by Irwin Shaw
Slowly, conscious of the hundred accusing, deprived eyes upon him, Noah moved out to the middle of the aisle, where the book was lying. He bent over and picked it up and absently smoothed the pages. Then he walked over to the window that had been the cause of all the trouble.
“Saturday night,” he heard in tones of bitter anguish from the other side of the room. “Confined on Saturday night! I got a date with a waitress that is on the verge and her husband arrives tomorrow morning! I feel like killing somebody!”
Noah looked at the window. It sparkled colorlessly, with the flat; dusty, sunbitten land behind it. On the lower pane in the. corner a moth had somehow managed to fling itself against the glass and had died there in a small spatter of yellow goo. Reflectively, Noah lifted the moth off.
He heard steps behind him above the rising murmur of voices, but he continued standing there, holding the suicidal moth, feeling the dusty, unpleasant texture of the shattered wings, looking out over the glaring dust and the distant, weary green of the pinewoods on the other side of the camp.
“All right, Jew-boy.” It was Rickett’s voice behind him. “You’ve finally done it.”
Noah still did not turn around. Outside the windows he saw a group of three soldiers running, running toward the gate, running with the precious passes in their pockets, running to the waiting buses, the bars in town, the complaisant girls, the thirty-hour relief from the Army until Monday morning.
“About face, Soldier,” Rickett said. The other men fell silent, and Noah knew that everyone in the room was looking at him. Slowly Noah turned away from the window and faced Rickett. Rickett was a tall, thickly built man with light-green eyes and a narrow colorless mouth. The teeth in the center of his mouth were missing, evidence of some forgotten brawl long ago, and it gave a severe twist to the Sergeant’s almost lifeless mouth and played a curious, irregular lisping trick to his flat Texas drawl.
“Now, Tholdier,” Rickett said, standing with his arms stretching from one bunk to another in a lounging, threatening position, “now Ah’m gawnta take you unduh mah puhsunal wing. Boyth.” He raised his voice for the benefit of the listening men, although he continued to stare, with a sunken, harsh grin, at Noah. “Boyth, Ah promise you, this ith the last tahm little Ikie heah is goin’ tuh interfeah with this ba’acks’ Saturday nights. That’s a solemn promith, Ah thweath t’ Gahd. Thith ithn’t a shitty thynagogue on the East Side, Ikie, thith ith a ba’ack in the Ahmy of the United Thtates of Americuh, and it hath t’ be kep’ shahnin’ clean, white-man clean, Ikie, white-man clean.”
Noah stared fixedly and incredulously at the tall, almost lip-less man, slouching in front of him, between the two bunks. The Sergeant had just been assigned to their company the week before, and had seemed to pay no attention to him until now. And in all Noah’s months in the Army, his Jewishness had never before been mentioned by anyone. Noah looked dazedly at the men about him, but they remained silent, staring at him accusingly.
“Lethun one,” Rickett said, in the lisp that at other times you could joke about, “begins raht now, promptly and immediutly. Ikie, get into yo’ fatigues and fetch yo’self a bucket. You are gahnta wash evry window in this gahdam ba’ack, and you’re gahnta wash them lihk a white, churchgoin’ Christian, t’ mah thatishfaction. Get into yo’ fatigues promptly and immediutly, Ikie, and start workin’. And ef these here windows ain’t shahnin’ like a whore’s belly on Christmath Eve when Ah come around to inthpect them, bah Gahd, Ah promith you you’ll regret it.”
Rickett turned languidly and walked slowly out of the barracks. Noah went over to his bunk and started taking off his tie. He had the feeling that every man in the barracks was watching him, harshly and unforgivingly, as he changed into his fatigues.
Only the new man, Whitacre, was not watching him, and he was painfully making up his bunk, which Rickett had torn down at the Captain’s orders.
Just before dusk, Rickett came around and inspected the windows.
“All raht, Ikie,” he said finally. “Ah’m gahn t’ be lenient with yuh, this one tahm. Ah accept the windows. But, remembuh, Ah got mah eye on yuh. Ah’ll tell yuh, heah an’ now, Ah ain’t got no use for Niggerth, Jewth, Mexicans or Chinamen, an’ from now on you’re goin’ to have a powerful tough row to hoe in this here company. Now get your ass inside and keep it there. An’ while you’re at it, you better burn those bookth, like the Captain sayth. Ah don’t mind tellin’ you at thith moment that you ain’t too terrible popular with the Captain, either, and. if he seeth those bookth again, Ah wouldn’t answer fo’ yo’ lahf. Move, Ikie. Ah’m tahd of lookin’ at your ugly face.”
Noah walked slowly up the barracks steps and went through the door, leaving the twilight behind him. Inside, men were sleeping, and there was a poker game in progress on two pulled-together footlockers in the center of the room. There was a smell of alcohol near the door, and Riker, the man who slept nearest the door, had a wide, slightly drunken grin on his face.
Donnelly, who was lying in his underwear on his bunk, opened one eye. “Ackerman,” he said loudly, “I don’t mind your killing Christ, but I’ll never forgive you for not washing that stinking window.” Then he closed his eye.
Noah smiled a little. It’s a joke, he thought, a rough joke, but still a joke. And if they take it as something funny, it won’t be too bad. But the man in the next bed, a long thin farmer from South Carolina, who was sitting up with his head in his hands, said quickly, with an air of being very reasonable, “You people got us into the war. Now why can’t you behave yourselves like human beings?” and Noah realized that it wasn’t a joke at all.
He walked deliberately toward his bunk, keeping his eyes down, avoiding looking at the other men, but sensing that they were all looking at him. Even the poker players stopped their game when he passed them and sat down on his bunk. Even Whitacre, the new man, who looked like quite a decent fellow, and who had, after all, suffered that day at the hands of Authority, too, sat on his re-made bed, and stared with a hint of anger at him.
Fantastic, Noah thought. This will pass, this will pass …
He took out the olive-colored cardboard box in which he kept his writing paper. He sat on his bunk and began to write a letter to Hope.
“Dearest,” he wrote, “I have just finished doing my house-work. I have polished nine hundred and sixty windows as lovingly as a jeweler shining a fifty-carat diamond for a bootlegger’s girl. I don’t know how I would measure in a battle against a German infantryman or a Japanese Marine, but I will match my windows against their picked troops any day …”
“It’s not the Jew’s fault,” said a clear voice from the poker game, “they’re just smarter than everyone else. That’s why so few of them are in the Army. And that’s why they’re making all the money. I don’t blame them. If I was that smart I wouldn’t be here neither. I’d be sitting in a hotel suite in Washington watching the money roll in.”
There was silence then, and Noah could tell that all the players were looking at him, but he did not look up from his letter.
“We also march,” Noah wrote slowly. “We march uphill and downhill, and we march during the day and during the night. I think the Army is divided into two parts. The fighting Army and the marching and window-washing Army, and we happen to be assigned to the second part. I have developed the springiest arches ever to appear in the Ackerman family.”
“The Jews have large investments in France and Germany,” another voice said from the poker game. “They run all the banks and whorehouses in Berlin and Paris, and Roosevelt decided we had to go protect their money. So he declared war.” The voice was loud and artificial, and aimed like a weapon at Noah’s head, but he refused to look up.
“I read in the papers,” Noah wrote, “that this is a war of machines, but the only machine I have come across so far is a mop-wringer …”
“They have an international committee,” the voice went on. “It meets in Poland, in a town called Warsaw, and they send out orders all over t
he world from there: Buy this, sell this, fight this country, fight that country. Twenty old rabbis with beards …”
“Ackerman,” another voice said, “did you hear that?”
Noah finally looked across the bunks at the poker players. They were twisted around, facing him, their faces pulled by grins, their eyes marble-like and derisive.
“No,” said Noah, “I didn’t hear anything.”
“Why don’t you join us?” Silichner said with elaborate politeness. “It’s a friendly little game and we’re involved in an interesting discussion.”
“No, thank you,” Noah said. “I’m busy.”
“What we’d like to know,” said Silichner, who was from Milwaukee and had a trace of a German accent in his speech, as though he had spoken it as a child and never fully recovered from it, “is how you happened to be drafted. What happened—weren’t there any fellow-members of the lodge on the board?”
Noah looked down at the paper in his hand. It isn’t shaking, he thought, looking at it in surprise, it’s as steady as can be.
“I actually heard,” another voice said, “of a Jew who volunteered.”
“No,” said Silichner, wonderingly.
“I swear to God. They stuffed him and put him in the Museum.”
The other poker players laughed loudly, in artificial rehearsed amusement.
“I feel sorry for Ackerman,” Silichner said. “I actually do. Think of all the money he could be making selling black-market tires and gasoline if he wasn’t in the infantry.”
“I don’t think,” Noah wrote with a steady hand to his wife far away in the North, “that I have told you about the new Sergeant we got last week. He has no teeth and he lisps and he sounds like a debutante at a Junior League meeting when he …”
“Ackerman!”
Noah looked up. A Corporal from another barracks was standing beside his bunk. “You’re wanted in the orderly room. Right away.”
Very deliberately, Noah put the letter he was writing back in the olive-colored box and tucked the box away in his foot-locker. He was conscious of the other men watching him closely, measuring his every move. As he walked past them, keeping himself from hurrying, Silichner said, “They’re going to give him a medal. The Delancey Street Cross. For eating a herring a day for six months.”
Again there were the rehearsed, artificial volleys of laughter.
I will have to try to handle this, Noah thought as he went out the door into the blue twilight that had settled over the camp. Somehow, somehow …
The air was good after the cramped, heavy smell of the barracks, and the wide silence of the deserted streets between the low buildings was sweet to the ear after the grating voices inside. Probably, Noah thought, as he walked slowly alongside the buildings, probably they are going to give me some new hell in the orderly room. But even so he was pleased at the momentary peace and the momentary truce with the Army and the world around him.
Then he heard a quick scurry of footsteps from behind a corner of the building he was passing, and before he could turn around he felt his arms pinned powerfully from behind.
“All right, Jew-boy,” whispered a voice he almost recognized, “this is dose number one.”
Noah jerked his head to one side and the blow glanced off his ear. But his ear felt numb and he couldn’t feel the side of his face. They’re using a club, he thought wonderingly as he tried to twist away, why do they have to use a club? Then there was another blow and he began to fall.
When he opened his eyes, it was dark and he was lying on the sandy grass between two barracks. His face was collapsed and wet. It took him five minutes to drag himself over to the wall of the building and pull himself up along its side to a sitting position.
Michael was thinking of beer. He walked deliberately behind Ackerman, in the dusty heat, thinking of beer in glasses, beer in schooners, beer in bottles, kegs, pewter mugs, tin cans, crystal goblets. He thought of ale, porter, stout, then returned to thinking of beer. He thought of the places he had drunk beer in his time. The round bar on Sixth Avenue where the Regular Army Colonels in mufti used to stop off on the way uptown from Governor’s Island, where they served beer in glasses that tapered down to narrow points at the bottom and where the bartender always iced the glass before drawing the foaming stuff out of the polished spigots. The fancy restaurant in Hollywood with prints of the French Impressionists behind the bar, where they served it in frosted mugs and charged seventy-five cents a bottle. His own living room, late at night, reading the next morning’s paper in the quiet pool of light from the lamp, as he stretched, in slippers, in the soft corduroy chair before going to bed. At baseball games at the Polo Grounds in the warm, hazy summer afternoons, where they poured the beer into paper cups so that you couldn’t throw the bottles at the umpires.
Michael marched steadily. He was tired and ferociously thirsty. His hands were numb and swollen, as they always were by the fifth mile of any hike, but he did not feel too bad. He heard Ackerman’s harsh, grunting breath, and saw the way the boy rolled brokenly from side to side as he climbed the gentle slope of the road.
He felt sorry for Ackerman. Ackerman had obviously always been a frail boy, and the marches and problems and fatigues had worn the flesh off his bones, so that he now looked like a stripped-down version of a soldier, reedy and breakable. Michael felt a little guilty as he stared fixedly at the heaving, bent back. The long months of training had thinned Michael down, too, but with an athlete’s leanness, leaving his legs steel-like and powerful, his body hard and resilient. It seemed unjust that in the same column, just in front of him, there was a man whose every step was suffering, while he felt so comparatively fit. Also, there had been the sickening hazing that Ackerman had been submitted to in the last two weeks. The constant ill-tempered jokes, the mock political discussions within Ackerman’s hearing, in which men had said loudly. “Hitler is probably wrong most of the time, but you’ve got to hand it to him, he knows what to do about the Jews …”
Michael had tried once or twice to interrupt with a word of defense, but because he was new in the company, and came from New York and most of the men were Southerners, they ignored him and continued with their cruel game.
There was another Jew in the company, a huge man by the name of Fein, who wasn’t bothered at all. He wasn’t popular, but he wasn’t annoyed. Perhaps his size had something to do with it. And he was good-natured and dangerous-looking. He had large, knotty hands and seemed to take everything easily and without thought. It would be hard to get Fein to take offense at anything, or even realize that he was being offended, so there would be little pleasure in baiting him. And if he did take offense he probably would do a tremendous amount of damage. So he was quietly left in peace by the men who bedeviled Ackerman. The Army, Michael thought.
Perhaps he’d been wrong to tell the man who had interviewed him at Fort Dix that he wanted to go into the infantry. Romantic. There was nothing romantic about it once you got into it. Sore feet, ignorant men, drunkenness, “Ah’m goin’ to teach you how to pick up yo’ rahfle and faght fo’ yo’ lahf …”
“I think I can put you into Special Service,” the interviewer had said, “with your qualifications …” That would probably have meant a job in New York in an office all during the war. And Michael’s self-consciously noble reply. “Not for me. I’m not in this Army to sit at a desk.” What was he in the Army for? To cross the state of Florida on foot? To re-make beds that an ex-undertaker’s assistant found not made to his liking? To listen to a Jew being tortured? He probably would have been much more useful hiring chorus girls for the USO, would have served his country better in Shubert Alley than here on this hot, senseless road. But he had to make the gesture. A gesture wore out so quickly in any army.
The Army. If you had to put what you thought of it in a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph … what would you say? It would be impossible. The Army was composed of ten million splinters. Splinters in motion, splinters that never coalesced, that neve
r went in the same direction. The Army was the Chaplain who gave you the talk after they showed you the sex hygiene picture. First the horrible closeups of the riddled penis, then the man of God in his Captain’s uniform, in front of the blank screen where lately the shabby whores and the vile flesh had been shown. “Men, the Army has to be practical …” The chanting Baptist voice, in the sweltering plank auditorium. “The Army says, ‘Men will expose themselves. Therefore we show you this picture and show you how a prophylaxis station works. But I am here to say that God is better than a prophylaxis, religion is healthier than lust …”
One splinter. Another splinter. The ex-high-school teacher from Hartford with the sallow face and the wild eyes, as though he feared assassination each night. He had whispered to Michael, “I’m going to tell you the truth about myself. I’m a Conscientious Objector. I don’t believe in war. I refuse to kill my fellowman. So they put me on KP. I’ve been on KP for thirty-six days in a row. I’ve lost twenty-eight pounds and I’m still losing, but they are not going to force me to kill my fellowman.”
The Army. The Regular at Fort Dix who had been in the Army thirteen years, playing on Army baseball and football teams in time of peace. Jock-strap soldiers, they called them. A big, tough-looking man with a round belly from beer drunk at Cavite and Panama City and Fort Riley, Kansas. Suddenly, he had fallen into disfavor in the orderly room and had been transferred out of the Permanent Party and had been put on orders to a regiment. The truck had driven up and he had put his two barracks bags on it, and then he had started to scream. He had fallen to the ground and wept and screamed and frothed at the mouth, because it was not a football game he was going to today, but a war. The Top Sergeant, a two-hundred-and-fiftypound Irishman who had been in the Army since the last war, had come out of the orderly room and looked at him with shame and disgust. He kicked him in the head to quiet him, and had two men lift him and throw him, still twitching and weeping, into the back of the truck. The Sergeant then turned to the recruits who were silently watching and had said, “That man is a disgrace to the Regular Army. He is not typical. Not at all typical. Apologize for him. Get the hell out of here!”