City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  a couple of farm horses in their stalls seemingly glad for the company

  their shudders and snorts modified in his mind to a kind of animal approval.

  That evening at dinner the general in dress uniform presided from the end of the table,

  Miss Manderleigh and my brother on either side.

  They dined on the garden’s produce and game birds from the fields.

  You knew in this country at war where everything came from.

  When the general was ready to call it a night

  he muttered his hopes for my brother’s well-being and shook his hand.

  His man helped him up the winding stairs.

  Ronald and Miss Manderleigh drank brandy and soda, and played cribbage by the fire

  And when she was satisfied the house was quiet she led him to her room.

  He told me he’d become quite drunk but did remember her bed, the four posts carved like chess bishops.

  I like to think how they must have swayed in parallel, rhomboiding east, rhomboiding west,

  until the pale dawn crept under the hems of the wartime window drapes.

  I like to think how this weekend of pragmatic English sport

  was by this time an achieved hallucination in his mind.

  How he’d imagine them shuttling to the matins bells of the cathedral a Cotswold away,

  with monks in their cells yawning as they scourged themselves,

  and the latinate syllables rising like unnerved barnswallows into the dark European morning.

  And not much later it was Good-bye First Sergeant

  First Sergeant it was in that way of patriotic flings with doomed Allied airmen,

  And everything wet in the gray light, the stained quarry stone of the castellated manor.

  The old bedewed high-polished black Bentley the browned gravel under his feet.

  He looked off to the barn a rolling hill away so oddly placed to kill the wind-blown birds.

  The chastened hedgerows still now, the morning cold and calm.

  He stood there not knowing what to say, they had not exchanged addresses.

  He felt from her no lingering intimacy.

  She was one of that English race that did what had to be done.

  They were threadbare now, on their uppers, but they still did what needed to be done.

  As an American soldier he was new to that,

  There was so much they would not speak of

  Anything they did was a form of mourning.

  Miss Manderleigh exhausted, and badly in need of sleep,

  Her smile was a terrible struggle on her swollen lips

  and her hair too hastily combed this morning

  for the illusory farewell of a sweet and lasting friendship.

  And he would never forget the genderless sad soul that stared from her eyes,

  erasing from his memory their color, as he said good-bye.

  Good-bye Miss Manderleigh, good-bye.

  Twenty-four hours later all the crews of my brother’s wing

  were put on alert, and at dawn the next morning

  the Flying Fortresses, each carrying five thousand pounds of bombs

  lumbered down the runway into the mists over Suffolk.

  Group joined group circling in the sky over East Anglia

  until the rendezvous of all 140 B-17s and their P-47 fighter escort was made.

  The bombs of this particular mission were intended for the ball-bearing factories in Schweinfurt, deep inside Germany

  Or perhaps Regensburg where the Germans made their fighter planes

  Or was it Regensfurt or maybe Schweinburg

  I’ll have to remember to check that with my brother

  He is as reticent about his war experiences as about his romances as a young man

  A modest family hero, now in his seventies playing tennis every day

  And proud of his three grown sons with whom he likes to fish,

  And devoted to his first wife of forty-odd years and to a martini before dinner

  And to the rituals of the High Holy Days.

  In any event the mission would prove a disaster

  Although the Fortresses were fitted out with long-range fuel tanks,

  the P-47s had only fuel to fly them

  over Holland as far as the German border and back

  But it was over Germany that the Huns appeared,

  their squadrons of yellow-nosed Messerschmitt 109s

  diving from the rear upon the stolid straight-flying bombers

  maintaining their formations

  as they were raked by the fighters’ wing cannon Punctured, stippled, set on fire

  their own .50-caliber twin-muzzle turret guns kerchunking away at the infuriating stings

  of the curling diving here-and-gone 109s.

  The intercom was filled with shouts, commands, and someone moaning.

  The cabinetry of gauges and lights and glowing tubes at Ronald’s station

  Seemed all at once to fall in upon itself like a sandcastle

  The lights went out, the intercom went dead

  He found a glowing piece of shrapnel burning through his glove

  The fuselage wall in front of him was like an eye of blue, the color of his mother’s eyes

  Smoke suddenly filled the shuddering Fortress and almost as suddenly dissipated.

  He disentangled himself and ran forward

  for the reason that the craft was tilted in that direction.

  He found the co-pilot slumped on his stick, the pilot gesturing.

  Ronald pulled the dead boy back from his chair —his head was almost severed from his body—

  gently cradled him to the floor of the cabin and took his place.

  He removed his own flight jacket using the fleece lining

  to wipe the blood out of the co-pilot’s oxygen mask,

  and put the mask on.

  He wiped the blood spatter from the windows.

  A calibrated row of lights marked the path of German rounds through the fuselage.

  The 17’s nose having been brought up level,

  he was ordered to hold the controls while the pilot, whose face was smeared with blood attempted to clear it from his eyes.

  So there was Ronald maintaining his new station,

  Ahead the sky was filled with broken formations of Fortresses

  Pairs of Focke-Wulfs now taking over from the 109s curling out of the sun

  diving upon the 17s,

  Flying right through their groups, machine guns spitting

  and soaring off insolently for another run.

  It didn’t seem to matter that one or another Hun would explode or tail off in a plume of smoke,

  They were suicidally joyous.

  The bombers burst into flame,

  or spun like falling leaves

  or wheeled over themselves on their wing-tips or dove straight-arrowed into the ground.

  Contrails and tracers crisscrossed the sky indecipherable messages

  punctuated with bursts of black flak

  Bodies flew past, parachutists caught in the slipstream pieces of wing, engine cowlings, hatches a bare foot, a head in its leather helmet, instrument panels, a propeller idly turning

  All the debris of machines and men Sky crap now to be flown through.

  How long it lasted he couldn’t tell there seemed to be no other possible life until finally the Focke-Wulfs were outdistanced

  and what remained of the squadrons perhaps sixty planes,

  came within sight of their target.

  With only a vicious covering flak to fly through the crews were ready to go to work.

  Bomb bays were opened, the Fortresses turned made their approach

  and went in for their runs.

  The city below seemed to puff out all at once

  There was a new sound under the engine drone,

  the wumphing of delayed explosions of the ground, accompanied by cradle sways of the aircraft

  H
is plane suddenly rising, Ronald heard the bombardier shout, Bombs away

  He imputed an anthropomorphic sense of triumph to his plane

  that had delivered its stern message to the Germans.

  Now let’s get the fuck out of here, the pilot said.

  Only then realizing no response from the stick. Whatever he did, nothing happened.

  The flight plan called for avoiding the Luftwaffe that had tormented them on the way in

  by continuing on, heading south over the Italian Alps to airfields in North Africa.

  But the run had pointed them westward over Germany.

  He could not coax the plane to turn or bank, or climb or do anything except go forward.

  It felt to him as they droned onward that the cables were stripped, hanging by a thread

  And that any minute everything might come off in his hands.

  Oh shit don’t do this to me, Ronald heard him say.

  Gradually they decreased altitude by temporarily slowing the ground speed and feathering two of the engines

  Until they were flying soundly enough in order to avoid detection

  just five hundred feet

  above perversely neat fields lined with hedgerows.

  Small herds of cows moved to a sluggish gallop as they passed

  An old man pointing, a woman was at her clothesline a railroad station porter shaking his fist

  A long freight train on a siding, guards raising their rifles,

  Ronald felt all of Germany was now alerted to this wounded American beast lumbering over the countryside.

  Yet on they went, just three or four crewmen left alive in their freezing pungently burnt-out plane alone, without radio contact,

  And the wind whistling through a thousand tears in the fuselage

  and dead comrades slumped in their shattered gun turrets. . .

  Friends, brothers and sisters

  How can we see to it that our stories don’t falter like old veterans parading?

  The experience of experience is untransmittable,

  The children shrug what’s done is done, and history instructs them finally

  not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,

  As some thirty million were in World War Two, each a packet of terminal agony for at least one unendurable moment

  and all the loving structures of consciousness satanically compressed as the world came to an end.

  I ask how many times the world may come to an end before the world comes to an end?

  Sitting in the rubble of the pilot’s cabin the green fields below grayed in the dried blood on the window screen,

  Perhaps my brother Ronald had intimation beyond the circumstance in which he found himself

  Of a Europe so historically steeped in fantasy, fantasy of king, fantasy of priest,

  as to be instantly enlistable to the causes of murderous storytelling

  From the mouths of its most monstrous twentieth-century impresarios,

  the loudspeaking sociopaths who always knew whom to blame.

  Or perhaps he ruminated on the difference between war and peace

  as a matter of organization, the deaths of peace

  being comparatively haphazard, slapdash, local or attenuated by such means as poverty

  compared to the surefire concerted mass mobilization of war death.

  More likely, as he sat freezing in his shirt and then, no more comfortably, in his flight jacket whose fleece lining was hung with small stalactites of the dead airman’s blood,

  he thought of his mother and father, Ruth and Ben, while not quite able to visualize them

  but feeling them as prevailing moral presences conferring strength merely from their existence as his mother and father.

  And he thought of his kid brother, Everett, who so seriously took instruction in the throwing and catching of a baseball, and he felt that Everett’s protected innocence was strength-conferring.

  He checked his watch: in the States their day was in full swing.

  He swore he would someday rejoin their modest life of work and school and home

  and never forget to thank God for the blessing of this coherent family.

  Meanwhile the sky had grown dark, bad weather loomed.

  Slowly, the pilot gained needed altitude

  not knowing at what moment of his urging the craft would no longer fly.

  The British called their airplanes machines

  a locution too quaint for a Flying Fortress in my brother’s opinion

  But with every tremor of the wings every sputtering choke of the engines

  the accuracy of it came home to him.

  Now I don’t know when or exactly how it happened that Ronald was ordered to bail out.

  The sky was black by then, the storm had hit,

  Perhaps lightning shorted the instrument panel.

  They were flying blind, the compass spinning,

  The turbulence was fierce, knocking them about,

  And I think he said the far starboard engine was on fire.

  In the light of the flames he saw the wing beginning to pull away.

  The pilot shouting at whoever was alive to get out, the plane yawing, bouncing, cracking up,

  Ronald staggering aft and finding his chute,

  A door was open, the rain hitting their faces, men tumbling out ahead of him

  And with one glance back at the pilot rising from his chair

  giving the plane up to its dive

  Ronald leapt into the raging thundering darkness.

  Bartender, another beer for these brothers and sisters gone dry in the mouth, and for me.

  Immunity to murderous loudspoken storytelling is storytelling, isn’t that so?

  A story on the page is like a printed circuit for our lives to flow through,

  A story told invokes our dim capacity to be alive in bodies not our own.

  You would want the whole planet in voice

  and the totality of intimate human narrations

  composing a hymn to enlightenment if that were possible.

  In any event, here is this young airman, age twenty-two

  falling to earth in the harness of a parachute

  His arms wrenched and shoulders about to desocket

  as he bumps up on the crests and drops in the sloughs of the turbulent storm of black air.

  He descends through cloud undergoing momentary silent fullnesses of illumination

  before going black in vituperous thunder.

  He is not able to hear his plane crash.

  In this great resounding sea of lightning-lit darkness,

  Deeper than any darkness he has known

  And with a continent of bone wrack rising to meet him

  He can remember nothing of Miss Manderleigh

  Not her words, not her cries, not her intimate bodily facts

  not her shape or size or form or smile or touch

  But only the genderless soul staring from her love-dulled eyes

  erasing from his memory their color, as he shouts into the sky

  Good-bye, Miss Manderleigh, good-bye!

  He really thought it was the end of him.

  But the parachutist who meets neither land nor water invokes a realm of mythic prophecy

  As when impossibly the woods of Dunsinane begin to stir though there is no wind, uproot, grow feet, and move out

  to take the measure of that poor dumb bastard Macbeth.

  My brother thought first he had come down on seashells. because of the jarring crackle under his boots,

  But dragged some distance, twisting and rolling until he spilled the wind out of his chute,

  he was whacked and pummeled with what seemed to be staffs or rake handles.

  He thought it was some peasant reception committee showing their patriotism.

  Only when he came to rest, one ankle twisted under an immovable bough,

  did the xylophonic sound track of the action play in his ears

  And in the ensu
ing silence he realized he held in one hand an ulna a tibia in the other.

  He’d arrived in a field of the war before, reopened by an errant shell of this war.

  It was the improvised graveyard of ancient bones and skulls

  still helmeted in the stylish French couture and phallic German,

  the skeletal warriors of his father Ben’s generation hastily shoveled under as the Great War moved on.

  He had reason to hope he was in France But at first too stunned to move and then in too much pain

  he lay there in that boneyard all the night.

  He learned that bones of a certain age are hollow, weightless, and rise with the breeze like flutes of straw or bamboo.

  They play, they ripple, they gently bongo among themselves,

  They clack like train tracks, shiver and shir like cards being shuffled,

  They clink like wind chimes, hoot soft as owls.

  He imagined a badinage of ghosts past protest, past outrage, gibbering.

  But in the morning a real French peasant found him.

  He was hidden in a farmhouse, nursed, bone set, and brought back to health.

  During this time he put together some working radios for the local Resistance

  and achieved the affection of an entire family this intrepid American boy from the Bronx with a shock of hair fallen over his forehead

  and a taste for fresh unpasteurized milk still warm in the pail.

  They embraced him, bid him good-bye and he rode hidden in haywagons, carts, and trucks

  From one safe house to another for weeks until a fishing boat smuggled him across the Channel.

  He’d been the only one of his crew to survive.

  But soon enough was back in the air again, at war in the fire-cracked nights of Europe

  Unable at times to know if the machine he rode

  was flying level or diving toward the earth

  If the screaming he heard was the engine’s or his own.

  And that’s how I choose to leave him—

  In the war after the war. . . before the war

  Before his tour was over and he came home.

  —The rabbi has faxed me her father’s file. Not much there. His letters to the Justice Department. Their bureaucratic replies. Two 1977 articles from the Times: deportation hearing, a finding. Blurry head shot, bald fellow with sickly thin face. Three people testify man in question is the ghetto commandant, Schmitz, but his lawyer shoots down their testimony. They were elderly, easily befuddled. Defendant testifies he is Helmut Preissen, an ex-corporal who only did guard duty in the ghetto for three months before he was shipped to fight on the Russian front. This is same ID he presented to the immigration authorities after the war. The judge finds in his favor.. . . Letters to and from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the functionary there agreeing with Sarah’s father that Preissen is almost certainly Schmitz, but short of convincing documentation, the ID cannot be made that will justify reopening the case, although their file is being kept open.