Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  Olson looked closely at him. They had been together so long, through so many things, that flickers and hints of expression on each other’s faces were recognized and acted upon. “Anything wrong?” Olson asked.

  “No,” said Seeger. “Nothing much.”

  “Norman,” Welch said, his voice young and solemn. “Norman, we’ve been talking, Olson and me. We decided—you’re pretty attached to that Luger, and maybe—if you—well …”

  “What he’s trying to say,” said Olson, “is we withdraw the request. If you want to sell it, O.K. If you don’t, don’t do it for our sake. Honest.”

  Seeger looked at them, standing there, disreputable and tough and familiar. “I haven’t made up my mind yet,” he said.

  “Anything you decide,” Welch said oratorically, “is perfectly all right with us. Perfectly.”

  They walked aimlessly and silently across the field, away from camp. As they walked, their shoes making a wet, sliding sound in the damp, dead grass, Seeger thought of the time Olson had covered him in the little town outside Cherbourg, when Seeger had been caught going down the side of a street by four Germans with a machine gun on the second story of a house on the corner and Olson had had to stand out in the middle of the street with no cover at all for more than a minute, firing continuously, so that Seeger could get away alive. And he thought of the time outside Saint Lô when he had been wounded and had lain in a minefield for three hours and Welch and Captain Taney had come looking for him in the darkness and had found him and picked him up and run for it, all of them expecting to get blown up any second.

  And he thought of all the drinks they’d had together and the long marches and the cold winter together, and all the girls they’d gone out with together, and he thought of his father and brother crouching behind the window in Ohio waiting for the rockets and the crowds armed with Browning automatic rifles.

  “Say,” he stopped and stood facing them. “Say, what do you guys think of the Jews?”

  Welch and Olson looked at each other, and Olson glanced down at the letter in Seeger’s hand.

  “Jews?” Olson said finally. “What’re they? Welch, you ever hear of the Jews?”

  Welch looked thoughtfully at the gray sky. “No,” he said. “But remember, I’m an uneducated fellow.”

  “Sorry, Bud,” Olson said, turning to Seeger. “We can’t help you. Ask us another question. Maybe we’ll do better.”

  Seeger peered at the faces of his friends. He would have to rely upon them, later on, out of uniform, on their native streets, more than he had ever relied on them on the bullet-swept street and in the dark minefield in France. Welch and Olson stared back at him, troubled, their faces candid and tough and dependable.

  “What time,” Seeger asked, “did you tell that captain you’d meet him?”

  “Eight o’clock,” Welch said. “But we don’t have to go. If you have any feeling about that gun …”

  “We’ll meet him,” Seeger said. “We can use that sixty-five bucks.”

  “Listen,” Olson said, “I know how much you like that gun and I’ll feel like a heel if you sell it.”

  “Forget it,” Seeger said, starting to walk again. “What could I use it for in America?”

  The Man with One Arm

  “I would like complete reports on these three people,” Captain Mikhailov was saying. He pushed a slip of paper across the desk to Garbrecht, and Garbrecht glanced at the names. “They are interpreters at the American civil affairs headquarters. The Americans have a charming habit of hiring ex-Nazis almost exclusively for those jobs, and we have found it rewarding to inquire into the pasts of such gentlemen.” Mikhailov smiled. He was a short, stocky man with a round, shielded face, and pale, unsmiling eyes, and when he smiled it was like a flower painted unconvincingly on stone.

  Garbrecht recognized two of the three names. Mikhailov was right. They were Nazis. It would take some thinking out, later, though, to decide whether to expose them to Mikhailov, or exactly how far to expose them. Garbrecht watched Mikhailov unlock a drawer in his desk and take out some American marks. Methodically, Mikhailov counted the notes out in his square, machine-like hands. He locked the drawer and pushed the money across the desk to Garbrecht.

  “There,” Mikhailov said, “that will keep you until we see each other next week.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Garbrecht said. He reached out and pulled the money toward him, leaving it on the top of the desk. He took out his wallet, and, slowly, one by one, put the notes into the wallet. He was still slow and clumsy with things like that, because he had not yet learned how to handle things deftly with his left hand, and his right hand and arm were buried behind the field hospital in the brewery fourteen hundred miles away. Mikhailov watched him impassively, without offering aid.

  Garbrecht put his wallet away and stood up. His overcoat was thrown over a chair and he picked it up and struggled to get it over his shoulders.

  “Till next week,” he said.

  “Next week,” Mikhailov said.

  Garbrecht did not salute. He opened the door and went out. At least, he thought, with a nervous sensation of triumph, as he went down the grimy steps past the two plain-clothes men loitering in the dark hall, at least I didn’t salute the bastard. That’s the third week in a row I didn’t salute him.

  The plain-clothes men stared at him with a common, blank, threatening look. By now he knew them too well to be frightened by them. They looked that way at everything. When they looked at a horse or a child or a bunch of flowers, they threatened it. It was merely their comfortable professional adjustment to the world around them, like Mikhailov’s smile. The Russians, Garbrecht thought as he went down the street, what a people to have in Berlin!

  Garbrecht walked without looking about him. The landscape of the cities of Germany had become monotonous—rubble, broken statues, neatly swept lanes between piled cracked brick, looming blank single walls, shells of buildings, half-demolished houses in which dozens of families somehow lived. He moved briskly and energetically, like everyone else, swinging his one arm a little awkwardly to maintain his balance, but very little of what he saw around him made any impression on him. A solid numbness had taken possession of him when they cut off his arm. It was like the anesthesia which they injected into your spine. You were conscious and you could see and hear and speak and you could understand what was being done to you, but all feeling was absent. Finally, Garbrecht knew, the anesthesia would wear off, but for the present it was a most valuable defense.

  “Lieutenant.” It was a woman’s voice somewhere behind him, and Garbrecht did not look around. “Oh, Lieutenant Garbrecht.”

  He stopped and turned slowly. Nobody had called him lieutenant for more than a year now. A short, blonde woman in a gray cloth coat was hurrying toward him. He looked at her, puzzled. He had never seen her before, and he wondered if it were she who had called his name.

  “Did you call me?” he asked as she stopped in front of him.

  “Yes,” she said. She was thin, with a pale, rather pretty face. She did not smile. “I followed you from Mikhailov’s office.”

  “I’m sure,” Garbrecht said, turning and starting away, “that you have made some mistake.”

  The woman fell in beside him, walking swiftly. She wore no stockings and her legs showed a little purple from the cold. “Please,” she said, “do not behave like an idiot.”

  Then, in a flat, undemanding voice, she said several things to him that he had thought nobody alive remembered about him, and finally she called him by his correct name, and he knew that there was no escaping it now. He stopped in the middle of the ruined street and sighed, and said, after a long time, “Very well. I will go with you.”

  * * *

  There was a smell of cooking in the room. Good cooking. A roast, probably, and a heavy, strong soup. It was the kind of smell that had seemed to vanish from Germany sometime around 1942, and even with all the other things happening to him, Garbrecht could feel the saliva wellin
g helplessly and tantalizingly up from the ducts under his tongue. It was a spacious room with a high ceiling that must have been at one time quite elegant. There was a bricked-up fireplace with a large, broken mirror over it. By some trick of fracture the mirror reflected separate images in each of its broken parts, and it made Garbrecht feel that something shining and abnormal was hidden there.

  The girl had ushered him without formality into the room and had told him to sit down and had disappeared. Garbrecht could feel his muscles slowly curling as he sat rigidly in the half-broken wooden chair, staring coldly at the battered desk, the surprising leather chair behind the desk, the strange mirror, the ten-inch high portrait of Lenin which was the only adornment on the wall. Lenin looked down at him from the wall, across the years, through the clumsy heroics of the lithographer, with a remote, ambiguous challenge glaring from the dark, wild eyes.

  The door through which he had himself come was opened and a man entered. The man slammed the door behind him and walked swiftly across the room to the desk. Then he wheeled and faced Garbrecht.

  “Well, well,” the man said, smiling, his voice hearty and welcoming, “here you are. Here you are. Sorry to keep you waiting. Terribly sorry.” He beamed across the room, leaning forward hospitably from his position in front of the desk. He was a short, stocky man with a light, pink face, and pale, silky hair that he wore long, possibly in an attempt to hide what might be an increasing tendency to baldness. He looked like an amiable butcher’s boy, growing a little old for his job, or the strong man in a tumbling act in a small-time circus, the one on the bottom that the others climbed on. Garbrecht stood up and peered at him, trying to remember if he had ever seen the man before.

  “No, no,” the man said, waving his pudgy hands, “no, we have never met. Do not trouble your brain. Sit down, sit down. Comfort first. Everything else after.” He leapt lightly across the room and almost pushed Garbrecht into his chair. “It is a lesson I have learned from our friends, the Americans. How to slouch. Look what they’ve accomplished merely by spending most of their time on the base of their spines.” He laughed uproariously, as though the joke were too merry not to be enjoyed, and swept quickly across the room, with his almost leaping, light gait, and hurled himself into the large leather chair behind the desk. He continued beaming at Garbrecht.

  “I want to say,” said Garbrecht, “that I have no notion of why I was asked to come here. I merely came,” he said carefully, “because the young lady made me curious, and I had an hour to spare, anyway, and …”

  “Enough, enough.” The man rocked solidly back and forth in the squeaking chair. “You came. Sufficient. Delighted. Very pleased. Have a cigarette.…” With a sudden movement, he thrust out the brass cigarette box that lay on the desk.

  “Not at the moment, thank you,” Garbrecht said, although his throat was quivering for one.

  “Ah,” the fat man said, grinning. “A rarity. Only German known to refuse a cigarette since the surrender. Still, no matter.…” He took a cigarette himself and lighted it deftly. “First, introductions, Lieutenant. My name. Anton Seedorf. Captain, Hermann Goering Division. I keep the title.” He grinned. “A man saves what he can from a war.”

  “I imagine,” Garbrecht said, “you know my name.”

  “Yes.” Seedorf seemed to bubble with some inward humor. “Oh, yes, I certainly do. Yes, indeed. I’ve heard a great deal about you. Been most anxious to meet you. The arm,” he said, with sudden solemnity. “Where was that?”

  “Stalingrad.”

  “Ah, Stalingrad,” Seedorf said heartily, as though he were speaking the name of a winter resort at which he had spent a marvelous holiday. “A lot of good souls left there, weren’t there, many good souls. A miscalculation. One of many. Vanity. The most terrible thing in the world, the vanity of a victorious army. A most interesting subject for historians—the role of vanity in military disasters. Don’t you agree?” He peered eagerly at Garbrecht.

  “Captain,” Garbrecht said coldly, “I cannot remain here all afternoon.”

  “Of course,” Seedorf said. “Naturally. You’re curious about why I invited you here. I understand.” He puffed swiftly on his cigarette, wreathing his pale head in smoke before the cracked mirror. He jumped up and perched himself on the desk, facing Garbrecht, boyishly. “Well,” he said, heartily, “it is past time for hiding anything. I know you. I know your very good record in the Party …”

  Garbrecht felt the cold rising in his throat. It’s going to be worse, he thought, worse than I expected.

  “… promising career in the army until the unfortunate accident at Stalingrad,” Seedorf was saying brightly, “loyal, dependable, et cetera; there is really no need to go into it at this moment, is there?”

  “No,” said Garbrecht, “none at all.” He stood up. “If it is all the same to you, I prefer not to be reminded of any of it. That is all past and, I hope, it will soon all be forgotten.”

  Seedorf giggled. “Now, now,” he said. “There is no need to be so cautious with me. To a person like you or me,” he said, with a wide, genial gesture, “it is never forgotten. To a person who has said the things we have said, who did the things we have done, for so many years, a paid Party official, a good soldier, a good German …”

  “I am not interested any more,” Garbrecht said loudly but hopelessly, “in being what you call a good German.”

  “It is not a question,” Seedorf said, smiling widely and dousing his cigarette, “of what you are interested in, Lieutenant. I beg your pardon. It is a question of what must be done. Simply that.”

  “I am not going to do anything,” said Garbrecht.

  “I beg your pardon once more.” Seedorf rocked happily back and forth on the edge of the desk. “There are several little things that you can be very useful doing. I beg your pardon, you will do them. You work for the Russians, collecting information in the American zone. A useful fellow. You also work for the Americans, collecting information in the Russian zone.” Seedorf beamed at him. “A prize!”

  Garbrecht started to deny it, then shrugged wearily. There might be a way out, but denial certainly was not it.

  “We, too, several of us, maybe more than several, could use a little information.” Seedorf’s voice had grown harder, and there was only an echo of jollity left in it, like the sound of laughter dying down a distant alley on a cold night. “We are not as large an organization at the moment as the Russians; we are not as well equipped for the time being, as the Americans … but we are even more … more …” He chuckled as he thought of the word … “Curious. And more ambitious.”

  There was silence in the room. Garbrecht stared heavily at the pale, fat head outlined against the broken mirror with its insane, multiplied reflections. If he were alone, Garbrecht knew he would bend his head and weep, as he did so often, without apparent reason, these days.

  “Why don’t you stop?” he asked heavily. “What’s the sense? How many times do you have to be beaten?”

  Seedorf grinned. “One more time, at least,” he said. “Is that a good answer?”

  “I won’t do it,” Garbrecht said. “I’ll give the whole thing up. I don’t want to get involved any more.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Seedorf happily, “you will give up nothing. It is terrible for me to talk to a man who gave his arm for the Fatherland this way,” he said with a kind of glittering facsimile of pity, “but I am afraid the Russians would be told your correct name and Party position from 1934 on, and they would be told of your affiliations with the Americans, and they would be told of your job as adjutant to the commanding officer of Maidanek concentration camp in the winter of 1944, when several thousand people died by orders with your name on them.…”

  Seedorf drummed his heels softly and cheerfully against the desk. “They have just really begun on their war trials … and these new ones will not run ten months, Lieutenant. I beg your pardon for talking this way, and I promise you from now on, we will not mention any of these matter
s again.” He jumped up and came across the room in his swift, round walk. “I know how you feel,” he said softly. “Often, I feel the same way. Quit. Quit now, once and for all. But it is not possible to quit. In a little while you will see that and you will be very grateful.”

  “What is it?” Garbrecht said. “What is it that you want me to do?”

  “Just a little thing,” Seedorf said. “Nothing at all, really. Merely report here every week and tell me what you have told the Russians and the Americans and what they have told you. Fifteen minutes a week. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Fifteen minutes a week.” Garbrecht was surprised that he had actually laughed. “That’s all.”

  “Exactly.” Seedorf laughed. “It won’t be so bad. There’s always a meal to be had here, and cigarettes. It is almost like old times. There!” He stepped back, smiling widely. “I am so happy it is settled.” He took Garbrecht’s hand and shook it warmly with both his. “Till next week,” he said.

  Garbrecht looked heavily at him. Then he sighed. “Till next week,” he said.

  Seedorf held the door open for him when he went out. There was no one else in the corridor and no guards at the door, and he walked slowly down the creaking hall, through the rich smell of cooking, and on into the street and the gathering cold evening air.

  He walked blankly through the broken brick wastes toward the American control post, staring straight ahead of him. Next week, he thought, I must ask him what the picture of Lenin is doing on the wall.

  The office of Captain Peterson was very different from the bleak room in which Captain Mikhailov conducted his affairs. There was a clerk in the corner and an American flag on the wall, and the busy sound of American typewriters from the next room. There was a water cooler and a warm radiator, and there was a picture of a pretty girl with a small blond child on Peterson’s disordered desk. Garbrecht took his coat off and sat down in one of the comfortable looted plush chairs and waited for Peterson. The interviews with Peterson were much less of a strain than the ones with Mikhailov. Peterson was a large young man who spoke good German and, amazingly, fair Russian. He was good-natured and naïve, and Garbrecht was sure he believed Garbrecht’s excellently forged papers and innocuous, false record, and Garbrecht’s quiet, repeated insistence that he had been anti-Nazi from the beginning. Peterson was an enthusiast. He had been an enthusiast about the war, in which he had performed quite creditably, he was an enthusiast about Germany, its scenery, its art, its future, its people, whom he regarded as the first victims of Hitler. Mikhailov was different. He bleakly made no comment on the official soft tones issuing from Moscow on the subject of the German people, but Garbrecht knew that he regarded the Germans not as the first victims, but as the first accomplices.