Short Stories: Five Decades (47 page)

“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 welling 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?”