Get a grip on yourself man, breathe, you’re a man now, you’re in the army, you’re in the hospital. Sweating dreams into the sheets in expiatory fever. Head cupped in the hands of a woman.
“There, it’s over, take a rest,” says the soothing voice, the nurse holding him up over the metal pan he has just puked in. The hospital rumbles as a convoy of military traffic passes by. “It’s okay Captain, just relax, you’re alright now, just relax.” He feels shaky, jittery, his hands are flushed and clammy, images and sounds mix and mash. “I think maybe you’re not handling the morphine too well.”
“Am I okay?”
“You’re doing great.” She smiles a professional smile.
“I thought you were my mother,” he says weakly, smiling wanly. “I’m really out of it.” His voice is wavering. He catches a sharp, sour whiff of his own vomit.
“I know you did,” replies the nurse, and she looks at him, her eyes kind and sad. “And you thought you were fishing, and you thought you were watching a train, and you thought you were shaving, too.” She looks young, no older than twenty-five, with pert auburn hair cut in a bob that accentuates her youth. Seen her before I’m sure of it, think her name’s Gwen, yes seen her before when laid up before with my arm my throbbing arm, sure I saw her after Leprenniere bought it at his post, RIP in the RAP, when they sent me back to the aid post wasn’t I just there now again yes I know I was I know I was. Shoulda warned him, shoulda told him. Coulda warned him. She picks up the pan and is about to carry on, when Jim interrupts her with a question.
“Are you a mother?” he asks, gathering himself and clinging to the conversation to pull himself together, out of the fever-dream world which will surely kill him.
“No, I’m not, I’m not even married,” she answers with a soft and thoughtful laugh, a little taken aback by the question. “Hmmm.” She smiles close-mouthed at him, and lets him be, leaving.
“Nurse?”
“Yes?” She looks over her shoulder, paused in mid-stride, puke-filled pan in hand.
“Am I okay?”
“You’re doing great.” Form-letter response. Like a government telegram. She continues on her way and returns with a glass of water a minute or a thousand years later, it is hard to tell which. “Drink this, Captain, it will make you feel better.”
“Thank you.” He sips the water. It soaks into his parched and pasty mouth, into his thick and swollen tongue. The lantern above shines a dull orange, haloed in its own light, and the world about him thuds with a pulse and the walls of the tent shimmer in vivid shadow-play as they billow gently in the breeze. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She is wearing a long brown felt coat and her black pillbox hat that he loves so much. “I’m glad you like it.” He takes his new wallet and inserts his money and his driving license and birth certificate into it after emptying his old one, his old tattered wallet, splitting at the seams, frayed threads sticking out raggedly from the hole in the corner, tattered and battered beyond repair; and he throws the old one in the wastebasket.
“Happy birthday. I tolerated that one for too long—so shabby!” She laughs at him, and he shrugs and smiles sheepishly. And they walk, and the tent walls billow in shadow-play, and the clouds move through the sky, the halo of the lantern the rays of an evening sun, the orange glow of a harvest moon, and why oh why did you do it really why did you do it why did you leave what is the reason really?
She asks him this, toe tapping rhythmically on the floor in the kitchen, toe in silk stocking want to crawl under the table and put it in my mouth just unroll that stocking and take it out of the stocking and suck, suck her toe under the table it makes me feel so dirty my dirty little mind like Miss Klein in school wanted to take off her black heels and just suck, suck, suck her toes lick in between them and purse my lips over the webbing and suckle yes, oh yes, want to smell her shoes the worn leather lived-in smell like my helmet I suppose but so much more appealing not the smell of a dirty man with dirty thoughts want to lick her pussy want to crawl up between her legs kissing up her leg, kissing up her leg oh yes her stockings rolled up in my hand, want to lick her pussy just put my tongue inside and lick oh my God what haven’t I done what haven’t I done I’m so inexperienced I’m so sorry for these dirty thoughts right now my darling I haven’t seen you in two years darling I have a mind like a French postcard darling rings out rather falsely now doesn’t it after all we’ve been through after all I’ve put you through I’m sorry I have these dirty thoughts these dirty perverted thoughts like masturbation, pulling the pud, cranking the shaft, choking the chicken, stroking the sceptre, the shame of it when I did it, the Christ staring down from the cross hanging over the dining-room doorway bloody shame of it, the hair on my palms shame of it, the wasteful messy sticky milky shame of it, when I did it I thought something broke inside, the whole squalid shame of it; forgive me Father for I have sinned, the dusty pleated curtain of the confessional like the pleats of his dress kilt worn proudly on the march, I’m sorry Father the shame of it, I’ve done so many things I’ve thought so many things and I’m sorry, I didn’t study, I just thought of Miss Klein, the shame of it, hands and knees against stones scurrying under the church pew to hide from the bombardment and hide your shellshock from the men rather than try to rally their morale while they were shelled time and time again, leaving your wife why so you look elsewhere to create your legacy and you add more bodies to this war how many people have you killed or had killed because of what private demons oh the bloody shame, shame, shame of it!
How many have you killed? How many that you have seen with your own eyes? One. Between the eyes, in the basement, bang with his pistol like the mule put out of burning misery, the man with splayed legs and his guts in his hands yes his guts in his hands his sticky slithering guts in his hands and the blood between his fingers and black in his clothes, the sticky syrupy meaty raw steak in butcher’s paper smell of it, mixed with shit, stinking shit spilling out of intestines mixed with the smell of smoke, of plaster, of broken stone and splintered wood, of spilled vinegar, of destruction, of deconstruction; those eyes, those young schoolboy eyes, those stunned eyes, understanding eyes, the eyes of a man who knows this is it, it’s over, this is the final moment … watching inevitability playing itself out, watching gravity assert itself, the laws of a moment reaching their verdict, their capital sentence, an eternity between those final heartbeats that beat like the beating of a gavel, the tolling of the bell to your own funeral; those eyes in the crack of the pistol frozen, last sight and every memory like a roll of film ripped from the camera, exposed, a flash of white, blinding exposure to the light.
A shadow hunches over him, the shadow of a man in the flickering half light of the tent, and he tries to avert his eyes, and he hides his face in his pillow for a moment, buries himself in his sheet, the monster has emerged from his closet from behind the coal pile behind the furnace in the basement, from the shifting labial shadows of the tent wall, and is now looming over him, and he looks again and the shadow is closer, and he can see now the face of the man standing over him, can see the wan greyish bloodless face and the bullet hole between the eyes, can smell the rotting meat stench of his breath, and a hand reaches out to touch him, and the hand touches his arm, cold, clammy, moist and blistered with putrefaction, and the lips mouth, “Come with me … ”
The approach to the front was tedious, a long march down the country road, and his head was sore from all that Dago wine with Schneider and Weiszack the night before; he could still taste the alcohol two hours after awakening. His head sweat under his cap in the beating of the sun. His tongue was thick and dry. Mein Gott, he thought, my God it’s hot out here and Decker has smoked my last damned cigarette. Thoughts turned to Elsa, back to Hamburg, if only he could call her and she could answer from the switchboards—
Oh Elsa I miss you, when you sent me your panties in the mail I nearly creamed myself, and Reinhardt offer
ed me his schnapps ration for them! Obviously, his luck at the brothels has been nil. Must be that he’s circumcised, yes he has the mark of the Jew about him, or so says Fricker. This is the sort of knowledge that Fricker would possess; I caught him glancing at Braun and Schneider when we were swimming. Oh Elsa, Elsa, Elsa!
Boots in the road dust, beating up a white pall of chalky grit, the sun in his eyes. Ahead, an even bigger cloud of dust, and as the company caught up he heard the braying of mules or donkeys, and they passed a convoy of field guns and ammunition trailers being towed by mules. Mules—are we really to win when we are reduced to these means, when the enemy has all the fuel and trucks he needs at his disposal? Never mind that we are better fighters than them—they have all the materiel. And where the hell is our transport? Damn logistical messups! Tromp, tromp, tromp, tromp, the monotonous stamp of boots to the front, and the clatter of carts and braying and snorting of mules.
And they marched and marched and marched, over the fields, the sunbaked fields, and over a ridge, and over more fields, and up another slope to a town, a small town on a hill and they passed the townsfolk who were wisely leaving, poor Italian townsfolk smelling a battle in the air, knowing it in their bones and conveying this ancient wearied wisdom in their passing glances, sizing up these latest invaders in a long history of them. Into the alleys they marched, and no sooner did they catch their breath and drink from their canteens and listen to the rolling thunder of the Allied advance beyond the valley before them than they were ordered to dig, and dig they did, into the perimeter of the town and underneath the town, slit trenches and fortifications and tunnels. They dug and they dug; inside the hole they dug and they passed dirt toward the mouth, and they sweated and they stank, hacking away into the chalky dirt with picks and spades in the dim lamplit darkness, hacking with spades and hawking gobs of dirty saliva from their mouths, and the earth shuddered as the bombs fell above them, and they dug and they dug, and the bombs crashed upon them, and they sang “Lilli Marlene” and passed the bottles of wine and smoked cigarettes, and they slept in their trenches and in the cellars and the tunnels.
And they waited in the ruins of the town, knowing that an attack would surely come, the Canadians amassed on the hill ahead of them hunkering down and preparing to attack despite all the artillery that could be brought to bear on them, and they dug and they dug, and they smoked and they talked and they slept when they could, and the bombs continued to fall, and in the lanternlight he read a letter:
Dear Helmut,
I hope that you are holding up well over there. I was doing laundry today and I thought of you, how I used to always wash your clothes. And all you kids making such a racket as I tried to work! I admit I cried a little as I did this. Your father and I and all your sisters miss you so much! But we are proud of your service to the Fatherland. Speaking of which, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your cousin Thomas was killed on the Eastern front recently. We are told that he was killed instantly. We can only pray that it was so, and that now he is at peace. Your Uncle Oskar’s family’s house was destroyed in an air raid—thankfully, they were out of town at the time.
These are hard times. But keep up the fight and come home in one piece. One day, we can all share coffee and cake in the afternoon as a family again, this war behind us like a bad dream. Missing you—
With love,
Mother
And then a tremendous bombardment, a shattering crashing totality of destruction, and the expected attack came in the night, and they fought on the hill in the shell-shattered darkness and fell back, back into the town, and they waited as the enemy soldiers arrived at the town and combed through the streets and lanes and searched through buildings; and then they fired the first shots and the struggle for the town was on, yes, on, and house by house his friends were killed in the melee, and they fell back through the tunnels or dashed through the yards; and then as they fired through the windows and blast holes of a house near where an SP gun got overwhelmed, they attracted a wave of enemy soldiers, and tank shells crashed into the house—one, then another, buffeting the room. A crash of debris. A wall blew inward and he was buried in debris, bleeding from the arms. He picked himself up from the floor in a daze, and he and Kaufman and Braun raced down the stairs as another shell smashed into the house; down the stairs they went as the upstairs was rocked by another hit, and they ran through the parlour, and then enemy soldiers were upon the house, shouting in their coarse barks, and there was a tromping of boots up the stairs, the thud of a grenade, the stutter of rifles and tear of a submachine gun. They made it to the kitchen, and they heaved open the cellar door and leapt down the stairs, pulling it shut behind them, and no sooner did they do this, fumbling through the dark for the mouth of the tunnel, than the door was flung open and there was a shaft of dusty light and the clatter of grenades rolling down the stairs—they all leapt away in different directions, and he tripped backward over some heavy object as he tried to avoid the explosions, and there was a stunning bang … a shivering, shuddering coldness. Ears abuzz. He found himself against the wall, stunned, and he looked down to see his own guts in his lap, and in his dazed state he tried to sensibly hold them in. He almost laughed, with what little energy he had left, almost laughed at this incongruous and ghastly sight, this slither of gore, this indecent outing of innards … out of the smoke approached three figures hunched in the clutter, enemy soldiers, one with a Tommy gun, one with a rifle, one with a pistol. The basement flickered as the soldier with the Tommy gun let loose a thudding volley. He shuddered and shivered; he was growing cold. He was thirsty, wanted to drink water, could drink Lake Constance dry, oh for a sip of water, just need some water, and as the man with the pistol approached, he managed to summon the fortitude to whisper the words, comrade, a little water, comrade, a cigarette, to the man standing before him; and he felt the darkness closing in, and his hands were cold and he shivered, and all he needed was a sip of water and a drag from a cigarette, just send me off with a sip and a smoke, please; and he stared into those eyes and into the mouth of the gun upraised to his own face, and he knew this is the end, this is it. A calm moment of reckoning. A crash, a reverberating crash, and an infinitude of experiences all at once exploded in a flash of white light—childhood, adolescence, adulthood, first steps first day at school first communion first kiss first day on the front, a million voices, a million questions answered and unanswered, memories colliding with memories, pushed aside as a bullet ripped through his mind—and forever and ever ring, foreverandeverandeverring …
Beckoning War Page 28