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Dog Tags
A Novel
Stephen Becker
To Nan Swinburne
with love
In the Days of Thy Youth
1
Life is a riddle but death is no answer, and a soldier alone walks in fear because there is no one with him to die instead. In April of 1945 Benjamin Beer found himself alone and afraid on a German plain, the land stark, spring itself stunted, misborn, the sky frozen, the wind a scythe. Fear: silence and solitude overwhelmed him after months of carnage and clamor; also he was a Jew and this was Germany and he loved women, all women, deeply and did not want to die or be mutilated in a swinish land. He followed a track westward across a waste of frozen stubble and vowed never to kill again if he survived this day. He knew that he was not the first to make that vow, and that he would break it. He kept to the small groves for shelter from the wind and hostile eyes. He skirted lacy ponds, ice-rimmed. Where were the birds? The rabbits, stock, dogs? He sniffled and spat.
He was twenty-one years old and wanted desperately to be twenty-two. He stood six feet one inch and was burly, almost six poods as he planned to tell the Russians when the grand meeting occurred; had black hair and vehement brown eyes. Being young and omnipotent he saw himself as a demigod, and felt that he ate barrels and baskets of meat and grain each day; drank firkins and hogsheads; sweated wine and honey; committed extravagant nuisance with extravagant pleasure; and blew his nose musically as became a fiddler. Like certain fiddlers of legend he ranked fornication above all sport. He disdained lesser pursuits like football and dancing as irrelevant, amusements for the flighty or timid but not worth the time of a serious man. In April of 1945 he had not touched a woman for four months. He would not rape, and for the time being scorned German flesh. In return for that manly forbearance he hoped, now, on the brooding and vengeful Teutonic plain, to be spared. Though he did not believe in justice, or even in God.
Prayer was something else: a useful distraction, an aspect of poetry. O God of Abraham and Isaac. Lesser gods, Johnny-come-latelies, might do for flat tires, clap and dog-bite, but in his present difficulties he preferred to deal only with principals. O God of Abraham and Isaac. O God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, uncounted cubits tall, ordinancer and manna-maker, O God of my fathers, wake up and pluck me from this coil! God slumbered on. Benny saw him, huge, rabbinical, dandruff, a faint odor of herring.
Benny tugged his wool scarf tighter and blinked into the sun. The track was joined by another; the ruts grew deeper and wider, almost a road, and Benny was faintly cheered. He seemed to be walking backward in time, perhaps directly toward the God of Abraham et cetera, but was nevertheless encouraged by the wider ruts, evidence of bustle and humanity. Around the next bend would lie a village, a village of the thirteenth century, perhaps earlier; perhaps these were late Roman days and this was the land of the Goths. The sun blinked back, low, a mad yellow eye. Shortly he would meet a charnel cart heaped high with peasants felled by the Black Plague. And a monk driving. “Ave.” “Ave.” Sign of the cross. The corpses, contorted. Benny’s regiment had been shown photographs. Mounds of skinny cadavers, open mouths, empty eyes. The new Black Death. It was somewhat incomprehensible. Benny himself refused to comprehend it; he grew icy and would not discuss such matters. For a day or two he enjoyed a mournful celebrity. The men of his platoon deferred to him, almost apologetic, and seemed to wonder what unique importance the Bennys of this world shared, that they must be rendered ash and clinker. And who in that platoon would be educated, ennobled, exalted by that hour of photographs? Not one.
The sight of a village roused him. His senses were congealed; he had barely the wit to feel alarm. He was muffled, deaf, blinded, hands and feet numb, nose so cold that the hairs no longer crackled. The village was all stone walls, like an ancient monastery half in ruins. There was no sound, no motion, no play now at dusk even of light and shadow, as if that plague had left the place gutted and damned; as if he might find crosses painted on the wooden doors, or hear faint plainsong from spared friars. A blind leper with a begging-bowl. Stark against the gathering night, a gibbet.
He advanced, wary but harmless. His rifle was slung, his hands too cold; more, he knew that the village was deserted. Not a man, not a rat. He imagined a tavern: a blazing fire and a round jolly innkeeper, a registered Vandal but for reasons of business only, you understand, a man must live; and a barmaid, a merry Saxon wench with fat breasts and unrelenting thighs; in the corner a drunken scholar, splenetic, wrung by morose delectation, muttering dog-Latin. Good even, master scholar. Good even, host. Come by the fire, girl, and warm a soldier. Benny would set his pack in a corner of the cozy room and they would serve him bread, cheese and ale. He would warm his hands between those thighs.
No. Not a man, not a rat, and he sensed it; half a dozen stone houses at a crossroads, and he knew they were deserted as he knew a man was dead. He had tried not to kill, not to hate, but had done both, and with some exhilaration, and always knew, surely, whether a man was dead or merely wounded: as if there were a smell or a glow or a sly wink of the dead eye. He shivered again in the wolfish light, and chose a door and broke it down.
He entered a shambles, the rude hooks hanging rusted, the wooden floor stained with generations of blood, with centuries of sheep, pigs, goats, cattle, heretics; in famine cats and dogs; perhaps babies, surely rabbis. Benny shivered again. The next two houses were dwellings, bare, inhuman, on one wall a carved crucifix, on another a rippled mirror. The fourth building was his tavern, with a table and chairs and a couple of wide benches, with a deep stone fireplace (the butcher’s lamb, spitted, the spatter of hot fat, savory smoke telling travelers a bill of fare). A fire might betray, but Benny was perhaps behind his own lines and disinclined to freeze. He set down his rifle and pack, broke up a chair, shaved kindling with his bayonet, opened the ponderous, ancient draft, dumped a ration from its waxed box, set fire to the box and fed the flames with care. He warmed his hands. They ached. He removed his helmet. Then he yawned. He yawned three times, great racking yawns, and hunkered himself onto a chair and blinked, thick, powerful blinks that squeezed tears from his tired, windburned eyes; and sat there like an ox. After a moment he poured water from his canteen to his cup, set the cup in the flames, and extracted a tea bag from his cartridge belt.
A tea bag. Benny was a city boy, from the greatest of them all, the heart of Manhattan, yea Union Square, and in his cartridge belt he also carried cubes of sugar. “Sugar gives cancer,” a street cleaner had once confided. A little fellow all in white, leaning on the broom. In the spring of 1938, when a trip to Atlantic City could be an epic. “And furthermore I do not eat protein. No meat whatsoever,” and with the sunniest of smiles, “so I am for my weight the strongest man in New York City and I don’t fart.” “That’s interesting,” Benny had said, fourteen, and sidled off discreetly. Now he was twenty-one and while preferring cities he enjoyed the countryside and scorned provincial pride; he knew that civilization consisted of New York and a few European capitals but saw no reason why men should not live elsewhere if they chose. Choice was all! Benny loved people, animals, plants, the sights and sounds of life; hearing that the Chinese spoke to flowers, he understood. He loved smells, of women, sweat, exhaust, frying onions, birdcages, his own effluvia, cigars, cheap perfume, lions in the zoo, gunpowder, tea and sponge cake; and the feel of women, rough stone walls on a summer day, the steering wheel of a jeep, rough bark, shingles, cats, subway straps, hammer handles, cosmoline, heavy wool; the taste of all food and drink (pork, yes, mussels, yes) and many flowers, best of all buttercups and violets, and of course women. W
omen. He experienced tender affection if not carnal desire for the female of any species, drab orioles and cardinals (yes! in city parks! the ’40s!), tabby cats and mallards and dugongs and vixens. One female leopard he remembered with the pangs of true heartbreak; he wondered if she were still alive, pacing her corner of the Bronx. He grew giddy in a subway car amid stenographers and salesgirls. He loved certain politicians (yes! the ’40s!) and believed that even clergymen might ultimately be pardoned. He did not love the Germans and he was fighting a war he believed in.
With warmth came content. The water boiled; he concocted tea, and the first sip swirled him dizzily back to Union Square. He laughed aloud, and tasted charlotte russe; a cubby on 14th Street that sold only charlotte russe. Where else in the world? He saw girls scampering to kiosks in the opal winter light, the delectably underbred faces, a contour too little chin, a contour too much nose, shapeless bodies breathing steam. At home Benny woke to music, blindly turning a knob, lying in wait for the day’s omen. Once a month it was a Beethoven quartet and he knew the girls would be pretty that day. Or the third Brandenburg; Benny was a fiddler with a fiddler’s prejudices. He had begun, or been begun, at the age of five, with a half-violin. He managed somehow to star at stickball also. He did many things well. He healed wounded cats and dogs, once a sparrow with a broken wing. He forced (the power of personality) recalcitrant automobiles into life and motion. He pleased his father, which not all young men cared to, or knew how to do; even tipsy, Benny insisted on a courtly manner, emanations of Vienna, Heidelberg, Leipzig absorbed from a tailor-father five feet six who, abandoned by God, had clung instead to Trotsky and civiltà, a word learned from a Florentine buttonholer, a word he could not properly define but only surround: dignity, privacy, respect for oneself without which there was no respect for others. So Benny bore himself always (barring ultimate moments of animal savagery, when killing, for example, or struggling in sweaty agony with a late quartet) like a princeling, and Jacob Beer was proud of him. “The boy will be what he wants to be,” Jacob said flatly. “A lifeguard. A cigar wholesaler. Whatever. But a gentleman.” In those days it seemed to matter. “And not like your Morgans and Rockefellers, take away the gold falling out of every pocket and what’s left has no brains, no class. Benny is noble.” Trotsky would have shrugged in despair.
Benny the paragon sat alone, lost straggler from a lost platoon, much aware that he was in Central Europe, that a coachman bearing letters for Herr L. van B. might have paused at this very inn for rest and refreshment. He sipped at the hot tea. He prayed for strudel and none came. The fire rose; he unwound his scarf. Jacob believed in scarfs, which he called mufflers, and on a January morning little of Jacob was visible: between the fur hat and the muffler, two sharp eyes, one sharp nose. Forty years of tailoring and eyes like an eagle (iggle, really, but Jacob invested a New York Yiddish accent with royal resonances): “Aiees laika niggle,” he said, “and do you know why? Because I make a point to alter the focus. Frequently. I look at a star. Or Jersey. And never never look into the sun. Alter the focus. Similarly the nose, the tongue. Once a week, Italian food. And,” this impish old man, “a good grade of cigar helps, and moderation in intercourse. Every man can live to be a hundred.”
Strudel failing, Benny prayed for a good cigar; none came. Reviving nonetheless, he rose to be a soldier, to inspect his perimeter before eating and sleeping. Through cloudy windows he reconnoitered the road. It entered the village from the northwest and curved off to the east. The last light faded. It was so quiet, as Jacob said, you could drop a pin. He was about to turn, to leave his fate in the lap of the gods (or the Hitlers and Stalins and Roosevelts), when his eye caught a flash of white, and an explosion of fear stopped his breath. He dashed for his rifle and pressed the safety, and crouched like a lover in the flickering firelight, hot and stupendous.
The man, the creature, the moving object, approached from the east. It proceeded by jerks and lurches, like a marionette. Puzzled, elementally perturbed, abruptly at the edge of tears, enraged, Benny pressed the safety back and set his rifle against the cold stone wall.
The creature approached in zigzags and staggers. It wore a clown’s suit, horizontal stripes. It was bald, shoeless and tiny, a child of nightmare. It stumbled to its knees and seemed to sleep; fell forward; lay flat. One star twinkled.
Benny stepped outside, peered left and right, and went to fetch it. He saw that it was a man, and picked it up. It weighed little more than a full field pack. Benny toted the man inside and placed him before the fire. The bald head gleamed like old ivory, yellowing. Frozen snot crusted the nose and lips. Gently Benny wiped it away. The feet were icy. Benny’s ear found a heartbeat. He removed his jacket and smoothed it over the body. He wrapped the feet in his scarf. He broke up another chair and stoked the fire. He chafed the wrists; when ladies in novels fainted, wrists were chafed. He rubbed the body like a masseur. A more conscientious warrior would have owned a blanket, but Benny had tea bags and sugar, and was sorry now. He chafed the wrists again, and the forearms, and in the firelight he saw the tag on the breast of the suit: 57359.
The man remained alive. Benny quit rubbing after a time and sat back against the stone fireplace. He was hungry but had only the one ration. Perhaps the man was dying. Those photographs. The survivors in striped hats, haunted. Huge eyes. The angel of death would come, and would be at home here. He would stride in like a knight, but only bones, a cheerful smile on his death’s-head, and would stand before the fire, snobbish, wearily elegant, jaded, leaning on his pike. “Be off,” Benny said aloud. The angel nodded coldly and passed along.
Nature called; Benny stepped once more outside, this time to make the village his own. The barest gleam of firelight followed him. The village was a bad dream and Benny was weary. He stood with his back to the breeze and pissed on Germany. Steam rose dimly, and two Bennys smiled in rue, sad and strange: half of him was named Hansi, illiterate, passed water in the road, loved the Saxon wench, chaffed the scholar, paid the host, sat unbathed at the oaken board and gobbled pork; the other half lay unconscious before the fire and might not see another dawn.
He buttoned up and returned to the little man, who had not stirred: only the bare rise and fall of the sunken breast. He smelled the man’s barracks and saw him eating garbage. The fat guards with tiny eyes and no lips. The commandant, a fantasy from the cinema, ranting in Teutonic English.
So. Now it had to be comprehended, a little at least. The camps were not off in Atlantis, with robed officials waiting gravely to set wrongs right. Benny Beer had prayed for strudel and cigars and had been sent this mummy. Benny Beer who could eat eight stuffed cabbage leaves at a sitting; who had perfect pitch; who had pleased Irene S—four times between eleven and one, and under a stairway at that; who was a corporal, by God. And now this. This wee criminal. A Jew? A politician? A traffic ticket? In this insane country how could you know?
Benny rubbed the man’s hands and feet, and sipped tea, and thought upon life and death and heaven and hell.
Later the man groaned, a birdlike exhalation, and licked his lips, and heaved a sigh, and slept. So did Benny, but lightly.
When Benny awoke, the little man was struggling to rise: on all fours, swaying, straining, staring. He hissed in horror, and wept.
“It’s all right,” Benny said, moved, unmoving. “Kamerad. American. Amerikanisch.”
57359’s lips formed words, uttered no sound. Benny stood up, and the little man contracted, and showed his rotting teeth. His ears were like wings.
“It’s all right,” Benny said. “Frei. Frei. Du bist frei.” The little man grimaced like a cat. “Look.” Benny pointed. “A fire. Feuer. Essen. Trinken.” Warily the man turned to see. His eyes were tremendous, Egyptian eyes, doe’s eyes in a mouse’s face. He dragged a knee toward the fire, slipped sidewise; he sat facing the flame like a baby, legs apart, back hunched, hands limp between his legs.
Benny showed him the rations, the canteen cup. He filled the cup again and set
it in the flames. He offered the canteen. It fell from the man’s hands. Benny knelt beside him and tilted it up. The man compressed his lips and shook his head. Benny sat back, bewildered, almost angry. The little fellow’s claw picked out the helmet, the scarf; Benny passed them along. A whisper: “Bitte.” 57359 slipped the helmet comically over his bald head and draped the scarf upon his shoulders. He peered about him like a child and then spoke aloud. He murmured and muttered and rocked and nodded. He was thanking God and not Benny. Benny looked away.
The little fellow pinched him. Benny gave him the canteen, and he drank deep. Benny withdrew the canteen and said, like a concertmaster, “Langsam.” He opened the tin and shaved a slice from the cylinder of cheese. Slice by slice he fed his charge.
“Wasser.”
Benny obliged, and pointed to the cup: “Tea.”
“Tee.” 57359 tried to smile and Benny’s heart cracked.
He fetched socks from his pack and slipped them onto the tiny feet, cursing that he had not thought of them sooner. He shaved more cheese. There were bits of bacon in the cheese. Meat and milk and not only meat but bacon. Well. The Messiah would come a day later.
57359, this newborn mouse, sipping tea, wept as if thawing. His tears gleamed like quicksilver, welled from the huge eyes and flowed beside the huge nose, dribbled from the little round chin. Fascinated, Benny crooned encouragement, recalled formalities: “Benny Beer,” he said. “Benjamin Beer. Benyamin Bear. Ich bin Benyamin Bear.” The survivor stuttered nods, swallowed, sighed, shook his head, pursed his lips, looked Benny in the eye and shrugged. Benny recognized the shrug: what difference can a little war make, or a little century, or a little death? A Goliath of shrugs. A Leviathan of shrugs.
In firelight the wraith licked his lips for forgotten crumbs. His vast brown eyes gleamed, a lunatic affirmation of life, appetite, hope. Again he attacked the tea, slurped, spilled, squeaked his pleasure. He published a thunderous belch.
Dog Tags Page 1
