Nine Stories

Nine Stories Page 9

by J. D. Salinger

>>

  I kept looking over at Charles, who had sat down and started to drink his tea, using both hands on the cup. I hoped he'd turn around, but he didn't.

  Esme stood up. `Il faut que je parte aussi," she said, with a sigh. <<>>

  I got up from my own chair, with mixed feelings of regret and confusion. Esme and I shook hands; her hand, as I'd suspected, was a nervous hand, damp at the palm. I told her, in English, how very much I'd enjoyed her company.

  She nodded. <<>>

  She gave her hair another experimental touch. <<>>

  <<>>

  She quickly touched her hair again. <<>> she asked. <<>>

  I answered that I'd like nothing better but that, unfortunately, I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to make it again.

  <<>> she asked, with a certain amount of color in her face. <<>>

  <<>> I took out pencil and paper and wrote down my name, rank, serial number, and A. P.O. number.

  <<>> She put the address into a pocket of her dress. <<
  I ordered another pot of tea and sat watching the two of them till they, and the harassed Miss Megley, got up to leave. Charles led the way out, limping tragically, like a man with one leg several, inches shorter than the other. He didn't look over at me. Miss Megley went next, then Esme, who waved to me. I waved back, half getting up from my chair. It was a strangely emotional moment for me.

  Less than a minute later, Esme came back into the tearoom, dragging Charles behind her by the sleeve of his reefer. <<
  I immediately put down my cup, and said that was very nice, but was she sure?

  <<>>

  His face lit up. <<>> he shrieked, and raced out of the room, possibly in hysterics.

  Esme was standing with crossed ankles again. <<>> she asked. <<>>

  I said there was absolutely no chance that I'd forget. I told her that I'd never written a story for anybody, but that it seemed like exactly the right time to get down to it.

  She nodded. <<>>

  I said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in one form or another, all the time, and that I'd do my best to come up to her specifications. We shook hands.

  <<>>

  I said it was, I said it certainly was.

  <<>>

  I thanked her, and said a few other words, and then watched her leave the tearoom.

  She left it slowly, reflectively, testing the ends of her hair for dryness.

  This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I'm still around, but from here on in, for reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose, I've disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.

  It was about ten-thirty at night in Gaufurt, Bavaria, several weeks after V-E Day. Staff Sergeant X was in his room on the second floor of the civilian home in which he and nine other American soldiers had been quartered, even before the armistice. He was seated on a folding wooden chair at a small, messy-looking writing table, with a paperback overseas novel open before him, which he was having great trouble reading.

  The trouble lay with him, not the novel. Although the men who lived on the first floor usually had first grab at the books sent each month by Special Services, X usually seemed to be left with the book he might have selected himself. But he was a young man who had not come through the war with all his faculties intact, and for more than an hour he had been triple-reading paragraphs, and now he was doing it to the sentences. He suddenly closed the book, without marking his place. With his hand, he shielded his eyes for a moment against the harsh, watty glare from the naked bulb over the table.

  He took a cigarette from a pack on the table and lit it with fingers that bumped gently and incessantly against one another. He sat back a trifle in his chair and smoked without any sense of taste. He had been chain-smoking for weeks. His gums bled at the slightest pressure of the tip of his tongue, and he seldom stopped experimenting; it was a little game he played, sometimes by the hour. He sat for a moment smoking and experimenting. Then, abruptly, familiarly, and, as usual, with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter, like insecure luggage on an overhead rack. He quickly did what he had been doing for weeks to set things right: he pressed his hands hard against his temples. He held on tight for a moment. His hair needed cutting, and it was dirty. He had washed it three or four times during his two weeks' stay at the hospital in Frankfort on the Main, but it had got dirty again on the long, dusty jeep ride back to Gaufurt. Corporal Z, who had called for him at the hospital, still drove a jeep combat-style, with the windshield down on the hood, armistice or no armistice. There were thousands of new troops in Germany. By driving with his windshield down, combat-style, Corporal Z hoped to show that he was not one of them, that not by a long shot was he some new son of a bitch in the E. T.O.

  When he let go of his head, X began to stare at the surface of the writing table, which was a catchall for at least two dozen unopened letters and at least five or six unopened packages, all addressed to him. He reached behind the debris and picked out a book that stood against the wall. It was a book by Goebbels, entitled <<>>

  It belonged to the thirty-eight-year-old, unmarried daughter of the family that, up to a few weeks earlier, had been living in the house. She had been a low official in the Nazi Party, but high enough, by Army Regulations standards, to fall into an automatic-arrest category. X himself had arrested her. Now, for the third time since he had returned from the hospital that day, he opened the woman's book and read the brief inscription on the flyleaf. Written in ink, in German, in a small, hopelessly sincere handwriting, were the words <<>> Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the sickly stillness of the room, the words appeared to have the stature of an uncontestable, even classic indictment. X stared at the page for several minutes, trying, against heavy odds, not to be taken in. Then, with far more zeal than he had done anything in weeks, he picked up a pencil stub and wrote down under the inscription, in English, <<>> He started to write Dostoevski's name under the inscription, but saw--with fright that ran through his whole body--that what he had written was almost entirely illegible. He shut the book.

/>   He quickly picked up something else from the table, a letter from his older brother in Albany. It had been on his table even before he had checked into the hospital. He opened the envelope, loosely resolved to read the letter straight through, but read only the top half of the first page. He stopped after the words <<>> After he'd torn it up, he looked down at the pieces as they lay in the wastebasket. He saw that he had overlooked an enclosed snapshot. He could make out somebody's feet standing on a lawn somewhere.

  He put his arms on the table and rested his head on them. He ached from head to foot, all zones of pain seemingly interdependent. He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective.

  The door banged open, without having been rapped on. X raised his head, turned it, and saw Corporal Z standing in the door. Corporal Z had been X's jeep partner and constant companion from D Day straight through five campaigns of the war. He lived on the first floor and he usually came up to see X when he had a few rumors or gripes to unload. He was a huge, photogenic young man of twenty-four. During the war, a national magazine had photographed him in Hurtgen Forest; he had posed, more than just obligingly, with a Thanksgiving turkey in each hand. <<>> he asked X. <<>> He preferred always to enter a room that had the overhead light on.

  X turned around in his chair and asked him to come in, and to be careful not to step on the dog.

  <<>>

  <<>>

  Clay found the overhead-light switch, flicked it on, then stepped across the puny, servant's-size room and sat down on the edge of the bed, facing his host. His brick-red hair, just combed, was dripping with the amount of water he required for satisfactory grooming. A comb with a fountain-pen clip protruded, familiarly, from the right-hand pocket of his olive-drab shirt. Over the left-hand pocket he was wearing the Combat Infantrymen's Badge (which, technically, he wasn't authorized to wear), the European Theatre ribbon, with five bronze battle stars in it (instead of a lone silver one, which was the equivalent of five bronze ones), and the pre-Pearl Harbor service ribbon. He sighed heavily and said, <<>> It meant nothing; it was Army. He took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, tapped one out, then put away the pack and rebuttoned the pocket flap. Smoking, he looked vacuously around the room. His look finally settled on the radio. <<>>

  X, opening a fresh pack of cigarettes, said he had just turned the radio off.

  Undarkened, Clay watched X trying to get a cigarette lit. <<>>

  X got his cigarette lit, nodded, and said Clay had a real eye for detail.

  <<>>

  <<>>

  Loretta was Clay's girl. They intended to get married at their earliest convenience. She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations. All through the war, Clay had read all Loretta's letters aloud to X, however intimate they were--in fact, the more intimate, the better. It was his custom, after each reading, to ask X to plot out or pad out the letter of reply, or to insert a few impressive words in French or German.

  <<
  <<>> He sat up again and tried for another belch, but with below-par results. A jot of alertness came into his face. <<>>

  X, regarding him hostilely, stated that he didn't want an Eisenhower jacket.

  Clay looked surprised, almost a trifle hurt. <<>>

  <<>>

  <<>>

  The two sat quiet for a moment, hating Bulling. Clay suddenly looked at X with newhigher-interest than before. <<>>

  X said he knew all about it, and covered his tic with his hand.

  Clay stared at him for a moment, then said, rather vividly, as if he were the bearer of exceptionally good news, <<>>

  <<>>

  <<>> Clay stretched himself out on the bed, shoes included. <<>>

  X bridged his hands over his eyes--the light over the bed seemed to be blinding him--and said that Loretta's insight into things was always a joy.

  Clay glanced over at him. <<>>

  <<>> X asked.

  Clay left his feet where they were for a few don't-tell-mewhere-to-put-my-feet seconds, then swung them around to the floor and sat up. <<>> He didn't get up from the bed, though.

  <<>>

  <<>>

  <<>>

  <<>>

  <<>>

  X threaded his fingers, once, through his dirty hair, then shielded his eyes against the light again. <<>>

  Clay looked at him suspiciously. <<>>

  <<>>

  <<>> Clay said, his lips thinned. <<>>

  X suddenly felt sick, and he swung around in his chair and grabbed the wastebasket- -just in time. When he had straightened up and turned toward his guest again, he found him standing, embarrassed, halfway between the bed and the door. X started to apologize, but changed his mind and reached for his cigarettes.

  <<ndly over it. <<>>

  <<>>

  <<>>

  <<>>

  Clay took a couple of slow steps toward the door. <<
  he said. <<>>

  <<>>

  <<>> The door slammed shut, then instantly opened again. <<>>

  <<>>

  <<>>

  X looked up and over at him, and said, with great effort, <<>>

  <<>> The door slammed shut, this time for good.

  X sat looking at the door for a long while, then turned his chair around toward the writing table and picked up his portable typewriter from the floor. He made space for it on the messy table surface, pushing aside the collapsed pile of unopened letters and packages. He thought if he wrote a letter to an old friend of his in New York there might be some quick, however slight, therapy in it for him. But he couldn't insert his notepaper into the roller properly, his fingers were shaking so violently now. He put his hands down at his sides for a minute, then tried again, but finally crumpled the notepaper in his hand.

  He was aware that he ought to get the wastebasket out of the room, but instead of doing anything about it, he put his arms on the typewriter and rested his head again, closing his eyes.

  A few throbbing minutes later, when he opened his eyes, he found himself squinting at a small, unopened package wrapped in green paper. It had probably slipped off the pile when he had made space for the typewriter. He saw that it had been readdressed several times. He could make out, on just one side of the package, at least three of his old A. P.O. numbers.

 

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