Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  She threw her arms around him and burst into tears. “You darling, sweet man!”

  “Actually, I had hoped he would never show up. Then I could have you for myself.”

  “I don’t believe that. Come in. Come on in.” She ran into the bathroom to throw cold water on her face and wipe away the tears. Then, a moment later, she said, “I must get over crying about everything. I never do it when I’m alone.”

  “We were worried,” Brissard admitted.

  “Where is he? When will he come back?”

  “First question. He’s in Toulouse, in a hospital.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “He’s all right. I told you that. He was wounded in two places, a shell fragment in his right arm and a bullet wound in the leg. But he’s all right.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Decide for yourself. Here’s a letter to you.” He handed her a thick envelope. “It’s dictated. He found someone down there to take his dictation, and he’s charged the paper the two hundred and eighty francs he paid her. But he sent us one hell of a story, believe me. It’s on the front page tomorrow.”

  “What hospital?”

  “The Sacred Heart.”

  “Could I get a train to Toulouse tonight?”

  “I doubt it. Look, Barbara, he’s all right. You can telephone the hospital, if you wish. You can’t speak to him because there’s no telephone in his room. Go down there by all means, if you wish. But wait until tomorrow—”

  She was tearing open the letter, her hands shaking.

  “I’m going to run along,” Brissard said. “I’ll be at the paper if you want to talk to me.”

  She hardly realized that he had gone. She began to read:

  “My darling Barbara, I am dictating this letter because my right arm is unfortunately not functioning. The lady taking the dictation, Madame Clouet, is, we think, some sort of a distant relative. She has five children, and she is an excellent stenographer and typist. You know that my father and mother still live in Toulouse, so in a way I have finally come home to them, a bit battered, but otherwise in fine fettle. As for the story, I think it’s good. As for my English, no more snide remarks from you and no more innuendos. I have been communicating in English—or American, if you will—believe it or not. My God, how I love you! How I adore you! Now Madame Clouet is regarding me very strangely. She is very proper. She says that for a writer, I am diffuse. She reads Balzac. I tell her to read Proust. She says she has no time for Proust, and that he bores her.”

  Laughing and crying all at once, Barbara paused to dry her eyes with the towel she had brought from the bathroom. “Not at all true that I don’t cry when I’m alone,” she whispered to herself. “Not at all true.” She turned back to the letter.

  “Very well, where have I been? You will read my story in the paper, but it’s a newspaper story. I have to tell it to you differently. To get here, they had to carry me part of the way over the passes in a litter, and in my rational moments I debated with myself whether to tell you what happened. Then I decided that I must, since neither of us had ever held anything back. So I begin with the group I joined, the 58th Lincoln Battalion, Americans. It is, or was, part of the 15th International Brigade, and when I joined them they had about three hundred men. Very young, most of them younger than we are. I wore my old service uniform, with a correspondent’s patch and a tricolor. Not much of anything, but most of the kids in the 58th wore old pants and what you Americans call sweat shirts. They were volunteers from every part of the States, lots of them from New York City, and a good many from your place, California, and I felt that those were particularly wonderful, since they shared a place of origin with someone I love so much. Have you predisposed me toward America? I think I fell in love with those kids. They didn’t look like soldiers. They carried bolt-action Springfield rifles, most of them, and they didn’t even have cartridge belts. They stuffed their pockets full of cartridges and hand grenades. But my God, they are something.

  “I heard rumors when I joined them that the Republican front was breaking up and that soon there might be a general retreat across the Ebro, but they didn’t know anything about this. I was with them two days, mostly experimenting with my English and trying to get some background stories, when orders came for the 58th Battalion to advance and to keep advancing until the orders were countermanded. There were six other correspondents there at their bivouac, three of them Americans. We had a meeting, and the correspondents decided that, in the light of the rumors they all had heard, the best thing would be to head back toward Barcelona for the time being. But I had just arrived. My lovely darling, I am not a brave man, and I know how you feel about ‘heroes,’ which is why I put it in quotation marks, but I had just arrived, and where was my story? Believe me, I had a vision of a lifetime of cursing out bad restaurants in print and reviewing second-rate plays, and I could not face it. So I decided to move along with the 58th and see what happened. I had made some slight acquaintance with the two officers in command, one by the name of Dave Doran and the other by the name of Bob Merryman. Merryman was from California. Poor boys, they both died. I also met your Bernie Cohen, but more of that later.

  “At first, they said flatly that I couldn’t go along, but when I explained that I would be doing a special feature for Le Monde and that, since I was French, I had done my army service and that if it came to the worst, I could take care of myself, they relented and agreed I could move with them.

  “The 58th began to advance. No opposition. It was hot and dry and bleak. Our water gave out, and we lost our liaison. We didn’t know it then, but the Republican army had already broken, and the whole line was in retreat. The 58th had simply cut loose, and there we were, three hundred men advancing against the whole fascist army. About noontime, we spotted a fascist water truck. The men guarding it gave up without a fight, and everyone’s mood changed. We had plenty of water, and the little victory over the truck gave us confidence. We tied up the three rebel soldiers, left them there, and continued our advance. But Merryman was nervous about the silence all around us, and he cut out on our flank to try to effect some kind of liaison.

  “It was very hot. About three o’clock in the afternoon, we decided to rest, and we sprawled in the shade under a grove of olive trees. We waited there for Merryman to return. It was very strange, just the American battalion, all alone, a few goats in the distance, not a living soul otherwise, the hot Spanish sun sinking slowly toward the west, and silence. Where were the armies? Where was the war? Then Merryman returned and told us that the 58th had advanced deep into fascist territory, while behind us the whole Republican army was in retreat. Also, he had met a Republican soldier who told him that the way back behind us was closed.

  “Doran gave the orders to march, and we headed back, not quite the way we had come but through some rough country. We marched very quickly, and it was quite exhausting. Then we came to an elevation where we could look down into a little Spanish town—I think it was called Gondese or something of the sort. That’s where the line of battle was, behind us now. We were behind the fascists, and we could see them driving their attack through the streets of the town, while the Spanish soldiers were trying to hold the little clay houses. Merryman and Doran decided that the only thing to do was to break through and join up with the Spaniards. It was getting on to twilight now. They detached a patrol of twenty-five men, and ordered them to fight their way through the fascist lines, join up with the Spaniards, and then we would mount an attack and drive the fascists out of the town. I thought it was very poor tactics to send out twenty-five men with no support, but I was in no position to comment. Well, we watched it happen. The whole patrol was wiped out. My God, those boys were so brave and so senseless! They were caught in a crossfire, attacking against machine guns with their old Springfields, and we watched it happen. There was nothing we could do.

  “Then the Spaniards gave up the town and retrea
ted to a hill beyond it, and there we were, holding our hill with the Republican soldiers on the other hill, and the fascists between us. We tried to dig in, but there weren’t enough trenching tools. Then, in the last light of day, the fascists sent a regiment of cavalry charging up the hill against us. Would you believe it, men in shining cuirasses waving their swords? I guess that with the Republican army retreating everywhere, the fascists felt that any show of force would carry the day. We stopped that charge and took a heavy toll of the cavalry. Night came, and we were joined by a few hundred Spanish soldiers who had been cut off. But by then the fascists had brought up their artillery. For two hours they shelled us. It wasn’t good. Eight more Americans died there, and that was where I got the piece of shrapnel in my arm. It wasn’t too bad at first. But we knew that if we stayed there, it would be the end.

  “We set out in the dark, and we walked all the rest of the night. By some miracle, we were not intercepted by the fascists who had been shelling us. Then, toward dawn, we ran smack into what may have been a German Nazi outfit. It was as if all the devils in hell had broken loose, as if their machine guns were set up and waiting for us. The Americans, instead of turning and getting out of there, attacked, and they were just cut to pieces. Afterward I heard that Merryman and Doran were both killed there, and I don’t think that even a hundred of the Americans survived that battle. Anyway, it was the end of the 58th Battalion. I was shot in the leg, and the same Bernie Cohen I spoke of before dragged me out of it, and then it was over, with only the crying and moaning of the wounded, and I got out of it somehow, hanging on to Cohen, and we found a little shed, which we crawled into. We couldn’t see what was happening from where we were, but we heard German voices all around us, and we were sure that sooner or later they would find us, and Cohen said that if they did, they’d shoot us on the spot, that the Germans didn’t take prisoners. Whether or not this is true, I don’t know, but I heard the same thing from others. Cohen was very strong and competent. He made splints out of some old wood in the shed and bound up my leg. I was in great pain, and after that, the events are somewhat vague.

  “We stayed in the shed all day, and when night came, we left the shed, Cohen carrying me on his back. We were close to the Ebro. He asked me if I could swim, and I said I thought I could, and somehow or other we got across the river. It’s all like a sort of nightmare. Then, to compound it, an Italian division of Black Shirts was encamped on the other side. With Cohen dragging me, on our hands and knees, we crawled through a whole sleeping Italian division, believe it or not. They didn’t even have a single guard posted. Then Cohen carried me on his back, and toward morning we were picked up by an English ambulance that was searching for wounded in the area between the fascists and the retreating Republican army.

  “So there is the whole story, my dear love, a confused, tragic little bit of an obscene and heartbreaking war. I wait now and count the hours before I see you again.”

  ***

  The nature of the immigrant is the state of being alone. Even if he goes to where he goes with a wife and family, he leaves behind him the whole intricate structure of the extended family that is hundreds of years in the making. So it was that when Feng Wo was laid away in the ground in the bleak, interdenominational cemetery in Los Angeles, six thousand miles from the land of his ancestors, in another land that designated him an outsider, a yellow man, a Chinese man, there were only six people present to hear the dirt fall on his coffin, Dan and May Ling, Joseph, So-toy, bent, withered, drying up from her tears, and Sam Goldberg and Sarah Levy, both of them down from San Francisco for the funeral.

  They all returned to the little house in Westwood after the burial. It was the first time since she had been married, in the year 1895, that So-toy had not prepared the evening meal—with the exception of those days when there was no food at all to put on the table. She sat in a corner in the kitchen, a tiny, withered woman, as if the death that had claimed her husband had mistakenly passed her by, waiting now to be taken.

  Sarah and May Ling prepared food, and May Ling explained to Sarah, “You see, she never learned English. She speaks a dialect called Shanghainese. So who will talk to her? That’s the most terrible part of it.”

  Joe had returned to school. Dan sat in the living room with Sam Goldberg, who was recalling the day they bought the Oregon Queen, that first almost mythical, iron ship on which the empire of Levy and Lavette was built. Feng Wo had brought his abacus with him then, and when Swenson, the owner of the Oregon Queen, proposed that they buy his two garbage scows along with the iron lumber freighter, the abacus became as active as a modern computer. Goldberg remembered how the kids had gathered around to watch with awe as Feng Wo added, subtracted, and multiplied on what Dan had called his “Chinese harp.”

  “They were all there, weren’t they,” Goldberg said, “Steve Cassala and his kid sister—what was her name?”

  “Rosa.”

  “Right, and Clair Harvey and Jake Levy and Martha Levy, all the kids.”

  “I remember,” Dan said.

  “Well, it’s gone. God Almighty, the world changes. Only thirty-two years since the big earthquake, and the whole world’s different. Do you think we’ll have a war, Danny?”

  “I’ve thought of it. You know, it was the last war that made us millionaires. Christ, when I think of it, it sours my gut. Still and all, that Nazi bastard won’t be satisfied. Sooner or later, he’ll want the whole hog.”

  “You don’t want any part of it, do you, Danny?”

  “None.”

  “Still, if we couldn’t stay out of it, where would they find the ships?”

  “That’s not my worry.”

  “What do you hear from Barbara?”

  “We got a long letter. Jake and Clair were over there, and that let the cat out of the bag.” He smiled ruefully. “She’s in love, or so she writes, with a French journalist. She says she intends to marry him.”

  “And live in France?”

  “God knows. I hope not. I miss her. On a day like this—Christ, it eats my heart out the way I miss her.”

  May Ling came into the room, leaned over Dan, and kissed him gently. “I’ve been meaning to say this since Papa died. I’m in your debt for a great deal, my husband.”

  “For what, May Ling? For all the years of grief?”

  “For all the years of love. But something else—for what you gave Papa. You gave him his manhood. Without that, life is wasted, the way thousands of Chinese here live wasted lives. His life wasn’t wasted. And I thank you for that.”

  She went back into the kitchen. Dan said slowly, “You know, Sam, she’s Chinese. She’s the second generation in this country, and she’s still Chinese.”

  “She’s also a very remarkable woman.”

  “She is. She certainly is.”

  ***

  The earliest train to Toulouse was a sleeper, which arrived there the following morning. Barbara was thankful to have had the compartment to herself, with no one to intrude on her thoughts except a solicitous wagon-lits conductor, a London cockney who assumed that every American or British girl traveling alone on the Continent was in constant and mortal danger. She read Marcel’s letter again and again. The end of it troubled her, An ambulance had picked him up, and then he was in the hospital in Toulouse. Even with a bullet wound in the leg, he should have been able to limp—unless it struck the bone. She had read somewhere that a bullet striking the bone in the leg makes the most devastating type of wound. What had happened at the end of the letter? Was he simply tired of reliving the experience?

  She compared his letter with the story in Le Monde. The headline read: Le Monde correspondent witnesses the GALLANT FORAY OF AN AMERICAN BATTALION. The story was longer than the letter, and it went into more detail, and Le Monde provided background material on both Doran and Merryman. The facts of the battle with the German detachment were more explicit, as was the story o
f their progress through the Italian division. And there it ended. She read and reread both pieces until she could repeat most of it by heart. She had telephoned the hospital last night, but only a night nurse was on duty, and she could give out no sensible information. Now she regretted that she hadn’t called again before she rushed off to catch the train. The train was impossible, slow, tortuous, stopping again and again. How much of her life had been spent on trains! They were lonely places that trapped her and forced her to examine the innermost recesses of her being. And she had brought nothing to read, nothing but the letter and the copy of Le Monde. Anyway, she did not want to read or divert herself. She wanted to be with the man she loved, and she wanted to recreate him lovingly in her mind, each part of him—the way he thought, the way he smiled, the way he touched her, the thin wrinkles that curled around either side of his mouth, the way he spoke English, mangling words and sentences, the time he bought a straw boater to do an imitation of Maurice Chevalier, their endless walks through the streets of Paris, the time they charmed a barge captain on the St. Martin Canal and then drifted through an afternoon on that incredible, dreamily improbable waterway—all the days and weeks that they had been with each other, examining each other, finding each other. They were both so far from home, so free, so uninhibited in their giving.

  She fell asleep. The wagon-lits man awakened her to make up her bed. Didn’t she care for dinner? The thought of food was impossible. I am certainly the most over-emotional, neurotic woman in the world, she told herself. Then she forced herself to go into the dining car and order dinner. A diaper salesman sat opposite her, a fat, jolly man as pink as a baby himself. What an extraordinary way to earn a living, she thought, listening to him pour out the tales of his trade. He chattered through the whole meal, and she was relieved to have something to divert her thoughts.