Armageddon In Retrospect (6 page)

They likes to hear me talk.

So I lay here, blind as a bat, and I tell ’em how I got here. I tell ’em all the things I see so clear inside my head—the Army of the World, everbody like brothers everwhere, peace everlasting, nobody hungry, nobody ascared.

That’s how come I got my nickname. Don’t hardly nobody in the hospital know my real name. Don’t know who thought of it first, but everbody calls me Great Day.

I.

W
hat you do is take a roasting chicken, cut it up into pieces, and brown it in melted butter and olive oil in a hot skillet,” said Private Donnini. “A good, hot skillet,” he added thoughtfully.

“Wait a minute,” said Private Coleman, writing furiously in a small notebook. “How big a chicken?”

“About four pounds.”

“For how many people?” asked Private Kniptash sharply.

“Enough for four,” said Donnini.

“Don’t forget, a lot of that chicken is bone,” said Kniptash suspiciously.

Donnini was a gourmet; many was the time that the phrase “pearls before swine” had occurred to him while telling Kniptash how to make this dish or that. Kniptash cared nothing for flavor or aroma—cared only for brute nutrition, for caloric blockbusters. In taking down recipes in his notebook, Kniptash was inclined to regard the portions as niggardly, and to double all the quantities involved. “You can eat it all yourself, as far as I’m concerned,” said Donnini evenly.

“O.K., O.K., so what do you do next?” said Coleman, his pencil poised.

“You brown it on each side for about five minutes, add chopped celery, onions, and carrots, and season to taste.” Donnini pursed his lips as though sampling. “Then, while you’re simmering it, add a mixture of sherry and tomato paste. Cover it. Simmer for around thirty minutes, and—” He paused. Coleman and Kniptash had stopped writing, and were leaning against the wall, their eyes closed—listening.

“That’s good,” said Kniptash dreamily, “but you know the first thing I’m gonna get back in the States?”

Donnini groaned inwardly. He knew. He had heard it a hundred times. Kniptash was sure there wasn’t a dish in the world that could satisfy his hunger, so he had invented one, a culinary monster.

“First,” said Kniptash fiercely, “I’m going to order me a dozen pancakes. That’s what I said, Lady,” he said, addressing an imaginary waitress, “twelve! Then I’m going to have ’em stack ’em up with a fried egg between each one. Then you know what I’m going to do?”

“Pour honey over ’em!” said Coleman. He shared Kniptash’s brutish appetite.

“You betcha!” said Kniptash, his eyes glistening.

“Phooey,” said Corporal Kleinhans, their bald German guard, listlessly. Donnini guessed that the old man was about sixty-five years old. Kleinhans tended to be absentminded, lost in thought. He was an oasis of compassion and inefficiency in the desert of Nazi Germany. He said he had learned his passable English during four years as a waiter in Liverpool. He would say no more about his experiences in England, other than to observe that the British ate far more food than was good for the race.

Kleinhans twisted his Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, and stood with the help of his antique, six-foot-long rifle. “You talk too much about food. That is why the Americans will lose the war—you are all too soft.” He looked pointedly at Kniptash, who was still up to his nostrils in imaginary cakes, eggs, and honey. “Come, come, back to work.” It was a suggestion.

The three American soldiers remained seated within the roofless shell of a building amid the smashed masonry and timbers of Dresden, Germany. The time was early March, 1945. Kniptash, Donnini, and Coleman were prisoners of war. Corporal Kleinhans was their guard. He was to keep them busy at arranging the city’s billion tons of rubble into orderly cairns, rock by rock, out of the way of non-existent traffic. Nominally, the three Americans were being punished for minor defections in prison discipline. Actually, their being marched out to work in the streets every morning under the sad blue eyes of the lackadaisical Kleinhans was no better, no worse than the fates of their better-behaved comrades behind the barbed-wire. Kleinhans asked only that they appear to be busy when officers passed.

Food was the only thing on the P.W.’s pale level of existence that could have any effect on their spirits. Patton was a hundred miles away. To hear Kniptash, Donnini, and Coleman speak of the approaching Third Army, one would have thought it was spear-headed, not by infantry and tanks, but by a phalanx of mess sergeants and kitchen trucks.

“Come, come,” said Corporal Kleinhans again. He brushed plaster dust from his ill-fitting uniform, the thin, cheap grey of the homeguard, the pathetic army of old men. He looked at his watch. Their lunch hour, which had been thirty minutes with nothing to eat, was over.

Donnini wistfully leafed through his notebook for another minute before returning it to his breast pocket and struggling to his feet.

The notebook craze had begun with Donnini’s telling Coleman how to make Pizza pie. Coleman had written it down in one of several notebooks he had taken from a bombed-out stationery store. He had found the experience so satisfying, that all three were soon obsessed with filling the notebooks with recipes. Setting down the symbols for food somehow made them feel much closer to the real thing.

Each had divided his booklet into departments. Kniptash, for instance, had four major departments: “Desserts I Am Going to Try,” “Good Ways to Fix Meat,” “Snacks,” and “Missalanious.”

Coleman, scowling, continued to print laboriously in his notebook. “How much sherry?”

“Dry sherry—it’s got to be
dry
,” said Donnini. “About three-quarters of a cup.” He saw that Kniptash was erasing something in his notebook. “What’s the matter? Changing it to a gallon of sherry?”

“Nope. Wasn’t even working on that one. I was changing something else. Changed my mind about what the first thing I want is,” said Kniptash.

“What?” asked Coleman, fascinated.

Donnini winced. So did Kleinhans. The notebooks had heightened the spiritual conflict between Donnini and Kniptash, had defined it in black and white. The recipes that Kniptash contributed were flamboyant, made up on the spot. Donnini’s were scrupulously authentic, artistic. Coleman was caught between. It was gourmet versus glutton, artist versus materialist, beauty versus the beast. Donnini was grateful for an ally, even Corporal Kleinhans.

“Don’t tell me yet,” said Coleman, flipping pages. “Wait’ll I get set with the first page.” The most important section of each of the notebooks was, by far, the first page. By agreement, it was dedicated to the dish each man looked forward to above all others. On his first page, Donnini had lovingly inscribed the formula for
Anitra al Cognac
—brandied duck. Kniptash had given the place of honor to his pancake horror. Coleman had plumped uncertainly for ham and candied sweet potatoes, but had been argued out of it. Terribly torn, he had written both Kniptash’s and Donnini’s selections on his first page, putting off a decision until a later date. Now, Kniptash was tantalizing him with a modification of his atrocity. Donnini sighed. Coleman was weak. Perhaps Kniptash’s new twist would woo him away from
Anitra al Cognac
altogether.

“Honey’s out,” said Kniptash firmly. “I kind of wondered about it. Now I know it’s all wrong. Doesn’t go with eggs, honey doesn’t.”

Coleman erased. “Well?” he said expectantly.

“Hot fudge on top,” said Kniptash. “A big blob of hot fudge—just let ’er set on top and spread out.”

“Mmmmmmmmmmm,” said Coleman.

“Food, food, food,” muttered Corporal Kleinhans. “All day, every day, all I hear is food! Get up. Get to work! You and your damn fool notebooks. That’s plundering, you know. I can shoot you for that.” He closed his eyes and sighed. “Food,” he said softly. “What good does it do to talk about it, to write about it? Talk about girls. Talk about music. Talk about liquor.” He implored Heaven with outstretched arms. “What kind of soldiers are these that spend all day exchanging recipes?”

“You’re hungry, too, aren’t you?” said Kniptash. “What have you got against food?”

“I get quite enough to eat,” said Kleinhans off-handedly.

“Six slices of black bread and three bowls of soup a day—that’s enough?” said Coleman.

“That’s plenty,” argued Kleinhans. “I feel better. I was overweight before the war. Now I’m as trim as I was as a young man. Before the war, everybody was overweight, living to eat instead of eating to live.” He smiled wanly. “Germany has never been healthier.”

“Yeah, but aren’t you hungry?” persisted Kniptash.

“Food isn’t the only thing in my life, nor the most important.” said Kleinhans. “Come, now, get up!”

Kniptash and Coleman arose reluctantly. “Got plaster or something in the end of your barrel, Pop,” said Coleman. They shuffled slowly back onto the littered street, with Kleinhans bringing up the rear, digging plaster from his rifle muzzle with a match, and denouncing the notebooks.

Donnini picked out a small rock from millions, carried it over to the curb and lay it at the feet of Kleinhans. He rested for a moment, his hands on his hips. “Hot,” he said.

“Just right for working,” said Kleinhans. He sat down on the curb. “What were you in civilian life, a cook?” he said after a long silence.

“I helped my father run his Italian restaurant in New York.”

“I had a place in Breslau for a while,” said Kleinhans. “That was long ago.” He sighed. “Seems silly now how much time and energy Germans used to spend just stuffing themselves with rich food. Such a silly waste.” He looked past Donnini and glared. He waggled a finger at Coleman and Kniptash, who stood together in the middle of the street, each with a baseball-sized rock in one hand, a notebook in the other.

“It seems to me there was sour cream in it,” Coleman was saying.

“Put those books away!” commanded Kleinhans. “Haven’t you got a girl? Talk about your girl!”

“Sure I got a girl,” said Coleman irritably. “Name’s Mary.”

“Is that
all
there is to know about her?” said Kleinhans.

Coleman looked puzzled. “Last name’s Fiske—Mary Fiske.”

“Well, is this Mary Fiske pretty? What does she do?”

Coleman narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “One time I was waiting for her to come downstairs and I watched her old lady make a lemon meringue pie,” he said. “What she did was take some sugar and some cornstarch and a pinch of salt, and mix it in with a couple of cups of wat—”

“Please, let’s talk about music. Like music?” said Kleinhans.

“And then what’d she do?” said Kniptash. He had laid his rock down, and was now writing in his notebook. “She used eggs, didn’t she?”

“Please, boys, no,” pleaded Kleinhans.

“Sure she used eggs,” said Coleman. “And butter, too. Plenty of butter and eggs.”

II.

It was four days later that Kniptash found the crayons in a basement—on the same day that Kleinhans had begged for and been refused relief from the punishment detail.

When they had set out that morning, Kleinhans had been in a terrible temper, and had railed at his three charges for not keeping in step and for marching with their hands in their pockets. “Go ahead and talk, talk, talk about food, you women,” he had taunted them. “I don’t have to listen anymore!” Triumphantly, he had pulled two wads of cotton from his cartridge pouch and stuffed them into his ears. “Now I can think my own thoughts. Ha!”

At noon, Kniptash sneaked into the cellar of a bombed-out house, hoping for a rack of full mason jars such as he knew were in his snug cellar at home. He emerged dirty and dispirited, gnawing experimentally at a green crayon.

“How is it?” asked Coleman hopefully, looking at the yellow, purple, pink, and orange crayons in Kniptash’s left hand.

“Wonderful. What flavor you like? Lemon? Grape? Strawberry?” He threw the crayons on the ground, and spit the green one after them.

It was lunch hour again, and Kleinhans was sitting with his back to his wards, staring thoughtfully out at the splintered Dresden skyline. Two white tufts protruded from his ears.

“You know what would go good, now?” said Donnini.

“A hot fudge sundae, with nuts and marshmallow topping,” said Coleman promptly.

“And cherries,” said Kniptash.

“Spiedini alla Romana!”
whispered Donnini, his eyes closed.

Kniptash and Coleman whipped out their notebooks.

Donnini kissed his fingertips. “Skewered chopped beef, Roman style,” he said. “Take a pound of chopped beef, two eggs, three tablespoons of Romano cheese, and—”

“For how many?” demanded Kniptash.

“Six normal human beings, or half a pig.”

“What’s this stuff look like?” asked Coleman.

“Well, it’s a lot of stuff strung together on a skewer.” Donnini saw Kleinhans remove an ear plug and return it almost instantly. “It’s kind of hard to describe.” He scratched his head, and his gaze landed on the crayons. He picked up the yellow one, and began to sketch. He became interested in the project, and, with the other crayons, added the subtler shadings and highlights, and finally, for background, a checkered tablecloth. He handed it to Coleman.

“Mmmmmmmm,” said Coleman, shaking his head and licking his lips.

“Boy!” said Kniptash admiringly. “The little bastards practically jump out at you, don’t they!”

Coleman held out his notebook eagerly. The page it was opened to was headed, straightforwardly, “CAKES.” “Could you draw a Lady Baltimore cake? You know, white with cherries on top?”

Obligingly, Donnini tried, and met with heartening success. It was a fine-looking cake, and, for an added flourish, he sketched in pink icing script on top: “Welcome home Private Coleman!”

“Draw me a stack of pancakes—twelve of ’em,” urged Kniptash. “That’s what I said, Lady—twelve!” Donnini shook his head disapprovingly, but began to rough in the composition.

“I’m going to show
mine
to Kleinhans,” said Coleman happily, holding his Lady Baltimore cake at arm’s length.

“Now the fudge on top,” said Kniptash, breathing down Donnini’s neck.

“Ach! Mensch!”
cried Corporal Kleinhans, and Coleman’s notebook fluttered like a wounded bird into the tangle of wreckage next door. “The lunch hour is over!” He strode over to Donnini and Kniptash, and snatched their notebooks from them. He stuffed the books into his breast pocket. “Now we draw pretty pictures! Back to work, do you understand?” With a flourish, he fastened a fantastically long bayonet on to his rifle. “Go!
Los!
”