The Gallery

by John Horne Burns

  Moe spun around. A Kraut lieutenant was standing behind him in the fireplace. There was a Lüger in his hand. Under his low helmet his lips drew back into a smile of something like welcome. And he bowed to Moe as though he desired to continue the graciousness of the old Italian lady. Moe returned the bow.

  — Very pleased to meet you, Moe said.

  Then he knew he was lying on the floor by the fireplace, hit harder than he’d ever been hit before. He looked into the ashes on the hearth, and he looked at the boots of the Kraut officer, towering up by his broken right hand. The German was still looking down at him with that smile, not bitter, not sweet. The Lüger now pointed down along the Jerry’s thigh, a twirl of smoke coming out of its barrel.

  — Grüss Gott, the German said. Heil Hitler. . . .

  And Moe realized that he was fading fast, as one does on the margin of sleep. Himself was ebbing away from himself with a powerful melancholy, with no hope of recall. For a moment an agony plucked at his brain. He sensed a longing and a regret such as he could never have imagined. But then he saw his mother and Maria Rocco, and he knew he’d come a long long way. It wasn’t really so long. But it was farther than most. So Moe smiled back at the German, and he felt his face dropping toward the floor.

  Exit

  THERE’S AN ARCADE IN NAPLES THAT THEY CALL THE GALLERIA Umberto. It’s in the center of the city. In August, 1944, everyone in Naples sooner or later found his way into this place and became like a picture on the wall of a museum.

  The Neapolitans came to the Galleria to watch the Americans, to pity them, and to prey upon them.

  The Americans came there to get drunk or to pick up something or to wrestle with the riddle. Everyone was aware of this riddle. It was the riddle of war, of human dignity, of love, of life itself. Some came closer than others to solving it. But all the people in the Galleria were human beings in the middle of a war. They struck attitudes. Some loved. Some tried to love.

  But they were all in the Galleria Umberto in August, 1944. They were all in Naples, where something in them got shaken up. They’d never be the same again — either dead or changed somehow. And these people who became living portraits in this Gallery were synecdoches for most of the people anywhere in the world.

  Outside the Galleria Umberto is the city of Naples. And Naples is on the bay, in the Tyrrhenian Sea, on the Mediterranean. This sea is a center of human life and thought. Wonderful and sad things have come out of Italy. And they came back there in August, 1944. For they were dots in a circle that never stops.

  18 June 1945–23 April 1946

  Naples

  Caserta

  Florence

  Leghorn

  Milan

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Windsor, Connecticut