by Irwin Shaw
“Officer, wanna lady, wanna lady?”
Peter looked down. A tiny, filthy ten-year-old boy, barefooted, in a torn, bag-like single garment, was smiling up at him conspiratorially, pulling at his blouse.
“French lady,” the boy whispered wickedly. “Fine French lady.”
Peter stared at him disbelievingly, then broke into a roar of laughter. The boy, after a moment of doubt, also laughed.
“No, thank you, sir,” Peter said.
The boy shrugged, grinned up at him. “Officer,” he said, “cigarette?”
Peter gave him a cigarette and lit it for him, and the boy darted off, to try the French lady on a Polish corporal.
The bar had a nice beery smell and was dark and cool and the bartender drew eight glasses at a time, letting the foam settle whitely on the glass rims.
“The two lieutenants,” Peter was saying, “were a little stuffy, but the major was fine.”
“I knew he would be,” Mac said. “I talked to him last night.”
“I had breakfast with him”—Peter waved for two more beers—“and he said he guessed he’d be doing the same thing himself if he had to hang around this town five months.”
Mac comfortably drained his beer.
“The birth rate in England,” Peter said, “has gone up. I read it in the Mail this morning. There’re three million Englishmen out of the country and the birth rate’s rocketing.…” He heard his own voice loud and angry and humorless. “How in the name of God do they dare print things like that?” He saw Mac grinning widely, but he couldn’t stop. “Who’re the fathers? Where’re the fathers? Bloody damned newspaper!”
“My,” Mac said, “you have it bad today.”
Suddenly Peter realized that Mac, placid and tolerant, was bearing a great deal of the burden of Peter’s nerves.
“Mac,” he said quietly, “forgive me.”
“Uh?” Mac looked at him, surprised.
“Wailing Wall Chrome. Agony, Cairo division.” Peter shook his head in disgust. “I keep feeding it to you seven days a week.”
“Oh, shut up. I’ve lived with lots worse.”
“Any time I get on your nerves, sing out, will you?”
“Sure thing. Drink your beer.” Mac was embarrassed.
“I must be going a little crazy.” Peter looked at his hands, which had taken to trembling in the last few months. The cigarette jerked minutely between his fingers, in a spasmodic rhythm. “This town. When I was with the regiment … Oh, hell …” The truth was that out in the desert, under the guns, on a pint of water a day, and the sudden air often dire with Stukas, he had been much happier. There were no women in the desert, no reminders of a civilized and normal life. There was clean, sterile sand, the noise of armor, thousands of grumbling, good-humored men intimate with an equal death, and above all there was the sense of immense and hardy effort and accomplishment, as first they had held the Afrika Corps and then driven it back. Cairo then had been a beautiful town, two days at a time, a hot bath and unlimited Scotch, and sweet, clean sheets and relief from the guns. But now, under the dry flood of paper, under the stiffness and pettiness of headquarters politics, under the cheap weight of men who had clung to soft jobs for three years, with the streets full of bare-legged girls, with the war on another continent a thousand miles away …
Now the regiment, what was left of it, was broken up. Most of them were in graves on the road to Tunis, others were in hospitals, the rest scattered among other units, after the four years that had started in France. Mac, who had been his platoon sergeant at Arras, calmly instructing the untrained men how to load and fire the guns they had never used before, then taking them out into the fresh May fields of France hunting for parachutists. Himself, who had crawled through the German lines to Dunkirk, who had entered Tripoli the first hour, who had blown up in the jeep outside Mareth, with his driver dead in the air beside him … Now, both of them clerks in small offices, chained to paper and civil servants.
“Six years,” he said, “some bloody MP said we’d be sent home after six years. What do you think a woman thinks when she reads that she’ll get her man back in only six years?”
“Always remember,” Mac grinned, “what Monty said. ‘The war can’t last more than seven years. We’ll run out of paper.’”
“If only I could get back to England,” Peter said, “and sleep with my wife for two nights, everything would be all right. Just two nights.”
Mac sighed. He was a quiet, efficient, small, matter-of-fact man, noticeably graying, and sighing was strange and incongruous to him. “Peter,” he said, “can I talk plainly?”
Peter nodded.
“Peter, you ought to get yourself a girl.”
They sat in silence. Peter played somberly with his beer. In France, even though he had just been married, he had been the gay young officer. Handsome and debonair, he had played joyfully and thoughtlessly with the pretty ladies of the country towns at which he’d been stationed, and in Paris, when he’d had a month there, a charming, beautifully dressed wife of a French captain stationed in Algiers.
But when he’d got back to England with the gray-faced remnants of his regiment, after the hideous, bloody days of the break-through, and had taken his wife silently into his arms, all frivolity, all smallness and lack of faith had seemed wanton and irreligious in the face of so much ruin, such agony. Leaving England for Africa, he had felt that behind him he had to leave the best part of his life orderly and decent.
“Maybe,” he said to Mac, “Maybe …”
“A man’s got to be practical,” Mac said. “Three years. Oh, my God!”
Peter had to smile at the drastic expression on the practical man’s face.
“You’ll just explode,” Mac said, “and blow away.”
Peter laughed loudly, nervously. “Whisky,” he said, “provides certain compensations.”
“Whisky,” Mac said grimly, “will send you home a doddering wreck. You’ll do no one any good that way.”
“Maybe. Maybe …” Peter shrugged. “Anyway, I hate these women out here. Having the best time of their lives. Ugly, impossible girls no one would ever look at in peacetime, just because there are a hundred men for every woman … Snobbish, overconfident … Bitches, all of them. A man has to sacrifice all decent, male pride to chase after one of these.…” He talked faster and faster, all the bitter observation of the past years flooding to his tongue. “They demand abasement, homage, the ugliest, horrible and meanest of them. Women,” he said, “have been among the most horrible of the war’s casualties. All humility’s gone, all normal value, all friendship. They’re man-greedy. They’re profiteering on the war, like the worst usurer and manufacturer of machine tools, except that their profits are lieutenants and generals, not cash. After the war,” he said, “we should have rehabilitation hospitals for women who have been in troop areas, just like the hospitals for maimed men, to teach them how to live normal lives again.…”
Mac was laughing by now, helplessly, into his beer. “Enough,” he said. “Enough, John Knox! All I wanted to say is that I have a date tonight, and my girl has a friend who’s just come from Jerusalem, and it might do you a world of good just to have dinner with a woman for once. Do you want to go?”
Peter flushed, looked down at the beer-ringed table. “I won’t even know how to talk to a woman any more.”
“Do you want to go?”
Peter opened his mouth, closed it. “All right,” he said. “All right.”
“Jerusalem is nice enough …” It was on the dance floor at the Auberge des Pyramides, under the stars, with the three great tombs standing huge and a rebuke to time in the darkness just outside the lights and the music. Joyce was talking as they went slowly and painfully around the dance floor. “The city’s clean, and the King David’s an amusing hotel, but the people’re simply dreadful.” She had a brittle, drawling voice, pitched just high enough so that everyone near by could hear clearly what she was saying. “There,” she said br
ightly, as Peter managed a full turn, “we’re doing much better, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” Peter said, sweating in the heavy Nile heat, only slightly tempered by night, as he tried to concentrate on the beat of the music. Joyce’s voice distracted him and put him off, and somehow she never seemed to stop talking. She worked in the consular service, and by nine-thirty Peter had a full store of information on the doings of the consulate in Jerusalem for the last year and a half, at which time Joyce had come out from England. He had hardly said a word all night, stammering, half finishing sentences, suffering, feeling like the clumsiest farmer. Still, she was pretty, most desirable in a full white evening gown (“We always dress in Jerusalem”), with full, sleek shoulders bare and daring under the gay lights.
“That’s King Farouk.…” For the first time all evening her voice dropped a bit. “Isn’t it?”
Peter looked. “Yes,” he said.
“Isn’t he attractive? What an original beard!”
Peter looked at King Farouk. “He looks like a fat, self-satisfied young man,” Peter said, the first full sentence he had got out all evening. “And I understand he grew the beard because he has a terrible case of acne.”
“Dance around the edge of the dance floor,” Joyce whispered. “I’d like people to see me.”
Dutifully and heavily Peter danced around the edge of the floor until the music stopped. He followed Joyce to the table. Joyce smiled vivaciously at seven or eight officers seated at various tables throughout the establishment.
“It’s amazing,” she said, brightly and loudly, “how many men I know in Cairo.” They sat down. There was an awful silence while Peter wondered where in the name of God Mac was, and his girl, and Joyce smiled prettily first at one table, then another.
“Are you married?” Peter heard his voice, crooked and rasping, asking inexplicably. For the first time that evening Joyce gave him her undivided attention.
“Why,” she said, looking at him queerly and coldly, “what a strange question!”
“It’s just that there’s a girl around my office,” Peter said, almost dazedly. “Married to a lieutenant in India. Marrying an American major in London …” The expression on Joyce’s face became more and more strained. “I don’t know what made me think of her,” Peter said lamely.
“No,” Joyce said coldly, “I’m not married.”
“I am,” Peter said, despairingly.
“Really.” Joyce smiled automatically at a colonel four tables away.
“My wife,” said Peter, not knowing why he was talking, feeling his tongue too loose from the drinking that had been continuous since six that evening, “my wife is a woman of admirable character, although I can’t remember what she looks like. Her name is Anne. She works for the Air Ministry in Manchester. After Dunkirk, I was stationed on the beach at Dover for five months. I used to manage to get away week ends. We’d just stay in one room and just look at each other. After France … I felt as though my wife had healed me of a dreadful disease. She healed me of mud and death and friends dying on all sides. She’s most beautiful, but I don’t remember what she looks like. She’s very calm and simple and her voice is low, although I don’t remember that, either. I sent her my photograph today. Six years is too long for a man to expect a woman to remember him. Someone ought to tell Parliament that.… Don’t you think?”
Joyce was staring at him, her mouth frozen to one side. “Yes,” she said.
“If I could only see her for two nights …” Well, finally, the thought crossed his consciousness, the lady from Jerusalem is listening to me. “Right before I came out here, I was moved to another beach. It was raining. Autumn and miserable and barbed wire at the high-tide marks and mines all over the beaches. I called her long-distance and she told me she had a week and asked me if she should come down. I told her no. It was so miserable. Cheap little shacks waiting for the Germans in the rain. I knew we were leaving for Africa and I didn’t want our last days together to be dreary, in that abominable place. I told her no, but she said, ‘You wait right there. I’m coming down tonight.’” Suddenly, above the dance music in the Valley of the Nile, Peter remembered what his wife’s voice had sounded like, merry and sensual and confidently commanding over the faulty wires on that autumn night on a wet beach on the English Channel. “She came down and we had the week together, and the rain and the barbed wire made no difference at all. I’ve never been so gay, and it was early in the war, and we always had a coal fire and hot rum and lovely heavy breakfasts, with the curtains still drawn. And never a tear when she left. And I started for Africa singing in my heart.” He was talking straight ahead to the Pyramids in the ancient desert darkness new, not to the silly, bare-shouldered girl across the table. “I haven’t heard from her in two months. Not a letter in two months.” He shrugged. “After the war,” he said, “I’m going to go in for politics. I’m going to stand for Parliament. There must be somebody in Parliament who knows what a war is like, who knows that one war is enough, six years is too much …”
“Why, Joyce, how nice!” It was the colonel, standing gallantly at the table. “Dance?”
Joyce looked doubtfully at Peter. Peter stood up, a little unsteadily. “Delighted,” he said ambiguously. Without looking at Peter, Joyce went off with the colonel, smiling impartially at dozens of officers in Sam Browne belts as she danced on the edge of the floor.
Peter hazily watched the flashing plump white dress among the brave khaki and brass pips. He passed his hand over his eyes, thinking, as he remembered his outburst, God, I must be going crazy.
He saw a captain step in and dance with Joyce, then an American major. “The world,” he said softly to himself, “is full of American majors.” He laughed gently to himself, stood up, walked slowly out of the night club. Outside, with the music thin and distant in his ears, the Pyramids loomed, crumbling in the darkness, in memory of the unremembered dead.
He got into a cab and started for Cairo.
When the cab got to Gezira Island, he tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Sporting Club,” he said.
The old, wheezing taxi laboriously turned. “I need a drink,” Peter told himself seriously. “I need a drink very badly.” He thought of old Mac caught there with two girls and the tremendous bill. He felt bad about it, but he’d pay his share, although it would mean considerably less drinking for the rest of the month. But he couldn’t stay with that damned girl. The truth was he couldn’t stay with any girl. Anne, unphotographed, in Manchester … Still, she should write more often than once every two months.…
The bar at Gezira was still open. There were some South Africans and some American fliers lounging against it. One of the American fliers was singing, in a soft Southern voice, “Oh, Susannah, don’t you cry for me …”
“Scotch,” Peter said to the bartender, feeling for the first time that evening a cessation of loneliness, his constant climate.
“Fo’ Ah’m gawn’ t’ Alabama, with mah banjo on mah knee …” the American pilot sang sweetly and happily.
“Gin and lime,” said one of the South Africans, a gigantic captain with huge, bare arms, whom the others called Lee. “Gin and lime all around.” He turned to Peter. “What’re you drinking, Captain?”
“I’ve ordered, thanks.” Peter smiled at him.
“Man says he’s ordered,” the American pilot sang. “What do you know about that? British captain says he’s ordered. Order again and order again, oh, Captain, order again.…”
The bartender put two Scotches in front of Peter, grinning. The huge South African captain poured it all into one glass. They lifted their glasses.
“To South Africa,” one of the Americans said.
They drank.
“To sergeants.” The American who had been singing grinned at a large South African lieutenant with a mustache. The lieutenant looked around him uneasily. “Quiet, please,” he said. “I’ll be in jail five years.”
“This gentleman looks like a gentleman.” Lee put his
arm around the lieutenant with the mustache. “Doesn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Peter.
“Jail,” said the lieutenant with the mustache.
“He’s not a gentleman. He is a sergeant. He is my bloody sergeant from my bloody company.”
“Ten years,” said the lieutenant with the mustache.
“We’re all AWOL, Sergeant Monks, lieutenant for the evening, Lieutenant Fredericks …” He waved to a slightly smaller red-headed South African down the bar. “And myself. We’re farmers. Independent men. When the bloody O.C. said ‘no leaves,’ we said farewell. Sixty miles out on the desert for three weeks. Miserable little clerk of an O.C. Sergeant, I said, here’s a pip. Take off those bloody stripes. We wish to show you the glories of Shepheard’s and Gezira, so that you can come back and dazzle the poor bastards in the other ranks with tales of the high life of Cairo.”
“I’ve been talking to brigadiers all afternoon and evening,” Monks complained. “Wearing on the nerves.”
“If the O.C. shows up, it’s all taped,” Lee said. “I grab Monks by one arm, Freddy grabs him by the other. ‘We’ve just arrested the bugger, sir,’ we say. ‘Impersonating an officer.’”
“Ten years,” Monks said, grinning. “This round is on me.”
Peter laughed. He lifted his glass. “To sergeants everywhere.” They all drank.
“On my right,” said Lee, “is the American Air Force.”
The American Air Force raised its glasses at Peter and the pilot who sang started in on “Chattanooga Choo-choo.” There were two lieutenants and a twenty-four-year-old major.
“The American Air Force is going home,” said Lee. “Their tour is over. Home by way of England. The infantry’s tour is never over. Oh, the poor, stinking, bloody infantry, their tour is never over …”