Armageddon In Retrospect (13 page)

I set the watch hands at noon, and pushed down the winder. The tiny chimes sounded twelve times, striking twice each second.

“Worth a thousand bucks in New York, Sammy,” said George thickly, as the chimes rang.

“That’s how long you have to drink out of that bottle, George,” I said, “as long as it takes the watch to strike twelve.”

“I don’t get it. What’s the big idea?”

I laid the watch on the table. “Like you said, George, it’s a funny thing about strychnine—a little of it can save your life.” I pushed the winder on the watch again. “Have a drink to Jerry Sullivan, buddy.”

The chimes tinkled again. Eight…nine…ten…eleven…twelve. The room was quiet.

“O.K., so I didn’t drink,” said George, grinning. “So what happens now, Boy Scout?”

III.

When I began this story, I said I thought it was a murder story. I’m not sure.

I made it back to the American lines, all right, and I reported that George had killed himself accidentally with a pistol he’d found in a ditch. I signed an affidavit swearing it had happened that way.

What the hell, he was dead, and that was that, wasn’t it? Who’d have benefited if I’d told them I shot George? My soul? George’s soul, maybe?

Well, Army Intelligence smelled something fishy about the story quick enough. At Camp Lucky Strike, near Le Havre, France, where they had all of the repatriated prisoners of war waiting for boats home, I got called into a tent Intelligence had set up there. I’d been in camp for two weeks, and was due to ship out the next afternoon.

A gray-haired major asked the questions. He had the affidavit in front of him, and he passed over the story about the pistol in the ditch without showing much interest. He quizzed me for quite a while about how George had behaved in prison camp, and he wanted to know exactly what George looked like. He took notes on what I told him.

“Sure you have the name right?” he asked.

“Yessir, and the serial number, too. Here’s one of his dogtags, sir. I left the other one with the body. Sorry, sir, I meant to turn this in before now.”

The major studied the tag, finally fastened it to the affidavit, and slipped both into a thick folder. I could see George’s name written on the outside. “I don’t know exactly what to do with this next,” he said, toying with the tie-string on the folder. “Quite a guy, George Fisher.” He offered me a cigarette. I took it, but I didn’t light it right away.

This was it. God knows how, but they’d found out the whole story, I thought. I wanted to yell, but I kept on smiling, my teeth clamped together hard.

The major took his time about phrasing the next sentence. “The tag is a phony,” he said at last, smiling a little. “There’s nobody by that name missing from the U.S. Army.” He leaned forward to light my cigarette. “Maybe we’d better turn this folder over to the Germans so they can notify the next of kin.”

I’d never seen George Fisher before they brought him into prison camp alone that day eight months previous, but I should have known the type. I grew up with a couple of kids like him. He must have been a good Nazi to get his job in German Intelligence, because as I said, most of the
Bund
kids didn’t do that well. I don’t know how many of them got back to the U.S. when the war ended, but my buddy George Fisher damn near made it.

I
was sitting before the window of my small cabinetmaking shop in the Czechoslovakian town of Beda. My widowed daughter, Marta, held the curtain back for me, and watched the Americans through one corner of the window, being careful not to block any of my view with her head.

“I wish he would turn this way, so we could see his face,” I said impatiently. “Marta, pull the curtain back more.”

“Is he a general?” said Marta.

“A general as commandant for Beda?” I laughed. “A corporal, maybe. How well fed they all look, eh? Aaaaaah, they eat—
how
they eat!” I ran my hand along the back of my black cat. “Now, kitty, you have only to cross the street for your first taste of American cream.” I raised my hands over my head. “Marta! Do you feel it, do you
feel
it? The Russians are gone, Marta, they’re gone!”

And now, we were trying to see the face of the American commandant, who was moving into the building across the street—where the Russian commandant had been a few weeks before. The Americans went inside, kicking their way through rubbish and splintered furniture. For a while, there was nothing to see through my window. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes.

“It’s over, the killing is all over,” I said, “and we’re alive. Did you think that was possible? Did anyone in his right mind expect to be alive when it was over?”

“I feel almost as though being alive were something to be ashamed of,” she said.

“The world will probably feel that way for a long, long time. You can at least thank God you’ve come through it all with very little guilt in all the killing. Having been helpless in the middle has that advantage. Think of the guilt on the shoulders of the Americans—a hundred thousand dead in the Moscow bombings, fifty thousand in Kiev—”

“What about the guilt of the Russians?” she said passionately.

“No—not the Russians. That’s one of the joys of losing a war. You surrender your guilt along with your capital, and join the ranks of the innocent little people.”

The cat rubbed her flanks against my wooden leg and purred. I suppose most men with wooden legs conceal the fact as best they can. I lost my left leg as an Austrian infantryman in 1916, and I wear one trouser leg higher than the other to show off the handsome oak peg I made for myself after World War I. Carved in the peg are the images of Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson, who helped the Czech Republic rise from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1919, when I was twenty-five. And below these images are two more, each within a wreath: Tomáš; Masaryk and Eduard Beneš;, the first leaders of the Republic. There are other faces that should be added, and now, now that peace is with us once again, perhaps I’ll carve them. The only carving I’ve done on the peg in the past thirty years is crude and obscure, and maybe barbaric—three deep nicks near the iron tip, for the three German officers whose car I sent down a mountainside one night in 1943, during the Nazi occupation.

These men across the street weren’t the first Americans I’d seen. I owned a furniture factory in Prague during the days of the Republic, and I did a great deal of business with buyers for American department stores. When the Nazis came, I lost my factory, and moved to Beda, this quiet town in the foothills of Sudetenland. My wife died soon after that, of the rarest of causes, the natural ones. Then I had only my daughter, Marta.

Now, praise God, I was seeing Americans again—after the Nazis, after the Russian Army of World War II, after the Czech communists, after the Russians again. Knowing this day was coming had kept me alive. Hidden under the floorboards of my workshop was a bottle of Scotch that had constantly tried my willpower. But I left it in its hidingplace. It was to be my present to the Americans when they finally came.

“They’re coming out,” said Marta.

I opened my eyes to see a stocky, red-headed American major staring at me from across the street, his hands on his hips. He looked tired and annoyed. Another young man, a captain, tall, massive, and slow, and very Italian-looking except for his stature, strode out of the building to join him.

Stupidly, perhaps, I blinked back at them. “They’re coming over here!” I said excitedly, helplessly.

The major and the captain walked in, each looking down at a blue pamphlet, which I gathered contained Czech phrases. The big captain seemed self-conscious, and I sensed that the red-headed major was a little belligerent.

The captain ran his finger down the margin of a page, and shook his head dispiritedly. “‘Machine gun, mortar, motorcycle…tank, tourniquet, trench.’ Nothing about filing cabinets, desks, or chairs.”

“What the hell you expect?” said the major. “It’s a book for soldiers, not a bunch of pansy clerks.” He scowled at the pamphlet, said something completely unintelligible, and looked up at me expectantly. “There’s one hell of a swell book,” he said. “Says that’s the way to ask for an interpreter, and the old man acts like it was Ubangi poetry.”

“Gentlemen, I speak English,” I said, “and my daughter, Marta, too.”

“By God, he really does,” said the major. “Good for you, Pop.” He made me feel like a small dog, who had cleverly—for a small dog—fetched him a rubber ball.

I held out my hand to the major, and told him my name. He looked down at my hand superciliously, and kept his hands in his pockets. I felt myself reddening.

“My name is Captain Paul Donnini,” said the other man quickly, “and this is Major Lawson Evans.” He shook my hand. “Sir,” he said to me—his voice was paternal and deep—“the Russians—”

The major used an epithet that made my jaw drop, and amazed Marta, who has heard soldiers talk for the better part of her life.

Captain Donnini was embarrassed. “They haven’t left a stick of furniture,” he continued, “and I’m wondering if you could let us have some of the pieces in your shop here.”

“I was going to offer you them,” I said. “It’s a tragedy they smashed everything. They confiscated the most beautiful furniture in Beda.” I smiled and shook my head. “Aaaaah, those enemies of capitalists—they had their quarters fixed up like a little Versailles.”

“We saw the wreckage,” said the captain.

“And then, when they couldn’t have the treasures anymore, then no one could have them.” I made a motion like a man swinging an axe. “And the world becomes a little duller for us all—for there being fewer treasures. Bourgeois treasures, maybe, but those who can’t afford beautiful things love the idea of there being such things somewhere.”

The captain nodded pleasantly, but, to my surprise, I saw that my words had somehow irritated Major Evans.

“Well, anyway,” I said, “I want you to take whatever you need. It will be an honor to help you.” I was wondering if now was the opportune time to offer the Scotch. Things weren’t going quite as I’d expected.

“He’s real smart, Pop is,” said the major acidly.

I suddenly realized what it was the major had been implying. It was a shock. He was telling me that I was one of the enemy. He meant that I should cooperate because I was afraid; he wanted me to be afraid.

For an instant, I was physically sick. Once, as a much younger and more Christian man, I liked to say that men who depended on fear to get things done were sick and pathetic and pitifully alone. Later, after having seen whole armies of such men in action, I saw that I was the kind that was alone—and maybe sick and pathetic, too, but I would have killed myself rather than admit that.

I had to be wrong about the new commandant. I told myself I’d been suspicious and—now that I’m old, I can say it—afraid too long. But Marta felt the threat, the fear in the air, too, I could tell. She was hiding her warmth, as she had hidden it for years, behind a dull, prim mask.

“Yes,” I said, “you are welcome to anything you can use.”

The major pushed open the door of the back room, where I sleep and do my work. I was through being host. I sank back down in my chair by the window. Captain Donnini, ill at ease, stayed with Marta and me.

“It’s very beautiful here in the mountains,” he said lamely.

We lapsed into an uncomfortable silence, broken from time to time by the major’s rummaging about in the back room. I took a good look at the captain, and was struck by how much more boyish he seemed than the major, though it was quite possible that they were the same age. It was hard to imagine him on a battlefield, and it was hard to imagine the major anywhere else.

I heard Major Evans give a low whistle, and I knew he’d found the commandant’s desk.

“The major must have been a very brave man, he has so many medals,” said Marta at last.

Captain Donnini seemed grateful for a chance to explain about his superior. “He was and is an extremely brave man,” he said warmly. He said that the major and most of the enlisted men in Beda had come from an apparently famous armored division, which, the captain implied, never knew fear or fatigue, and loved nothing better than a good fight.

I clucked my tongue in wonderment, as I always do when hearing of such a division. I have heard of them from American officers, German officers, Russian officers; and my officers in World War I solemnly declared that I belonged to such a division. When I hear of a division of war-lovers from an enlisted man, maybe I will believe it, provided the man is sober and has been shot at. If there are such divisions, perhaps they should be preserved between wars in dry ice.

“And what about you?” said Marta, breaking into the captain’s blood-and-thunder biography of Major Evans.

He smiled. “I’m so new to Europe, I can’t—if you’ll pardon the expression—find my behind with both hands. The air of Fort Benning, Georgia, is still in my lungs. The major—he’s the hero, been fighting for three years without a break.”

“And I didn’t figure to wind up here as a combination constable, county clerk, and wailing wall,” said Major Evans, standing in the doorway of the back room. “Pop, I want this desk. Making it for yourself, were you?”

“What would I do with a desk like that? I was building it for the Russian commandant.”

“A friend of yours, eh?”

I tried to smile, unconvincingly, I imagine. “I wouldn’t be here to talk to you, if I’d refused to make it. And I wouldn’t have been here to talk to
him,
if I hadn’t made a bed for the Nazi commandant—with a garland of swastikas and the first stanza of the Horst Wessel Song on the headboard.”

The captain smiled with me, but the major didn’t. “
This
one is different,” said the major. “
He
comes right out and says he was a collaborator.”

“I didn’t say that,” I said evenly.

“Don’t spoil it, don’t spoil it,” said Major Evans, “it’s a refreshing change.”

Marta suddenly hurried upstairs.

“I was no collaborator,” I said.

“Sure, sure—fought ’em every inch of the way. You bet. I know, I know. Come here a minute, will you? I want to talk about my desk.”

He was seated on the unfinished desk, an enormous and, to me, hideous piece of furniture. I’d designed it as a private satire on the Russian commandant’s bad taste and hypocrisy about symbols of wealth. I’d made it as ornate and pretentious as possible, a Russian peasant’s dream of what a Wall Street banker’s desk looked like. It glittered with bits of colored glass set like jewels in the wood, and it was highlighted with radiator paint that looked something like gilt. Now it appeared that the satire would have to remain private, for the American commandant was as taken by it as the Russian had been.

“This is what I call a piece of furniture,” said Major Evans.

“Very nice,” said Captain Donnini absently. He was looking up the stairs, where Marta had fled.

“There’s just one thing wrong with it, Pop.”

“The hammer and sickle—I know. I was going to take—”

“How right you are,” said the major. He drew back his boot, and gave the massive escutcheon a savage kick on its edge. The round piece broke free, rolled drunkenly into a corner, and settled face down with a rowrroworrowrr—clack! The cat investigated it, and backed away suspiciously.

“An eagle goes there, Pop.” The major took off his cap to show me the American eagle on it. “Like this one.”

“Not a simple design. It’ll take a while,” I said. “Not as simple as a swastika or a hammer and sickle, eh?”

I’d dreamed for weeks of sharing the joke of the desk with the Americans, of telling them about the secret drawer I’d built in for the Russian commandant, the richest joke of all. Now, the Americans were here; and I felt little different than before—rotten and lost and lonely. I didn’t feel like sharing anything with anyone but Marta.

“No,” I said, answering the major’s poisonous question. “No, sir.” What was I supposed to say?

The Scotch stayed under the floorboards, and the secret drawer in the desk remained a secret.

The American garrison in Beda was about a hundred men, almost all of them, save Captain Donnini, veterans of years of fighting in the same armored division from which Major Evans had come. They behaved like conquerors, with Major Evans encouraging them to do just that. I’d expected a great deal of the coming of the Americans—a rebirth of pride and dignity for Marta and me; a little prosperity and good things to eat, too; and for Marta, the better part of a lifetime worth living. Instead, there was the bullying distrust of Major Evans, the new commandant, multiplied a hundred times in the persons of his men.

In the nightmare of a warring world, it takes peculiar skills to get along. One of these is the understanding of the psychology of occupation troops. The Russians weren’t like the Nazis, and the Americans were very different from either. There wasn’t the physical violence of the Russians and Nazis, thank God—no shootings or torture. What was particularly interesting was that the Americans had to get drunk before they could make real trouble. Unfortunately for Beda, Major Evans let them get drunk as often as they liked. When they were drunk, they were fond of stealing—in the name of souvenir hunting—driving jeeps through the street at breakneck speeds, firing guns in the air, shouting obscenities, picking fistfights, and breaking windows.