fear, far greater than the agony he had suffered over the past weeks. It shot through him like a red hot knife thrust. George!

Fear for himself had made him want to flee from the danger, flee from the awful noise and fearsome silence, flee to the light. But this fear took on a different quality- rising above and blotting out all else. Fear not for himself.

This fear sent him reeling, stumbling into the choking dust, to the jaws of the monster lying ominously silent.

George!

“George!”

“It's all right, Eric. I heard it coming.”

The steady voice from the dust was followed by a ghostly pinpoint of light and the sound of familiar steps.

Eric stepped aside to let George pass, and overflowing with a great contentment, walked out behind his mate.

 

*Henderson J.B. Fear: Australian Short Stories. Moscow: Progress publishers, 1975, pp. 297-300.