Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  “May I take you back to the beechwood forest, Mr. Blackwood?”

  “I’m listening, Mr. Bruder.”

  “You recall how I first met Dieter?”

  “Along the stream. He sold you the tin cup that saved Willis Poore’s life.”

  “Yes, exactly. Dieter was a one-man supply store walking up and down the lines. He was selling tin cups and tin bowls and tin canteens, and entrenching spades and haversacks packed with field dressings and iron rations, and vials of morphine and tobacco kept dry in bullet shells. Anything a soldier might need when cut off from a supply line.”

  “Is it why he went to Europe?”

  “Dieter never forgot that fortunes were made in supplying desperate men.”

  “I can understand that,” said Blackwood.

  “Because I met Dieter that day by the stream, Willis Poore recovered long enough to be picked up by an ambulance. He was transported to a hospital outside Paris, where he convalesced under the care of hobble-skirted nurses. He told me afterward that his bed lay in a shaft of sunlight and that he would close his eyes and feel the warmth on his face and dream he had returned to California. Every day his mind would carry him back to the rancho, and his strength returned and the wound on his nape closed and healed and buckled and scarred. While in the hospital he was promoted to captain and given his medal, and when the nurses came to sponge him down he’d show it to them, and soon he learned how its gleam brought a profoundly respectful smile to anyone who looked at it, and especially to those who fingered it against his breast. Captain Poore was released days before the Armistice, and he spent the winter roaming the cold alleys of Paris, and like many doughboys he succumbed to the whistles and calls shot from darkened doorways. It was there, I presume, that he first acquired his taste for the whore.”

  “Mr. Bruder!”

  “You’ve never sampled the wares yourself, Mr. Blackwood?”

  “Indeed I have not.” And this was true, technically speaking.

  “Don’t think you’re a better man for it.”

  “I do not.” And then: “But what does this have to do with our deal, Mr. Bruder?”

  Bruder ignored the question. “And while Willis was lying atop the ticking-striped mattress in the convalescent hospital, I was left to defend the burned-out depot. A platoon of soldiers arrived as reinforcement, and they were shocked when they saw the destruction, barracks burned to ashes. Every time a new soldier arrived he’d say, ‘That was a hell of a gun the Germans shot. You must’ve done something to make them really mad at you.’ I’d made my deal and so I said nothing, and the men would kick the char and soon we got to work on rebuilding the depot. Within a couple of days you would never have known what had happened there unless you stumbled across the pile of blackened rubble dumped in the forest.

  “It was only a few days later that the line gave up some territory and the front moved closer to our station. Now we could hear the battle day and night, and the howitzers traced the sky and the wounded stumbled into our depot, and soon we were no longer fixing trucks, we were fixing men.

  “Every night around eleven o’clock, Dieter would arrive in the forest, his tinware clanging like cowbells, and the men one by one would slip away into the beechwood stand and buy themselves some tobacco or morphine or whatever it was they could afford and needed. Supplies were low and the road that had first brought me to the depot was under siege, and we never knew what was coming or when. Every soldier who’d been in France more than a week knew that in the woods behind the lines were traveling salesmen. And not just Dieter. Most of them were Frenchmen, and some were boys too young to shave, and they were quick to adapt to the soldiers’ needs, always supplying a demand. When canned beef was low at a camp it could be found in the forest, and when supplies of scurvy pills were gone they could be bought for a dime. The doughboys called the salesmen Vultures, and when things were calm, sometimes word would arrive at a camp or a station that five hundred yards into the forest, a Vulture had arrived with girls for sale. That business went on, French maidens lying atop mounds of moss, and soldiers would pay for what they needed most. They’d hand over every last centime for a turn. Why the face, Mr. Blackwood? It was war, and the men needed comfort and the girls needed food, and other than the syphilis there was nothing more tragic about this than about everything else.”

  “The Vultures!” said Blackwood. “What terrible men!”

  “Mr. Blackwood, you of all people should think before you condemn.”

  At some point during Bruder’s tale, Pal and Sieglinde had slipped into the cottage and curled their legs up onto the window seat. They were leaning their heads upon the panes, their faces turned toward the ocean, but both boy and girl were silent, as if Bruder’s story had sent their minds traveling too. Sieglinde’s knives and whetting stone sat on the floor beside her, but she ignored the work; her face, in the light through the window, was—Blackwood imagined—identical to her mother’s.

  “As I was saying, I was at the depot and one night the guns fell silent. At this point, as you might imagine, I was having trouble sleeping. To tell the truth, never again in my life would I sleep through a full night. It was a moonlit evening at summer’s end and I got up, took my rifle, and went for a walk. If I told you I wasn’t looking for a certain thing, I’d be lying. It was very late, and typically the Vultures had come and gone by midnight, but I went to see anyway. I followed a path and I leapt across the stream and still I found no one. I walked for almost an hour. Then I gave up on finding one of the men and his girls, and I stroked the coins in my pocket and told myself to hold them in reserve for another night. The sky was as blue and dark as the ocean, and the moonlight seeped through the forest’s canopy, and there was something about this night that carried me on, and the fear that I typically bore had fallen away. It occurred to me that perhaps the battle that had been waging had ended and that word had yet to reach us of the outcome. I continued walking, thinking I should scout for information. The line wasn’t far, and I knew that if I walked another half mile or so I would come across something to tell me what was going on, some sort of battle debris: the abandoned clips of ammunition, the pockmarked shells, the scraps of military leather, shredded and mildewed, the bits of flesh as pale and bright as bread crumbs on a path.

  “The forest became even more dense, and I pushed my way through the low branches and stomped upon the soft ferns and sometimes the sticks cracking beneath my boot echoed in a way that startled me, and I would stop and stare into the silvery darkness and wonder if anyone was there. But no one was there, and I continued, and there’s a funny thing about fear: once you recognize that you’re afraid, you become less so, as if you’ve somehow thrown a saddle across its bucking back.

  “I kept walking, and after a quarter of an hour, through the stand of trees, I saw something move. It was dark and small and at first I thought that perhaps it was a bear, but then I figured that every bear along the front must have been killed long before. Then there was a second figure and a third, one large and one small, but they were only black outlines in the forest and a careless eye wouldn’t even have seen them. I’m sure you would have, and I saw them too and I dropped to my knees. I wasn’t close enough to sense what was going on, but then one of the figures moved away from the other two and walked twenty or thirty yards into the forest, until it seemed to sit upon a felled tree. Then there was a glow like a firefly and soon I could smell the burning tobacco.

  “I didn’t know what I had come across, but I held my rifle tightly and thought that maybe I was somewhere I shouldn’t be. In the distance I could see the cigarette burning, the orange glowing brighter as a pair of lips sucked upon it. Back over where the two others were, they were standing close and making some strange motions and it was impossible to tell what was going on. Suddenly, one dropped to the forest floor and the other followed, and soon horrible cries were traveling through the forest, grunts and pleas and it was then that I heard a voice.

  “It was a girl�
�s voice, and she was crying in both German and French, ‘Nein, nein, nein … non!’ I moved closer, and the forest rustled beneath me, and then the heaving and the panting stopped and I held still and it seemed as if the glowing orange tobacco was the only thing alive in the night. For a few minutes I didn’t move, and the figures in the dark held still, and after a long while someone said, in German, ‘It’s nothing, there’s nothing there.’ And soon the girl repeated her cry, and I heard her French accent, and then I realized what I had stumbled across.

  “Just as there were Vultures on the Allied side of the front, there were Vultures on the German side as well, and at some point I had crossed the line, for in the final months of the war the front slithered back and forth, and there were points in the forest where no one knew who was in control. And it was at such a point that I had found a Vulture selling a French girl to a German soldier.

  “My heart was racing, but I wasn’t shocked. I realized that I had simply come face-to-face with my enemy. In some ways, certainly every soldier awaits this moment, and I inched forward, carefully sweeping the way with my hands, and every time a twig snapped I prayed to God the soldier wouldn’t hear me. But by now he was so engaged in the act of raping the girl that he wouldn’t have heard anything—he was moaning and grunting and drowning out the owls. I knew I wouldn’t have much time, and soon I found myself no more than ten yards from the mossy clearing in the forest.

  “I arranged myself as silently as possible and aimed my rifle, and as I peered through the sight the moon appeared from behind the clouds and the soldier’s face came into my view. He was a common infantryman with a spiked helmet camouflaged by a field-gray cover. Beside him was his backpack of stiff, undressed hide, and his ten-pound rifle and bayonet were propped against it, and he was so young in the face that under any other circumstances one would have assumed that the gun and the bayonet were toys. His cheek was flushed, and his nose was small and round, like a lamb’s. But he was thrusting himself violently against the girl, and his black bluchers dug into the soil. Then his neck stretched like a turtle’s and his lips parted and he gasped embarrassingly and I witnessed him reach his moment of pleasure. All of him shook and trembled, and I thought that perhaps this was his first time.

  “Beneath him, the girl was in a sundress printed with sweet peas. She was as young as he, but it wasn’t her first time—her stoic face told me that. Her skirt was pushed beyond her hips and her bodice had been clumsily opened and her breasts were small and white. Even in this terrible position she maintained a dignified beauty, holding her mouth grimly, refusing to contort her face. Her eyes were open and she was looking into the soldier’s face, and I saw that she was braver than he because he wouldn’t look at her, he was overwhelmed with pleasure, and then the moment was over, as it always is.

  “The soldier stood and pulled up his trousers. His leather greatcoat hung from him heavily. He was shockingly thin, with a waist that was fleshless and bony, and it touched me that he had spent his money on the girl rather than on food, and isn’t that the way men are? Choosing one hunger over another?

  “In any case, I wasn’t there to philosophize. I was there to kill. As he adjusted his buckle, I squeezed the trigger and felt the hot bullet pulse through the barrel. The shot went swiftly through the soldier’s temple, and for the shortest instant in my life his face cleared, as if he’d been acquitted of all the crimes that he’d ever committed, and he looked like a happy teenage boy, a smile upon his lips, guilty of nothing.

  “This moment, too, did not last. At once he fell over dead, and the girl screamed and leapt to her feet and bent to arrange her tattered stockings, and the dark figure off in the forest stubbed out his cigarette, and there were footsteps and branches snapping and the girl was crying and a man’s voice came to her in French, telling her to be quiet, it was all right, they’d be fine. And I remained in place, prepared to kill the German Vulture, and when the man reached the girl I saw through my sight that he was Dieter.

  “I was as surprised as you, and with a steady voice I told the man not to move, and I rose from the ferns and then he spotted me, my rifle aimed at his heart. His hands went up slowly and I told him to step away from the girl, and he obeyed. I don’t think he recognized me at first, and I could see his eyes turning as he tried to hatch a plan. He began speaking in English, his German accent nearly concealed, and he was thanking me for killing the soldier and I yelled at him to shut up. The girl was weeping and I told her to leave, but she didn’t move, and Dieter told her in French to run home. The girl looked at me with frightened eyes to see if I was really freeing her or if I was going to kill her, and Dieter told her, again, to run.

  “She left us, and to this day I can recall her skirt fluttering and her legs as long and fast as a deer’s. Then she was gone. Dieter remained, his hands up and waving like two white flags. Behind him was his traveling rack of tinware, the dented cups and the lidded bowls and the forks that bent in the fist. He said, ‘The German took the girl from me.’ I told him to shut up again and I told him I had eyes and I told him not only had I caught him hawking girls, I’d caught him selling them to the enemy. Dieter tried to convince me that I was wrong, that it’d been too dark for me to see things correctly. But my patience was thinning and I yelled, ‘Do you know what they do to traitors?’

  “He was protesting with his hands that I was wrong, and he was such a small man that it was hard for me to believe that he was peddling such evil but I’d seen what I’d seen and I said to him, ‘Maybe I should shoot you now.’

  “ ‘Shoot me?’ he squealed. ‘For selling a girl? I’m out here trying to stay alive like everyone else. Her family will eat tonight.’

  “I told him to drop to his knees, and when he didn’t I shoved my rifle barrel in his direction and he was soon down on the ground and his hands were clasped and he was begging: ‘Oh, please, please, I’ll do anything. Anything you want! Just let me go free. What harm have I done? You’ve killed a German because of me. I’m not the enemy, he is.’ And he turned to the poor boy, dead with the happy smile eternally upon his face. ‘What can I give you? I’ll give you anything you want. I’ll give you any girl you want. Tell me what you like, soldier. Do you like brunettes? Do you like them blond? Or dark in the eye? I can get you any girl. I can get you enough cigarettes for your whole company. Tell me what you want. Please—’

  “ ‘I don’t want one of your whores,’ I said.

  “ ‘Every soldier wants a whore. What about Sylvie? The girl who was just here? She’s fifteen. You can have her. You can marry her. I can arrange it.’

  “ ‘I don’t want her,’ I said.

  “ ‘There’s more!’ He fished a photograph from his pocket and said, ‘What about her? Do you like her?’ He pushed the picture toward me but I didn’t want to take it, something told me not to take the picture, and I resisted but he continued to dangle it between us. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Have a look. She’s the most beautiful girl I know. Go on, have a peek.’ I told myself not to look, I sensed even then the mistake of looking at this girl, and I told Dieter to put the picture away but he didn’t. ‘This one’s special,’ he said. ‘Tall and strong, hair as black as the sky tonight, and flesh as white as milk, and you’ve never seen a girl like her, soldier. Go on, take a look.’ The voice remained in my head, warning me not to look, but urges mount us, don’t they? I wondered what made this girl so special. The picture was a small square in Dieter’s fingers and I found myself pulled toward it as if it were magnetic, and I found my hand reaching out for it and I felt Dieter’s horny fingers graze mine as I took it from him and brought it to my eye.

  “Dieter hadn’t lied. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, eyes dark and deep and a throat rising from her blouse in a way that would make any man want to kiss it. She was a young girl, but her eyes were a woman’s. I tried to resist her and I said, ‘I told you I don’t want one of your whores.’

  “ ‘She isn’t a whore,’ said Dieter. ‘This one’s sp
ecial.’

  “ ‘Who is she?’ I asked, even though I knew I shouldn’t.

  “ ‘She’s my daughter. She can be yours.’

  “I cupped the picture in my palm, and her eyes held me, and I fell in love with Linda then and there, as the dawn cracked above the forest, and before I knew it I was under her spell and Dieter could see this; he was always a clever man. He said, ‘I can see that you like her. She can become yours.’

  “ ‘Where is she?’ I said.

  “ ‘In California.’

  “ ‘In California?’

  “ ‘Do you want her, soldier?’

  “In the pale glow of early morning I nodded obediently.

  “ ‘Then all we have to do is make a deal,’ said Dieter, ‘and you can come home with me to Condor’s Nest.’ ”

  3

  Much later, Blackwood found himself slumped in the rocker, Bruder across from him. After finishing his story, Bruder had fallen into a pitiable sleep, but then Blackwood too had allowed his neck to slacken, and the two men had wheezed through sleep that brought them to the dawn. When Blackwood woke, he could see that Bruder was motionless but alert. Pal was gone, and Sieglinde had thrown more wood into the hearth, and the fire burned upon the black oil of Bruder’s eyes. He was wheezing through heavy lungs, and coughing into a rag, and as Blackwood rubbed the sleep from his eyes, Bruder’s decline became even more apparent. And now Blackwood understood: from the beginning, Bruder had tried to manipulate Linda’s fate, and now he was suffering for it.

  “You haven’t been well, Mr. Bruder?”

  “Nothing more than the years catching up with me.”

  “You seem to have something in your chest. Have you tried that new miracle drug, penicillin?”