A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  “True. He seemed quite certain, though.”

  “Combat can do funny things to the mind. Hooper had just seen the rest of his flight destroyed before his very eyes, hadn’t he?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “The man was in a state of terrible shock, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Not when he gave me his report . . .” Skull saw the air commodore raise his eyebrows. “Of course that was much later,” Skull said tamely.

  “Terrible shock. His mind was in turmoil, wasn’t it? Overwhelmed by a primitive rage.” Bletchley gave a sad smile. His voice was calm and reasonable. “I expect it was swamped by a wild blood-lust to take revenge on the brutal enemy. You’d be the same, wouldn’t you?”

  “Um . . . approximately,” Skull said.

  “So we can discount what Hooper said. After all, ambulances don’t blow up. That’s a well-known fact.”

  “Yes, indeed.” Skull scratched his head and collected a little sand in his fingernails. “So there’s nothing more to be said.”

  “Oh, the Germans will probably show some wrecked ambulances to the Red Cross and shout atrocity. Usual propaganda humbug. I mean, we all know what happened to those ambulances. They took a wrong turning and got blown up by their own mines.”

  “Happens all the time, sir,” Skull said. “Well-known fact.”

  “How’s Pip Patterson?”

  “Quite murderous.”

  “Good show. Got to keep biffing the Boche.”

  While they were eating lunch the Kittyhawks arrived. Barton briefed his pilots on the move to LG 250. Only a dozen ground crew would be going, so everyone would have to help with cooking, refueling, rearming and other chores. Once they had been fed, the ferry pilots flew the Tomahawks out. Air Commodore Bletchley put the wounded airmen in the Brute and took off for Cairo. The bulk of the ground crew, not wanted at LG 250, struck their tents and drove away. Finally, the Bombay and the Kittyhawks got into the air and flew toward the setting sun. That night a section of Italian bombers raided LG 181 and missed by a mile, which was not bad for night bombing in the desert in 1942.

  * * *

  The road from Barce to Benghazi was busy both ways. Schramm joined a stream of empty trucks returning from the front and watched loaded convoys flick past in the opposite lane. Surely Rommel must attack soon. Someone was bound to attack, and if Rommel waited much longer it would be the British. How odd to be a general and draw a large arrow on a map, knowing that it meant the killing of thousands of men, his own and the enemy’s. Did the general care? The thought occupied Schramm all the way to the Italian barracks.

  He went in, and ten minutes later he came out. Captain di Marco was not in his office, was not in Benghazi. When would he be back? That depended how long he was detained somewhere else. Nobody tried to persuade Schramm to take a seat and have a coffee.

  He stood in the sun and thought: bad luck. Immediately he confronted himself: if it was bad luck, why was his nervous system beginning to tingle? Come to that, why hadn’t he telephoned di Marco from Barce? Because he didn’t want to risk learning that he was not at the barracks, that’s why. Schramm got in the car and drove out of the barracks so fast that he sprayed a sentry with gravel. He waved an apology and, driving one-handed, nearly put a wheel in a ditch.

  The same bald-headed orderly was reading a different newspaper outside her office. “She’s operating,” he said fast, before Schramm could hit him.

  The operating theater was off a busy corridor. Schramm was the only person not going somewhere. He stood with his back to the wall and avoided the eyes of the walking wounded, until he found that it made no difference whether he looked or not. The damaged men were interested only in their own pain. He was invisible. And eventually he had seen so many of them that they too ceased to have any individuality. One stained bandage was just like another. They were part of the furnishings, like the stark smell of disinfectant, or the flop of hospital slippers.

  His legs grew stiff, so he sat on a windowsill. He felt like a schoolboy, which made him straighten his back, square his shoulders and try to look like à Luftwaffe major; but still he felt like a schoolboy. How odd. Why should that be? He worried about it until his mind almost reached out and touched the answer, and at that moment she came out of the theater, buttoning her white coat, and saw him. “Oh, no! Not you.” She was shaking her head. “Not now. Not today.”

  He jumped down. “It’s not important,” he said. “I’ll come back another time.”

  “Oh, don’t be stupid, of course it’s important. Why tell lies? It’s such a waste. You can walk me to my office.” She took his arm. “Why do you tell such lies?” she said again; only now she sounded weary instead of angry.

  They walked to her office. Halfway there, her hand slipped down his sleeve and gripped his wrist. He was too pleased to speak.

  “A bottle of the good white wine,” she told the orderly. He handed her a sheaf of messages. “Good wine,” she reminded him, “or I won’t treat your piles. Give him money,” she told Schramm.

  They went inside, and she skimmed through her messages. “Thank Christ,” she said. “No operations this afternoon. Both canceled. The patients had the good sense to die. You have brought me luck, Paul Schramm!” She tossed the bits of paper in the air and embraced him. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. Good.” She kissed him, very firmly and positively. She held him by the ears and looked in his eyes.

  “Are we friends?” he asked.

  “I have decided to be in love with you for five minutes,” she said. “After that, we shall see.” She kissed him, lightly, and turned away. “I stink,” she said. “All that hacking and chopping, very sweaty. Shower.” She took a towel and went into another room.

  He had opened and sampled the wine by the time she came out, wearing a white cotton dressing gown and, from the way it clung, not much else. “That took more than five minutes,” he said. “Are we still in love?”

  “I’m not sure. D’you think it’s wise?” She was back to her old self: composed, controlled, unpredictable.

  “It’s enjoyable.” He gave her a glass of wine. “I’m told I don’t enjoy myself enough.”

  She drank steadily and long. She moved away from him, tipped her head back and stared at the ceiling. “It is possible to know too much human anatomy,” she said. “I feel this wonderful wine descend via my pharynx and esophagus on its journey through my digestive system. It rushes into my stomach now, prompting the gastric glands and the liver into action. Soon, I know, it will make its way into the small intestine, and then . . .” Schramm had crossed the room and was looking out of the window. “I have offended you,” she said.

  “Not offended. Bored.”

  “You’re not in love with my kidneys?” He shook his head. “You positively dislike my kidneys?” He nodded. “Well, at least that is honest,” she said. She poured more wine.

  “Look, if you don’t want to love me, don’t love me,” he said firmly. “I lived without you for forty-odd years. I’ll survive.” He sat on the windowsill, the place she usually took. “Just don’t give me all this gibberish. And for Christ’s sake cover your breasts.”

  “About the alleged gibberish I am prepared to negotiate,” she said, “but I have just had a hot shower and I am not going to suffer the discomfort of sweaty breasts in order to satisfy your Prussian sense of propriety. Gesundheit” She drank.

  “I’m not Prussian,” Schramm said, “and it’s not Gesundheit.”

  “It isn’t?” She raised her glass again. “Donner und Blitzkrieg!”

  He grunted. “You don’t hear too much of that sort of thing nowadays, either.”

  “Well, be patient. Soon the war will wake up.”

  “And then I shall enjoy myself. Is that right?”

  She came over and took his hand; he did not resist. “Listen,” she said. Out in the street, a man with an accordion was playing a wistful, jerky little waltz. “He plays that every day,” she said. She stepped back and he got off the
windowsill, and they began to dance. After a few steps she took him by the arms and shook him. “Relax!” she ordered. The tune was delightful. “He skips a beat now and then,” she said. “But so do you, and he never complains.” Schramm laughed.

  The waltz ended. They stood in the middle of the room, waiting, but there was no more music.

  “Completo,” she said, and gave him a quick hug. “Now it’s time for wards.” She banged the cork into the bottle.

  In three minutes she was dressed; in five they were walking into the first ward. Schramm knew what to expect; the prospect did not worry him. A nurse gave him a white coat. Did she think he was a doctor? He put it on and began to practice the professional stroll, hands behind his back, the expression impartial, tinged with wisdom. He remained three paces behind Dr. Grandinetti.

  The physical damage did not upset him. He had seen too many wrecks already, dragging themselves along the corridor; by contrast, most of these patients were asleep under sheets that hid the unhappy evidence of a contest between high explosive and flesh and bone. Maria Grandinetti led a hushed bunch of nurses and young doctors from bed to bed, asked questions, checked temperature charts, occasionally peeled back the sheet and scrutinized the repairs.

  The next ward was much the same. Occasionally, she turned to him and made a short remark: this patient had been weakened by hepatitis, or that one had a bullet lodged near the spine. Schramm nodded, and the junior doctors looked at him with greater respect.

  They moved on. A man in a distant corner was groaning, not expressively but mechanically, the same gloomy sound repeating itself as regularly as breathing. Schramm did not like it. Why couldn’t the fellow scream or shut up? He tried to ignore him. He paid attention instead to the patient now being examined and he got a bad shock. It was the young German airman wounded in the Barce raid and Schramm could see that he was much worse. His skin looked bleached and it was creased around his eyes and mouth as if by an effort of concentration. Dried saliva had collected at the corners of his lips. His breathing was so shallow that it scarcely raised his chest. He looked so altered that Schramm turned aside and checked the name on the chart hooked over the bed-rail. Debratz, Kurt. Same man.

  Maria completed her rounds, and Schramm was glad to get out. The man in the corner was still manufacturing his meaningless groans as they went by.

  “I could do with a shower,” Schramm said as soon as they were alone.

  “I have a better idea,” she said. “Let’s go for a swim in the sea.”

  They drove a long way out of Benghazi. She directed him down a rutted lane that went through two farmyards before it became a twisting track. Dried grasses swished and crackled against the car. The air was like a herb-garden and heavy-winged butterflies scouted ahead. He saw a lizard on a great flat rock and before he could blink it had gone. “I’m sure you know where we’re going,” he said. “The question is, are you sure?”

  “Have faith.”

  The track delivered them to a long, flat headland which overlooked a stretch of sand that slipped into the Mediterranean without causing more than a ripple. The water was so clear that they could see the patterned throb of sunlight on the seabed.

  “Nobody ever comes here,” she said. “It’s haunted.”

  “Who by?”

  “Who knows? Nobody ever comes to find out.”

  They swam, naked. For a middle-aged woman, her body was in good shape and Schramm enjoyed seeing it. But the sight did not excite him. Wrong time and place, he concluded; and then forgot about it in the unrestrained glee of swimming. The water was the only place where he was not a cripple.

  They stretched out in the sun to dry, got covered in sand and went back to wash it off. The ripple was in fact a foot or two high, so they lay at the water’s edge and let it rush over them. She laughed, got a mouthful of water and spewed it out. “Very, very childish,” he said dozily.

  “I try to be childish once a day.”

  They walked along the sand. She had been wrong: somebody did come. A boy brought a herd of goats to the headland, their bells tinkling like small change. He sat on a rock and watched them.

  “He thinks we are ghosts,” she said, quite untroubled.

  “If we don’t eat soon he could be right.” It was well into the afternoon and the swimming had aroused his appetite.

  “Have faith.”

  “I can’t eat faith. And we must be twenty kilometers from civilization. I need my food, I’m a growing lad. I’m trying to grow a new left leg.”

  “I like you as you are. Lopsided. Different.”

  They walked back to their clothes, dressed and climbed up to the car. The boy kept his distance, but he waved when they waved. By now Schramm was too hungry to talk. They jolted back up the track, escorted by the same blithe butterflies or perhaps their relatives, and at the first house Maria told him to stop. “We eat here,” she said.

  “You know these people?”

  “They know me. That’s what matters.”

  A hefty woman in black came out, holding a scythe. They had a conversation in staccato Italian, in which neither seemed to complete a sentence. But within a minute Schramm was sitting in the kitchen with a tumbler of red wine and a bowl of olives. “I treated her brother-in-law’s cousin for gallstones,” Maria said. “That makes me a member of the family.”

  It was a simple meal: pasta, salad, fruit. Afterward, Schramm felt guilty because he could not thank the woman in her own language. Maria read his face. “Don’t think about giving money,” she said. “Just enjoy.”

  He drove halfway back to the road and stopped. He turned off the engine. “Look: I did enjoy,” he said. “The swim, the walk, the food. It was good.” She watched him gravely, her eyebrows raised just a fraction, not quite creasing her brow. “So why did you . . .” He sensed an oncoming stammer and looked away, clenching his jaws. “At first you told me to go,” he said. “In the corridor you said No, not you, didn’t you? Not you, not now. That sounds definite. Not much room for doubt, is there?”

  She stretched out a hand, and he flinched slightly, but she merely straightened his shirt collar.

  “Anyhow, I was ready to go. I mean, what right have I to . . .” For a moment the stammer threatened again, but he beat it down. “That was no good either, was it? You didn’t want that, and the next thing I know we’re in your office drinking your wine and . . . and so on.”

  “Embracing.” Still she watched his face. “We embraced.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then say it. Why not?”

  “Does it matter? You said you loved me. For five minutes. That was a joke, right? A small joke.”

  “No, it was true.” A blue butterfly flirted with the red bonnet of the car, then quit. “For five minutes it was absolutely true.”

  “For five minutes you were in the shower.”

  “You could have been there too.” She smiled, and he saw so much imagined pleasure in her smile that he was angry at having lost his chance.

  “That’s not good enough,” he said. “All this emotional ping-pong, I can’t handle that; I’m just a gloomy German, I’ve got to know how I stand.” She pursed her lips a fraction too much. “Don’t make a joke about how I stand,” he warned. “You make a joke about that and I’ll strangle you.”

  “Let’s get out. I’m sticking to my seat.”

  They strolled to a cluster of olive trees and stood in the shade.

  “Bring on the pan-pipes,” he said. “All we need is a few nymphs and a couple of satyrs. No, we don’t. Cancel that. Feel like a sexual fling?”

  “Not in that tone of voice.” Her answer was so quick and so calm that it flattened him. Clumsy idiot, he told himself. He was swamped by the kind of despair he hadn’t felt since he was six and forced to dance with girls at parties.

  “You’re still in a rage,” she said. “You’ve been angry ever since I came out of the operating theater and saw you there, looking like a bump on a log. You’re always furious, Paul. You�
�re like a man with a trumpet who can only play one note. Experiment, for God’s sake! There are lots of other notes.”

  “Well, so were you angry, too. Angrier than me.”

  “Listen: I’d just spent several hours groping around inside the guts of one of your countrymen, trying to reassemble him in the order God intended. I’m good but God was better. When I came out, did I want to see you and your problems? No, I certainly did not.”

  “You didn’t have to spell it out.”

  “Why not? I said what I felt. You didn’t.”

  “I tried to—”

  “You tried to take all the blame. You felt guilty for what wasn’t your fault.”

  “I didn’t want to make matters worse, that’s all. You were obviously under pressure and—”

  “Oh, pooh. You didn’t care a damn about me. What did you really feel at that moment? Tell me what you really felt.”

  Schramm felt battered and weary. “Betrayed,” he said. He turned away, but she would not allow an easy escape. She stepped round him and grabbed his shoulders. “Louder!” she cried. “What did you feel?”

  “Betrayed,” he said. She shook him. “Betrayed!” he shouted. “Betrayed!” And this time the word stretched into a howl.

  “It’s inevitable,” she said. “Failure, stupidity, clumsiness, incompetence, pain, unhappiness, betrayal, stupidity, injustice, tragedy: they all happen, so make the most of them.”

  “You said stupidity twice,” he said.

  “That’s because there is more of it.” She kissed him on the mouth. “Don’t ask me if I love you,” she warned, “or I’ll have you sent to the Russian front.”

  They walked back to the car.

  “How can I make the most of feeling betrayed?” he asked. And got no answer.

  He dropped her at the hospital and drove to the Italian army barracks. Captain di Marco was there. He studied the aerial photographs and said that he could not make sense of what Major Jakowski was doing, nor where the missing twenty trucks had gone. If they were not on the photographs they must be off the photographs. What was needed was more information. If they were his men, di Marco said, he would order them to break radio silence.