Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  “I saw the picture,” Mitchell said. He had seen it one night in Cambridge, and he remembered how some of the boys in the audience had whistled when Miss Grable had kissed the leading man.

  “We were all told to keep absolutely quiet,” Ruth said, “because the British had patrols going through every town. They must have known something, because that week three men high up in the police force were suspended and investigated. It wasn’t so hard to keep the older people quiet, but it was awful with the children, and one man really proposed that a little girl who kept crying all day be strangled for the good of the others. We sat there for a week, whispering, making a noise like thousands of mice in a cupboard, and each night cars would come and some people would be taken away to a collective farm somewhere in the hills. Finally, my turn came and I stayed on that farm for two years, working in the fields and teaching children how to read and write German.

  “After two years, the British gave you papers, if you managed to dodge them all that time, and I got my papers and started to work for a canning factory outside Tel Aviv. My father was let out of concentration camp in 1938, but his ship was turned back at Haifa, and he was put back in concentration camp in Germany, and for all I know he’s still there now, although he’s probably dead.

  “Joachim wrote me, and my mother, from Berlin. They became good friends once I was gone, and he brought her food, and on Friday nights would come and watch her light the candles. My mother wrote me he told her he had a girl, but he was dissatisfied, he guessed he’d gotten the taste for Jewish girls.” Ruth smiled slightly, thinking of the boy with the checkered vest and the monocle many years ago, and Mitchell wondered if he had dropped a bomb near the market-analyzer somewhere in Africa, or in Sicily or Italy.

  “He helped my mother get out of Germany,” Ruth went on, staring up at the window of her home, which was now secure and dark. “She came out in a Portuguese boat, and I heard she was coming and I was on the shore at Haifa Harbor when it came in. But the British wouldn’t let it dock, and after six days they insisted that it turn back, and there were thousands of people on the shore, relatives and friends of the people on the boat, and the worst sound I’ve ever heard in the world was the sound those people on the shore made when the boat turned around and started to steam toward the Haifa breakwater. But the boat never got out of the harbor.” Ruth paused and licked her lips, and spoke very matter-of-factly. “There was an explosion. We saw the puff of dirty black smoke first, then a long time later we heard the noise, and people on shore were screaming and laughing and crying. Then there was fire and the boat started to go down, and everybody grabbed at any kind of boat they could find and started out toward the steamer, and there were people who couldn’t find boats who just jumped into the water, clothes and all, and started to swim, and nobody ever found out how many people drowned that way, because bodies were washed in to shore for three weeks afterward. My mother was drowned and five hundred other people on the boat, but seven hundred were saved, and then the British had to let them in, and I suppose that’s what the people who set the bomb figured would happen. Some people would die, but some would be saved. If the boat went back to Europe, everybody would be killed. Of course, they bungled it somewhat, and they didn’t figure on the fire, and they thought the boat would sink more slowly and only a few people would be killed, but even so it was a pretty fair bargain.” Ruth lit a cigarette calmly and held the light for Mitchell. “My mother was washed up a week later, and at least her grave is in Palestine. I couldn’t tell my father she was dead, so when I wrote to him in concentration camp, I forged letters from my mother, because I had a lot of her letters and I learned how to make good copies. Even now, through the Red Cross, I write him notes in my mother’s handwriting, and if he’s alive he thinks my mother is living on a farm with a family near Rehovoth.”

  Ruth pulled at her cigarette and inhaled deeply and in the increased glow Mitchell looked at her and thought again, as he’d thought so many times before, that it was a wonderful and terrible thing that the human race covered its scars so completely, so that Ruth, standing there, with the torture and smuggling and burning and drowning and hiding and dying behind her, looked, with her lipstick and fluffy, cleverly combed hair, and her soft, fragile, print dress, like any one of a thousand girls at a dance in America, with nothing more behind them than a weekly allowance from father, and two proms a season at New Haven or Cambridge.

  “Ah,” Ruth said, throwing her cigarette away, “she must be asleep by now. Come.” She smiled at him, dry-eyed and pleasant, and took his hand, and they walked quietly up through the dim hallways to the apartment in which she lived. She opened the door silently and waved him in, her finger to her lips, and when they were safely in her room, with the door locked behind them, she giggled like a child who has pulled some sly trick on the grown-up world, then kissed him hungrily in the dark room, and whispered, “Mitchell, Mitchell,” making the name somehow foreign and tender by the way she said it.

  He held her tight, but she pulled away. “Not yet, Lieutenant,” she said, grinning, “not yet.” She put on a light and went over to a chest of drawers in a corner and started to rummage under some scarves. “I have something for you. Sit down and wait, like a polite boy.”

  Mitchell sat on the low daybed, blinking in the light. The room was small and painted white and very clean. There was a large piece of Egyptian batik in red and dark green on the wall over the bed and there were three photographs on a dressing table. Mitchell looked at the photographs—a round, smiling woman, with a healthy, simple face, Ruth’s mother, the picture taken long before the morning when the ship went down in Haifa Harbor. The other two photographs were of men. There was a man who looked like Ruth, obviously her father, a studious, humorous, rather weak face, with frail, delicate bones and shy, childish eyes. And there was the young man in the checkered vest, slender and laughing and proud of himself, with the monocle in his eye like a burlesque of a German general or a British actor.

  “Here.” Ruth came over to him and sat down beside him. She had a soft chamois bag, and there was a little rich clinking as she put it in his hand. “To take with you,” she said.

  Mitchell slowly opened the bag. A heavy silver medal on a chain, glittering dully in the lamplight, fell into his hand. Ruth was crouched on her knees on the couch beside him, looking anxiously at his face to see if her present would meet with favor. Mitchell turned it over. It was a Saint Christopher, old and irregular, of heavy silver, with the Saint awkward and angular and archaic and very religious in the loving workmanship of a silversmith who had died a long time before.

  “It’s for voyages,” Ruth said, hurriedly. “For a navigator, I thought, it might be quite—quite useful.…” She smiled uncertainly at him. “Of course,” she said, “it is not in my religion, but I don’t think it would do any harm to give it to you. That’s why I went to Jerusalem. Something like this, something holy, might have a tendency to be more effective if it comes from Jerusalem, don’t you think?”

  “Of course,” Mitchell said. “It’s bound to be.”

  “Will you wear it?” Ruth glanced quickly and shyly at him, sitting there, dangling the medal on its chain.

  “All the time,” Mitchell said. “Day and night, every mission, every jeep-ride, year in, year out.”

  “May I put it on for you?”

  Mitchell opened his collar and gave the medal to Ruth. She stood up and he bowed his head and she slipped it on, then leaned over and kissed the back of his neck where the chain lay against the flesh.

  She stepped back. “Now,” she said matter-of-factly. “There we are.” She went over to the lamp. “We don’t need this any more.” She put the light out and went over to the window and threw back the blackout blinds, and a faint breeze carrying salt and the scent of gardens came into the room. She stood at the window, looking out, and Mitchell got up and crossed over to her, feeling the unfamiliar cool jewelry of the medal dangling against his chest. He stood behind her, silen
tly, holding her lightly, looking out over the city. The white buildings shone in the heavy moonlight machined and modern and Biblical all at once, and from the west came the faint sound of the sea. Mitchell wanted to tell her that he would remember her, remember everything about her, her drowned mother and imprisoned father, her old, courageous lover, drinking champagne with her at the Nazi cafés; he wanted to tell her that he would remember the dealings with the Greek sailor and the hold of the ship that had been built in 1887 and the dying Jews buying a lemon with a gold candlestick; he wanted to tell her that flying over the Germans in Europe or watching the first snow fall at Stowe he would remember the small boat grating on the sand in the darkness outside Rehovoth and the week in the closed movie theater with the British patrols outside; he wanted to tell her that the terror and courage would not be forgotten, but he didn’t know how to say it, and besides, being honest with himself, he knew it would be difficult to remember, and finally, back in Vermont, it would blur and cloud over and seem unreal as a story in a child’s book, read many years ago and now almost forgotten: He held her more tightly, but he said nothing.

  “There he is,” Ruth said, her voice casual and unimpressed. “See him standing down there next to the house with the picket gate.…”

  Mitchell looked over Ruth’s shoulder. Down on the street, thirty yards from the entrance of Ruth’s house, was a small dark figure, almost completely lost in shadow.

  “Ali Khazen,” Ruth said. “He comes and waits outside my window. Ah …” she sighed, “I suppose finally he’ll kill me.”

  She turned away from the window and led him back to the couch across the strip of moonlight that divided the room. She looked up at him gravely, then suddenly pushed him gently down to the couch and fell beside him, holding onto him. She held him and kissed his cheek and chuckled a little. “Now, Lieutenant,” she said, “tell me about Vermont.”

  Walking Wounded

  He wondered what had happened to the curtains. He lay stiffly on the bed, listening, with the old, irritated tightening of the nerves, to the wild and grating hubbub of the Cairo street outside his window, the insane wailing of newsboys, the everlasting iron drip of garry-horses’ hooves, the pained yelps of peddlers. The sun, bright and hurtful as hot nickel, cut in through the open windows. On the floor lay the curtains, torn, with bits of cord still running from them to the top of the windows, like a ruptured spider web.

  “What happened to the curtains?” he asked. His voice felt dry and sandy in his throat, and the right side of his head began to ache.

  Mac was shaving at the washstand. His beard made a crinkly, Spartan sound against the razor. “Last night,” Mac said, without turning. “In the excitement.”

  “What excitement?”

  “You pulled the curtains down.”

  “Why?”

  Mac shaved quietly and intently around the short, soldierly mustache. “Don’t know,” he said. “Either you wanted to throw me out, or throw yourself out, or just tear down the curtains.”

  “Oh, God!”

  Mac scrubbed his face with water. “Pretty drunk, Peter,” he said.

  “What else did I do?”

  “Two lieutenants and a major. In the lounge. Ten minutes of insults.”

  “A major! Christ!” Peter closed his eyes.

  “I think you hit a lieutenant.” Mac’s voice was muffled in a towel. “Anyway, you hit something. Your hand’s all cut up.”

  Peter opened his eyes and looked at his hand. Across the back of it there was a wide, ugly wound, just beginning to puff up around the edges. As he looked at it, he realized that it was hurting him.

  “I poured iodine over it,” Mac said. “You won’t die.”

  “Thanks.” Peter let his hand drop, licked his dry lips. “What did I say to the major?”

  “‘Base wallah.’ ‘Imperial vulture.’ ‘Gezira bloodsucker.’ ‘Headquarters hangman.’”

  “That’s enough.” The right side of Peter’s head hurt very strongly for a moment.

  “You were a little unfair,” Mac said calmly. “He was a nice type. Been in the desert three years. Just come back from Sicily with dysentery. Wounded twice. Been attached to headquarters four days.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Peter said. “Oh, Christ.”

  The room was silent as Mac put on his shirt and combed his hair.

  “Get his name?” Peter asked finally.

  “Major Robert Lewis. Might be a good idea to say good morning.”

  “How about the lieutenants?”

  Mac took out his notebook. “Maclntyre and Clark,” he read. “They await your pleasure.”

  Peter sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The room faded and glittered for a moment, and he had to hold on to the bed when he stood up.

  “Some day, soon,” he said, “I have to stop drinking.”

  “A little whisky,” Mac said kindly, “is good for the soul. Anything I can do for you?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Mac stood at the door.

  “Mac …”

  “Yes, Captain …?” Tiny, astringent, helpful mockery in the title.

  “Mac, this is the first time anything like this ever happened to me.”

  “I know,” Mac said softly. He went quietly out of the room.

  Peter walked slowly over to the wash basin, looked at himself in the mirror. The familiar long, thin face, the uneven dotted crenelation of his wound across his forehead, the strange dark mark in the eye that had been blind for three weeks, all seeming to tremble slightly now in the bitter sunlight, as it had trembled for two months.

  He shaved carefully and went to take a shower. He came back, feeling better, and put on fresh clothes. He switched his tabs with the three pips to his clean shirt, looking absently and automatically to see if there was any lipstick on them. Three and a half years ago, at Arras, there had been lipstick one morning, and he had walked around all day long, ignorant, wondering why smiles hid on sergeants’ lips.

  Then he went down to apologize to the major.

  He sat at his desk, sweating. The heat of Egypt was like the inside of a balloon. The balloon was being constantly filled; the pressure getting greater and greater. Typewriters clicked dryly in the swelling air, and flies, the true owners of Egypt, whirled cleverly and maliciously before his eyes.

  Sergeant Brown, his thick glasses clouded with sweat, clumped in and put a stack of papers on his desk, clumped out again. The back of Sergeant Brown’s shirt was soaked where he had been pressing against the back of a chair, and sweat ran in trickles down his infantryman legs to the heavy wool socks and gaiters.

  Peter stared at the stack of papers. Ruled forms and tiny and intricate notations that had to be gone over slowly, corrected, signed.

  Outside, a donkey brayed painfully. It sounded like an immense wooden machine in agony, wood grating against wood, incredibly loud. It made the little, paper-stacked room seem hotter than ever.

  Peter reread the letter he had received that morning from Italy. “… I am taking the liberty of answering your letter to Col. Sands, who was badly wounded last week. I am afraid there is nothing we can do about requesting your being posted to this regiment, as there is no provision in our establishment for medically graded officers.”

  The donkey brayed again outside. It sounded like the death of all the animals of Egypt on this hot morning.

  Peter stared at the papers on his desk. Three flies danced over them, lighted, swept off. The typewriters rattled flatly in the heat. He took the top paper off the pile, looked at it. The figures leapt and wavered in the heat, and a drop of sweat fell from his forehead and mistily covered a 3, a 7, an 8. His hands glistened in little sick beads, and the paper felt slippery under his fingers. Hobnails sounded on the marble floor in the corridor, ostentatious and overmilitary among the clerks and filing cabinets. His throat burned dryly with the fifteenth cigarette of the morning.

  He stood up jerkily and took his hat and went out. In the corridor he passed
Mrs. Burroughs. She was a tall, full-bodied girl who wore flowered prints and always seemed to manage silk stockings. She was going home to England to divorce her husband, who was a lieutenant in India. She was going to marry an American Air-Force major who had been switched to London from Cairo. She was very pretty and she had a soft, hesitant voice, and her bosom was always oppressively soft and noticeable under the flowered prints.

  She smiled at him, hesitant, polite, gentle. She had two rosebuds clasped in her dark hair. “Good morning,” she said, stopping, her voice cool, shy, inviting in the drab corridor. She always tried to stop him, talk to him.

  “Good morning,” Peter said stiffly. He never could look squarely at her. He looked down. No silk stockings this morning. The pretty legs bare, the skin firm and creamy. He had a sudden, hateful vision of Mrs. Burroughs landing in London, running to be crushed in the arms of the American major in the press of Waterloo Station, her eyes bright with tears of love and gratitude, her husband, used and forgotten, in India.…

  “I’m going to Groppi’s,” he heard himself say, surprisingly. “Tea. Would you like to join me?”

  “Sorry,” Mrs. Burroughs said, her voice sounding genuinely sorry. “So much work. Some other time. I’d be delighted.…”

  Peter nodded awkwardly, went out. He hated Mrs. Burroughs.

  The street was full of heat, beggars, dirt, children with fly-eaten eyes, roaring army lorries. He put on his hat, feeling his forehead, wet and warm, rebel under the wool. A drunken New Zealander, at eleven o’clock in the morning, wobbled sorrowfully in the full glare of the sun, hatless, senseless, reft of dignity, 7,000 miles from his green and ordered island.