There had been nothing frightening about the soldiers. Since the man was so old and the child so young, the military took a playful view of the pair—who, of all the people in the city, alone had recorded their presence nowhere, had been inoculated against nothing, had sworn allegiance to nothing, renounced or apologized for nothing, voted or marched for nothing, since the war.
“I meant no harm,” the old man had told the soldiers with a pretence of senility. “I didn’t know.” He told them how, on the day the war ended, a refugee woman had left a baby in his arms and never returned. That was how he got the boy. The child’s nationality? Name? Birthdate? He didn’t know.
The old man rolled potatoes from the stove’s wood fire with a stick, knocked the embers from their blackened skins. “I haven’t been a very good father, letting you go without birthdays this long,” he said. “You’re entitled to one every year, you know, and I’ve let six years go by without a birthday. And presents, too. You’re supposed to get presents.” He picked up a potato gingerly, and tossed it to the boy, who caught it and laughed. “So you’ve decided tomorrow’s the day, eh?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“All right. That doesn’t give me much time to get you a present, but there’ll be something.”
“What?”
“Birthday presents are better if they’re a surprise.” He thought of the wheels he had seen on a pile of rubble down the street. When the boy fell asleep, he would make some sort of cart.
“Listen!” said the boy.
As at every sunset, over the ruins from a distant street came the sound of marching.
“Don’t listen,” said the old man. He held up a finger for attention. “And you know what we’ll do on your birthday?”
“Steal cakes from the bakery?”
“Maybe—but that isn’t what I was thinking of. You know what I’d like to do tomorrow? I’d like to take you where you’ve never been in all your life—where I haven’t been for years.” The thought made the old man excited and happy. This would be the gift. The cart would be nothing. “Tomorrow I’ll take you away from war.”
He didn’t see that the boy looked puzzled, and a little disappointed.
It was the birthday the boy had chosen for himself, and the sky, as the old man had promised, was clear. They ate breakfast in the twilight of their cellar. The cart the old man had made late at night sat on the table. The boy ate with one hand, his other hand resting on the cart. Occasionally, he paused in eating to move the cart back and forth a few inches, and to imitate the sound of a motor.
“That’s a nice truck you’ve got there, Mister,” said the old man. “Bringing animals to the market, are you?”
“Brummmaaaa, brummmaaaa. Out of my way! Brummmaaaa. Out of the way of my tank.”
“Sorry,” sighed the old man, “thought you were a truck. You like it anyway, and that’s what counts.” He dropped his tin plate into the bucket of water simmering on the stove. “And this is only the beginning, only the beginning,” he said expansively. “The best is yet to come.”
“Another present?”
“In a way. Remember what I promised? We’ll get away from war today. We’ll go to the woods.”
“Brummmaaaa, brummmaaaa. Can I take my tank?”
“If you’ll let it be a truck, just for today.”
The boy shrugged. “I’ll leave it, and play with it when I get back.”
Blinking in the bright morning, the two walked down their deserted street, turned into a busy boulevard lined with brave new façades. It was as though the world had suddenly become fresh and clean and whole again. The people didn’t seem to know that desolation began a block on either side of the fine boulevard, and stretched for miles. The two, with lunches under their arms, walked toward the pine-covered hills to the south, toward which the boulevard lifted in a gentle grade.
Four young soldiers came down the sidewalk abreast. The old man stepped into the street, out of their way. The boy saluted, and held his ground. The soldiers smiled, returned his salute, and parted their ranks to let him pass.
“Armored infantry,” said the boy to the old man.
“Hmmmm?” said the old man absently, his eyes on the green hills. “Really? How did you know that?”
“Didn’t you see the green braid?”
“Yes, but those things change. I can remember when armored infantry was black and red, and green was—” He cut the sentence short. “It’s all nonsense,” he said, almost sharply. “It’s all meaningless, and today we’re going to forget all about it. Of all days, on your birthday, you shouldn’t be thinking about—”
“Black and red is the engineers,” interrupted the boy seriously. “Plain black is the military police, and red is the artillery, and blue and red is the medical corps, and black and orange is…”
The pine forest was very still. The centuries-old carpet of needles and green roof deadened the sounds floating up from the city. Infinite colonnades of thick brown trunks surrounded the old man and the boy. The sun, directly overhead, showed itself to them only as a cluster of bright pinpoints through the fat, dense blanket of needles and boughs above.
“Here?” said the boy.
The old man looked about himself. “No—just a little farther.” He pointed. “There—see through there? We can see the church from here.” The black skeleton of a burned steeple was framed against a square of sky between two trunks on the edge of the forest. “But listen—hear that? Water. There’s a brook up above, and we can get down in its little valley and see nothing but treetops and sky.”
“All right,” said the boy. “I like this place, but all right.” He looked at the steeple, then at the old man, and raised his eyebrows questioningly.
“You’ll see—you’ll see how much better,” said the old man.
As they reached the top of the ridge, he gestured happily at the brook below. “There! And what do you think of this? Eden! As it was in the beginning—trees, sky, and water. This is the world you should have had, and today, at least, you can have it.”
“And look!” said the boy, pointing to the ridge on the other side.
A huge tank, rusted to the color of the fallen pine needles, squatted on shattered treads on the ridge, with scabs of corrosion about the black hole where its gun had once been.
“How can we cross the water to get to it?” said the boy.
“We don’t want to get to it,” said the old man irritably. He held the boy’s hand tightly. “Not today. Some other day we can come out here, maybe. But not today.”
The boy was crestfallen. His small hand grew limp in the old man’s.
“Here’s a bend up ahead, and around that we’ll find exactly what we want.”
The boy said nothing. He snatched up a rock, and threw it at the tank. As the little missile fell toward the target, he tensed, as though the whole world were about to explode. A faint click came from the turret, and he relaxed, somehow satisfied. Docilely, he followed the old man.
Around the bend, they found what the old man had been looking for: a smooth, dry table of rock, out by the stream, walled in by high banks. The old man stretched out on the moss, affectionately patted the spot beside him, where he wanted the boy to sit. He unwrapped his lunch.
After lunch, the boy fidgeted. “It’s very quiet,” he said at last.
“It’s as it should be,” said the old man. “One corner of the world—as it should be.”
“It’s lonely.”
“That’s its beauty.”
“I like it better in the city, with the soldiers and—”
The old man seized his arm roughly, squeezed it hard. “No you don’t. You just don’t know. You’re too young, too young to know what this is, what I’m trying to give you. But, when you’re older, you’ll remember, and want to come back here—long after your little cart is broken.”
“I don’t want my cart to be broken,” said the boy.
“It won’t, it won’t. But just lie here, close your ey
es and listen, and forget about everything. This much I can give you—a few hours away from war.” He closed his eyes.
The boy lay down beside him, and dutifully closed his eyes, too.
The sun was low in the sky when the old man awakened. He ached and felt damp from his long nap by the brook. He yawned and stretched. “Time to go,” he said, his eyes still closed. “Our day of peace is over.” And then he saw that the boy was gone. He called the boy’s name unconcernedly at first; and then, getting no answer but the wind’s, he stood and shouted.
Panic welled up in him. The boy had never been in the woods before, could easily get lost if he were to wander north, deeper into the hills and forest. He climbed onto higher ground and shouted again. No answer.
Perhaps the boy had gone down to the tank again, and tried to cross the stream. He couldn’t swim. The old man hurried downstream, around the bend to where he could see the tank. The ugly relic gaped at him balefully from across the cut. Nothing moved, and there was only the sound of wind and the water.
“Bang!” cried a small voice.
The boy raised his head from the turret triumphantly. “Gotcha!” he said.
Brighten Up
There was a time when I was at one with my Father in feeling that to become a reverent, brave, trustworthy, and courteous Eagle Scout was to lay the foundations for a bountiful life. But I have since had occasion to reflect more realistically upon twig-bending, and am wondering now if Hell’s Kitchen isn’t a more sound preparation for living than was the Beaver Patrol. I cannot help feeling that my friend Louis Gigliano, who had been smoking cigars since he was twelve, was a great deal better prepared to thrive in chaos than was I, who had been trained to meet adversity with a combination pocketknife, can opener, and leather punch.
The test of the manly art of surviving I have in mind took place in a prisoner-of-war camp in Dresden. I, a clean-cut American youth, and Louis, a dissipated little weasel whose civilian occupation had been hashish-peddling to bobby-soxers, faced life there together. I am remembering Louis now because I am stone-broke, and because I know that Louis is living like a prince somewhere in this world he understands too well. It was that way in Germany.
Under the democratic provisions of the Geneva Convention, we, as privates, were obliged to work for our keep. All of us worked, that is, but Louis. His first act behind barbed wire was to report to an English-speaking Nazi guard that he wanted no part of the war, which he considered to be brother against brother, and the handiwork of Roosevelt and Jewish international bankers. I asked him if he meant it.
“I’m tired, for God’s sake,” he said. “I fought ’em for six months, and now I’m tired. I need a rest, and I like to eat as well as the next guy. Brighten up, will you!”
“I’d rather not, thank you,” I said icily.
I was sent out on a pick-and-shovel detail; Louis remained in camp as the German sergeant’s orderly. Louis got extra rations for whisk-brooming the sergeant three times a day. I got a hernia while tidying up after the American Air Force.
“Collaborationist!” I hissed at him after a particularly exhausting day in the streets. He was standing at the prison gate with a guard, immaculate and sprightly, nodding to his acquaintances in the dusty, weary column. His response to my taunt was to walk beside me to the sleeping quarters.
He laid a hand on my shoulder. “And then you can look at it this way, kid,” he said. “Here you’re helping Jerry clean up his streets so he can run tanks and trucks through ’em again. That’s what I’d call collaboration. Me a collaborator? You’ve got it backwards. All I do to help Jerry win the war is smoke his cigarettes and hit him for more to eat. That’s bad, I suppose?”
I flopped down on my bunk. Louis took a seat on a straw-tick nearby. My arm hung over the side of the bunk, and Louis interested himself in my wrist watch, a gift from my Mother.
“Nice, very nice watch, kid,” he said. And then, “Hungry after all that work, I’ll bet.”
I was ravenous. Ersatz coffee, one bowl of watered soup, and three slices of dry bread are not the sort of fare to delight a pick-swinger’s heart after nine hours of hard labor. Louis was sympathetic. He liked me; he wanted to help. “You’re a nice kid,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll make a quick deal for you. There’s no sense in going hungry. Why, that watch is worth two loaves of bread, at least. Is that a good deal, or isn’t it?”
At that point, two loaves of bread was a dazzling lure. It was an incredible amount of food for one person to have. I tried to bid him up. “Look, friend,” he said, “this is a special price to you, and it’s a top price. I’m trying to do you a favor, see? All I ask of you is to keep quiet about this deal, or everybody will want two loaves for a watch. Promise?”
I swore by all that is holy that I would never reveal the magnanimity of Louis, my best friend. He was back in an hour. He cast a furtive glance around the room, withdrew a long loaf from a rolled field jacket, and stuffed it beneath my mattress. I waited for him to make the second deposit. It was not forthcoming. “I hardly know what to tell you, kid. The guard I do business with told me the whole bottom’s dropped out of the watch market since all these guys came in from the Bulge. Too many watches all at one time is what did it. I’m sorry, but I want you to know that Louis got you the maximum for that watch.” He made a move toward the loaf under the mattress. “If you feel gypped, all you have to do is say the word, and I’ll take this back and get your watch again.”
My stomach growled. “Oh hell, Louis,” I sighed, “leave it there.”
When I awoke the next morning, I looked at my wrist to see what time it was. And then I recalled that I no longer owned a watch. The man in the bunk overhead was also astir. I asked him for the time. He stuck his head over the side, and I saw that his jaws were crammed with bread; he blew a shower of crumbs over me as he answered. He said he no longer had a watch. He chewed and swallowed until a major portion of the great wad of bread was cleared from his mouth and he could make himself understood. “I should care what time it is when Louis will give me two loaves and ten cigarettes for a watch that wasn’t worth twenty dollars new?” he asked.
Louis had a monopoly on rapport with the guards. His avowed harmony with Nazi principles convinced our keepers that he was the only bright one among us, and we all had to do our Black-Marketeering through this superficial Judas. Six weeks after we had been quartered in Dresden, nobody had any way of knowing what time it was outside of Louis and the guards. Two weeks after that, Louis had done every married man out of his wedding ring with this argument: “O.K., go ahead and be sentimental, go ahead and starve to death. Love’s a wonderful thing, they tell me.”
His profits were enormous. I later found out that my watch, for instance, brought a price of one hundred cigarettes and six loaves of bread. Anyone familiar with starvation will recognize that this was a handsome prize. Louis converted most of his wealth into the most negotiable of all securities, cigarettes. And it wasn’t long before the possibilities of being a loan shark had occurred to him. Once every two weeks we were issued twenty cigarettes. Slaves of the tobacco habit would exhaust the ration in one or two days, and would be in a state of frenzy until the next ration came. Louis, who was coming to be known as “The People’s Friend” or “Honest John,” announced that cigarettes might be borrowed from him at a reasonable fifty-percent interest until the next ration. He soon had his wealth loaned out and increasing by half every two weeks. I was terribly in debt to him, with nothing left for collateral but my soul. I took him to task for his greed: “Christ drove the moneylenders from the temple,” I reminded him.
“That was money they were lending, my boy,” he replied. “I’m not beggin’ you to borrow my cigarettes, am I? You’re beggin’ me to lend you some. Cigarettes are luxuries, friend. You don’t have to smoke to stay alive. You’d probably live longer if you didn’t smoke. Why don’t you give up the filthy habit?”
“How many can you let me have until next Tues
day?” I asked.
When usury had swelled his hoard to an all-time high, a catastrophe, which he had been awaiting impatiently, caused the value of his cigarettes to sky-rocket. The USAAF swept over the feeble Dresden defenses to demolish, among other things, the major cigarette factories. As a consequence, not only the P.W. cigarette ration, but that of the guards and civilians as well, was cut off completely. Louis was a major figure in local finance. The guards found themselves without a smoke to their names, and began selling our rings and watches back to Louis at a lower price than they had given him. Some put his wealth as high as one hundred watches. Louis’ own estimate, however, was a modest fifty-three watches, seventeen wedding rings, seven high school rings, and an heirloom watch-fob. “Some of the watches need a lot of work done on them,” he told me.
When I say that the AAF got the cigarette factories among other things, I mean that a number of human beings got blown up as well—something like 200,000. Our activities took a ghoulish turn. We were put to work exhuming the dead from their innumerable crypts. Many of them wore jewelry, and most had carried their precious belongings to the shelters. At first we shunned the grave goods. For one thing, some of us felt that stripping corpses was a revolting business, and for another, to be caught at it was certain death. It took Louis to bring us to our senses. “Good God, kid, you could make enough to retire on in fifteen minutes. I just wish they’d let me go out with you guys for just a day.” He licked his lips, and continued: “Tell you what—I’ll really make it worth your while. You get me one good diamond ring, and I’ll keep you in smokes and chow for as long as we’re in this hole.”
The next evening I brought him his ring, tucked into my trouser cuff. So, it turned out, did everyone else. When I showed him the diamond he shook his head. “Oh, what a dirty shame,” he said. He held the stone up to a light: “Here the poor kid risked his life for a zircon!” Everybody, a minute inspection revealed, had brought back either a zircon, a garnet, or a paste diamond. In addition, Louis pointed out, any slight value these might have was destroyed because of a glutted market. I let my plunder go for four cigarettes; others got a bit of cheese, a few hundred grams of bread, or twenty potatoes. Some hung on to their gems. Louis chatted with them from time to time about the dangers of being caught with loot. “Poor devil over at the British Compound got it today,” he would say. “They caught him with a pearl necklace sewed into his shirt. It only took ’em two hours to try him and shoot him.” Sooner or later everyone made a deal with Louis.
Armageddon in Retrospect Page 7