Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  “Alicja, I cannot keep you with me. Wish I could.”

  Fear became frenzy, and she tore at him with her fingernails. He had a gash under one eye—another wartime souvenir at the very end of war. The Polska went limp, and Sonny sat her down in a chair while the Mother Superior removed her first-aid kit from a drawer.

  “That’s a nasty cut, Herr Salinger. You will have a scar, I’m afraid.”

  She swabbed his wound with a dark solution and dressed it with a bandage while Alicja rocked on her feet and shrieked a tongueless song to soothe all the savagery locked inside her thin, pathetic frame.

  Sonny remained gallant. He kissed Alicja’s unwashed hand, gave the Mother Superior all the occupation currency he could collect from his pockets, and strolled out of the orphanage with his torn, twitching cheek.

  2.

  HE WAS LYING IN BED in the room he shared with Corporal Benson at the Villa Oberwegner, but the corporal was out playing poker at the divisional canteen. From his balcony window on Nürnberger Straße, Sonny could look out upon the ruins of the last B-17 bombing raid of the war. The villa had been spared. It was a beige-and-brown stucco “mansion” with a tiny bull’s-eye window under a slanted slate roof. The villa also served as CIC headquarters in Bavaria for the American Army of Occupation. Suspected spies, saboteurs, SS officers, and Nazi Party officials were questioned in an interrogation room on the ground floor, and some were later shackled and sent to the Army of Occupation’s prisoner of war cage at the northern edge of Nuremberg. But Sonny had unmasked very few spies or Nazi officials, high and low, in the past few weeks.

  There was a knock on his door. He ignored it until Lieutenant Colonel Blunt marched into the room and growled, “Sergeant, may I come in?”

  Sonny nodded. He was clutching his Colt .45.

  “Jesus Christ,” Blunt asked, “do I look like an enemy agent?”

  “Yes,” Sonny answered with a trenchant smile. “You could be a Kraut in disguise.”

  The lieutenant colonel was silent for a moment and then his mouth puckered like a fish searching for oxygen on dry land.

  “Sergeant, holster that firearm, or I’ll have you put away.”

  Sonny thrust the Colt .45 under his bed. “Is this a social call, sir?”

  Blunt began to pace the narrow room. It had two beds, two night tables, two lamps, two chairs, a closet with a moth-infested curtain, and a chipped mahogany bureau.

  “I was chatting with the mayor—that was a social call. He mentioned the bombardment. The entire city was covered in a shower of dust. The dust didn’t clear for days. Fifteen buildings were either damaged or destroyed, he said—no, sixteen, counting the Wehrmacht barracks. And Weißenberg had never even been targeted. That’s a fact, son. It was a logistical error.”

  Sonny stared at him with the same trenchant smile. “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Very little—and quite a lot. We’re guests in this town.”

  “I thought we were conquerors—or occupiers at least,” Sonny said.

  “Don’t get smart,” Blunt said. “We have to show these Krauts the American way of life, or we’ll go from a shooting war to a fickle mind game…. Sergeant, it’s impossible to read your reports.”

  “Something wrong with my English, sir?”

  “No,” Blunt shouted, with a rawness in his eyes. “It’s your handwriting. I can’t decipher a word. No one can.”

  “Ah,” Sonny said, covering the twitch in his cheek with one hand, “I always had a problem with penmanship. It drove my teachers crazy.”

  “But we didn’t have this problem—until now. Why are you wearing a bandage?”

  “A little girl scratched me,” Sonny said. “I rescued her from Kaufering Four.”

  Blunt stared at him. “Sergeant, we’re not in the business of rescuing little girls.”

  “I know,” Sonny said. “But I couldn’t leave her there, in that hell house. I took her to a Catholic orphanage, and made a bargain with the Mother Superior.”

  “That’s illegal,” Blunt said.

  Sonny had captured the lieutenant colonel now in his own little bag of tricks. “Everything we do is illegal—we’re CIC.”

  “Not quite,” Blunt said, pleased with himself and his “band of angels,” as he called the CIC agents under him. “I’ll grant you that little girl. It’s the kind of initiative I like. But don’t take advantage of me, Salinger. I want those reports. And don’t give me any more crap about penmanship.” He paused to scratch his chin, and his entire manner shifted. “I’m grateful to you, kid. You took care of me on Utah Beach. I had a mental lapse. Corporal Benson would have left me there to rot. You didn’t. Why did you save my ass?”

  “We’re CIC,” Sonny said. But that wasn’t the reason. Blunt seemed vulnerable, lost, alone, right after the landing. His eyes were static, dull. He would never have made it off the beach alive. Sonny couldn’t abandon him—just like that.

  “No more mistakes,” Blunt said. “It’s harvest time. We’re grabbing Nazis by the bushel.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sonny said, saluting Blunt. “By the bushel.”

  Sonny didn’t believe in the CIC’s denazification program. Some local schoolteacher was put in a cage, while rocket scientists and aeronautical engineers were treated like little kings and chauffeured to America on heavy bombers converted into transport planes. Sonny despised the unfairness of it all, the brutal unfairness of the peace that arrived right after war.

  Blunt returned his salute. “Salinger, behave!” And he sauntered out of the room.

  He’s nuts, Sonny said to himself, nuttier than I am. And suddenly he recollected his trip to Poland when he was eighteen. His father has sent him to discover the pork business after he flunked out of NYU. And Sonny went off to the town of Bydgozcz, where he had to learn to slaughter pigs from the king of the slaughterers, a huge man with a broken face who called himself Roman. For two months Sonny had to walk around with butcher knives and bathe in pig blood. The stench wasn’t nearly as awful as Kaufering, but it was awful enough. He would go on excursions with Roman the hog butcher, at three in the morning, in a wagon full of slaughtered animals. Roman carried a shotgun to protect him and Sonny from rival hog butchers. Sonny felt like he was living inside a tale by Gogol or some other surreal master. But not even Gogol could have invented Roman, who hitched himself to his own horses and plowed through the snow and sleet, shooting whatever target met his eye—winter crows, fellow wagoners, bear traps, the roofs of barns, all with a merriment and meanness that were unfathomable….

  3.

  HE HAD FOUR COMMENDATIONS, four bronze battle stars and was due a fifth, but his cheek continued to twitch and his hand couldn’t stop shaking. He could have gone to a military facility—U.S. 15 Evac. Hospital—but that would have meant a Section Eight discharge for being mentally unfit for service. So he checked himself into Nuremberg’s General Hospital, which had its own psychiatric clinic—Krankenhaus 31—an ornate stone building on a quiet street, with civilian psychiatrists and not one link to the U.S. Army of Occupation.

  A nervous disorder, Sonny said. He did not mention battle fatigue, nor did he wear his uniform and his CIC armband to the clinic. He’d requested a two-week furlough from Blunt to wander around in the Bavarian Alps, and Blunt had granted his request.

  He didn’t lie to the inquisitors at the front desk of Krankenhaus 31. He revealed who he was, a secret soldier with the Counter Intelligence Corps. He wasn’t put in with the other patients in the psychiatric ward. He had a room of his own on the second floor; it faced a garden surrounded by a wooden fence that looked like the loops of a gigantic leather belt. There were bars on Sonny’s window, but his room wasn’t somber or bleak. He had a sleigh bed with a bright coverlet that could have been knit by a child, with a child’s sense of spectacular colors. He had a simple desk and a handyman’s bench, where he could have worked on his Holden Caulfield novel. He hadn’t written a word since he fell upon Kaufering IV with his driver. Hi
s typewriter collected dust on a shelf at the Villa Oberwegner. He no longer had the knack of placing word after word, like musical footsteps. The footsteps were gone. His CIC commander had been wrong. Sonny’s handwriting wasn’t indecipherable—it had vanished, along with his psyche. Sergeant Salinger wasn’t here, there, or anywhere.

  An intern entered. She was tall and had dark hair, with bloodred fingernails and lipstick. She introduced herself as Frau Doktor Sylvia Welter, an ophthalmologist who was in training at Krankenhaus 31 under the guidance of Herr Doktor Ulrich Fleck, director of the psychiatric clinic. This tall ophthalmologist was wearing silk stockings and high heels, both a luxury in a defeated land that lived on coupons and ration books, and had no coffee, chocolate, tea, or milk.

  It was like an opening gambit. Sonny could have come to the clinic wearing his CIC armband and arrested Herr Doktor Fleck, who had been with the storm troopers and the SS, but he didn’t want to create havoc at the one hospital in Nuremberg that could care for him. So he left the Herr Direktor in place—for the moment. And here was his disciple, a volupt-u-u-u-u-ous ophthalmologist with bloodred nails. She was Sonny’s age, it seems, and he was drawn to her—no, driven—like a melancholic under a witch’s spell.

  “I am told you are a reader—and a Schreiber of short novels, Herr Sergeant Jerome Salinger. And you have inscribed yourself at the clinic for a rest. This is not the first time our paths have crossed. I live in Weißenberg and work at the little hospital there … when I am not at the clinic. And I have seen you many times in the street, outside your headquarters.”

  Sonny stared at her. She touched his cheek, and it stopped twitching.

  “Frau Doktor, why didn’t you say hello?”

  She laughed, and her voice had such a musical lilt that the enchantment grew.

  “I didn’t dare,” she said. “You had a brooding look on your face, like Ishmael in Herr Melville’s novel. But you must call me Sylvia. And I will call you—”

  “Sonny. But what is an ophthalmologist doing at a mental clinic?”

  “Ah,” she said, with a sudden, almost savage movement of her wrists. “You can tell many things from a patient’s eyes. The blood vessels are like a soothsayer’s map.”

  Sylvia was wearing a light blue smock that revealed the sweep of her hips. She plucked a tiny flashlight from her pocket and looked into Sonny’s left eye.

  “Oh, I am not a magician, Herr Sonny. But the sadness is there in your blood vessels … a kind of morbidity.”

  Morbidity. Yes, he had a kind of morbidity. “Fräulein Sylvia, I am already bedazzled. The director sent you here from your little hospital as his little spy, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” she said, with all the music gone from her voice. “He is frightened of your American Gestapo.”

  “But why did he accept me as a patient?”

  “He is a doctor,” Sylvia said. “He must accept you.”

  “Hide me, you mean, from my own Army of Occupation.”

  “Call it what you like,” she said.

  He was cracked, wasn’t he? Inside a loony bin with bars on the window. And so he seized Fräulein Sylvia, like some resurrected Rhett Butler right off the screen at the RKO 86th Street in Manhattan, and kissed her on the mouth. It was ludicrous, but she didn’t resist: a movie romance inside Krankenhaus 31, with Sonny as his own projectionist. And then a kind of miasma gripped him, a melancholy he had never felt with such force, like an iron crown screwed to his skull.

  “Please,” he said. “You can tell Herr Fleck. I won’t arrest him—not while I’m in his care. But I’ve seen his file. The CIC will come to collect him very soon.”

  Sylvia preened at Sonny with defiance, like an exotic bird of prey. “And will they collect me?”

  “I’m not so sure,” he said. “I’m not so sure.”

  4.

  SHE APPEARED IN HIS DREAMS, utterly undressed, her hips as sharp as razor blades. He hadn’t been with a woman during his entire European junket. He’d dreamt of Oona recently, but it wasn’t at a Nazi cellar on the Avenue Foch, and it wasn’t at the Stork—it was at Schrafft’s, on Madison and Seventy-seventh, with cupcakes in the window, and Doris in residence with their mother and father. He was no longer the bar mitzvah boy. He was wearing his military tunic with his CIC armband and bronze battle stars. Oona Chaplin O’Neill. He couldn’t dance the rhumba with her on the checkerboard floor. Schrafft’s had a soda fountain and waitresses in smart black uniforms, but not even one solitary musician. And now he had this Fräulein. And their lovemaking—in his dreams—was akin to madness. He tore at pieces of her flesh. She straddled him, and his orgasm was like a bitter, suffering song….

  She didn’t appear again at the clinic. He had nurses who bathed him, sat with him in the garden, read to him from Moby-Dick. Residents asked him ridiculous questions about his sexual fantasies. But Herr Doktor Fleck seemed to avoid him. And then he had a visitor—Hemmy.

  The commandant of the Ritz wasn’t carrying a Colt or a submachine gun. And he didn’t have his band of Irregulars. He’d come alone to Krankenhaus 31. He’d been attached to the Fourth Division as a correspondent for Collier’s. He’d gone through the Hürtgen campaign and the Ardennes, though Sonny had never seen him once at Division. The Fourth had been shipped home in June, and Hem was currently unattached, an abandoned war bride. His cockiness was gone, the bravado of a civilian marauder with his own little mob of soldiers and Resistance fighters. Sonny could see the panic and pain of Hürtgen in his eyes, the despair of a haunted wood.

  “Hem, how did you find me?”

  “Easy, kid. I got it right from the horse’s mouth.”

  “Was that a military horse?” Sonny asked.

  “Righto. Lieutenant Colonel Blunt.”

  He’d been the fool of fools. Blunt had outwitted him all along. He must have known that Sonny’s Bavarian Alps was a stone building with a garden—Krankenhaus 31. That’s why the inquisitors at the front desk had awarded him a private room. It all came with the compliments of CIC. Sergeant Salinger was a Nazi hunter who hadn’t really left the hunt.

  “It must hurt like a bitch.”

  Sonny could tell that Hem wasn’t talking about the bandage on his cheek; he was almost prescient as Papa pursed his lips.

  “Oona.”

  A ripple went right up to Sonny’s throat. He was back at the Stork with Winchell and Hem and the playwright’s daughter with her dark lashes and dark hair, her bosoms floating above her strapless gown, her bare arms like fucking musical flesh—it was worse than any nightmare, because it was tinged with both acid and delight.

  “I’ll survive,” Sonny said. “We survived the Hürtgen.”

  “Did we?” Papa asked. “I haven’t sent a dispatch in for months. Collier’s calls me their celebrated ghostwriter. And I was rear echelon, not like you. I dined with the generals at Division, and it was still that bad. The artillery never stopped. There wasn’t a damn inch of stable ground.”

  Sonny was also rear echelon, some of the time. His desk was at Division, where CIC was headquartered. Sonny had several tunics in his sack. A CIC man wasn’t supposed to reveal his sergeant’s stripes, and he never did at Division. It was the rule of law, since a CIC agent often had to bark at men who outranked him; he had to boss those men around, and they might not have listened to a staff sergeant. But he always wore his stripes at the front. He was Sergeant Salinger, dammit, Salinger of E Company, and it was his chevrons that gave him whatever identity he had, and a bit of peace … until Lager IV, when all his identity fled into some forest that could have been another Hürtgen.

  “Salinger, you weren’t there when we said good-bye to the bravos of the Fourth. They were shipped back home last month. Major Oliver asked about you. ‘Where’s my CIC man?’ he said. He missed you. A lot of the guys did. They admired their rifleman who came over from Division.”

  Sonny couldn’t bring himself to attend that reunion, that last hurrah. He was as skittish as a cat locked in a closet. He ke
pt to his quarters at the Villa Oberwegner, right across from the Kraut barracks that had been firebombed as the Allies whooped into Bavaria with their war cries. He couldn’t seem to face these men, as if he’d been at fault, a spy among them, put there by the CIC. But he’d never spied, not once.

  “Can you sleep, kid?”

  “Not much.”

  “I’m a casualty,” Hem said. “I keep losing wives—with every war…. Bad dreams, bad dreams.”

  “It feels like we’re still in that damn forest,” Sonny said. “The wind keeps howling, even in my deaf ear.”

  This Falstaff with his own arsenal must have shed fifty pounds since Sonny had last seen him at the Ritz. Hem had been chastened, spanked, not by General Patton or the provost marshal, but by the unfortunate and chaotic melodies of battle, the continual, relentless barrage in a dark wood. He’d lost his enthusiasm, his appetite. He had a chicken neck; his shirt and trousers didn’t fit. He was all skin and bones, with a scraggly beard. He could have been a hobo who’d come in off the street to visit a staff sergeant who was largely invisible at Krankenhaus 31. He was the most recognizable and revered writer in the world, and Sonny pitied him.

  “Hem, forget the fucking dispatches. Have you gone back to writing fiction?”

  One side of Hemmy’s mouth curled, and he had a satanic smile. “I don’t have all my marbles, kid. Nothing is left in the barrel.”

  5.

  IT WAS HEM WHO MUST HAVE HEALED HIM a little with his own sense of grief and despair. Sonny opened his sack, put on his tunic with the chevrons, wore his armband, and paraded around the clinic as a CIC man. Nurses ran from him. “Ach, the American Gestapo is here.” He went into the psychiatric ward, and was startled by what he saw. It was filled with German soldiers who lay abed in their uniforms, some with their boots still on. They must have endured the Hürtgen and the Ardennes. The Krauts had lost the privilege of their own military hospitals, and the casualties had come here, to this ward. The soldiers kept kneading their hands in some kind of gesture that Sonny couldn’t fathom. They had an aura of dullness about them, a sense of absolute oblivion. Sonny wasn’t even sure they had noticed him. He could have been a cosmic Santa Claus delivering K rations, but he had no rations to give. He wiped the spittle from one soldier’s mouth with his handkerchief.