Refiner's Fire (56 page)

Marshall had looked at the breaking surf for a long while, as if he were judging something. At last he turned to Livingston, who delighted in seeing the little face with a missing tooth. “Well? Are you going to go through the waves?”

“No,” Marshall had said.

The lieutenant's voice broke all reveries, and he had them stand to as he explained his completely idiotic plan for a direct frontal attack. They would all be killed. “Robert, do you want to come with us?” asked Marshall.

“Yes.”

“Help me make a diversion.” Marshall picked up a rock, and, when no one was looking, threw it at Ashkenazi. At the same time, Robert pushed the son of a Rumanian butcher into a Hungarian second-story man. The second-story man attacked the butcher's son, and Ashkenazi, who thought that he had been a victim of their fallout, proceeded to demolish them both. The uproar was tremendous and groups formed around the fighters.

Marshall, Lenny, and Robert flipped themselves backward over the stone wall. As the fight played itself out after the lieutenant fired a shot in the air, they dropped down a hill and ran past the Arab house onto a road.

From the road, they could see the rest of the platoon sneaking like thieves amid rocks and bent trees. “They're crazy. They'll all be dead before they reach the second kilometer on the flats.”

“And what about us?” asked Robert. “Where are we that's so special?”

“Don't worry,” said Marshall. “We'll have that flag in our hands in an hour and a half. We might have to wait here for a while, but probably not for long.”

They thought he was crazy, but in ten minutes they saw a truck coming down the narrow road. Marshall stuck out his hand pompously. The Arabs in the truck looked at them in deferential hostility. “Oh sirs,” said Marshall. “Would it be your pleasure to provide small transportations?”

“Surely, oh my sir,” said the driver, hardly able to refuse three armed soldiers.

“Why do you ride with us?” asked one of them. “You have many tanks and trucks.”

“Reasons of state and developmental prerogatives of the littoral republics in the Arab League,” answered Marshall, lifting a phrase from many winters past in the language laboratory at Boylston Hall.

“You are not Israelis, are you?”

“We are of all nations and all beliefs,” answered Marshall, “and we have come to Algiers to affirm the solidarity of the Third World in the price evaluation of basic commodities essential to Western manufacture.”

“Oh,” said the Arab. He laughed nervously and was silent for the rest of the trip.

“Why did you say that to them?” asked Lenny, afterward, when Marshall had translated the conversation.

“Because I don't know how to say anything else,” answered Marshall. “All they ever taught us was political stuff, the Koran, and medieval anatomy texts.”

They hid their packs, shovels, helmets, and jackets. Shortsleeved and draped with weapons and ammunition, they began the ascent, taking little care, intent upon reaching the top quickly. The cliffs were steep, and there were places where Marshall normally would have used pitons and etriers. But they moved along smoothly, and the sun reflected from the bronze rock, hot and hale even in November.

Their weapons sometimes clattered against the stone, but it didn't matter. The sound could not arch over the summit, and the wind was coming from the other side. They climbed using hand-jambs and chimneying cracks the way Marshall showed them, and every once in a while they would look out into the blue spaces where gulls wheeled and turned after inland flights from the sea.

As they got higher, they saw Ramallah past a low hill, rising in white patches and artful spires. They thought that in a hundred feet or so they would be able to see Jerusalem, and they were right. It was a series of quiet terraces sitting in the static mist which even clear light sets between distance and the eye. Al Aqsa glowed and winked a gold fleck. They wondered what the gulls could see from thousands of feet above and what the pilots could see from planes so far up that they seemed silent and weightless.

From a distance the three climbers looked like mites on the rock walls. Finally they reached a spot just under the lip of the summit. Marshall peeked over. “They're all there, looking the other way. Ten soldiers and three judges. There's a sentry post between us and them, but the sentry is a Bengali and he's also looking the other way. They're downhill from us.”

Staying in position, Lenny silently lifted his automatic rifle over the ledge and trained it on a group near the flag. He put two extra clips of ammunition on the rock, and took a bead. Marshall and Robert crept over the ledge and hid. Marshall had a knife in hand, and three grenades hooked to his belt. Robert held a submachine gun, and carried an extra magazine in his teeth. They moved forward while Robert kept his gun trained on some soldiers who had a light machine gun on a tripod, and who were reclining in a sandbagged pit.

Marshall and Robert stopped at a flat rock. Robert took position, well within comfortable range. They looked back at Lenny and saw him staring quietly down the barrel of his rifle. The soldiers at the citadel took occasional long-distance shots at those in the platoon who were unfortunate enough to be trapped near the base of the hill. Marshall heard a captain say, “He's dead,” as he put down his binoculars and checked off a figure on a clipboard.

Marshall removed his shirt and crawled toward the sentry, who was combing his hair and facing the opposite way. Marshall had to remember not to kill him, but just to pretend. Grabbing him violently from behind, he put his hand over the poor Bengali's mouth, and pulled him instantly backward beyond the few sandbags. Marshall held the knife at the terrified sentry's throat. “You're dead. Understand? Dead. Shut up. Okay?” The Bengali nodded. Then Marshall hopped into the sandbag redoubt and lay flat.

He placed the grenades in front of him, pulled their pins, and tossed them. They exploded quite loudly even though they were not real. Lenny and Robert opened fire, emptying four clips before the amazed victims could even see what was happening. Had the grenades been real and the bullets not blanks, the citadel troops would have been dead. They had not even turned their machine gun, or lifted a weapon against their attackers.

Robert and Lenny ran up, holding their freshly loaded weapons on the troops and officers. Marshall was already there.

“You see,” he screamed, ripping down the signal flag. “The best army in the world.” He couldn't stay still, and had the knife in one hand, and the flag in the other. “You treat us like criminals. You treat us like idiots. But we're not the idiots. You are. And we just proved it, because we killed you in your own game.”

A
CERTAIN
equanimity prevailed during a two-day storm when sheets of rain were thrown on the hillsides in sporadic bursts and clouds brushed against the raiding windows. Marshall, Lenny, Robert, Baruch, and the three Bengalis (Wilson, Prithvi, and Chobandresh) sat on upturned wooden crates arranged in a circle around an enormous cauldron in one of the enlisted mens kitchens. The floor was red terra-cotta tile. Several poorly joined windows gave out on wet rock ledges and water-battered bushes. Steel shelves covered the walls and were piled high with canned goods and sacks of flour. It was the afternoon of the fifth eighteen-hour kitchen day since the Americans had been released from the stockade.

The officers on the mountaintop had understood English perfectly, and had not taken kindly to Marshall's remarks. Therefore, instead of being rewarded for their spectacular victory they were charged with absence from a training area; abandoning equipment; being out of uniform; abuse of officers; and getting from point A to point B faster than is humanly possible without giving explanation. Of all the accusations, this was the gravest. At the trial, the Major presided in splendor, directing a frightening ritual of salutes, attentions, and formulaic greetings.

Baruch had volunteered to be counsel for the defense, and Marshall discovered to his dismay that Baruch not only lisped and whistled, but stuttered painfully when speaking in public. The Major had no patience with this, and kept interrupting him, saying, “State your case or shut up.” Heavily laced with constructive selfinterest, Baruch's case was that neither the accused nor their attorney should have been in the punishment company in the first place.

“That is completely irrelevant,” the Major responded. “At issue here is a set of specific charges, to which you will confine your discussion. Is that clear, you fat little Turkish bastard?” The Major's troop of pompous lieutenants thought that this was very funny.

When it came time for sentencing, Lenny was first up. “State your full name for the record.”

“Leonard Schnaiper. They also call me the Delaware Funny Boy.” Laughter came this time from the accused.

“Trainee Schnaiper, you will forfeit a month's pay and spend two days in the stockade. Next, state your full name for the record.”

“Robert Stein. They also call me Mr. Jive,” he said in appropriate dialect. He received a duplicate of Lenny's sentence.

The Major tensed when Marshall stepped before him and saluted. Marshall comforted himself by thinking that the more punishment he got, the better.

“State your full name for the record.”

“Marshall Pearl,” said Marshall.

“What kind of name is that?”

“Half Anglo-Saxon, and half Pearl, Major.”

“Is Pearl a name for Jews?”

“Yes, Major.”

“Is it your father's name?”

“No, Major.”

“Do you know who your father is?” asked the Major, delighted to have found so quickly what seemed to be a very weak spot.

“Yes, Major. I do.”

“He is not named Pearl?”

“No, Major.”

“Who is he?”

“He is Anwar Sadat, President of the Arab Republic of Egypt, Major.”

“Trainee Pearl, you will forfeit two months' pay and stay three days in the stockade.”

“That's not enough.”

“That's what?”

“Not enough, not enough. How about three months' pay and four days in the stockade?”

“Very well. You have it.”

“Major.”

“Yes?”

“I'll take five and five.”

“Are you mad?”

“No, Major, but you can't do anything to me that I don't want you to do. Do you understand, Major?”

“Would you like thirty days in the stockade?”

“I would be truly grateful, Major.” They could see in his face that he would have been truly pleased to spend thirty days in the stockade.

“You will serve the same sentence as the others.”

“Thank you, Major. It is just what I want, Major.”

“Get him out of here,” said the Major. “Just get him out!”

Being in the stockade was not so terrible. They ate the same food, didn't have to work, and only one other prisoner shared the little stucco building. He was a rotund Egyptian with two front teeth absent, and he had the rather distressing habit of ripping up his clothes, banging his head against the wall, and saying,
“Ani meshugah, Ani meshugah”
(I am crazy, I am crazy), over and over again. At first they were frightened by this fat fellow Safran, but when the guards went to dinner he stopped and turned to them with a sigh. “I'm not crazy,” he said. “I'm just trying to get out of the Army. ”

Marshall recalled the Majors summation before sentencing: “If, as you allege, you should not have been assigned to Company T, it does not make the slightest bit of difference. You have found the right place, as your actions show. It may have been out of order to begin with, but it has proved correct. As I have always said, a great army makes great mistakes.”

It rained all the time. The big cauldron was filled with an infinite number of hardboiled eggs to shell (there were so many that once in a while they came upon a chick). To heat the room, they had six burners on an open-frame gas range burning green and blue in double rows. By their fourth day they were allowed to stay together in their anteroom as long as they were continually engaged at various tasks. Lenny sang, or the Bengalis hummed and drummed exquisite ragas which blended resolutely with the rain and green fire and drafts of wet mountain wind. They were even allowed to make a kettle of tea, and they would have been happy, were it not for each man's freshly kindled passion for home. And they were always tired—so tired that their eyes sagged like horse collars.

As they shelled the eggs they spoke about their condition. They were disgusted by the uncivil behavior of the criminals, especially since Ashkenazi had organized a ring to extort money and unmentionable services. Were it not for the three Americans, the Bengalis would have been done for, and had it not been for a magnificent and heroic Rumanian boxer named Mush, a few unfortunate Russians and Czechs would also have been done for. As it was, the entente of three Americans, three Bengalis, Baruch, four Russians, four Israelis, and the boxer—sixteen in all—was more than enough to protect against Ashkenazi and his subalterns. Quickly coalescing into an alliance, the sixteen wielded immense power and rose above extortion and attack. The rest were suicidal or evil—except for little Yakov, who was good, and had fallen irreparably into the hands of Ashkenazi. But even Yakov survived continued indignities. The protected ones saw him tossed about in the storm, and loved him not only for his suffering, but because he seemed to be a just man caught in the body of a broken toy.

“What would you do then?” asked Baruch. “How can you control thuch awful criminalths?”

“Beats me,” said Lenny.

“Oh oh oh. Nothing can be done. Nothing can be done,” chirruped Chobandresh.

“Now that I've lived a few weeks with these maniacs,” said Marshall, “I know exactly what to do.”

“What?” said Wilson.