Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  “Do you live here?” the major asked.

  “No. Five streets from here,” said Segal. “But with all due respect, major, I prefer not showing a German, any German, where I live.”

  The major shrugged. “Stop here,” he told the driver.

  The car pulled over to the curb and stopped. Segal opened the door and got out.

  The major held his hand. “Don’t you think we’ve paid?” he asked harshly. “Have you seen Berlin, have you seen Hamburg, were you at Stalingrad, have you any idea what the battlefield looked like at Saint Lô, at Mortain, at Falaise? Have you any notion of what it’s like to be on the road with the American air force over you all the time and Germans trying to get away in wagons, on foot, on bicycles, living in holes like animals, like cattle in slaughter pens in an abattoir? Isn’t that paying, too?” His face worked convulsively under the dust and it seemed to Segal as though he might break into tears in a moment. “Yes,” he said, “yes, we’re guilty. Granted, we’re guilty. Some of us are more guilty than the rest. What are we to do now? What can I do to wash my hands?”

  Segal pulled his arm away. For a moment, helplessly, he felt like comforting this aging, wornout, decent-looking man, this automobile salesman, father of three children, this weary, frightened, retreating soldier, this wavering, hopeless target on the straight, long roads of France. Then he looked at the rigid face of the driver, sitting at attention in the front of the car, with his machine pistol, small, and clever, well-oiled and ready for death in the sling under the windshield.

  “What can I do?” the major cried again, “to wash my hands?”

  Segal sighed wearily, spoke without exultation or joy or bitterness, speaking not for himself, but for the first Jew brained on a Munich street long ago and the last American brought to earth that afternoon by a sniper’s bullet outside Char-tres, and for all the years and all the dead and all the agony in between. “You can cut your throat,” he said, “and see if the blood will take the stain out.”

  The major sat up stiffly and his eyes were dangerous, cold with anger and defeat, and for a moment Segal felt he had gone too far, that after the four years’ successful survival, he was going to die now, a week before the liberation of the city, and for the same moment, looking at the set, angry, beaten face, he did not care. He turned his back and walked deliberately toward his home, the space between his shoulder blades electric and attendant, waiting tightly for the bullet. He had walked ten steps, slowly, when he heard the major say something in German. He walked even more slowly, staring, stiff and dry-eyed, down the broad reaches of the Boulevard Raspail. He heard the motor of the car start up, and the slight wail of the tires as it wheeled around sharply, and he did not look back as the car started back toward the Seine and the Madeleine and the waiting troops sleeping like so many dead by their armored cars before the Madeleine, back along the open, unforgiven road to Germany.

  Act of Faith

  “Present it in a pitiful light,” Olson was saying, as they picked their way through the mud toward the orderly room tent. “Three combat-scarred veterans, who fought their way from Omaha Beach to—what was the name of the town we fought our way to?”

  “Konigstein,” Seeger said.

  “Konigstein.” Olson lifted his right foot heavily out of a puddle and stared admiringly at the three pounds of mud clinging to his overshoe. “The backbone of the army. The noncommissioned officer. We deserve better of our country. Mention our decorations in passing.”

  “What decorations should I mention?” Seeger asked. “The marksman’s medal?”

  “Never quite made it,” Olson said. “I had a cross-eyed scorer at the butts. Mention the bronze star, the silver star, the Croix de Guerre, with palms, the unit citation, the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

  “I’ll mention them all.” Seeger grinned. “You don’t think the CO’ll notice that we haven’t won most of them, do you?”

  “Gad, sir,” Olson said with dignity, “do you think that one Southern military gentleman will dare doubt the word of another Southern military gentleman in the hour of victory?”

  “I come from Ohio,” Seeger said.

  “Welch comes from Kansas,” Olson said, coolly staring down a second lieutenant who was passing. The lieutenant made a nervous little jerk with his hand as though he expected a salute, then kept it rigid, as a slight superior smile of scorn twisted at the corner of Olson’s mouth. The lieutenant dropped his eyes and splashed on through the mud. “You’ve heard of Kansas,” Olson said. “Magnolia-scented Kansas.”

  “Of course,” said Seeger. “I’m no fool.”

  “Do your duty by your men, Sergeant.” Olson stopped to wipe the rain off his face and lectured him. “Highest ranking noncom present took the initiative and saved his comrades, at great personal risk, above and beyond the call of you-know-what, in the best traditions of the American army.”

  “I will throw myself in the breach,” Seeger said.

  “Welch and I can’t ask more,” said Olson, approvingly.

  They walked heavily through the mud on the streets between the rows of tents. The camp stretched drearily over the Rheims plain, with the rain beating on the sagging tents. The division had been there over three weeks by now, waiting to be shipped home, and all the meager diversions of the neighborhood had been sampled and exhausted, and there was an air of watchful suspicion and impatience with the military life hanging over the camp now, and there was even reputed to be a staff sergeant in C Company who was laying odds they would not get back to America before July Fourth.

  “I’m redeployable,” Olson sang. “It’s so enjoyable …” It was a jingle he had composed to no recognizable melody in the early days after the victory in Europe, when he had added up his points and found they only came to 63. “Tokyo, wait for me …”

  They were going to be discharged as soon as they got back to the States, but Olson persisted in singing the song, occasionally adding a mournful stanza about dengue fever and brown girls with venereal disease. He was a short, round boy who had been flunked out of air cadets’ school and transferred to the infantry, but whose spirits had not been damaged in the process. He had a high, childish voice and a pretty baby face. He was very good-natured, and had a girl waiting for him at the University of California, where he intended to finish his course at government expense when he got out of the army, and he was just the type who is killed off early and predictably and sadly in motion pictures about the war, but he had gone through four campaigns and six major battles without a scratch.

  Seeger was a large, lanky boy, with a big nose, who had been wounded at Saint Lô, but had come back to his outfit in the Siegfried Line, quite unchanged. He was cheerful and dependable, and he knew his business and had broken in five or six second lieutenants who had been killed or wounded and the CO had tried to get him commissioned in the field, but the war had ended while the paperwork was being fumbled over at headquarters.

  “They reached the door of the orderly tent and stopped. “Be brave, Sergeant,” Olson said. “Welch and I are depending on you.”

  “O.K.,” Seeger said, and went in.

  The tent had the dank, army-canvas smell that had been so much a part of Seeger’s life in the past three years. The company clerk was reading a July, 1945, issue of the Buffalo Courier-Express, which had just reached him, and Captain Taney, the company CO, was seated at a sawbuck table he used as a desk, writing a letter to his wife, his lips pursed with effort. He was a small, fussy man, with sandy hair that was falling out. While the fighting had been going on, he had been lean and tense and his small voice had been cold and full of authority. But now he had relaxed, and a little pot belly was creeping up under his belt and he kept the top button of his trousers open when he could do it without too public loss of dignity. During the war Seeger had thought of him as a natural soldier, tireless, fanatic about detail, aggressive, severely anxious to kill Germans. But in the past few months Seeger had seen him relapsing gradually and pleasantly into
a small-town wholesale hardware merchant, which he had been before the war, sedentary and a little shy, and, as he had once told Seeger, worried, here in the bleak champagne fields of France, about his daughter, who had just turned twelve and had a tendency to go after the boys and had been caught by her mother kissing a fifteen-year-old neighbor in the hammock after school.

  “Hello, Seeger,” he said, returning the salute in a mild, offhand gesture. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Am I disturbing you, sir?”

  “Oh, no. Just writing a letter to my wife. You married, Seeger?” He peered at the tall boy standing before him.

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s very difficult,” Taney sighed, pushing dissatisfiedly at the letter before him. “My wife complains I don’t tell her I love her often enough. Been married fifteen years. You’d think she’d know by now.” He smiled at Seeger. “I thought you were going to Paris,” he said. “I signed the passes yesterday.”

  “That’s what I came to see you about, sir.”

  “I suppose something’s wrong with the passes.” Taney spoke resignedly, like a man who has never quite got the hang of army regulations and has had requisitions, furloughs, requests for court-martial returned for correction in a baffling flood.

  “No, sir,” Seeger said. “The passes’re fine. They start tomorrow. Well, it’s just …” He looked around at the company clerk, who was on the sports page.

  “This confidential?” Taney asked.

  “If you don’t mind, sir.”

  “Johnny,” Taney said to the clerk, “go stand in the rain some place.”

  “Yes, sir,” the clerk said, and slowly got up and walked out.

  Taney looked shrewdly at Seeger, spoke in a secret whisper. “You pick up anything?” he asked.

  Seeger grinned. “No, sir, haven’t had my hands on a girl since Strasbourg.”

  “Ah, that’s good.” Taney leaned back, relieved, happy he didn’t have to cope with the disapproval of the Medical Corps.

  “It’s—well,” said Seeger, embarrassed, “it’s hard to say—but it’s money.”

  Taney shook his head sadly. “I know.”

  “We haven’t been paid for three months, sir, and …”

  “Damn it!” Taney stood up and shouted furiously. “I would like to take every bloody chair-warming old lady in the Finance Department and wring their necks.”

  The clerk stuck his head into the tent. “Anything wrong? You call for me, sir?”

  “No,” Taney shouted. “Get out of here.”

  The clerk ducked out.

  Taney sat down again. “I suppose,” he said, in a more normal voice, “they have their problems. Outfits being broken up, being moved all over the place. But it is rugged.”

  “It wouldn’t be so bad,” Seeger said. “But we’re going to Paris tomorrow. Olson, Welch and myself. And you need money in Paris.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Taney wagged his head. “Do you know what I paid for a bottle of champagne on the Place Pigalle in September …?” He paused significantly. “I won’t tell you. You won’t have any respect for me the rest of your life.”

  Seeger laughed. “Hanging,” he said, “is too good for the guy who thought up the rate of exchange.”

  “I don’t care if I never see another franc as long as I live.” Taney waved his letter in the air, although it had been dry for a long time.

  There was silence in the tent and Seeger swallowed a little embarrassedly, watching the CO wave the flimsy sheet of paper in regular sweeping movements. “Sir,” he said, “the truth is, I’ve come to borrow some money for Welch, Olson and myself. We’ll pay it back out of the first pay we get, and that can’t be too long from now. If you don’t want to give it to us, just tell me and I’ll understand and get the hell out of here. We don’t like to ask, but you might just as well be dead as be in Paris broke.”

  Taney stopped waving his letter and put it down thoughtfully. He peered at it, wrinkling his brow, looking like an aged bookkeeper in the single gloomy light that hung in the middle of the tent.

  “Just say the word, Captain,” Seeger said, “and I’ll blow …”

  “Stay where you are, son,” said Taney. He dug in his shirt pocket and took out a worn, sweat-stained wallet. He looked at it for a moment. “Alligator,” he said, with automatic, absent pride. “My wife sent it to me when we were in England. Pounds don’t fit in it. However …” He opened it and took out all the contents. There was a small pile of francs on the table in front of him. He counted them. “Four hundred francs,” he said. “Eight bucks.”

  “Excuse me,” Seeger said humbly. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “Delighted,” Taney said vigorously. “Absolutely delighted.” He started dividing the francs into two piles. “Truth is, Seeger, most of my money goes home in allotments. And the truth is, I lost eleven hundred francs in a poker game three nights ago, and I ought to be ashamed of myself. Here …” He shoved one pile toward Seeger. “Two hundred francs.”

  Seeger looked down at the frayed, meretricious paper, which always seemed to him like stage money, anyway. “No, sir,” he said, “I can’t take it.”

  “Take it,” Taney said. “That’s a direct order.”

  Seeger slowly picked up the money, not looking at Taney. “Some time, sir,” he said, “after we get out, you have to come over to my house and you and my father and my brother and I’ll go on a real drunk.”

  “I regard that,” Taney said, gravely, “as a solemn commitment.”

  They smiled at each other and Seeger started out.

  “Have a drink for me,” said Taney, “at the Café de la Paix. A small drink.” He was sitting down to write his wife he loved her when Seeger went out of the tent.

  Olson fell into step with Seeger and they walked silently through the mud between the tents.

  “Well, mon vieux?” Olson said finally.

  “Two hundred francs,” said Seeger.

  Olson groaned. “Two hundred francs! We won’t be able to pinch a whore’s behind on the Boulevard des Capucines for two hundred francs. That miserable, penny-loving Yankee!”

  “He only had four hundred,” Seeger said.

  “I revise my opinion,” said Olson.

  They walked disconsolately and heavily back toward their tent.

  Olson spoke only once before they got there. “These raincoats,” he said, patting his. “Most ingenious invention of the war. Highest saturation point of any modern fabric. Collect more water per square inch, and hold it, than any material known to man. All hail the quartermaster!”

  Welch was waiting at the entrance of their tent. He was standing there peering excitedly and short-sightedly out at the rain through his glasses, looking angry and tough, like a big-city hack-driver, individual and incorruptible even in the ten-million colored uniform. Every time Seeger came upon Welch unexpectedly, he couldn’t help smiling at the belligerent stance, the harsh stare through the steel-rimmed GI glasses, which had nothing at all to do with the way Welch really was. “It’s a family inheritance,” Welch had once explained. “My whole family stands as though we were getting ready to rap a drunk with a beer glass. Even my old lady.” Welch had six brothers, all devout, according to Welch, and Seeger from time to time idly pictured them standing in a row, on Sunday mornings in church, seemingly on the verge of general violence, amid the hushed Latin and Sabbath millinery.

  “How much?” Welch asked loudly.

  “Don’t make us laugh,” Olson said, pushing past him into the tent.

  “What do you think I could get from the French for my combat jacket?” Seeger said. He went into the tent and lay down on his cot.

  Welch followed them in and stood between the two of them, a superior smile on his face. “Boys,” he said, “on a man’s errand.”

  “I can just see us now,” Olson murmured, lying on his cot with his hands clasped behind his head, “painting Montmartre red. Please bring on the naked dancing girls. Four bucks worth.”<
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  “I am not worried,” Welch announced.

  “Get out of here.” Olson turned over on his stomach.

  “I know where we can put our hands on sixty-five bucks.” Welch looked triumphantly first at Olson, then at Seeger.

  Olson turned over slowly and sat up. “I’ll kill you,” he said, “if you’re kidding.”

  “While you guys are wasting your time,” Welch said, “fooling around with the infantry, I used my head. I went into Reems and used my head.”

  “Rance,” Olson said automatically. He had had two years of French in college and he felt, now that the war was over, that he had to introduce his friends to some of his culture.

  “I got to talking to a captain in the air force,” Welch said eagerly. “A little fat old paddle-footed captain that never got higher off the ground than the second floor of Com Z headquarters, and he told me that what he would admire to do more than anything else is take home a nice shiny German Luger pistol with him to show to the boys back in Pacific Grove, California.”

  Silence fell on the tent and Welch and Olson looked tentatively at Seeger.

  “Sixty-five bucks for a Luger, these days,” Olson said, “is a very good figure.”

  “They’ve been sellin’ for as low as thirty-five,” said Welch hesitantly. “I’ll bet,” he said to Seeger, “you could sell yours now and buy another one back when you get some dough, and make a clear twenty-five on the deal.”

  Seeger didn’t say anything. He had killed the owner of the Luger, an enormous SS major, in Coblenz, behind some paper bales in a warehouse, and the major had fired at Seeger three times with it, once knicking his helmet, before Seeger hit him in the face at twenty feet. Seeger had kept the Luger, a long, heavy, well-balanced gun, very carefully since then, lugging it with him, hiding it at the bottom of his bedroll, oiling it three times a week, avoiding all opportunities of selling it, although he had been offered as much as a hundred dollars for it and several times eighty and ninety, while the war was still on, before German weapons became a glut on the market.