by Irwin Shaw
The pilot stood up and bowed sedately and asked the dark lady if she wished to dance. The lady melted into his arms and they inched out onto the tiny, crowded dance floor. The band was playing a rhumba now and the pilot, elegant in his blue uniform, dancing like a Cuban, wove in and out with a serious and exalted expression on his face.
“Whitacre,” Pavone said, across the table, “you’re a fool if you ever leave this city.”
“I agree with you, Colonel,” Michael said. “When the war is over, I’m going to ask them to discharge me on the Champs Elysées.” And, for the moment, he meant it. From the second, when, from among the rolling troop-filled trucks, he had seen the spire of the Eiffel Tower rising above the roofs of Paris, he had felt that he had finally arrived at his true home. Caught in the riotous confusion of kissing and handshaking and gratitude, hungrily reading the names of the streets which had haunted his brain ever since he was a boy, “Rue de Rivoli,” “Place de l’Opera,” “Boulevard des Capucines,” he had felt washed of all guilt and all despair. Even the occasional outbursts of fighting, among the gardens and the monuments, when the remaining Germans had fired away their ammunition before surrendering, had seemed like a pleasant and fitting introduction to the great city. And the spilled blood on the streets, and the wounded and dying men being hurried away on stained stretchers by the FFI red-cross women, had added the dramatically necessary, proper note of poignance and suffering to the great act of liberation.
He would never be able to remember, he knew, what it had been like, exactly. He would only remember the cloud of kisses, the rouge on his shirt, the tears, the embraces, the feeling that he was enormous, invulnerable, and loved.
“Hey, you,” said the first correspondent.
“Yes, Sir,” said the second correspondent.
“Which way is Second Armored Headquarters?”
“I don’t know, Sir. I just arrived from Camp Shanks.”
“You’re relieved.”
“Yes, Sir.”
They drank solemnly.
“I remember,” Ahearn was saying next to him, “that the last time I saw you I questioned you on the subject of fear.”
“Yes,” Michael said, looking agreeably at the sunburned red face, and the serious gray eyes, “I believe you did. How’s the market on fear these days among the editors?”
“I decided to put off writing it,” Ahearn said earnestly. “It’s been overdone. It’s the result of the writers after the last war, plus the psychoanalysts. Fear has been made respectable and it’s been done to death. It’s a civilian concept. Soldiers really don’t worry as much about it as the novelists would have you believe. In fact, the whole picture of war as an unbearable experience is a false one. I’ve watched carefully, keeping my mind open. War is enjoyable, and it is enjoyed by and large by almost every man in it. It is a normal and satisfactory experience. What is the thing that has struck you most strongly in the last month in France?”
“Well,” Michael began, “it’s …”
“Hilarity,” Ahearn said. “A wild sensation of holiday. Laughter. We have moved three hundred miles through an enemy army on a tide of laughter. I plan to write it for Collier’s.”
“Good,” Michael said gravely. “I shall look forward to it.”
“The only man who has ever written accurately about a battle,” said Ahearn, leaning over so that his face was just six inches from Michael’s, “was Stendhal. In fact, the only three writers who have ever been worth reading twice in the whole history of literature, were Stendhal, Villon and Flaubert.”
“The war will end in thirty days,” a very handsome British correspondent on the other side of the table was saying, “and I regret it. There are a lot of Germans who must be killed, and if the war continues we will do the work in hot blood. If the war ends, they will still have to be killed, but in cold blood, and I’m afraid we, the British and the Americans, will flinch from the job. And we will leave a powerful generation of enemies in the center of Europe. Personally, I pray for a terrible reverse of our fortunes …”
“Oh, sweet and lovely, lady be good,” the trumpet player was singing in accented English, “oh, lady be good to me …”
“Stendhal caught the unexpected and insane and humorous aspect of war,” Ahearn said. “Do you remember in his journal, his description of the Colonel who rallied his men during the Russian campaign?”
“I’m afraid not,” Michael said.
“What’s the situation?” asked the first correspondent.
“We are surrounded by two full divisions.”
“You’re relieved,” said the first correspondent. “If you can’t cross that river, I’m going to find me somebody who can.”
They drank.
“You look like a nice, lonesome soldier.” It was a tall, dark-haired girl in a flowered dress whom Michael had smiled at across the room fifteen minutes before. She was standing, bent over the table, her hand on Michael’s. Her dress was cut low, and Michael noticed the pleasant firm olive sweep of her bosom so close to his eyes. “Wouldn’t you like to dance with a grateful lady?”
Michael smiled at her. “In five minutes,” he said, “when my head is cleared.”
“Good.” The girl nodded, smiling invitingly. “You know where I’m sitting …”
“Yes, I certainly do,” Michael said. He watched the girl slip through the dancers in a sinuous flowery movement. Nice, he thought, very nice for later. I should really make love to a Parisienne to make official our entry into Paris.
“There are volumes to be written,” Ahearn said, “about the question of men and women in wartime.”
“I’m sure there are,” Michael said. The girl sat down at her table and smiled across at him.
“Relations are healthy and free, with a romantic undertone of haste and tragedy,” said Ahearn. “Take my case, for example. I have a wife and two children in Detroit. Frankly, while I admire my wife immensely, I find I am now bored with the idea of her. She is a small, plain woman, and her hair is thinning. In London, I have been living with a voluptuous girl of nineteen who works in the Ministry of Supply. She has lived through the war, she understands things that I have gone through, I am very happy with her … How can I be honest and say I would like to return to Detroit?”
“Everyone,” said Michael politely, “has his own particular problems.”
There were shouts from the other end of the room, and four young men with FFI armbands and rifles pushed their way through the dancers, dragging another young man whose face was bleeding from a long gash over his eyes. “Liars!” the ‘bloody young man was shouting. “You’re all liars! I am no more of a collaborationist than anybody in this room!”
One of the FFI men hit the prisoner on the back of the neck. The young man’s head sagged forward and he was quiet. The blood made a thin arc to the dance floor. The four FFI men dragged him up the steps past the candles in their glass holders on the maroon walls. The orchestra played louder than before.
“Barbarians!” It was a woman’s voice, speaking in English. A lady of forty was sitting in the seat that the French pilot had vacated next to Michael. She had long, dark-red fingernails and an elegant simple black dress, and she was still very handsome. “They all ought to be arrested. Just looking for an excuse to stir up mischief. I am going to suggest to the American Army that they disarm them all.” Her accent was plainly American and both Ahearn and Michael stared at her puzzledly. She nodded briskly to Ahearn, and more coolly to Michael, after swiftly noting that he was not an officer. “My name is Mabel Kasper,” she said, “and don’t look so surprised. I’m from Schenectady.”
“We are delighted, Mabel,” Ahearn said gallantly, bowing without rising.
“I know what I’m talking about,” the lady from Schenectady said feverishly, obviously three or four drinks past cold sobriety. “I’ve lived in Paris for twelve years. Oh, the things I’ve suffered. You’re a correspondent—the stories I could tell you about what it was like under the German
s.…”
“I would be delighted to hear,” Ahearn began.
“The food, the rationing,” Mabel Kasper said, pouring a large glass full of champagne and drinking half of it in one gulp. “The Germans requisitioned my apartment, and they only gave me fifteen days to move my furniture. Luckily, I found another apartment, a Jewish couple’s, the man is dead now, but this afternoon, imagine that, the second day of liberation, the woman was around asking me to give it back to her. And there wasn’t a stick of furniture in it when I moved in, I was damn careful to have affidavits made, I knew this would happen. I have already spoken to Colonel Harvey, of our Army, he’s been most reassuring. Do you know Colonel Harvey?”
“I’m afraid not,” Ahearn said.
“These are going to be hard days ahead of us in France.” Mabel Kasper finished the glass of champagne. “The scum are in the saddle. Hoodlums, parading around with their guns.”
“Do you mean the FFI?” Michael asked.
“I mean the FFI,” said Mabel Kasper.
“But they’ve done all the fighting in the underground,” said Michael, trying to puzzle out what this woman was driving at through all the noise.
“The underground!” Mabel Kasper snorted in a genteel, annoyed way. “I’m so tired of the underground. All the loafers, all the agitators, all the ne’er-do-wells, who had no families to worry about, no property, no jobs … The respectable people were too busy, and now we’ll all pay for it unless you help us.” She poured herself another glass of champagne and leaned toward Michael. “You’ve liberated us from the Germans, now you must liberate us from the French and the Russians.” She drained her glass and stood up. “A word to the wise,” she said, nodding gravely.
Michael watched her walk along the jumbled line of tables, in her simple, handsome black dress. “Lord,” he said softly, “and out of Schenectady, too.”
“A war,” Ahearn said soberly, “as I was saying, is full of confusing elements.”
“What’s the situation?” the first correspondent asked.
“My left flank has been turned,” said the second correspondent. “My right flank is crumbling, my center has been driven back. I shall attack.”
“You’re relieved,” said the first correspondent.
“After the war,” the handsome British correspondent was saying, “I am going to buy a house outside Biarritz, and just stay there. I can’t stand English food. When I am forced to go to London, I’ll pack a hamper and take a plane for a weekend, eating in my hotel room …”
“This wine,” said a public-relations officer with a brand-new, shining shoulder holster, at the other end of the table, “is not mature.”
“If there is any hope in the future,” Michael heard Pavone lecturing two young American infantry officers who were AWOL from their Division for the night, “it is in France. It is not enough for Americans to fight for France, they must understand it, stabilize it, be patient with it. That is not easy, because the French are the most annoying people in the whole world. They are annoying because they are chauvinistic, scornful, reasonable, independent, and great. If I were the President of the United States, I would send every young American to France for two years instead of to college. The boys would learn about food and art, and the girls would learn about sex, and in fifty years you would have Utopia on the banks of the Mississippi …”
Across the room, the girl in the flowered dress, who had been watching Michael intently, smiled broadly and nodded when she caught Michael’s eye.
“The irrational element in war,” Ahearn said, “is the one that has been missing from all our literature. Let me remind you once more of the Colonel in Stendhal …”
“What did the Colonel in Stendhal say?” Michael asked dreamily, happily floating in the haze of champagne, smoke, perfume, candlelight, lust …
“His men were demoralized,” Ahearn said sternly, his tone now martial and commanding, “and they were on the verge of running under a Russian attack. The Colonel swore at them, waved his sword, and shouted, ‘My ass-hole is as round as an apple, follow me!’ And they followed him and routed the Russians. Irrational,” Ahearn said professorially, “a perfect non-sequitur, but it touched some obscure spring of patriotism and resistance in the hearts of the soldiers, and they won the day.”
“Ah,” said Michael regretfully, “there are no Colonels like that today.”
A drunken British Captain was singing, very loudly, “We’re going to hang our washing on the Siegfried Line,” his voice bellowing strongly, drowning out the music of the orchestra. Immediately, other voices took up the song. The orchestra gave in and stopped the dance tune they were playing and began to accompany the singers. The drunken Captain, a huge, red-faced man, with glaring teeth, grabbed a girl and began to dance around the room among the tables. Other couples jumped up and attached themselves to the line, weaving slowly and loudly between the paper tablecloths and the wine buckets. In a minute, the line was twenty couples long, chanting, their heads thrown back, each person’s hands on the waist of the dancer ahead of him, like a triumphant snake dance in college after a football game, except that it was all enclosed in a low-ceilinged, candle-lit room, and the singing was deafening.
“Agreeable,” Ahearn said, “but too normal to be interesting, from a literary point of view. After all, after a victory like this, it is only to be expected that the liberators and the liberated sing and dance. But what a thing it would have been to be in the Czar’s palace in Sevastopol when the young cadets filled the swimming pool with champagne from the Czar’s cellar and tossed naked ballet girls by the dozen into the foam, while waiting for the arrival of the Red Army which would execute them all! Excuse me,” Ahearn said gravely, standing up, “I must join this.”
He wriggled out onto the floor and put his hands on the waist of the Schenectady-born Mabel Kasper, who was swaying her simple taffeta hips and singing loudly at the end of the line.
The girl in the flowered dress was standing in front of the table, looking at Michael, smiling through the clamor. “Now?” she asked softly, putting out her hand.
“Now,” Michael said. He stood up and took her hand. They hitched onto the line, the girl in front of Michael, her hips living and slender under the frail silk of her gown.
By now everybody in the room was in the line, spiraling in a roaring, silk and uniformed line, over the dance floor, in front of the blaring band, among the tables. “We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line,” they sang. “Have you any dirty washing, Mother dear?”
Michael sang with the loudest of them, his voice hoarse and happy in his ears, holding tight to the desirable slim waist of the girl who had sought him out of all the victorious young men in the celebrating city. Lost on a clangorous tide of music, shouting the crude, triumphant words, remembering with what savage irony the Germans had thrown those words back in the teeth of the British who had first sung them in 1939, Michael felt that on this night all men were his friends, all women his lovers, all cities his own, all victories deserved, all life imperishable …
“We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line,” the blended voices sang among the candles, “if the Siegfried Line’s still there,” and Michael knew that he had lived for this moment, had crossed the ocean for it, carried a rifle for it, escaped death for it.
The song ended. The girl in the flowered dress turned and kissed him, melting into him, clutching him, making him dizzy with the smell of wine and heliotrope perfume, as the other people around him sang, like all the gay, jubilating ghosts at every New Year’s party that had ever been held, the sentimental and haunting words of “Auld Lang Syne.”
The middle-aged pilot from Park Avenue, who had given the ingenious parties in 1928, and who had gone to Harlem late at night, and who had flown three complete tours in the Lorraine Squadron, and whose friends had all died through the years, and who now was finally back in Paris, was weeping as he sang, the tears unashamedly and openly streaming down his handso
me, worn face …“should old acquaintance be forgot,” he sang, his arm around Pavone’s shoulders, already hungry and nostalgic for this great and fleeting night of hope and joy, “and never brought to mind …?”
The girl kissed Michael ever more fiercely. He closed his eyes and rocked gently with her, the nameless gift of the free city, locked in his arms …
Fifteen minutes later, when Michael, carrying his carbine, and the girl in the flowered dress and Pavone and his bleached lady were walking along the dark Champs Elysées, in the direction of the Arch, near where Michael’s girl lived, the Germans came over, bombing the city. There was a truck parked under a tree, and Michael and Pavone decided to wait there, sitting on the bumper, under the moral protection of the summer foliage above their heads.
Two minutes later, Pavone was dead, and Michael was lying on the tarry-smelling pavement, very conscious, but curiously unable to move his legs below the hips.
Voices came from far away and Michael wondered whatever had happened to the girl in the silk dress, and tried to puzzle out how it had happened, because all the firing had seemed to be on the other side of the river, and he hadn’t heard any bombs dropping …
Then he remembered the sudden dark shape roaring across the intersection … A traffic accident … He chuckled remotely to himself. Beware French drivers, all his traveling friends had always said.
He couldn’t move his legs and the light of the torch on Pavone’s face made it seem very pale, as though he had been dead forever, and there was an American voice saying, “Hey, look at this, an American, and he’s dead. Hey, look, it’s a Colonel. What do you know …? He looks just like a GI.”
Michael started to say something clear and definitive about his friend, Colonel Pavone, but it never quite formed on his tongue. When they picked Michael up, although they did it very gently, considering the dark and the confusion and the weeping women, he dropped steeply into unconsciousness …
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE REPLACEMENT DEPOT was on a sodden plain near Paris, a sprawling collection of tents and old German barracks, still with the highly colored paintings of large German youths and smiling old men drinking out of steins, and bare-legged farm-girls like Percheron horses on the walls, under the swastika and eagle. Many Americans, to show that they had passed through this hallowed spot, had written their names on the painted walls, and legends like, “Sgt. Joe Zachary, Kansas City, Missouri” and “Meyer Greenberg, PFC, Brooklyn, USA” were everywhere in evidence.