Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  They smiled at each other.

  But an hour later she thought she heard a noise outside the door. She made him get up and dress and go out the back door, the way he’d come, and she was very vague about when he could see her again.

  Christian sat in the corner of the crowded compartment, his face set and abstracted, his eyes closed, as the train drew closer to Rennes. There was a heavy, rank smell in the train, because it was night and all the windows were closed and the blinds drawn, a thick, sour smell of soldiers who never had enough changes of linen or frequent enough opportunities to bathe, who ate and slept and lived in the same clothes for months on end. Suddenly he hated the smell with a nerve-tearing, intolerable intensity. A civilized man, he thought, should not have to live in such constant foulness. The least a man should expect to get from the twentieth century was that the air he breathed not be a continual offense in his nostrils. He opened his eyes and looked gloomily at the sprawling men around him. Slack, slightly drunken, sleeping faces. Sleep redeemed some faces, made them gentle, child-like, but not these faces. There was an air of slyness, of cheating and timid cunning that sleep seemed to intensify on these flabby, ugly features. God, Christian thought, feeling the muscles of his jaw jumping in distaste, I must get out of this …

  He closed his eyes again. Another few hours, he thought, and Rennes again, Lieutenant Hardenburg again, the thick, unexciting face of Corinne again, the patrols again, the weeping Frenchmen, the lounging soldiers in the cafés, the soggy routine again … He felt like standing up on his seat and screaming at the top of his voice. And nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t even help win or lose the war, shorten or lengthen it by a minute. And every time he got into bed, and closed his eyes and tried to sleep, the image of Gretchen began to roar in his waking blood, tantalizing, hopeless … She had refused to see him again after that night. She had been polite on the phone, although frightened, and had said she’d really love to see him, but there was an old friend who had just come back from Norway …(That old friend, who kept returning from Tunis or Reims or Smolensk, always with a rich, expensive gift that Christian couldn’t match …) That might be the way to do it. The next time he got to Berlin to have a lot of money, be able to get her a fur coat, a leather suit, the new phonograph she had mentioned. That might be it, Christian thought, eyes closed among the stinking soldiers, with the rattle of the wheels below in the French night … enough money might do the trick. I’ll tell Corinne, he thought, to bring her brother-in-law around. It was time to stop being a fool about this. Next time I get to Berlin, he thought, I am going to have my pockets stuffed. A little gasoline, Corinne had said, and her brother-in-law could run three trucks. Brother-in-law will get that gasoline, Christian thought grimly, without delay. He smiled a little and even managed to drop off to sleep in the next ten minutes as the train rolled slowly on toward Brittany.

  Lieutenant Hardenburg was in the orderly room when Christian reported in the next morning. He looked thinner and more alert, as though he had been exercising. He was striding back and forth with a springy, energetic step, and he smiled with what was for him great amiability, as he returned Christian’s salute.

  “Did you have a good time?” he asked, his voice friendly and pleasant.

  “Very good, Sir,” Christian said.

  “Mrs. Hardenburg wrote me,” the Lieutenant said, “that you delivered the lace.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very good of you.”

  “It’s nothing, Sir.”

  The Lieutenant peered at Christian, a little shyly, Christian thought. “Did she uh … look well?” he asked.

  “She looked very fit, Sir,” Christian said gravely.

  “Ah, good. Good.” The Lieutenant wheeled nervously in what was almost a pirouette, in front of the map of Africa that had supplanted the map of Russia on the wall. “Delighted. She has a tendency to work too hard, overdo things. Delighted,” he said vaguely and spiritedly. “Lucky thing,” he said, “lucky thing you took your leave when you did.”

  Christian didn’t say anything. He was in no mood to engage in a long, social conversation with Lieutenant Hardenburg. He hadn’t seen Corinne yet and he was impatient to get her and tell her to get in touch with her brother-in-law.

  “Yes,” Lieutenant Hardenburg said, “very lucky.” He grinned inexplicably. “Come over here, Sergeant,” he said mysteriously. He went to the barred grimy window and stared out. Christian followed him and stood next to him.

  “I want you to understand,” Hardenburg whispered, “that all this is extremely confidential. Secret. I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but we’ve been together a long time and I feel I can trust you …”

  “Yes, Sir,” Christian said cautiously.

  Hardenburg looked around him carefully, then leaned a little closer to Christian. “Finally,” he said, the jubilance plain in his voice, “finally, it’s happened. We’re moving.” He turned his head sharply and looked over his shoulder. The clerk, who was the only other person in the room, was thirty feet away. “Africa,” Hardenburg whispered, so low that Christian barely heard him. “The Africa Corps.” He grinned widely. “In two weeks. Isn’t it marvelous?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Christian said, flatly, after awhile.

  “I know you’d be pleased,” said Hardenburg.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “There’ll be a lot to do in the next two weeks. You’re going to be a busy man. The Captain wanted to cancel your leave, but I felt it would do you good, and you could make up for the time you’d lost …”

  “Thank you very much, Sir,” said Christian.

  “Finally,” said Hardenburg triumphantly, rubbing his hands. “Finally.” He stared unseeingly through the window, his eyes on the dust clouds rising from the armored tread on the roads of Libya, his ears hearing the noise of cannon on the Mediterranean coast. “I was beginning to be afraid,” Hardenburg said softly, “that I would never get to see a battle.” He shook his head, raising himself from his delicious reverie. “All right, Sergeant,” he said, in his usual, clipped voice. “I’ll want you back here in an hour.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Christian. He started to go, then turned. “Lieutenant,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “I wish to submit the name of a man in the 147th Pioneers for disciplinary action.”

  “Give it to the clerk,” said the Lieutenant. “I’ll send it through the proper channels.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Christian and went over to the clerk and watched him write down the name of Private Hans Reuter, unsoldierly appearance and conduct, complaint brought by Sergeant Christian Diestl.

  “He’s in trouble,” the clerk said professionally. “He’ll get restricted for a month.”

  “Probably,” said Christian and went outside. He stood in front of the barracks door for a moment, then started for Corinne’s house. Halfway there, he halted. Ridiculous, he thought. What’s the sense in seeing her now?

  He walked slowly back along the street. He stopped in front of a jeweler’s shop, with a high small window. In the window there were some small diamond rings and a gold pendant with a large topaz on the end of it. Christian looked at the topaz, thinking: Gretchen would like that. I wonder how much it costs.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THERE WERE BOYS and young men all over the halls, lounging, smoking, spitting, talking loudly in the concrete accents of the New York streets, saying, in the grimy cold corridor that smelled of sweat and public use, “Uncle Sam, here’s Vincent Kelly,” and “There I was lissenin’ to the foolball game and this bastidd breaks in and he says, the Japs went and hit Hickam Field. And I got so excited I didn’t lissen no more and then I said to my wife, I said, ‘Where the hell is Hickam Field?’ and that’s the first words I said in the war.”

  And other voice said, “Nuts, they’ll grab you later on, anyway. My motto is get in on the ground floor. My old man was in on the Marines the last time and he said, ‘The ratings’ll all go to the first guys
that show up.’ That’s the way it was in the last one, he said, you didn’t have to be smart, you just had to be early.”

  And they said, “I wouldn’t mind seeing those Islands. One thing I can’t stand is Noo Yawk in the winter. Summertime they’d have to come and get me, but I got a outside job, anyway, with the Gas Company, and no army could be worse than that.”

  And they said, “Have a drink. This war is great. The dame I was with said, ‘My aching back, they’re killing American boys’ an’ I said, ‘I’m joinin’ up in the mawning to fight for democracy, Clara,’ and she cried and I laid her, right there in her own bedroom, with her husband’s picture watchin’ in a sailor suit. I been tryin’ to lay that broad for three weeks and I was thrown out at first base every time I got up to the plate. But last night she was like a cage full of overflowin’ tigers, and she nearly bust the springs loose from the bed with patriotism.”

  And they said, “The hell with the Navy. I want to be some place where I can dig a hole.”

  Noah stood among the patriots, waiting his turn to be interviewed by the recruiting officer. He had taken Hope home late and it had been a bad time when he told her what he was going to do, and he had slept poorly, with one of his old dreams about being put up against a wall and machine-gunned, and he had risen in the dark to go down to Whitehall Street to enlist, hoping to be early enough to avoid getting caught in the crowd he was sure would be besieging the place. As he looked around at the others he wondered how the draft had missed them all, but that was almost the limit of speculation his weary mind could manage at the moment. In the days before the attack he had tried not to think it out, but, remorselessly, his conscience had made the decision for him. If the war began, he could not hesitate. As an honorable citizen, as a believer in the war, as an enemy of Fascism, as a Jew … He shook his head. There it was again. That should have nothing to do with it. Most of these men were not Jews, and yet here they were at six-thirty of a winter’s morning, the second day of the war, ready to die. And they were better, he knew, than they sounded. The rough jokes, the cynical estimates, were all on the surface, embarrassed attempts to hide the true depths of the feeling that had brought them to this place. As an American, then. He refused to put himself at this moment into any special category. Perhaps, he thought, I will ask to be sent to the Pacific. Not against Germany. That would prove to them that it wasn’t because he was a Jew … Nonsense, nonsense, he thought, I’ll go where they send me.

  A door opened and a fat sergeant with a beery face came out and shouted irritably, “All right, all right, you guys. Stop spittin’ on the floor, this is government property. And stop shovin’. Nobody’s goin’ to be left behind. The Army’s got plenty of room for everybody. Come in, one by one, through this door, when I give you the word. And leave your bottles outside. This is a United States Army installation.”

  It took all day. He was shipped to Governor’s Island in an Army ferry that had a General’s name on it. He stood on the crowded deck, his nose running with the cold, watching the harbor traffic on the slate waters. He wondered what obscure act of heroism or flattery the General had done in his day to deserve this minute honor. The Island was busy and thronged with soldiers who were grimly carrying guns, as though they expected to have to repel a landing party of Japanese marines at any moment.

  Noah had told Hope he would try to call her at her office some time during the day, but he didn’t want to lose his place in the slow line that went past the bored, short-tempered doctors.

  “Christ,” the man next to Noah said, looking down the long line of naked, scrawny, flabby aspirants for glory, “is this what’s going to defend the country? Christ, we’ve lost the war.”

  Noah grinned a little self-consciously, and threw his shoulders back, measuring himself secretly in his nakedness against the others. There were three or four powerful young men, who looked as though they had played football, and one enormous man with a clipper in full sail tattooed on his chest, but Noah was pleased to see that he compared favorably with most of the rest. He had become acutely conscious of his body in the last few months. The Army, he thought as he waited to get his chest x-rayed, will probably build me up considerably. Hope will be pleased. Then he grinned. It was an elaborate, roundabout way to put yourself in condition, to have your country go to war against the Empire of Japan.

  The doctors paid little attention to him. His vision was normal, he did not have piles, flat feet, hernia, or gonorrhea. He did not have syphilis or epilepsy, and in a minute and a half interview a psychiatrist decided he was sane enough for the purposes of modern warfare. His joints articulated well enough to please the Surgeon General and his teeth met in an efficient enough manner to insure his being able to chew Army food and there were no scars or lesions evident anywhere on his skin.

  He dressed, glad to get his clothes on once again, thinking, tomorrow it will be a uniform, and went up, in the slow-moving line, to the sallow, harassed-looking medical officer who sat at a yellow desk, stamping 1A, Limited Service, or Rejected, on the medical records.

  I wonder, Noah was thinking, as the doctor bent over his record, I wonder if I’ll be sent to some camp near New York so I can see Hope on passes …

  The doctor picked up one of the stamps and tapped it several times on a pad. Then he hit Noah’s record and pushed it toward him. Noah looked down at it. REJECTED was smeared across it in blurred purple letters. Noah shook his head and blinked. It still said REJECTED.

  “What …?” he began.

  The doctor looked up at him, not unkindly. “Your lungs, son,” he said. “The x-ray show scar tissue on both of them. When did you have t.b.?”

  “I never had t.b.”

  The doctor shrugged. “Sorry, son,” he said. “Next.”

  Noah walked slowly out of the building. It was evening now, and the wind was cruel and full of December as it swept off the harbor across the old fort and the barracks and parade ground that stood over the sea approaches to the city. The city itself was a clot of a million lights across the dark stretch of water. New levees of draftees and volunteers came pouring off the ferries, shuffling off to the waiting doctors and the final purple stamps.

  Noah shivered and put his collar up, clutching the sheet of paper with his record on it, pulling at his hand in the wind. He felt numb and purposeless, like a schoolboy deserted among the dormitories on Christmas Eve, with all his friends off to celebrations in their homes. He put his hand inside his coat and inside his shirt. He touched the skin of his chest and felt the firm skeleton of his ribs. It felt solid and reliable, even with tips of cold wind whipping at it through his opened clothing. Tentatively,’ he coughed. He felt strong and whole.

  He moved slowly to the ferry slip and stepped aboard past the MP with the winter hat with the earmuffs and the rifle. The ferry was almost empty. Everybody, he thought dully, as the ferry with the dead General’s name painted on it slid across the narrow black stretch of water toward the looming city, everybody is going the other way.

  Hope wasn’t home when he got there. The uncle who read the Bible was sitting up in his underwear in the kitchen, reading, and he peered ill-naturedly at Noah, whom he did not like, and said, “You here? I thought you’d be a Colonel by now.”

  “Is it all right,” Noah asked wearily, “if I stay here and wait for her?”

  “Suit yourself,” the uncle said, scratching himself under the arm, above the Book, open to the gospel according to Luke on the table before him. “I don’t guarantee when she’ll be home. She’s a girl who’s developed some mighty fast habits, as I write her parents in Vermont, and the hours of the night don’t seem to make much impression on her.” He grinned nastily at Noah. “And now her fellah’s goin’ in the Army, or leastwise, she thinks he is, she’s probably out scoutin’ out some new ground, wouldn’t you say?”

  There was some coffee heating on the stove, and a half-filled cup before him, and the smell was tantalizing to Noah, who hadn’t eaten since noon. But the uncle made
no offer and Noah wouldn’t ask for it.

  Noah went into the living room and sat down in the velour easy chair with the cheap lace antimacassars on it. It had been a long day and his face smarted from the cold and wind, and he slept, sitting up, not hearing the uncle shuffling loudly about the kitchen, banging cups and occasionally reading aloud in his nasal, scratching voice.

  The noise of the outside gate being opened, one of the deep familiar noises of his world, woke him from his sleep. He blinked his eyes and stood up just as Hope came into the room. She was walking slowly and heavily. She stopped short when she saw him standing there in the middle of the living room.

  Then she ran to him and he held her close to him.

  “You’re here,” she said.

  Her uncle loudly slammed the door between the kitchen and the living room. Neither of them paid any attention to the noise.

  Noah rubbed his cheek in her hair.

  “I was in your room,” Hope said. “All this time. Looking at all your things. You didn’t call. All day. What’s happened?”

  “They won’t take me,” Noah said. “I have scars on my lungs. Tuberculosis.”

  “Oh, my God,” Hope said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE CLASHING SOUND of a lawnmower awoke Michael. He lay for a moment in the strange bed, remembering where he was, remembering what had happened yesterday, smelling the clipped fragrance of the California grass. “Probably,” the movie writer on the edge of the swimming pool at Palm Springs had said yesterday afternoon, “probably ten guys are home writing it now. The butler comes into the garden with the tea and he says, ‘Lemon or cream?’ and the little nine-year-old girl comes in, carrying her doll, and says, ‘Daddy, please fix the radio. I can’t get the funnies. The man keeps talking about Pearl Harbor. Daddy, is Pearl Harbor near where Grandma lives?’ And she bends the doll over and it says, ‘Mamma’.”

  It was silly, Michael thought, but more true than not. Large events seemed to announce themselves in clichés. The arrival of universal disaster in the ordinary traffic of life always seemed to come in a rather banal, overworked way. And on Sunday, too, as people were resting after the large Sabbath dinner, after coming out of the churches where they had mumbled dutifully to God for peace. The enemy seemed to take a sardonic delight in picking Sunday for his most savage forays, as though he wanted to show what an ironic joke could be played over and over again on the Christian world. After the Saturday night drunkenness and fornication and the holy morning prayer and bicarbonate of soda.