The Naked and the Dead (71 page)

            He was still fretting when they were relieved by the next team. He trudged back along the trail to where he had left his rifle and pack and settled down into his melancholy. Ach, so many things I could have done. Apparently without cause, a deep and limitless sorrow welled in his chest. He pitied himself, but his pity grew larger, swelled to include everybody in his compassion. Ai! it's hard, it's hard, he thought. He could not have said why he made this statement; it seemed a truth he had absorbed in his bones.

            The mood did not surprise Goldstein; he was accustomed to it, enjoyed it. He would be cheerful for days, liking everyone, pleased with whatever task was assigned, and then suddenly, almost inexplicably, for the causes already seemed minor, he would wallow in a self-induced gloom.

            Now he bathed himself in despondency. Oh, what does it all mean? What are we born for, why do we work? You're born and then you die, is that all there is to it? He shook his head. Look at the Levine family. They had such a promising son, he had a scholarship to Columbia, and then he got killed in an automobile accident. Why? What for? They worked so hard to let him go to school. He had known the Levine family only casually but he felt like weeping. Why should it be? Other sorrows possessed him, minor ones, major ones, in a suite of random undisciplined waves. He remembered when his family was very poor and his mother had lost a pair of gloves which she treasured. Ai! he sighed again. It's a hard business. He had drawn apart from the platoon, from the patrol ahead. Even Croft, what will he get out of it all? You're born and then you die. The knowledge somehow made him feel superior. He shook his head once more.

            Minetta was sitting beside him. "What's the matter with you?" he asked sharply, his sympathy guarded for Goldstein had been Ridges's partner.

            "Oh, I don't know." Goldstein sighed, "I was just thinking."

            Minetta nodded. "Yeah." He stared down the corridor they had hewn out of the jungle. It extended in a reasonably straight line for almost a hundred yards before bending around a tree, and all along it the men in the platoon were sprawled on the ground or sitting on their packs. Behind him he could hear the steady chopping and macing of the machetes. The sound depressed him, and he shifted his position, feeling the dampness of the earth against his buttocks. "That's all you can ever do in the Army, sit and think," Minetta said.

            Goldstein shrugged. "Sometimes it's not so good. I'm the type of man it's better for me when I don't think so much."

            "Yeah, the same for me." Minetta realized Goldstein had forgotten how poorly he and Roth had worked, and it made Minetta like him. He ain't one of these other guys holdin' a grudge. That made Minetta think of his argument with Croft. The anger that had sustained him in his quarrel was gone and he could think only of the consequences. "That sonofabitch Croft," he said. To avoid facing them, he was generating his indignation again.

            "Croft!" Goldstein said with loathing. He looked about warily for a moment. "I thought when we got that lieutenant, things would be different, you know he seemed like a nice fellow." Goldstein realized suddenly how much hope he had fabricated because Croft was no longer in command.

            "Aaah, he don't do a fuggin thing," Minetta said. "Listen, I wouldn't trust an officer. They work hand in glove with guys like Croft."

            "Only, he should take over," Goldstein said. "If you leave it to somebody like Croft, we're just dirt to him."

            "He's got it in for us," Minetta told him. He had a spasm of doubtful pride. "I ain't afraid of him, I told him what I thought, you saw that."

            "I should have done it." Goldstein was upset. Why couldn't he tell people what he thought of them? "I'm too easygoing," he said aloud.

            "Yeah, you are," Minetta said. "You can't let those guys run right over ya. You got to tell 'em where to get off. When I was in the hospital there was a doctor tried to give me a pushing around. I told him off." Minetta believed himself.

            "It's a good way to be."

            "Sure." Minetta was pleased. The aching in his arms had dulled, and a weary gentle relief was spreading through his body. Goldstein was all right, a thinker, Minetta told himself. "You know I've fooled around a lot, dances and kidding around with the girls, you know. Back home I'm the life of the party, you ought to see me. Only I ain't really like that, 'cause when I'd be goin' out with Rosie, for instance, we'd have a lot of serious talks. My aching back, the things we'd talk about. That's what I really am," Minetta decided. "I go a lot for stuff like philosophy." It was the first time he had ever thought of himself in such a way and the classification pleased him. "Most of these guys when they get back are gonna do just what they were doin' before, just screwing around. But we're different, you know that?"

            Goldstein's love of discussion roused him from his melancholy. "I'll tell you something I've often debated with myself, is it worth it?" The sad lines that extended from his nose to the corners of his mouth became deeper, more reflective, as he spoke. "You know maybe we'd be happier if we didn't think so much, maybe it's better to live and let live."

            "That's something I've wondered about too," Minetta said. His thoughts, ambiguous, indefinite, troubled him. He felt himself on the edge of something profound. "Sometimes I get to thinking, you know, what's it all about? There was a guy who died in the hospital in the middle of the night. Sometimes I start thinking about him."

            "Oh, that's terrible," Goldstein said. "He died just like that with nobody near him." He made a clucking sound of sympathy, and surprisingly, abruptly, a few tears mounted in his eyes.

            Minetta looked at him in amazement. "Jesus, what's the matter?"

            "I don't know, it's just so sad. He probably had a wife, parents."

            Minetta nodded. "It's a funny thing about you Jews. You know you feel sorrier for yourself and sorrier for everybody else than most people do."

            Roth, who had been lying beside them, quite silent until now, roused himself. "I'd like to take exception to that." The generalization made him apprehensive, as if a drunk were mouthing abuse at him.

            "What do ya mean?" Minetta snapped. Roth irritated him, reminded him that in a few minutes they would be turning back to work. It loosed the covert fear that Croft would be watching them. "Who the hell invited you, Roth?"

            "I think your statement had no foundation." The rebuff keyed Roth to defiance. A twenty-year-old kid, he said to himself, even they think they know it all. He shook his head, and said in his slow pompous voice, "It's a big question. A statement like that. . ." He waved his hand slowly in contempt.

            Minetta had been pleased with his observation; Roth's interference fed his malice. "Who do you think is right, Goldstein? Me or the undertaker over there?"

            Despite himself, Goldstein laughed. He had some compassion for Roth when he was not near him, but Roth was always so slow, so solemn, in everything he said. It was annoying to wait for him to finish a sentence. Besides, Minetta's analysis had not displeased Goldstein. "I don't know, I thought there was a lot of sense in what you said."

            Roth smiled sourly. He was used to it, he told himself. Everybody always sided against him. Earlier, when they were working, he had resented the way Goldstein was so efficient. In some manner he had felt it to be a betrayal. That Goldstein agreed with Minetta now, caused him no surprise. "Absolutely without foundation," he repeated.

            "Is that all you can say?" Minetta sneered. "Ab-so-lute-ly without foun-da-tion," he mimicked.

            "All right, then, consider me." Roth ignored his sarcasm. "I'm a Jew, but I'm not religious. I probably am less well informed about it than you are, Minetta. Who are you to say what I feel? I have never detected any similarities in Jews. I consider myself an American."

            Goldstein shrugged. "Are you ashamed?" he asked softly.

            Roth expelled his breath with annoyance. "That's a species of question I don't like." His heart was thumping powerfully from the tension he felt at arguing into their blank unsympathetic faces. A strong, apparently irrational, anxiety moistened the palms of his; hands. "Is that the only answer you can think of?" he snapped. His voice tapered shrilly.

            Aaah, the guineas and Jews are all the same, Minetta told himself. Always getting worked up over nothing. It made him feel superior to the argument.

            "Listen, Roth," Goldstein said. "Why do you think Croft and Brown don't like you? It's not because of you, it's because of your religion, because of something that you say has nothing to do with you." Yes, he was uncertain. Roth disturbed him; he was always a little chagrined that Roth was Jewish, for he felt he would give a bad impression to Gentiles.

            Roth had a pang because Croft and Brown didn't like him. He knew it, and yet it hurt somehow, hearing it put into words. "I wouldn't say that," he protested. "It's got nothing to do with religion." He was completely confused. It would be comforting if he could believe his religion was the cause of their antipathy, but other problems issued from it, other portents of future failure. He wanted to close his arms over his head, tuck up his knees, and shut out the clamant bickering about him, the incessant hacking of the machetes, the murmur of conversation, and the necessity to keep straining and exerting himself through one pain-racked hour after another. The jungle was protective suddenly, a buffer against all the demands that would be made. He longed to lose himself in it, become separate from the men. "I don't know," he said. It seemed important to stop arguing.

            They fell silent, lay again on their packs, relapsing into their private thoughts. Minetta's weariness colored his reverie, made him sad. He thought of Italy, which he had visited with his parents when he was a child. Very few memories remained; he could recall the town in which his father was born and a little of the city of Naples, but the rest had become clouded.

            In his father's village the houses tumbled down a hillside in a network of tiny alleyways and dusty courtyards. At the foot of the hill a little mountain stream lashed over the rocks and raced along vigorously into the valley below. The women would carry their laundry down in baskets in the morning, and wash the family clothing on the flat rocks of the bank, kneading and slapping and scrubbing with the ancient absorbed motions of peasant women at work. The boys in the town would fetch water every afternoon from the same stream and carry it up the hill, moving slowly, their small brown legs cording with labor as they toiled up the footpath to the town.

            Those were about the only details he could remember, but they stirred him. He seldom thought of the town, and he had forgotten almost all the Italian he once knew how to speak, but when he was moody or reflective he would remember things like the heat of the sun between the walls of the alleyways, or the acrid fermy odors of the dung on the fields.

            Now, for the first time in many months, he brooded about the war in Italy and wondered if the town had been destroyed in bombardments. It seemed almost impossible to him; the little houses of rock and plaster must remain forever. And yet. . . He was very depressed. He had seldom thought of returning to that village, but now, transiently, it was what he wanted most to do. Jesus, that place all ruined, he thought. It made him very sad. For a few seconds his mind held in montage all the wrecked towns, the corpses on the road, the perpetual muted thunder of artillery over the horizon; it even contained a place for this patrol on an island in another ocean. Everything's being smashed all over the world. The magnitude of the idea was too great; his mind veered away, careened back giddily to the rock on which he was sitting, absorbed itself once more in the wretchedness and fatigue of his body. Aaah, it's all so big you get lost in it. There's always some goon on top of ya. Despite himself, he pictured his village destroyed, the cold shattered walls standing like the upraised arms of dead soldiers. It shocked him, made him feel guilty as though he were imagining the death of his parents, and he tried to shut out the fantasy. He was enraged at the waste. Again it seemed impossible that the women should not be washing laundry on the rocks. He shook his head. Aaah, that fuggin Mussolini. But he was confused; his father had always told him Mussolini had brought prosperity, and he had accepted it. He could remember the arguments between his uncles and his father. They were so goddam poor they needed a guy who could run things, he told himself now. He remembered one of his father's cousins who had been a big shot in Rome, and had marched with Mussolini's army in 1922. All through his childhood, Minetta had heard tales of those days. "All a the young men, the patriotists, they fight with Mussolini in 'twenty-two," his father had told him, and he had dreamed of marching with them too, of being a hero.

            Everything was mixed up. His mind could see no farther than his eyes. He was hemmed by the dense palpable mesh of the jungle. "Aaah, that fuggin Mussolini," he said again, as if to relieve himself.

            Goldstein was stirring beside him. "Come on, it's our turn again."

            Minetta lurched to his feet. "Why the hell don't they give us a decent break? Jesus Christ, we just sat down." He glared at Ridges, who was shouldering his way along the narrow ragged swath of the trail; nothing was left of his reverie but the resentment and fatigue that had initiated it.

            "C'mon, M'netta," Ridges called back. "We got work to do." Without waiting for an answer, he plowed ahead to relieve the crew that had been laboring. Ridges was angry and perplexed. He had spent the rest period debating whether he would have time to clean his rifle, and he had decided he could never do the job properly in ten minutes. It annoyed him. The rifle was wet and muddy, and would rust if he couldn't take care of it soon. Shoot, Ridges said to himself, a man never has time to do one thing, when they ain't cussin' for him to do somethin' else. He felt pleasantly spiteful at the stupidity of the Army, and yet guilty too. He was taking poor care of a valuable piece of property, which bothered his sense of honesty. The gov'ment give me that M-one 'cause they figgered Ah'd watch over it, an' Ah ain't doin' it. The rifle must be worth a hundred dollars, Ridges thought, and that was a vast sum to him. Ah gotta clean it, but what ifen they don't gimme time? It was too much for him to resolve. He sighed, picked up his machete, and began to work. In a few seconds Goldstein had joined him.