A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “We’ll worry about that later. Now translate for your mother and sister.”

  I had convinced myself that I would bring her back to America as my wife in a year. The money was not important save as a means to that goal.

  Really convinced myself, so much that I could actually imagine her at the good April’s supper table?

  Hardly.

  There were tears and protestations of gratitude in German from the backseat when Trudi had finished her translation.

  “My mother and sister are very grateful,” she said formally, “for your generosity and your bravery. Like me, they cannot understand why you are so generous to us. They express hope that you are not in any danger. All of us”—she choked—“would rather go to the Russian zone than endanger you.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said with equal formality. “I’m in no danger.”

  “May I ask you a question, Karl?”

  “I have to concentrate on driving the car, Trudi. Please don’t bother me.”

  “But does the E on that gauge mean empty?”

  “I’m afraid it does.”

  How big a fool can you be? You’re leaving on a dangerous mission, you calculate all the details, but you don’t look at the gas gauge. Polly’s requisition had told them to fill it up. But in the occupying Army everything routinely went wrong. I had burned up much of what they had put in the tank on my extended tryst with Trudi. God was catching up with me.

  I slowed the car. “Thank you, Trudi. When I do something dumb, please tell me.”

  “Ja.”

  “We will turn around and go back to that fuel station a few miles up the road. I’m sure we have enough gas to make it.”

  “Ja,” she said with a little less confidence in me than I would have liked, more however than I deserved.

  I drove across the thirty-foot median strip, an exercise that the elegant 1947 Buick did not like. It bumped and heaved and jolted.

  What if I break an axle or the transmission?

  The Buick lunged up on the pavement, shook once, and then proceeded on the highway back to Bamberg.

  Only then did I realize that I should have used second for the trip across the median.

  The car stalled a hundred meters short of the fuel depot. I eased it forward and limped into the station, where it died completely.

  A yawning PFC ambled out of the station.

  “What can I do for you, Sarge?” He yawned again.

  “Fill ’er up.” It was the first time in my life I had ever said that. I showed him the authorization from General Meade.

  “Okay, fill out this requisition form.” He glanced at the women in the car, smiled his approval, and started the pump.

  I filled in the form with trembling fingers.

  “Hey, Sarge, you damn near run this thing dry.”

  “I know.”

  “Nothing wrong with it. We all do it. Looks like you have some pretty good distractions.”

  “Yeah.”

  He put some numbers on the form, I signed it.

  Then I glanced up at a car coming into the station from the west. John and Polly Nettleton were in the front seat. What were they doing out here at this time of night?

  I turned over the ignition, shifted into first, and got the hell out of there. Fortunately there was pavement connecting both sides of the autobahn here, so I didn’t have to put the Buick through another ordeal.

  “Good,” Trudi sighed in approval.

  In the rearview mirror I watched the Nettletons’ car. It crossed from the eastbound to the westbound lane. They too were heading for Nürnberg.

  We had lost only twenty minutes, twenty minutes that could be very important before we were finished.

  What would happen to me if I was caught? Would the general cover up for me? Perhaps a few months in a disciplinary barracks and then a general discharge without GI benefits? And disgrace to my family?

  Or would someone higher up decide that it was necessary to make an example of me? Would they throw the book at me?

  If they did, it would be a pretty heavy book.

  Each kilometer reduced that possibility. Once I had delivered the Schultzes to Stuttgart, it would be impossible for a court-martial to connect me with their disappearance.

  The headlights of another car turned on as sunset approached and continued steadily behind us. Was it still John and Polly? Were they trailing me? Or were they up to something else?

  Then, about halfway to Nürnberg, we fell in behind a heavy convoy of Army trucks, rolling along at forty-five miles an hour.

  Damn.

  Then I recalled my trip to Nürnberg to pick up the Old Fitz for General Meade. That had been on a Thursday night too. It was about the same time that they had delayed me—and thus made it possible to rescue Trudi. I was in no hurry that night, but now I was. Damn them.

  If I remembered correctly, they’d turn off in about ten minutes. I couldn’t figure out what it all meant, but I thought I’d better measure the time.

  Twelve minutes later they did exactly what they, or a similar convoy, had done in the winter.

  Black market?

  I would have to look at that next week if I was still a free man. I noticed I was shivering again. A bitter midwinter in August.

  I tried to calm my nerves as we roared by Nürnberg where the real war criminals were on trial—theirs that is, not ours. Victors don’t try their own criminals such as Winston Churchill.

  I still had not thought of the trail I had left behind that would point right to me. There were no headlights behind us anymore. John and Polly—if it were they—must have turned into Nürnberg.

  Stuttgart and safety suddenly receded into the distance. The Buick lurched and heaved, crunched into the other lane, and ground to a halt, despite my increased pressure on the gas pedal.

  “The tire is kaput,” said little Erika calmly as though we were on a Sunday-morning drive in the country.

  “Do you know how to change a tire?” I looked helplessly at Trudi.

  “Nein.”

  “Neither do I.”

  Another noncom had taught me how to drive, but he had neglected to include tire changing in his lessons.

  “The . . . machine for lifting the vehicle is, I think, in the boot.”

  “I know that much. It’s called the jack. And in America it is not the boot but the trunk.”

  “Thank you.”

  We pried the jack out of the trunk and tried to rig it under the car and pump on the handle.

  It did not work.

  We tried again and again. For the Schultzes it seemed amusing: Herr Yankee could not make his car work! Even Trudi, who perhaps sensed the dangers better than her mother and sister, laughed at my futile efforts.

  I was humiliated, angry, and scared.

  “Stop laughing at me, damn it!” So what if the knight can’t shoe his steed?

  “I am sorry, Karl, but it is better than crying, nein?”

  Maybe.

  We tried again; the chassis lifted an inch off the ground and then flopped noisily back on the shoulder of the autobahn.

  The jack snapped in two, shooting parts in several directions.

  Trudi did not laugh now. “We are in trouble, Karl, are we not?”

  “Bad trouble.”

  This time I wanted to cry.

  Then, as the sun edged toward the horizon, a jeep bounded by us, stopped, and backed up. Constabs? MPs?

  No, just a corporal and a private from the Third Armored.

  “Trouble, Sarge?”

  “Flat tire and broken jack,” I tried to sound cheery. “Guy taught me how to drive these things but not how to change tires.”

  “They don’t make ’em like prewar anymore. Let’s see if we can help.”

  Both GIs were younger, if such was possible, than I and glanced appreciatively at the Schultzes as they removed their “machine for lifting the vehicle” from the jeep.

  They were a striking enough threesome, Erika now rapidl
y blossoming into a young woman, Magda in American clothes and makeup, looking like a mother in her late thirties again—too much like her picture in Clarke’s documents.

  “Three of them, Sarge,” said the corporal as he pumped on the jack, “that’s hoarding.”

  “I should be so lucky.” I laughed. “I’m driving them to Mannheim for my CO.”

  “The one with the long hair is a real dish,” he sighed. COs’ women were strictly off-limits. And verboten too. “I wonder how good she would be in bed.”

  There was no particular malice in this talk, merely young-male conversation in a locker room.

  “I tell myself that it’s better not to think about it in a car at night . . . especially with her mother in the backseat.”

  We laughed innocently enough.

  “The frau is not bad herself,” the private sighed.

  “You wanna drive me out of my mind with that idea?”

  We laughed again, not so innocently.

  But in ten minutes I was back on the autobahn, racing toward Stuttgart.

  “Why did you laugh that way?” Trudi demanded.

  “Want to guess?”

  “They wondered why one soldier had three women?”

  “I told them you were friends of my CO.”

  “Ah.” Her voice was neutral.

  “They also thought your mother looked very pretty.”

  “She does, Karl. You have brought life to all of us and some of her youth back to her. She loves you like she would love the son she did not have.”

  That was news to me. Scary news.

  It was also not exactly what the GIs had in mind. But they were not the kind of boys who would have taken such fantasies seriously.

  Not with a Constabulary trooper driving a general’s car anyway. Probably not under any circumstances.

  However, they’d implanted another fantasy in my head as we drove, an hour behind schedule but still with lots of time to spare. It was a terrible and pleasurable fantasy—the total possession of three helpless women slaves to whom I could do anything I wanted. They were totally dependent on me. I could demand their three bodies for my amusement and they would have to comply. I would never act out such a daydream in the real world. The fact that it assaulted me and persisted in my imagination indicates how frightened I was and how severed from my moral roots.

  My wet hands gripped the wheel of the Buick with grim determination.

  We were all perspiring in the humid twilight now turned into darkness, unbearably hot for my companions in their expensive American dresses. The trip had become a surrealistic nightmare—unrelated sequences of strange lights, hideous shapes—a scary night in a film made by an angry drunk (and very like some of Fassbinder’s later movies about postwar Germany).

  At the checkpoint entering the French zone, the nightmare became terrifying.

  The American guards took one look at my blue scarf and beret (worn even on a hot night if you want quick passage) and waved us through.

  The African Zouave at the French end looked suspiciously at me and my passengers, glanced at our papers, and walked away without a word.

  The three women gasped at the sight of the African. French black troops had a reputation in Germany after the war even worse than the Russians’. A mass rape by one of their regiments that went wild in Stuttgart was often cited by Germans as evidence that the Allies were not better than the Russians or the Nazis. It was said that the Africans had special amusements that made their rapes particularly degrading and cruel. Everyone in Germany knew the story and almost no one in America. How much basis in fact there was, I did not know.

  And did not much care just then. I merely wanted our papers back.

  A French corporal, a half-pint redhead, much like me, sauntered over to our car, the Zouave lurking behind him, fingering his automatic weapon.

  I flipped open the holster on my .45 as my stomach did slow, lazy, and dangerous turns.

  The corporal sneered at me in French that was too rapid to understand and gestured contemptuously at my ID. I shouted back at him in English, casting grave reflections on his ancestry and that of the entire French Army, Charles de Gaulle, Napoleon, and if I remember correctly, Joan of Arc, poor woman.

  He backed down a little, shook his head dubiously, waved off the Zouave, and walked back to their guardhouse.

  We waited five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, a half hour.

  I knew I had to do something. If I delayed any longer, the Frogs would think I had a guilty conscience and keep us there all night.

  The French were an occupying power by Allied courtesy. They hadn’t done much to win the war; left to themselves they would have lost it and been part of the Thousand Year Reich till the very last day. “By rights,” General Meade would mutter, “the Canadians ought to have a zone instead of the Frogs.”

  “Canucks, sir.”

  “That’s right, Sergeant.” He would laugh, not realizing that I was mocking his ethnic prejudice.

  Well aware of our contempt for them, the French responded with bureaucratic harassment, a tactic at which they leave the rest of the world at the starting gate.

  We in turn reacted by shouting them down, a ploy that usually worked.

  Well, I had better start shouting.

  I slipped out of the front seat, removed from my Ike jacket pocket the general’s authorization to pick up the Wülfes, prayed that no one at the checkpoint could read English, and marched toward the guardhouse.

  The African raised his rifle, not, I noted, releasing the safety. I placed my left hand on my .45 (I guess I haven’t noted that among my other oddities I am a southpaw) and waved the general’s letter in his face.

  He backed down and stepped aside, whether impressed by my weapon or the general’s letter, I wasn’t sure. My knees quivering out of control I strode as best I could to the command post, shoved open the door, and screamed at the corporal, using language that was banned at the O’Malley house.

  The red-haired corporal was snoozing, head on the desk in front of him, in the tiny room into which I pushed my way. Our papers were tossed casually on the edge of the desk.

  “What the hell is the matter with you stupid sons of bitches? That goddamn African pointed his weapon at me. Do you guys want the flicking Third World War to start, between us and you? Do you know what this blue stands for? I’m Constabulary, are you too fucking dumb to recognize that? Do you want to see the orders from my general? Here they are, asshole, read them and get the hell out of our way or I’ll nail your ass to the top of the Eiffel Tower.”

  I don’t think he understood much except the vulgarities, which translate easily, but he was impressed with my document.

  He shrugged his shoulders, a tactic at which the French also leave the rest of the world in the gate, and murmured, I think, that his commandant was asleep.

  “Well, asshole, wake up the fucking commandant or I’ll nail his ass right next to yours on the Eiffel Tower.”

  I picked up our papers and shoved open the door at the other side of the room. The trick with the French, the CO had often told me, was to be even more arrogant than they were. With dry throat and pounding heart, I sure hoped that he was right.

  The commandant was an elderly lieutenant with a row of ribbons on his coat. He was sound asleep on a cot in the other room of the post.

  I shook him by the shoulder, shouted pretty much the same line, and waved the CO’s letter in front of him, pointing at the Constabulary letterhead.

  His sleepy eyes twitched in fury at being awakened. He was about to chew me out when he noticed the fancy trimmings of my uniform. He reached for his glasses and snatched the general’s letter away from me.

  Please God, don’t let him know any English.

  He glanced at the paper, pretended to read it, and chewed out the corporal instead.

  I didn’t get much of his tirade, but I think he left out Joan of Arc.

  Then he thrust the letter back into my waiting hand and rolled
over on the cot, his face to the wall.

  “Bonne nuit, mon commandant.” I saluted and bowed.

  He grumbled something unintelligible and probably scatological (we English speakers beat the rest of the world in that area). I strode out of the command post without a single backward look, jumped into the front seat of the Buick, turned over the ignition, and started to move toward the gate. The corporal waved us through, and the African kid, with a big, friendly grin, opened the gate.

  He saluted me as if I were at least a field marshal. I returned the salute crisply.

  Maybe I’d make a good field marshal. Too short?

  What about Napoleon?

  “What did you do, Karl?” Trudi asked anxiously.

  “Pretended I was Gen. Omar Nelson Bradley.” I laughed.

  “Pardon?”

  “Bluffed, darling, bluffed my fool head off. I could begin to enjoy this gumshoe business.”

  “Please don’t,” she begged.

  Small danger. I was still shaking.

  “Next stop Stuttgart,” I said. “Lake Street Transfer, change for Douglas Park.”

  They knew, I guess, that I was a euphoric boy and did not ask what Lake Street Transfer was.

  How would I have explained the Chicago el system of that time to them anyway?

  My schedule had called for us to be in Stuttgart between ten-thirty and eleven. It was well after twelve when we finally pulled off the autobahn, climbed the ring of hills around the city, and drove down into the saucer in which Stuttgart lay like a rosary of faint yellow lights. It took another half hour to find our way into the center of town and to the Bahnhof, on which there was a lighted blue Mercedes-Benz symbol—which of course was the logo of the city before it became the logo of the auto. I helped them out of the car. With their small bags, they could easily pass as travelers waiting for an early-morning train in the quiet and empty platz in front of the ugly Gothic train station.

  I was already more than two hours behind schedule, exhausted and drained. So, our leave-taking was brief and tense. All three women kissed me quickly, Trudi only a little less quickly than her mother and sister.

  “Will you be all right?” I asked.

  Trudi’s thin face was pale and strained in the dim lights on the outside of the station. “Of course. We will wait in the Bahnhof till morning and take a taxi to our friends. We shall never forget—”