The Young Lions (77 page)

"Well," Michael began, "it's…"

"Hilarity," Ahearn said. "A wild sensation of holiday. Laughter. We have moved three hundred miles through an enemy army on a tide of laughter. I plan to write it for Collier's."

"Good," Michael said gravely. "I shall look forward to reading it."

"The only man who has ever written accurately about a battle," said Ahearn, leaning over so that his face was just six inches from Michael's, "was Stendhal, In fact, the only three writers who have ever been worth reading twice in the whole history of literature were Stendhal, Villon and Flaubert."

"Oh, sweet and lovely, lady be good," one of the musicians was singing in accented English, "oh, lady be good to me…"

"Stendhal caught the unexpected and insane and humorous aspect of war," Ahearn said. "Do you remember, in his journal, his description of the Colonel who rallied his men during the Russian campaign?"

"I'm afraid not," Michael said.

"You look like a nice, lonely soldier." It was a tall, dark-haired girl in a flowered dress whom Michael had smiled at across the room fifteen minutes before. She was standing, bent over the table, her hand on Michael's. Her dress was cut low, and Michael noticed the pleasant, firm, olive sweep of her bosom so close to his eyes. "Wouldn't you like to dance with a grateful lady?"

Michael smiled at her. "In five minutes," he said, "when my head is cleared."

"Good." The girl nodded, smiling invitingly. "You know where I'm sitting…"

"Yes, I certainly do," Michael said. He watched the girl slip through the dancers in a sinuous flowery movement. Nice, he thought, very nice for later. I should really make love to a Parisienne to make official our entry into Paris.

"There are volumes to be written," Ahearn said, "about the question of men and women in wartime."

"I'm sure there are," Michael said. The girl sat down at her table and smiled across at him.

There were shouts from the other end of the room, and four young men with FFI armbands and rifles pushed their way through the dancers, dragging another young man whose face was bleeding from a long gash over his eyes. "Liars!" the bloody young man was shouting. "You're all liars! I am no more of a collaborationist than anybody in this room!"

One of the FFI men hit the prisoner on the back of the neck. The young man's head sagged forward and he was quiet. The four FFI men dragged him up the steps past the candles in their glass holders on the maroon walls. The orchestra played louder than before.

"Barbarians!" It was a woman's voice, speaking in English. A lady of forty was sitting in the seat that the French pilot had vacated next to Michael. She had long, dark red fingernails and an elegant simple black dress, and she was still very handsome.

"They all ought to be arrested. Just looking for an excuse to stir up mischief. I am going to suggest to the American Army that they disarm them all." Her accent was plainly American and both Ahearn and Michael stared at her puzzledly. She nodded briskly to Ahearn, and more coolly to Michael, after swiftly noting that he was not an officer. "My name is Mabel Kasper," she said, "and don't look so surprised. I'm from Schenectady."

"We are delighted, Mabel," Ahearn said gallantly, bowing without rising.

"I know what I'm talking about," the lady from Schenectady said feverishly, obviously three or four drinks past cold sobriety.

"I've lived in Paris for twelve years. Oh, the things I've suffered. You're a correspondent – the stories I could tell you about what it was like under the Germans…"

"I would be delighted to hear," Ahearn began.

"The food, the rationing," Mabel Kasper said, pouring a large glass full of champagne and drinking half of it in one gulp.

"The Germans requisitioned my apartment, and they only gave me fifteen days to move my furniture. Luckily, I found another apartment, a Jewish couple's; the man is dead now, but this afternoon, imagine that, the second day of liberation, the woman was around asking me to give it back to her. And there wasn't a stick of furniture in it when I moved in, I was damn careful to have affidavits made, I knew this would happen. I have already spoken to Colonel Harvey, of our Army, he's been most reassuring. Do you know Colonel Harvey?"

"I'm afraid not," Ahearn said.

"These are going to be hard days ahead of us in France." Mabel Kasper finished the glass of champagne. "The scum are in the saddle. Hoodlums, parading around with their guns."

"Do you mean the FFI?" Michael asked.

"I mean the FFI," said Mabel Kasper.

"But they've done all the fighting in the underground," said Michael, trying through all the noise to puzzle out what this woman was driving at.

"The underground!" Mabel Kasper snorted in a genteel, annoyed way. "I'm so tired of the underground. All the loafers, all the agitators, all the ne'er-do-wells, who had no families to worry about, no property, no jobs… The respectable people were too busy, and now we'll all pay for it unless you help us. You've liberated us from the Germans, now you must liberate us from the French and the Russians." She drained her glass and stood up. "A word to the wise," she said, nodding gravely.

Michael watched her walk along the jumbled line of tables, in her simple, handsome black dress. "Lord," he said softly, "and out of Schenectady, too."

"A war," Ahearn said soberly, "as I was saying, is full of confusing elements."

"If there is any hope in the future," Michael heard Pavone lecturing two young American infantry officers who were AWOL from their Division for the night, "it is in France. It is not enough for Americans to fight for France, they must understand it, stabilize it, be patient with it. That is not easy, because the French are the most annoying people in the whole world. They are annoying because they are chauvinistic, scornful, reasonable, independent and great. If I were the President of the United States, I would send every young American to France for two years instead of to college. The boys would learn about food and art, and the girls learn about sex, and in fifty years you would have Utopia on the banks of the Mississippi…"

Across the room, the girl in the flowered dress, who had been watching Michael intently, smiled broadly and nodded when she caught Michael's eye.

"The irrational element in war," Ahearn said, "is the one that has been missing from all our literature. Let me remind you once more of the Colonel in Stendhal…"

"What did the Colonel in Stendhal say?" Michael asked dreamily, happily floating in a haze of champagne, smoke, perfume, candlelight, lust…

"His men were demoralized," Ahearn said sternly, his tone now martial and commanding, "and they were on the verge of running under a Russian attack. The Colonel swore at them, waved his sword, and shouted, 'My arse-hole is as round as an apple, follow me!' And they followed him and routed the Russians. Irrational," Ahearn said professorially, "a perfect nonsequitur, but it touched some obscure spring of patriotism and resistance in the hearts of the soldiers, and they won the day."

"Ah," said Michael regretfully, "there are no Colonels like that today."

A drunken British Captain was singing, very loudly, "We're going to hang out our washing on the Siegfried Line," his voice bellowing strongly, drowning the music of the orchestra. Immediately, other voices took up the song. The orchestra gave in and stopped the dance tune they were playing and began to accompany the singers. The drunken Captain, a big, red-faced man, grabbed a girl and began to dance around the room among the tables. Other couples jumped up and attached themselves to the line, weaving slowly and loudly between the paper tablecloths and the wine buckets. In a minute, the line was twenty couples long, chanting, their heads thrown back, each person's hands on the waist of the dancer ahead of him, like a triumphant snake dance in college after a football game, except that it was all enclosed in a low-ceilinged, candlelit room, and the singing was deafening.

"Agreeable," Ahearn said, "but too normal to be interesting, from a literary point of view. After all, after a victory like this, it is only to be expected that the liberators and the liberated sing and dance. But what a thing it would have been to be in the Czar's palace in Sevastopol when the young cadets filled the swimming pool with champagne from the Czar's cellar and tossed naked ballet girls by the dozen into the foam, while waiting for the arrival of the Red Army which would execute them all! Excuse me," Ahearn said gravely, standing up, "I must join this."

He wriggled out on to the floor and put his hands on the waist of the Schenectady-born Mabel Kasper, who was swaying her simple taffeta hips and singing loudly at the end of the line.

The girl in the flowered dress was standing in front of the table, looking at Michael, smiling through the clamour. "Now?" she asked softly, putting out her hand.

"Now," Michael said. He stood up and took her hand. They hitched on to the line, the girl in front of Michael, her hips living and slender under the frail silk of her gown.

By now everybody in the room was in the line, spiralling in a roaring silk and uniformed line, over the dance floor, in front of the blaring band, among the tables. "We're gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line," they sang. "Have you any dirty washing, Mother dear?"

Michael sang with the loudest of them, his voice hoarse and happy in his ears, holding tight to the desirable slim waist of the girl who had sought him out of all the victorious young men in the celebrating city. Lost on a clangorous tide of music, shouting the crude, triumphant words, remembering with what savage irony the Germans had thrown those words back in the teeth of the British who had first sung them in 1939, Michael felt that on this night all men were his friends, all women his lovers, all cities his own, all victories deserved, all life imperishable…

"We'll hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line," the blended voices sang among the candles, "if the Siegfried Line's still there," and Michael knew that he had lived for this moment, had crossed the ocean for it, carried a rifle for it, escaped death for it.

The song ended. The girl in the flowered dress turned and kissed him, melting into him, clutching him, making him dizzy with the smell of wine and heliotrope perfume, as the other people around him sang, like all the gay, jubilating ghosts at every New Year's party that had ever been held, the sentimental and haunting words of "Auld Lang Syne".

The middle-aged French pilot from Park Avenue, who had given the ingenious parties in 1928, and who had gone to Harlem late at night, and who had flown three complete tours in the Lorraine Squadron, and whose friends had all died through the years, and who now was finally back in Paris, was weeping as he sang, the tears unashamedly and openly streaming down his handsome, worn face… "Should old acquaintance be forgot," he sang, his arm around Pavone's shoulders, already hungry and nostalgic for this great and fleeting night of hope and joy, "and never brought to mind…?"

The girl kissed Michael ever more fiercely. He closed his eyes and rocked gently with her, the nameless gift of the free city, locked in his arms…

Fifteen minutes later, as Michael, carrying his carbine, and the girl in the flowered dress and Pavone and his bleached lady were walking along the dark Champs Elysees, in the direction of the Arch, near where Michael's girl lived, the Germans came over, bombing the city. There was a truck parked under a tree, and Michael and Pavone decided to wait there, sitting on the bumper, under the moral protection of the summer foliage above their heads.

Two minutes later, Pavone was dead, and Michael was lying on the tarry-smelling pavement, very conscious, but curiously unable to move his legs below the hips.

Voices came from far away and Michael wondered what had happened to the girl in the silk dress, and tried to puzzle out how it had happened, because all the firing had seemed to be on the other side of the river, and he hadn't heard any bombs dropping…

Then he remembered the sudden dark shape roaring across the intersection… A traffic accident… He smiled remotely to himself. Beware French drivers, all his travelling friends had always said.

He couldn't move his legs and the light of the torch on Pavone's face made it seem very pale, as though he had been dead for ever, and there was an American voice saying, "Hey, look at this, an American, and he's dead. Hey, look, it's a Colonel. What do you know…? He looks just like a GI."

Michael started to say something clear and definitive about his friend, Colonel Pavone, but it never quite formed on his tongue. When they picked Michael up, although they did it very gently, considering the darkness and the confusion and the weeping women, he dropped steeply into unconsciousness…

THE replacement depot was on a sodden plain near Paris, a sprawling collection of tents and old German barracks, still with the highly coloured paintings of large German youths and smiling old men drinking out of steins, and bare-legged farm girls like Percheron horses on the walls, under the swastika and eagle. Many Americans, to show that they had passed through this hallowed spot, had written their names on the painted walls, and legends like "Sgt. Joe Zachary, Kansas City, Missouri" and "Meyer Greenberg, PFC, Brooklyn, USA" were everywhere in evidence.

There was a big new batch of replacements that had just come over from the States. The swollen, oversize, casual company stood in the drizzle, the mud thick on their boots, answering to their names, and the Sergeant said, "Sir, L Company all present and accounted for," and the Captain took the salute and walked away to supper.

The Sergeant did not dismiss the Company. He strolled back and forth in front of the first line, peering out at the dripping men standing in the mud. The rumour was that the Sergeant had been a chorus boy before the war. He was a slender, athletic-looking man, with a pale, sharp face. He wore the good-conduct ribbon and the American defence ribbon and the European Theatre ribbon, with no campaign stars.