Battle Fatigue (5 page)

Chapter Eight

A Live German

I remember my father once saying “The more money you have, the more money you can get.” This, of course, is very bad news for poor people. Well, there is also some bad news for lonely people: the more friends you have, the more friends you can get.

Ever since the Cuban missile crisis, when Kathy declared officially that I was creepy—and everyone heard her—I haven't been popular. Let me be clear. I am fourteen years old, well into my teenage years, and for teenage boys, popularity means being liked by girls. I still have my friends Athos and Porthos. We click our stones and talk about fighting the Russians and even debate whether we will do this from the army, the navy, or the air force.

I am not sure about fighting the Russians but these are my friends and I don't want to be alone. The winter of my unpopularity would have been the perfect time to meet someone new, but that was not when Karl Moltke showed up. Instead he came along in the spring after I made my comeback.

I owed my new standing to the correct application of my two pinkies. It had started during baseball practice. Mr. Bradley watched me at bat and then called me over. “I told you what your problem is,” he said while his fingers kneaded the sinew in his damaged shoulder as though he were looking for something lost in there.

I knew the problem. He had been telling me all spring. I gripped the bat too tightly and it choked my swing. I tried to loosen up but every time the pitcher stared at me, my fingers tightened.

“That's why they stare at you like that, Joel,” said Mr. Bradley, still searching through his shoulder.

“I can't help it.”

“Tell you what you do. Hold your pinkies out.”

“What?”

“Just try it.”

He had me swing the bat with my little fingers pointed out and suddenly my swing felt so easy that when I connected with a ball it just leaped off the bat into the air to the far end of the park and beyond.

I have become a home run hitter. I have more home runs and a better batting average than Donnie LePine. Of course he is still a better fielder and a better base runner. But everyone loves a home run hitter. I am going to get a varsity letter, a big orange letter that you sew on the pocket of an ivory-colored buttoned sweater. There are twenty-five team members and twelve varsity letters. I have never gotten one. Tony Scaratini always gets the one for my position. But maybe not this year.

We have a good team this year because Mr. Bradley finally realized that Rocco Pizzutti is not a third baseman. Mr. Bradley stood on the mound, fingers working his shoulder, and said, “Come over here, Rocco.” He turned him toward home plate and told Stanley to hold up a mitt. Then Rocco pulled back his left arm and threw.

Stanley screamed and dropped the glove in pain. And that was it. Rocco has become a pitcher. No one can hit him. No one even wants to be standing there when he throws—not the batter, not the catcher, not even the umpire. If the catcher misses and the pitch hits the backstop fence it gets stuck there, wedged in the chain links.

This is my first winning team and my hitting streak is one of the reasons why. Mr. Bradley smiles at me and jokes with me. All my teammates want to be around me. Girls want to be around me, though Kathy still thinks I'm creepy. Suddenly Susan Weller is talking to me and not just neighing and spitting. And I notice that she doesn't look a bit like a horse. She looks very nice.

I enjoy my new standing. Of course I will have to learn soccer and get a lot better at basketball if I want to maintain this position all year—like Donnie, who has varsity letters in all three sports.

I might write about this in my diary. For my birthday my parents gave me a red leather book with a strap across the pages that locks with a small brass key. Every few weeks I carefully unlock the book, examine its blue-lined empty pages, and just as carefully lock it up. I do this over and over again. I have for months now. But I've been thinking that I might write about events. What Fidel Castro said that day. How the astronaut training program will someday send the first men to space—if the Russians don't get there first and make the moon Communist. How Ted Williams hit three home runs in the same day for the Red Sox. I have become an enthusiast for power hitters now that I am one. And who else is there to root for, now that the Dodgers are gone?

Or I could use this diary as an imaginary friend to talk to about the things I can't talk to my friends about. Like my fear of nuclear war or the shape of Susan Weller's no-longer-horselike body. Maybe I should write about sex. I've been thinking about it a lot and I am not going to talk to anyone about it.

I don't know how to write a diary.

The most famous diary, the one I have heard the most about, was written by a girl not much older than me, named Anne Frank. Anne Frank was a German Jew in hiding with her family in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. She wrote in her diary while in hiding. She wrote about her family and the other people in hiding and her thoughts and her feelings. She could express herself. Her diary was her friend. And all of it is particularly stirring because I know that in the end, no one will save her. Someone will give up the hiding place, the Germans will come and take the family away to be gassed to death, and no one will do anything to help them.

I start spending late afternoons after baseball on the screened-in porch, lying in a glider, a sort of rocking couch, reading the carefully written feelings of this German girl, soon to be killed by Germans.

Suddenly there is the flat slapping sound of someone trying to knock on the screen door. With my book still in my hand, I walk over to the door.

There stands a boy of about my age, with short-clipped dirty-blond hair and gray eyes. I have not met many foreigners but I can tell that he is one. His haircut, half-inch spikes of hair sticking out evenly all over his head, is not an American haircut. His baggy gray shorts pulled in tight at the waist and ballooning out around his thin legs are definitely not American. Nor are his leather sandals with long straps that wrap several times around his bony ankles.

“Hello,” he says with a slight accent. “My name is Karl Moltke. I am zeh new Gehman exchange student.”

He explains that he is staying with the Hargroves. They live down the street but I don't know much about them because they don't have any kids. I think Mr. Hargrove was in the Pacific.

Karl holds out his right hand to shake mine and I quickly take the book into my left hand and hide it behind my back, hiding Anne Frank from the German. As we lock hands to shake, he gives one stiff jerk and nods his head, at the same time swiveling his feet to make his heels hit each other. After a childhood of German ghosts, this is my first live German.

Chapter Nine

Taking a Stand

“Mom,” I say. “This is Karl. He is from Germany and he is living here now.”

My mother extends her hand but Karl does not take it. Instead he makes a slight bow and swivels his feet so that the sides of his heels slap together. My mother backs slightly away from him. I look across the lawn at the Panicellis' house. Popeye Panicelli might shoot him if he acts like that. What is Mr. Shaker going to do when he sees Karl click his heels? The new exchange student doesn't know it, but he's in danger. He needs to be a lot less German to live in Haley. I better teach him quickly.

I teach Karl how to shake hands, not to click his heels, and how to dress. I will have to teach him baseball. That is the quickest way to be an American. But as I think about it, baseball is not that easy to explain. In the fall there will be soccer and he will probably be the best player in school. Germans are good soccer players. That is the answer. Soccer will be his savior, just as baseball had been mine. In my school, it doesn't matter how smart you are. None of the other kids care what kind of grades you get. Good looks are not that important. Where your family came from, how much money they have, what your father did in the war, the clothes you wear—all that is secondary. But if you play a sport well, you are in.

This summer I am teaching Karl how to act more American, starting with a good batting stance. The other kids don't treat him badly. They always call him “Kraut,” but they use a friendly tone. “Why don't you put the Kraut in?” Rocco and the other pitchers shout from the mound. They all do the same thing. They blow two pitches right past him and then with a two-strike count, instead of striking him out, they fire a fastball right into his left shoulder. It doesn't hurt him very much except when Rocco is pitching. Karl never has enough sense to get out of the way. He seems to think it would be unmanly to dodge a pitch. Besides, he likes being hit because it means he can go to first base and he knows that he would never be able to hit a single. He isn't a very good base runner and he almost never scores. His running has improved a little since I got him to get rid of those weird sandals and get some cleats.

I thought things would start going well for Karl once soccer season began. But something terrible happens. We are walking to school together, and just before we enter the school yard I see Tony Scaratini just standing there, smiling. Tony doesn't smile very much and when he does it is never good. As we approach he raises two fingers to his smirking upper lip as though they are Hitler's mustache, thrusts his other hand straight into the air, and shouts, “
Sieg Heil!
”

It is the Nazi salute. He is calling Karl a Nazi. What difference does it make? Tony Scaratini is the biggest jerk in the school. Everybody knows that.

Except maybe not the two kids by the gate to the school yard who seem to think that Tony has made a great joke and are now doing the same thing. More and more kids join in. We are surrounded by dozens of boys mocking Karl, making fun of him for being German. Karl just looks at the ground and keeps walking.

The same thing happens on the way home from school and on the way to school the next morning. It happens twice every day. Mr. Shaker seems to see it. You can never tell with him but he is standing in the doorway of the school watching kids make fun of Karl, calling him a Nazi and shouting “
Sieg Heil!
” Looking at Mr. Shaker, I think he is very angry. As I get closer I can see that he is shaking a little bit.

“It isn't fair, is it, Mr. Schacter?” I say, thinking for once there is something we can agree on.

Mr. Shaker's eyes look like he can see for hundreds of miles. All he says is, “Who can say what is fair after what they did?”

I want to say that Karl hasn't done anything, but I am late and have to get to my homeroom. At my locker there is a group of boys giving Nazi salutes and telling Nazi jokes. Stanley is there and he laughs uncomfortably at the jokes.

“It isn't fair,” I say. “Karl didn't do anything.” But the other kids just laugh. And then Stanley, still smiling and looking uncomfortable, says, “Ah, Aramis, have you gone over to the Cardinal's side?” And he looks around for approval but the other kids ignore him because they do not understand. I do, of course. The Cardinal was the Musketeers' enemy.

Karl isn't going out for soccer. He wants to spend as little time at school as possible. I tell him that it might make a difference if he did well at a sport but he only says, “It's not even an American sport.” He is right. Playing soccer better than everyone else would be like wearing weird clothes or having an accent.

Dickey Panicelli has moved up from go-karts. He is working on a big eight-cylinder engine in an old green-and-white Chevy, black grease smudged on his white T-shirt, his long sandy hair falling in front of his eyes as he leans over.

“Dickey, did you ever notice the way they treat Karl?”

“The German exchange student—” He says more, but he revs his engine and I can't hear it.

“But it's not fair, don't you think?”

The engine shouts, covering Dickey's voice for a few seconds. “… the whole problem with Germans. They can't stand up for things. My father says that if a few Germans had stood up and said Hitler was wrong there would not have been a World War II.”

“But I thought it started because of Pearl Harbor.”

I can't hear his answer. So is that it? Not standing up against something wrong is so bad that even the children who had not yet been born are guilty? Maybe that is why I have to stand up for Karl. He didn't do anything. Probably his parents didn't do anything either. I want to stand up for him but I also don't want to because this is the kind of thing that can turn the whole school against you. Karl's is not the side to be on.

I wonder what my uncle, whose whole life seems to have been shaped by killing Germans, thinks. I tell him the entire story and he says, “Do you know what the Germans drank?”

He insists on waiting for an answer. “No,” I say.

“Ice wine, Joel. Wine made from ice. We moved into this
Schloss
and the cellar was full of this
Eiswein.
We drank three bottles a day. It was pretty good stuff.”

My mother says that there is no such thing as a good German, that they are all bad. But I don't see how that is possible. “Karl didn't do anything,” I insist.

“No,” my mother says, “but what about his parents?”

My father has gotten into the habit, when he wants to talk to me, of saying “Let's go to the shelter and get some tuna.” Down we go, and we lightly stroke the roundness of the cans while we talk.

“Even if the Germans didn't do anything,” my father says, “there are times when not doing anything is a crime too.” He seems to think this is an important point, something he wants me to get. But I am wondering why we have so much tuna fish.

I need somebody to help me, to help Karl. I write about it in my diary but, of course, a diary never answers. Mr. Bradley is younger than the World War II generation and increasingly I feel that if you want to talk through something you need to talk to people who haven't been in World War II.

Mr. Bradley says that I am right, that it isn't fair. “You should have him come out for baseball this spring. Tell him that there are not going to be any
Sieg Heil
s on my ball field.”

I wonder if I could talk Karl into it. Baseball is a long way off. It is still soccer season. I say to Karl—we have never really talked about it—“I think it is so unfair the way these kids treat you. You didn't do anything. It wasn't your parents.”

He looks at me with his gray eyes pale as chalk.

“Your parents didn't do anything, right?”

“As a matter of fact …”

“What?”

“My
Vater.
”

“What about your vater?”

“I don't know. I never knew him. After zeh war, zey were going to put him on trial. Za Americans. For sings he did.”

“What did he do?”

“I don't know,” Karl says. “But he killed himself. I was a baby.”

I am quiet for a very long moment trying to think of what I can say.

“You know,” Karl says, “it's very funny. I must tell my
Mutter
when I write her.”

“What's funny?”

“Isn't it funny zat I come to America and everyone treats me badly because I am German and zeh only one who is nice to me is za Jew. Za only Jew I've ever known.”

We both smile uneasily.

Karl never makes it to baseball season. He writes his mother and tells her the “funny” thing and suddenly Karl is packed off. His only explanation is that his mother told him he had to go back to Germany. I don't know if she is calling him back because the other kids treat him badly or because his only friend is “the Jew.” What is his mother like?

I have another big-hitting baseball season and I am getting a varsity letter and Tony Scaratini isn't getting one. His response is to try to club me with a baseball bat. He takes a good swing but I move out of the way and he misses. You can never please everyone. But maybe I should stand up to him more. I do not want to be like a silent German. Since Karl left I have been thinking a lot about Germans. Shouldn't I have said something more to him? It's bothering me. In a way I am glad he left so that I won't have to stand up for him, but that is bothering me too. Finally I have something to write about in my diary. I write a lot about the Germans, which is funny because my diary inspiration, Anne Frank, did not write much about them at all.