by Irwin Shaw
“Top floor,” said Christian, “the first door to the right of the stairway.”
“Good,” said von Schlain. He had a lordly, disdainful way of speaking, as though he felt that the Army was making poor use of his great talents, and he wished the world to understand that immediately. He gestured languidly to the four soldiers who had come in the truck, and went up the steps and rang the bell very loudly.
Standing on the curb, leaning against the car in which he had come from SS Headquarters, Christian could hear the bell wailing mournfully away in the concierge’s quarters deep in the sleeping fastnesses of the house. Von Schlain never took his finger off the bell, and the ringing persisted in a hollow, nervous crescendo. Christian lit a cigarette and pulled at it hard. They’ll hear it upstairs, he thought. That von Schlain is an idiot.
Finally there was a clanking at the door and Christian heard the irritable, sleepy voice of the concierge. Von Schlain barked at her in rapid French and the door swung open. Von Schlain and the four soldiers went in and the door closed behind them.
Christian paced slowly up and down alongside the car, puffing on the cigarette. Dawn was beginning to break and a pearly light, mingled with secret blues and silvery lavenders, was drifting across the streets and buildings of Paris. It was very beautiful and Christian hated it. Soon, that day perhaps, he would leave Paris, and probably never see it again in his whole life, and he was glad. Leave it to the French, to the supple, cheating, everlastingly victorious French … He was well rid of it. It looked like a fair meadow and it turned out to be slippery swampland. It seemed full of beauty and promise and it turned out to be a sordid trap, well-baited and fatal to a man’s dignity and honor. Deceptively soft, it blunted all weapons that attacked it. Deceptively gay, it lured its conquerors into a bottomless melancholy. Long ago, the Medical Corps had been right. The cynical men of science had supplied the Army with the only proper equipment for the conquest of Paris … three tubes of Salvarsan …
The door was flung open and Brandt, with a civilian coat thrown over pajamas, came out between two soldiers. Right after him came Françoise and Simone, in robes and slippers. Simone was sobbing, in a childish, strangled, tearing convulsion, but Françoise looked out at the soldiers with calm derision.
Christian stared at Brandt, who looked painfully back at him in the half-light. There was no expression on Brandt’s face, snatched out of its deep, secure sleep, only dull exhaustion. Christian hated the lined, over-delicate, compromising, losing face. Why, he thought with surprise, he doesn’t even look like a German!
“That’s the man,” Christian said to von Schlain, “and those’re the two women.”
The soldiers pushed Brandt up into the truck, and rather gently lifted Simone, now lost in a tangled wet marsh of tears. Helplessly, Simone, once she was in the truck, stretched out her hand toward Brandt. Christian despised Brandt for the soft, tragic way in which, without shame, in front of the comrades he would have deserted, he put out his hand to take Simone’s and carry it up to his cheek.
Françoise refused to allow the soldiers to help her climb into the truck. She stared for a moment with harsh intensity at Christian, then shook her head gently in a gesture of numb bewilderment, and climbed heavily up by herself.
There, Christian thought, watching her, there, you see, it is not all over yet. Even now, there are still some victories to be won—
The truck started down the street. Christian got into the small car with Lieutenant von Schlain and followed it through the lavender streets of dawning Paris toward SS Headquarters.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THERE WAS something wrong about the town. There were no flags hanging out of the windows, as there had been in all the towns along the way from Coutances. There were no improvised signs welcoming the Americans, and two Frenchmen who saw the jeep ducked into houses when Michael called to them.
“Stop the jeep,” Michael said to Stellevato. “There’s something fishy here.”
They were on the outskirts of the town, at a wide intersection of roads. The roads, stretching bleakly away in the gray morning, were cold and empty. There was no movement to be seen anywhere, just the shuttered windows of the stone houses, and the vacant roads with nothing stirring on them. After the crowded month, in which almost every road in France had seemed to be jammed with tanks and half-tracks and gasoline trucks and artillery pieces and marching men, in which every town had been crowded with cheering Frenchmen and women in their brightest clothes, waving flags hidden through all the years of the Occupation, and singing the Marseillaise, there was something threatening and baleful about the dead silence around them.
“What’s the matter, Bo?” Keane said from the back seat. “Did we get on the wrong train?”
“I don’t know,” Michael said, annoyed at Keane. Pavone had told him to pick up Keane three days ago and bring him along, and Keane had spent the three days in mournful chatter about how timidly the war was being run, and how his wife kept writing him that the money she was getting was not enough to keep a family alive with prices going up the way they were back home. By now, the prices of chopped meat, butter, bread and children’s shoes were indelibly engraved in Michael’s brain, thanks to Keane. In 1970, if somebody asks me how much hamburger cost in the summer of 1944, Michael thought irritably, I’ll answer, sixty-five cents a pound, without thinking for a second.
He got out the map and opened it on his knees. Behind him he heard Keane snapping the safety off his carbine. A cowboy, Michael thought, staring at the map, a brainless, bloodthirsty cowboy …
Stellevato, slouched in the front seat beside him, smoking a cigarette, his helmet tipped far back on his head, said, “Do you know what I could use now? One bottle of wine and one French dame.” Stellevato was either too young, too brave, or too stupid to be affected by the autumnal, dangerous morning, and by the unusual, unliberated aspect of the buildings in front of them.
“This is the place, all right,” Michael said, “but it certainly doesn’t look good to me.” Four days before, Pavone had sent him back to Twelfth Army Group with a bagful of reports on a dozen towns they had inspected, reports on the public-utility situations, the food reserves, the number of denunciations of the incumbent civil officials, that had been made by the local people. After that, he had ordered Michael to report back to him at the Infantry Division’s Headquarters, but the G3 there had told Michael that Pavone had left the day before, leaving instructions for Michael to meet him in this town the next morning. A combined armored and mechanized task force was to have reached the town by ten hundred hours and Pavone was to be with them.
It was eleven o’clock now, and aside from a small sign that read “Water Point,” in English, with an arrow, there was no hint that any Americans had been here since 1919.
“Come on, Bo,” Keane said. “What’re we waiting for? I want to see Paris.”
“We don’t have Paris,” Michael said, putting the map away, and trying to make some sense out of the empty streets before him.
“I heard over the BBC this morning,” Keane said, “that the Germans’ve asked for an armistice in Paris.”
“Well, they haven’t asked me,” Michael said, sorry that Pavone wasn’t with him at this moment to take on the burden of responsibility. The last three days had been pleasant, riding around the celebrating French countryside as commander of his own movements, with no one to order him about But there was no celebrating going on here this morning, that was certain, and he had an uneasy sensation that if he guessed wrong in the next fifteen minutes, they might all be dead by noon.
“The hell with it.” Michael nudged Stellevato. “Let’s see what’s happening at the Water Point.”
Stellevato started the jeep and they went slowly down a side street toward a bridge they could see in the distance, crossing a small stream. There was another sign there, and a big canvas tank and pumping apparatus. For a moment, Michael thought that the Water Point, along with the rest of the town, was deserted, b
ut he saw a helmet sticking cautiously up from a foxhole covered with branches.
“We heard the motor,” said the soldier under the helmet. He was pale and weary-eyed, young and, as far as Michael could tell, frightened. Another soldier stood up next to him and came over to the jeep.
“What’s going on here?” Michael asked.
“You tell us,” said the first soldier.
“Did a task force go through here at ten o’clock this morning?”
“Nothing’s been through here,” the second soldier volunteered. He was a pudgy little man, nearly forty, who needed a shave badly, and he spoke with a hint of a Swedish singsong in his voice. “Fourth Armored Headquarters went through last night and dropped us off here and turned south. Since then it’s been mighty lonesome. There was some shooting near dawn from the middle of the town …”
“What was it?” Michael asked.
“Don’t ask me, Brother,” said the pudgy man. “They put me here to pump water out of this creek, not conduct private investigations. These woods’re full of Krauts and they shoot the Frogs and the Frogs shoot them. Me, I’m waiting for reinforcements.”
“Let’s go into the middle of the town and look around,” Keane said eagerly.
“Will you’ shut up?” Michael swung around and spoke as sharply as he could to Keane. Keane, behind his thick glasses, grinned unhappily.
“Me and my buddy here,” the pudgy soldier said, “have been debating whether maybe we ought to pull out altogether. We ain’t doing anybody any good sitting here like ducks on a pond. A Frog came by this morning, he spoke some English, and he said there was 800 Krauts with three tanks on the other side of town, and they was going to come in here and take the town some time this morning.”
“Happy days,” Michael said. That was why there had been no flags.
“Eight hundred Krauts,” Stellevato said. “Let’s go home.”
“Do you think it’s safe here?” the pale-faced young soldier asked Michael.
“Just like your own living room,” said Michael. “How the hell would I know?”
“I was just asking a question,” the young soldier said reproachfully.
“I don’t like it,” said the man with the Swedish accent, peering down the street. “I don’t like it one bit. They got no right leaving us like this, all by ourselves, sitting next to this goddamn creek.”
“Nikki,” Michael said to Stellevato. “Turn the jeep around and leave it on the road, so we can get away from here fast if we have to.”
“What’s the matter?” Keane asked, leaning toward Michael. “Got your wind up?”
“Listen, General Patton,” Michael said, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice, “when we need a hero, we’ll call on you. Nikki, turn that jeep around.”
“I wish I was home,” Stellevato said. But he got into the jeep and turned it around. He unhooked his tommygun from under the windshield and blew vaguely on it. It was coated with dust.
“What’re we going to do, Bo?” Keane asked. His big blotched hands moved eagerly on his carbine. Michael looked at him with distaste. Is it possible, Michael thought, that his brother won the Congressional Medal of Honor out of sheer stupidity?
“We’re going to sit ourselves down here for awhile,” Michael said, “and wait.”
“For what?” Keane demanded.
“For Colonel Pavone.”
“What if he doesn’t show up?” Keane persisted.
“Then we’ll make another decision. This is a lucky day for me,” Michael said crisply. “I bet I’m good for three decisions before sunset.”
“I think we ought to say the hell with Pavone,” said Keane, “and move right in on Paris. The BBC says …”
“I know what the BBC says,” Michael said, “and I know what you say, and I say we’re going to sit here and wait.”
He walked away from Keane and sat down on the grass, leaning against a low stone wall that ran alongside the stream. The two Armored Division soldiers looked at him doubtfully, then went back into their foxhole, pulling the branches cautiously over their heads. Stellevato leaned his tommygun against the wall and lay down and went to sleep. He lay straight out, with his hands over his eyes. He looked dead.
Keane sat on a stone and took out a pad of paper and a pencil and began writing a letter to his wife. He sent his wife a detailed account of everything he did, including the most horrible descriptions of the dead and wounded. “I want her to see what the world is going through,” he had said soberly. “If she understands what we are going through, it may improve her outlook on life.”
Michael stared past the helmeted head of the man who, at this distance, was attempting to improve the outlook on life of his frigid wife three thousand miles away. On the other side of Keane, the unscarred old walls of the town, and the shuttered, unbannered windows, held their enigmatic secret.
Michael closed his eyes. Someone ought to write me a letter, he thought, to make me understand what I am going through. The last month had been so crowded with experience, of such a wildly diversified kind, that he felt he would need years to sift it, classify it, search out its meaning. Somewhere, he felt, in the confusion of strafing and capturing and bumping in dusty convoys through the hot French summer, somewhere in the waving of hands and girls’ kisses and sniping and burning, there was a significant and lasting meaning. Out of this month of jubilation, upheaval and death, a man, he felt, should have been able to emerge with a key, a key to wars and oppression, a key to unlock the meaning of Europe and America.
Ever since Pavone had so savagely put him in his place that night on sentry duty back in Normandy, Michael had almost given up any hope of being useful in the war. Now, he felt, in lieu of that, I should at least understand it …
But nothing fell into generalities in his brain, he could not say, “Americans are thus and so and therefore they are winning,” or “It is the nature of the French to behave in this fashion,” or “What is wrong with the Germans is this particular misconception …”
All the violence, all the shouting, ran together in his brain, in a turbulent, confused, many-threaded drama, a drama which endlessly revolved through his mind, kept him from sleeping, even in these days of heat and exhaustion, a drama which he never could shake, even at a time like this, when his life perhaps was silently being jeopardized in this quiet, gray, lifeless village on the road to Paris.
The hush-hush of the water going by between its banks mingled with the soft, busy scratching of Keane’s pencil. With his eyes closed, leaning against the stone wall, drowsy from all the lost hours of sleep, but not surrendering to sleep, Michael sifted through the furious events of the month just passed …
The names … The names of the sunlit towns, like a paragraph out of Proust: Marigny, Coutances, St. Jean le Thomas, Avranches, Pontorson, stretching away into the seaside summer in the magic country where Normandy and Brittany blended in a silvery green haze of pleasure and legend. What would the ailing Frenchman in the cork-lined room have said about his beloved Maritime Provinces during the bright and deadly August of 1944? What observations would he have made, in his shimmering, tidal sentences, about the changes in architecture of the 105s and the dive-bombers had brought about in the fourteenth-century churches; what would have been his reaction to the dead horses in the ditches under the hawthorn bushes and the burned-out tanks with their curious smell of metal and flesh; what elegant, subtle and despairing things would M. de Charlus and Mme. de Guermantes have had to say about the new travelers on the old roads past Mont St. Michel?
“I have been walking for five days now,” the young Middle Western voice had said next to the jeep, “and I ain’t fired a shot yet. But don’t get me wrong, I ain’t complaining. Hell, I’ll walk them to death, if that’s what they want …”
And the sour-faced aging Captain in Chartres, leaning against the side of a Sherman tank across the square from the cathedral, saying, “I don’t see what people’ve been raving all these years about this countr
y for. Jesus Christ on the mountain, there ain’t nothing here we can’t make better in California …”
And the chocolate-colored dwarf with a red fez dancing among the Engineers with minesweepers, at a crossroads, entertaining the waiting tankmen, who cheered him on and got him drunk with Calvados they had taken as gifts from the people along the road that morning.
And the two drunken old men, weaving down the shattered street, with little bouquets of pansies and geraniums in their hands, who had given the bouquets to Pavone and Michael, and had saluted and welcomed the American Army to their village, although they would like to ask one question: Why it was on July fourth, with not a single German in the town, the American Army had seen fit to come over and bomb the place to rubble in thirty minutes?
And the German Lieutenant in the First Division prisoner-of-war cage who, in exchange for a clean pair of socks, had pointed out on the map the exact location of his battery of 88’s, to the Jewish refugee from Dresden who was now a Sergeant in the MP’s.
And the grave French farmer who had worked all one morning weaving an enormous “Welcome USA” in roses in his hedge along the road to cheer the soldiers on their way; and the other farmers and their women who had covered a dead American along the road with banks of flowers from their gardens, roses, phlox, peonies, iris, making death on that summer morning seem for a moment gay and charming and touching as the infantry walked past, circling gently around the bright mound of blossoms.
And the thousands of German prisoners and the terrible feeling that you got looking at their faces that there was nothing there to indicate that these were the people who had torn Europe from its roots, murdered thirty million people, burned populations in gas-ovens, hanged and crushed and tortured through three thousand miles of agony. There was nothing in their faces but weariness and fear, and you knew, being honest with yourself, that if they were dressed in OD’s, they would all look as though they came from Cincinnati.