Short Stories: Five Decades (51 page)

And, supposing H. G. Wells had been a Jew, and were standing on the deck of the
Hope
this morning, after the years of murder in Germany, after the displaced persons’ camps, after the illegal journey across Europe and the crooked voyage down the Mediterranean, what clever, hopeful statement would he make then, waiting there like an old bull in the knacker’s yard, waiting for the clubs and the Cyprian wire?

An Arab laborer walked by, rolling a wheelbarrow. He put the wheelbarrow down in front of the platoon, his long, skinny arms dark mahogany, dangling out of his tattered shirt. He had a little black scraggly beard, and he didn’t smell so good, either. He grinned at the soldiers. His teeth were not all there, but when he smiled, he looked childlike and ingratiating, and some of the men smiled back at him. The Arab looked over his shoulder at the approaching boat, grinned more widely, and moved his finger across his Adam’s apple in the gesture of throat slitting.

“Get out of here, you filthy old rascal,” Lieutenant Madox said, smiling broadly. “Go ahead. Out of the way. We’ll have no international incidents on this dock.”

The Arab bobbed his head, the grin fixed on his face, and made the throat-cutting gesture again, like a child who repeats a trick that he sees has pleased his elders. Then he bent and picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow again and trundled it off, giggling to himself.

Hawkins didn’t remember what H. G. Wells had had to say about the Arabs. He was sure there must have been something on the subject, because there was something on every subject in the old man’s books, but he couldn’t remember. The Arabs, Hawkins had to admit, were much more pleasant to have around than the Jews. For one thing, they did what you told them. For another thing, they weren’t likely to get you off in a corner and engage you in a loud political argument. Esther lived in the same house with a family by the name of Freedman, who were German refugees and whose two sons had been in the Jewish Brigade during the war. The two boys lay in wait for Hawkins when he came to call for Esther and battered him with questions like “Why doesn’t Britain live up to the Balfour Declaration?” and “Why does Britain allow the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who worked with the Nazis during the war, to come back to lead the Arabs from Cairo?” It was very queer, sitting in the small white living room of the apartment house, with your rifle leaning against the wall (from time to time, Division Headquarters ordered that all troops be armed when they left the barracks), drinking tea and eating little sweet cookies that Mrs. Freedman kept pressing on you, debating politely with the two fierce young veterans, who were probably members of the Jewish underground and had probably blown up a sergeant major in the morning.

“It’s not fair,” he had said to Esther after one such session, when he had finally managed to get her away from the house. “They talk as though I was personally responsible.”

Esther had glanced at him obliquely, then looked away. “Maybe,” she said softly, “maybe that’s what they think about every British soldier.”

“Is that what you think?”

Esther had shaken her head and gripped his arm more firmly. “No,” she had said gravely, her low, soft voice solemn and warm. “No, I do not think of you as a British soldier.” They had been walking along the quiet, white street, in the clear, foreign evening air—his boots making a hob-nailed clatter on the pavement and his rifle sling pulling at his shoulder and the girl beside him in a thin white dress with a blue sweater over it, her hair blowing gently, soft and pale brown, in the stirring wind.

“Listen to them sing,” Hogan said, his voice nervous and angry. “The mur-derin’ heathen! They’ll sing a different tune an hour from now, they will!”

Hawkins opened his eyes. The ship was much closer now, and the songs clamored across the water from the packed ship, with the soprano of the women shrill and glittering over the menacing bass of the men’s voices. Hogan, Hawkins remembered, also sang songs in another language—in Gaelic—and the words “freedom” and “justice” figured prominently in them, too. They were songs Hogan’s grandfather had taught him in memory of his dead father, shot through the throat on a Dublin pavement by men in the same uniform that Hogan was wearing now so far away, seventy-five miles north of Jerusalem.

Hawkins closed his eyes again. It would do no good to watch the boat come nearer, foot by foot. There would be time enough to look, later. He thought of Esther. He had arranged to meet her that night in Tel Aviv and take her to a movie if he got off duty early. He had not known what the duty would be, though, and he doubted if he would tell her later on. Matters were complicated enough with Esther as it was. She looked so cheerful and agreeable, so pretty and young, like the very nicest kind of girl you might meet by a lucky accident at home, but there had been the terrible times when she had suddenly broken down, for no apparent reason, and wept in his arms, wildly and inconsolably, clutching him as though to make certain again and again that he was there and alive. She was a German girl, whose mother and father had been killed in Munich, and whose husband had been caught by the British near Haifa unloading illegal immigrants in 1939. He had been put into a camp, where he had caught typhus and died. The authorities had permitted Esther to visit her husband the day he died, and once Esther had told Hawkins about it, although most of the time they avoided talking about things like that. The husband, who was twenty-four years old and had been a robust, laughing young man (Hawkins had seen his picture), had been wasted by the disease to ninety pounds and was screaming in his delirium when Esther finally saw him. He did not recognize his wife at all when she came into the room, and that, somehow, was Esther’s bitterest memory—the screaming, skeleton-like boy turning his head senselessly to the wall in the bare, barred room. Then, after that, all through the war, Esther had been kept under house arrest and had not been permitted to go out into the streets from sunset to dawn. When Hawkins had first known her, she had been quiet, almost fearful, and perhaps it was because she had matched his own shyness and fearfulness so well that he had begun to love her.

For the past several months, whenever Hawkins was waiting somewhere, and closed his eyes, as he was doing now, he had had a recurrent daydream. It was winter in the dream, a cold, windy night, and he and Esther were sitting before a warm fire in their own house. He could never decide whether the house was in England, in a quiet village, or on a farm in Palestine, cupped in the small, old hills, among the orange orchards. They were reading, and occasionally they looked up from their books and smiled at each other, not having to talk, in the firelight. After a time, there was a knock on the door and guests began to come in; not many of them, just good friends. Hogan, with his wild hair plastered down politely. Fleming, with the schoolteacher wife from Leeds he talked about so often. Robinson, who had been in Hawkins’ platoon in Africa—it was always hard to remember, especially in a daydream, that Robinson was dead, buried in the small, windy cemetery near Constantine. They talked quietly in the warm room, and Hawkins opened up the tall bottles of heavy beer, and after a while Hogan sang, in his hoarse, accurate boy’s voice, the sad, thrilling songs his grandfather had taught him in his father’s honor, songs whose words no one understood but whose melodies made you somehow melancholy and proud.

Hawkins blinked and refused himself the pleasure of taking the daydream through to its quiet ending. It was ridiculous to allow himself to moon like that, and it only made it worse when he finally opened his eyes and looked around him. There he was, on the dock, in the hot, bare sun, with the nightstick, waiting for Lieutenant Madox to order him to fight. And in the hills behind him, among the orange groves, people were hiding rifles and knives and machine guns to murder each other in the long winter nights. And in England, from all the letters he got from his family, they were preparing to starve and freeze to celebrate their victory in the war. He was sorry he was not older. Perhaps if he were thirty or forty or fifty, he could understand it better. During the war they had been warm, during the war they had been fed, during the war the Russians had loved them, the Americans had admired them, the French had kissed them when they came into a town; wherever they had gone, they had been heroes and saviors. He remembered the day that the election returns came out. He was still in Germany, in Hamburg, and an American sergeant had come over to him and said, very solemnly, “Soldier, my name is McCarthy. I’m a paid-up C.I.O. member from Indianapolis. I decided I wanted to tell some Englishmen how wonderful I think they are, and you’re the first one I’ve come across since I made the decision. You’ve shown the whole world how civilized human beings should behave.” The American had been drunk, of course (was it possible that Americans appreciated other people only when they had ten drinks under their belts?), but he had shaken Hawkins’ hand sternly and clapped him on the back, and Hawkins had walked away grinning and feeling proud because he had voted for Attlee and the others who were going to prove that a country could be run for the benefit of the workingman without violence or disaster. He was glad the American wasn’t around to see him standing on the dock today with helmet and nightstick, in this land of widows and orphans, in this land where there were no whole families, only survivors, in this land where everyone—every girl on the street, every child in a schoolroom, every farmer plowing a furrow—had a story like Esther’s, memories like Esther’s, nightmares like Esther’s, where the memory of the furnace flickered across every face, the knocking of the midnight arrest broke into every dream, where agony was so commonplace that no one even remarked it. What a puzzling, sad thing it was to be an Englishman today, Hawkins thought, staring at the boat, which was so close now. If he was in England, he was caught between cold and hunger, in Palestine between Jew and Arab, in India between Hindu and Moslem, in the East Indies between Dutchman and Javanese, and no friends anywhere, no approval anywhere, just the helmet and the nightstick, the barbed wire and the Lieutenant, the songs in the strange languages hurled at your head like hand grenades. You could read all the pamphlets, vote all the elections, pray all the Sundays, and each day it became worse, each day made you more of a villain, each day your uniform was cursed on the streets of more cities, in more languages. He closed his eyes.

“Hawkins!”

Hawkins jumped and straightened up. Lieutenant Madox was standing in front of him. “Damn you, Hawkins!” Madox was saying. “Will you keep your bloody eyes open! Get over here!”

“Yes, sir,” said Hawkins. He gripped his club and moved to where two sailors were swinging a gangplank up to the railing of the boat. The boat was tied to the dock now, and a terrible stillness had settled over the people on it.

“Spread out, spread out,” Madox was shouting to the platoon “Don’t let anyone jump onto the dock. Make ’em all come down the gangplank.”

The smell was awful now, and in the silence the Jews stared down at the Lieutenant and the men of the platoon with cold, devouring hatred. Over a loudspeaker came a cool, pleasant voice.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the voice said, and it sounded like at least a colonel in the Guards, “we wish to do this in as orderly a fashion as possible. You will please come down the gangplank in twos and march to your right and go aboard the vessel moored directly behind your boat. You are going to be transferred to Cyprus, where you will be taken care of in British Army camps. Your sick will be treated and you will be given every consideration possible. Now, if you please, start leaving your vessel.”

The voice halted in a mechanical crackle. No one moved.

“All right,” Madox said. “Let’s get on board.”

Slowly and deliberately, the men of the platoon started up the gangplank. Hawkins was right behind the Lieutenant, with Hogan at his side. For a moment, at the top of the gangplank, he stopped. He looked down at the deck of the schooner. There was a blur of eyes, dark, staring, wild; a confusion of gaunt, ravaged faces; a wavering mass of tattered clothing such as might have been recovered from the corpses of a dug-up graveyard. Hawkins tottered momentarily, feeling, dizzily, this has happened to me before. Then he remembered. Belsen, he thought—wherever you turn, it is Belsen. In Belsen, he remembered, there had been the smell, too, and the same eyes, the same clothes, and there had been the old man (although later Hawkins had found out the man was only thirty) who had opened a door of one of the huts and come slowly out, holding his hands in front of him, his hands like claws, his face twisted skull-like and horrible in what Hawkins had later realized the man had meant as a glorious smile of greeting but which at the moment had seemed weird and threatening. Then, just as he had reached Hawkins, he had dropped to the ground, and when Hawkins had bent over him, he had died. But no one here approached Hawkins; there was no expression here that might later be deciphered into a smile. On the other side of the deck, there were the women, and standing, facing the gangplank, were the young men, and then Hawkins knew there was going to be a fight. Crazily, he thought: I’ll bet there are some of these people here who will recognize me from Belsen. What will they think of me?

“Come on!” Madox was shouting furiously. “Come on, Hawkins, get in there!”

Slowly, with dreamy obedience, Hawkins moved toward the first line of men. I am not going to hit them, he thought as he walked through the stinking, unreal silence. No matter what, I am not going to hit them. Then he saw Hogan swing and there was the flat, awful noise of the stick hitting a shoulder. Then the screams began, and the shouting, which closed around you in a savage, wild, echoing vault of sound, and the bodies slamming into you, and the spurt of someone’s blood, hot and slippery, in your face, and the confused flailing of arms and the black gleam of wood flashing against the yellow sky and a form dropping with a scream out of the rigging. Hawkins tried to keep his arms over his head, so that he wouldn’t be pinned in helplessly, but hands grabbed at his club, and stabbed into his face, and he had to move his arms furiously to keep the club from being torn away. Then, suddenly, there was a pair of hands at his throat and he was staring into a dark, grimacing face, the eyes, just six inches from his, pitiless, mad, as the powerful fingers pressed and pressed. Hawkins tried to pull away, but there was no escaping the hands. Oh, God, Hawkins thought, feeling the blood pounding in his head, oh, God, he is going to kill me. No, he wanted to say, you don’t understand. I am not doing anything. I was at Belsen. I was one of the people at Belsen. But the hands gripped firmer and firmer, the eyes stared coldly and triumphantly close to his own, as though the man who was choking him were finally taking vengeance for the ghetto in Poland, the death of his children, the locked cars, the whips, the furnaces, the graves of Europe. Hawkins felt his eyes clouding, his throat being torn, his knees slowly crumpling, as he pressed back and back, with the screams and the wet smashing of blows all around him. With his waning strength, he wrenched away. Then he hit the man. The man did not let go. Hawkins hit him again, across the face, and the man’s face disappeared in a fuzz of blood, but still the fingers gripped, as strong as ever. Then, again and again, with all the desperate strength in his arms and body, Hawkins lashed out at the man who was trying to strangle him. The man’s face seemed to crumble in a red, dissolving tissue, his jaw hanging queer and sidewise in a broken leer, only his eyes, steadfast and full of hatred, still glaring into Hawkins’ own. There was a last, convulsive spasm of the fingers at Hawkins’ throat; then the man slowly and silently slid down and away. Hawkins stared at him, then fell on top of him, and something crashed across his head, and when he opened his eyes again, he was lying on the dock and everything was very quiet, except for the weeping of women, soft and far away.