by Leo Litwak
They told me I might find Marishka with her mother in Haut Cagnes on the Côte d’Azur. Travel wasn’t easy and they didn’t know what transport was available.
I must have seemed naive, but more intelligent than they had thought. Bernard suggested we have a drink together at the Deux Magots the next afternoon. I said I was returning to my unit the next day. The fact is, I yearned for home and didn’t intend any trip to the south of France.
I walked down to the Seine, sat on a bench, reread Dad’s last letter. The tone had the oratorical, formal quality he had developed to cover his problems with ordinary language. The script was awkward, the letters wavering, his thick fingers and heavy hand better adapted to making fists than writing.
We are victorious, and you, my son, who were in the front lines of this great battle are safe. There will be festivities to celebrate your return. Your mother, like myself, is eager to embrace you. She will serve you a meal direct from her victory garden (photo enclosed.) We are very proud of you. We love you very much.
Despite three years of service and a stint of combat, I didn’t feel wiser or braver or more mature.
I wrote him, describing how the war had ended, like all the war movies at the Dexter Theater, like all the hokey Hollywood scripts, like all my dreams of war. Justice done, the good guys ending with the beautiful girls and the loot, the bad guys dead or humbled. I asked, Did this mean there was a grand scriptwriter who saw to it that his chosen peoples would only be brought to the brink of extermination and then, in the manner of a commonplace action flick and at the last possible moment, be pulled back from the edge so that they might suffer once again through other cliff-hangers?
Not said in those terms, not so mocking. I thought it was my father I mocked with his simple scenarios and easy judgments about good guys and bad guys. But I only expressed my own yearning for simplicity.
Maurice once told me, no one is simple. And he meant there were no simple moral identifications, no clear distinctions between winners and losers, the quick and the dead. And I think he meant that the only possibility for joy in life was to give up simplicity, to give up one’s faith in unreal scenarios that precisely located us on some ladder of moral worth.
But in Paris, full of dreams of home, our war seemed to have confirmed simplicity. We had survived evil with the promise of a clear itinerary for the rest of the journey, advancing from one landmark to the next, ending far from any battleground, safe with our Bettys and Dottys and Sylvies, telling children our stories of war.
I wanted to strip away any evidence of war. The uniform would go. I would keep my camera. I would give my Luger to Dad. I would dispose of any other loot in my duffel bag and return home brand new.
What did Leo want?
I wanted everything to be simple.
I didn’t ever again want to hear rockets or be summoned to give aid. I didn’t ever again want to dig in or see anyone wounded or suffer anyone’s dying.
We had been part of a system, spread over the world, organized in theaters and armies and corps and divisions and regiments and battalions and companies. We had had an exact address. We could locate ourselves down to platoon and squad. Now I wanted us to be scattered and never reassembled. No more armies or divisions or regiments or battalions or companies or platoons. No more theaters of war. No veterans’ groups, no reunions, no visits to old battlefields, no celebration of what we once were compelled to be. Let that all be in the past, cleansed by recollection.
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2001 by Leo Litwak. All rights reserved.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.
Design by Anne Winslow.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for a previous edition of this work.
eISBN 9781565128774
ALSO BY LEO LITWAK
To the Hanging Gardens,
a novel
Waiting for the News,
a novel
College Days in Earthquake Country
(with Herbert Wilner)
