Dog Tags (22 page)

“Yes.”

“So you will not broadcast.”

“No. Medicine, any time. Diplomacy, no. Show business, no.”

“Would you like to write to your family?”

“Oh not that, please,” I said. “Only if everybody does.”

“Such heroism.”

“God no. Not even patriotism.”

He snorted. A big man, bowed, hostile, the enemy. “I could make you trouble,” he said.

“Don't make me trouble.” I almost fell asleep then and there. The weariness was an ache. It was not sleepiness; it was a way of life. “Listen to me. I had a friend, a Chinese, in New York. A rich boy, from a rich family, and one day I asked him where he would spend his life. China, he said. They won't have you, I said. China, he said. He said even if there was a
Japanese
in charge,” and Ou-yang went gratifyingly popeyed, “he'd still go back to China. Do you understand?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Not patriotism.”

“No, no. Much more.”

“Much more.” I was out of it now, slack, even sleepier. “So much of what a man was, and is, and will be. The landscape, the language, the color of the sky and the rhythm of the rain. Virtues and defects. You understand me?”

He nodded. “Give me the pictures.” I pushed them across the desk. “I will not make you trouble, Die-foo.”

“Ding how,” I said.

“Ding how.” He smiled. I smiled.

On the way out I ran into Ewald. He was reading as he walked, and his lips stirred. It was earnest and rather touching. “Well, where you off to?” I asked.

He was startled; thoughts and words pushed at him. He licked his lips and said, “I'm glad to see you, Lieutenant.”

“Been a long time since we talked.”

“Yes.”

“Heard from home?”

He nodded. “They're okay.”

“Good. Take it easy,” I said.

“Lieutenant,” he said, so I stopped. “I'm beginning to understand. A lot of things.”

“Well, that's good.”

“I mean about the war.”

“You're a better man than I am.”

“And that time, when we were captured.”

“Forget it,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “I just wanted to tell you.”

“Sure,” I said. “Listen, watch your step. Someday the others—”

“I'll take care of myself,” he said. “I've got the will to live.”

The will to live. This innocent. This squarehead. This eminent philosopher. “So did Jack,” I said.

“Who?”

“Just watch yourself. I mean it. Don't move around alone. Stay with your progs.”

“You can sneer,” he said, “but we could end it. All of us. If we—”

“Go to hell,” I said.

The interrogations resumed, ceased, resumed again. No one was injured but the pressure was constant: what next? when? New prisoners came in, a trickle. The food improved again but there was no mail. No reading matter but Lenin and Hugo; I tried reading aloud to my bored fellows, translating as I went, but kept falling asleep. My audience made no protest. When I was not working or extending the previously recorded limits of torpor, I made an effort to think about sublimer matters. Tried to find, for example, an absolute. One. To hang on to. Deduce from. You may have one. God. Country. Wife. Husband. Lucky you. For us sad skeptics it is not so easy. The closest I managed was the sanctity of human life. No two human beings are alike—an axiom, biological differentiation—therefore every life is unique and no man is expendable. Not even the enemy. Corollary: therefore every man is absolutely alone at all times. Contradiction: we all die, so are expended after all. Important to ourselves but not to the universe; yes, man's whatness and nature's so-whatness. Then I wasn't sure, so returned to simpler matters. You will not mind. Short attention span. I wished for paper and pencil but they would not have helped. I hummed themes until rudely silenced. We improvised a chess set but energy failed. Kinsella caught cold and blew his nose through his fingers. Jacob did that in the washbowl every morning, while warm water ran. “God damn. You know what I miss, I miss handkerchiefs. Got this little polyp or something too.”

“I'll fix it up free when we're home.”

“Nah. The army'll do it.”

“That's right, the army,” someone said. “Where the hell are they?”

“They'll be along,” Kinsella said in an invalid's voice.

I thought of Jacob, who might be suffering more than I; and about the history of my obstreperous sect; and about the existence or non-existence of chance and fate. I decided that I was an atom, possibly even an electron, possibly one of the more mysterious particles, certainly a negative charge, capable only of weak interactions, a bit of mass, a bit of energy, hello and goodbye. Unprofitable but time-consuming ruminations; I omit detailed fantasies, laments and whimperings. In the end I was grateful for work and devoted myself to public service. Dropped in on my platoon. Fennimer and company had joined them, replacing departed shades. Good tough bunch now: Cuttis was a baby boy still, but the others were mean and raunchy. Except Trez, who had not condemned earlier and did not toady now. “Lieutenant,” he said. “How you doing with the nurses?”

“Killing myself. How's the Marianna flash?”

“Hard as nails,” he said. “Two hundred pounds of dynamite.”

“About one fifty,” I judged. “Anybody sick?”

“Not my boys.”

Fennimer said, “The major escape yet?” They snickered.

“What's the gossip?” Trez asked.

I told them what I knew about the truce talks. They all cursed. That was as far as we ever went, jokes and current events, but they shored me up. Some days it seemed we were the only Americans in the whole camp who planned to survive. Turks and Greeks and Englishmen, sure; they were real people, but many of my compatriots seemed insubstantial. To identify them you would have to examine their dog tags. They did not wail and gnash teeth; they faded. That second winter was deadly in subtler ways: the unexpressed sense of permanent servitude, of life foreclosed. Plus the oft expressed sense of betrayal, or at least criminal horsing around, by generals and politicians. Yessir. Oft.

We survived, and spring came again. What a simple statement! You will draw an approving breath and think, thank heaven, our boys certainly deserved survival and springtime. Ah, to hell wid all o' yiz. I had a rebuke building here, sharp, savage, memorable. Forget it. We survived, and spring came again. (All the same, what were you doing that spring, or a dozen such springs since? I know: paying taxes. Accept this fig, one and all.)

Kinsella survived his cold. I chatted with Ou-yang. The truce talks were in full swing, one millimeter each way. Early birds fluttered in, the ice on the Yalu floated out. One night, late, dark, I was trudging homeward, my mage's rounds accomplished, and the air was sweet, moist, the stars icy and reassuring, and I was a shaman, possessed of intimate powers, tuned to an eternal animism, immune to the wrath of capricious gods. I was, for reasons still beyond me, sanguine; had survived an unnamed plague; felt a bit more like Benny Beer, condottiere, scion of the eminent buttonhole merchants, lover, financial wizard and glass of fashion. This war would end. I visualized the brass band. The Irish queen … With whimsical excitement, almost aroused, I remembered a legend: Cuchulainn? Brian Boru? His men won a great battle for a great queen, and when they marched back to the queen's castle her women had lined the road on both sides, and as the warriors tramped by, the women raised their skirts to the neck, every last one of them. Keep your brass band. Give me Kathleen O'Toole every time. So I trudged, musing upon that mossy allée of noble shrubbery, when I heard a moan. I thought it was myself moaning, but when I heard it again I halted.

I found him quickly, with his belly cut open, one good slash and the blood welling. I looked around like a cat; we were alone. I ran, shouting, momentarily mindless; then doubled back, still shouting, and padded the wound, awkwardly, an amateur. A guard called. “Die-foo,” I shouted. “Kwai kwai,” which meant quick. I heard commotion. I felt for a pulse. Perhaps I caught the last flutter, the last desperate message. I crouched, cold, cursing Fennimer and his cronies—unfair, it could have been anyone.

The guard ran up soon, Li behind him. Ewald was dead. He could not have been saved. He was dead. That poor baby butterball. Dead in a far place. I sat down and raised him, to look into his face by starlight. It was stubbled and drawn but it was the face of a chubby child, dust on a country road, the old swimming hole, apples. Men gathered around me, and no one spoke, and I cradled him in my arms, and rocked him, and wept dry tears.

No one was questioned or punished. What was Ewald? Dirty prog. Two more dog tags on the heap. I bore them to Kinsella, Ewald's final expiatory offering, like the testicles of some sacred bull.

Well golly folks I wish they'd crucified somebody, Bewley maybe; nailed him to a wooden cross and left him to hang for a day, and then in the morning we all gathered, all eight hundred, and Kinsella and I took him down gently, and Trez wiped his face with a cloth, and the sky darkened and a great cry went up from the people, and the Chinese wept and turned away. How it would round out this blockish account! How it would lend meaning to all that happened!

No. What happened was meaningless. A dreary succession of minor episodes in the subhuman comedy. You want more. You insist on significance, affirmation, a chronicle instinct with life, informed by morality. Okay. First they had a hunch about that crazy epidemic, the bleeding and fever: ticks, they said. So we declared war on ticks. We worked at it. Nothing inspires a man to virtue like the fear of bloody urine. Sure enough: only two cases. They survived. Then one day they said we could all write home, and they supplied paper and pencil. So we all wrote home. Briefly, but to the starving man an egg is a chicken.

A week later—it was August of 1952—we were swimming in the Yalu under a molten sky; we played, splashed, rolled sensually in the girlish waters, about twenty of us, and on a friendly eddy there sailed to us a sheet of paper. “A message!” Kinsella cried, and we laughed boisterously, urging ribald suggestion, and he stroked out to it and bore it in. “More,” I called, and pointed; behind that first message sailed a flotilla, some crumpled, some soaked, some like toy boats or paper hats. The men cheered and thrashed to the rescue. Then the laughter fell and the sun went black: they were our letters. All of that same date, all in those flat formulas. Angered and silent, we stood in the shallows. A few more letters floated past. Deliberately timed? An accident, just a day's garbage like any day's? How's that for significance, affirmation and morality?

We could not tell now whether the planet outside existed still, and that night we sat upon the ground and told sad stories of the end of the world. Suppose we had dropped the big one, and the Russians had done the same, one for one, and then two for two, and New York was gone, and Moscow, and Peking? Kinsella scoffed and ordered a change of subject. But the thought was almost cheering: imagine
other
people in trouble! Entertainment. Flights of fancy. Modern art. The difference to us would be slight: our letters would never be mailed, therefore the outside world did not exist. The seminar proceeded: it exists objectively, one said. Then why did our letters come back? Weird sense, but sense. Suppose a visitor came and reported all well outside? Then for the space of his narration it would exist. Then it must exist now. Why? Why does existence have to be continuous? “God damn,” Kinsella said. “Shut up.” Very high-class stuff. College level. “Your wives and kids exist,” Kinsella ordained. “Now shut up.” I wondered.

Vignette. October, 1952: Doctor Beer has just conferred with Doctor Li about a Chinese private who seems to suffer from Raynaud's syndrome. Will wonders never cease. Chiefly in females. Is the private perhaps a female? No. Numb fingertips, swollen, painful. The man is obviously neurotic. But neurosis does not exist in the Chinese army. Perhaps, says Li, acupuncture. A transfer to Canton, Doctor Beer suggests, warmer climes. That, says Li, is merely treating the symptom; acupuncture treats the whole organism. Doctor Beer admits defeat and slinks off. Outside he takes a good lungful of crisp Manchurian air, turns a corner and finds himself face to face with a Russian officer: squarish face, farmer's jaw, broad pug nose, blond hair, blue eyes; all this absorbed in a blink. The Russian is escorted by a convoy of Chinese officers, and for a moment no one moves: the Chinese seem to retire, to subside, to vanish, ectoplasmic. The Russian and the American stare, spark, and for the space of a weak interaction a new bond exists: white proton plus white electron equals racial flash: what are we doing in this Mongolian madhouse? (He felt that; I swear it.) Doctor Beer breaks the crust of a smile; the corner of a Russki mouth wryses. Doctor Beer steps aside; the convoy of officers stamps past. Cossack! Anti-Semite! (But I felt it too, Cousin Vanya!)

Ou-yang sent for me again, more sociable now, to tell me that General Eisenhower had been elected and had promised to come to Korea and end the war and all sorts of fine things. For an insane moment I thought he was saying that Eisenhower would come
here
, and that we must prepare for an inspection. Ou-yang was displaying good will. I had no idea what I was expected to say, so I said that I would miss him, and that we must have lunch some time when it was all over. No. These pleasantries whizzed through an exhausted mind, but no sound issued. I shrugged. A year and a half ago there had been talk of a truce. Now there would be more talk of a truce. It was the prisoners' equivalent of the Christian heaven, the Communist utopia: later, always later. The smart ones, the tough ones, knew that there was no such thing and never would be. We were all lifers.

And yet we hoped. Damn,
damn
, we hoped. Even the best of us. The most brutal, obscene epithet in the English language is “optimist,” and yet we hoped.