The Dark Arena

by Mario Puzo

  The official stamps and seals of the different bureaus dispelled his doubt. Almost regretfully he accepted the fact that she had not lied.

  Hella went to the wardrobe and took out a pile of clothing. She held each one up, the little undershirts, blouses, the small trousers. Some of the materials and colors were familiar to Mosca. And then he understood that because there was nothing else to be had, she had cut up her dresses, even her underclothing, and sewed them together to fit a smaller body.

  “I knew it would be a boy,” she said. And then suddenly Mosca was very angry. He was angry that she had given the color from her face, the flesh along her hips and shoulders, the teeth, the clothing so cleverly cut and fitted together and that she had received nothing in return. And he knew that what had brought him back was his own need and not hers.

  “That was silly,” he said, “that was goddamn silly.”

  Mosca sat on the bed and Hella sat beside him. For a moment they were both embarrassed and stared at the bare table, the only chair, the indented walls, knd sagging ceiling, and then moving slowly, as if taking part in an ancient tribal ritual, like heathens cementing their relationship with a vague and fearful god, not knowing if the ceremony would bring disaster or good fortune, they stretched out on the narrow bed and came together, he finally with a passion inspired by drink, guilt, remorse, and she with love, tenderness, and an absolute faith that this consummation was good, that it would bring happiness to them both. And she accepted the pain given to her not-yet-healed body, the cruelty of his passion, his lack of faith in her and in himself and in all things, knowing the final truth that, of all the human beings that he had known, he had need of her, her faith, her body, her belief and love for him.

  five

  That second summer of peace went by quickly for Mosca. The work at the air base was so light, it seemed as if he were there only to keep Eddie Cassin company, listen to his stories, and cover up for him when he was too drunk to come in and work. Eddie Cassin didn't have much to do. Lieutenant Forte came in for a few minutes each morning to sign papers and thai went up to the Operations Office to sweat out a flight and pass the day talking to his fellow pilots. After work Mosca had supper with Wolf and Eddie and sometimes Gordon at the Rathskellar, the official mess for American officers and civilians in Bremen.

  Evenings he and Hella kept to their room, lying together on the couch reading, the radio tuned to a German station that played soft music. When the last of the warm summer twilight died away they would look at each other and smile and go to bed. They would let the radio play until very late.

  The floor on which they lived was quiet, but on the floors below parties went on night after night. In the summer evenings the sound of radios filled the Metzer Strasse, and jeeps loaded with Americans in their olive-green civilian uniforms, pretty, barelegged German girls on their laps, stopped in front of the building with a screaming of brakes and shrilling cries of the young women. The laughter and clinking of glasses carried out to passers-by who turned their heads curiously and cautiously as they went on down the street. Later they might hear Eddie Cassin cursing drunkenly as he fought with one of his girl friends outside the building. Sometimes the parties would break up early, and a late summer night breeze, its freshness tainted with the smell of rubble, would rustle leaves and branches of the trees that lined the street below.

  On Sundays Hella and Frau Meyer prepared dinner in Meyer's attic apartment, usually a rabbit or duck that Eddie and Mosca drove out to a near-by farm to trade for, and with it garden vegetables from the same farm. Then gray German bread topped off with PX coffee and ice cream. When they had finished eating, Hella and Mosca would leave Eddie and Frau Meyer to their drinking and go for a long walk through the city, and beyond it to the flat, green countryside.

  Mosca smoking his cigar, Hella wearing one of his starched, white shirts, sleeves rolled neatly up above the elbow, they would go up past the police building, its massive, green-colored concrete showing pray scars chipped out by the explosion and past the Glocke Building, a little farther on, which now housed the American Red Cross Club. In the square before it, children waited and begged for cigarettes and chocolate. Stubble-cheeked men in Wehrmacht caps and torn, dyed Army jackets picked up the butts as soon as one of the olive-drab GIs leaning against the building flicked it away. The GIs lounged easily, eyeing the women, picking out the Frauleins who passed by slowly as if walking on a treadmill, and who a short time later, circling the building, passed by again, and then again and again until it was like watching someone known riding a merry-go-round, the familiar face appearing inevitably before the watchful, expectant, and amused onlookers. In the warm summer afternoon the square was like a gay, thriving market place, making the day seem not like Sunday, taking away the Sunday atmosphere of quiet and suspended motion.

  Great olive-drab Army busses and mud-covered trucks poured into the square every few minutes, bringing occupation troops from the hamlets surrounding Bremen and some from as far away as Bremerhaven. The GIs were natty in pressed olive drabs, the trouser legs tucked neatly into polished, mahogany-colored combat boots. There were English troops sweltering in their heavy woolens and beretiike headgear. American merchant mariners, wild looking in raggedy trousers and dirty sweaters and occasionally with bushy, full-grown beards, waited sullenly for MPs to check their papers before they could enter the building.

  Sporadically the German police in their dyed, soldierlike uniforms cleared the square, shooing the child beggars down the many side streets, pushing the haggard-looking butt snipers to the far corner of the square, and then letting them rest on the steps of the German Communications Building. The Frauleins on their merry-go-round speeded up the tempo slightly but were never molested.

  Mosca would pick up sandwiches in the Red Cross, and they would go on, mingling with the stream of people on their way to Burger Park.

  The enemy on Sunday still took their traditional afternoon strolls. The German men walked with the dignity of family chiefs, some with unfilled pipes in their mouths. Their wives pushed baby carriages and children gamboled sedately and somewhat tiredly before them. The summer sun caught the loose dirt raised by the light afternoon breeze that swept through the ruins, imprisoned it, flooded it, so that over the whole city hung an almost imperceptible veil of golden dust.

  And then, finally, after they had crossed a great, reddish prairie of ruins, an earth of leveled homes, a soil of crushed brick and dust and iron, they would come out into the countryside, and walking until they were tired, would come to rest in a green and heavily grown field. They would rest and sleep and eat the sandwiches they had brought, and if the spot were secluded enough, make love peacefully in the empty world which seemed to surround them.

  When the sun faced them across the sky, they walked back into the city. Over the prairie of ruins dusk would fall, and coming into the square they could see the GIs leaving the Red Cross Building. The victors had had their fill of sandwiches, ice cream, Cokes, Ping-pong and the professional, sterilized friendliness of the hostesses. In the street the soldiers would lounge just as if they were on the street corners back home. The lines of Frauleins passing up and down would thin out, enemy and conqueror disappearing together down the rubble-filled side streets to half-destroyed rooms in shattered buildings, or if time pressed, to cavelike cellars. In the square, black and almost still, there were only a few hopeful beggars, a child, tired and now stationary girls. As from a dying carnival, the blurring music would filter out of the building and wash gently over the silent figures in the darkened square, sift through the ruins down to the Weser, as if following them to the quiet river, and as Mosca and Hell a walked along the bank, they left the music behind and gazed across the water to the moonlit skeletal city on the other side.

  In the Metzer Strasse Frau Meyer and Eddie Cassin would have tea and cookies waiting for them; sometimes Eddie would be in a drunken stupor on the couch but come alive when he heard their voices. They would drink their tea and tal
k quietly, feeling the new raw peace of the gentle summer night and the slow, rising drowsiness that would lead to safe and dreamless sleep.

  six

  In the billet, the room next to Mosca's was occupied by a short, heavy-framed civilian wearing the usual olive-green uniform. But on it was a blue-and-white patch stitched with the letters AJDC. They saw him rarely, and no one in the billet knew him, but late at night he could be heard moving around his room, the radio playing softly. One evening he gave Mosca a lift in his jeep. They were both going to the Rathskellar for supper. His name was Leo, and he worked for the American Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish relief organization. The initials were also painted on his jeep in great white letters.

  As they were driving through the streets, Leo asked Mosca in a high voice with an English accent, “Have I met you some place? You look familiar to me.”

  “I used to be with Mil Gov right after the war,” Mosca said. He was sure they had never met.

  “Ah, ah,” Leo said, “you came up to Grohn with the coal trucks, eh?”

  “That's right,” Mosca said surprised.

  “I was an inmate there, a DP.” Leo grinned. “You didn't do such a good job. Many a week-end we went without hot water.”

  “We had trouble for a while,” Mosea said, “It got straightened out”

  “Yes, I know.” Leo smiled. “A fascist method but perhaps necessary.”

  They had supper together. Leo in ordinary times would have been fat. He had a hawk-nosed, big-boned face, the left side of which twitched spasmodically. He moved nervously and quickly but with the awkwardness and lack of co-ordination of one who had never participated in any kind of athletics. He was ignorant of almost all sports.

  Over their coffee Mosea asked, “What do you people do?”

  “It is UNRRA work,” Leo said. “Distribute supplies to the Jews who are in the camps waiting to leave Germany. I was myself eight years in Buchenwald.”

  A long time ago, a time that was no longer real, Mosea thought, that was one of the big reasons he had enlisted, to fight against concentration camps, but that hadn't been him, that was the guy in the photo, the one Gloria and his mother and Alf cared so much about. But remembering this aroused a strange emotion in him, of embarrassment and shyness because he no longer gave a damn.

  “Yes,” Leo said. “I went in when I was thirteen.” He rolled up his sleeve and on his arm as if printed there with purple ink was a six-digit number with a smeared letter before it. “My father was there with me. He died a few years before the camp was liberated.”

  “You speak English pretty well,” Mosea said. “No-body'd think you were German.”

  Leo looked at him with a smile and said in his quick, nervous voice, “No, no, I am not a German. I am a Jew.” He was silent for a moment. “I was a German, of course, but Jews cannot any longer be Germans.” “How come you haven't left?” Mosea asked. “I have a very good” here. I have all the privileges Americans have and I earn good money. And then I must make up my mind whether to go to Palestine or the United States. It is very difficult to decide.”

  They talked for a long time, Mosca drinking whisky and Leo coffee. At one point Mosca found himself trying to explain different sports to Leo, realty trying to tell how it felt because the other had spent his childhood and his youth in the concentration camp, had it stolen, irretrievably lost.

  Mosca tried to explain how it felt to go up for a shot in basketball, the thrill of faking a guard out of position and rising easily in the air to float the ball through the basket, the quick whirling and running on the warm wooden floor of the gym, the soaking, sweaty tiredness, and the magical refreshment of the warm shower afterward. Then walking down the street, his whole body relaxed, carrying the blue gym bag, and the prls waiting for them in the ice-cream parlor. Later the peaceful and complete oblivion of perfect sleep.

  Riding back to the billet, Leo said, “Tm always on the ways, my job makes me travel a great deal. But with the cold weather coming I will spend more time in Bremen. We'll get to know each other better, eh?”

  ‘I'll show you how to play baseball,” Mosca said with a smile, “get you ready for the States. And don't say ‘on the ways.’ That's German. Say ‘on the road,’ or ‘traveling.’ ”

  After that he would come to their room some nights and drink tea and coffee, and Mosca taught him how to play cards—poker, casino, and rummy. Leo never talked about the time he had spent in the camps and never seemed depressed, but he never had the patience to stay in one place long and their quiet life was not appealing to him. They became good Maids, Leo and Hella, and he claimed that she was the only girl who had been able to teach him how to dance properly.

  And then when autumn came and the trees dropped their leaves on the bicycle paths and laid a speckled brown-and-green carpet along the shaded streets, the freshened air stirred Mosca's blood and lifted him out of his summer lethargy. He became restless, ate more often at the Raths-kellar, went drinking at the Officers” Club—all places where Hella was not allowed to enter because she was the enemy. Returning late to the billet, a little drunk, he would eat the thick, canned soup Hella wanned up for him on the electric plate and then sleep fitfully through the night. On many mornings he would wake at dawn and watch the gray clouds being swept across the sky by the early October wind. He watched the German workers walking briskly to the corner where they could catch a Strassenbahn to the heart of the city.

  One morning as he stood by the window, Hella rose and stood by him. She was in the undershirt she used for bedclothing. She put her aim around him, and they both looked down at the street below.

  “Can't you sleep?” she murmured drowsily. “You're always up so early.”

  “I guess well have to start getting put more. This home life is too much for me.”

  Mosca watched the russet blanket of leaves being rolled up Metzer Strasse, covering the dirt bicycle path underneath the trees.

  Hella leaned against him. “We need a baby, a wonderful baby,” she said softly.

  “Christ,” Mosca said, “the FGkrer really drummed that crap into your heads.”

  “Children were loved before that.” She was angry that he could laugh at what she wanted so much. “I know it's thought stupid to want children. In the Flak the Berlin girls used to laugh at us farmers because we cared about babies and talked about them.” She pushed away from him. “All right, go to work,” she said.

  Mosca tried to reason with her. “You know we can't get married until they lift the ban. Everything we do here is illegal, especially your being here in the billet When the kid comes well have to move to German quarters and that's illegal for me. There's a million things I'd have to do that they could ship me back to the States for and no way to take you with me.”

  She smiled at him and there was a trace of sadness in it. “I knew you won't leave me here again.” Mosca was surprised and shocked that die should know this. He had already decided to go underground with false papers if some tremble should come.

  “Ah, Walter,” she said, “I don't want to be like the people downstairs; drink, dance at the club, go to bed, and never have anything to keep us together except ourselves. The way we live, that's not enough.” She stood there, the undershirt reaching just over her hipbone and navel, without dignity and without shame. He wanted to smile.

  “It's no good,” he said.

  “Listen to me. When you went away I was happy I was going to have a baby. I thought I had such very good luck. Because even if you didn't come back there would be another human being in the world I could love. Do you understand that? From my whole family I only have one sister left, and she is far away. Then you came and you left and I had no one. In all the world there was no one that it would be pleasure for me to bring pleasure to, no one that was part of my life. There's nothing more terrible.”

  Below them some Americans came out of the building into the cold street, unlocked the security chains on their jeeps, and warmed up the motors, the r
ising and falling throb coming faintly through the closed windows.

  Mosca put his arm around her. “You're not well enough.” He looked down at the thin, naked body. “I don't want anything to happen to you.” And as he said the words a wave of fear swept over him that she would leave for some reason, and that in the gray winter mornings he would stand alone at the window, the room empty behind him, and that the fault in some unforeseen way would be his. Turning to her suddenly, he said in a gentle voice, “Don't be mad at me. Wait a bit.”

  She rested in his arms and then quietly she said, ‘You're afraid really of yourself. I think you know that. I see how you are with other people and how you are with me. Everyone thinks you're so unfriendly, so“—she searched for a word that would not make him angry—”so rough. I blow you're not that way, not really. I could never want a better man, in everything. Sometimes Frau Meyer and Yergen, when I say something nice about you, they look at each other. Oh, I know what they think.” Her voice was bitter, the bitterness of all women speaking in defense of their own against a world that does not comprehend the reason for their love. “They don't understand.’

  He picked her up, put her on the bed, and drew the blanket over her. “You'll catch a cold,” he said. He leaned over to kiss her before he left for work. “You can have anything you want,” he said, then smiled. “Especially something that easy. And don't worry about them ever making me leave, no matter what.”

  “I won't,” she said laughing. “FU be waiting for you tonight”

  seven

  A band was playfng fast dance mask when they entered the German night club. It was a long rectangular room bare of ornament and bleak with white, unshaded light The walls were roughly calcimined and the high, domed ceiling gave it a vast cathedral-like air. It had been a school auditorium, but the rest of the building had been blown away.