"Sank you."
At this point I would remove my notepaper, shoe trees, laundry, and other unclassifiable articles from the small table I used as a desk and a catchall. Then I would plug in my electric percolator, often commenting sagely, "Kaffee ist gut." (Coffee is good.)
We usually drank two cups of coffee apiece, passing each other the cream and sugar with all the drollery of fellow pallbearers distributing white gloves among themselves. Often Leah brought along some kuchen or torte, wrapped rather inefficiently--perhaps Surreptitiously--in waxed paper. This offering she would deposit quickly and insecurely in my left hand as she entered my sitting room. It was all I could do to swallow the pastry Leah brought. First, I was never at all hungry while she was around; second, there seemed to be something unnecessarily, however vaguely, destructive about eating anything that came from where she lived.
We usually didn’t talk while we drank our coffee. When we had finished, we picked up our conversation where we had left it--on it’s back, more often than not.
"Uh. Ist die Fenster--uh--Sind Sie sehr kalt dort?" I would ask solicitously. (Is the window--uh--Are you very cold there?)
"No! I feel very warmly, sank you."
"Dass ist gut. Uh. Wie geht’s Ihre Eltern?" (That’s good. How are your parents?) I inquired regularly after the health of her parents.
"They are very well, sank you very much." Her parents were always enjoying perfect health, even when her mother had pleurisy for two weeks.
Sometimes Leah introduced a subject for conversation. It was always the same subject, but probably she felt she handled it so well in English that repetition was little or no drawback. She often inquired, "How was your hour today morning?"
"My German lesson? Oh. Uh. Sehr gut. Ja. Sehr gut.” (Very good. Yes. Very good.)
"What were you learning?"
"What did I learn? Uh. Die, uh wuddayacallit. Die starke verbs. Sehr interessant." (The strong verbs. Very interesting.)
I could fill several pages with Leah’s and my terrible conversation. But I don’t see much point to it. We just never said anything to each other. Over a period of four months, we must have talked for thirty or thirty-five evenings without saying a word. In the long shadow of this small, obscure record, I’ve acquired a dogma that if I should go to Hell, I’ll be given a little inside room--one that is neither hot nor cold, but extremely drafty--in which all my conversations with Leah will be played back to me, over an amplification system confiscated from Yankee Stadium.
One evening I named for Leah, without the slightest provocation, all the Presidents of the United States, in as close order as possible: Lincoln, Grant, Taft, and so on.
Another evening I explained American football to her. For at least an hour and a half. In German.
On another evening I felt called on to draw her a map of New York. She certainly didn’t ask me to. And Lord knows I never feel like drawing maps for anybody, much less have any aptitude for it. But I drew it--the U.S Marines couldn’t have stopped me. I distinctly remember putting Lexington Avenue where Madison should have been--and leaving it that way.
Another time I read a new play I was writing, called He Was No Fool. It was about a cool, handsome, casually athletic young man--very much my own type--who had been called from Oxford to pull Scotland Yard out of an embarrassing situation: One Lady Farnsworth, who was a witty dipsomaniac, was being mailed one of her abducted husband’s fingers every Tuesday. I read the play to Leah in one sitting, laboriously editing out all the sexy parts--which, of course, ruined the play. When I had finished reading, I hoarsely explained to Leah that the play was “Nicht fertig yet.” (Not finished yet.) Leah seemed to understand perfectly. Moreover, she seemed to convey to me a certain confidence that perfection would somehow overtake the final draft of whatever the thing was I had just read to he.... She sat so well on a window seat.
I found out entirely by accident that Leah had a fiance. It wasn’t the kind of information that stood a chance of coming up in our conversation.
On a Sunday afternoon, about a month after Leah and I had become acquainted, I saw her standing in the crowded lobby of the Schwedenkino, a popular movie house in Vienna. It was the first time I had seen her either off the balcony or outside my sitting room. There was something fantastic and extremely heady about seeing her standing in the pedestrian lobby of the Schwedenkino, and I readily gave up my place in the box-office queue to go to speak to her. But as I charged across the lobby toward her over a number of innocent feet, I saw that she was neither alone nor with a girl friend or someone old enough to be her father.
She was visibly flustered to see me, but managed to make introductions. Her escort, who was wearing his hat down over one of his ears, clicked his heels and crushed my hand. I smiled patronizingly at him--he didn’t look like much competition, grip of steel or no grip of steel; he looked too much like a foreigner.
For a few minutes the three of us chatted unintelligibly. Then I excused myself and got back on the end of the line. During the showing of the film, I went up the aisle several times, carrying myself as erectly and dangerously as possible; but I didn’t see either of them. The film itself was one of the worst I’d seen.
The next evening, when Leah and I had coffee in my sitting room, she stated, blushing, that the young man I had seen her with in the lobby of the Schwedenkino was her fiance.
"My fahzzer is wedding us when I have seventeen years," Leah said, looking at a doorknob.
I merely nodded. There are certain foul blows, notably in love and soccer, that are not immediately followed by audible protest. I cleared my throat. "Uh. Wie heisst er, again?" (What’s his name, again?)
Leah pronounced once more--not quite phonetically enough for me--a violently long name, which seemed to me predestined to belong to somebody who wore his hat down over one ear. I poured more coffee for both of us. Then, suddenly, I stood up and went to my German- English dictionary. When I had consulted it, I sat down again and asked Leah, "Lieben Sie Ehe?" (Do you love marriage?)
She answered slowly, without looking at me, "I don’t know."
I nodded. Her answer seemed the quintessence of logic to me. We sat for a long moment without looking at each other. When I looked at Leah again, her beauty seemed too great for the size of the room. The only way to make room for it was to speak of it. "Sie sind sehr schon. Weissen Sie dass?" I almost shouted at her. (You're very pretty, you know that?)
But she blushed so hard I quickly dropped the subject--I had nothing to follow up with, anyway.
That evening, for the first and last time, something more physical than a handshake happened to our relationship. About nine-thirty, Leah jumped up from the window seat, saying it was becoming very late, and rushed to get downstairs. At the same time, I rushed to escort her out of the apartment to the staircase, and we squeezed together through the narrow doorway of my sitting room--facing each other. It nearly killed us.
When it came time for me to go to Paris to master a second European language, Leah was in Warsaw visiting her fiance’s family. I didn’t get to say good-by to her, but I left a note for her, the next-to-last draft of which I still have:
Wien
December 6, 1936
Liebe Leah,
Ich muss fahren nach Paris nun, und so ich sage auf wiedersehen. Es war sehr nett zu kennen Sie. Ich werde schreiben zu Sie wenn ich bin in Paris. Hoffentlich Sie sind haben eine gute Ziet in Warsaw mit die familie von ihre fiance. Hoffent- lich wird die Ehe gehen gut. Ich werde Sie schicken das Buch ich habe ges- prochen iiber, Gegangen mit der Wind. Mit beste Grussen,
Ihre Freund
John
Taking this note out of Jack-the-Ripper German, it reads:
Vienna
December 6, 1936
Dear Leah,
I must go to Paris now, and so I say good-bye. It was very nice to know you. I hope you’re having a good time in Warsaw with your fiance's family. I hope the marriage goes all right. I will send you that book I was ta
lking about, Gone with the Wind. With best greetings,
Your friend,
John
But I never did write to Leah from Paris. I never wrote to her again at all. I didn’t send a copy of Gone with the Wind. I was very busy in those days. Late in 1937, when I was back in college in America, a round, flat package was forwarded to me from New York. A letter was attached to the package:
Vienna
October 14, 1937
Dear John,
I have many times thought of you and wondered what is become of you. I myself am now married and am living in Vienna with my husband. He sends you his great regards. If you can recall, you and he made each other’s acquaintance in the hall of the Schweden Cinema.
My parents are still living at 18 Stiefel Street, and often I visit them, because I am living in the near. Your landlady, Mrs. Schlosser, has died in the summer with cancer. She requested me to send you these gramophone records, which you forgot to take when you departed, but I did not know your address for a long time. I have now made the acquaintance of an English girl named Ursula Hummer, who has given to me your address.
My husband and I would be extremely pleased to hear from you frequently.
With very best greetings,
Your friend,
Leah
Her married name and new address were not given.
I carried the letter with me for months, opening and reading it in bars, between halves of basketball games, in Government classes, and in my room, until finally it began to get stained, from my wallet, the color of cordovan, and I had to put it away somewhere.
About the same hour Hitler’s troops were marching into Vienna, I was on reconnaissance for geology 1-b, searching perfunctorily, in New Jersey, for a limestone deposit. But during the weeks and months that followed the German takeover of Vienna, I often thought of Leah. Sometimes just thinking of her wasn’t enough. When, for example, I had examined the most recent newspaper photographs of Viennese Jewesses on their hands and knees scrubbing the sidewalks, I quickly stepped across my dormitory room, opened a desk drawer, slipped an automatic into my pocket, then dropped noiselessly from my window to the street, where a long- range monoplane, equipped with a silent engine, awaited my gallant, foolhardy, hawklike whim. I’m not the type that just sits around.
In late summer of 1940, at a party in New York, I met a girl who not only had known Leah in Vienna, but had gone all through school with her. I pulled up a chair, but the girl was determined to tell me about some man in Philadelphia, who looked exactly like Gary Cooper. She said I had a weak chin. She said she hated mink. She said that Leah had either got out of Vienna or hadn’t got out of Vienna.
During the war in Europe, I had an Intelligence job with a regiment of an infantry division. My work called for a lot of conversation with civilians and Wehrmacht prisoners. Among the latter, sometimes there were Austrians. One feldwebel, a Viennese, whom I secretly suspected of wearing lederhosen under his field-gray uniform, gave me a little hope: but it turned out he had known not Leah, but some girl with the same last name as Leah’s. Another Wiener, an unteroffizier, standing at strict attention, told me what terrible things had been done to the Jews in Vienna. As I had rarely, if ever, seen a man with a face quite so noble and full of vicarious suffering as this unteroffizier’s was, just for the devil of it I had him roll up his left sleeve. Close to his armpit he had the tattooed blood-type marks of an old SS man. I stopped asking personal questions after a while.
A few months after the war in Europe had ended, I took some military papers to Vienna. In a jeep with another man, I left Nurnburg on a hot October morning and got into Vienna the next, even hotter, morning. In the Russian Zone we were detained five hours while two guards made passionate love to our wristwatches. It was mid-afternoon by the time we entered the American Zone of Vienna, in which Stiefelstrasse, my old street, was located.
I talked to the Tabak-Trafik vendor on the corner of Stiefelstrasse, to the pharmacist in the near-by Apotheke, to a neighborhood woman, who jumped at least an inch when I addressed her, and to a man who insisted that he used to see me on the trolley car in 1936. Two of these people told me that Leah was dead. The pharmacist suggested that I go to see a Dr. Weinstein, who had just come back from Vienna from Buchenwald, and gave me his address. I then got back into the jeep, and we cruised through the streets toward G-2 Headquarters. My jeep partner tooted his horn at the girls in the streets and told me at great length what he thought of Army dentists.
When we had delivered the official papers, I got back into the jeep alone and went to see Dr. Weinstein. It was twilight when I drove back to Stiefelstrasse. I parked the jeep and entered my old house. It had been turned into living quarters for field-grade officers. A red-haired staff sergeant was sitting at an Army desk on the first landing, cleaning his fingernails. He looked up, and, as I didn’t outrank him, gave that long Army look that holds no interest or curiosity at all. Ordinarily I would have returned it.
"What’s the chances of my going up to the second floor just for a minute?" I asked. "I used to live here before the war."
"This here’s officers’ quarters, Mac," he said.
"I know. I’ll only be a minute."
"Can’t do it. Sorry." He went on scraping the insides of his fingernails with the big blade of his pocketknife.
"I’ll only be a minute," I said again.
He put down his knife, patiently. "Look, Mac. I don’t wanna sound like a bum. But I ain’t lettin' nobody go upstairs unless they belong there. I don’t give a damn if it’s Eisenhower himself. I got my--" He was interrupted by the sudden ringing of a telephone on his desk. He picked up the phone, keeping an eye on me, and said, "Yessir, Colonel, sir. This is him on the phone.... Yessir.... Yessir.... I got Corporal Santini puttin' 'em on the ice right now, right this minute. They’ll be good and cold.... Well, I figured we’d put the orchestra right out on the balcony, like. Account of there’s only three of ‘em.... Yessir.... Well, I spoke to Major Foltz, and he said the ladies could put their coats and stuff in his room.... Yessir. Right, sir. Ya wanna hurry up, now. Ya don’t wanna miss any of that moonlight.... Ha,ha,ha!...Yessir. G’bye, sir." The staff sergeant hung up, looking stimulated.
"Look," I said, distracting him, "I’ll only be a minute."
He looked at me. "What’s the big deal, anyhow, up there?"
"No big deal." I took a deep breath. "I just wanted to go up to the second floor and look at the balcony. I used to know a girl who lived in the balcony apartment."
"Yeah? Where's she at now?"
"She's dead."
"Yeah? How come?"
"She and her family were burned to death in an incinerator, I'm told."
"Yeah? What was she, a Jew or something?"
"Yes. Can I go up a minute?"
Very visibly, the sergeant's interest in the affair waned. He picked up a pencil and moved it from the left side of the desk to the right. "Christ, Mac. I don't know. It'll be my ass if you're caught."
"I'll just be a minute."
"Okay. Make it snappy."
I climbed the stairs quickly and entered my old sitting room. It had three single bunks in it, made up Army style. Nothing in the room had been there in 1936. Officer's blouses were suspended on hangers everywhere. I walked to the window, opened it, and looked down for a moment at the balcony where Leah had once stood. Then I went downstairs and thanked the staff sergeant. He asked me, as I was going out the door, what the hell you were supposed to do with champagne--lay it on its goddam side or stand it up. I said I didn't know, and left the building.
21. Blue Melody
IN mid-winter of 1944 I was given a lift in the back of an overcrowded G.I. truck, going from Luxembourg City to the front at Halzhoffen, Germany--a distance of four flat tires, three (reported) cases of frozen feet, and at least one case of incipient pneumonia.
The forty-odd men jammed in the truck were nearly all infantry replacements. Many of them had just got out of hospitals
in England, where they had been treated for wounds received in action somewhat earlier in the war. Ostensibly rehabilitated, they were on their way to join rifle companies of a certain infantry division which, I happened to know, was commanded by a brigadier general who seldom stepped into his command car without wearing a Lugar and a photographer, one on each side; a fighting man with a special gift for writing crisp, quotable little go-to-hell notes to the enemy, invariably when outnumbered or surrounded by a latter. I rode for hours and hours without looking anybody in the truck straight in the eye.
During daylight hours the men made an all-out effort to suppress or divert their eagerness to get another crack at the enemy. Charade groups were formed at either end of the truck. Favorite statesmen were elaborately discussed. Songs were started up--spirited war songs, chiefly, composed by patriotic Broadway songwriters who, through some melancholy, perhaps permanently embittering turn of the wheel of fortune, had been disqualified from taking their places at the front. In short, the truck fairly rocked with persiflage and melody, until the night abruptly fell and the black-out curtains were attached. Then all the men seemed to go to sleep or freeze to death, except the original narrator of the following story and myself. He had the cigarettes, and I had the ears.
This is all I know about the man who told me the story:
His first name was Rudford. He had a very slight Southern accent and a chronic, foxhole cough. The bars and red cross of a captain in the medics were painted, as fashion had it, on his helmet.
And that's all I know about him except for what comes naturally out of his story. So please don't anybody write in for additional information--I don't even know if the man is alive today. This request applies particularly to readers who may sooner or later think that this story is a slam against one section of this country.
It isn't a slam against anybody or anything. It's just a simple little story of Mom's apple pie, ice-cold beer, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Lux Theater of the Air--the things we fought for, in short. You can't miss it, really.
22 Out-of-print J. D. Salinger Stories Page 26
