Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  “God in heaven!” he shouted. “A beautiful woman in this pisshole! Don’t you remember? Mike Kendell.”

  “Of course.”

  “Let me buy you a drink.”

  “In this weather? All right, tonic water; I don’t dare drink when it’s this hot.”

  “Best time. Warms the inside, cools the outside.” And seated in the bar, he asked her, “What brings you out this way?”

  “Going home, I hope. I’ve had it—up to here.” She touched her throat. “War is for men and idiots. Or are they the same?”

  “Come on, baby. Don’t be so hard on us.”

  “Which way for you, Mike?”

  “Burma, maybe China, if we get there, if I survive, if I can stay drunk. When do you pull out?”

  “I’m waiting for a cable from my editor. Today, tomorrow, the next day. It can’t come too soon. I’ve had eight months of this. It’s enough.”

  “Look, Barbara, you’re in for tonight, anyway. No more planes out of here today. The limeys are throwing a party tonight. Come along with me. You know, very posh, regimental headquarters, charge of the light brigade, gunga din, all that Indian crap. You’ll enjoy it.”

  “This is my last clean uniform.”

  “You look great. Listen, they got a great dry cleaning service here, honest to God. Give me all your stuff, and I’ll get it cleaned for you. That’s paying my dues. Anyway, you’re safe with me. By midnight, I’m too drunk to make a pass at Mae West.”

  “O.K., I’m your date,” Barbara agreed.

  “Pick you up at eight.”

  Barbara had been to British regimental parties before, and this one was no different: British officers grasping an opportunity to wear their dress uniforms and pretend that nothing in India had changed, British officers up from the ranks who had never owned a dress uniform, American officers, stringy, dried-out British ladies who had lived a lifetime in India, Red Cross women, a sprinkling of nurses, a few correspondents, a few civilians, but very noticeably no natives, no Indians. The moment she entered the room—a broad, handsome room with a high ceiling and polished teak beams—she regretted that she had agreed to come. She would be bored; she would be told by half-drunk, lonely men that she was the most attractive woman there; she would spend the evening in a miasma of alcoholic breath; she would dance with men who grasped her out of hunger and desperation; and she would be looked at with envy by other women who were older, tired, plain. How often she had despised her own beauty, seeing it as an illusion that separated her not only from the world but from herself; but those were bad moments. Tonight she told herself that even this banality was better than another evening alone in her room, trying to read, trying to sleep, trying to forget the things she had seen.

  Men clustered around her. On these occasions, men always clustered around her. She lost Mike Kendell to the bar and found herself dancing with a British officer and trying to decipher the layers of ribbon on his blouse. His name was Wescott, Colonel Wescott, about forty, very charming, breaking his back to be charming: “Never could find the proper words for American women. God’s gift, you know. But whoever thought to find a girl like you in Karachi. Makes the war worthwhile, don’t you know?”

  “I’m sure it does.” Barbara smiled. “You were in the first African campaign, weren’t you? With the Italians?”

  “Reading my ribbons, are you? Bright girl. Quite. With Wavell. Do you know, that’s deuced hard to say. Never occurred to me before. With Wavell, yes, quite.”

  “I knew a sergeant who was in it. He was with a gun carrier. I thought perhaps—”

  “Gun carriers, Bren trucks—that is your word, isn’t it, trucks?”

  “How clever of you,” Barbara said.

  “Not at all. What was his name?”

  “Bernie Cohen.”

  “Cohen? He’d be a Jew, wouldn’t he?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “No, can’t recollect any Cohen. Didn’t have much to do with enlisted men, to tell you the truth. Bernie Cohen. No, can’t say that I ever met him. Relation of yours? Don’t tell me you’re Jewish?”

  “Just as dreadful,” Barbara said seriously. “I’m Italian.”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “Oh, no. But I’ve learned to live with it.”

  When the music stopped, she found Mike Kendell tugging at her arm, and she allowed him to draw her over to the side of the room. “I heard you asking the limey about a Bernie Cohen. Maybe there are fifty Sergeant Cohens in the British army. Who knows? I met up with one in Tunis.”

  “Let’s get a drink,” Barbara said, steering Kendell toward the bar. “The hell with the weather.”

  “You don’t think you could get tight enough to look upon me with dewy eyes, as the poets say?”

  “Not likely. But I have a deep affection for you, Mike. Do you know, the more I see of the British out here, the deeper my affection for Americans. I used to love the British, but their tight little island suits them better than this place. God, I’ve had my fill of the mysterious East! When I get back to San Francisco, I’m never going south of Market Street or west of Van Ness, and since I live one block to the east of Van Ness, that about sums up my state of mind; and for six months I’m going to wear nothing but organdy and crêpe de Chine. You know, years ago I met a guy whose name was Bernie Cohen—I won’t go into the circumstances—and now he’s in the British army, if he’s still alive. He’s a good friend, and so I ask around. One day I’ll meet a British officer who won’t do a double take when he hears a Jewish name. What about this Sergeant Cohen?”

  He ordered two gin and tonics from the turbaned Sikh behind the bar. “I guess it was about a year ago, maybe a little more. When was it Von Arnim surrendered on Cape Bon?”

  “May of forty-three.”

  “God damndest thing you ever saw. We had these POW compounds, and the Germans marched into them in perfect order, as if they were on parade. There was one battalion that goose-stepped. Would you believe that? Goose-stepping into a prisoner-of-war compound.”

  “What about Cohen?”

  “Right. Well, I’m watching this with a couple of guys from the AP and some British enlisted men. One of them is a big feller, maybe six-foot-two or -three, and that in itself is very peculiar with the limeys. They run pretty small, except among the officers, and this guy has a shoulder patch I never saw before, some sort of a Jewish unit. So I ask him about the patch.”

  “What did he look like?” Barbara asked eagerly. “Come on, Mike, you’re a writer. Describe him.”

  “Like I said, big, six-foot-two or -three. Hawklike nose—how’s that? Blue eyes, very pale blue. I remember that because his skin was burned brown as leather, and the eyes were like blue holes in his head. Very cold, very tough. Interviewing him was like pulling teeth. And an American. Did I tell you that?”

  “No, you idiot, you didn’t.”

  “Did you just say you were from San Francisco?”

  “Yes, that’s what I said.”

  “So was he.”

  “It has to be. For God’s sake, Mike, tell me about him. Don’t just stand there looking at me.”

  “He fought in Spain,” Kendell said.

  “I’m going to cry,” Barbara whispered. “I tried so hard to find him. When I was in North Africa, I must have asked a hundred people.”

  “Are you in love with this guy?”

  “I can’t explain it, Mike. It’s very complicated. What else did you find out about him?”

  “Well, he was in the African thing from the beginning. It made a good story. They commissioned him in the field, and he was made a second louie or something like that, and then his captain made some disparaging remark about his being Jewish, and Cohen beat him up and was court-martialed and busted. He would have been jailed, but apparently he was the best weapons expert they had, and, well, ther
e he was at Cape Bon, where it ended. I can’t tell you much more than that, because as I said, it was like pulling teeth.” He lifted his glass. “Here’s to you, lady. Shape up. Because if he’s your guy, he is one tough cookie.”

  Barbara shook her head sadly. “No, Mike. He’s not my guy, and he’s not so tough. Where do you suppose he is now?”

  “God knows! I think they shipped some of them out to Burma, but I imagine most of them went to England for the invasion.”

  The following day, Barbara’s cable arrived. Her editor reluctantly accepted her decision to come home, begging her, however, to turn the journey to use. The Air Transport Command was setting up an airlift from the China-Burma-India theater for the time when it would be needed to ferry troops back. A series of airfields had been hastily established in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Baluchistan. There was one spot in particular called Sharjah, in Saudi Arabia, and the paper had printed a letter from a local boy stationed there. A background story would be useful, so could she work out a stopover? And finally, the cable read, “I don’t know what to do with your story about the famine. It’s a hell of a story, but is this the time?”

  It was a hundred and five degrees in the shade in Karachi the day she left, and while she knew nothing about Saudi Arabia, she felt it couldn’t be any worse than this; but when the C-47 finally dipped down and landed in a blazing, sunbaked expanse of white sand, she began to have doubts, and when she stepped out of the plane, a blast of heat struck her and made her feel that death was imminent. The installation was only a hundred yards from where the plane rolled to a stop, but Barbara knew deep in her heart that she would die before she crossed that space. The young navigator of the plane saw Barbara stagger, and he went up to her, took her arm, and said cheerfully, “It’s all mental, miss. This is a regular part of my run. Just think about ice cream and snow. The installation is air-cooled.”

  Somehow she made it. There was a huge thermometer on the wall on the porch of the installation, and it read a hundred and twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit. “Good heavens,” she whispered, “what is it out in the sun?”

  “Never took it, miss,” the navigator said. “Better off that way.”

  Half a dozen GIs were unloading cargo from the plane. They wore gloves, as did the mechanics who were fueling it.

  “Why the gloves in this heat?” Barbara asked.

  “To keep them from burning their hands.”

  The door from the porch led directly into the mess, where the temperature was no more than eighty degrees, and cool by contrast. The soldiers sitting there, playing cards or sipping Cokes, looked at her bleakly, and it appeared to Barbara that the whole place was depressed to the point of somber madness. The navigator had observed to her that, stationed here, he would blow out his brains in a week. The commanding officer, a Lieutenant Cocoron, in his mid-twenties, greeted her uncertainly.

  “You’re the first white woman,” he said. “You’re a correspondent, aren’t you?”

  Barbara nodded.

  “You don’t mean to stay here. I mean, I’d like to have you stay, but we haven’t got any accommodations for a woman. Jesus, I just don’t know. We never had any reporter here before.”

  “I don’t know. What do you say?” Barbara asked him. “The truth is, I think if I step out into that heat again, I shall go quite mad.”

  Grinning inanely, the lieutenant said, “At least we don’t sweat. Dry heat. That’s a plus. But why did you come here?”

  “I work for a San Francisco paper. My editor cabled that there’s a San Francisco kid stationed here, and that I should do a background story on him.”

  “A San Francisco kid? Jesus, that must be Polchek.”

  “Adrian Polchek, yes.”

  Cocoron shook his head. “He’s gone.”

  “Oh? He went home?” she asked.

  “No. He’s in jail in Cairo. He raped an Arab girl.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Look, why don’t you sit down and let me get you a Coke.” She sank into a chair at one of the tables. “Brady,” Cocoron called to one of the soldiers, “get the lady a Coke.” The GIs in the mess were staring at her hungrily. One or two of them grinned. But most of them just stared at her, bleakly, hungrily. Brady brought her the Coke. It was cold, and she drank it eagerly, realizing for the first time how very thirsty she was.

  “Tell me about it,” she said to Cocoron.

  “You’re sure you want me to?”

  “Of course I do. I’m a reporter. The only reason I’m here is to get a story on this kid, and now you tell me he’s in jail in Cairo.”

  “Well, you know, we only got two rooms in this lousy installation, this and the barracks.” He glanced at the soldiers, who had stopped talking and were listening intently.

  “Please,” Barbara said.

  “O.K.” He dropped his voice, but still he could be heard. “I’m Lebanese,” he said. “I mean, my Mom and Pop were. Anyway, I talk the language, and that’s the only reason I’m here in this shithole. No. Please. I don’t know how to talk to a dame anymore.”

  “I heard all the words,” Barbara reassured him.

  “Yeah, I guess so. All right, so you’re the first American woman ever set foot in this place. You know what that’s like?”

  “I know.”

  “Yeah. Well,” he said uneasily, “it’s like this. We got two or three Arab girls come from the village to clean up.”

  “You mean people live here?”

  “There’s a village two miles away. They got a little well there. Look, I want you to understand. Not Arab girls—I mean, not just Arab girls. These women are slaves.”

  “Slaves? You mean their situation in social terms—the Arab family and women’s place?”

  “No. No, miss. I don’t mean that.” He glanced around the room uneasily. “These are slaves. They still got the slave trade here, black girls they bring in from Africa. Well, Christ, you got to understand how it is here.” His voice dropped still further. “Some of the guys sleep with them. Fifty cents, which is more money than anyone in the village ever saw before. Then they turn the money over to their owners. Well, they raised the price, and one of them demanded a dollar from Polchek, and he got sore and wouldn’t give her anything, and then this headman from the village comes back with the girl and lodges a charge of rape against Polchek. They know the law, and word gets around, even out here, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do. I had to send him up to Cairo with the charge.”

  “But why? Why didn’t you pay him off? Ten dollars probably would have bought the headman and his village too.”

  “Don’t you think I thought of that, miss? But the way the breaks come, we had two air force captains here, straight out of stateside, and they raised hell and put the kid under arrest.”

  “And what happens now?” Barbara asked him.

  “Christ, I don’t know. We’re stuck down here in the asshole of creation—forgive the expression, but that’s what it is. We can’t appear as witnesses unless they call us, and that depends on how much they want to brown-nose the Saudis, which is a lot. The guys want me to go up there, but there’s just no way. He could get fifteen years or ten years or five years or just dishonorable discharge, depending.”

  “Was it rape?”

  “No, ma’am, it was not. The girl was a hustler, and the poor dumb kid wouldn’t have done anything, but she was scared to death of the headman.”

  “Well, who will testify against Polchek? The girl?”

  “No, ma’am. If the Saudis want to make something out of it, they’ll bring the headman up there. But just the charge is enough to get the kid a dishonorable discharge.”

  An hour later, Barbara staggered through the heat back to the plane, and a few minutes after that they took off for Cairo, Barbara the only passenger, sharing the plane with a cargo of empty Coca-Cola bottles. Once they were
airborne, the young navigator came back and asked her whether she was going to write anything about the so-called rape.

  “I’ll do the best I can,” Barbara said.

  “Well, all I can say, miss, is that I’d rather be dead than stationed there at Sharjah. That’s worse than hell itself. That’s just the worst place there is, and some of those guys have been there six months. They don’t have any replacements for those jobs, because it’s too far back from any front, so they just forget about it for the duration.”

  I wonder, Barbara asked herself, what I would do if I were trapped there?

  The sun was setting when the plane landed at Payne Field in Cairo. Captain Leonard Belton, the public relations officer for Air Transport, spotted Barbara as she entered the airport building, grabbed her Valpack, and assured her that he had never believed life could be this kind to him. “How long is it, Miss Lavette? Months. And for a man who adored you—”

  “I’m on my way home, Leonard. Nothing, but nothing, is going to get in my way.”

  “I’m not even married,” he pleaded. “How many of these old married bastards have you had to fight off? And my love is a true love. Will you at least have dinner with me tonight?”

  Barbara regarded him thoughtfully. He was tall, rather good-looking, and rather nondescript. He had been an assistant to an account executive in a large New York advertising agency before the war, but as he had put it to her when she had been in Cairo earlier, his best years were the war years. The best of everything. He was describing the new VIP hostel that had recently been completed. “I swear,” he told her, “that there isn’t a hotel in New York that can offer better service. Kid, it’s the absolute lap of luxury. We have a dining room that would make the Plaza weep. Maybe not as big, but class. And the food is good. That, love, is the essential nature of war—it is all on the house. You don’t even need a charge account. When I saw your name on the transport list, I reserved the absolute best suite in the place. Bedroom, sitting room, and bath. Wait until you see that bathroom. And all I ask in return is to bask in the loveliness of your smile. Well, maybe a little more—but I’m a good loser. Where have you been?”