Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  “Good morning, good morning,” the citizens of the town said on their assaulted thoroughfares. “Isn’t it a lovely day? I hear they hit poor Mrs. Finchley’s fishmarket again. Well, now isn’t it nice to have your Albert back with you for the weekend? Isn’t it nice that the fog has gone? You can see France today. We are going to go up after dinner and look. Yes, I. heard from Sidney. Quite well, thank you, quite well, they took the last stitches out of the wound three weeks ago, and they are sending him to Calcutta on his convalescent leave … My Roberta has her American Sergeant down with her again this week-end and he brought a large can of that delicious American fruit salad and a whole carton of Chesterfields. A lovely boy, a lovely, lovely boy, and he says the permission ought to come through in about a month, now, you know how slow armies are, and they’re to be married here, if it’s before the invasion, I’ve already asked Reverend Redwine. Good morning, good morning, good morning …”

  Noah stopped in front of the church. It was a squat, stone building, with a heavy, square tower. It looked as though the God who was addressed within it was a forbidding Old Testament God, Who laid the Law down squarely and with no frills or subtleties to the long generations of Channel-side worshipers; a Coast and Cliff God, a coldwater and storm God, long on justice and rationed in mercy. There was an air-raid shelter on the lawn, and rolls of zig-zagging barbed-wire fences near the rectory at the back, and menacing-looking concrete pyramids of tank blocks at the corner of the lawn, to stop the Germans who had never climbed the cliff as they had promised to do in 1940.

  The service was already on, and they were singing a hymn to the accompaniment of an organ within. The soprano of women’s and children’s voices over the deeper rumble of the organ and the men, seemed surprisingly delicate and frivolous, coming from the angular, gray stone. On an impulse that he did not examine, Noah went in.

  The congregation was small, and Noah sat down on one of the empty oak benches in the rear of the church. Many of the windows were broken, some patched with cardboard, others merely glittering edges of glass in heavy lead frames. The wind off the Channel, freighted with salt, gusted in through the holes, ruffling veils and Bible pages, flicking at the long white hair of the minister, who stood rather dreamily in the pulpit, rocking softly on his heels with the hymn, looking, with his thin, parchment face, and his blowing white hair, like an ancient pianist or astronomer, too deep in fugues or stars to remember to go to the barber.

  Noah had never gone to synagogue. His father’s overblown, rhetorical intimacy with religious literature had clouded over the idea of God in Noah’s mind early in life. And he had never even spoken to a Chaplain, Jewish or Christian, in the Army. They had always seemed too bluff, too hearty, too soldierly and mundane, too much like any other Captain or Troop Commander, to offer spiritual comfort of any kind to Noah. He always felt that if he went to any one of them and cried, “Father, I have sinned,” or “Father, I am afraid of Hell,” they would have clapped him on the back, quoted an Army regulation, and sent him out to clean his rifle.

  Noah hardly listened to the service. He stood with the others, sat down with the others, listened, without bothering to follow the words, to the pulsating sweet minors of the hymns, and kept his eyes on the weary, delicate face of the minister, lit palely by the winter sea sun that drifted down through the gaping windows above his head.

  There was a final rustling among the congregation, a shifting of prayer books, a scuffling of feet, a hush-hush among the children, and the minister leaned reflectively on the pulpit, his large, bleached hands gripping the polished dark wood, and began his sermon.

  At first Noah did not follow the words. His mind seemed to be in the state in which he often listened to music, not following the melody exactly, or the unfolding development of the composer’s statements, but stirred by the abstract sound into a separate stream of images of the mind’s own making. The minister had a low, old man’s voice, gentle and intimate, lost for moments on end in the rush of wind from the broken windows. It was a voice without professional passion or exhortation, a voice that seemed to address God and his congregation out of a fresh reflection, with no echoes of past devotion in it, a voice free of the lumber of the old sermons and ceremony, a truly religious and unchurchly voice.

  “… love,” the old man was saying, “is the word of Christ and it admits of no divisions, no slyness of calculation, no diversity of interpretation. We are told to love our neighbor as ourself and our enemy as our brother, and the words and the meaning are as plain as an iron weight in the scale in which our actions are balanced.

  “We are Channel-dwellers, but we do not dwell on the banks of the Channel, we live among the sea moss and polished wrecks, among the waving salt ferns and bitter bones of the drowned at the dark bottom, and above us roll the deep torrents of man’s hatred of man and God. Our tide now comes all from the north and nourishes us on the polar juice of despair. We live among the guns and the brass sound of their speaking drowns out the soft voice of God, and only the wild crying of vengeance can be heard above their thunder. We see our cities crumble under the enemy’s bombs, and we mourn for our children struck at their early tasks by the enemy’s bullets, and we strike back, cruelly and wildly, from the seabed of our hatred, at his cities and his children. The enemy is more savage than the tiger, hungrier than the shark, crueler than the wolf; in honor and in defense of our moderate way of life, we stand up to him and combat him, but in doing so we out-tiger him, out-shark the shark, over-wolf the wolf. Will we at the end of all this then pretend to ourselves that the victory is ours? The thing we defend perishes from our victory as it would never perish from our defeat. Can we sit here, deep in our underwater hardness of heart, and think that our Sunday words swim up to God, after we have spent the week killing the innocent, dropping the bombs on the churches and the museums, burning the libraries, burying the children and the mothers in the jagged steel and broken concrete which is the special filth of our century?

  “Do not boast to me in your newspapers of the thousands of tons of bombs you have let loose at random on the unhappy land of Germany, because I will tell you that you have let loose those bombs on me, on your church, on yourselves and on your God. Tell me, rather, how you have wept for the single German soldier you have been forced to kill as he stood before you armed and dangerous, and I will say, you are my defender and the defender of my church and my England.

  “I see several soldiers among the congregation and I know they have a right to ask, What is love for a soldier? How does a soldier obey the word of Christ? How does a soldier love his enemy? I say it is this way—to kill sparingly and with a sense of sin and tragedy, sin that is yours equally with the sin of the man who falls at your hand. For was it not your indifference, your weakness of spirit, your greed, your deafness earlier in the day which armed him and drove him into the field to slay you? He struggled, he wept, he cried out to you, and you said, ‘I hear nothing. The voice does not carry across the water.’ Then, in his despair, he picked up the rifle, and, then, finally, you said, ‘His voice is clear. Now let us kill him.’

  “Do not,” the old man said, his voice mild and growing weaker, “do not feel righteous in your heart because of this late and bloody attention you pay him. Kill, if you must, because in our weakness and in our error, we have found no other road to peace, but kill remorsefully, kill with a sense of sorrow, kill with economy for the immortal souls who leave this life in battle, carry mercy in your cartridge cases, forgiveness in your knapsacks, kill without revenge, because vengeance is not yours but the Lord’s, kill, knowing that each life you spend makes your life that much the poorer.

  “Come up, children, up from the Channel-bed cast off from the wrecks below, struggle up from the sea-fern jungle, nourish yourselves on a wanner current. Though we strive against butchers, let us not wet our hands in butchery. Let us not make ghosts of our enemies, let us rather make of them our brothers. If we carry the sword of God in our hands, as we boast, let us remembe
r that it is a noble steel, let us not have it turn in our English hands into the slaughterer’s busy knife.”

  The old man sighed and shivered a little, his hair blowing in the wind from the windows. He gazed abstractedly over the heads of the congregation, as though he had forgotten, in his old man’s cluttered, almost dreaming way, that they were there. Then he smiled gently down at the half-empty pews.

  He led the congregation in a prayer and a closing hymn, but Noah hardly heard. The minister’s words had set up in him an excitement, a trembling tenderness toward the old man, toward the people around him, toward the soldiers standing beside their guns here and across the Channel, toward everything living and about to die. It filled him with a mysterious sense of hope. Logically, he did not agree with what the old man had said. Committed to killing, a target himself, knowing the confusion in design of such a war as he was fighting, he felt that it was almost impossible to be as strict and rigorous in attack as the old man desired, felt, too, that to attempt it would put too much of a burden on his own Army’s shoulders, give the enemy too easy an advantage at a time when such an advantage might one day cost him his own life. Still, the minister’s sermon filled him with hope. If, at such a time, in such a place, where the smoke from the last seven malicious shells had barely cleared, in a church already chipped and broken by war, among soldiers already wounded and civilians already bereft, if, at such a time, in such a place, there lived a man who could speak so passionately for brotherhood and mercy, and who could speak without fear of retribution or restriction, then, indeed, the world was not lost. Across the Channel, Noah knew, no man could raise his voice thus, and across the Channel were the men who were finally going to go down in defeat. The world was not going to fall into their hands, but into the hands of the people who sat nodding, a little sleepily, perhaps, a little dully, before their ancient preacher. So long, Noah thought, as such voices could be raised in the world, stern, illogical and loving, so long might his own child live in confidence and hope …

  “Amen,” said the minister.

  “Amen,” chorused the congregation.

  Noah stood up slowly and went out. He stopped at the door and waited. Outside, a child with a bow and arrow was aiming at one of the tank blocks. He fired and missed, retrieved the arrow and took careful aim again.

  The minister came to the door and stood there, shaking hands gravely with his parishioners as they filed past him to their rationed Sunday roasts. His hair blew more wildly than ever in the strong wind, and Noah saw that his hands shook badly. He looked very old and very frail.

  Noah waited until all the congregation had scattered. Then, just as the minister was turning to go in, Noah went up to him.

  “Sir,” he said softly, not knowing exactly what he wanted to say, not being able to put into words the shimmering confusion of gratitude and hope that was shaking him, “Sir, I … I wanted to wait and … I’m sorry I can’t say it better … thank you …”

  The old man looked soberly at him. His eyes were dark, pouched in waxen wrinkles, farsighted and tragic. He nodded his head slowly and shook Noah’s hand. His hand was dry and transparently fragile and Noah shook it very carefully.

  “Ah, good,” said the minister. “Thank you. It is to you young men that I speak, because it is you who have to make the decisions … Thank you.” He peered curiously at Noah’s uniform. “Ah …” he said politely, “Canadian?”

  Noah couldn’t help smiling. “No, Sir,” he said, “American.”

  “American. Ah,” said the old man, a little puzzled. “Ah, yes.” Noah had the feeling that the old man had not quite digested the fact that America was in the war, that he had been told and forgotten a dozen times, that all uniforms seemed like the same drab blur to him. “Ah, welcome, welcome,” the old man said warmly and vaguely. “Welcome, indeed. Ah,” he said, suddenly glancing up at the windows of the church behind him, “we must get some new windows, it must have been a terrible draught inside.”

  “No, Sir,” said Noah, and again he could not help smiling. “I didn’t notice it at all.”

  “Good of you,” said the minister, “good of you to say so. America?” Again that slight, polite note of puzzlement. “God bless you, Son, and return you safe to your home and your loved ones after the terrible days that lie ahead.” He started in. Then, suddenly, he turned and came back. He stared almost harshly at Noah. “Tell me truthfully, Son,” he said, and he sounded crisply alert, like a young, energetic man, “tell me, do you think I am a babbling old fool?” He gripped Noah’s arms with surprising steadiness and strength.

  “No, Sir,” said Noah softly. “I think you are a great man.”

  The old man stared piercingly at Noah, as though he was hunting down any trace of mockery or patronage for his age and his old-fashioned, outmoded opinions in Noah’s face. Then he seemed to be satisfied with what he saw. He took his hands away from Noah’s arms and tried to smile, but his face trembled, his eyes clouded over.

  “Son, Son,” he whispered … He shook his head. “An old man,” he said, “sometimes an old man hardly knows what world he is living in, whether he is speaking for the grave or the cradle … I look down into my congregation and I see faces that have been dead fifty years and for awhile I speak to them, until I remember. How old are you, Son?”

  “Twenty-three, Sir,” said Noah.

  “Twenty-three,” said the minister, reflectively, “twenty-three.” He put out his hand slowly and touched Noah’s cheek. “A living face. Living. I will pray for your safety.”

  “Thank you, Sir,” said Noah.

  “Sir,” said the minister. “Sir. I suppose they teach you that in the Army.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Noah.

  “How ugly,” the minister said. “Ah, God, how I hate armies.” He blinked, and seemed to forget for a moment whom he was talking to. He looked around vaguely. “Come again, some Sunday,” he said, his voice very tired, “perhaps we will have the windows back.” He turned abruptly and shuffled in through the dark hole of the doorway.

  When he got back to camp, Noah found a cable waiting for him. It had taken seven days to reach him. He opened it clumsily, feeling the blood jumping in his wrists and fingertips. A boy, he read, six and a half pounds, I feel magnificent, I love you, love you. Hope.

  He walked dazedly out of the orderly room.

  After supper, he distributed the cigars. He made a careful point of giving cigars to all the men whom he had fought back in Florida. Brailsford wasn’t there, because he had been transferred back in the States, but all the rest of the men took them with a surprised, uneasy shyness, and they shook his hand with dumb, warm congratulation, as though they, too, shared the wonder, so far away, in the fine English rain, among the assembled instruments of destruction, of the state of fatherhood.

  “A boy,” said Donnelly, the Golden-Gloves heavyweight, the flame-thrower, shaking Noah’s hand numb in his terrible, friendly fist, “a boy. What do you know about that? A boy! I hope the poor little son of a bitch never has to wear a uniform like his old man. Thank you,” soberly sniffing the gift, “thanks a lot. This is a great cigar.”

  But at the last moment Noah could not bring himself to offer cigars to Sergeant Rickett or Captain Colclough. He gave three to Burnecker, instead. He smoked one himself, the first of his life, and went to sleep slightly dizzy, his head wavering in smoky, thick visions.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE DOOR OPENED and Gretchen Hardenburg stood there in a gray wrap.

  “Yes,” she said, opening the door only part way and peering out. “What is it?”

  “Hello,” Christian said, smiling. “I just arrived in Berlin.”

  Gretchen opened the door a little more widely and looked closely at him. After a perceptible moment, during which she looked at his shoulder boards, a faint light of recognition crossed her face. “Ah,” she said. “The Sergeant. Welcome.” She opened the door, but before Christian could kiss her, she extended her hand. They shook hands. Her ha
nd was bony and seemed to be shaken by some slight, interior ague.

  “For a moment,” she apologized, “the light in the hall … And, you’ve changed.” She stepped back and looked at him critically. “You’ve lost so much weight. And your color …”

  “I had jaundice,” Christian said shortly. He hated his color himself, and didn’t like people to remark about it. This was not how he had imagined the first minute with Gretchen, caught at the door this way, in a sharp discussion of his unpleasant complexion. “Malaria and jaundice. That’s how I got to Berlin. Sick leave. I just got off the train. This is the first place I’ve been …”

  “How flattering,” Gretchen said automatically, pushing her hair, which was uncombed, back from her face. “Very nice of you to have come.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in?” Christian said. Begging again, he thought bitterly, as soon as I lay eyes on her.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Gretchen laughed shrilly. “I was napping, and I suppose I’m still dazed. Of course, of course, come in …”

  She closed the door behind him and put her hand familiarly on his arm, pressing it firmly. It may still be all right, Christian thought, as he went into the well-remembered room, maybe she was surprised in the beginning and now she’s getting over it.

  Once in the living room he made a move toward her, but she dipped away and lit a cigarette and sat down.

  “Sit down, sit down,” she said. “My pretty Sergeant. I often wondered what had happened to you.”