Armageddon In Retrospect (14 page)

The people of Beda were so used to keeping silent and out of sight, no matter what happened, that it took us a while to discover the really basic difference between the Americans and the others. The Americans’ toughness, callousness, was very shallow, and beneath it was grave misgiving. We discovered that they could be embarrassed easily by women or older men who would stand up to them like parents, and scold them for what they were doing. This sobered most of them up as quickly as buckets of cold water would have.

With that insight into our conquerors, we were able to make things a little more bearable, but not much. There was the crushing realization that we were regarded as the enemy, little different from the Russians, and that the major wanted us punished. The townspeople were organized into labor battalions, and put to work under armed guard, like prisoners of war. What made the labor particularly deadly is that it wasn’t concerned with repairing the war damage to the town so much as with making the American garrison’s quarters more comfortable, and with building a huge and ugly monument honoring the Americans who had died in the battle for Beda. Four had died. Major Evans made the atmosphere of the town the atmosphere of a prison. Shame was the order of the day, and budding pride or hope was promptly nipped. We weren’t entitled to them.

There was one bright spot—an American unhappier than any of us—Captain Donnini. It was up to him to carry out the major’s orders, and getting drunk, which he tried several times, didn’t do for him what it did for the others. He carried out the orders with a reluctance I’m sure he could have been court-martialed for. Moreover, he spent as much time with Marta and me as he did with the major, and most of his talk with us was a guarded apology for what he had to do. Curiously, Marta and I found ourselves comforting this sad, dark giant, rather than the other way around.

I thought about the major as I stood at my workbench in the back room, finishing up the American eagle for the front of the new commandant’s desk. Marta lay on my cot, staring at the ceiling. Her shoes were white with rock dust. She had been working all day on the monument.

“Well,” I said gloomily, “if I’d been fighting for three years, I wonder how friendly I would be. Let’s face it, whether all of us wanted to or not, we gave men and materials that helped to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.” I gestured at the mountains to the west. “Look where the Russians got their uranium.”

“Eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” said Marta. “How long does that go on?”

I sighed and shook my head. “The Czechs have paid with interest, God knows. Hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” We’d lost most of our young men, Marta’s husband among them, in suicide waves before main Russian attacks; and our largest cities were little more than gravel and smoke.

“And, after paying it, we get a new commissar. They’re no different from the rest,” she said bitterly. “It was childish to expect anything else.”

Her terrible disappointment, for which I’d built her up, her apathy and hopelessness—good God in Heaven, I couldn’t bear it! And there would be no more liberators. The only strength left anywhere in the world was in America, and the Americans were in Beda.

Dully, I set to work on the American eagle again. The captain had given me a dollar bill from which to copy the insignia. “Let me see—nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen arrows in the claw.”

There was a diffident knock on the door, and Captain Donnini walked in. “Pardon me,” he said.

“I guess we’ll have to,” I said. “Your side won the war.”

“Afraid I didn’t have much to do with it.”

“The major didn’t leave anybody for the captain to shoot,” said Marta.

“What happened to your window?” said the captain.

There was shattered glass all over the floor, and a big piece of cardboard now kept the weather from coming in the window. “It was liberated last night by a beer bottle,” I said. “I’ve written the major a note about it—for which I’ll probably be beheaded.”

“What’s that you’re making?”

“An eagle with thirteen arrows in one claw, and an olive branch in the other.”

“You’re well-off. You could be whitewashing rocks. You were kept off the list, just so you could finish the desk.”

“Yes, I saw the rock whitewashers,” I said. “With the whitewashed rocks, Beda looks better than it did before the war. You’d never know it had been shelled.” The major had ordered that a stirring message be written on his lawn in whitewashed rock:
1402 MP Company, Major Lawson Evans Commanding
. The flower beds and walks were also being outlined in rock.

“Oh, he’s not a bad man,” said the captain. “It’s a miracle he’s come through it all as well as he has.”

“It’s a miracle any of us have come through as well as we have,” said Marta.

“Yes, I realize that. I know—you’ve been through terrible times. But, well, so has the major. He lost his family in the Chicago bombings, his wife and three children.”

“I lost my husband in the war,” said Marta.

“So what are you trying to tell us—that we’re all doing penance for the death of the major’s family? Does he think we wanted them killed?” I said.

He leaned against the workbench, and closed his eyes. “Oh hell, I don’t know, I don’t know. I thought it would help you to understand him—make you not hate him. Nothing makes any sense, though—nothing seems to help.”

“Did you think you could help, Captain?” said Marta.

“Before I came over here—yes, I did. Now I know I’m not what’s needed, and I don’t know what is. I sympathize with everybody, damn it, and see why they are the way they are—you two, all the people in town, the major, the enlisted men. Maybe, if I’d got a bullet through me or had somebody come after me with a flame-thrower, maybe I’d be more of a man.”

“And hate like everyone else,” said Marta.

“Yes—and be as sure of myself as everybody else seems to be on account of it.”

“Not sure—
numb
,” I said.

“Numb,” he repeated, “everyone has reasons for being numb.”

“That’s the last defense,” said Marta. “Numbness or suicide.”

“Marta!” I said.

“You know it’s true,” she said flatly. “If gas chambers were set up on European street corners, they’d have longer queues than the bakeries. When does all the hate end? Never.”

“Marta, for the love of Heaven, I won’t have you talking that way,” I said.

“Major Evans talks that way, too,” said Captain Donnini. “Only he says he wants to go on fighting. Once or twice, when he’s been tight, he’s said he wished he’d been killed—that there wasn’t anything to go home to. He took fantastic chances in the fighting, and never got a scratch.”

“Poor man,” said Marta, “no more war.”

“Well, there’s still guerrilla action—a lot of it around Leningrad. He’s applied for a transfer there, so he can get into it.” He looked down and spread his fingers over his knees. “Well, anyway, what I came to tell you was that the major wants his desk tomorrow.”

The door swung open, and the major strode into the workshop. “Captain, where the hell have you been? I sent you on an errand that should have taken five minutes, and you’ve been gone thirty.”

Captain Donnini stood at attention. “Sorry, sir.”

“You know how I feel about my men fraternizing with the enemy.”

“Yessir.”

He confronted me. “Now what’s this about your window?”

“One of your men broke it last night.”

“Now, isn’t that too damn bad?” It was another one of his unanswerable questions. “I said, isn’t that too damn bad, Pop?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pop, I’m going to tell you something that I want you to get through your head. And then I want you to make sure everybody else in town understands it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve lost a war. Have you got that? And I’m not here to have you or anybody else cry on my shoulder. I’m here to see that everybody damn well understands they lost a war, and to see that nobody makes trouble. And that’s all I’m here for. And the next person who tells me he was a pal of the Russians because he had to be gets his teeth kicked in. And that goes for the next person who tells me he’s got it rough. You haven’t got it half rough enough.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s your Europe,” said Marta quietly.

He turned to her angrily. “If it were mine, young lady, I’d have the engineers bulldoze the whole lousy mess flat. Nothing in it but gutless wonders who’ll follow any damn dictator that comes along.” Again I was struck, as I’d been on the first day, by how awfully tired and distracted he seemed.

“Sir—” said the captain.

“Be quiet. I didn’t fight my way here so the Eagle Scouts could take over. Now, where’s my desk?”

“I’m finishing the eagle.”

“Let’s have a look.” I handed him the disk. He swore softly, and touched the insignia on his cap. “Like this one,” he said. “I want it exactly like this one.”

I blinked at the insignia on his cap. “But it is like that one. I copied exactly from a dollar bill.”

“The arrows, Pop! Which claw are the arrows in?”

“Oh—on your hat they’re in the right claw, on the bill they’re in the left.”

“All the difference in the world, Pop: one’s the Army, the other’s for civilians.” He raised his knee, and snapped the carving over it. “Try again. You were so anxious to please the Russian commandant, please me!”

“Could I say something?” I said.

“No. All I want to hear from you is that I’ll get the desk tomorrow morning.”

“But the carving will take days.”

“Stay up all night.”

“Yes, sir.”

He walked out, with the captain at his heels.

“What were you going to tell him?” said Marta, with a wry smile.

“I was going to tell him that the Czechs have fought against the Europe he hates as hard and long as he has. I was going to tell him—Oh well, what’s the use?”

“Go on.”

“You’ve heard it a thousand times, Marta. It’s a tiresome story, I suppose. I wanted to tell him how I’ve fought the Hapsburgs and the Nazis, and then the Czech communists, and then the Russians—fought them in my own small ways. Not once have I sided with a dictator, and I never will.”

“Better get to work on the eagle. Remember, arrows in the right hand.”

“Marta, you’ve never tasted Scotch, have you?” I dug the claws of a hammer into a crack in the floor, and pried up the board. There lay the dusty bottle of Scotch I had saved for the great day of my dreams.

It was delicious, and the two of us got quite drunk. While I worked, we relived the old days, Marta and I, and for a while it seemed almost as though her mother were alive again, and Marta was a young, pretty, and carefree girl again, and we had our home and friends in Prague again, and…Oh God, it was lovely for a little while.

Marta fell asleep on the cot, and I hummed to myself as I chiseled out the American eagle long into the night. It was a crude, slap-dash job, and I covered its faults with putty and the fake gilt.

A few hours before sunrise, I glued the emblem to the desk, applied clamps, and dropped off to sleep. It was ready for the new commandant, exactly, save for the emblem, as I had designed it for the Russian.

They came for the desk early the next morning, a half-dozen soldiers and the captain. The desk looked like a casket for an Oriental potentate as they carried it like pallbearers across the street. The major met them at the door, and cried warnings whenever they threatened to bump the treasure against the doorframe. The door closed, the sentry took up his position before it again, and there was nothing more to see.

I went into my workroom, cleared the shavings from the bench, and began a letter to Major Lawson Evans, 1402 MP Company, Beda, Czechoslovakia.

Dear sir:
I wrote,
There is one thing about the desk I neglected to tell you. If you will look just below the eagle, you will find…

I didn’t take it across the street right away, although I’d intended to. It made me feel a little sick to read it over—something I never would have felt had it been addressed to the Russian commandant, who was to have received it originally. Thinking about the letter spoiled my lunch, though I haven’t had enough to eat for years. Marta was too lost in her own depression to notice, though she scolds me when I don’t look out for myself. She took away my untouched plate without a word.

Late in the afternoon, I drank the last of the Scotch, and walked across the street. I handed the envelope to the sentry.

“This another one about the window, Pop?” said the sentry. Apparently the window episode was a joke in wide circulation.

“No, another matter—about the desk.”

“O.K., Pop.”

“Thanks.”

I went back to my workshop, and lay down on my cot to wait. I even managed to nap a little.

It was Marta who awakened me.

“All right, I’m ready,” I murmured.

“Ready for what?”

“The soldiers.”

“Not the soldiers—the major. He’s leaving.”

“He’s what?” I threw my legs over the side of the cot.

“He’s getting into a jeep with all of his equipment. Major Evans is leaving Beda!”

I hurried to the front window, and pulled aside the cardboard. Major Evans was seated in the rear of a jeep, in the midst of duffel bags, a bed roll, and other equipment. One would have thought from his appearance that a battle was raging on the outskirts of Beda. He glowered from beneath a steel helmet, and he had a carbine beside him, and a cartridge belt, knife, and pistol about his waist.

“He got his transfer,” I said in wonderment.

“He’s going to fight the guerrillas,” laughed Marta.

“God help them.”

The jeep started. Major Evans waved, and jolted away into the distance. The last I saw of the remarkable man was as the jeep reached the crest of a hill at the town’s edge. He turned, thumbed his nose, and was lost from sight in the valley beyond.

Captain Donnini, across the street, caught my eye and nodded.

“Who’s the new commandant?” I called.

He tapped his chest.

“What is an Eagle Scout?” whispered Marta.