“I got to talking to a captain in the Air Force,” Welch said eagerly. “A little, fat old paddle-footed captain that never got higher off the ground than the second floor of Com Z headquarters, and he told me that what he would admire to do more than anything else is take home a nice shiny German Luger pistol with him to show to the boys back in Pacific Grove, California.”
Silence fell on the tent, and Welch and Olson looked at Seeger.
“Sixty-five bucks for a Luger, these days,” Olson said, “is a very good figure.”
“They’ve been sellin’ for as low as thirty-five,” said Welch hesitantly. “I’ll bet,” he said to Seeger, “you could sell yours now and buy another one back when you got some dough, and make a clear twenty-five on the deal.”
Seeger didn’t say anything. He had killed the owner of the Luger, an enormous S.S. major, in Coblenz, behind some bales of paper in a warehouse, and the major had fired at Seeger three times with it, once nicking his helmet, before Seeger hit him in the face at twenty feet. Seeger had kept the Luger, a heavy, well-balanced gun, lugging it with him, hiding it at the bottom of his bedroll, oiling it three times a week, avoiding all opportunities of selling it, although he had once been offered a hundred dollars for it and several times eighty and ninety, while the war was still on, before German weapons became a glut on the market.
“Well,” said Welch, “there’s no hurry. I told the captain I’d see him tonight around eight o’clock in front of the Lion d’Or Hotel. You got five hours to make up your mind. Plenty of time.”
“Me,” said Olson, after a pause, “I won’t say anything.”
Seeger looked reflectively at his feet, and the two other men avoided looking at him.
Welch dug in his pocket. “I forgot,” he said. “I picked up a letter for you.” He handed it to Seeger.
“Thanks,” Seeger said. He opened it absently, thinking about the Luger.
“Me,” said Olson, “I won’t say a bloody word. I’m just going to lie here and think about that nice, fat Air Force captain.”
· · ·
Seeger grinned a little at him and went to the tent opening to read the letter in the light. The letter was from his father, and even from one glance at the handwriting, scrawly and hurried and spotted, so different from his father’s usual steady, handsome, professorial script, he knew that something was wrong.
“Dear Norman,” it read, “sometime in the future, you must forgive me for writing this letter. But I have been holding this in so long, and there is no one here I can talk to, and because of your brother’s condition I must pretend to be cheerful and optimistic all the time at home, both with him and your mother, who has never been the same since Leonard was killed. You’re the oldest now, and although I know we’ve never talked very seriously about anything before, you have been through a great deal by now, and I imagine you must have matured considerably, and you’ve seen so many different places and people. Norman, I need help. While the war was on and you were fighting, I kept this to myself. It wouldn’t have been fair to burden you with this. But now the war is over, and I no longer feel I can stand up under this alone. And you will have to face it sometime when you get home, if you haven’t faced it already, and perhaps we can help each other by facing it together.”
“I’m redeployable. It’s so enjoyable,” Olson was singing softly, on his cot. He fell silent after his burst of song.
Seeger blinked his eyes in the gray, wintry, rainy light, and went on reading his father’s letter, on the stiff white stationery with the university letterhead in polite engraving at the top of each page.
“I’ve been feeling this coming on for a long time,” the letter continued, “but it wasn’t until last Sunday morning that something happened to make me feel it in its full force. I don’t know how much you’ve guessed about the reason for Jacob’s discharge from the Army. It’s true he was pretty badly wounded in the leg at Metz, but I’ve asked around, and I know that men with worse wounds were returned to duty after hospitalization. Jacob got a medical discharge, but I don’t think it was for the shrapnel wound in his thigh. He is suffering now from what I suppose you call combat fatigue, and he is subject to fits of depression and hallucinations. Your mother and I thought that as time went by and the war and the Army receded, he would grow better. Instead, he is growing worse. Last Sunday morning when I came down into the living room from upstairs he was crouched in his old uniform, next to the window, peering out.”
“What the hell,” Olson was saying. “If we don’t get the sixty-five bucks we can always go to the Louvre. I understand the Mona Lisa is back.”
“I asked Jacob what he was doing,” the letter went on. “He didn’t turn around. ‘I’m observing,’ he said. ‘V-1s and V-2s. Buzz bombs and rockets. They’re coming in by the hundred.’ I tried to reason with him and he told me to crouch and save myself from flying glass. To humor him I got down on the floor beside him and tried to tell him the war was over, that we were in Ohio, 4,000 miles away from the nearest spot where bombs had fallen, that America had never been touched. He wouldn’t listen. ‘These’re the new rocket bombs,’ he said, ‘for the Jews.’ ”
“Did you ever hear of the Panthéon?” Olson asked loudly.
“No,” said Welch.
“It’s free.”
“I’ll go,” said Welch.
Seeger shook his head a little and blinked his eyes before he went back to the letter.
“After that,” his father went on, “Jacob seemed to forget about the bombs from time to time, but he kept saying that the mobs were coming up the street armed with bazookas and Browning automatic rifles. He mumbled incoherently a good deal of the time and kept walking back and forth saying, ‘What’s the situation? Do you know what the situation is?’ And once he told me he wasn’t worried about himself, he was a soldier and he expected to be killed, but he was worried about Mother and myself and Leonard and you. He seemed to forget that Leonard was dead. I tried to calm him and get him back to bed before your mother came down, but he refused and wanted to set out immediately to rejoin his division. It was all terribly disjointed, and at one time he took the ribbon he got for winning the Bronze Star and threw it in the fireplace, then he got down on his hands and knees and picked it out of the ashes and made me pin it on him again, and he kept repeating, ‘This is when they are coming for the Jews.’ ”
“The next war I’m in,” said Olson, “they don’t get me under the rank of colonel.”
It had stopped raining by now, and Seeger folded the unfinished letter and went outside. He walked slowly down to the end of the company street, and, facing out across the empty, soaked French fields, scarred and neglected by various armies, he stopped and opened the letter again.
“I don’t know what Jacob went through in the Army,” his father wrote, “that has done this to him. He never talks to me about the war and he refuses to go to a psychoanalyst, and from time to time he is his own bouncing, cheerful self, playing handball in the afternoons and going around with a large group of girls. But he has devoured all the concentration-camp reports, and I found him weeping when the newspapers reported that a hundred Jews were killed in Tripoli some time ago.
“The terrible thing is, Norman, that I find myself coming to believe that it is not neurotic for a Jew to behave like this today. Perhaps Jacob is the normal one, and I, going about my business, teaching economics in a quiet classroom, pretending to understand that the world is comprehensible and orderly, am really the mad one. I ask you once more to forgive me for writing you a letter like this, so different from any letter or any conversation I’ve ever had with you. But it is crowding me, too. I do not see rockets and bombs, but I see other things.
“Wherever you go these days—restaurants, hotels, clubs, trains—you seem to hear talk about the Jews, mean, hateful, murderous talk. Whatever page you turn to in the newspapers, you seem to find an article about Jews being killed somewhere on the face of the globe. And there are large, influential
newspapers and well-known columnists who each day are growing more and more outspoken and more popular. The day that Roosevelt died I heard a drunken man yelling outside a bar, ‘Finally they got the Jew out of the White House.’ And some of the people who heard him merely laughed, and nobody stopped him. And on V-J Day, in celebration, hoodlums in Los Angeles savagely beat a Jewish writer. It’s difficult to know what to do, whom to fight, where to look for allies.
“Three months ago, for example, I stopped my Thursday-night poker game, after playing with the same men for over ten years. John Reilly happened to say that the Jews got rich out of the war, and when I demanded an apology, he refused, and when I looked around at the faces of the men who had been my friends for so long, I could see they were not with me. And when I left the house, no one said good night to me. I know the poison was spreading from Germany before the war and during it, but I had not realized it had come so close.
“And in my economics class, I find myself idiotically hedging in my lectures. I discover that I am loath to praise any liberal writer or any liberal act, and find myself somehow annoyed and frightened to see an article of criticism of existing abuses signed by a Jewish name. And I hate to see Jewish names on important committees, and hate to read of Jews fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the cheated and hungry. Somehow, even in a country where my family has lived a hundred years, the enemy has won this subtle victory over me—he has made me disfranchise myself from honest causes by calling them foreign, Communist, using Jewish names connected with them as ammunition against them.
“Most hateful of all, I found myself looking for Jewish names in the casualty lists and secretly being glad when I saw them there, to prove that there, at least, among the dead and wounded, we belonged. Three times, thanks to you and your brothers, I found our name there, and, may God forgive me, at the expense of your blood and your brother’s life, through my tears, I felt that same twitch of satisfaction.
“When I read the newspapers and see another story that Jews are still being killed in Poland, or Jews are requesting that they be given back their homes in France or that they be allowed to enter some country where they will not be murdered, I am annoyed with them. I feel that they are boring the rest of the world with their problems, that they are making demands upon the rest of the world by being killed, that they are disturbing everyone by being hungry and asking for the return of their property. If we could all fall in through the crust of the earth and vanish in one hour, with our heroes and poets and prophets and martyrs, perhaps we would be doing the memory of the Jewish race a service.
“This is how I feel today, son. I need some help. You’ve been to the war, you’ve fought and killed men, you’ve seen the people of other countries. Maybe you understand things that I don’t understand. Maybe you see some hope somewhere. Help me. Your loving Father.”
· · ·
Seeger folded the letter slowly, not seeing what he was doing, because the tears were burning his eyes. He walked slowly and aimlessly across the dead, sodden grass of the empty field, away from the camp. He tried to wipe away his tears, because, with his eyes full and dark, he kept seeing his father and brother crouched in the old-fashioned living room in Ohio, and hearing his brother, dressed in the old, discarded uniform, saying, “These’re the new rocket bombs. For the Jews.”
He sighed, looking out over the bleak, wasted land. Now, he thought, now I have to think about it. He felt a slight, unreasonable twinge of anger at his father for presenting him with the necessity of thinking about it. The Army was good about serious problems. While you were fighting, you were too busy and frightened and weary to think about anything, and at other times you were relaxing, putting your brain on a shelf, postponing everything to that impossible time of clarity and beauty after the war. Well, now, here was the impossible, clear, beautiful time, and here was his father, demanding that he think. There are all sorts of Jews, he thought: there are the sort whose every waking moment is ridden by the knowledge of Jewishness; who see signs against the Jew in every smile on a streetcar, every whisper; who see pogroms in every newspaper article, threats in every change of the weather, scorn in every handshake, death behind each closed door. He had not been like that. He was young, he was big and healthy and easygoing, and people of all kinds had liked him all his life, in the Army and out. In America, especially, what was going on in Europe had been remote, unreal, unrelated to him. The chanting, bearded old men burning in the Nazi furnaces, and the dark-eyed women screaming prayers in Polish and Russian and German as they were pushed naked into the gas chambers, had seemed as shadowy and almost as unrelated to him, as he trotted out onto the stadium field for a football game, as they must have been to the men named O’Dwyer and Wickersham and Poole who played in the line beside him.
These tortured people had seemed more related to him in Europe. Again and again, in the towns that had been taken back from the Germans, gaunt, gray-faced men had stopped him humbly, looking searchingly at him, and had asked, peering at his long, lined, grimy face under the anonymous helmet, “Are you a Jew?” Sometimes they asked it in English, sometimes French, sometimes Yiddish. He didn’t know French or Yiddish, but he learned to recognize that question. He had never understood exactly why they asked the question, since they never demanded anything of him, rarely even could speak to him. Then, one day in Strasbourg, a little, bent old man and a small, shapeless woman had stopped him and asked, in English, if he was Jewish. “Yes,” he’d said, smiling at them. The two old people had smiled widely, like children. “Look,” the old man had said to his wife. “A young American soldier. A Jew. And so large and strong.” He had touched Seeger’s arm reverently with the tips of his fingers, then had touched the Garand Seeger was carrying. “And such a beautiful rifle.”
And there, for a moment, although he was not particularly sensitive, Seeger had got an inkling of why he had been stopped and questioned by so many before. Here, to these bent, exhausted old people, ravaged of their families, familiar with flight and death for so many years, was a symbol of continuing life. A large young man in the uniform of the liberator, blood, as they thought, of their blood, but not in hiding, not quivering in fear and helplessness, but striding secure and victorious down the street, armed and capable of inflicting terrible destruction on his enemies.
Seeger had kissed the old lady on the cheek and she had wept, and the old man had scolded her for it while shaking Seeger’s hand fervently and thankfully before saying goodbye.
Thinking back on it, he knew that it was silly to pretend that, even before his father’s letter, he had been like any other American soldier going through the war. When he had stood over the huge, dead S.S. major with the face blown in by his bullets in the warehouse in Coblenz, and taken the pistol from the dead hand, he had tasted a strange little extra flavor of triumph. How many Jews, he’d thought, has this man killed? How fitting it is that I’ve killed him. Neither Olson nor Welch, who were like his brothers, would have felt that in picking up the Luger, its barrel still hot from the last shots its owner had fired before dying. And he had resolved that he was going to make sure to take this gun back with him to America, and plug it and keep it on his desk at home, as a kind of vague, half-understood sign to himself that justice had once been done and he had been its instrument.
Maybe, he thought, maybe I’d better take it back with me, but not as a memento. Not plugged, but loaded. America by now was a strange country for him. He had been away a long time and he wasn’t sure what was waiting for him when he got home. If the mobs were coming down the street toward his house, he was not going to die singing and praying.
When he had been taking basic training, he’d heard a scrawny, clerkish soldier from Boston talking at the other end of the PX bar, over the watered beer. “The boys at the office,” the scratchy voice was saying, “gave me a party before I left. And they told me one thing. ‘Charlie,’ they said, ‘hold onto your bayonet. We’re going to be able to use it when you get back. On the Yids.’ ”
He hadn’t said anything then, because he’d felt it was neither possible nor desirable to fight against every random overheard voice raised against the Jews from one end of the world to the other. But again and again, at odd moments, lying on a barracks cot, or stretched out trying to sleep on the floor of a ruined French farmhouse, he had heard that voice, harsh, satisfied, heavy with hate and ignorance, saying above the beery grumble of apprentice soldiers at the bar, “Hold onto your bayonet.”
And the other stories. Jews collected stories of hatred and injustice and inklings of doom like a special, lunatic kind of miser. The story of the Navy officer, commander of a small vessel off the Aleutians, who in the officers’ wardroom had complained that he hated the Jews because it was the Jews who had demanded that the Germans be beaten first, and the forces in the Pacific had been starved in consequence. And when one of his junior officers, who had just come aboard, had objected and told the commander that he was a Jew, the commander had risen from the table and said, “Mister, the Constitution of the United States says I have to serve in the same Navy with Jews, but it doesn’t say I have to eat at the same table with them.” In the fogs and the cold, swelling Arctic seas off the Aleutians, in a small boat, subject to sudden, mortal attack at any moment.… And the million other stories. Jews, even the most normal and best adjusted, became living treasuries of them, scraps of malice and bloodthirstiness, clever and confusing and cunningly twisted so that every act by every Jew became suspect and blameworthy and hateful. Seeger had heard the stories and had made an almost conscious effort to forget them. Now, holding his father’s letter in his hand, he remembered them all.
He stared unseeingly out in front of him. Maybe, he thought, maybe it would’ve been better to have been killed in the war, like Leonard. Simpler. Leonard would never have to face a crowd coming for his mother and father. Leonard would not have to listen and collect these hideous, fascinating little stories that made of every Jew a stranger in any town, on any field, on the face of the earth. He had come so close to being killed so many times; it would have been so easy, so neat and final. Seeger shook his head. It was ridiculous to feel like that, and he was ashamed of himself for the weak moment. At the age of twenty-one, death was not an answer.
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 75