by Adam Thorpe
14
There were some big turn-of-the-century houses along the wide street, villas with stone porches and complicated wrought iron on the balconies and some neat gardens. Most of them had been hit or shot up some. Either the Heinies ran like hell or they stopped and brought down trouble on everyone’s heads. You are entering an enemy country. KEEP ALERT.
One big house was intact for a couple of floors, though the door was hanging off its hinges. He could see furniture inside. Maybe there were nice wooden beds in there with down mattresses and maybe this was virgin territory, untouched by other squads, and the beds were all free. The map they’d used to work out who was covering which sector was so dirty you could hardly make out the streets anyway. He’d made a rough copy of it as patrol leader, and he looked at it now.
This one must be Fritz-Todt-Strasse, big and curved. There were a lot of bodies lying about on Fritz-Todt-Strasse, only one in uniform and not searched; it was another SS dead, with a Hitler moustache of blood that had unravelled down one cheek to the ear and onto the grey collar. Every intact dead in the world looked like they were pretending to sleep. Some looked like they had stomach cramp. The other deads were half-naked, mostly women and kids. A dead horse nearby tied to a charred farm wagon. The smell was bad.
And these were people who said only yesterday, ‘Our luck will turn right tomorrow or maybe the day after tomorrow.’ Otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered to run.
He should go home.
Some goddamn 88s were still whistling and out to the east there were detonations and columns of black smoke. Maybe the rabbits who’d ambushed them on the highway had pals the other side of town.
The big houses might have some liquor in them, or stashed food, apart from beds. There were no people. The rich had got out. He didn’t bother to go through the pockets of that SS soldier. Who was half-burnt, anyway. Instead, he took a closer look at the villa, holding his rifle. All the windows were shuttered and the railings high and the gates padlocked. One of the railings was buckled from the shell that had killed the horse and stuff in the road – he could step right over it and almost immediately he stopped on the path up.
There were two steps and then the door, only the door had been blown or kicked open. He guessed the rooms had been looked over. There was a shadow stood halfway inside the door and he tensed out of cover as though he was in a wood.
It was a GI.
In fact, it was Morrison. Hell, he almost thought I love you. He could tell that stocky, stubbled neck anywhere. Also the sloped shoulders and the black linen tape on the barrel of the shouldered rifle and the pocket lamp tucked into his left bootstrap. And the way the tunic folded at the shoulders. It was all almost beautiful because he knew it so well, like home.
Morrison was talking to someone in the darker shadows of the room.
Parry came up and Morrison didn’t even look surprised, he was too concentrated on the immediate task in hand. He was offering a couple of hard candies to a girl. She was standing in the shadows of the hall. Parry couldn’t see clearly, but he reckoned this girl was a looker. The ceiling above her head bulged down and the furniture had been kicked or blown over. She was not exactly frightened, more not wanting to make the wrong move. She looked very thin, too thin even for Parry, with a lot of unwashed, copper-blonde hair.
‘Candy?’ Morrison was saying. ‘Candy? Bonbon?’ Then he looked round and saw Parry, who laughed.
‘I guess she sees there are strings attached,’ said Parry.
‘Hell, she gets the candy and the American.’
Morrison’s lips were as curvy as ever, his eyelids half-closed in the square face: Parry could see a sweet-and-lovely going for him. Or a man. A film star’s mouth. A female star! That was why he couldn’t remember which fucking one it was. Certainly not Tony Martin.
‘She may not want the second. I’ve liberated some cognac. Morriboy, I’ve gotten hold of some cognac.’
‘Cognac?’
‘Vintage stuff. Like in France. Where are the others?’
‘They ain’t showing up till they’ve had themselves some fun, Neal.’
‘Hell, we’re regrouping in about ten minutes.’
‘Is that so? Time flies. What’s “sleep” in German? It’s gone clean outa my head. Sounds like a steam train.’
‘You ain’t got time,’ said Parry.
‘Sure I have time. I have so much time. I have more time than you can know. Hundreds of fucking hours.’
‘Don’t mind me, then.’
‘I don’t know this word.’
‘Maybe I don’t know it like you don’t know it.’
‘All right. And you know everything, pal. You’re quicker than a speedboat.’
‘Morriboy –’
‘What’s that fucking word, Neal? C’mon, c’mon . . . It is necessary. It is obliged, man.’
Parry began to feel nervous about what he’d done. Maybe he’d have to go back alone and invent something. I lost the patrol I was leading when a spare batalion of Waffen-SS sprang up. Then he thought: Gentle up, man, time is not sacred. Only warmth is sacred. Outside of the eternal, which is probably neither warm nor cold. Like sleep.
‘Schlafen,’ he said.
‘Yup, that’s it.’
If only he’d known the German for ‘roundworm’. Or ‘knitting needle’. He knew ‘canal’.
Morrison walked forward into the room, waving his candies and saying, ‘Schlafen? Schlafen?’
The girl was not saying one word back. She was standing there with her hands clasped in front of her and her pair of big eyes staring out and saying nothing.
Morrison was going slowly, like she was a rabbit.
Parry looked past Morrison’s stocky neck and its stubble folding up against the collar and he saw the girl glancing to her left.
The front door had been blown or kicked open. The house would have been cased but she was looking sideways. She was glancing to her left.
Morrison did a pirouette.
The wallpaper on the side wall started to spot and smoke red along a line and the sound was a fraction after. He could not hear the shots until there they were and they were so goddamn loud they slit his mind up like pants.
Parry seemed to take months to get to the point where he was crouched outside by the side of the two steps, gripping the rifle, not even his nose showing beyond the doorjamb.
He waited, his heart in his nose. If he showed his nose he’d be shot up. That’s all it took. There were no sounds, now, except the buzz in his ears. There was no one in the hallway, he could hear that.
He inched forward until he could see in over the side of the steps, the rifle’s muzzle going first with his helmet on it, playing the puppet.
Nobody was shooting him up.
Morrison had got in the fucking gondola and was crossing the line. He was shuddering on the floor with a pink candy in his hand, still in its cellophane. The girl had vanished. Blood was pulsing out from under Morrison’s jaw and he had gills in his neck. He had to be thrown back in the water. The splash on the wallpaper was like a hill painted by a five-year-old. It was dribbling down over the pattern of flowers.
Morrison was not saying anything, he was not even calling for a medic or his mom. He was just shuddering, eyes wide open and looking hard at the floor between him and Parry, with his hand under his head as if cradling it. His helmet was rocking on the floor and the pin-up was soaked in blood next to it. Would you mind if I took a little time to think that over?
Parry was trembling so much that he couldn’t keep the goddamn rifle still. The sniper must be in the room to the right, its outside shutters closed, a slice of flowery yellow wallpaper through its open door. Ugly fucking foreign taste.
Back of him, out in the street, a few civilians were wandering about, picking their way over debris and the bodies. There was not a single soldier in sight. Morrison was crossing in the fucking speedboat, from the look of his shuddering. There was blood all over his face, like he was stari
ng through fall leaves in a West Virginia wood, and his lips were pulled back and no longer curved.
This was all virgin fuck.
Parry could hear Morrison moan now, little upset moans like a kid. Hell, he could have gone quietly. Parry wanted to shout for a medic, for back-up, he wanted to yell but that would give him away to the sniper whereas right now the sniper did not know there was another man, of that he was fairly sure. He didn’t have a goddamn grenade. He wanted to keep cool. Nobody must call him sir or Corporal. He was all fuck. He should’ve had a grenade and chucked it in by the door but grenades were heavy, hanging off your belt, and he liked to travel light when he could. He could only blame himself. He was a jerk. He should drag Morrison out of there but the sniper was in the room to the right and the wounded man was lying in front of the open door to the room. Parry had been in this situation before, but with the boys around him; here he was alone. He couldn’t quite grasp this thing: his guardian angel had been hit after seven months of living through everything that was fucking thrown at him in France and Belgium and Luxembourg and Germany. Not at any point on the whole goddamn run had Parry felt so alone and now, he realised, he was scared.
In fact, he hadn’t been scared like this for months. Even crossing the Siegfried Line and the two big rivers. He’d gotten over the fright that almost paralysed him, those first days under fire in France. If he kept quiet, now, and stopped shaking so much the sniper might come out into the hall. If only he’d had a fucking grenade or a sticky bomb. All he had was his lousy M1 carbine and his combat knife and his German fucking phrase book.
I can run for help.
It seemed crazy that there were no Americans around, none of their own guys. He had not disbanded the patrol for ever, just for a few goddamn fucking minutes. Maybe they’d all left, his whole Company – every one of the companies, whole battalions of them, the whole of the fucking division, the whole goddamn Third Army down to the last cigarette and dehydrated T-juice cocktail, leaving behind just him and Morrison in the ruins, like in so many dreams he’d had.
In which he could never skip rope, either.
There was a strong scent of cognac. His back was wet. He’d smashed the fucking goddamned cognac in his pack, leaping out of the doorway and backing up against the wall. One minute you’re in one place and the next another. Day after tomorrow your luck turns but you’re dead by then.
The civilians passed by and kept their distance. They had plaster in their hair, like flour. He must look real worked up and scared, his knuckles white on his rifle. It would do no good if he yelled, not even for a medic. It was unnatural, not yelling for a medic. His ears were ringing from the shots. The back of Morrison’s stocky neck was still folded up against the collar, still unattractive. Parry felt gripped by a kind of exhaustion, it made him indecisive. His raw ass chafed like hell against his filthy underwear as he sat on his heels and grew indecisive.
He tried to concentrate.
It looked and sounded like Morrison had been hit by a Spandau – a whole shiny machine-gun sitting on its bipod, the girl like a fat fly luring the bird. The way those bullets had smacked the wallpaper, it was bound to be a machine-gun. Yup. Yup. Yup.
Gentle up.
Then one of the civilians in the road put her hand up to her face, staring in horror. The blood was coming down over the doorsill and over the two smooth marbled steps and trickling down the side like paint and around his heels and kind of making it down the three yards of path because the path was also on a slope and the joints were done awful good and the blood was pooling at the bust gate.
He looked at it, dispassionately, as if it was water, as if someone had thrown a bucket of water on the hall tiles to clean them and it was coming out that dark red colour he knew so well. It was spilling over his side of the steps and pooling around his big solid soldier’s heels. The guy had a lot of blood in him.
Abel Morrison shouldn’t have done what he did. He shouldn’t have tried to fraternise. To entice the dumb rabbit.
Would you mind if I took a little time to think that over?
Now he – Neal Wesley Parry – must find a solution. The solution could not be found on his own merit.
He was sliding his back very slowly up the wall. He stopped, bent over a little. He listened. It was very quiet. He thought he’d heard something, a movement. The civilians had fucked off, scared. There, again. The sound.
It was a match.
He heard a match being struck in the room off the hallway. The guy was maybe going to blow the house up, a suicidal gesture. Parry tensed himself to run.
Then he smelt tobacco.
The guy who’d shot Morrison out of his life was smoking a cigarette. No, a pipe. It made Parry want one, too. Good, rich, three-star pipe tobacco. Sweet tamped-down tobacco, a great deal better than Old Gold.
He was still shaking – more trembling, now. And the blood was everywhere. Morrison was just emptying himself out like a tipped-over bottle. Profound wound, haemorrhaging. The blood had reached the gate and was crumpling up in the dust there. The world was very quiet. Even the explosions and small-arms shit had stopped. He thought he could hear the guy’s pipe leaving his lips. He must be just sitting there behind his Spandau, with the girl, arm around the girl, smoking his curved and warty Heinie-type pipe – the fucking heroic last stand of the crazy son-of-a-bitch cocksucking German. Waiting.
Parry felt really scared, now. Fear came up and winded him like grief. He’d never met this before, that’s why. The only Germans he’d seen were either dead or hurt or walking out with their hands above their heads – mostly Volkssturm guys, the ones walking out with their hands above their heads, mostly old men and kids. The others’d fired at him from woods or distant buildings, but he’d never seen them firing. He’d seen their gunfire sparkle off the sides of tanks or drop his comrades right next to him but he’d never seen the guys in person, actually firing. This is why he was scared. It was a kind of duel.
He was angry with himself for being scared. He was even angrier with himself for having the shits again.
He was pressed up against the wall, his boots in Morrison’s good Wisconsin blood, and he was needing to go. He pictured himself rolling into the hall and firing from the hip through the doorway, but this would not translate into action. His face was so tense it hurt, it was creased up and his helmet lining was chafing his eczema and he wanted to cry. The civilians had walked off and away, they weren’t even spectating. Yellow cowards. He couldn’t handle a Spandau on his own, a whole 23-pounder spitting 800 sharp bullets a minute so there was nowhere to put yourself. He ought to run like hell for help. The others couldn’t be far. They shouldn’t have gone so far, they should’ve been heading back to the museum by now, all seven of them.
Morrison was still making sounds.
Not really moans now, more like whimpers, more like a puppy whimpering in the basket when it wants the mother-bitch. Parry stopped his desire to take a look, or to whisper, ‘It’s OK, buddy, I’m right by you.’ Instead he mouthed it, which was pointless. He had a picture of Bayou their old labrador in his head, back in Clarksburg. She’d have so many litters, puppies squirming all around her and whimpering just like that, and sometimes his father would have to drown them when they weren’t pure-breed labrador. That was sad. He didn’t see what was so wrong with mongrels.
He inched his back further up the wall, but his tunic caught on the roughness of the finish and the collar was pulling at his neck, squashing his Adam’s apple. He came away slightly, like everything was balanced very finely on his head. He heard a laugh. He was sure it was a laugh. From inside the room. A man’s low laugh. His belly ached. He looked across at the window but there was no way he’d get that shutter open in time, he’d be shot to pieces through the slats. He was desperate to look through the slats. Maybe he could fire his M1 straight through the shutter without opening it, through that gap there between the slats, but the window was set too high, he’d have to jump up. It was set so high yo
u could only have seen over the sill on tiptoe: the whole house was set two good steps up, it was to keep the damp ground off, like at home in Clarksburg. Sensible. Against the bugs. For a moment everything went dream-like and hazy, as if his fear had sleepiness on the flip-side.
He all but went to sleep standing up, with his eyes open.
He came to and reckoned he ought to run like hell, but his legs were weak and the ground kept rolling a little. He was fully upright, now, bent over slightly, wanting only to jump out of the blood, his belly aching to let go its weight.
Then his belly let go all by itself.
This was not very polite. Always the left leg, as if he could only shit from one side. It reached his sock. The smell rose up to his nose as steam and smoke from around a locomotive rises and covers everything on the station platform, only this one didn’t smell of coal.
Germans, beware! Do not buy from Jews! Who said, I do not counsel you to love your neighbour, but to love him who is furthest from you? Could it really have been Nietzsche? Or was it Schopenhauer? I wish I could ask Papa!
15
Herr Hoffer was only half-surprised by the realisation that Werner despised him. Nevertheless, he could not speak for several minutes. Silences could be unembarrassedly long in shelters during air raids, which was why people would take down with them a gramophone or a pack of cards. People would go to sleep, or pretend to. It was like sitting in a train carriage for a long journey with others and scarcely speaking. The soft darkness helped, and the fear that seemed like an abstract thing behind one’s mind, a sort of square of purple or vermilion. This fear united one with the others present; it was a sobering thought, to think one might die with these people – perfect strangers, much of the time. Strangers who sniffed or mumbled or tapped and drove one mad.
