Nine Stories (13 page)

"Not
at all! As a matter of fact, I think a lot of the wave is coming back
already."

She
quickly touched her hair again. "Do you think you'll be coming
here again in the immediate future?" she asked. "We come
here every Saturday, after choir practice."

I
answered that I'd like nothing better but that, unfortunately, I was
pretty sure I wouldn't be able to make it again.

"In
other words, you can't discuss troop movements," said Esme. She
made no move to leave the vicinity of the table. In fact, she crossed
one foot over the other and, looking down, aligned the toes of her
shoes. It was a pretty little execution, for she was wearing white
socks and her ankles and feet were lovely. She looked up at me
abruptly. "Would you like me to write to you?" she asked,
with a certain amount of color in her face. "I write extremely
articulate letters for a person my--"

"I'd
love it." I took out pencil and paper and wrote down my name,
rank, serial number, and A.P.O. number.

"I
shall write to you first," she said, accepting it, "so that
you don't feel compromised in any way." She put the address into
a pocket of her dress. "Goodbye," she said, and walked back
to her table.

I
ordered another pot of tea and sat watching the two of them till
they, and the harassed Miss Megley, got up to leave. Charles led the
way out, limping tragically, like a man with one leg several, inches
shorter than the other. He didn't look over at me. Miss Megley went
next, then Esme, who waved to me. I waved back, half getting up from
my chair. It was a strangely emotional moment for me.

Less
than a minute later, Esme came back into the tearoom, dragging
Charles behind her by the sleeve of his reefer. "Charles would
like to kiss you goodbye," she said.

I
immediately put down my cup, and said that was very nice, but was she
sure?

"Yes,"
she said, a trifle grimly. She let go Charles' sleeve and gave him a
rather vigorous push in my direction. He came forward, his face
livid, and gave me a loud, wet smacker just below the right ear.
Following this ordeal, he started to make a beeline for the door and
a less sentimental way of life, but 1 caught the half belt at the
back of his reefer, held on to it, and asked him, "What did one
wall say to the other wall?"

His
face lit up. "Meet you at the corner!" he shrieked, and
raced out of the room, possibly in hysterics.

Esme
was standing with crossed ankles again. "You're quite sure you
won't forget to write that story for me?" she asked. "It
doesn't have to be exclusively for me. It can--"

I
said there was absolutely no chance that I'd forget. I told her that
I'd never written a story for anybody, but that it seemed like
exactly the right time to get down to it.

She
nodded. "Make it extremely squalid and moving," she
suggested. "Are you at all acquainted with squalor?"

I
said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in
one form or another, all the time, and that I'd do my best to come up
to her specifications. We shook hands.

"Isn't
it a pity that we didn't meet under less extenuating circumstances?"

I
said it was, I said it certainly was.

"Goodbye,"
Esme said. "I hope you return from the war with all your
faculties intact."

I
thanked her, and said a few other words, and then watched her leave
the tearoom. She left it slowly, reflectively, testing the ends of
her hair for dryness.

This
is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes.
The people change, too. I'm still around, but from here on in, for
reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose, I've disguised myself so
cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.

It
was about ten-thirty at night in Gaufurt, Bavaria, several weeks
after V-E Day. Staff Sergeant X was in his room on the second floor
of the civilian home in which he and nine other American soldiers had
been quartered, even before the armistice. He was seated on a folding
wooden chair at a small, messy-looking writing table, with a
paperback overseas novel open before him, which he was having great
trouble reading. The trouble lay with him, not the novel. Although
the men who lived on the first floor usually had first grab at the
books sent each month by Special Services, X usually seemed to be
left with the book he might have selected himself. But he was a young
man who had not come through the war with all his faculties intact,
and for more than an hour he had been triple-reading paragraphs, and
now he was doing it to the sentences. He suddenly closed the book,
without marking his place. With his hand, he shielded his eyes for a
moment against the harsh, watty glare from the naked bulb over the
table.

He
took a cigarette from a pack on the table and lit it with fingers
that bumped gently and incessantly against one another. He sat back a
trifle in his chair and smoked without any sense of taste. He had
been chain-smoking for weeks. His gums bled at the slightest pressure
of the tip of his tongue, and he seldom stopped experimenting; it was
a little game he played, sometimes by the hour. He sat for a moment
smoking and experimenting. Then, abruptly, familiarly, and, as usual,
with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and
teeter, like insecure luggage on an overhead rack. He quickly did
what he had been doing for weeks to set things right: he pressed his
hands hard against his temples. He held on tight for a moment. His
hair needed cutting, and it was dirty. He had washed it three or four
times during his two weeks' stay at the hospital in Frankfort on the
Main, but it had got dirty again on the long, dusty jeep ride back to
Gaufurt. Corporal Z, who had called for him at the hospital, still
drove a jeep combat-style, with the windshield down on the hood,
armistice or no armistice. There were thousands of new troops in
Germany. By driving with his windshield down, combat-style, Corporal
Z hoped to show that he was not one of them, that not by a long shot
was he some new son of a bitch in the E.T.O.

When
he let go of his head, X began to stare at the surface of the writing
table, which was a catchall for at least two dozen unopened letters
and at least five or six unopened packages, all addressed to him. He
reached behind the debris and picked out a book that stood against
the wall. It was a book by Goebbels, entitled "Die Zeit Ohne
Beispiel." It belonged to the thirty-eight-year-old, unmarried
daughter of the family that, up to a few weeks earlier, had been
living in the house. She had been a low official in the Nazi Party,
but high enough, by Army Regulations standards, to fall into an
automatic-arrest category. X himself had arrested her. Now, for the
third time since he had returned from the hospital that day, he
opened the woman's book and read the brief inscription on the
flyleaf. Written in ink, in German, in a small, hopelessly sincere
handwriting, were the words "Dear God, life is hell."
Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the
sickly stillness of the room, the words appeared to have the stature
of an uncontestable, even classic indictment. X stared at the page
for several minutes, trying, against heavy odds, not to be taken in.
Then, with far more zeal than he had done anything in weeks, he
picked up a pencil stub and wrote down under the inscription, in
English, "Fathers and teachers, I ponder `What is hell?' I
maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love." He
started to write Dostoevski's name under the inscription, but
saw--with fright that ran through his whole body--that what he had
written was almost entirely illegible. He shut the book.

He
quickly picked up something else from the table, a letter from his
older brother in Albany. It had been on his table even before he had
checked into the hospital. He opened the envelope, loosely resolved
to read the letter straight through, but read only the top half of
the first page. He stopped after the words "Now that the g.d.
war is over and you probably have a lot of time over there, how about
sending the kids a couple of bayonets or swastikas . . ." After
he'd torn it up, he looked down at the pieces as they lay in the
wastebasket. He saw that he had overlooked an enclosed snapshot. He
could make out somebody's feet standing on a lawn somewhere.

He
put his arms on the table and rested his head on them. He ached from
head to foot, all zones of pain seemingly interdependent. He was
rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all
go out if even one bulb is defective.

The
door banged open, without having been rapped on. X raised his head,
turned it, and saw Corporal Z standing in the door. Corporal Z had
been X's jeep partner and constant companion from D Day straight
through five campaigns of the war. He lived on the first floor and he
usually came up to see X when he had a few rumors or gripes to
unload. He was a huge, photogenic young man of twenty-four. During
the war, a national magazine had photographed him in Hurtgen Forest;
he had posed, more than just obligingly, with a Thanksgiving turkey
in each hand. "Ya writin' letters?" he asked X. "It's
spooky in here, for Chrissake." He preferred always to enter a
room that had the overhead light on.

X
turned around in his chair and asked him to come in, and to be
careful not to step on the dog.

"The
what?"

"Alvin.
He's right under your feet, Clay. How 'bout turning on the goddam
light?"

Clay
found the overhead-light switch, flicked it on, then stepped across
the puny, servant's-size room and sat down on the edge of the bed,
facing his host. His brick-red hair, just combed, was dripping with
the amount of water he required for satisfactory grooming. A comb
with a fountain-pen clip protruded, familiarly, from the right-hand
pocket of his olive-drab shirt. Over the left-hand pocket he was
wearing the Combat Infantrymen's Badge (which, technically, he wasn't
authorized to wear), the European Theatre ribbon, with five bronze
battle stars in it (instead of a lone silver one, which was the
equivalent of five bronze ones), and the pre-Pearl Harbor service
ribbon. He sighed heavily and said, "Christ almighty." It
meant nothing; it was Army. He took a pack of cigarettes from his
shirt pocket, tapped one out, then put away the pack and rebuttoned
the pocket flap. Smoking, he looked vacuously around the room. His
look finally settled on the radio. "Hey," he said. "They
got this terrific show comin' on the radio in a coupla minutes. Bob
Hope, and everybody."

X,
opening a fresh pack of cigarettes, said he had just turned the radio
off.

Undarkened,
Clay watched X trying to get a cigarette lit. "Jesus," he
said, with spectator's enthusiasm, "you oughta see your goddam
hands. Boy, have you got the shakes. Ya know that?"

X
got his cigarette lit, nodded, and said Clay had a real eye for
detail.

"No
kidding, hey. I goddam near fainted when I saw you at the hospital.
You looked like a goddam corpse. How much weight ya lose? How many
pounds? Ya know?"

"I
don't know. How was your mail when I was gone? You heard from
Loretta?"

Loretta
was Clay's girl. They intended to get married at their earliest
convenience. She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of
triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations. All through
the war, Clay had read all Loretta's letters aloud to X, however
intimate they were--in fact, the more intimate, the better. It was
his custom, after each reading, to ask X to plot out or pad out the
letter of reply, or to insert a few impressive words in French or
German.

"Yeah,
I had a letter from her yesterday. Down in my room. Show it to ya
later," Clay said, listlessly. He sat up straight on the edge of
the bed, held his breath, and issued a long, resonant belch. Looking
just semi-pleased with the achievement, he relaxed again. "Her
goddam brother's gettin' outa the Navy on account of his hip,"
he said. "He's got this hip, the bastard." He sat up again
and tried for another belch, but with below-par results. A jot of
alertness came into his face. "Hey. Before I forget. We gotta
get up at five tomorrow and drive to Hamburg or someplace. Pick up
Eisenhower jackets for the whole detachment."

X,
regarding him hostilely, stated that he didn't want an Eisenhower
jacket.

Clay
looked surprised, almost a trifle hurt. "Oh, they're good! They
look good. How come?"

"No
reason. Why do we have to get up at five? The war's over, for God's
sake."

"I
don't know--we gotta get back before lunch. They got some new forms
in we gotta fill out before lunch.... I asked Bulling how come we
couldn't fill 'em out tonight--he's got the goddam forms right on his
desk. He don't want to open the envelopes yet, the son of a bitch."

The
two sat quiet for a moment, hating Bulling. Clay suddenly looked at X
with new-higher-interest than before. "Hey," he said. "Did
you know the goddam side of your face is jumping all over the place?"

X
said he knew all about it, and covered his tic with his hand.

Clay
stared at him for a moment, then said, rather vividly, as if he were
the bearer of exceptionally good news, "I wrote Loretta you had
a nervous breakdown."