Numbers Game
The international language of gestures and integers.
By BRENDAN GIBSON

By Sunday, most of our small group had succumbed to weissbier hangovers, women, and injuries. We were rounding off a great season in the Alps with a long weekend of spring skiing at Flims. But now it was down to John and me, and we were going on the advice of a guy we met at the bar the previous night. "Go find the cornice drop," he told us over glasses of Franziskaner. It sounded enticing, and we woke that morning feeling our season was about to end on a high note.

Our usual morning anxiety was replaced by a relaxed mood (Swiss spring sunshine has a way of doing that) and we skated into the lift line feeling calm and chatty. Though there were few people around, an elderly gent slid up beside us as we got onto the quad. Once airborne and settled, I turned to greet our companion.

"Nice day, hey?" I was hoping he spoke English since my German is limited, and my Swiss-German is even worse. No such luck with this guy, judging by the expression on his face.

"Guter tag, ja?" I tried again, this time getting a better response but one that neither John nor I really understood. He noticed this and said in a thick accent, "I am from Lichtenstein."

Lichtenstein? Wow. I had never met anyone from there and wanted to know more, but was wary of the language barrier. I replied in broken German that we originally hailed from Australia. Thankfully he avoided the tired joke about us skiing down the north face of Ayer's Rock (not that we would have understood him anyway) and he inquired, in German, about the number of ski resorts in Australia.

Numbers. For some reason German numbers had stayed in my brain all these years. Not much else of the language, but certainly the numbers. I replied that there were 10, and asked how many there were in Lichtenstein.

He gestured and responded in kind. And we continued this way for the entire chairlift ride, speaking fluently in only numbers and gestures. We managed to convey the populations of our respective countries and home towns. We talked about prices and lengths of holidays. We learned each other's ages and the number of years we had been skiing.

Before we disembarked from the quad I managed to pry from him the numbers of girlfriends he had. "Auf wiedersehen!" he shouted with a wink in his eye as he skied left while John and I skied right.

We looked at each other in shock and amazement. Did we really hear him right? We eventually found the cornice and reaped its steep fruits, feeling the delight of gravity in our bones. But something impressed us even more that day, something surprising and vaguely hopeful, for we never would have guessed that an elderly man from Lichtenstein would be such a ladies man!


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