Oh, I was as happy and thoughtless as an apple on a tree until another girl told me that Inge had an Austrian boyfriend and that whenever I was on guard or had some other night duty he came and stayed in my apartment. I could hardly believe that, but I decided I had to to find out. I told her I was going to be on guard one night. After dark I came off Post and sneaked up close to the apartment. The shades were up and I looked in the window. She was all dressed up in the best clothes I had bought her, dancing with a young Austrian. They danced and she was laughing as I’d never seen her do before, and all the time my portable record player was playing my records. I went over to the gasthaus and watched from the window. I sat up all night, fuming and tormented, and at dawn I saw him leave, blowing a kiss to her. As soon as he was out of sight, I ran across the field to the apartment and opened the door. She sat up in the bed, clutching the sheet over her breasts.
“What are you doing here?” she said. “What are you going to do?”
“You bitch,” I said, starting to take off my belt. “I’m going to beat the living hell out of you.”
“Please don’t,” she said. “Please, please don’t touch me. I never said I loved you. You’ve been good to me but I never said I loved you.”
“So what about the kraut?”
“I love him,” she said. “That boy doesn’t have any money, but I love him. You’ve got to understand.”
“Okay,” I said. “You go ahead and love who you want to. I won’t lay a finger on you. I’ve got a better idea. I’m going to tear this place apart.”
“Don’t!” she said. “Don’t do that.”
“I’m going to tear this place to pieces and if you say anything about it to anyone I’ll turn your name in to the CID as a whore.”
That frightened her because if she was even arrested under suspicion of being a prostitute she was done for. As a DP she could never hold a job or be legally married in Austria, and certainly with that on her record she would never get to the States. I was in a terrible rage, more at myself than anything else, I guess. She sat in the bed sobbing hopelessly while I broke everything to pieces. I even smashed my own records and the player. I took her clothes out of the bureau drawers and off the hangers and ripped them into shreds and ribbons. I tore that smiling photograph in half.
“You had no right,” she said.
I slammed the door and ran to catch the bus back to camp. At first I felt almost good about it, but after a day or two I began to realize how much I had fooled myself and what a terrible thing I had done. I went to the PX and bought a lot of things to take to her, but when I got to the apartment the landlady told me that Inge had run away and left no address. I paid her the rent we owed and went back to camp. I don’t know where she went or could have gone. Salzburg probably, where there are a lot of troops. I never heard from her or found any trace of her again.
4. What’s the Purpose of the Bayonet?
I ALWAYS USED to hate pulling stockade duty. They had some regular personnel up there, but the actual guarding was detailed to individual units. When your name came up on the list you had to move up there and guard the prisoners. This meant hours in the towers around the barbwire compound or else being a chaser. I hated being a chaser. You had to pick up a little group of prisoners at the gate in the morning and take them to whatever job they were supposed to do. You weren’t allowed to smoke or talk to the prisoners. You were just there to shoot them if they tried to run away or refused to obey an order. You had to be spic and span and pass inspection every morning. It was almost as bad as being a prisoner yourself. Not quite.
This time I was assigned to a different job—the cage. In the center of the compound they had a building they had converted into a kind of stronghold for very serious cases—men who were being sent back to the States for long terms. They had double doors with armed guards outside, and inside they had two rows of cages with bars all the way around. It was kind of like a zoo. They kept the men in the individual cages like wild beasts. They were afraid they would try to kill themselves rather than go back to the States and do time in Leavenworth. They wouldn’t let them shave. Some of them grew long beards waiting for shipment. They wouldn’t give them silverware with the chow. They had to eat it off the tray with their fingers. They were like savages. There weren’t any windows but the room was always brightly lit. You could easily forget whether it was night or day. You couldn’t hear a sound from the outside world. I had four hours on and eight hours off, sitting alone in the middle of the room at a big desk. I had a telephone and they called me every half hour to find out how everything was. If anything happened I was supposed to shoot the prisoners with a .45 pistol.
There were four men in the cages while I was there, two long-term AWOLS, a lifer who had killed his shack job while he was drunk, and a rapist. They said the rapist was going to hang when they got him back to the States. He seemed crazy as hell. He was filthy and obscene and he probably was guilty. He had been accused of raping a young Austrian girl and they threw the book at him. They gave him a big public trial and invited the local population to come and see the show. They had buses to pick them up, free lunch, and earphones for the trial so they could follow by interpreter what was going on. A real goodwill gesture.
This particular guy used to worry me more than all the rest. They had their moods, but all in all they seemed resigned. He didn’t seem to know what was going on. I don’t think he had the faintest notion he was going to hang. He used to talk to me all the time about what he was going to do when he got home. He received mail once in a while, but the people writing him didn’t have any idea he was even in trouble. He either talked about home or else he paced up and down his cage silently and you could tell there was a big blowoff coming. After a while he’d start hollering at the top of his voice, crazy things. I remember he used to yell questions and answers like the ones from basic training, the one they yelled at you in bayonet drill. “What’s the purpose of the bayonet?” they’d yell. And everybody was supposed to answer back, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” He’d carry on like that. The rest of the prisoners put up with it most of the time, but sometimes it got on their nerves and then a couple of the regular stockade people had to come in and hold him while the doctor gave him a shot that knocked him out cold.
The officer in charge at the stockade was a recent graduate of West Point and he was plenty mad to have a dirty little job like that. He used to come in the cage and take it out on the prisoners. He never touched them, he just teased and harassed them, hoping that one of them would give him an excuse to get tough. Helpless men like that seem to bring out the worst in some people. One day he was standing in front of the cage of one of the AWOL’s, telling him terrible stories about Leavenworth and how rough they were going to treat him there for the next ten years. The guy finally got tired of just listening and walked over to the bars. He cleared his throat and spat in the Lieutenant’s face. The Lieutenant didn’t flinch or move a muscle, I’ll say that for him. He just took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face clean.
“That’s going to cost you,” he said.
He was right. A day or so later they came in and shaved and cleaned the guy, put a uniform on him, and took him away to be court-martialed.
“It was worth it,” he told me when they brought him back. “It was worth a little more time just to get a shave and a bath and a clean uniform on. I’ll spit again if he gives me half a chance.”
The Lieutenant must have been satisfied. He never bothered that particular prisoner again, except in little ways like taking chow off of his tray. Finally some MP’s from Livorno showed up to take the prisoners to the ship.
“So long, old sport,” the rapist told me. “I’ll see you on Times Square.”
“In a pig’s eye you will,” the MP guarding him said. “You’re going to hang, buddy.”
That was the last that I saw of any of them. I was put back outside as a chaser and I was glad to be back in the fresh air and in the open view of the wo
rld again. The first day one of my prisoners, a seventeen-year-old kid who was pulling sixty days for some minor infraction, started to act up. He asked me what I was going to do if he tried to run away.
“I’m going to kill you if you try and run, fatface,” I told him. “Because if I don’t kill you, they’ll throw you in the cage and in a week you’ll wish you were dead.”
He shut up and went to work.
5. Torment
THERE ARE ALWAYS things going on out of sight. Creatures move in disguise and there’s a vigorous invisible life everywhere. You have to poke around or have an accident to discover it. Trip over a decayed log or just roll it upside down and you’ll find a swarm of white wormy life, or death if you want to call it that, lively death; and I know no matter how content your eyes are with the green sweetness and your nose with the winey odor of the woods, you’ll turn away almost sick at your stomach. On the other hand, in innocence, in ignorance, you may be fascinated by the idea of corruption, just as leaning over a fence and watching a great-bellied sow wallow in the dungy mud you may have wished to be a lot less than human. Knowledge is always something else. If somebody rubs your face in the filth you may yearn for even two-legged dignity.
When I was a boy we had an old leather-bound set of books purporting to be the history of the world and even before I could read I used to rifle those pages for the illustrations of great events. Before I ever went to school I had an idea about the Pyramids and the Fall of Rome and the Storming of the Bastille. As a matter of fact that first experience of history, flipping pages and looking for pictures, ruined me for any of the conventional ways of looking at history. Your first impressions, like your first wounds, are deepest. So I’ve always had a kind of haphazard view of time. What difference does it make whether you begin or end with the Fall of Rome?
There’s one picture I remember quite well from another period of my childhood. It was a favorite of mine during the nervous time of early puberty when a woman is only a sign or signal of desire and might as well be two-dimensional. Next to the rather vapid girls in underwear available in the Sears Roebuck Catalogue the best pornographic material I had access to in those days was in The History of the World. There was one especially titillating picture—“The Inquisition in Session.” It showed a full-blown woman as naked as God made her, hiding her face. A huge executioner with a black mask on had just ripped away the last shreds of her clothes. In the background there was a raised bench with ecclesiastical dignitaries, bored or leering, and in one corner there were instruments of torture, whips, and irons heating red-hot on a fire. It was a perfect field day for undeveloped sexuality. An innocent’s paradise.
The reality of torment is somewhat less appealing. I used to pull Courtesy Patrol downtown in Linz. We had an office in the main police station and whenever we were off duty we used to gather around the stove in that room. It seems to me it was always cold in Austria. The police station was a big gloomy building, cold and high-ceilinged, poorly lighted. In the rooms around us the local police carried on their daily jobs with a muted efficiency. You could hear their heavy boots sometimes in the hall and there was always the faint insect noise of a distant typewriter, but most of the time the place seemed as quiet and decorous as a tomb. We had a feeling of awe for those cops. They were all big, handsome men and they never seemed to relax from a dignified, unsmiling position of attention. Their high boots gleamed and their uniforms were immaculate. Next to them we felt like a bunch of civilians in costume.
Every once in a while the authorities would decide to crack down on prostitution in the town. Sometime around midnight they’d wheel out the trucks and be gone, and in an hour or so they’d start bringing in the night’s catch. Then there was some excitement in the halls. The whores would be shepherded in, old ones and young ones, fat ones and skinny ones, in all stages of dress and undress, expensive ones as shiny and clean as a model in an advertisement, cheap ones with black ruined teeth and an itchy look. They all seemed dazed or numb. They were taken down our hall and through a door at the end. After that crowds of cops went down there, too, and pretty soon you could hear military band music being played on some kind of loudspeaker. Once I got curious about what was going on. I asked the interpreter they had assigned to our office about it. He just grinned and shrugged.
“See for yourself,” he said. He was an easygoing guy who was happy just to sit around the office and smoke our cigarettes.
I went down the hall and opened the door into the blaring military band music. It was a hell of a sight. They had all the whores stripped and the cops were running around among them beating them with rubber truncheons. It was like a picture out of Dante’s Inferno. The women were all crying and screaming and begging and praying. The cops were running around in circles like crazy sheepdogs. They’d beat at random and then spontaneously single out an individual and beat her down to the floor, the truncheons blurring with fury and speed. Some of the cops had their shirts off. They had wild faces like men hopped up on dope. One man sat on a table where the record player was, changing the records, smoking and just watching. When the whores were like this, naked, scared, and in pain, they all looked alike, just poor flesh and bones suffering. But the worst thing was the blood. Nobody ever talks about the blood of beatings. Their faces were swollen and bleeding from broken noses, cheeks and jaws, split lips. Their bodies were bleeding from dark bruises and cuts. The floor was slick with blood like the back of a butchershop. They were slipping and falling in it, cops and whores alike.
I shut the door and went back to the office.
“So?” the interpreter said. “Now you have seen our floorshow.”
I felt so numb I didn’t want to say anything.
“Why?” I said finally. “Why do they do it?”
He shrugged. “There is no severe penalty for prostitution,” he said. “They try to scare them.”
“Does it work?”
“No,” he said. “It’s the same ones all the time. They can’t afford to be anything else.”
“What’s the sense of it then?”
“Maybe some of them leave town,” he said. “Who knows?”
I went to the window and looked out at the soft, foggy winter’s night and the old sleeping city. All those people sleeping safe and sound for the time being, having dreams, rooting among the wreckage of their absurd, forlorn desires. Down the street the Beautiful Blue Danube flowing. On the other side of the bridge, the Russian zone, the lonely Rusky guard stamping his boots, blowing on his hands, thinking about the big lost spaces back home. And me sick. I was sick thinking about the fine avenues and boulevards of this world where you walk with your head up, strut if you want to like a god, and meanwhile all the time there’s an invisible world breeding and thriving. In back rooms, in hidden corners, behind blank smiles, all over the world people are suffering and making other people suffer. The things God has to see because He cannot shut His eyes! It’s almost too much to think about. It’s enough to turn your stomach against the whole inhuman race.
THE STRONG MAN
“CHEER UP,” Harry said. “It isn’t really a serious matter.”
“You don’t think so?”
He only smiled. It was a great gift, that smile, sudden, frank, wholly disarming, and, like a child’s, shaped by secret mischief. It was impossible to talk seriously about anything in the face of such an abrupt and charming defense. She looked at him, studied him as she might have examined a perfect stranger—the close-cut, sandy hair, the small eyes, bland and sad as a dog’s, the soft lips and the thrilling brightness of his smile. Harry was almost handsome, certainly, but, she thought, strangely unreal. There was a sense of the alien about him. You never quite thought of him in three dimensions.
“No,” he went on, “we’ll get over it. And anything you can get over isn’t really serious—like the measles.”
“Or smallpox.”
Harry smiled again and poured some beer into her glass. They were sitting in a little trattoria be
side the Arno. It was twilight, the long gold twilight of Tuscany in late summer, and all of the tables were taken. Along the sidewalks on both sides of the street the bright, close-pressed crowds flowed as slowly as the river. They had just arrived in Pisa that afternoon from Rome.
“We’ll stay here a couple of days and rest,” he said. “It’s a restful place. We can sit by the window in the hotel room and have late breakfasts and see the river. In the morning I’ll take you over to see the campanile. It really does lean, you know.”
“Does it?” she said. “I’m not sure I’m going to stay with you. I’m not at all sure I ought to.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “Of course you’ll stay.”
“You’re so sure of me. Why are you always so sure?”
She was fumbling in her pocketbook for matches. She thought for a moment that she was going to cry and she didn’t want that to happen. He leaned across the table and lit her cigarette with his lighter.
“Where would you go?”
“You bastard,” she said.
“No, I’m serious,” Harry said. “For once I’m being perfectly serious. Let’s try and be rational about this whole thing. Where would you go?”
“Home. I think I’d like to go home.”
“Out of the question,” he said. “What would you do when you got there—get a divorce?”
“Stop it, Harry. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“I want to know,” he said quickly. “Do you want a divorce or don’t you? It’s just that simple. Either—or.”
“I don’t know, Harry. I don’t know what to do yet. I’m trying to work all this out in my mind. Will you please stop asking me dumb questions?”
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