by Irwin Shaw
A drink, he thought, a drink will give me a breathing spell, a drink will keep me going.
He walked stiffly through the open door of a café, wheeling the bicycle at his side. There were some soldiers sitting in the back of the room and they looked at him briefly and without surprise, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for German Sergeants to enter cafés wheeling bicycles, or leading horses, or at the controls of armored cars. Christian carefully put the bicycle against the wall and placed a chair against the back wheel. Then he sat down slowly in the chair. He gestured to the old man behind the bar. “Cognac,” he said. “A double cognac.”
Christian looked around the shadowy room. There were the usual signs in French and German, with the rules for the sale of alcohol on them, and the legend that only apéritifs would be sold on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This was a Thursday, Christian remembered hazily, but the special nature of this particular Thursday might be said to countermand even the regulations of a Minister of the French Government at Vichy. At any rate, the Minister who had delivered himself of the regulation was no doubt running as fast as he could at the moment and would probably be grateful for a little cognac himself. The only law anyone could be expected to observe on the evening of this summer day was the law of flight, the only authority the guns of the First and Third American Armies, not yet heard in this part of the country, but already felt, already exercising a premature and dreadful sovereignty.
The old Frenchman shuffled over with a small glass of brandy. The old man had a beard like a Jewish prophet and his teeth smelled terribly of decay, Christian noticed irritably. Was there no escaping, even in this cool dark place, the odors of ferment and mortality, the scent of dying bone and turning flesh?
“Fifty francs,” said the old man, leaning horribly over Christian, his hand still cautiously on the glass.
For a moment Christian thought of arguing with the old thief about the overcharge. The French, he thought, making a good thing out of victory and defeat, advance and retreat, friend and enemy. God, he thought sourly, let the Americans have them for awhile, see how happy they’ll be about it. He tossed the fifty francs, worn scraps of paper printed by the German Army, on the table. He would have little use for francs, soon, anyway, and he grinned within himself at the thought of the old man trying to collect on the printed, flimsy German promise from the new conquerors.
Methodically, the old man put the paper away, and dragged himself back, past the outstretched legs of the other soldiers, to his position behind the bar. Christian toyed with his glass, not drinking yet, content for the moment merely to sit, with his aching legs resting, his shoulders heavily comfortable against the wooden back of the chair. He glanced idly at the other men in the bar. It was too dark to see their faces clearly, and they were not talking or making a sound, merely sitting in attitudes of exhaustion and contemplation, sipping slowly at their drinks, as though they did not expect to be able to drink much longer, and wished to hold the memory of the alcohol, the sense of its sharpness against their tongues, as long as possible now.
Hazily, Christian remembered that other bar in Rennes, long ago, and the group of soldiers with their tunics unbuttoned, loud and boisterous and rich, drinking cheap champagne. No one was drinking champagne now, and no one was loud, and if anyone talked, he spoke in a single low phrase and was answered in a monosyllable. Yes. No. Will we die tomorrow? What will the Americans do to us? Is the road to Rennes passable? Did you hear what happened to the Panzer Lehr Division? What does the BBC say? Is it over yet? Is it over? Dimly, toying with his glass, Christian wondered whatever had happened in the long years to the Private in the Pioneers he had turned in for insubordination and improper conduct. Confined to barracks for a month. Christian smiled weakly, leaning back against his bicycle. How wonderful it would be to be confined to barracks for a month. Confine the First American Army to barracks for a month, confine the Eighth Air Force, confine all Austrians in the German Army, for improper conduct …
He sipped gently at the cognac. It was raw and probably not even cognac. Probably made three days ago and doctored with plain spirits. The French, the miserable French. He looked at the old man behind the bar, hating him. He knew that the old man had been dragged out of doddering retirement for this week’s work. Probably, a sturdy fat merchant and his plump, sweaty wife owned this place, and had run it until now. But when they saw how things were going, had seen the first scum of the German tide racing through the town, they had resuscitated the old man and put him behind the bar, feeling that even the Germans would not take out their venom on such a poor, outdated specimen. Probably the owner and his wife were tucked away somewhere in a safe attic, eating a veal steak and a salad, with a strong bottle of wine, or they were climbing into bed with each other in a sweaty, garlicky embrace. (Remember Corinne in Rennes, the cowy flesh and the milkmaid’s hands, and the coarse dyed ropes of hair.) The owner and his wife, chubbily linked in a warm featherbed, were probably chuckling at this moment at the thought of the drained soldiers paying fantastic prices to Papa in their dirty estaminet, and at the dead Germans all along the road, and at the Americans rushing toward the town, eager to pay even higher prices for their wretched raw alcohol.
He stared at the old man. The old man stared back, his little pebbles of eyes black and insolent, secure and defiant in the rotting, ancient face. Old man with thousands of printed, useless francs in his pockets, old man with bad teeth, old man who felt he would outlive half the young men sitting silently in his daughter’s establishment, old man roaring within him at the thought of what dire handling lay ahead for these almost-captured and almost-dead foreigners huddled around the stained tables in the dusk.
“Monsieur wishes …?” the old man said in his high wheezy voice that sounded as though he were listening to a joke no one else in the room had heard.
“Monsieur wishes nothing,” Christian said. The trouble was, they had been too lenient with the French. There were enemies and there were friends, and there was nothing in between. You loved or you killed, and anything else you did was politics, corruption and weakness, and finally you paid for it. Hardenburg, faceless on Capri, in the room with the armored Burn, had understood, but the politicians hadn’t.
The old man veiled his eyes. Yellow, wrinkled lids, like dirty old paper, hooded down over the black, mocking pebbles of his pupils. He turned away and Christian felt that somehow the old man had won a bloody victory over him.
He drank his cognac. The alcohol was beginning to have an effect on him. He felt at once sleepy and powerful, like a giant in a dream, capable of slow, terrible movements, and enormous, semi-conscious blows.
“Finish your drink, Sergeant.” It was a low, remembered voice, and Christian looked up, squinting through the increasing evening haze at the figure standing before his table.
“What?” he asked stupidly.
“I want to talk to you, Sergeant.” Whoever it was, was smiling.
Christian shook his head and opened his eyes very wide. Then he recognized the man. It was Brandt, in an officer’s uniform, standing over him, dusty, thin, capless, but Brandt, and smiling.
“Brandt …”
“Sssh.” Brandt put his hand on Christian’s arm. “Finish your drink and come on outside.”
Brandt turned and went outside. Christian saw him there, standing against the café window, with his back to it, and a ragged column of labor troops trudging past him. Christian gulped down the rest of the cognac and stood up. The old man was watching him again. Christian pushed the chair away and carefully grabbed hold of, the handlebars of the bicycle and wheeled it toward the door. He could not resist turning at the door for one last encounter with the pebbly, French, 1870, mocking, Verdun and Marne-like eyes of the antique bartender. The old man was standing in front of a poster, printed in French but inspired by the Germans, of a snail horned with one American flag and one British flag, creeping slowly up the Italian peninsula. The words on the poster ironically pointed out tha
t even a snail would have reached Rome by now … The final insolence, Christian felt. Probably the old man had put the poster up this very week, straight-faced and cackling, so that every fleeing German who came by could look and suffer.
“I hope,” the old man wheezed, in that voice that sounded like laughter heard among rocking chairs in a home for the aged, “that Monsieur enjoyed his drink.”
The French, Christian thought furiously, they will beat us all yet.
He went out and joined Brandt.
“Walk with me,” Brandt said softly. “Walk slowly around the square. I don’t want anyone to hear what I am going to say to you.”
He started along the narrow sidewalk, along the shuttered row of shops. Christian noticed with surprise that Brandt looked considerably older than when last they met, that there was considerable gray at the photographer’s temples, and heavy lines around his eyes and mouth, and that he was very thin.
“I saw you come in,” Brandt said, “and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I watched you for five minutes to make sure it was you. What in God’s name have they done to you?”
Christian shrugged, a little angry at Brandt, who, after all, didn’t look magnificently healthy himself. “They moved me around a little,” Christian said. “Here and there. What are you doing here?”
“They assigned me to Normandy,” Brandt said. “Pictures of the invasion, pictures of captured American troops, atrocity pictures of French women and children dead from American bombing. The usual thing. Keep walking. Don’t stop. If you settle down any place, some damned officer is liable to come over and ask for your papers and try to assign you to a unit. There are just enough busybodies around to make it unpleasant.”
They walked methodically along the side of the square, like soldiers with orders and destinations. The gray stone of the buildings was purple now in the sunset, and the lounging and restless men looked hazy and evening-colored against the cobblestones and the shuttered windows.
“Listen,” Brandt said, “what do you intend to do?”
Christian chuckled. He was surprised to hear the dry sound come out of his throat. For some reason, after the many days of running, dictated only by the threat of the onrushing Americans, the thought that it was possible for him to have any intentions of his own had struck him as amusing.
“What’re you laughing at?” Brandt looked at him suspicously, and Christian arranged his face, because he had the feeling that if he antagonized Brandt, Brandt would withhold valuable information from him.
“Nothing,” Christian said. “Honestly, nothing. I’m just a little tired. I have just won the cross-country nine-day all-European bicycle race, and I’m not exactly in control of myself. I’ll be all right.”
“Well?” Brandt asked querulously. Christian could tell from the timbre of the photographer’s voice that he was very near the thin edge of breaking, himself. “Well, what do you intend to do?”
“Bicycle back to Berlin,” Christian said. “I expect to equal the existing record.”
“Don’t joke, for the love of Christ,” Brandt said.
“I love pedaling through the historic French countryside,” Christian said light-headedly, “conversing with the historic natives in their native costumes of hand-grenades and Sten guns, but if something better came up, I might be interested …”
“Listen,” Brandt said, “I have a two-seater English car in a farmer’s barn one mile from here …”
Christian became very cool and all tendency to chuckle left him.
“Keep moving!” Brandt snapped, under his breath. “I told you not to stop. I want to get back to Paris. My idiotic driver quit last night. We were strafed yesterday and he got hysterical. He started toward the American lines around midnight.”
“Well …?” Christian asked, trying to seem very keen and understanding. “Why’ve you been hanging around here all day?”
“I can’t drive,” Brandt said bitterly. “Imagine that, I never learned how to drive a car!”
This time Christian couldn’t keep his laughter down. “Oh, my God,” he said, “the modern industrial man!”
“It isn’t so funny,” said Brandt. “I’m too highly strung to learn how. I tried once, in 1935, and I nearly killed myself.”
What a century, Christian thought deliciously, enjoying this sudden advantage over a man who had before this done so well out of the war, what a century to pick to be too highly strung! “Why didn’t you get one of these fellows …” Christian gestured toward the men lounging on the town hall steps, “to drive you?”
“I don’t trust them,” Brandt said darkly, with a paranoiac glance around him. “If I told you half the stories I’ve heard about officers being killed by their own troops in the last few days … I’ve been sitting in this damned little town for nearly twenty-four hours, trying to figure out what to do, trying to find a face I really could trust. But they all travel in groups, they all have comrades, and there’re only two places in the car. And, who knows, by tomorrow the Americans might be here, or the road to Paris will be closed … Christian, I confess to you, when I saw your face in that café, I had to hold onto myself to keep from crying. Listen …” Brandt grabbed his arm anxiously. “There’s nobody with you? You’re alone, aren’t you?”
“Don’t worry,” Christian said. “I’m alone.”
Suddenly Brandt stopped. He wiped his face nervously, “It never occurred to me,” he whispered. “Can you drive?”
The bare anguish plain on Brandt’s face as he asked the simple, foolish question that at this moment, at the time of the crumbling of an army, had become the focal point and tragedy of his life, made Christian feel grotesquely and protectively full of pity for the thin, aging ex-artist. “Don’t worry, comrade.” Christian patted Brandt’s shoulder soothingly. “I can drive.”
“Thank God,” Brandt sighed. “Will you come with me?”
Christian felt a little weak and giddy. Safety was being offered here, speed, home, life …“Try and stop me,” he said. They grinned weakly like two drowning men, who somehow have contrived, by helping each other, to reach shore.
“Let’s start right away,” Brandt said.
“Wait,” said Christian. “I want to give this bicycle to someone else. Let someone else have a chance to get away …” He peered at the shadowy figures stirring around the town hall, trying to devise some innocent way of choosing the lucky man to survive.
“No.” Brandt pulled Christian back toward him. “We can use the bicycle. The Frenchman at the farm will give us all the food we can carry for that bicycle.”
Christian hesitated, but only for a second. “Of course,” he said evenly. “What could I have been thinking of?”
With Brandt looking back nervously over his shoulder to make certain they were not being followed, and Christian wheeling the bicycle, they walked out of town, back over the road Christian had traversed just a half hour before. At the first intersection, where a dusty dirt road slid out into the main highway between banks of flowering hawthorn bushes, fragrant and heavy in the still evening air, they turned off. After walking for fifteen minutes, they reached the comfortable, geranium-bordered farmhouse and the large stone barn in which, under a pile of hay, Brandt had hidden the two-seater.
Brandt had been right about the bicycle. When, under the first stars of evening, they started out along the narrow dirt road leading from the farmhouse, they had with them two hams, a large can of milk, half a huge cheese, a liter of Calvados and two of cider, a half dozen thick loaves of coarse brown bread and a whole basketful of eggs that the farmer’s wife had hard-boiled for them while they were taking the hay off the small car. The bicycle had proved most useful.
With his stomach full, relaxed behind the wheel of the small, humming, beautifully conditioned car, riding past the pale glow of the hawthorns into the main road in the moonlit evening, Christian smiled gently to himself. Meeting the boy in the blue shirt on the empty road early that morning, he reflected, had proved consider
ably more profitable than he had expected.
They drove back through the town without stopping. Someone shouted at them as they sped through the square, but whether it was a command to halt or an appeal for a ride or a curse because they were going too fast and were endangering the men on foot, they never found out, because Christian accelerated as much as he dared. A moment later, they were sliding out on the dim ribbon of road that stretched ahead of them across the moonlit countryside toward the city of Paris two hundred kilometers away.
“Germany is finished,” Brandt was saying, his voice thin and weary, but loud, to be heard against the rush of night wind that piled across the open car as they went at the same steady pace across the sleeping countryside. “Only a lunatic wouldn’t know it. Look at what’s happening. Collapse. Nobody gives a damn. A million men left to wander around the best way they know how. A million men, almost without officers, without food, plans, ammunition, left to be picked up by the Americans when they have time. Or massacred, if they’re foolish enough to make a stand any place. Germany can’t support an army any more. Maybe, somewhere, they’ll collect some troops and draw a line, but it will only be a gesture. A temporary, blood-thirsty gesture. A sick, romantic Viking funeral. Clausewitz and Wagner, the General Staff and Siegfried, combined for a graveyard theatrical effect. I’m as much of a patriot as the next man, and God knows, I’ve served Germany the best way I knew how, in Italy, in Russia, here in France … But I’m too civilized for what they’re doing to us now. I don’t believe in the Vikings. I’m not interested in burning on Goebbels’ pyre. The difference between a civilized human being and a wild beast is that a human being knows when he is lost, and takes steps to save himself … Listen, when it looked as though the war was about to start, I had my application in to become a citizen of the French Republic, but I gave it up. Germany needed me,” Brandt went on, earnestly, convincing himself as much as the man in the seat beside him, of his honesty, his rectitude, his good sense, “and I delivered myself. I did what I could. God, the pictures I’ve taken. And what I’ve gone through to get them! But there are no more pictures left to be taken. Nobody to print them, nobody to believe them or be touched by them if they are printed. I traded my camera to that farmer back there for ten liters of gasoline. The war is no longer a subject for photographers because there is no war left to photograph. Only the mopping-up process. Leave that to the American photographers. It is ridiculous for the people who are being mopped up to record the process on film. Nobody can expect it of them. Listen, when a soldier joins an army, any army, there is a kind of basic contract the army makes with him. The contract is that while the army may ask him to die, it will not knowingly ask him to throw his life away. Unless the government is asking for peace this minute, and there are no signs that this is happening, they are violating that contract with me, and with every other soldier in France. We don’t owe them anything. Not a thing.”