by Carson, Tom
“Hey, fuck you!” I screamed. “Fuck you. I got here first, Maggie! I got here first.”
“So did the Vikings. Now get out of my way.”
In “The Gates of Hell,” the Arbeit Macht Frei gate opens somewhat mysteriously: “As if the demand for liberty of those within could no longer be contained.” It’s bullshit. I was standing right there when, after a quick check on whether the arguing officers were paying any attention, which they weren’t—that was when the light colonel jerked his .45 from its holster—Maggie started to prise up the restraining bar I hadn’t noticed, incidentally proving which of us was the real deal.
The thing she hadn’t counted on was that the once and future people all straining against it had no stake whatsoever in letting anyone in. They only saw someone about to let them out, and I doubt they even registered Maggie was female. That can’t have been a too significant distinction in there since around 1936. The second the restraining bar was loose, she went from bulky-coated human champagne bottle to cork in a latrine-smelling flash flood.
If the gate’s outward swing hadn’t pinned me behind it, I’d’ve been as buffeted as she was. I’d lost sight of Nachum Unger too, had no idea if—inspired to reclaim anonymity for the same reason he’d clung to his name—he was part of that frail and foul exodus. Nor did I see him once the crowd was recooped, or when I went back the next day in a foredoomed attempt to refind him.
Your Gramela’s only exportable Dachau memento: when the inmates sluiced out and the gate’s bars slammed into me or I banged into them, the r or the i in Arbeit Macht Frei cut my forehead, three-fourths of an inch above my left eyebrow. Half a century later, when my medicine-cabinet mug shot showed me the tiny scar was lost for good in crinkly Clio Airways routes, I confess to having mixed feelings.
At some officer’s shout, a few Tommy guns rat-tatted. Our boys had fired in the air, but the shots stopped the flood anyway. Some of them trying to apologize as they did so—and the single word “Pal,” spoken in a Tulsa twang in Dachau’s miasmal air, was never to sound so moving or so inadequate to me again—the 45th’s GIs moved the protesting, all too used to being herdable not-quite-former people back into their compound, desperately trying to avoid actually pushing them or aiming weapons: “Ya gotta wait, pal. Doctors are coming. Food’s on the way. For your sake I hope it ain’t Spam, buddy! You know Spam? Spam?”
Not a soul understood him, but his face must’ve been comic: I swear someone laughed. The sound could have made a bird gasp.
Just as the last of them were being squeezed back behind the gate, another GI grabbed my elbow to propel me inside. “Mac, what the fuck are you doing?” I shrieked. “Do I look Jewish to you, for Christ’s sake?”
“You were bleeding,” he blurted by way of atonement, mixed with a hint that I’d pulled a fast one: something any snail could do. Probably a replacement, he looked as if his unlined face’s inadequacy to everything it was being asked to react to would make his eyes resentful rather than generous in old age.
Quoth droll Eddie in Munich: “Easy mistake, Pamita. You are on the skinny side. Plus, that beak—”
I pitched a pillow at him. “I didn’t say I was complaining, did I?” he called. Stomping out of the room, I stomped back to my typewriter. Three words aside—“by Pamela Buchanan”—the scrounged page rolled into it was still blank but for the swastika watermark.
Posted by: Pam
If you’ve figured it out, you’re faster than I was. It wasn’t until my third straight day of being blocked on “The Gates of Hell” that I smacked my still Band-Aided forehead at my stupidity. Good God, why hadn’t I kept my mouth shut and bled? A little more thinking fast and I’d have succeeded where Maggie had failed. What a scoop: the only correspondent to experience Dachau while caged. Hell, the bonus I’d gotten for “To the Ends of the Earth” would’ve ended up looking like bus fare.
Thanks partly to that, none of Maggie’s biographers mentions the other woman reporter on the scene that day. Her mischief with the gate does show up in the more scrupulous accounts of Dachau’s liberation and is this old bag’s test of their reliability. Miss Higgins’s own published report, incidentally, had Eddie and me guffawing, since she and a photographer had apparently ended the Holocaust, which we didn’t yet call it, single-handed. In fairness to her, I repeat: twenty-four.
She’s my road not taken, Panama, not that I flatter myself I’d have gone along it as far as she did. Partly because it had no sequels—unlike Maggie, I’d never go through anything like that in front of a typewriter again—I did feel miffed when “The Gates of Hell” didn’t make the cut for the Library of America’s two volumes of classic World War Two reporting, unlike not only some of Maggie’s stuff but Eddie’s radio report from Dachau: “Better tell Junior to go out and play, folks. I come before this microphone with eyewitness testimony to a crime against mankind that must never be repeated…” But Marguerite Higgins is buried in Arlington and she deserves to be; for not only that war but Korea and Vietnam.
When I respotted her near the jeeps, she was plainly the worse for wear. I think she’d actually gotten knocked down in the panic when the Tommy guns blatted skyward—and if ever a sky deserved killing, it was that one. Tossing a breath up at those tightscrolled curls under her strangely earflapped soldier’s cap, she looked back at the gate with pride. Not complacent, hard-won. In memory, for we never met again, I salute her. If the books only put one gal at Dachau, I say give it to the braver of us two.
Then she got out a notebook coolly enough to turn Pam’s impulse to mimic her into intolerable monkey-do. As I started past her to make my way back over the stubby canal bridge instead, secretly begging only to be somewhere not raw with the imprint of livid events—in Dachau? Good luck there, Miss Buchman—I heard her say, “Colonel, Maggie Higgins, the Trib. Do we have an estimate yet on the numbers?”
“In there? My God, none.”
If I was looking for Eddie Whitling, which I’d like some points for thinking I wasn’t, I was lurching the wrong way. He was still on the compound side of the canal, trailing behind a squad of Thunderbirds along the fence to see if he could talk to anyone through it without risking his or their electrocution. (The juice was still live.) What hindsight tells me I was after is bound to strike you as grotesque. Not unlike Eddie, I was looking for a little bit of Dachau I could call my own.
I wished “Tiger! Tiger!” hadn’t stressed stench. Now I’d sound like a real broken record, all nose and no brain! Dogs would do better. The six I’d just lurched past, what made them journalistically interesting? Got it: even in death, thanks to their pelts, they looked warmer than the fifteen or twenty near naked or naked former human beings I could see sprawled in plain sight between mud and silver. If only it would rain in earnest. No, Roy had teased me for my devotion to weather.
American trucks were starting to groan this way from the camp’s main entrance, so slowly they clearly didn’t understand anything. Near the second cattle train—or was it now the first? The shit-stained and shit-stinking but empty one, near the railhead—a lone MP with a snagged brassard was already posted to direct them here and there with stupid traffic flags. He had a GI handkerchief knotted over his nose and mouth against the smell.
“Howdy, cowpoke!” I brayed. “Robbing the train? Stick ’em up! That gold’ll never reach Tucson, Tom Mix. Bang, bang, bang!”
Fumbling with his stupid sticks—too slow, too slow!—he jerked the kerchief down. “Ma’am?”
A few seconds later, he said, “Ma’am, I can’t move from here. How can I help?”
Pam was pretty sure he couldn’t, but I did have a list. If I’d had my druthers, Pam definitely wouldn’t be on her hands and knees in this icy foul muck. Lord knew when we’d get to change to dry clothes! I wished Pam hadn’t just vomited, partly because that reminded me of all the food she could eat anytime she or I liked.
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I wished that hadn’t reminded Pam of Dottie Idell in our kitchen before Pearl Harbor, especially since thinking that had just taken the horrifically inept hop, skip, and jump of thinking Sharon Halevy Cohnstein—instantly scooting in front of a substitute stove out in Williamsburg—shouldn’t be allowed to exist in a world like this one. Above all, I wished Pam hadn’t started blubbering because her forehead’s new ruby still smarted and she was fresh out of dulcetly literate Regent’s descriptions of bodies and stink and the awful factory clatter of machine guns and euphemized human shit everywhere. What I’d have given for Pam’s one lucid thought since noon to have been something other than a venomous reflection as she stared at Maggie that life’s always greased for you when your hair is pretty.
I wished the stupid MP and his fucking dumb little furled flags would wave the trucks to run over me when they finally got here. Oh, Panama! Never mind that Maggie Higgins wasn’t scared of trying to get into the compound, however irresponsible that sounds. She wasn’t scared of writing it. On my hands and knees in randomly silvered mud, I was feeling sorry for myself with starved bodies reaching for the sky around me.
The hands that helped up not-Pam turned out to be Eddie’s. “It’s all right, Pamita,” he said, atavistically batting away the reek of my pukey breath before a grimace signaled he’d remembered what replaced it: Dachau’s. “It got to me too.”
And notice, as I only did a week later, his admission’s implication that I hadn’t seen it get to him back at the death train. Men always try to treat our hearing and our sight as two sovereign powers, brokering alliances with one or the other as it suits their notion of Realpolitik. They can’t even be selfless without hoping we’re eyeless.
Posted by: Pam
“The Gates of Hell” takes dramatic license in compressing all its perceptions—and omissions, says a wry vegetable-chopping voice or two—into one afternoon. In unforgiving fact, it wasn’t until we forced ourselves to go back the next day and split up to poke around as much of Dachau’s vast layout as possible that Eddie completed his metamorphosis into “the soldier” by discovering its abandoned Brigadoon. Spotting a portal in a discreetly walled brick compound north of the inmates’ stinking barracks, he stepped into a haven of Gemütlichkeit homes and tended lawns: housing for Hauptsturmfühers, Sturmbannführers, Obersturmbannführers, and Standartenführers.
The one he entered was cozy, with the one and only unprefixed Führer approvingly sizing up chintz from his gilt frame above the mantel and the familiar boiled-potato smell of humid German kitchens, whose gestalt always does make cooking seem like another ablution. People had sat down to meals here. Upstairs, one room held a boy’s playthings: rocking horse, toy train set. Children had been raised here.
Think of that, Panama. Because it’s associated with your earliest memories, you love beach air’s freighted tang. Today, are those onetime tykes’ nostrils doomed to quake with nostalgia when they walk past cesspools? Funerals bother them: of their five senses, one that should be stimulated isn’t. In food shops they’re suckers for especially stinky cheeses, like the ones they misremember Mutti used to buy. For no reason they can name, coffins strike them as a waste of money.
And no: it wasn’t their idea to be born there. It’s never anyone’s idea to be born anywhere, and we get no say as to when. Unlike our exit if we’re in the mood, and this pretzel should know.
In the master bedroom, which like the whole building was infuriatingly undamaged—our boys had looted the liquor, left the rest—the soldier saw a feather bed. From pure campaign habit, he threw himself on it, stretching out from crusty boots to crewcut; booze was the only other thing nobody in the ETO passed up. We claimed beds even when we hadn’t felt tired until then, knowing our illusion of wakefulness was just exhaustion held in check by nerves.
Just as the pillow’s wings nunnified the soldier’s now helmetless head, obliterating the ticks of the watch on the forearm hooked under it, he turned his eyes to the wall. Like all those in this house that faced the inmates’ barracks, it had no windows.
Thanks to a grippable bedpost, he was back on his feet right away. When Eddie agreed to let Pam borrow not-him for “The Gates of Hell,” he claimed his hands were swabbing at his clothes without a say-so from his brain. He even felt bad about grabbing the bedpost, and his scalp was telling him he wouldn’t rest easy until he’d found some shampoo. Just not theirs.
However pooped a man may be, some beds just aren’t worth sharing with their former owners. Of course “I’d just pictured that pillow under Frau Major’s fat ass” was too crude an epiphany for the soldier to think it, but I did try to hint at the sexual dimension of Eddie’s revulsion by scattering some women’s unmentionables on the carpet. They’d probably been there, Frau Major having presumably packed in a hell of a hurry. Men just don’t notice.
From his next remark, Eddie must’ve regretted giving me that glimpse of an Eddie whose body was jerked by morality’s strings. We were in the gloomy domed basement of Munich’s Hofbrauhaus, site of Adolf’s proclamation of the Nazi Party’s program in 1920 and now, a few unmoving migrations later, one of the 45th’s regimental CPs. The Germans took it back eventually; the night Cadwaller and I revisited in 1959, glum tourists playing glum hooky from a glum NATO conference, a group sing broke out, swaying tankards and all. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” my third husband grunted.
Four days after Dachau’s liberation, what was Eddie’s next remark? This, with a forced and hence authentic grin: “Natch, if you’d been there with me, Pamita, the story might’ve had a different ending. Huh?” He even got his eyes to twinkle, which was like watching television be invented in a crypt.
“Oh, Eddie,” I said, disgusted. And for the first time, sorry for him, the reaction that fatally lingered. Pink Thing’s archives keep maintaining Nothing’s pub party was when chipper, compulsively self-estranging Eddie Whitling crossed from irrepressible to helpless. That’s wrong, though: it was in Munich. So often, what we remember as our perceptions are just belated confirmation of something we’ve known latently forever.
“I wonder if they made beer there?” he said restlessly, which was chivalry of a sort. He was groping for an acceptable halfway house between his manner and my mood. “You didn’t see a brewery, did you?”
Posted by: Pam
I hadn’t, which doesn’t mean there wasn’t one somewhere in Dachau’s maze of workshops. And though I hesitated briefly over dead Daisy’s typewriter—good detail, too patly yeasty an irony?—the American woman who wandered through “The Gates of Hell” didn’t see a brewery either. Fudging was one thing, outright invention another.
For instance, it was a meek Hershey bar, not my idiot Lucky Strikes, that the nurse was on the verge of pulling from her breast pocket to push through the Arbeit Macht Frei gate when the shavetail lieutenant shouted at us to quit. That kind of thing was all right. So was resorting to an anodyne “Later” to get her inside the prisoners’ compound, something I only did under escort the next day. Not without a teeth-clenched inner “Fuck you,” I admit, since my rival—her deadlines were tighter, like her skirts and her curls and her coiled pissy cunt—had shedaddled by the time they let us correspondents in.
I’d reluctantly introduced the nurse after realizing the soldier couldn’t see everything, not only because his perspective was limited but because no such entity was within human grasp. As I wrote in “The Gates,” there was no everything to Dachau. Something would always be left out, had to be—the story of a single shoe in that place could’ve filled an encyclopedia.
So like the soldier, the nurse just wandered. Unlike me, she didn’t throw up, much less turn a lone MP into Hopalong Cassidy; she was a professional. As she went through the barracks, she was assessing which emaciated not-quite-former people had a chance. (In fact, I was looking for Nachum Unger. As I’ve said, in vain.) Around the time the sold
ier came upon the officers’ quarters, the nurse found the camp’s infirmary.
Naturally it was for the guards. Unable to grasp that not only were they prisoners but their former victims weren’t, its tenants—poor halitosal Hansel, down with a corn—had been monstrously indignant, so I was told, at being ejected (poor greentoothed skeevy Erich, did you shiver with the flu?) to make room for a handful of inmates.
All the same, it’s true that, like the soldier and the nurse in “The Gates,” Eddie’s and my paths recrossed outside Dachau’s modest crematorium. Modest, you ask? Oh, yes. Unlike Auschwitz, Dachau wasn’t an extermination camp. The thousands who died there died unsystematically: shot, worked to death, succumbing to starvation or disease.
Mauled by trained dogs for entertainment.
In the usual tangle, the couple of hundred as yet unburned bodies our soldiers had found heaped almost to the rafters in the storehouse next to the crematorium were still there. Roy rightly made me cut an overelaborate simile about indecipherable chalk at the top of an oversized blackboard, but I was trying to get across the strangeness of looking up at mortality. Ever since, I’ve believed we stick it in the ground to make that state inferior to our own.
Anyhow, that’s when I turned and saw Eddie. While I wouldn’t understand for years that the final sentence of “The Gates of Hell” was also my goodbye to my quip-happy ETO Virgil, I was proudest of it for a note of doubt I don’t think my editor (“beautiful roy”) ever caught. Tapped out in Munich on dead Daisy’s typewriter in a two a.m. litter of balled-up pages, overflowing ashtrays, half filled bottles, maimed copies of Mein Kampf, and Eddie’s new snores, this was it: “Four living creatures despite it all, their eyes met.”
