Short Stories: Five Decades (32 page)

Nelson walked along Madison Avenue before the windows of the fine shops. Two women passed him and a high woman’s voice said, “Taffeta. Baby-blue taffeta, shirred, with the back bare down to the hips. It has a startling effect.”

It never occurred to me it could happen, Nelson thought, walking slowly and blindly away from the station where his son had set off to battle. There was one war and that was all. It’s my fault. I had a son, but I didn’t take my responsibility seriously enough. I worked and I dressed him and fed him and sent him to a good college and bought him books and gave him money to take out girls and took him with me on vacations to Vermont, but I didn’t take my responsibility seriously enough. I worked, and it wasn’t easy, and I was poor for a long time and only the poor know how hard it is to stop being poor. I worked, but for the wrong things. I’ve added millions of rows of figures, detailed the maneuverings of many corporations, year by year, and sometimes it was eighteen hours a day and no time for meals.… Nonsense! I’m guilty. I should’ve been out stopping this.… I am nearly the same age as Hitler. He could do something to kill my son. I should’ve been doing something to save him. I’m guilty. I should be ashamed to stand in the same room with my son in his lieutenant’s green blouse. Money … I thought about the grocer, the insurance man, the electric light company … Nonsense, nonsense … I’ve wasted my life. I’m an old man and alone and my son has gone to war and all I did was pay rent and taxes. I was playing with toys. I was smoking opium. Me and millions like me. The war was being fought for twenty years and I didn’t know it. I waited for my son to grow up and fight it for me. I should’ve been out screaming on street corners, I should’ve grabbed people by their lapels in trains, in libraries and restaurants and yelled at them. “Love, understand, put down your guns, forget your profit, remember God …” I should have walked on foot through Germany and France and England and America. I should’ve preached on the dusty roads and used a rifle when necessary. I stayed in the one city and paid the grocer. Versailles, Manchuria, Ethiopia, Warsaw, Madrid—battlefields, battlefields—and I thought there was one war and it was over.

He stopped and looked up. He was sweating now and the salt was in his eyes and he had to rub them to see that he was standing in front of the great monument of a building, serene and immutable, in which, in war and peace, Marshall and Co. conducted its business. His charts and figures were waiting for him, all the clever, legal, evasive, money-saving numbers that a global dealer in valves and turbines could assemble in this bloody and profitable year to turn over in its solemn annual report to the government of the republic. Depreciation … $3,100,456.25.

He looked up at the soaring shining building sharp against the soft summer sky.

He stood there, before the graven entrance, and people jostled him and came and went, but he didn’t go in.

Hamlets of the World

T
he captain was getting more and more remote every moment. He kept stuffing papers into a heavy saddle-leather bag, whistling tunelessly under his breath. From time to time he looked out over the windy plain, swirling with dust in the late afternoon sun. He would peer thoughtfully into the eye-burning distance, then shake himself a little and resume his packing, a little more quickly each time. He never looked at Lieutenant Dumestre.

Lieutenant Dumestre sat on the edge of the desk, very neat in his expensive uniform. He was a tall, fairish man, who looked too young to be in his lieutenant’s uniform, too young to be so serious, too young to be in a war.

He never took his eyes off the Captain. The Captain was a round, solid man, who had been very jovial when they had met in Algiers and had paid for the wine and had sighed gallantly over all the pretty women in the café. There was nothing jovial or gallant about the Captain now, as he prepared in a businesslike way to disappear, each moment seeming more and more remote.

“Do you expect to come back, sir?” Lieutenant Dumestre finally asked, because the silence in the orderly room broken only by the low bumble of the Captain’s humming was at last too much to bear.

The Captain stopped his packing and looked thoughtfully out over the plain again, as though there, in the dust and scrub, some answer to a profound although somewhat vague question was to be found. He stood silently, even forgetting to hum.

“Do you expect to come back, sir?” the Lieutenant asked loudly.

The Captain at last turned and looked at the Lieutenant. His eyes were very cool and you would never have thought from looking at him in this moment that he had ever bought a bottle of wine for a lieutenant in his life. “Come back?” the Captain said. He turned away and sturdily buckled his bag. “Who can tell?”

“What do I do with the Americans?” The Lieutenant’s voice, he noticed angrily, was much higher than it should have been. At Saint Cyr they had been after him all the time to pitch his voice lower. “An order given in the soprano register, Mister, is not calculated to drive troops to impossible glories.” “What happens when the Americans arrive?”

The Captain was putting his helmet on very carefully in front of a mirror. “That is just what I hope to discover,” he said.

“In the meantime?”

“In the meantime your orders are to resist. Naturally.”

The Lieutenant peered out over the plain, hoping painfully that over the rim of the horizon the Americans would appear before the Captain could leave on his personal retreat. But the only movement to be seen was a corporal hurrying to the battery observation post.

“They’ll arrive tomorrow morning, at the latest,” the Lieutenant said.

“Quite possibly.” The Captain picked up his bag decisively, marched out and into the command car. The Lieutenant followed him and saluted. The Captain saluted and the car started and the Captain drove down the road.

The Lieutenant plodded slowly up the road toward the forward gun, thinking of the Captain, in the command car, speeding over a macadam road to Algiers, where there would be other men to make the decisions, other men to say, “We will move to the left, we will move to the right …” and the Captain would have to make no decisions himself. No matter how things turned out, he would not be committed and would be a fine fellow with whichever side turned up on top, and would jovially buy wine for his new lieutenants at the second-best restaurant in town.…

The Lieutenant made his way to the aimless little mud house they used as an observation post and climbed the ladder and stood under the umbrella next to the red-eyed little corporal and peered through his glasses at the plain. He looked until his eyes ached, but aside from the blowing dust there was nothing.

The men who served the forward gun had rigged up a tarpaulin to one side and lay under it, out of the wind. Usually they slept all the afternoon, but today no one was sleeping.

Sergeant Fourier even went so far as to get up and look out across the plain.

“Anything?” Labat asked.

The Sergeant squinted anxiously. “Nothing.”

“Waiting, everything is waiting,” Labat said. He was a long, ugly man, with a big nose and large ears. He was from Paris and excitable and given to throwing his arms around in rage and was a great patriot of the French Republic. “In a war you wait for everything! Even the Americans! At last, I thought, things will finally move. The Americans are famous for their briskness.… We’re still waiting.…”

“Only a day,” said Boullard. Boullard was a big, quiet man, over forty, with a wrinkled, brown, farmer’s face. “They’ll be here soon enough.”

“I can’t wait,” Labat said. He stood up and peered out. “For a year I sat in the Maginot Line. Now for two years I sit here. I am finally impatient. A day is too much.”

“Shut up,” Boullard said calmly. “You’ll get us all nervous.”

Labat lay down and put his hands behind his head and looked up at the tarpaulin angrily. Sergeant Fourier came back and sat down.

“More of the same,” Sergeant Fourier said. “More nothing.”

“It must be worse for Americans,” Corporal Millet said. He was a man who, although he was nearly thirty-five, was still plagued by pimples. His face had raging red blots on it all the time and he suffered meanly under his affliction, taking his misfortune out on the work details in his charge. “It must be unbearable for Americans.”

“Why?” Labat asked angrily. “What’s wrong with the Americans?”

“They are not a military people,” Corporal Millet said. He had a lawyer’s voice, smooth and reasonable and superior, and on bad days it made men want to kill Corporal Millet. “They are used to sitting back and pushing buttons.”

“Corporal,” Labat said calmly, “you are perhaps the biggest idiot in the French Army of 1942.”

“The jokes,” Corporal Millet said. “We can do without the jokes. It is a fact that war is harder on some races than on others. The Americans must be suffering the tortures of the damned.”

“I repeat,” Labat said. “The biggest.”

Corporal Millet was a devotee of Vichy, and Labat enjoyed making him angry.

“Push buttons,” Boullard said reflectively. “I could use a few push buttons at the moment.”

“See,” Corporal Millet gestured to Boullard. “Boullard agrees.”

“See,” Boullard said. “Boullard does not agree.”

There was silence for a moment, while the men thought of the wind and the ugliness of the men around them and the possibility of dying tomorrow.

“Be more cheerful,” Boullard said, “or kindly keep quiet.”

The men sat silently for a moment, everyone heavy and gloomy because the word death had finally been mentioned.

“It will be a ridiculous thing,” Labat said. “To be killed by an American.” Labat had fought at Sedan and made his way bitterly down the length of France, cursing the politicians, cursing the officers, cursing the Germans and English and Italians and Americans. At last he had stowed away aboard a freighter to Algiers and without losing a day had joined up all over again and had since then sat, full of pent-up vengeance, in the gloom of Africa, waiting to fight the Germans once more.

“I refuse,” Labat said. “I refuse to be killed by an American.”

“You will be told what your orders are,” Corporal Millet said, “and you will follow them.”

Labat stared gloomily and dangerously at Corporal Millet. His face, which was ugly but usually pleasant enough, now was harsh and his eyes were squinted balefully. “Corporal,” he said, “Corporal of the pimples, do you know what our orders are?”

“No.”

“Does anybody know?” Labat looked around, his face still flushed and glowering, angry at Corporal Millet and the government of France and his position in the world that afternoon.

Sergeant Fourier cleared his throat professionally. “The Lieutenant. He must know. The Captain’s gone …”

“What a wonderful thing,” Boullard said, “to be a captain.…”

“Let us ask the Lieutenant,” Labat said.

“Sergeant Fourier, we make you a committee of one.”

Sergeant Fourier looked around him uneasily, pulling in his round little belly nervously, uncomfortable at the thought of any action that would make him conspicuous, endanger his pleasant anonymous future with the masseuse in Algiers. “Why me?” he asked.

“Highest non-commissioned officer present,” Labat chanted. “Channels of communication with the commissioned personnel.”

“I haven’t said two words to him,” Sergeant Fourier protested. “After all, he just got here five days ago. And he’s reserved.… All he’s said to me in five days is, ‘Make sure the men do not smoke in the open at night.’”

“Enough,” Labat said cheerfully. “It’s obvious he likes you.”

“Don’t joke,” Boullard said sharply. “We have no more time to joke.”

“I’m only joking,” Labat said soberly, “because I am willing to slit my throat.”

He got up and went to the edge of the tarpaulin and stood there, his back to the men, watching across the enigmatic plain for the first fateful dust cloud.

“What sort of man is this Lieutenant Dumestre?” Boullard asked.

“It’s hard to tell,” Sergeant Fourier said, with the caution born of three years in an army where a hasty approval of a man, before all the facts of courage, sense and rectitude were in, might one day cause your death. “He’s very quiet. Stiff …”

“A bad sign,” said Boullard.

“Very rich in the uniform department.”

“Another bad sign.”

“It doesn’t pay to be too hurried,” Sergeant Fourier protested.

“It’s the Americans,” Boullard said. “They’re in a hurry, not me. Well, there’s only one thing to be done.” He rubbed his cheek absently with the back of his hand, like a man determining whether or not he needs a shave. The other men watched him silently, anxious and curious about a definite plan that might have finally bloomed on this last nervous afternoon. “One thing,” Boullard repeated. “We kill him.”

Lieutenant Dumestre stood in the observation post and felt the headache coming on like an express train. Every afternoon the boredom and misery of the day accumulated in his brain pan and punished him for still living. He stared painfully over the darkening plain, which was silently enveloping itself in blue and purple folds, intangible and deceptive, in which the shapes of men and machines might be capriciously and dangerously lost.…