All this running through my cretin’s noggin, my gut pleading. In thine image. At the point of death man is obliged to fart and giggle. Retching and yakking. Well enough to warn the men against culinary fantasies, but a man brought up on Hannah’s and Pinsky’s notions of the necessary tended toward gustatory masturbation in the best of times. Trezevant scoffed but had not achieved a couple of hundred pounds on collard greens alone, whatever they were; I would ask him. Chitlins I knew, and hominy. And Ewald, silent vengeful Ewald, buttery Ewald: on what Scandinavian glories had he waxed fat? I guessed at eight or nine hundred calories a day, so far; and our army liked thirty-five hundred. The Chinese army? Less. Far less, and it would not be easy now to explain that Americans were different. Different. How, different?
Trezevant disinterred the cigarette, lit it, held it to Oldridge’s lips. “A cigarette!” Sunderman said. Trezevant held it to Cuttis’s lips, to Scafa’s, took a drag himself and passed it on. I opened my mouth to decline the gift, but an obscure echo of some militant uncle checked the impulse: if Trez should think it was color? I drew in smoke, passed the cigarette: “No more for me. I quit.” “I don’t smoke,” Mulberg said, and Ewald declined with a shake of the head.
There had been no distribution of clothing, but three wadded yards of cheap cotton had been flung into the hut. I had sponged Yuscavage’s shoulder with hot water and bound him up, no infection; the wound would heal slowly but it would heal. There were other wounds to come, some perhaps that would not heal.
They rested, limp in the light of the puny bulb.
“Sons of bitches never brought clothes,” Collins said.
“That corn was enough excitement for one day,” I said. “Hell, we’re warm.”
Collins scoffed. “Corn. And those slant bastards eating chop suey. With meat. And then fucking each other.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“That’s what I heard,” Collins said. “They fuck each other.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“Go to hell,” Collins said.
“Democracy,” I said. “No more officers.”
“That’s it,” he said.
“Step outside?”
Trezevant laughed and I caught, or thought I caught, a gleam of approval. Trezevant was no child. Ewald might be. I looked at my little platoon, each in turn, and wondered who would live and who would die.
Next day we were marched, those who could walk, to a long wooden shed where each man was issued a pair of cotton socks and a padded blue cotton uniform; and then marched home again. A flying squad arrived shortly with an identical issue for the prostrate, though we did not dress the dysenteries. The uniforms were all the same size, 38 short, I judged, single-breasted, good needlework, nothing fancy in the cut. Chinese quartermasters seemed, like all quartermasters, grudging malcontents. As in any advanced society we were listed: name, rank, serial number, date of birth. Under guard, Kinsella visited and delivered a brief but pungent patriotic oration. He left amid silence. I wondered if our little world was improving or degenerating: we had heat now, and clothing, and what might pass for food, but in the new uniforms the men seemed more, well, uniform: more silent, passive, acquiescent, as if made brutish, almost content by the ordeal and its end. At the noonday meal they were complacent, considerate, benevolent. I too accepted: perhaps now I would not die. I thought of Carol, and of Jacob, and was too empty for tears.
“Ou-yang,” I said to the guard, and was escorted to Ou-yang. I was offered a chair and a cup of tea. I accepted a cigarette. I had decided that I would decline nothing. Mark that down. I stuck the cigarette behind my ear and was startled by the soundless echo of a Frenchman who had once taken two from me: “pour mon frère qui n’a pas de travail.” “How many doctors have you?”
“One,” Ou-yang said. “Pee-joe. Do you know that word?”
I shook my head.
“Pee-joe,” Ou-yang said. “It means beer in Chinese.”
“Die-foo pee-joe,” I said.
“No. Pee-joe die-foo. Name first, title second. We Chinese, you know. Backward. Upside down. Look here.” He opened a desk drawer, rummaged, unfolded a map. “The world.” He passed it to me, and I examined it with a bewildering sense of error and dislocation: a huge central land-mass, bracketed by oceans in turn bracketed by small strips of the good old U.S. of A.; the edges of the map ran through Grand Forks, Oklahoma City, Fort Worth. “A new perspective,” I said.
“Travel is broadening,” he said.
I returned the map. “I want permission to move freely. Let me have bandages and a simple antiseptic.”
“House calls,” Ou-yang said, and I could not help laughing. Treason. Sorry. The laughter seized me and I struggled to control it. We would all go mad and die laughing. Perhaps the Chinese would win quickly. For the first time I contemplated the war’s end, and was sobered. Perhaps the Americans would drop the bomb. Perhaps we would kill everybody and occupy Asia. Homesteaders. Frontiers. Free land for all, no more unemployment.
Deliberately I calmed myself. On a shelf behind Ou-yang stood a small white porcelain bowl inlaid with a translucent pattern of rice grains. I concentrated on the bowl. I counted the grains. Sanity returned. I craned: in the bowl were three gnarled tubers, yellow-brown.
Ou-yang was pensive, and sipped tea. This was so civilized. I recalled movies, the British and German officers discussing Shakespeare. Von Waldstein with his year at Oxford. You must understand, my dear Cavendish, that the sun has set on the British empire. “Naturally,” I said, additional dialogue by B. Beer, “you have my word for my good conduct.”
“But is it not,” von Ou-yang asked politely, “every officer’s duty to escape?”
“Not this time,” I said. “Where? Manchuria? Siberia?”
“Not this time,” he said. He appeared to be meditating vaster concepts. “Yes. It’s a good idea. You must let me think about it.”
“Is there a clinic here? For your own men?”
“We have an infirmary,” he said. “Two beds, a thermometer, two medicines, one for loose bowels and one for constipation. We have herbs, for fever. We have not much of anything. Our medical people are in the lines. And the villages,” he added sourly. “All war is total war now.”
I agreed wearily. “Forget that. We have other problems, terrible problems. This is a real mess, the end of the world. There are men who need amputations. Transfusions. There’ll be pneumonia. There’s dysentery, there’s internal bleeding, there’s starvation. We need a whole hospital. Do you see? If I can’t treat them, a lot of these men will die.”
“Then they will die,” Ou-yang said equably. “Many have died already.”
“It’s inhuman.” I remember my fists were balled in my lap and I was no longer full of insane laughter. “Let me use your infirmary.”
“No.”
“Two hours a day. An hour.”
“No.”
No. Redress, petition. My congressman. The Red Cross. I bowed my head and emitted a sobbing growl, pure defeat, pain.
“You are not a permanent soldier,” Ou-yang said.
“Sometimes I wonder,” I said. “No. I was drafted. I think of myself as a permanent doctor. And now a permanent prisoner.”
“No. Some day you will go home.” He smiled. “The sooner the better.”
“Amen.” We were back in the cinema but the sentiment was acceptable.
“Return to your hut,” he said. “I will send for you.”
“What are those?” Those tubers.
He turned to see, and frowned. “Wait. I forget the name in English. Like carrots.”
“Turnips.”
“Turnips. Pickled.”
“Give them to me.”
“To you?”
Glumly I sorted phrases. Oh for a world of yes and no, I live I die I love I hate. “The day may come,” I said, “when we fight for a blade of grass. When we drink the wind and eat the dead. We can’t count on a damn thing.”
“Take them,” he shrug
ged, and dismissed me.
10
“What does it matter who?” Benny asked, starchy, peeved at these gnats. Though Major Cornelius was no mite: tall, thin, white-blond, azure-eyed. A watercolor, slightly run, highlights of intelligence and secret depravity in the eyes. “You want to know why.”
“We want to know all we can,” Cornelius said. “And now this.” He tapped the questionnaire. “Not as straightforward as we would have liked.”
“I don’t imagine anything is.” To Parsons Benny said, “May I have a cup of that coffee?”
“Sugar? Vap?”
“Both, thanks. You’re spoiled rotten.”
Alex smiled, sympathetic and priestly.
Gabol asked, “How’s your weight?”
“What do you care? You’re a shrink.”
“Hah. You’re an intern.”
Without budging, Cornelius seemed to rap for order. “One man in three collaborated,” he said.
“One man in three died,” Benny said.
“Then start there. Of what?”
“Wounds, dysentery, pneumonia, one heart attack that I know of; inanition.”
“And at the hands of the Chinese?”
“None that I know of. Sorry to disappoint. Several beatings, and sustained psychological pressure, but no physical torture and no killings. Not on my turf, anyway.”
“On your what?”
“Never mind,” Benny said.
“How many could have been saved by good medical care?”
“Two-thirds,” Benny said. “Maybe all. And good food. Or no war.”
“How did the survivors react?”
“React?” This albino. “Same way civilians do, down deep. Indifference. Relief that it was the other guy, or that there was more to go around.”
“Benny,” Gabol said reproachfully.
“Socks particularly,” Benny said. “Socks wore out fast. In winter an extra pair was useful.”
Cornelius sighed.
“Oh listen,” Benny said, “we were all half-dead. There were bunches that hung together, took care of each other. But death was a fact of life. At first, anyway. Hardly anybody died after the first six months, but we never knew. It wasn’t a special occasion. No flowers, no music. Just haul him out and bury him. We had one man used to say a prayer when he heard about a death, but he was a crazy.”
“Did progressives and reactionaries respond the same way?” Alex spoke softly, genuinely curious. “To the deaths, I mean.”
“There weren’t any progressives and reactionaries while we were dying. That came later.”
“Your own feelings?”
“Frustration.”
“Anger?”
“Professional.”
“Sympathy?”
Benny took refuge in coffee. Soon he said, “Yes.”
They waited. “Go on,” Cornelius said.
“I can’t,” Benny said. “Any man who dies, it might have been you. So you’re sorry for him. Millions of people die every day.”
“You’re a help,” Gabol said.
“You haven’t really asked me anything,” Benny said. “It’s like the third grade here. We must all be happy that they went to heaven.”
“We’ll change the subject,” Cornelius said. “Tell us about the quarrels, the fights. Race, politics, whatever.”
“There wasn’t much, considering how long we were there. A few fights about thieving, a few raids, a little gang war, a little racial stuff, but that was unimportant.”
“Religion?”
Benny shook his head.
“Politics?”
“Some.” Ewald: rest in peace. “Not so much between progs and reactionaries either. They were segregated.”
“Then what was it?”
Benny indulged impish longings. “One: whether we should have gone in there or not. Two: whether it was better to give them what they wanted and take the food, the privileges, the amenities, or tell them to go to hell. Later on, three: whether our own government was selling us out. Four: whether Eisenhower was or was not less, as much, or more of a horse’s ass than Truman.”
“You take this lightly,” Cornelius said, icy.
“Yessir. But it’s the truth.”
“If he starts talking polite talk,” Gabol said, “it won’t help us. Some of these other fellows are lying all the time.”
“Well, I understand that,” Cornelius said. “I can understand that normal standards of respect would suffer erosion.”
“Hear hear,” Benny said easily. Respect! Erosion! A plague on all their houses, on every plump, prating, pious Pecksniff … paranoia. “It was the only entertainment we had.”
“Tell us more about your second point,” Alex said. “The collaborating.”
“Nothing you can’t guess. Once in a while a man would disappear suddenly, transferred or whatever, and we used to wonder if he’d gone over, or what. So somebody would say he damn well should have, and a fight would start. But anybody who said he damn well should have, could have done it himself, and didn’t, so he was only making noise. More entertainment.”
“You’re speaking now of your own squad. Platoon.”
“Yes. There were others. The broadcasts. The defectors. You know more about that than I do.”
“Yuscavage? Bewley?”
“Yuscavage just disappeared. Bewley was a Christian. And a Negro. Maybe that mattered.” He asked Gabol, “Any correlations?”
“Correlations? We haven’t even got the facts yet.”
“Oh,” Benny said. “Facts.”
Cornelius tacked: “Were there women in the camp?”
“A few. Clerks. Not for us. Couldn’t tell them from the men, hardly. Baggy pants, baggy jackets.”
“Were they used?”
“Used?”
“Bait?”
“Not that I know of.” Benny smiled wistfully but at the notion he glowed, prickled and throbbed. “They missed a trick, didn’t they. Puritan revolutionaries. Listen,” he said earnestly, “the Chinese are not savages. You understand? They are highly civilized and very angry and contemptuous of barbarians. They don’t use women that way. Women were slaves for centuries, but now some of their heroes are women.” And mine, he thought, perturbed and ashamed, a lecherous mutt, a man of the past. No room for him now with his antique gallantries and peremptory prick.
Gabol asked, “Would it have worked?”
Benny shrugged.
“You’re full of news,” Cornelius said.
“Hell,” Benny said, “this is just gossip. All I really know about is myself.”
“Then talk about yourself,” Alex said.
“Just a moment,” Cornelius said, and made a great play of leaning back and assuming magisterial airs. “You’re being deliberately evasive, we know that, and you’re doing your men a disservice. You had some freedom of motion. You saw a lot, including misconduct. You saw a friend killed. You’ve got to help now. You’ve got to level.”
“Oh, I know some things that happened,” Benny said, “but not their consequences. Not whether they were right or wrong. I won’t judge. Nobody has the right. And I didn’t see him killed. I saw him dead.”
“The right?” Cornelius was almost lofty. “Some of these men betrayed themselves, their army, their country. You may not want to believe it, but this is for their own good. For everybody’s.”
“Maybe their army and their country betrayed them. Where were you when we needed you?”
Cornelius scowled. “If we’d known how to prepare them, they’d have done better. Not died, turned on their own, defected. We’re not out to hang anybody.”
“Ah, come on,” Benny said.
“Benny,” Alex said gently, and Benny remembered that Cornelius was a major but Alex a lieutenant-colonel, the chain of command, remembered who was boss here, shadowy regions of cop and dossier. “Benny, some of these men made propaganda for the enemy. Somewhere there may be a line between that and firing on your own troops; if there is such
a line we want to find it. A lot of what happened was shameful. Some of it was treason.”
Benny groaned. “Propaganda. What a big word. And was it all lies? Do we incinerate white kids? You’re worried about good and bad,” he burst out bitterly, a spasm of twisted pride, “well, I’m worried about good and evil.”
“Do you think there was truth in it?”
“Yes,” Benny said more quietly. “A little. Possibility, if not truth. Hang me.”
“Nonsense,” Alex murmured. “We’re old friends. But the major’s right: you’re not much help.”
“All I know is me.”
“Then talk about you.”
“Peccavi.” Benny sighed. In this chrome-and-teak confessional. The lulling throb of engines. Portholes, blue circles. This morning bacon and eggs. Last night chicken. Salt, pepper, soft bread, hot coffee. Sheets, magazines, soap, pinups. “I never killed,” he began correctly. “I never informed. I cut no records, wrote no speeches, transmitted no Christmas greetings. Never stole from my own men,” he was in his stride now, “and not that I recall from the Chinese—though I would have. I assaulted no officers, but in moments of severe and understandable stress I walloped a couple of enlisted men. I practiced medicine on any human being in need, and once accepted food for myself that I could not distribute among the men.” He had his second wind now. “I cursed a lot, and indiscriminately. I quit once, but was restored to active duty by a few well-chosen words. I was falsely accused by my own men of high crimes and misdemeanors. I was flagrantly lacking in reverence, optimism and moral tone. I made no effort to escape. I declined to pray.”
“That’ll do,” Cornelius said.
“I begged,” Benny recited. “I humbled myself in the face of the enemy and begged turnips and aspirin. Pickled turnips.”
Wearily Cornelius said, “We’re only trying to avoid a repetition of this sort of collapse.”
“The Chinese told me,” Benny said, “that they were only trying to avoid a repetition of this sort of war.”
Cornelius snorted. “And you believed them.”
Benny laughed aloud.
“You never believed in this war.” Alex was matter-of-fact.
“Not for me. Wasn’t even supposed to be there.” After brief consideration he went on: “I’ll give you the same answer I once gave Ou-yang. I do not believe in killing anyone today for the sake of some maybe-if-we’re-lucky better world tomorrow. Because that automatically makes it a worse world tomorrow, right there. I can conceive of dying today for a better tomorrow. But not killing.”
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