The Pledge (3 page)

“I'm no writer, but it seems to me you got yourself a story.”

“Maybe. Maybe it's another story.” He didn't want to discuss the evening with Legerman. He didn't want to discuss it with anyone. He wanted to go back to his quarters, drink a glass of the warm British beer, and brood about food and hunger and life and death and people like Chatterjee and Majumdar.

“Who are they?” he asked Legerman.

“How do you mean that, Mr. Bacon?”

“Time you called me Bruce. Same as you, Sergeant. Who the hell are you and who is Chatterjee and who is Majumdar?”

“Well, me. You know who I am. Chatterjee teaches math and physics. Majumdar — well, he works on a local newspaper.”

“What newspaper?”

“
Prasarah
, which I'm sure you never heard of. It's a communist newspaper, and
prasarah
is the old Sanskrit word for freedom or something of that sort. I guess it gives it a sort of universality, with India full of different languages.”

“So Majumdar is a communist.”

“That's right. Chatterjee, Majumdar, and me too. If you feel you were put on, I'm sorry.”

“I don't know what I feel,” Bruce said.

“You can sit around the palace like the rest of them and read the handouts and rewrite them, and it's no skin off my back. I thought you were looking for something.”

“What are you getting so pissed off about?” Bruce demanded. “Did I say anything? Who the hell do you think I am, Howard Rushmore? I don't work for
the Journal.
I work for the
Tribune.”

“OK, OK. You came here for a story that no one else wants. I think Chatterjee and Majumdar are two of the most connected people I know.”

“I didn't see it tonight.”

“Give it time. Give it time. Are you hungry?”

“I had to force myself to eat that damn cookie or whatever. Now I'm starving.”

“Good. I'll take you to the Jewish restaurant.”

Bruce didn't know what to expect, and he thought of the various possibilities that would place a Jewish restaurant in blacked-out, famine-stricken Calcutta. Now, in Calcutta nothing surprised him, and he watched, intrigued, as Legerman conducted the jeep driver through a seemingly endless maze of streets, the more so as the jeep rode without lights, with only the moon to light the way.

“What do you do when there's no moon?” he asked Legerman.

“Not a hell of a lot.”

For Bruce, the city had become another world, a strange, ghostly place, painted over with silver. Families huddled together, asleep on the sidewalks; lean, half-starved cows were everywhere; and people awake moved slowly. An occasional streetcar thundered by, shattering the silver silence, and sometimes a taxi with the two fierce Sikhs sitting side by side, and sometimes an army vehicle, British or American, racing through the streets.

“When they hit someone, they don't stop,” Legerman said, and the driver of the jeep, a Pfc from the motor pool, said, “I had officers in here told me to hit a wog. I told the fucken shitheads that a jeep can't do it. I told them to get an army truck, they wanted to hunt wogs.”

“You're kidding,” Bruce said.

“He ain't kidding,” Legerman said.

It was ten o'clock when they reached the Jewish restaurant, a handsome building with a white stone front. Legerman told the driver to pick them up at midnight. The driver was dating a nurse at the general hospital, and he was pleased with the break. “This gives me an hour with Maddie. An hour is a challenge.” Bruce, recalling the Sixth Avenue Delicatessen and mountainous sandwiches of hot pastrami and corned beef, was unprepared for the elegant dining room, the fourteen-foot-high ceilings with their gently revolving fans, the tables with their spotless white cloths and the well-dressed Hindus and Bengalis as well as British and American officers, dining with Red Cross women and nurses.

“Not the Sixth Avenue Deli,” Bruce said.

The proprietor came to meet them and shook hands eagerly with Legerman and Bruce and ushered them to a table in a quiet corner, sitting with them for a few minutes and inquiring from Legerman what might be the progress of the war. His name was Abel Shar, a slender man with small, elegant features, a skin almost black, and silky black hair. When he left them, Bruce said, “I suppose he's Jewish?”

“That's right. They came here two thousand, three hundred years ago. He put on a big Passover dinner for Jewish GI's, and he serves cold beer. What more can you ask for, twelve thousand miles from home? We manage to find potatoes for him, a sack here and there that the army loses. He'll bring us Indian food if you want it, but mostly we have beer and potato pancakes when we're here. His potato pancakes are better than my mother's.”

Bruce agreed that they were extraordinary potato pancakes, small, hot, and crisp, fried in deep fat; and he was also coming to the conclusion that Hal Legerman was an extraordinary man. His desire to be alone, to brood and weep over the immeasurable human suffering that was Calcutta disappeared. More GI's drifted into the restaurant, until a dozen young men were pressed around the table, eating potato pancakes and drinking ice cold beer, and arguing hotly about the past, the future, Adolf Hitler, Burma, Assam, the Japanese, the British, the Americans, hopes, dreams, indignities, horrors, and Atabrine. They all took Atabrine, a yellow medicine that gave their skin a golden glow and served as a more or less reliable preventive against malaria; and this kid, New York from his speech, Italian from the look of him and the cross he wore around his neck, was talking about a Southern GI who wouldn't take Atabrine. “He couldn't stand the color. The dumb bastard claimed it made him colored.”

“What happened?”

“Malaria happened.”

Hal Legerman said, “We are without question the worst bunch of racist bastards that ever infested this planet.”

“Colonel Hallway says it's toilets, all toilets.”

“Hallway is a total cretin.”

“Who's Hallway?” Bruce asked Legerman.

“He's famous here. He's chief of orientation in this area and he gave a lecture about toilets. He says the world is divided into two groups, those who sit on toilets and those who whack it off the back and piss on the grass. That's the colored part of the world. No toilets, which means they haven't made what Hallway calls the final step into the human family.”

“The fucken moron sent a mimeo of it to the
New York Times,”
someone said. “Then he'd be in the PX every day to see if they printed it. He ordered that a paper be saved for him every day, and it got around and we'd manage to steal his paper. He tried to have the PX sarge court-martialed. Imagine, the PX sarge, the most important man in this shithead army.”

Bruce listened to them. It was a forum of sorts. Men came and went, all enlisted men, no officers, an astonishing cross section, college men, men barely literate, men who sat and listened and never said a word and others who held the floor, egocentrics, easygoing, angry, every shade of mood, with a crazy assortment of ideas that ranged from the depopulation of Japan and Germany to mutiny in the enormous CBI Army, which for the most part did nothing but occupy the Indian subcontinent. When midnight came, Bruce rose reluctantly, fascinated by the conversation at this round corner table of what was called the Jewish restaurant.

“We can't keep the driver waiting,” Legerman told him. “That guy has a short fuse.”

“You talking about Johnson?” someone asked. “Johnson's jeep?”

There were three applicants for rides on the jeep. Legerman, meanwhile, had changed a dollar into pice, the bottom end of the local coinage, loading his pockets with the tiny coins. “I always keep a pocketful. With ten beggars per block, you bankrupt yourself or deal in pice.”

“Fuck it,” a voice said. “You can't deal with a million beggars.”

“You can try,” Legerman said. “It helps work off the guilt.”

The city was asleep now, the moon lower, the streets darker. Johnson drove through dark passages, where Bruce saw very little. “He got antennas,” someone said.

“The army runs a kind of bus service, trucks with boards for seats. They close up at midnight.”

A figure stood in the road, waving his arms. Johnson jammed on his brakes, and another GI climbed into the jeep.

“Last one,” Johnson said. “This is no half-track, and I don't stop for no fucken general.”

“Can you believe it?” the rescued GI said. “Koorum Street. I told the fucken driver Koorum Street. I know a nurse quartered there. So he drops me at Goochum Street. Do you believe that. Where the hell is Goochum Street?”

“Where I picked you up,” Johnson said.

“It happened to me once,” Legerman said. “Lost in Calcutta at night. That has to be the scariest kind of thing you ever go up against.”

“What did you do?”

“Walked all night.”

Walked all night, Bruce thought, in this warren of six, eight, nine million people. Who knew? They lay on almost every street the jeep drove through, single men, single women, children, clusters of families, some awake, some asleep. How could they be counted? If more than five million had already perished, then there were at least a million or two or three more who had come into the city, hoping for a few grains of rice to sustain their lives another day, another hour, and in the middle of this, wealth, palaces, tropical gardens, and dozens of elegant restaurants where people dipped into platters of steaming food, as they had this evening in what was called the Jewish restaurant. And that night, as Bruce crawled under his mosquito netting, he decided that, including all the days he had spent in North Africa and in England and on the Continent with the invasion, this was by all means one of the strangest. But not the strangest. That happened a few days later.

Bruce never slept well during his time in Calcutta. Between the sickening wet heat and the things he had seen, even a few hours of sleep in his sweat-soaked bed was a blessing. Waking by night, he yearned for morning and release from the mosquito netting, which he felt covered him like a shroud, and as a result, when dawn broke he was out of bed and in the shower. By six o'clock, he would be dressed and breathing the somewhat cooler morning air, either in the garden behind the palace or on the front steps, where he could stretch out in the shade of the cool stone building. It was there, in front of the old palace, that Ashoka Majumdar found him.

“Greetings, Mr. Bacon. So early. I was prepared to wait. Do you ride a bicycle?” Majumdar was steadying two ancient bicycles, each with one hand.

By now, Bruce was accustomed to the apparent non sequiturs that were an integral part of Bengali thinking. Actually, they were not non sequiturs at all, but the result of a slightly different use of logic. Since Majumdar had appeared with two bicycles, it must be apparent to Bruce that they would take off on said bicycles, and regardless of his agreement or disagreement, the first question to be answered was whether or not he could ride a bicycle. He nodded and examined the bikes, old single-speed Raleighs that had been patched and wired and taken apart and put together so many times that it was doubtful whether they still deserved their original name.

“Yes,” he replied, “I ride a bicycle — at least I did once.” He shook his head. “But these?”

“Perfectly serviceable. But perhaps I presume. We are so happy you are interested in our sad picture here that we felt I should round it out. You know that I work for our newspaper,
Prasarah.
I also read for it. That is how I earn my keep.”

“I don't understand.”

“Ah. I explain poorly.” Majumdar opened a small bag attached to his bicycle and took out of it a rolled-up sheet of paper. He unrolled it. It was half the size of the
Tribune's
front page, and it was covered with tight print. The other side was bare. “Of course it is in Bengali,” Majumdar said, “but I will sum up the stories for you as we go — if, of course, you will come with me. I can promise you that it will be enlightening.”

“Where? Where are we going? And why? You know something, Majumdar? I can't help feeling that I am being hustled.”

“What is ‘hustled'?”

“Forget it, forget it.”

“We should have some bottles of spring water from the bar. I drink ordinary water anywhere, but it could make you ill, since you have not made your peace with all the small, angry bacteria that live in Bengali water.”

“That makes sense.” The bar was closed, but in the kitchen a dollar bought him three bottles of water, which claimed to be as pure as a virgin, drawn from a sparkling spring high in the mountains of Kashmir.

“You must forgive our hyperbole,” Majumdar said as he read the label. “This is very good water.” He stowed the bottles in his canvas bag, placing the Bengali newspaper in the folds of his dhoti. “We are both newspapermen,” he explained. “I write for our paper — I also distribute it and broadcast it, as you might say.”

“That's the communist paper?”

“You say it as if it certainly must explode. No, sahib. It is a harmless sheet of paper with some facts the people need.”

“Don't ever give me that ‘sahib' shit again,” Bruce said angrily. “You want to know what hustled means — me. I'm being hustled, but I know it. Just show me. I don't intend to apologize for one damned thing, because my world is just as weird as yours.” He was relieved that it was so early in the morning, and that he wouldn't have to explain to any of his colleagues why he was taking off with a skinny, sad-looking Indian on a strange machine that pretended to be a bicycle.

“Will it hold together?”

“Oh, so many years it has held together. Why should the fates be against us now?”

The bicycle actually worked, and riding side by side, they took off along a maze of streets, dirt roads, and paths that led them out of the city into the countryside. Once out of the central part of the city, they saw fewer of the families crouched around their little fires of cow chips, fewer people sprawled on the street, fewer hands outstretched and pleading for alms. Unlike cities in the West, this city turned to country abruptly. They rode through heavy tropical growth and then into a countryside of rice paddies and vegetable fields, but all of it brown and dry before the monsoon.