The Medic

by Leo Litwak

  “The war in Europe is over,” he shouted. “Eat, drink, and enjoy!”

  We cheered, whooped, shook hands, hugged. An hour later, drunk and sated and happy, we ignored the fact that Japan was undefeated and the war in the Pacific still beckoned. We changed into fatigues and went to the meadow behind the Schloss for a game of softball.

  Afterward I was sleepy and still high and prickly with sweat and meadow dust, but I didn’t want to return to the Schloss and lose the holiday mood. I walked with Novak to the village center to pick up some more photos of Russian soldiers.

  Grossdorf was tranquil. There were a few DPs waiting at the square, but otherwise nothing moved.

  Novak called this a great day, as strong a statement of feeling as I could expect from him. He seemed confident about where he had been and how he would end up. He was the man we asked to mediate our arguments. He’d grin and tell you to figure it out for yourself. His refusal to be involved seemed evidence of wisdom.

  Almost from the time we arrived in Grossdorf, Novak had shacked up with Carla, a tiny, blond widow from Chemnitz. Novak spoke a few words of German. Her English was barely decipherable. They walked arm in arm near the Schloss in open disregard of the nonfraternization order, and that didn’t seem wise. Novak went to her each night, bringing rations, like a family man.

  He already had a family in Wisconsin. A wife and child waited on a farm outside Lacrosse for his return. How many wives could a judicious man have? All he would say about Carla when we needled him about his Grossdorf ménage was that she was very clean, as though that unremarkable quality was justification for setting up house. What he may have meant was, she was dainty and tidy and he’d been in combat with rank men for six months and when relief was offered he couldn’t refuse. I asked him on the way to the town center if Carla knew he was married.

  “She knows.”

  “It’s okay with her?”

  “Well, that’s how it is.”

  I asked what would happen to her when he returned to Wisconsin. He said he’d survived the ordeal of combat and nothing more could worry him.

  It was an attitude I wished for, and always the student—trying to find out from anyone how to survive and be happy surviving—I hung around Novak, hoping for lessons in being carefree.

  I rattled on about how great I was feeling. I told Novak I didn’t know if my love for the platoon would last out the day, but right now I felt the same as Klamm, that we were family. Maybe if in the next hour word reached us that VE Day was a hoax and the war was still on and we were stuck with each other for another six months, I’d feel that the platoon was a prison and that I was only connected to these other inmates by chains. Right now I felt we were brothers. We may have come from different worlds but what we’d been through together made us family.

  “Let’s see how you feel when you sober up.”

  “It’s not just the wine,” I said. How could you not feel intimate if you’d slept together in slit trenches and shit together in straddle trenches?

  Novak said, “Thanks, but I’ll take my two holer back on the farm.”

  Straddle trenches were narrow trenches, about a foot wide, two feet deep, a dozen feet long. We squatted face to back, toilet tissue in the webbing of helmet liners, learning each other’s stink—“Man, something must have crawled up you and died”—and accepting each other despite the stink and despite the excesses of war.

  “I feel terrific,” I said. “We’re going home. Maybe there are kooks in the family but like that kook Roy says, every family has its kooks.”

  “You’re feeling terrific because you’re loaded. There’s still the Japs to fight. We got a long way to go.”

  We were talking outside the camera shop at the town center when we heard a horn honking and saw the jeep barreling toward us. Lieutenant Klamm braked sharply, flung open the passenger door. He barked at me to get in. “Not you,” he said to Novak.

  Novak asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Trouble at one of our posts.”

  “Is it the Russkis?”

  We took off fast, leaving him behind. We headed east, toward Chemnitz.

  “A kid’s been shot. A seven-year-old boy. He may be dead. I got a call from the guards. I warned the assholes not to fire their weapons. They must have been shooting at deer and a stray hit the kid.”

  “You think it’s our guards?”

  “Roy Jones and Alfieri on duty? With screwups like that, what are the chances it wasn’t them? VE Day and this happens! Can you believe it?”

  We drove to the edge of Grossdorf. The boy lay on a culvert crossing a few hundred yards from the guard post. A German civilian hovered over him, shielding the body from the child’s playmates, three boys and a girl, all about seven or eight. Roy Jones and Alfieri stood nearby, obviously worried. The German civilian seemed to be in his thirties, probably a returned soldier in civvies. He stepped aside, and I knelt by the child, a freckled, sandy-haired boy, mouth open, lips soft, long-lashed eyes closed, and a wound like a large red caste mark in the middle of his forehead, no breath or pulse.

  The German calmly said, “Das Kind ist tot.” The child is dead.

  I tipped the boy’s face, smoothed aside the light brown hair, looked for an exit wound, but didn’t find one.

  The lieutenant asked what I thought.

  The child wore a broad-striped shirt, green lederhosen, ankle-high boots with rolled white socks—someone’s lovely, well-tended child. I handled him as unfeelingly as I did any of the dead. I was cool and unaffected. In retrospect, I’d say, numb and frozen, definitely sobered.

  I told the lieutenant I didn’t see how a wound so small could have been caused by an M1. There was no exit wound. I’d have expected a thirty-caliber bullet to have blown a hole in the back of the skull. The only scenario I could imagine was that the shot had traveled a great distance and that the bullet was spent. I asked how far away the guard post was.

  “Between three and four hundred yards.”

  “Maybe an M1 could do this from that far away.”

  Alfieri said, “We aimed into the forest. We didn’t shoot this way.”

  Roy Jones told him to shut up.

  Lieutenant Klamm was furious. “You had orders, no shooting! VE Day, a day of celebration, peace in Germany, and you screwups have to bring on big trouble. You see what happens when you disobey orders? You killed a seven-year-old kid!”

  Roy and Alfieri looked at each other glumly.

  The lieutenant asked where exactly they were when they were shooting. “If you don’t want to spend the next few years in the stockade, you’ll tell me the truth.”

  Alfieri said, “We were at the guard post. Ask the Russkis. There were two of them on guard with us. They were shooting, too. Maybe it was a Russki bullet.”

  “Which way were they shooting? What weapons did they use?”

  “They were using grease guns, shooting everywhere.”

  “Grease guns don’t have the range. You’re sure they didn’t have rifles?”

  “Maybe. Ask Roy.”

  Roy stared coldly ahead. The lieutenant asked, “How about it?”

  “They were using grease guns. Nothing else.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “They didn’t use rifles.”

  “Great. Just great. Now I have to call the CO and who knows where it’s going?”

  The German civilian, who had been whispering with the children, suddenly cuffed one of the boys, then grabbed him and shook hard. The boy started wailing and that set off the others.

  I asked, “Was gibt?” Instead of answering, the German shook the boy harder. The child sobbed something I couldn’t make out, and the German let go of him, went to the side of the road, sprawled on his belly, stretched below the roadway into the culvert, and came up holding a pistol that fit the palm of his hand. “Ein Walther,” he said, naming the tiny weapon he handed to the lieutenant.

  The children had found the cute Walther pistol, were playing wi
th it; it went off and the boy was killed. The children who had at first been solemn and quiet now sobbed all out. The civilian gathered them in. He had one of those stern, neutral faces I expect to see on cops. He wore a white shirt, sleeves rolled up, arms tanned and muscular. He stroked their heads, patted them, “Shhh.”

  He’d served with the police before the war. Grossdorf was then a quiet town, he said. Two officers, detached from Chemnitz, were the entire force. There was sometimes trouble with drunken farmers after market day, but nothing that couldn’t be easily handled. No need for night duty. The spillover from Chemnitz caused more serious crime, but still nothing of great moment. In his seven years in Grossdorf there had never been a homicide.

  I repeated all this to the lieutenant, who was obviously relieved. “This is a civilian matter. Ask him if he’s going to take care of it.”

  The German cop, still sheltering the weeping kids, told me the child’s mother had already been notified. He would wait until she arrived. He agreed to take care of police details.

  Klamm asked if the man needed the use of the jeep.

  “Thank you. We have transportation.”

  “Let’s get out of here before it gets more complicated.” He told Roy and Alfieri he’d sent their relief to the guard post and they could return to the platoon.

  I didn’t want to ride back with the lieutenant and told him I’d walk to the Schloss.

  When he was gone, Roy Jones shoved me hard in the chest. “J. Edgar Hoover here says, ‘No exit wound. Must be a shot from the guard post.’ The son of a bitch is ready to blame his buddies for something they didn’t do.”

  I apologized. Klamm suspected the fatal shot had come from our post and I hadn’t thought of other possibilities.

  “What the hell do you know about exit wounds?”

  I agreed I knew nothing. I told Roy he’d be glad to know I was finished with the aid-man business. “The war’s over. If anyone calls for help I’m heading the other way.”

  “That should save a few lives.”

  He was satisfied to get in the last word and I wasn’t about to quarrel. My days with Roy Jones were numbered.

  Before we could take off, the child’s mother came running toward us, arms waving, hair flying, shouting something like, “Hansi! Hansi!” I didn’t recognize Ingrid Schultz until she was almost at the crossing. She fell to her knees moaning, and clasped the body of her child. The German cop knelt at her side and told her what had happened. The children had found the weapon, were playing with it, and her son was killed.

  She rocked with her child, moaning, “Mein Kind, mein liebes Kind!” The other kids were bawling.

  I bent down to her and said lamely that I sorrowed for her loss. It must have sounded absurd. She glanced at me with no apparent recognition. I asked the German if there was anything I could do to help. He could think of nothing.

  Roy Jones and Alfieri were finished with their duty and eager to return to the platoon and what remained of the celebration.

  “They saved us chow,” Roy said. “Let’s go while it’s still saved.”

  I started back to the Schloss with them. Roy was still pissed off that he had been suspected in the killing of the boy. “I know what I was shooting at and I hit what I’m shooting at. I wasn’t shooting at no seven-year-old kid.”

  Alfieri, who was not much of a marksman, agreed. “We were shooting at targets in the woods.”

  I told them to go on ahead. I wanted to be by myself. “His mother’s a friend. I used to bring chocolate for the kid.”

  “That’s something you won’t do no more.”

  I turned into the woods above town, terrifically deflated, as low as I had been high. The platoon brotherhood I had celebrated seemed no more than drunken sentimentality. We accommodated to everything. Being alive was a transient, easily modified condition, no intrinsic joy in it. Killing was simple, dying was scarier than ever. I would return to Detroit and resume my life. Nothing would have changed except that I’d lost time.

  An old resentment boiled up while I stumbled through the woods above town, past the abandoned German motor pool with its scavenged, camouflaged vehicles. What came to mind with sudden vividness was the night they left me in a trench with Lucca and Billy dying and rockets coming in. Everyone ran for cover and I was stuck under rocket fire with the dying men. By the time relief came, fear was rung out of me and I felt as dead as stone. The platoon had abandoned me and no Paris leave could make that right.

  I knew it was a stupid grievance. They came for me as soon as the rockets let up. And then wasn’t Marishka the true reward? The gods must have placed her near the entrance of the Moulin Rouge and given me the nerve to approach her. In her rue du Bac apartment I unfroze and came alive.

  There was no such chance with Ingrid Schultz. We had sex, the kids never around, the blinds always drawn. I asked her not to wear scent and she scrubbed herself plain for our next date, her skin dry, the deep lines in her face apparent, her light hair—the color of her son’s hair—pulled back and bound. The next time she dressed in something like ski pants and a white blouse. She offered me a glass of wine. Danke. Bitte. I offered her a cigarette. When she bent for an ashtray I brought her to the couch and it was quickly done, no intimacy, nothing said. I was the master, she the occupied, nothing equal in our dealings, and I couldn’t get beyond the eroticism of that inequality. Again I came away from her solitary and unrelieved.

  Her grief revealed her to me as sex hadn’t. I felt ashamed that I’d made so little of her. Novak would have done better.

  It no longer felt like victory.

  WILLY FRUCHT STOPPED me on a street near the Schloss. I hadn’t seen him in several days. He waved me over to where he stood out of sight.

  He had come to say good-bye. He had decided to leave Grossdorf. He would be in Zwickau for a few days, then, who could tell? Maybe Palestine. Maybe the USA. Never again the Netherlands. He intended one day to go to America and, if so, would look me up in Detroit.

  Did he know about Ingrid’s child?

  He knew.

  “Will she be okay?”

  He looked at me as if I were a fool. “She will survive. Everyone has lost family. It’s a common European experience. You mourn and recover.”

  “That’s all?”

  “If you are lucky.”

  “Where’s your family, Willy?”

  “All gone,” he said.

  Willy despised self-confession. It was a habit of mind without survival value and Willy had a passion to survive. He didn’t want to talk about Ingrid and my lack of feeling.

  “Why should you feel? You are a Jew. She is a German. What do you expect, love and marriage, and you will take her back to Detroit or maybe, even worse, settle in Grossdorf? These people made life hell on earth.”

  He removed a sleek black Luger tucked inside his shirt. It was in even better condition than the weapon Maurice owned. “I give it to you. It is yours.”

  I wasn’t allowed to carry weapons and anyhow didn’t want one.

  “Take it. The war is over. It will remind you while you are wallowing in the life of the mind that there is another way to be. This gun is the wisdom I leave you with.”

  “A gun in my hand instead of an idea in my head?”

  “I cannot afford to be caught with this. Take it. It’s a gift. Consider it like money in the bank.”

  “You once told me you never offer gifts.”

  “I make an exception. But beware. I could one day show up in Detroit and demand payment.”

  I told him I would love to see him in Detroit. I would treat him as family.

  “I don’t ask for that.”

  The last I saw of Willy in Grossdorf he was headed toward the town center. He was by my reckoning nineteen years old, nowhere at home and in constant motion.

  I CLIMBED THE factory fence and cut blooms from the garden and brought the flowers and chocolate to Ingrid. I waited outside the house. The neighbors may have disapproved of my being ther
e but they couldn’t do anything about it. I saw her coming down the forest road, dressed in black, shawled like a peasant woman, her boots muddy, carrying a bundle of twigs and small branches for kindling. I went to meet her, took the bundle from her, and walked her to her door.

  She must have felt that whatever my motive, it was somehow connected to desire. I tried to reassure her that I was only moved by sympathy. At her house she took off her boots. She let me into the house so there wouldn’t be a scene.

  The chocolate was for her daughter. “Take it. It’s for Martha.”

  She left flowers and chocolate on the little table in the vestibule.

  I asked what I could do to help her.

  “Nichts.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Gar nichts.” Nothing at all.

  She was cold and distant. “It is best if you do not come here again.”

  I thought I had something to offer—sympathy, consolation, chocolate, cigarettes—but she said, “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  CHAPTER 12

  < LEAVING GROSSDORF >

  Grossdorf was our town by dint of conquest and occupation. A few of us, like Novak, had come to have quasi family connections with Grossdorfers. We knew—and the townsfolk certainly knew—that someday there would be a bill presented and Grossdorf would be made to pay for the foreign labor it had abused and the regime it had supported. But we were there to protect them when the day of reckoning came, and with that assurance the town was able to keep operating with Russian units poised at the border.

  In late July we were awakened at midnight and summoned to the parlor of the Schloss. A first lieutenant from company headquarters was there with orders confining us to quarters, no communication with anyone outside our unit. Saxony had been given to the Russians at the Yalta summit. We were pulling out of town. We had four hours to get out. We had to be gone by morning, our first stop Zwickau, then out of Saxony entirely, and then out of Europe, a brief stopover in the United States. The invasion of Japan was our final destination. That’s what the messenger told us.