“We’ll pay for it,” said Marson.
The boy went away and in less than an hour he returned with two bottles under his shirt. The wine was very dark and strong tasting, with a heavy aroma, and the flavor of it lingered on the tongue. It made Marson realize how bad the wine was that they had been drinking.
They were drunk coming back to the unit, and they slipped into their tents as if this were reconnaissance.
The fact was that the whole army seemed confused and not to know where its own soldiers were. There were also soldiers from the other armies—British and Canadian and free French—and there were many combinations of rank, including warrant officers and merchant seamen. Marson and Asch spent time with some of these others, talking about going home and about how maybe the war would end before they had to go where it was. On two other occasions they returned to the café, and each time Mario brought them the good wine.
Other soldiers went into the city and got into trouble. One soldier, a gunnery sergeant, stabbed a man over an Italian girl in one of the saloons. Several people witnessed it and they chased him down and beat him bloody like a dog in the street. The army was going to try him for attempted murder, but then lessened the charge to assault with a deadly weapon. Mario had all of the details.
There wasn’t anything to do but unload the ships that kept coming into the harbor. The ships kept unloading troops, too, so the numbers kept getting bigger. There were times when the beaches were crowded, looking like the vacation beaches of home, except that there were very few women. But then the weather turned miserably hot, and several men contracted sandfly fever and malaria. Orders came, forbidding entry into the city anymore.
In the early mornings, in the increasing heat, they went through training and drilling. The first hot days of August were spent in discomfort and sweat work, followed by hours of enforced idleness.
Corporal Marson, halfway up the mountain in the freezing rain near Cassino, remembered how hot it had been in Palermo, and how much he had hated it.
They all hated the inactivity and the waiting and the living out of a pack, not to mention the first and most discouraging matter, being away from home. Home. The word had a resonance that could choke you, and Marson lay awake at night trying very hard not to allow it into his thoughts at all. The thinking itself was terrible. You always ended with the same ache. The idea of never seeing home again burned deep, and he would lie on his side with his knees up and try to pray. Rumors went through the ranks like infection—talk that the Italians would seek an armistice, and that this might truly mean the end of the war. Maybe this would be all there was that they would have to go through…
The bells rang from the church spires on Sunday, and the townspeople spoke proudly about how they seemed to sound brighter, clearer, than they ever had during the reign of the Fascists; and all the shops were open. People went back and forth on bicycles and in little cars. Children played in the rubble and dust and in the ponds of water that formed from the few squalls of rain that came in off the sea. It was a coastal city and already there was work on the damages of the invasion.
And the invading force, Marson’s portion of it anyway, was stationary, nothing to do but clean and drill and wait. Mario took to coming into the bivouac to see Marson. Merchants, clergy, others were allowed past the perimeter as well. Mario would come in with bottles of wine under his shirt. “For my friend with the hole in his smile,” he said.
NINE
ON THE SIDE of the mountain in the rain, Marson and Asch were awake. Marson decided to let this pause go on a little, for the trembling in his own legs, and the stabbing that he felt with every step. Joyner slept on, though he fidgeted some, his legs jerking. Now and then little plaintive sounds came from him. The old man lay as still as any corpse, cloak pulled half over his head. Marson had also given him his blanket roll. The rock shelter smelled like a basement. There was also the redolence of rotting leaves, mixed with the stale damp odors of the men.
“I don’t wanna sleep,” Asch said, low. “Ever again. Every time now I go to the fucking desert and see that burning tank. Christ. You figure.”
“You’ve got me seeing it,” Marson said.
“I don’t think I’m afraid of dying. I’m afraid of suffering.”
Marson said nothing.
“That woman just stopped. Like that. Dead before she hit the ground. Out like a light. It’s worse than the tank, and I’m scared I’ll start dreaming that.”
“Asch, can we talk about something else?”
“Sure. You wanna plan next year’s prom?”
Marson let this go. He shivered and felt once more as if he would retch.
“You believe in God?” Asch said.
“Yes.”
“I think it’s all one thing. I mean one reason for all of it—the religion and the philosophy and all of the rest.”
“Do you mean that all religions are true?”
“They’re all there for the same true reason, yeah. It’s all trying to explain the one thing. Why we have to die. It’s all a puny attempt to deal with that fact.”
“Well,” Marson said. “That’s how you see it.”
“Listen to the prayers—they’re all about save us from it, from the big bad dark. Every single religion. I think they all exist not necessarily because there’s a God but because there’s death. They’re all trying to explain that away somehow.”
“Every human civilization or social group, every tribe, believes in a God.”
“Yeah?”
“I guess we need a God.”
“That’s it, then? And you’re religious. It’s just a practical decision?”
“Yeah,” Marson said. And then nodded. “Yeah, sure, why not? Practical.”
“Shit, just because you need it?”
“But look where that leads. Name one thing human beings need that doesn’t exist. We need food, there’s food. We need air, air. We need love, there’s love. We need hope, there’s hope.”
“Okay, what about money?”
“You’re gonna tell me there’s no such thing as money?”
Asch pondered this.
“And there’s also how you live your life,” Marson told him.
“What you do while you’re here.”
“You mean like shooting a helpless woman in cold blood?”
Marson was silent.
“Yeah,” Asch said. “And all this—all this—this destruction—that’s a response to it, too. And it’s just gonna go on forever or until they find some way to kill everybody.”
“Like I’ve been saying, Asch—you are the most morbid son of a bitch I know.”
“‘The truth will set you free.’”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” Marson said. “You think all this hasn’t occurred to me? You think I haven’t had these thoughts exactly? I don’t want to talk about it or think it or hear it said, either. It doesn’t do anybody any good. Not now. Not in this mess.”
“Fuck,” Asch said. “I’m just—talking.”
“I agree with you about that—that business back down the road, too,” said Marson after another pause. “But we’ve gotta get through this night, too. Right? What good does it do to argue with Joyner about it?”
“I don’t know. He’s so sure everything’s a joke on everybody else.”
Marson drank from his canteen and then held it out to catch the rain.
“I got enough bad imagery in my head to last two lifetimes,” Asch said. “I don’t know how I’m gonna get rid of it all.”
In his mind, Marson saw the eyes of the man he had shot, the curved smudged calves of the woman’s legs jutting from the wet grass.
“I don’t think any damn church is gonna help me,” Asch said. “I wish like hell it could. I’d be in the front row.”
“Act as if you have faith, and faith will be granted.”
“Is that so. You believe that.”
Marson remembered being at a mass in Palermo. The company chaplain, a
balding priest named Prentice, said the words Hoc est enim corpus meum and held the host up, and Marson believed he could feel the strength flowing into him from the words and what they signified. The church was a bombed-out building, some sort of community hall, and when the mass was over two soldiers walked in casually, talking about the cold water of the beach, and with the practiced gestures of old habit removed the crucifix and the tabernacle, wheeling them aside like so much furniture. Marson, who had remained behind to pray, saw this and was appalled. For a long time the fact of it disturbed him and broke through the flow of his thinking. It gave him a disagreeable sense of being privy to a sordid secret. All his young life, he had been adept at concentrating his attention, diverting himself from unwanted thoughts.
“My grandfather,” Asch said. “The one who fought for the Kaiser. He was in the war to end all wars, I believe they, uh, called it. Yeah—that was it. Well, I’ve read the histories and the philosophies, too. This is not ideas we’re fighting about, here. No matter what anybody says. They don’t like Jews at home either. Or the blacks. The Nazis’ ideas don’t really mean shit. It’s all just—better weapons. The ideas are just excuses. Just—we’re getting better and better at killing. That’s what it is. We’ve got the mechanisms for wider and more efficient killing. It’s got nothing to do with ideas.”
“You don’t really believe that,” Marson said.
“If it wasn’t the Krauts it’d be somebody else. And it ain’t ever gonna end, either. Not until there’s nobody left to kill. Between 1600 and 1865 you know how many years of collective peace there were? Years where nobody was killing anybody in armies anywhere in the world? Eleven. Eleven little years, bud. Think of it.”
“Where’d you get that statistic. You made that up.”
“I made a study. It’s true. And try counting up the years of peace since then.” Asch stared out at the raining dark.
“Christ,” Marson said. He saw in his mind the dead woman’s legs jutting out of the drenched grass.
“I guess we have to go to battalion headquarters first,” Asch said. “Don’t we?”
“There’s the chain of command.”
“You wanna talk to Glick about it?”
“I guess we go to the captain. An officer anyway. Some officer.”
A little later, Asch said, “You think it’ll ever stop raining?”
“No.”
“I wish we were back in Palermo.”
“I wish I was back in Washington, D.C.”
“You think Glick would shoot somebody to keep’m from reporting him?”
“Hey—I said I wish I was back in Washington, D.C.,” Marson told him. “Try and get some sleep, why don’t you.”
“Can’t sleep. I close my eyes and drift and it’s carnival time with the burning tank.” Scrunching down against the base of the rock, Asch looked like a puffy little boy in clothes that were too big for him.
They were quiet for a few minutes, and now Marson saw that the other man had indeed drifted off.
TEN
THE GAP IN the corporal’s teeth had been caused by getting hit with a baseball when he was about fifteen years old—Mario’s age. The ball knocked the one tooth out, and the others grew toward the space, nearly closing it. He explained this to Mario, who wanted to talk about baseball from then on, being, as he said, a New York Yankees fan. No one in the world loved the Yankees like Mario, according to Mario, but among players he had a special affection for the New York Giants player Mel Ott, who lifted his leg when he swung at the ball and still hit home runs. “I know he has failed to hit as many home runs as Ruth, that is true, but Ruth don’t have the difficulty of having to lift his leg when he swings at the ball. Is this not right?”
“That’s right,” Marson said, amused. “You know more about this than a lot of Americans.”
“I am a fan. I know from the dictionaries that the first three letters from the word fanatic are fan.”
Marson laughed. “Hell, kid, I didn’t realize that one.”
The boy stuck his chest out. “I love all things from your country.”
“Well, I’m impressed. All this from one summer.”
“I have followed it in the papers, signore.”
“I see that.”
Mario shrugged and half smiled, with his missing tooth. “Anyway, I never saw Ruth.”
“He was gone by the time you got there.”
“Oh, far gone, sì. The Chicago team.”
“That’s right.”
“But of his former self, una voce. A rumor, yes?”
Marson smiled. “Yes.”
“Still, people told me stories about this man so big in everything he did, this personaggio leggendario, a fable already.”
“A man with a big potbelly from excess,” Marson said, making a phantom circle around his middle with his arms.
“Excess,” said Mario. “Fat?”
Marson explained about too much of everything.
“Oh,” the boy said. “Like my gap-toothed friend and his friend Asch.”
Marson grinned. “All right. Sure. Though not as much.”
“Little bit,” Mario said. “Not as much. Yes.”
“Yes. And he—Ruth—he had these spindly little legs, and he could drink twenty bottles of beer and down sixteen hot dogs and still go to the ballpark and hit three home runs in a single game.”
“And he also built the ballpark.”
“Figuratively,” Marson said.
“What is that: figuratively?”
“Like a picture. Making a point. He didn’t actually build the stadium.”
Mario thought a moment. The look of concentration on his face made him wholly beautiful. Marson felt a thrill of affection for him. He had a moment of hoping that if he lived to have sons, all of them would be as inquisitive and expressive and sharp as this dark charming boy, with his habit of reading the English news and listening to radio not to lose the language he had learned in one happy summer in New York.
“I only got to watch Gehrig, and the other one, DiMaggio,” Mario said.
The corporal reached over and patted his shoulder. “You’re a good man, Mario.”
The boy was evidently thinking about having seen the great Gehrig and DiMaggio. “Wondrous players but, you know, also right-handed.”
“Well,” said Marson. “Gehrig was left-handed.”
“He was?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“You say Gehrig was. He died, then?”
Marson nodded.
The boy frowned darkly, processing the information. He rubbed his lips with the long fingers of his left hand, then held them up and looked at them, as if searching for some answer there, something in the lines of his own palm. “I believe I read that.” He sighed. Then: “Yes, I believe I did.”
“A great ballplayer,” Marson said, wanting to change the subject.
“Well, Gehrig and Ruth and Ott, all left-handers, then. Sì? And I am left-handed, too. I love left-handed people and I feel myself to be a brother to them all.”
Marson did not tell the other, as he was sorely tempted to do—in that friendly rivalry between boys—that he had been a left-handed pitcher in the Washington Senators organization for almost two years. To do so would’ve meant having to talk about it, and he did not want to do that anymore, did not want to think about being home and playing baseball, since it dejected him so much and made him realize with such sorrow where he actually was.
Each morning he prayed for the strength to do what would be required, and every single minute he felt like curling up and crying. He kept all this deep inside and never showed any of it to anyone.
Time passed more slowly than he would ever have believed possible. He took to trying to trick his mind by not looking at the time, would do whatever there was to do, forgetting his watch, believing that not to be aware of it could make the passage of the hours seem quicker. He was doing this, working at it one morning, sweeping refuse from the long platform where a
temporary mess had been set up. He had seen that it was five minutes past seven in the morning, and he kept his eyes averted, working on, losing himself in the rote motion, imagining what everyone was doing in the late night of back home, the nightclub hour, the hour of all the talk and the music, when the pretty photographers came around and snapped the photos of everyone and offered the pictures for sale, and the cigarette girls walked up and down with their little strapped-on trays and all the choices; it was the hour when people were getting out of movie houses and yawning in the street, waiting for a taxi to take them to some quiet place for coffee or a cocktail. Five minutes past seven o’clock in the morning in Sicily, and Marson imagined it all, back home, a reverie he had fallen into, and when he realized it and shut it off, he felt certain that at least the hour of his dreaming must have gone by. He checked the time again: nine minutes past seven.
Four minutes.
He almost howled from the frustrated rage that came over him. He took the watch off and threw it over the wooden fence that bordered the makeshift mess hall where he was. But then he went looking for it that afternoon with the feeling of trying to find a precious part of life and with the fear of having lost it forever. When he found it, he stood holding it in the shadow of a blasted tree and wept, not even looking around himself to be sure he was alone. He packed it away among his things. And a little later he sent it home, with a note asking his brother to keep it for him.
The gap between his teeth gave him a tough, determined look, whereas Mario, with his missing tooth, just looked simpleminded. But Mario was nothing of the kind. He was quite proud about the wine and claimed that he knew every hiding place the Italians had used to keep the best of it from the Germans. Mario said the Italians—the Sicilians, anyway—hated the Germans more than the Americans or Brits, as he called the English, ever could. The Germans were not slow, he said, but their beliefs made them stupid. Because they believed as they did, they were prevented from receiving certain insights and perceptions, such as the truth that the people of an ancient town like Palermo would have the courage and the intelligence to hide the good wine. It was happening all over Italy, Mario said with pride. The Germans had been fooled into thinking that Italian wine generally was grossly overrated. But Mario would provide Robert Marson (he pronounced it “Mar-sone”) with the good stuff.
Peace Page 4
