Peace
Page 13
“Madre di Dio,” Marson said to him.
Angelo sank to his knees. And in his face now you could see that he had nothing but loathing for the other, his expression defiant but resigned. There was an unnatural glitter of triumph in it, the look of someone who has proved himself right about something. Clearly he expected to die, and he had accepted it.
He had taken Marson and the others across the mountain because it was a way to survive, and Joyner had been right about him all along.
“Fascist,” Marson said.
“Uccidami,” Angelo muttered through his teeth.
“I don’t understand. No capeesh.”
“Faccialo!”
“No capeesh.”
“Do! Shoot. Ti maledico!”
Corporal Marson raised the barrel of the carbine, leveling it at the other’s middle.
“Maledico?” he said.
“Visit hell,” Angelo said.
“You’re telling me to go to hell.”
“È bene che l’ebreo è morto.”
“I think I understand you,” Marson said. He wanted to shoot now. He felt the nerve pulse travel along his wrist to his finger on the trigger.
“Is a-good the Jew die.”
He aimed the rifle. “Yeah,” he said. “Pig.”
“Prega per noi peccatori, adesso e nell’ora della nostra morte. Amen.” The old man was talking fast now, eyes wide and frantic and full of hate.
Marson understood that the other had begun to pray again, and he paused once more. “You visited Washington, D.C.”
“Che cosa.” The old man muttered the words, head bowed, trying to master himself.
“You saw New York,” Marson said.
“New York, sì. Washington.” Something like expectation showed in the eyes. “I like.”
“Catholic.”
“Sì.”
“You.”
The old eyes gave back nothing. Marson stared at him, and had a moment when he thought they might begin to speak back and forth in some other language. Something passed between them, a kind of silent acknowledgment of what all of this had been, and the old man was indeed Catholic. And a Fascist, too.
“Fascist,” Marson said.
And then again the praying began. “Madre di Dio…”
He looked back once more in the direction of the road, then turned and let the barrel of the carbine down. “Via,” he said. “Just go. Get the hell away from me.”
Angelo looked at him. The dark eyes were unreadable now. Water ran down the lined face. He did not move. He went on muttering the prayer.
“Get out,” Marson said. “Go. Run.”
“Santa Maria, Madre di Dio…”
“Goddamn it,” Marson said, low. “Via! Via!”
The old man stood slowly, feebly, the legs barely holding him up, face contorted with his defiance and with the certainty that he was about to die. But then he began pleading again for his life, crying and holding out his skeletal hands. Marson felt a sudden black surge of rage, a kind of revulsion at the other’s abjectness, given what he was, the pitiful shape of him there, the dark eyes pleading, and the centuries-old hatreds in him, the crying, going on, rain and tears on the old face with its high twin networks of wrinkles over the eyes. Marson, in his exhaustion and his emptiness, raised the barrel of the carbine, and said, once more, “Via.” He experienced another urge to shoot, go ahead and do it now. Do it. It would only be another Fascist. It might as well be the devil himself.
The old man turned, took a step, and then fell to his knees.
Marson walked over and put the barrel of the carbine against the base of his skull. He had been ordered to do this. The old man kept praying, and again Marson said, “Goddamn you. Via! Via!” He reached down and took hold of the cloak, and pulled him to his feet. Then he made a gesture, waving him away, and he fired the rifle into the wet earth. One shot. The old man jumped, and fell to the ground again, covering his face. Marson felt an overwhelming desire to be rid of him, and now he, too, was weeping. “Via, goddamn you. Go. Go.”
At last, Angelo seemed to understand. Weeping, bowing, he got to his feet and started backing away, and he was nothing more than an old man who had tried to use both sides to go on being who he had ignorantly been all his long life. He went along the path, and around that bend of the river, still looking back, still saying the prayer. Marson sat down in the middle of the path and, laying the rifle across his knees, put his hands to his face. “Hail Mary,” he said, “full of grace. The Lord is with thee.” But he could not find the rest of the words.
He wept a little, thinking of what he had come near to doing, and of what he had already done, and thinking, too, of Asch and the others. Asch was dead. And Glick was dead, too. The war had got him. There was nothing to report, now, nothing to say or do about all that. He looked where the old man had gone. Angelo, the Fascist, had survived the night. Angelo would say or be anything to survive. He was an old man in a war, on the losing side. And Robert Marson had let him go. There was not much a seventy-year-old Italian man would be able to do to change the war. And maybe something or someone else would kill him, but Robert Marson of 1236 Kearney Street in Washington, D.C., had not done so.
Morning had come, light spreading across the low sky. The corporal got to his feet and started back toward the road. Just before he reached sight of it, and the others, he stopped, feeling something rise in him. The rain was increasing. The wind had died. The clouds were showing places where sun might come through, or it might not. There was no sound of firing, and the river ran with its steady roar. He waited, breathing slowly.
It was peace. It was the world itself, water rushing near the lip of the bank from the storms, the snow and the winter rain. He felt almost good, here. He thought of home, and he could see it, that street, those people. He had found a way back to imagining it. For a few moments, he believed that he might simply stay here by this river. He wanted to. It came to him that he had never wanted anything so much. It would be perfectly simple. He would lie down and let the war go on without him, and when it was over and the killings had stopped, he would get up and go home. He thought of going off in the direction the old man had taken, of finding someplace away. Someplace far.
He turned in a small circle and looked at the grass, the rocks, the river, the raining sky with its ragged and torn places, the shining bark of the wet trees all around. He could not think of any prayers now. But every movement felt like a kind of adoration.
Then the feeling dissolved, was gone, like a breath.
His foot hurt. It was probably infected. He turned his face up into the rain and sobbed, once, like a gasp, and then it was as if he were letting go a silent scream, standing there shaking, frozen in the attitude of the scream, head turned to the sky, mouth open. No sound came. There was just the tremor, the tensed muscles, the eyes shut tight, the mouth open. The rain hit his face, and when the muscles of his jaw relaxed, he kept his mouth wide, and drank. He could not believe how thirsty he had become. He let his mouth fill with the rain, then swallowed. It was so cold. He let it fill, and swallowed again. He took one more look around himself. A pattern of the water had formed in a wild tangle of a thicket, a silver shimmer dropping onto the mud of the path. The water was so clear and clean.
He shouldered his carbine and made his way back into the war.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
This is Richard Bausch’s eleventh novel. He is also the author of seven volumes of short stories. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Playboy, GQ, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications and has been featured in numerous best-of collections, including O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories from the South. In 2004 he won the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction. He is Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and lives in Memphis, Tennessee, where he is Moss Chair of Excellence in the Writer’s Workshop of the University of Memphis.
ALSO BY RICHARD BAUSCH
; Real Presence
Take Me Back
The Last Good Time
Spirits and Other Stories
Mr. Field’s Daughter
The Fireman’s Wife and Other Stories
Violence
Rebel Powers
Rare & Endangered Species: Stories
Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea
The Selected Stories of Richard Bausch (Modern Library)
In the Night Season
Someone to Watch Over Me: Stories
Hello to the Cannibals
The Stories of Richard Bausch
Wives & Lovers: Three Short Novels
Thanksgiving Night
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2008 by Richard Bausch
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this work originally appeared in Narrative magazine.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bausch, Richard, [date]
Peace / Richard Bausch.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26930-0
1. World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. 2. Italy—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.A846P43 2008
813'.54—dc22
2007037096
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
v1.0