Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Anna smiled. “It’s worse in Warsaw,” she said.

She had been in prison in Warsaw. Only for forty-eight hours, but in prison. They were in the restaurant by this time, but waiting at the bar, with the whiskeys still coming. The American hadn’t shown up yet. The restaurant was a small one off the Champs-Elysées, with men sitting alone reading newspapers. On the front page of one of the newspapers there was a large photograph of two fattish middle-aged gentlemen gingerly poking rapiers at each other. There had been a duel that morning in a garden in Neuilly between two representatives of the Chambre des Députés. A little blood had been spilled. A nick in the arm. Honor had been satisfied. France.

“I am only sixteen at the time,” Anna was saying. “I am invited to party. A diplomat from Italy. I am in demand in foreign circles because of my languages.” She was a mistress of the present tense, Anna. “I still drink only juices of fruit. All the Poles present are arrested.”

“ Encore trois whiskeys, Jean ,” said Harrison to the barman.

“The diplomat is smuggling works of art out of Poland.” Anna said. “He is a lover of art. The police talk to me for ten hours in small room in prison. They want me to tell them how I help smuggle out works of art and what I am paid. They say they know I am spy, besides. All I can do is cry. I know nothing. When I am invited to party I go to party. A girl goes to party when she is invited. I want to see my mother, but they say they will lock me up and keep me in prison until I talk, they do not tell nobody I am there. Forever.” She smiled. “They put me in cell with two other women. Prostitutes. Very bad talking. They laugh when they see me crying, but I cannot stop. They are in prison three months already, they do not know when they must get out. They are crazy for man. Three months too long to go without man, they say. Out of cloth, twisted around, they make an,” she hesitated, searching for the word, “an object,” she said modestly, “shaped like sex of man.”

“Penis,” Harrison said, helpfully British.

“They use it on each other,” Anna said. “They want to use it on me. I scream and the guard comes and they laugh. They say in three months I be screaming for them to lend it to me.” She sipped her drink, smiling. “The next night, I am set free. I am not to tell anybody where I have been. So now I am in Paris and I would like to marry American and live in America.”

On cue, the American entered the restaurant. There was a young blond-and-pink Journey’s End kind of Englishman with him. The American was called Carroll and had a long, gaunt, sunburnt face. He was wearing a leather jacket and a black turtleneck sweater under it. He was a news photographer working for a big agency and had just come back from Vietnam and he explained he was late because he had been waiting in the office for blowups of some of his shots. They hadn’t arrived yet. The Englishman had something to do with the BBC and seemed shy. The American kissed Anna, a brotherly kiss. He was not the type to enter into a marriage of convenience.

More whiskey appeared. Rosemary felt radiant. The young Englishman seemed to blush again and again, whenever she caught him looking at her. How much better this was than sitting brooding alone in the hotel room, with lights too dim to read by.

“Prison is the ultimate experience,” Harrison was saying, on his schedule of whiskey. Anna’s reminiscence had set him off. He had been in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp for three years. “It is more of a test of character, it is more essential than combat, even.”

They were at table. They were eating hors d’oeuvres. The restaurant was famous for its hors d’oeuvres. There were two large carts loaded with plates of tuna, sardines, little radishes, céleri rémoulade, eggs with mayonnaise, raw mushrooms in oil, ratatouille, a dozen different kinds of sausage and pâté. The armies of the poor could be fed indefinitely on these tidbits of Paris. The young Englishman was sitting next to Rosemary. When his knee touched Rosemary’s accidentally under the table, he pulled his leg back frantically, as though her knee were a bayonet. The whiskey had been transmuted to wine. New Beaujolais. The purple bottles came and went.

“The guards had a little game,” Harrison was saying. “They would smoke a cigarette, very slowly, in front of us. A hundred men, starving, in rags, who literally would have given their lives for a cigarette. There wouldn’t be a sound. Nobody would move. We just stood there, our eyes riveted on a little man with his rifle, looking at us over the smoke, letting the cigarette burn away in his hand. Then when it was half-finished, he’d throw it to the ground and trample it with his boot and walk away a few yards. And a hundred men would fling themselves on their knees, punching, scratching, kicking, cursing, to get at the shreds of the tobacco, while the guards laughed at us.”

“The magical East,” Carroll said. “Some of the things I’ve seen in Vietnam.…”

Rosemary hoped he wouldn’t elaborate. She was enjoying her hors d’oeuvres and given half a chance the wine, after all that whiskey, would make her happy to be in Paris. Luckily, Carroll was a taciturn man and didn’t go on. All he did was to reach into his pocket and take out a photograph and put in on the table in front of Rosemary. It was the sort of photograph you were used to seeing these days. A woman who looked about eighty years old, in black, squatting against a wall, her hand held out, begging, with a small, starved, almost naked child seated, puppy-eyed, beside her. A slender Eurasian girl, heavily made up, with a bouffant hairdo and a long slit in her silk dress showing a marvelous leg was walking past the old woman without a glance at her. On the wall that filled the background of the picture somebody had scrawled in large chalk letters, God was here, but He left early.

“I took it for my religious editor,” Carroll said, pouring himself some more wine.

Anna picked up the photograph. “That girl,” she said. “If I am man I would never look at white women.” She handed the photograph to the young Englishman, who studied it for a long time.

“In China,” he said, “I understand there are no more beggars.” Then he blushed, as though he had said something dirty and put the picture down quickly.

Eldred Harrison tilted his head, birdlike, to peer at the photograph. “The new art of America,” he said. “Graffiti. Wall-to-wall communication.” He smiled deprecatingly at his joke.

Carroll put the picture back into his pocket.

“I didn’t see a woman for two and a half years,” Harrison said, starting on his steak.

Paris, Rosemary thought, the capital of dazzling conversation. Flaubert and his friends. She began to try to think of excuses for leaving before the dessert. The young Englishman poured her some more wine, almost filling the deep glass. “Thank you,” she said. He turned his head away, uncomfortable. He had a beautiful long English nose, blond eyelashes, drawn-in pink cheeks, and full-girlish lips. Alice in Wonderland in his pocket during the barrage, Rosemary remembered vaguely, from a summer revival of Journey’s End . All this talk of war. She wondered what he’d do if she quietly said, Does anybody here know of a reliable abortionist?

“We had a large group of Gurkhas in the camp, maybe two hundred,” Harrison said, slicing his steak. We are in the Far East for the night, Rosemary thought. “Wonderful chaps. Enormous soldiers. The Japs kept working on them to come over to their side. Brothers-in-color, exploited by the white imperialists, that sort of thing. Gave them extra rations, cigarettes. The Gurkhas would carefully divide the rations with all the other prisoners. As for the cigarettes.…” Harrison shook his head in wonderment, twenty-five years later. “They’d accept the cigarettes, without a word. Then, as one man, they’d tear them deliberately to bits. Right in front of the guards. The guards would laugh and next day they’d give them more cigarettes and the same thing would happen. It went on like that for more than six months. Inhuman discipline. Marvelous troops, they were. In all that mud and dust, with people dropping dead all around them.” Harrison sipped at his wine. All this seemed to be aiding his appetite, distant deprivation edging today’s pleasure. “Finally,” he said, “their colonel called them together and said it had to stop, it was degrading that the Japs could still think they could buy Gurkhas. He said a gesture was needed, a convincing gesture. The next day a Jap had to be killed—publicly. They were on work details and were issued shovels. He wanted one man to sharpen the rim of a shovel and when the work details were formed up next morning brain the nearest guard.” Harrison finished his steak and pushed the plate an inch away from him, reflecting on Asia. “The colonel asked for a volunteer. Every man stepped forward in one moment, as if it were a parade. The colonel didn’t hesitate. He picked the man directly in front of him. The man worked on sharpening his shovel all night with a big stone. And in the morning, in the sunlight, he moved over to the guard who was assigning the details and brained him. He himself was shot immediately, of course, and fifty others were beheaded. But the Japs stopped handing out cigarettes to Gurkhas.”