The Medic

by Leo Litwak

  Red slapped my back as we got up to go. He congratulated me for snatching this beauty from all the competition. The officers would have eaten her up. She could have chosen some flashy Brit or a red-hatted Zouave. But this trophy mademoiselle, a credit to our division, to our squad of eight, chose a T-5 from the Third Army. Red gloated in my triumph as if it were his.

  Marishka took me a couple of blocks to the Hotel de l’Avenir, a drab building with a faded gilt sign. A portly woman dozed on a chair in the tiny lobby near the stairs. Marishka paid her and we climbed two flights to a dingy studio with a closet-sized recess containing a bidet and washstand.

  “Would you like me to pay you now?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “In francs or dollars?”

  “I prefer dollars.”

  She didn’t ask me to wash or put on a rubber. She pulled off her dress, unhooked her brassiere, stepped out of her panties, and offered with full confidence a view she knew would please.

  “Tu es très belle.”

  “Merci.”

  She climbed under the covers and waited for me to undress.

  She was what I’d dreamed of; no, more than I expected. I barely entered her. I came without release. She beamed a child’s smile and I didn’t know how I could remain the night.

  “Listen,” I said, “let’s try again after I’ve rested. I’m very tired.”

  She asked if I wanted to sleep.

  “No, just rest.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll wash.”

  There was no washroom door and I could see her sitting on the bidet. She smiled at me, unembarrassed, then standing naked, her back to me, she washed her hands. She bent to wash her face. I could also see her in the mirror. She used a cloth for her underarms. She toweled herself, dabbed on scent, brushed her long brown hair. She burped, said, “Ooh la la!” and smiled.

  She was fresh and vibrant, there was nothing her body did that was less than beautiful. But when she was in my arms I lost heart again and was drained by my coming. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for or what her beauty deserved. She was receptive, not transported. There was the rest of the night still waiting, my leave diminishing in her bed.

  I used what French I had easily, without self-consciousness, able to say what I wanted to say. I said it was difficult to believe she was a student at the Sorbonne. Perhaps she had attended a lecture.

  Why was it hard to believe she was a student?

  I couldn’t understand why a student at the Sorbonne would earn a living off soldiers at the Moulin Rouge.

  She asked if I had any idea how hard life was in wartime.

  I said, “You’re right, I have no idea; I believe you. You are a student at the Sorbonne.”

  “Yes,” she said, “it’s true.”

  I said in English, “Who gives a fuck?”

  She asked what I’d said.

  “Nothing important.”

  Her parents were Russian, had left after the revolution, had come to France in 1925. She was born in Paris. She had an older brother who was a prisoner of war in Germany.

  I asked if she’d had many men and she said, not many.

  She asked if I’d had many women and I said, a few.

  She said, “You are also young.”

  I told her I was here—in Paris—because of what happened to me on the battlefield. Again I told the story I should never have used, how my closest friend, Lucca, fell on me, his belly torn open, and another friend lost his leg, and I stayed with these dying men all night in a hole in the ground. I told her that the night was on fire all around us and I lay as close to Lucca in that hole as she was to me in this bed.

  I wanted Marishka to experience the slit trench and the night on fire and Lucca and Billy dying, hoping, I suppose, that if her feeling deepened it would nourish mine, and in fact, there was tenderness in her kisses. I had the illusion my response was heartfelt but the satisfaction didn’t last long. I lay beside her uncomforted and ashamed. I had again used Lucca’s death to win sympathy.

  I asked if we were obliged to lie here all night.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Did I pay to be in bed all night?”

  She laughed. Would I like to go out to eat? It would be difficult to find a restaurant so late. There was little to eat in the restaurants—almost everything was rationed—but she had an idea. The bakers would soon begin baking for the morning and she knew a baker who would let us have fresh bread and coffee. Would I like that?

  The boulangerie was down the block. Lights were out and she rapped on the window and the baker came to the door, a fat man with heavy jowls and a thick black mustache dusted with flour; he was dressed in white, his hair covered in white. He embraced Marishka, clearly pleased to see her. His French was too fast and I only got the drift of what he said. He loved Americans. The war would soon be over, Paris returned to itself. After this past hard winter, there would be a marvelous spring, and what did I think of Marishka?

  “She’s beautiful,” I said. He led us through the dark shop to the ovens in back, sat us at a small wooden table with spindle legs, and brought out plates. He had a treat for us. He had difficulty getting enough butter so he didn’t make croissants every night, but a supply had arrived and we were in luck—hot croissants, fresh sweet butter, marmelade, coffee. He refused to let me pay.

  His name was Victor. Like Marishka he had a Russian mother. His father was French, also a baker.

  He asked what was my nation.

  Les États Unis. Couldn’t he tell by my uniform?

  Yes, but all Americans came from elsewhere. Where did my parents come from?

  “The Ukraine, Zhitomir, near Kiev.”

  “Marvelous! Congratulations!” We were countrymen.

  He brought out a bottle of wine, poured glasses for us.

  “Look at the beautiful child,” he said, nodding at Marishka who licked a fleck of wine from her lips. “She drinks with her tongue like a cat.”

  He had to get back to work and gave us a baguette to take with us.

  I asked Marishka how much of the night I had purchased. Did I have time left?

  She said she was very tired now.

  “Let’s go back to your hotel.”

  She would have to pay the concierge again.

  “I will pay the concierge. And I will pay for your time tomorrow. I paid twenty dollars for the night? I will pay twenty dollars for the day. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And if I want you for tomorrow night you will accept another twenty dollars?”

  “You want me for tomorrow night?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Then perhaps yes.”

  “Is it yes to any man with twenty dollars?”

  “I choose who I go with.”

  I gave her another twenty dollars. “Tomorrow is mine. I buy your day. And maybe I will buy tomorrow night also. Agreed?”

  She took my arm. “You like me, then?”

  “To like you is simple.”

  We returned to her hotel, undressed, lay in bed. She let me fumble around and held me affectionately. She said she needed to sleep.

  Before leaving I asked if she would remember me.

  She said, “I see you tomorrow, no?”

  “After tomorrow night, when I have gone back to the war, will you remember me?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “How can you remember me when there are so many others?”

  “I will remember you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are intelligent, you are young, you are clean. You speak French. You are special. Yes, I will remember you. Why do you want that I remember you?”

  I told her everything that happened in these hours had to be important. There was no time to waste on what had no importance. Money, for instance, was not important. Twenty dollars for you is important, I said. Twenty dollars for me is not important.

  “Perhaps I should ask for more,” she said smiling.

  “L
isten. I’m going back to my hotel. But tomorrow is mine, no one else can have it. Agreed?”

  “Okay.”

  “So if another American soldier offers you twenty-five or thirty dollars you will say, ‘No, I am taken, I belong to another’?”

  “You are crazy,” she said, “that is why I will remember you.”

  I told her to meet me outside my hotel at noon. She wouldn’t be allowed into the hotel. She should be there exactly at twelve o’clock.

  When I was dressed and ready to take off, she asked, “And you will remember me?”

  “You took all my dollars. Of course I will remember you.”

  “Good.”

  RED WAS SPREAD OUT on his belly, arm dangling from the cot, stripped to his GI underpants, moaning with his mouth open. I went to the bath down the hall and took a bath and when I returned Red was sitting on the edge of the cot, his head in his hands.

  He asked what time it was. I said four in the morning.

  He told me our schedule. “We leave from the hotel twelve noon, day after tomorrow. That’s thirty-two hours. We’re due back at our outfits by midnight, another twelve hours.” He had the latest battle reports from the army newspaper, Stars and Stripes. “A big push to the Rhine, tank battles, lots of action. Just forty-eight hours from now we’ll be assembled for a morning assault. So what the hell am I doing in bed?”

  He got up, pulled on his clothes, combed his hair, straightened his cap.

  He asked, “You coming?”

  “I got to sleep. I’ll be crazy if I don’t sleep.”

  He implored me to come party with him. He wanted to find his Marishka. My French would help. There were beautiful mademoiselles everywhere and somewhere one for him. “Don’t let me down, Buddy. We’re running out of time. Let’s party.”

  “Not a chance.”

  He said once more, “Come on, Buddy,” and I wanted him out of the room and blew up and told him to quit calling me buddy, my buddies were dead, he was no buddy of mine, to hell with the buddy bullshit anyway.

  He held up his hands as if warding off blows. “Okay, okay, okay.”

  I immediately apologized. “Give me a couple hours and I’ll go with you.”

  He giggled. “Sleep, Buddy. You earned it. Now I got to go out and earn mine.”

  I READ STARS AND STRIPES over a breakfast of coffee and powdered eggs and Spam. There was a battle along the whole of Germany west of the Rhine. Something enormous was happening. My platoon was dying while I dallied in Paris.

  I had the same need as Red to make these hours extraordinary. I didn’t look forward to Marishka. That was killing time. I wouldn’t have been unhappy if she hadn’t been waiting for me at noon, but there she was beneath the naked chestnut tree, across from the hotel entrance. She waved, “Bonjour, Léo.”

  It was chilly and overcast and she wore a head scarf and a GI raincoat and carried a folded umbrella.

  I asked where she’d found the raincoat. She said a friend had given it to her.

  “An American friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “People give you things because they are friendly?”

  “Yes, that is true.”

  “I’m friendly but I have no more to give. You have it all.”

  She ignored the belligerence and asked if I’d slept well.

  “Comme ci, comme ça.”

  Did I want to rest?

  There would be time to rest. I wasn’t looking for rest.

  Did I still want to see Paris?

  I didn’t know what I wanted.

  If I would like to walk we could go down to the river or take the metro to the Bois de Boulogne or go to the Luxembourg Gardens.

  Walking didn’t interest me. I had done too much walking.

  Would I care to visit the Sorbonne?

  Again my French failed me and I couldn’t describe my mood. The word “désespoir” seemed fancy. “Chagrin”—grief—would have led me back to Lucca and another betrayal. Maybe sleeplessness would explain enough. She seemed even more like a kid, her hair pulled in tight by the scarf, her nose made prominent, her smile shy and anxious. She looked dumpy in the raincoat.

  “We can go to a café and talk,” she said.

  Speaking French had become an effort. I wasn’t doing as well as the night before. I told her I wasn’t good company.

  “You don’t want to be with me?”

  I said, “I paid, didn’t I?” then apologized. I told her I was tired and annoyed at having to explain myself.

  She said she understood.

  We kept walking and passed a movie theater showing Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights.

  I asked if she knew the film.

  She had seen Modern Times but not this one.

  “Do you want to see it?”

  She was agreable, and why shouldn’t she be? I’d bought her time and it was a way of being with each other without obligation.

  The dark, familiar place was the same in Paris as in Detroit. I could detach from her, take a recess, consider what I could do in these next few hours to make my return to combat bearable. My platoon was dying while I killed time in Paris, and that was unbearable.

  Marishka was thrilled by the movie. She laughed like a child. At the end, when the once blind girl extends a flower to the tramp and the theme plays—“Won’t you buy my pretty violets?”—I, too, was sucked into it. I felt the pressure of tears and was dismayed and held back. She sobbed out loud.

  I said, “Shut up,” and got up, and she followed me out.

  “What is wrong?”

  “You cry for that?”

  She felt sad for the little tramp who at the end was so alone.

  “It’s a lie,” I said. “The little tramp is a rich man. He has everything. The beautiful ladies adore him. He is never alone. The world explodes”—detonates, I said—“and you don’t cry for that but you cry for a character in a film.”

  “You are right. I will cry no more. You didn’t pay to see me cry.”

  I told her again I didn’t care about the money, the money had no importance. Only time had weight for me. I’d pay a fortune to have more time. Twenty-four hours left. Time was the only thing I truly wanted to own. My time was vanishing.

  She got the gist of what I meant despite my messed-up French. “You don’t want to go back to the war.”

  “What good is wanting?”

  It started to rain and she opened her umbrella, a uselessly elegant flower of impermeable cloth. She held it over me. I was barely covered and her head was getting soaked. I told her to take the umbrella for herself; I didn’t need it.

  She said, “Come to my place, where I live. You didn’t pay to see me cry. We’ll have something to eat.”

  IT WASN’T A hotel in Pigalle, but an old building near the Seine in the fifth arrondissement, and we walked a narrow stairway to the fourth floor and down a bleak corridor into a cramped three-room apartment she shared with a couple she identified as fellow students at the Sorbonne. There was a minuscule kitchen. The fairly large, bright living room belonged to her roommates, Annie and Bernard. There was a bed heaped with pillows and an Oriental rug. The walls were decorated with movie posters—one with Jimmy Cagney and the Dead End Kids, Les Anges Aux Figures Sales, Angels with Dirty Faces. There was a battle scene with a bandaged, bloody sansculotte hoisting a red flag. The poster said, “Come, Communards, Meet the Red Sun of May; Come, Communards, Meet the Red Day.” The toilet and bath were down the corridor, shared with other tenants.

  Her room was tiny and dark, a mattress on the floor, old photos and etchings on the walls, a beaded lamp on a wood mosaic end table, a cane chair, an ornate gold-framed mirror above the bed. There was no door to her room. Strings of beads separated her from her roommates. She said we didn’t have to worry about being interrupted. They were at work and wouldn’t return till morning. I sat at a small table in the kitchen while she heated a large iron pot on a gas burner. She brought out bread from a window box. Rid of scarf and raincoat, in
her short skirt and tight blouse she more clearly resembled the Marishka of the previous night.

  We had a thick beef soup, bread, even butter and wine. We sat opposite each other on unstable rattan chairs. I apologized. She had done nothing wrong. I wasn’t sure why I was so annoyed by her response to the film but if I felt nothing for my comrade Lucca, why should I feel anything about Charlie, the tramp? Her tears oppressed me, offended me, pushed me close to the outrage of weeping.

  I mixed English with French, got tenses wrong. “Pardon?” she said, confused, but I pushed ahead and she seemed to catch on. “Si, Si,” she said, “je comprends,” and I moved my chair till we were next to each other and I put my arm around her and she leaned her head on my shoulder and we went to her room and undressed, lay in her bed and connected, and I don’t know where it came from—it was uncalculated and without ground and completely surprised me. I said, “I love you”—I have no idea what I meant, I don’t know what the feeling was that I named. I had no other name for it, a sudden release of the heart, a relief from the press of time—the war for a moment distant.

  “I am content,” I said, and she said, “Moi, aussi.”

  This was a long way from “love” but even “content” was too large a claim. I lay there, clinging to contentment and it slipped away. I was already back with my platoon, spinning the story of my leave, Marishka at its center, Red there, the Moulin Rouge, Paris, the supply complex at Esch. I had no idea who had survived the advance to the Rhine and who would be there to hear about my leave.

  We were still in bed when Bernard pushed the beaded strings aside, arms spread wide against the frame of the entry, a dark, wiry, eagle-beaked Frenchman, perhaps in his mid-twenties. Annie was behind him, looking over his outspread arm.

  “You bring your work home again?” he asked Marishka, barely glancing at me. “I thought we had an agreement.”

  “What agreement?”

  “That this is not your place of business.”

  “Léo is a friend. He is a student.”

  “He comes to my home to study cunt?”

  She said, “Fuck you, Bernard.”

  Before leaving, Bernard looked back at my uniform. He said in English, “This time she brings an American.”

  I got out of bed and dressed. “You said they wouldn’t be home.”