Collected Fiction Read online

  His father lay rigid and frail on the bed, his mouth open as if to speak in the bare light. Noah swayed a little as he looked down at him. Foolish, tricky old man, with the fancy beard and the bleached hair and the leatherbound Bible.

  Make haste, make haste. O God. to deliver me … What religion does the deceased profess? Noah felt a little dizzy. His mind didn’t seem to be able to fix on any one thing, and one thought slid in on top of another, independent and absurd. Full lips. Twenty-five dollars for the sailors and nothing for him. He had never had particular luck with women, certainly nothing like that. Trouble probably made a man attractive, and the woman had sensed it. Of course she had been terribly drunk … Ronald Beaverbrook. The way the flowers had waved on her skirt as she rolled toward the ladies’ room. If he had stayed he’d probably be snug in bed with her now, under the warm covers. the soft, fat, white flesh, onion, gin, raspberry. He had a piercing, sharp moment of regret that he was standing here in the naked room with the dead old man … If the positions had been reversed, he thought, if it was he lying there and the old man up and around, and the old man had got the offer, he was damned sure Jacob would be in that bed now, with the blonde and the Four Roses. What a thing to think of. Noah shook his head. His father, from whose seed he sprang. God, was he going to get to talk like him as he grew older?

  Noah made himself look for a whole minute at his father’s dead face. He tried to cry. Somehow, deserted this way, at the end of a year, on this winter night, a man, any man, had the right to expect a tear from his only son.

  Noah had never really thought very much about his father, once he had got old enough to think about him at all. He had been bitter about him, but that was all. Looking at the pale, lined head, looming from the pillow like a stone statue, noble and proud as Jacob had always known he would look in death, Noah made a conscious effort to think of his father. How far Jacob had come searching for this narrow room on the shore of the Pacific. Out of the grimy streets of Odessa, across Russia and the Baltic Sea, across the ocean, into the sweat and clangor of New York. Noah closed his eyes and thought of Jacob, quick and lithe, as a young man, with that handsome brow and that fierce nose, taking to English with a quick, natural, overblown rhetorical instinct, striding down the crowded streets, his eyes lively and searching, with a ready bold smile for girls and partners and customers and travel … Jacob, unafraid, and dishonest, wandering through the South, through Atlanta and Tuscaloosa, quick-fingered, never really interested in money, but cheating for it, and finally letting it slip away, up the continent to Minnesota and Montana, laughing, smoking black cigars, known in saloons and gambling halls, making dirty jokes and quoting Isaiah in the same breath, marrying Noah’s mother in Chicago, grave-eyed and responsible for a day, tender and delicate and perhaps even resolved to settle down and be an honorable citizen, with middle age looming over him, and his hair touched at the ends with gray. And Jacob singing to Noah in his rich, affected baritone, in the plush-furnished parlor after dinner, singing, “I was walking through the park one day, In the merry, merry month of May …”

  Noah shook his head. Somewhere in the back of his mind, echoing and faraway, the voice, singing, young and strong, resounded, “In the merry, merry month of May,” and refused to be stilled.

  And the inevitable collapse as the years claimed Jacob. The shabby businesses, getting shabbier, the charm fading, the enemies more numerous, the world tighter-lipped and more firmly organized against him, the failure in Chicago, the failure in Seattle, the failure in Baltimore, the final, down-at-the-heels, scrubby failure in Santa Monica …“I have led a miserable life and I have cheated everyone and I drove my wife to death and I have only one son and I have no hope for him, and I am bankrupt …” And the deceived brother, crumbling in the furnace, haunting him across the years and the ocean, with the last, agonized breath.…

  Noah stared, dry-eyed at his father. Jacob’s mouth was open, intolerably alive. Noah jumped up, and crossed the room, wavering, and tried to push his father’s mouth shut. The beard was stiff and harsh against Noah’s hand, and the teeth made a loud, incongruous clicking sound as the mouth closed. But the lips fell open, ready for speech, when Noah took his hand away. Again and again, more and more vigorously, Noah pushed the mouth shut. The hinges of the jaw made a sharp little sound and the jaw felt loose and unmoored, but each time Noah took his hand away the mouth opened, the teeth gleaming in the yellow light. Noah braced himself against the bed with his knees to give himself more leverage. But his father, who had been contrary and stubborn and intractable with his parents, his teachers, his brother, his wife, his luck, his partners, his women, his son, all his life, could not be changed now.

  Noah stepped back. The mouth hung open, pitiful and pale under the swirling white moustaches, under the noble arch of the deceptive dead head on the gray pillow.

  Finally, and for the first time, Noah wept.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHRISTIAN FELT like an imposter, sitting in the little open scout car, with his helmet on his head. He held his light automatic machine pistol loosely over his knees as they sped cheerfully along the tree-bordered French road. He was eating cherries they had picked from an orchard back near Meaux. Paris lay just ahead over the ripples of frail green hills. To the French, who must be peering at him from behind the shutters of their stone houses along the road, he looked, he knew, like a conqueror and stern soldier and destroyer. He hadn’t heard a shot fired yet, and here the war was already over.

  He turned to talk to Brandt, sitting in the back seat. Brandt was a photographer in one of the propaganda companies and he had hitched on to Christian’s reconnaissance squadron as far back as Metz. He was a frail, scholarly-looking man who had been a mediocre painter before the war. Christian had grown friendly with him when Brandt had come to Austria for the spring skiing. Brandt’s face was burned a bright red and his eyes were sandy from the wind, and his helmet made him look like a small boy playing soldier in the family backyard. Christian grinned at him, jammed in there with an enormous Corporal from Silesia, who spread himself happily over Brandt’s legs and photographic equipment in the cramped little seat.

  “What’re you laughing about, Sergeant?” Brandt asked.

  “The color of your nose,” Christian said.

  Brandt touched the burned, flaked skin gingerly. “Down to the seventh layer,” he said. “It is an indoor-model nose. Come on, Sergeant, hurry up and take me to Paris, I need a drink.”

  “Patience,” Christian said. “Just a little patience. Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

  The Silesian Corporal laughed uproariously. He was a high-spirited young man, simple and stupid, and aside from being anxious to please his superiors, he was having a wonderful time on his journey across France. The night before, very solemnly, he had told Christian, as they lay side by side on their blankets along the road, that he hoped the war didn’t end too soon. He wanted to kill at least one Frenchman. His father had lost a leg at Verdun in 1916, and the Corporal, whose name was Kraus, remembered saying, at the age of seven, standing rigidly in front of his one-legged father after church on Christmas Eve, “I will die happy after I have killed a Frenchman.” That had been fifteen years ago. But he still peered hopefully at each new town for signs of Frenchmen who might oblige him. He had been thoroughly disgusted back at Chanly, when a French Lieutenant had appeared in front of a café, carrying a white flag, and had surrendered sixteen likely candidates to them without firing a shot.

  Christian glanced back, past Brandt’s comic burning face, at the other two cars speeding smoothly along on the even, straight road at intervals of seventy-five meters behind them. Christian’s Lieutenant had gone down another parallel road with the rest of the section, leaving these three cars under Christian’s command. They were to keep moving toward Paris, which they had been assured would not be defended. Christian grinned as he felt himself swelling a little with pride at this first independent command, three cars and eleven men, with armament
of ten rifles and tommyguns and one heavy machine gun.

  He turned in his seat and watched the road ahead of him. What a pretty country, he thought. How industriously it has been taken care of, the neat fields bordered by poplars, the regular lines of the plowing now showing the budding green of June.

  How surprising and perfect it all had been, he thought drowsily. After the long winter of waiting, the sudden superb bursting out across Europe, the marvelous irresistible tide of energy, organized and detailed down to the last salt tablet and tube of Salvarsan (each man had been issued three with his emergency field rations in Aachen, before they started out, and Christian had grinned at the Medical Department’s estimate of the quality of French resistance). And how exactly everything had worked. The dumps and maps and water just where they had been told they would be, the strength of the enemy and the extent of his resistance exactly as predicted, the roads in precisely the condition they had been told they would be. Only Germans, he thought, remembering the complex flood of men and machines pouring across France, only Germans could have managed it.

  There was the sound of an airplane over the hum of the scout car’s engine. Christian looked up behind him and smiled. A Stuka, fifty feet in the air, was flying slowly along the road behind him. How graceful and sure it looked, with the two wheels like hawk’s talons stretching eagerly forward under the belly. For a moment, looking up at the wings against the sky, Christian regretted that he hadn’t gone into the Air Force. There was no doubt about it, they were the darlings of the Army and the people back home. And their living conditions were absurdly comfortable, like first-class accommodations at a fancy resort hotel. And the men themselves were wonderful types, the best in the country, young, careless, confident. Christian had seen them in the bars, and listened to them talk, in tight, exclusive groups, with-their own peculiar, elliptical language, spending a lot of money, talking about what it was like over Madrid, and the day they hit Warsaw, and the girls in Barcelona, and what they thought of the new Messerschmitt, all of them seeming to be oblivious of the facts of death or defeat, as though those things could not exist in their close, aristocratic, dangerous, gay world.

  The Stuka was above Christian now, and Christian could see the pilot’s face, grinning over the cockpit, as he banked across the scout car. Christian grinned back, and waved, and the pilot waggled his wings before he flew on, unprotected and youthful and arrogant, down the tree-lined road stretching out ahead of them toward Paris.

  Through Christian’s head, as he sat easily in the front seat of the scout car, with the sound of the engine busy and reassuring in his ears, and the green-smelling wind in his hair, ran a theme of music he had heard at a concert when he was on leave in Berlin. It was from a clarinet quintet by Mozart, sorrowful and persuasive, like a young girl mourning decorously for a lost lover by a slowly moving river on a summer afternoon. As Christian listened to the interior music, his eyes half closed, the gold flecks in their depths only occasionally glinting for a moment, he remembered the clarinetist. He had been a small, sad-looking little man with a bald head and drooping sandy moustaches, like a henpecked husband in a cartoon.

  Really, Christian thought playfully, at a time like this, I should be humming Wagner. It is probably a kind of treachery to the Greater Third Reich not to be singing Siegfried today. He didn’t like Wagner very much, but he promised himself he would think of some Wagner after he got through with the clarinet quintet. Anyway, it would help keep him awake. His head fell onto his chest and he slept, breathing softly and smiling a little. The driver looked over at him, and grinned and jerked his thumb at Christian in friendly mockery for the benefit of the photographer and the Silesian corporal in the back. The Silesian corporal roared with laughter, as though Christian had done something irresistibly clever and amusing for his benefit.

  The three cars sped along the road through the calm, shining countryside, deserted, except for occasional cattle and chickens and ducks, as though all the inhabitants had taken a holiday and gone to a Fair in the next town.

  The first shot seemed to be part of the music.

  The next five shots wakened him, though, and the sound of the brakes, and the tumbling sensation of the car skidding sideways to a halt in the ditch next to the road. Still almost asleep, Christian jumped out and lay behind the car. The others lay panting in the dust beside him. He waited for something to happen, somebody to tell him what to do. Then he realized that the others were looking anxiously at him. In command, he thought, the non-commissioned officer will take immediate stock of the situation and make his dispositions with simple, clear orders. He will betray no uncertainty and will at all times behave with confidence and aggressiveness.

  “Anybody hurt?” he whispered.

  “No,” said Kraus. He had his finger on the trigger of his rifle and was peering excitedly around the front tire of the car.

  “Christ,” Brandt was saying nervously. “Jesus Christ.” He was fumbling erratically with the safety on his pistol, as though he had never handled the weapon before.

  “Leave it alone,” Christian said sharply, “leave the safety on. You’ll kill somebody this way.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Brandt said. His helmet had tumbled off and his hair was dusty. “We’ll all get killed.”

  “Shut up,” Christian said.

  There was a rattle of shots. Slugs tore through the scout car and a tire exploded.

  “Christ,” Brandt mumbled, “Christ.”

  Christian edged toward the rear of the car, climbing over the driver as he did so. This driver, Christian thought automatically, as he rolled over him, hasn’t bathed since the invasion of Poland.

  “For God’s sake,” he said irritably, “why don’t you take a bath?”

  “Excuse me, Sergeant,” the driver said humbly.

  Protected by the rear wheel of the car, Christian raised his head. A little clump of daisies waved gently, in front of him, magnified to a forest of prehistoric growths by their closeness. The road, shimmering a little in the heat, stretched away in front of him.

  Twenty feet away a small bird landed and strutted, busy with its affairs, rustling its feathers, calling unmusically from time to time, like an impatient customer in a deserted store.

  A hundred yards away was the road block.

  Christian examined it carefully. It was squarely across the road in a place where the land on both sides rose quite steeply, and it was placed like a dam in a brook. There were no signs of life from behind it. It was in deep shadow, shaded by the rustling trees that grew on both sides of the road and made an arch over the barricade. Christian looked behind him. There was a bend in the road there, and the other two cars were nowhere to be seen. Christian was sure they had stopped when they heard the shots. He wondered what they were doing now and cursed himself for having fallen asleep and letting himself get into something like this.

  The barricade was obviously hastily improvised, two trees with the foliage still on them, filled in with springs and mattresses and an overturned farm cart and some stones from the near-by fence. It was well placed in one way. The overhanging trees hid it from aerial observation; the only way you’d find out about it would be by coming on it as they had done.

  It was a lucky thing the Frenchmen had fired so soon. Christian’s mouth felt dusty. He was terribly thirsty. The cherries he had eaten suddenly made his tongue smart where it had been burned a little raw by cigarettes.

  If they have any sense, he thought, they will be around on our flanks now and preparing to murder us. How could I do it? he thought, staring harshly at the two felled trees silent in the enigmatic shadow a hundred meters away, how could I have fallen asleep? If they had a mortar or a machine gun placed anywhere in the woods, it would be all over in five seconds. But there was no sound in front of them, just the bird hopping beyond the daisies on the asphalt, making its irritable sharp cry.

  There was a noise behind him and he twisted around. But it was only Maeschen, one of the men fro
m the other two cars, crawling up to them through the underbrush. Maeschen crawled correctly and methodically, as he had been taught in training camp, with his rifle cradled in his arms.

  “How are things back there?” Christian asked. “Anybody hurt?”

  “No,” Maeschen panted. “The cars are up a dirt side road. Everybody’s all right. Sergeant Himmler sent me up here to see if you were still alive.”

  “We’re alive,” Christian said grimly.

  “Sergeant Himmler told me to tell you he will go back to battery headquarters and report that you have engaged the enemy and will ask for two tanks,” Maeschen said, very correct, again as he had been taught in the long weary hours with the instructors.

  Christian squinted at the barricade, low and mysterious in the green gloom between the aisle of trees. It had to happen to me, he thought bitterly. If they find out I was asleep; it will be court-martial. He had a sudden vision of disapproving officers behind a table, with the rustle of official papers before them and he standing there stiffly, waiting for the blow to fall.

  It’s damned helpful of Himmler, he thought ironically, to offer to go back for reinforcements, leaving me here getting my balls shot off. Himmler was a round, loud, jovial man who always laughed and looked mysterious when he was asked if he was any relation to Heinrich Himmler. Somehow it was part of the uneasy myth of the battery that they were related, probably uncle and nephew, and Sergeant Himmler was treated with touchy consideration by everyone. Probably at the end of the war, by which time Himmler would have risen to the rank of Colonel, mostly on the strength of the shadowy relationship, because he was a mediocre soldier, and would never get anywhere by himself, they’d find out there was nothing there at all, no connection whatever.

  Christian shook his head. He had to concentrate on the job ahead of him. It was amazing how difficult it was. With your life hanging on every move you made, your brain kept sliding around: Himmler, the rank, heavy smell of the driver’s body, like old laundry, the little bird hopping on the road, the pallor under the sunburn of Brandt’s skin and the way he sprawled, biting into the ground, as though he could dig a trench for himself with his teeth.