Old Men at Midnight

by Chaim Potok

  “It explains nothing.”

  “Every story is some kind of explanation, which explains why I dislike stories and do not read I. D. Chandal. I became a historian so I would not have to explain anything, only recount the evidence, the facts.” He looked around. “Where is our waiter? I’m going to have to leave you, Benjamin, unless you’ve finished eating.”

  “I’ll take care of the check.”

  “No, let me.”

  “Why are you so angry today, Robert?”

  “I have a meeting with the provost about the historian whom Fox wants to bring in.”

  “Oh, yes, the language-deprived woman.”

  “I will tell the provost that if he and Fox intend to make her an offer, I intend to make a telephone call.”

  “To whom?”

  “To the one who funded the chair and has in mind the funding of another.”

  “You know him?”

  “We were in the war together.”

  “What do you mean? I thought—”

  “In the same barrack in Auschwitz. I saved his life when they herded us through the woods ahead of the Russian army.”

  Distinctly, someone held Benjamin Walter by the shoulders and was pushing him steadily backward into a landscape thickly befouled with death. How his arms and legs ached.

  “Life connects us, Benjamin, not artifice. Ah, here’s our waiter.”

  The driveway had been cleared: no trace of the splinters and the fallen limb. He parked the Saab and walked on painful legs to the oak. The spiraling scar seemed inconsequential in the late-afternoon sunlight. Surely the lightning-wounded wood would soon dry, scab, heal.

  How still the street was, the air calm, the woods serene. I. D. Chandal was nowhere to be seen. The length of soil she had cleared from the lawn lay planted with infant mist-flower, goldenrod, coleus, impatiens. At the end of the garden, where it approached the woods, she had rooted a bush with strikingly twisted branches. What a day’s work she had put in!

  Inside the kitchen the nurse was preparing a clear broth for Evelyn. His wife was so much better today, thank the Lord, the nurse said. Her color was greatly improved, her strength returning. The tree man had been there earlier, and would the professor believe what he’d told her? The oak tree had taken the lightning bolt meant for the house. Yes, that’s what he’d said, those very words. The mysterious ways of the Lord. Now she would bring the broth to his wife and then give her the sleeping medication, it was good for her to sleep long and deep. Did the professor need anything? Benjamin Walter said he would take the broth to his wife and spend a bit of time with her. He went upstairs and found Evelyn awake and sitting up in bed.

  “It appears you’ll be able to finish your Virginia Woolf after all.”

  She began to cry and he comforted her and fed her the broth and waited until she was asleep and the nurse had gone.

  He ate some chicken in the kitchen and went back upstairs. From the window of his study he looked out at the Tudor and saw it was dark. He had forgotten to take his medication and his arms ached painfully. Downing the pills in the bathroom, he gazed upon himself in the medicine-chest mirror and saw eyes that brimmed with memory.

  Back in his study he sat at his desk, apprehensively reading the pages typed by his secretary. How very sad, the story of Mr. Zapiski, she’d commented upon returning the manuscript. She’d no idea Professor Walter came from such a background.

  Cool dry night air blew through the open window. The Tudor was strangely dark. Where had she gone? The clock on the wall above the framed fragments of headline read close to eight. He stared at the headline.

  M RI NS TACK B TWE SE D AR ONNE OREST

  A different time, a different war. His father’s and Mr. Zapiski’s war. Each generation and its own conflagration. But why, really, had he framed and hung those headlines? A connection between his war and theirs?

  He would need to write the chapter about his war. But as much as the first chapter had resisted being written by him, he himself now resisted writing the second. The obstacle was not a paucity of memory but a surfeit. Memory, once begun, swelling to a detonation, a blazing eruption. Do I need to do this? Weary, weary. Fingers in pain. Drop it. An act of hubris, these memoirs. Give yourself some well-earned years of rest. Attend to Evelyn. Put the deathwork aside.

  The light came on in the kitchen of the Tudor. He closed the window and in the very next instant, it seemed to him, was standing at her door, she in tight jeans and jersey. He gazed at her openly and without shame as she swung the door wide and stepped back.

  “I saw your light.”

  “Please come in.”

  “I’m not interrupting?”

  “No, no.”

  “I noticed you were busy with your garden today.”

  “Isn’t it pretty? Especially the mulberry bush. Watch how quickly it grows. Its leaves turn a marvelous golden color in the fall.”

  They entered the kitchen. For some reason, he expected it to be different this time. But nothing had changed. He saw the same bleak yellow light; cherry-wood cabinets; 1950s stove, sink, and refrigerator; reddish floor tiles; wooden table and chairs; light-green paint and bare walls; and piles of newspapers on the table.

  “Coffee? Donuts?”

  “Thank you.”

  “How is your wife?”

  “Much improved.”

  “That’s wonderful news, Benjamin. And how are you?”

  “Tired, achy, struggling with the memoirs.”

  “Too many memories or too few?”

  “Far too many, tumbling over each other, difficult to sort out.”

  “How fortunate for you! The floodgates have been opened. Let it all pour through.”

  “Not so easy to do, I’m afraid. I’ve begun to doubt the entire effort.”

  “Doubt? What do you mean, doubt?”

  “I’m not sure of its worth.”

  “What are you saying, Benjamin? You want sure? Go to your tax collector, get hit by lightning, that’s sure.”

  “I didn’t bargain on it being so—disquieting.”

  “You want memory and comfort?”

  “Having frequent nightmares. Bits and pieces of memory skittering about like the squirrels on my roof even when I’m driving. Cannot talk to Evelyn, of course.”

  “Why don’t you talk to me, Benjamin? Who can better appreciate a story?”

  Her presence across the table—intoxicating. Blue eyes, oval-shaped features, high cheekbones. No makeup. Her face without a wrinkle. How does she manage that? And alluring breasts. An image of his hands cupping her breasts, fingers caressing the nipples.

  She sipped coffee, studied him over the rim of her cup. “Well, Benjamin, are you going to tell me your story?”

  Do you know about the final offensive of the German army against the Allies in the Ardennes forest? It began in early December 1944. At first, thousands of our men deserted, and by the time it ended, thousands were dead. In January, of the thirty-six men originally in my platoon, four were left.

  We all did odd things to stay sane and alive. We talked to photographs of our fathers and mothers and sweethearts and wives and children. We kissed crucifixes and stars of David. We made vows. The second day of the Ardennes offensive Mr. Zapiski suddenly appeared beside me. Dark suit and hat and tie. Not an image in my head but actually there. I heard his raspy voice and smelled his cigarette breath. How I welcomed him! I was overjoyed. He walked with me and slept with me. He would chant the trope of passages from the Scroll of the Law, and I would quietly chant along with him. In firefights he would tell me clearly when to zig to the right and when to zag to the left, when to lie prone, when to jump up. Whenever we were being shelled, he would show me which tree to get behind and where to dig my hole. He would run alongside me, holding on to his dark hat. Strangely, his wooden leg seemed not to encumber him. He kept me alive through that terrible time. The Germans hacked us to pieces in the forests, but finally we pushed them back and straightened the line. By the end
of that winter, we were moving forward again.

  One morning we were reconnoitering through some woods with five or six tanks, all that remained of a battalion. A chill morning and a gray-white dawn, with ground mist covering the roots and curling up around the tree trunks. Suddenly the Germans started to pound us with artillery and tank fire. The proximity shells were exploding on contact with the treetops, and the coniferous trees and hardwoods were falling all over us, showering us with jagged splinters, and one of the guys near me caught a piece of wood in his neck, like an old-fashioned arrow. I distinctly heard Mr. Zapiski tell me to crouch behind a tree and fire into the underbrush up ahead, which I immediately proceeded to do, though I saw no enemy. Suddenly a soldier in a green uniform and helmet emerged from the underbrush, bleeding from a wound and lunging at me with his rifle and bayonet. I shot him in the face and stood near him, vomiting. Our tanks were returning fire. It went on for a few more minutes. And then it grew very quiet. I looked around and trembled. Mr. Zapiski was gone.

  The infantry was ordered to advance ahead of the tanks. We moved forward through the woods, our squad in two fire teams, advancing and covering. The ground mist was absorbing the smells of the tank exhausts, which intensified the other smells: cordite and moist earth and leaking sap and newly shattered trees. My squad had just leapfrogged forward and I thought I saw something moving up ahead, but it was only the mist eddying around the shredded fragments of a tree trunk.

  Then we were out of the woods and in a meadow. The mist was thinner and a breeze had risen and suddenly there was a different smell in the air, and we stopped.

  The smell was like nothing I had ever experienced before—not like the charred-wood and broken-stone odors of bombed-out towns and villages, or the blood-and-gunpowder stink of a field after a firefight, or the sweaty stench of combat soldiers. It was a pungent, acrid, throat-tightening odor, and it was up ahead and moving toward us.

  Then the whole forward line stopped, and we could hear the tanks behind us stopping, too.

  Up front the lieutenant was in a crouching position with his binoculars to his eyes, and behind us the tank commanders were searching through the mist with their periscopes.

  And then the order came down to hold our fire. I thought I saw something moving through the mist.

  The lieutenant put down his binoculars and stood up.

  Something moved past him. Perhaps “moved” is not quite the proper word. Something shuffled and scraped past him, a shadow of some sort. Then another shadow. A host of shadows came through the mist, some crawling on their hands and knees. They were about twenty-five yards away, and they kept coming.

  The first thing we noticed was their ghastly emaciation. Then we saw their wide and dark eyes. And then we saw that they had no teeth, only rotting stumps.

  Two of them were advancing directly toward my squad. I heard voices, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. They kept on moving toward us and one of them stopped about three feet from me—a grotesque figure of a man; the stench that rose from him!—and he reached out and grabbed hold of my arm, and croaked at me, “Warum?”—and my blood ran cold. He said again in Yiddish, “Warum?”; and added in Yiddish, “Why did you take so long?”; and again, “Why? Why?”—and I gaped at him in horror and pulled my arm away, and he went shuffling and stumbling off toward the woods. There must have been about thirty or forty of them; they all disappeared into the woods. Later I found out that most of them had traveled laterally and died in the woods; only about half a dozen made it to the other side.

  We were ordered to move on. Whoever those apparitions had been, they were not our problem. We were merely infantry, ground-pounders; as far as we were concerned, those people were only a piece of information: there was something up ahead we had to watch out for.

  The ground mist soon lifted. We advanced toward a slight rise. Behind us came our tanks. There was not an enemy soldier in sight. Then we spotted smoke beyond the rise.

  When we got to the rise we saw some sort of encampment about a mile away: tall fences and low buildings and guard towers with machine guns. We advanced toward it slowly and could smell it, and most of us gagged and some vomited as we went along.

  From a distance we could see that the gates were open. We leapfrogged, doing reconnaissance by fire, toward the guard towers. It turned out they were deserted. Bodies lay on the perimeter fence. We charged through the gates.

  Half-human ghoulish creatures stood near the buildings, staring at us as we entered. They seemed not to know what to do or say. It had rained recently; the ground was a quagmire. There were hard, narrow paths through the mud, and duckboards had been laid down, and we deployed rapidly.

  The stench was horrendous: the foulest of pigsties; an open cesspool of reeking excrement. Hot, thick, pungent. A putrid, cloying, acidic smell that seemed to coat our palates and throats. The camp was about a half-mile long by a half-mile wide. We went past squalid buildings that looked to be barracks, and then a broad open space, and an inner encampment of well-kept buildings, and a brick building with a chimney that turned out to be a crematorium, and beyond that we came upon the most heart-numbing sight I have ever witnessed: a vast graveyard, trenches upon trenches of putrefying whitish bodies stacked one on top of the other like wood.

  And there I found Mr. Zapiski.

  He lay half covered with earth and quicklime in a trench in the mass cemetery; and facedown on the ground, reeking and begrimed, alongside a duckboard; and rotting into the mud near the fence, decaying in his urine and excrement; and among the murmuring phantoms we found in the barracks who gaped at us when we entered and began a low keening when we told them we were Americans, one of them crying out in a broken voice, “Why did you take so long to get here?”

  “Warum?” I heard him say. And again, “Warum?”

  The lieutenant asked them, “Where are the guards?”

  They did not understand him.

  I translated his question into Yiddish.

  They stared at me, stunned. A soldier with a weapon, in an American uniform, speaking Yiddish!

  “Most ran away,” one answered. “A few are still in those houses.” He pointed toward the rear of the camp.

  The lieutenant sent our squad over to secure the houses.

  Two of the houses were empty. We found six guards inside the third, all drunk, their holsters empty, but still wearing their helmets.

  The sergeant asked them, “Where are the others?”

  They stared at him, muttering in German.

  “You fucking bastards,” the sergeant said. “Where are the others?”

  “Where are the others?” I said to them in Yiddish.

  One of them, a corporal, stiffened and looked at me.

  “Where are the others?” I asked again.

  He said, drunk and sullen, “They took the vehicles and ran off. There wasn’t enough transport for all of us.”

  “He says they took off and left them behind,” I said to the sergeant.

  “Tell him if he’s lying I’ll have his ass,” the sergeant said.

  “If you are lying we will kill you,” I said.

  The corporal trembled. “It is the truth.”

  “He says it’s the truth.”

  One of the guards, a tall heavy-shouldered man with a jutting lower jaw and a pockmarked face, suddenly said, “What kind of German do you speak?”

  “New York German.”

  “That’s not German.”

  “Warum? Is that okay German?”

  “You are not speaking German.”

  “What’s going on?” the sergeant said.

  “Go fuck yourself, you piece of shit,” I said to the guard. “Is that good enough German for you?”

  He muttered something, his fingers twitching.

  “I am one of those you were killing!” I suddenly shouted.

  He stiffened. His face grew red. A Jew shouting at him! He reached for his empty holster.

  Absently, as if in a dream, I h
eard scurrying sounds and shouts.

  An M1-Garand rifle is a semiautomatic weapon, with eight bullets in a clip. The rounds have a muzzle velocity of 2,800 feet per second and an impact velocity of one and one-half foot-tons per square inch. That amounts to ten to fifteen tons of pressure at the point of impact.

  I did not have to raise my weapon but simply pointed it at him.

  I fired twice. Both bullets hit him in the chest. The second must have struck bone; he was lifted about six inches off his feet and thrown against the wall behind him and fell dead. On the wall were blood and bone from the exit wounds.

  There had been only two rounds left in my clip. It had ejected with its characteristic clink. I shoved another clip in.

  “Was that good German?”

  The other guards shrank back.

  Faintly, through the pounding in my head, I heard the sergeant say, “Cease fire!”

  I turned the weapon upon the cringing guards.

  The sergeant said, “As you were, soldier!”

  I pointed the weapon downward.

  The sergeant said, “What the fuck was that all about?”

  “He reached for his pistol.”

  “What pistol?”

  “His holster. And he was wearing his helmet.” I turned to the guards and asked in Yiddish, “Are there more camps like this?”

  They glanced at each other.

  “I asked them if there were more camps like this,” I said to the sergeant.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” the sergeant murmured.

  He ordered me outside.

  I walked around the camp. Everywhere I went I saw Mr. Zapiski, dead and dead and dead in the vile exhausted earth.

  The sergeant, reporting the incident to the lieutenant, made a point of the German’s threatening gesture and the fact that they hadn’t fully surrendered because they were still wearing their helmets, and the lieutenant determined that my reaction was justified, and the matter was dropped.

  Ten days later, I came down with a bad case of diarrhea. Within twenty-four hours I was burning with fever. Terrible hallucinations accompanied the fever. Lights kept flashing on inside my head illuminating frightful scenes: I was shooting the German guard over and over again; then I was killing the other guards; then I was running through the camp chanting at the top of my lungs the trope to the biblical account about the attack of the Amalekites, and the melody drifted through the meadows along which we had advanced; it penetrated the ruined woods, and there the human shadow who had grabbed my arm heard it and threw back his head as he walked shuffling and staggering and began to chant it too in his croaky voice, sounding precisely like Mr. Zapiski, and he stumbled against a shell-blasted tree and the tree opened itself to him and he vanished inside.