Three Days Before the Shooting ... (19 page)

Sometimes in the cold, breathless middle of the night I relive our approach to the cathedral, our emergence into the deserted square, where it looms like a mountain which was felt rather than seen in the predawn darkness, its roof smashed in, its stained glass removed, and its lower walls and buttresses protected by sandbags. I can still see my shipmate heading straight into the dark interior as though he had been there many times before. Perhaps he had during times of peace. I didn’t ask, I was too busy trying to keep up to speculate too much about it. But there we were, and I had no time even to try to penetrate the darkness about me, for now two maquis stepped out of the shadows with burp guns trained straight at us. This was a bad moment for me. The night before, the Germans had made a parachute drop of troops dressed in civilian clothing into the hills overlooking the town, and being sure that the maquis were searching for these, I thought us triply doomed: by our dress, by our semi-civilian status, and by the fortunes of war. I fully expected that we would be killed, swiftly and without interrogation.

It was then I heard my companion’s excited whispering—he had the odd name of Severen—and we were being swiftly searched for weapons, then hurried along a path cleared through the broken masonry which cluttered the vast enclosure. As we moved along, I could feel the great walls of the edifice
sweeping up, up, in great shattered curves to the dark dome of the sky, where the stars, there so far above us, showed like tiny lights stuck in the ceiling. I was awed by the sweep of it, and the very damage, the smashed incompleteness, made me realize as never before the grandeur of its inspiration. It was like watching two great arms reaching up to encompass all of heaven. And indeed, in that moment I could believe in heaven, no questions asked.

Then came the sound of a voice which seemed, there in the shadows and vast space, utterly sourceless. It seemed, in my excited state, to rise from the walls or from beneath the broken masonry. And all the more because it was hardly more than a whisper. Afterwards, I learned that acoustical perfection was frequently a property of such buildings, but then I realized that my nerves had been rendered supersensitive by danger and by darkness, and I almost bolted. In that instant a scent of tobacco came to me, and I was aware that the voice had spoken in English. Then close by I saw the glow of a cigarette, and the sharply defined face of a man appeared, whom my shipmate recognized with a low greeting. And somehow the sharp, amused eyes which looked out of the fatigued face were as reassuring to me as to Severen. It was only for the briefest instant, then the two of them moved off into the shadows and I, still wondering what I had pushed myself into, found myself being marched by the two maquis through a labyrinthine darkness, and suddenly I was standing outside the towering walls.

They showed me the path down to the dock area below and left me there, and I made my way, puzzling over the true identity of my shipmate, down to a Red Cross club near the Seine. There I found a gear-laden group of soldiers just back from the front lines standing in quiet, worshipful repose before an oil portrait of the singer Lena Horne. They uttered no word; they simply stood there gazing upward as at a brown goddess in an apple-green dress. It was, to say the least, quite odd. Leaving them at their communion, I started back to the ship. It was necessary to avoid two groups of brawling soldiers along the way, and to avoid a third up ahead, I stopped in a café for a drink. There were a few Frenchmen at the tables, and three GIs who stood at the bar looked up when I came in, studied me briefly, then resumed their conversation.

“No, that’s not him,” one of them said as I waited for the bartender. He sported a moused eye.

I ordered a calvados and as I drank I listened, hoping to learn if these were the men who had attacked Severen.

“So how’d it happen, Cyril?” one of them said.

“Oh, hell,” the one with the moused eye said, “Rooster and Ringo and me were up the street drinking in a bar when this seaman came in looking all nice and clean and one of the fellows called him Joady.”

“Who did? You?”

“Hell, no, one of the other guys. It was Rooster Mills. I don’t have a girl to worry about.”

“So what happened?”

“Oh, hell, we were just kidding, but the mother got mad. He said something about, ‘Soldier, did you call me Joady? If so, you must have received some pretty jazzy letters from home.’ Then he turned back and took a drink.”

“Yes? So?”

“Then Rooster said, ‘Aw, listen, Joady, don’t try to kid us, we know your type.’ So then the fellow looks at Rooster and says, ‘Fellow, you really must be cockeyed.’ And Rooster says, ‘Who’s cockeyed?’

“‘You,’ the fellow says. ‘You’re cockeyed; coming over, we lost five ships to the subs, and they’ll probably sink others before we get back. So if you can stand here in Rouen and call me ‘Joady,’ then, hell yes, you must be cockeyed.’ ”

“So then what did Rooster do?”

“Rooster told him, ‘Aw, you’re still a Joady, Joady.’ And the guy pushes his drink back on the bar and stands up. He says, ‘Yeah, and I’m sitting in a fine hotel room wearing silk pajamas and waiting with a bottle of cold champagne for your best girl to arrive.’ ”

They laughed and slapped the bar.

“Old Joady had him a pretty sharp tongue, didn’t he?” one of them said.

“All of these Joadies have a sharp tongue,” Cyril said. “Too sharp.”

“Was that when he hit you, Cyril?”

“Naw, it was later.”

“I bet he went on to tell you about the great contribution the merchant marine is making to the war effort and all that bull,” one of the others said.

“No,” Cyril said. “But then Rooster turned to us and said, ‘What do you think, man, is he or ain’t he a Joady?’ and Tom said, ‘Well, he
looks
like a Joady,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, and he sure
talks like
a Joady,’ and then Rooster said, ‘Then, hell, I was right, so he
must be a Joady
.’”

“Was that when he hit you, Cyril?”

“Not yet! That’s when he picked up his bottle and started out. He said, ‘Man, I be damn if I’ll ever understand the military mind, if it’s got a mind. But since you all think everybody who rides ships is a Joady, I hope somebody back stateside is performing a few Joady-grinding favors for all three of you.’ ”

They laughed.

“What happened then, Cyril?”

“The mother left then, and we took a drink and laughed about it. But then old Rooster got to thinking about his broad back stateside, and in two minutes
flat he’s all red in the face and says, ‘Come on, I’m going to get that Joady sonofabitch,’ and we went out and saw the mother going up the road and caught up with him and the mother struck at Rooster and missed—and that’s when he knocked the living hell out of me! Man, that Joady sonofabitch could rumble like gangbusters! But if you think my eye is bad, you wait ‘til you see Rooster’s!”

No
, I thought with relief,
it doesn’t sound like Severen’s style
.

They were still laughing when I went out and returned to the ship.

I kept a lookout for my shipmate throughout the night, but he failed to appear, and when I saw him at mess the following morning, he appeared tired and excited but offered me no explanation of our adventure. By now, however, being both resentful and respectful of his privacy, I had decided not to question him.

In another two days the ship was unloaded, and we made our way down the Seine past Le Havre, where we joined our convoy, then moved on to Milford Haven from whence our flotilla of merchant ships, baby flattops, and cruisers set sail for the U.S. But I had no further opportunity to question Severen. He avoided me, and I, having decided that he was probably connected with some government agency, the OSS or the like, thought it best to leave him with his secrets. In fact, acting on the premise that some knowledge might be quite inconvenient to one of my background—if not highly dangerous—I quit the ship in New York. Two trips later I was drafted and assigned to the ETO, and I quickly allowed the strange young man and the night’s incident to slip from my mind.

The war went on until the fall of that year, and upon its conclusion I returned to the States and became so busy picking up some of the threads of my life (while avoiding others) that I thought little of the war except in terms of the interruption it had caused me. I forgot both Severen and the mysterious figure in the cathedral until some time later, when I thought of writing a novel about the war. At the time, books about the recent conflict were quite popular, and I thought to do something more romantic than the works then being offered by the contenders in the field, but I found it more than a notion. I discovered that I possessed little talent for invention, and my experience gave me so little to go on, so little to feed my rather limited imagination, and, although I was taking courses in sociology on the GI Bill at the time, the prospect of serving up yet another set of case histories as fiction repelled me. So I began with a street fight among Americans along the bank of the Seine during a night of war, followed by a trip which the hero made as the barely tolerated companion of a mysterious American student turned merchant seaman to contact a group of armed members of the French Underground in a bomb-and fire-gutted cathedral. But I got no further. I couldn’t plot it, couldn’t extend these bare details into a significant action. I knew none of the
related facts, and my discipline, such as it was, had been geared to the searching out and weighing of facts, not to imaginative speculation. So I forgot it—we Americans are great forgetters. Yes, we are as competent at forgetting things which confuse us as we are at begetting confusion (and often it is our attempt to forget which causes the confusion in the first place). Whatever. I next made an attempt at writing a philosophical novel of wartime adventure—with political overtones—and discovered that I was as ill-equipped for this as for the first project, so reluctantly I put it aside. I told myself that the idea wasn’t in the American mode anyway and convinced myself that I, at least, possessed few ideas worth troubling the reader’s mind.

So Severen and the mysterious maquis were not to cross my mind again until sometime later when, through my work in Washington, I became interested in Europe again. This was probably a holdover from the thirties of my eager youth, but I now wished to see what Europe was like during the tumult of the postwar years. I wanted to retrace my steps, as it were. For now I was sharply aware that much of my youth had been left there, and that the war had been no mere incident, no mere interruption but involved the only living I had done during those violent years. It was, except for my concern over Spain, the one great fact of my youth and my youth’s true end. I was by now too wise to think that I could recapture those lost years and certainly not so isolationist in my thinking as to believe that I had been robbed of them by Europe in the interest of goals that were not my own, or at least not
our own
. Nowadays, few Americans cling to that illusion and most have made peace with the fact that the world is of a sad, complex whole.

So I wished to see the place again, to regard once more the people and the old ancestral earth. I wished to see some of what had been so telescoped and explosive and accelerated and youth-consuming with my older, more sober—and conservative—eyes. For all my suspicions and discouragements, I wished to understand, to glean just what had actually happened during that time when my sense of the ideal, my yearning for perfect political solutions for all human problems, rejected that which my sense of patriotic duty had made an act of irrational faith—for I believed in our allies and had gone to sea long before I had been called up by the draft. So now, as I say, I wanted to view the land as one returns to view an old movie years after it no longer possesses such immediate power to guide one’s actions and perceptions, when its spell can no longer deaccelerate one’s breathing or expand one’s sense of wonder. It was with this in mind that I took a quick trip to London, Paris, Salzburg, and Rome, and on my return put great energy into trying to obtain an extended assignment in Europe. It was during this effort that I saw the Frenchman for a second time. I was assigned to cover a press interview at the French Embassy which he had granted, and it was then that the incident in the cathedral returned once more to mind.

For it was only when I confronted M. Vannec from my place in the ring of photographers and reporters that I realized that the legendary artist, activist, and French dignitary before me and the mysterious man in the dark cathedral were one and the same. I was both startled and relieved, for there had been many times during the latter days of the war when I had wondered if I might not have aided the contact between two enemy agents, and now at last I felt reassured. M. Vannec appeared not to have noticed my shock of recognition, and as I observed him handle questions I congratulated myself that I’d had enough self-control not to make myself known to him. Observing his answering my colleagues’ questions, I even congratulated myself that I possessed a certain advantage, since I recognized him while he was unaware that I had participated in what might have been for him a significant historical encounter. I felt proud that I had dropped into that underground—if only briefly—out of which M. Vannec was to emerge after the war to take his place of importance in the world’s affairs; that I had touched, even this slightly, the fluid center wherein postwar Europe was being reorganized—a matter which brought me then and there, and most ironically, the most meaningful sense of what had happened to my war-spent youth.

I say “ironically” because I recognized my pride as a reflection of that helpless, American, most democratic yearning which seeks ever to effect some sense of personal connection between the self and historical events, our need to write, as did so many GIs on the backsides of statues of Italian saints “Kilroy Was Here” if only on the backside of history. Involved here, I knew, was the driving desire to be “in the know,” to step behind the scene, which arises, perhaps, out of the fluid, shifting center of power and the absence of ancient hierarchical structure which is native to our form of government.