by Ray Bradbury
Melter looked after him in a hysterical kind of triumph.
Then Melter hefted his weapon and walked east over another hill, out of view.
Smith lay there, his thoughts getting sicker and dimmer, and Johnny walked on and on. If only there were some way to cry out. Johnny, look out!
An artillery shell came over and burst. Johnny fell down on the ground without a sound and lay there, not making a movement of his once-miraculous limbs.
Johnny!
Have you stopped believing? Johnny, get up! Are you dead now? Johnny?
And then darkness mercifully gathered Smith in and swallowed him down.
Scalpels rose and fell like small keen guillotines, cutting away death and decay, beheading misery, eliminating metal pain. The bullet, plucked from Smith’s wound, was cast away, small, dark, clattering into a metal pan. The doctors pantomimed over and around him in a series of blurred frenzies. Smith breathed easily.
Across the dim interior of the tent Johnny’s body lay on another operating table, doctors curious over him in a sterile tableau.
‘Johnny?’ and this time Smith had a voice.
‘Easy does it,’ a doctor cautioned. The lips under the white mask moved. ‘that a friend of yours – over there?’
‘Yeah. How is he?’
‘Not so good. Head injury. Fifty-fifty chance.’
They concluded with Smith, stitches, swabbings, bandages and all. Smith watched the wound vanish under white gauze, then he looked at the assembled crowd of medics. ‘Let me help with him, will you?’
‘Well, now, after all, soldier—’
‘I know the guy. I know the guy. I know him. He’s funny. If it means keeping him alive, how’s about it?’
The scowl formed over the surgical mask, and Smith’s heart beat slow. The doctor blinked. ‘I can’t chance it. What can you possibly do to help me?’
‘Wheel me over. I tell you I can help. I’m his bosom-pal. I can’t let him conk out now. Hell, no!’
The doctors conferred.
They transferred Smith to a portable stretcher and two orderlies delivered him across the tent where the surgeons were engaged with Johnny’s shaved, naked skull. Johnny looked asleep and dreaming a nightmare. His face twisted, worried, frightening, wondering, disappointed and dismayed. One of the surgeons sighed.
Smith touched one surgical elbow. ‘Don’t give up, Doc. Oh, God, don’t give up.’ To Johnny: ‘Johnny-lad. Listen. Listen to me. Forget everything Melter said. Forget everything he said – you hear me? He was full of crap up to here!’
Johnny’s face still was irritated, changing like disturbed water. Smith gathered his breath and continued.
‘Johnny, you gotta go on playing, like always. Go on ducking, like in the old days. You always knew how, Johnny. It was part of you. It didn’t take learning or teaching, it was natural. And you let Melter put ideas in your head. Ideas that may be okay for people like Melter and me and others, but don’t jibe for you.’
One surgeon made an impatient gesture with a rubber-gloved hand.
Smith asked him, ‘Is his head hurt bad, Doc?’
‘Pressure on the skull, on the brain. May cause temporary loss of memory.’
‘Will he remember being wounded?’
‘It’s hard to say. Probably not.’
Smith had to be held down. ‘Good! Good! Look,’ he whispered quickly, confidentially to Johnny’s head. ‘Johnny, just think about being a kid, and how it was then, and don’t think about what happened today. Think about running in ravines and through creeks and skipping pebbles on water, and ducking b-b guns, and laughing, Johnny!’
Inside, Johnny thought about it.
A mosquito hummed somewhere, hummed and circled for an endless time. Somewhere guns rumbled.
Someone finally told Smith, ‘Respiration improved.’
Someone else said, ‘Heart action picking up.’
Smith kept talking, part of him that wasn’t pain, that was only hope and anxiety in his larynx, and fear-fever in his brain. The war thunder came closer, closer, but it was only the blood hurled through his head by his heart. Half an hour passed by. Johnny listened like a kid in school to an over-patient teacher. Listened and smoothed out the pain, erased the dismay in his expression, and regained the old certainty and youth and sureness and calm acceptance of belief.
The surgeon stripped off his tight rubber gloves.
‘He’ll pull through.’
Smith felt like singing. ‘Thanks, Doc. Thanks.’
The Doc said, ‘You from Unit 45, you and Choir and a guy named Melter?’
‘Yeah. What about Melter?’
‘Funniest darn thing. Ran head on into a burst of German machine-gun fire. Ran down a hill screaming something about being a kid again.’ The doc scratched his jaw. ‘We picked up his body with fifty bullets in it.’
Smith swallowed, lying back to sweat. Ice-cold, shivering sweat.
‘That’s Melter for you. He just didn’t know how. He grew up, too fast, like all of us. He didn’t know how to stay young, like Johnny. That’s why it didn’t work. I – I gotta give him credit for trying, though, the nut. But there’s only one Johnny Choir.’
‘You,’ diagnosed the surgeon, ‘are delirious. Better take a sedative.’
Smith shook his head. ‘What about home? Are we going, Johnny and I, with our wounds?’
The surgeon formed a smile under the mask. ‘Home to America, the two of you.’
‘Now, you’re delirious!’ Smith let out a careful whoop of glee. He twisted to get a good look at Johnny sleeping so peacefully and easily and dreaming, and he said, ‘You hear that, Johnny? We’re going home! You and me! Home!’
And Johnny replied, softly, ‘Mom? Oh, Mom.’
Smith held Johnny’s hand. ‘Okay,’ he said to the surgeons. ‘So now I’m a mother. Pass the cigars!’
Darling Adolf
They were waiting for him to come out. He was sitting inside the little Bavarian café with a view of the mountains, drinking beer, and he had been in there since noon and it was now two-thirty, a long lunch, and much beer, and they could see by the way he held his head and laughed and lifted one more stein with the suds fluffing in the spring breeze that he was in a grand humor now, and at the table with him the two other men were doing their best to keep up, but had fallen long behind.
On occasion their voices drifted on the wind, and then the small crowd waiting out in the parking lot leaned to hear. What was he saying? and now what?
‘He just said the shooting was going well.’
‘What, where?!’
‘Fool. The film, the film is shooting well.’
‘Is that the director sitting with him?’
‘Yes. And the other unhappy one is the producer.’
‘He doesn’t look like a producer.’
‘No wonder! He’s had his nose changed.’
‘And him, doesn’t he look real?’
‘To the hair and the teeth.’
And again everyone leaned to look in at the three men, at the man who didn’t look like a producer, at the sheepish director who kept glancing out at the crowd and slouching down with his head between his shoulders, shutting his eyes, and the man between them, the man in the uniform with the swastika on his arm, and the fine military cap put on the table beside the almost-untouched food, for he was talking, no, making a speech.
‘That’s the Führer, all right!’
‘God in heaven, it’s as if no time had passed. I don’t believe this is 1973. Suddenly it’s 1934 again, when first I saw him.’
‘Where?’
‘The Nuremberg Rally, the stadium, that was the autumn, yes, and I was thirteen and part of the Youth and one hundred thousand soldiers and young men in that big place that late afternoon before the torches were lit. So many bands, so many flags, so much heartbeat, yes, I tell you, I could hear one hundred thousand hearts banging away, we were all so in love, he had come down out of the clouds. The gods had sent him, we
knew, and the time of waiting was over, from here on we could act, there was nothing he couldn’t help us to do.’
‘I wonder how that actor in there feels, playing him?’
‘Sh, he hears you. Look, he waves. Wave back.’
‘Shut up,’ said someone else. ‘They’re talking again. I want to hear—’
The crowd shut up. The men and women leaned into the soft spring wind. The voices drifted from the café table.
Beer was being poured by a maiden waitress with flushed cheeks and eyes as bright as fire.
‘More beer!’ said the man with the toothbrush mustache and the hair combed forward on the left side of his brow.
‘No, thanks,’ said the director.
‘No, no,’ said the producer.
‘More beer! It’s a splendid day,’ said Adolf. ‘A toast to the film, to us, to me. Drink!’
The other two men put their hands on their glasses of beer.
‘To the film,’ said the producer.
‘To darling Adolf.’ The director’s voice was flat.
The man in the uniform stiffened.
‘I do not look upon myself—’ he hesitated, ‘upon him as darling.’
‘He was darling, all right, and you’re a doll.’ The director gulped his drink. ‘Does anyone mind if I get drunk?’
‘To be drunk is not permitted,’ said Der Führer.
‘Where does it say that in the script?’
The producer kicked the director under the table.
‘How many more weeks’ work do you figure we have?’ asked the producer, with great politeness.
‘I figure we should finish the film,’ said the director, taking huge swigs, ‘around about the death of Hindenburg, or the Hindenburg gasbag going down in flames at Lakehurst, New Jersey, whichever comes first.’
Adolf Hitler bent to his plate and began to eat rapidly, snapping at his meat and potatoes in silence.
The producer sighed heavily. The director, nudged by this, calmed the waters. ‘Another three weeks should see the masterwork in the can, and us sailing home on the Titanic, there to collide with the Jewish critics and go down bravely singing “Deutschland Uber Alles.”’
Suddenly all three were voracious and snapping and biting and chewing their food, and the spring breeze blew softly, and the crowd waited outside.
At last, Der Führer stopped, had another sip of beer, and lay back in his chair, touching his mustache with his little finger.
‘Nothing can provoke me on a day like this. The rushes last night were so beautiful. The casting for this film, ah! I find Göring to be incredible. Goebbels? Perfection!’ Sunlight dazzled out of Der Führer’s face. ‘So. So, I was thinking just last night, here I am in Bavaria, me, a pure Aryan—’
Both men flinched slightly, and waited.
‘—making a film,’ Hitler went on, laughing softly, ‘with a Jew from New York and a Jew from Hollywood. So amusing.’
‘I am not amused,’ said the director, lightly.
The producer shot him a glance which said: the film is not finished yet. Careful.
‘And I was thinking, wouldn’t it be fun …’ Here Der Führer stopped to take a big drink, ‘… to have another … ah … Nuremberg Rally?’
‘You mean for the film, of course?’
The director stared at Hitler. Hitler examined the texture of the suds in his beer.
‘My God,’ said the producer, ‘do you know how much it would cost to reproduce the Nuremberg Rally? How much did it cost Hitler for the original, Marc?’
He blinked at his director, who said, ‘A bundle. But he had a lot of free extras, of course.’
‘Of course! The Army, the Hitler Youth.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Hitler. ‘But think of the publicity, all over the world? Let us go to Nuremberg, eh, and film my plane, eh, and me coming down out of the clouds? I heard those people out there, just now: Nuremberg and plane and torches. They remember. I remember. I held a torch in that stadium. My God, it was beautiful. And now, now I am exactly the age Hitler was when he was at his prime.’
‘He was never at his prime,’ said the director. ‘Unless you mean hung-meat.’
Hitler put down his glass. His cheeks grew very red. Then he forced a smile to widen his lips and change the color of his face. ‘That is a joke, of course.’
‘A joke,’ said the producer, playing ventriloquist to his friend.
‘I was thinking,’ Hitler went on, his eyes on the clouds again, seeing it all, back in another year. ‘If we shot it next month, with the weather good. Think of all the tourists who would come to watch the filming!’
‘Yeah. Bormann might even come back from Argentina.’
The producer shot his director another glare.
Hitler cleared his throat and forced the words out: ‘As for expense, if you took one small ad, one mind you! in the Nuremberg papers one week before, why, you would have an army of people there as extras at fifty cents a day, no, a quarter, no, free!’
Der Führer emptied his stein, ordered another. The waitress dashed off to refill. Hitler studied his two friends.
‘You know,’ said the director, sitting up, his own eyes taking a kind of vicious fire, his teeth showing as he leaned forward, ‘there is a kind of idiot grace to you, a kind of murderous wit, a sort of half-ass style. Every once in a while you come dripping up with some sensational slime that gleams and stinks in the sun, buster. Archie, listen to him. Der Führer just had a great bowel movement. Drag in the astrologers! Slit the pigeons and filch their guts. Read me the casting sheets.’
The director leaped to his feet and began to pace.
‘That one ad in the paper, and all the trunks in Nuremberg get flung wide! Old uniforms come out to cover fat bellies! Old armbands come out to fit flabby arms! Old military caps with skull-eagles on them fly out to fit on fat-heads!’
‘I will not sit here—’ cried Hitler.
He started to get up but the producer was tugging his arm and the director had a knife at his heart: his forefinger, stabbing hard.
‘Sit.’
The director’s face hovered two inches from Hitler’s nose. Hitler slowly sank back, his cheeks perspiring.
‘God, you are a genius,’ said the director. ‘Jesus, your people would show up. Not the young, no, but the old. All the Hitler Youth, your age now, those senile bags of tripe yelling “Sieg Heil,” saluting, lighting torches at sunset, marching around the stadium crying themselves blind.’
The director swerved to his producer.
‘I tell you, Arch, this Hitler here has bilge for brains but this time he’s on target! If we don’t shove the Nuremberg Rally up this film, I quit. I mean it. I will simply walk out and let Adolf here take over and direct the damned thing himself! Speech over.’
He sat down.
Both the producer and Der Führer appeared to be in a state of shock.
‘Order me another goddamn beer,’ snapped the director.
Hitler gasped in a huge breath, tossed down his knife and fork, and shoved back his chair.
‘I do not break bread with such as you!’
‘Why, you bootlicking lapdog son of a bitch,’ said the director. ‘I’ll hold the mug and you’ll do the licking. Here.’ The director grabbed the beer and shoved it under Der Führer’s nose. The crowd, out beyond, gasped and almost surged. Hitler’s eyes rolled, for the director had seized him by the front of his tunic and was yanking him forward.
‘Lick! Drink the German filth! Drink, you scum!’
‘Boys, boys,’ said the producer.
‘Boys, crud! You know what this swill-hole, this chamberpot Nazi, has been thinking, sitting here, Archibald, and drinking your beer? Today Europe, tomorrow the world!’
‘No, no, Marc!’
‘No, no,’ said Hitler, staring down at the fist which clenched the material of his uniform. ‘The buttons, the buttons—’
‘Are loose on your tunic and inside your head, worm. Arch, look at him pour! Look
at the grease roll off his forehead, look at his stinking armpits. He’s a sea of sweat because I’ve read his mind! Tomorrow the world! Get this film set up, him cast in the lead. Bring him down out of the clouds, a month from now. Brass bands. Torchlight. Bring back Leni Riefenstahl to show us how she shot the Rally in “34. Hitler’s lady-director friend. Fifty cameras she used, fifty she used, by God, to get all the German crumbs lined up and vomiting lies, and Hitler in his creaking leather and Göring awash in his blubber, and Goebbels doing his wounded-monkey walk, the three superfags of history aswank in the stadium at dusk, make it all happen again, with this bastard up front, and do you know what’s going through his little graveyard mind behind his bloater eyes at this very moment?’
‘Marc, Marc,’ whispered the producer, eyes shut, grinding his teeth. ‘Sit down. Everyone sees.’
‘Let them see! Wake up, you! Don’t you shut your eyes on me, too! I’ve shut my eyes on you for days, filth. Now I want some attention. Here.’
He sloshed beer on Hitler’s face, which caused his eyes to snap wide and his eyes to roll yet again, as apoplexy burned his cheeks.
The crowd, out beyond, hissed in their breath.
The director, hearing, leered at them.
‘Boy, is this funny. They don’t know whether to come in or not, don’t know if you’re real or not, and neither do I. Tomorrow, you bilgy bastard, you really dream of becoming Der Führer.’
He bathed the man’s face with more beer.
The producer had turned away in his chair now and was frantically dabbing at some imaginary breadcrumbs on his tie. ‘Marc, for God’s sake—’
‘No, no, seriously, Archibald. This guy thinks because he puts on a ten-cent uniform and plays Hitler for four weeks at good pay that if we actually put together the Rally, why Christ, History would turn back, oh turn back, Time, Time in thy flight, make me a stupid Jew-baking Nazi again for tonight. Can you see it, Arch, this lice walking up to the microphones and shouting, and the crowd shouting back, and him really trying to take over, as if Roosevelt still lived and Churchill wasn’t six feet deep, and it was all to be lost or won again, but mainly won, because this time they wouldn’t stop at the Channel but just cross on over, give or take a million German boys dead, and stomp England and stomp America, isn’t that what’s going on inside your little Aryan skull, Adolf? Isn’t it!’
