Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“I knew he would be,” Mac said. “I talked to him last night.”

“I had breakfast with him”—Peter waved for two more beers—“and he said he guessed he’d be doing the same thing himself if he had to hang around this town five months.”

Mac comfortably drained his beer.

“The birth rate in England,” Peter said, “has gone up. I read it in the Mail this morning. There’re three million Englishmen out of the country and the birth rate’s rocketing.…” He heard his own voice loud and angry and humorless. “How in the name of God do they dare print things like that?” He saw Mac grinning widely, but he couldn’t stop. “Who’re the fathers? Where’re the fathers? Bloody damned newspaper!”

“My,” Mac said, “you have it bad today.”

Suddenly Peter realized that Mac, placid and tolerant, was bearing a great deal of the burden of Peter’s nerves.

“Mac,” he said quietly, “forgive me.”

“Uh?” Mac looked at him, surprised.

“Wailing Wall Chrome. Agony, Cairo division.” Peter shook his head in disgust. “I keep feeding it to you seven days a week.”

“Oh, shut up. I’ve lived with lots worse.”

“Any time I get on your nerves, sing out, will you?”

“Sure thing. Drink your beer.” Mac was embarrassed.

“I must be going a little crazy.” Peter looked at his hands, which had taken to trembling in the last few months. The cigarette jerked minutely between his fingers, in a spasmodic rhythm. “This town. When I was with the regiment … Oh, hell …” The truth was that out in the desert, under the guns, on a pint of water a day, and the sudden air often dire with Stukas, he had been much happier. There were no women in the desert, no reminders of a civilized and normal life. There was clean, sterile sand, the noise of armor, thousands of grumbling, good-humored men intimate with an equal death, and above all there was the sense of immense and hardy effort and accomplishment, as first they had held the Afrika Corps and then driven it back. Cairo then had been a beautiful town, two days at a time, a hot bath and unlimited Scotch, and sweet, clean sheets and relief from the guns. But now, under the dry flood of paper, under the stiffness and pettiness of headquarters politics, under the cheap weight of men who had clung to soft jobs for three years, with the streets full of bare-legged girls, with the war on another continent a thousand miles away …

Now the regiment, what was left of it, was broken up. Most of them were in graves on the road to Tunis, others were in hospitals, the rest scattered among other units, after the four years that had started in France. Mac, who had been his platoon sergeant at Arras, calmly instructing the untrained men how to load and fire the guns they had never used before, then taking them out into the fresh May fields of France hunting for parachutists. Himself, who had crawled through the German lines to Dunkirk, who had entered Tripoli the first hour, who had blown up in the jeep outside Mareth, with his driver dead in the air beside him … Now, both of them clerks in small offices, chained to paper and civil servants.

“Six years,” he said, “some bloody MP said we’d be sent home after six years. What do you think a woman thinks when she reads that she’ll get her man back in only six years?”

“Always remember,” Mac grinned, “what Monty said. ‘The war can’t last more than seven years. We’ll run out of paper.’”

“If only I could get back to England,” Peter said, “and sleep with my wife for two nights, everything would be all right. Just two nights.”

Mac sighed. He was a quiet, efficient, small, matter-of-fact man, noticeably graying, and sighing was strange and incongruous to him. “Peter,” he said, “can I talk plainly?”

Peter nodded.

“Peter, you ought to get yourself a girl.”

They sat in silence. Peter played somberly with his beer. In France, even though he had just been married, he had been the gay young officer. Handsome and debonair, he had played joyfully and thoughtlessly with the pretty ladies of the country towns at which he’d been stationed, and in Paris, when he’d had a month there, a charming, beautifully dressed wife of a French captain stationed in Algiers.

But when he’d got back to England with the gray-faced remnants of his regiment, after the hideous, bloody days of the break-through, and had taken his wife silently into his arms, all frivolity, all smallness and lack of faith had seemed wanton and irreligious in the face of so much ruin, such agony. Leaving England for Africa, he had felt that behind him he had to leave the best part of his life orderly and decent.

“Maybe,” he said to Mac, “Maybe …”

“A man’s got to be practical,” Mac said. “Three years. Oh, my God!”

Peter had to smile at the drastic expression on the practical man’s face.

“You’ll just explode,” Mac said, “and blow away.”

Peter laughed loudly, nervously. “Whisky,” he said, “provides certain compensations.”

“Whisky,” Mac said grimly, “will send you home a doddering wreck. You’ll do no one any good that way.”

“Maybe. Maybe …” Peter shrugged. “Anyway, I hate these women out here. Having the best time of their lives. Ugly, impossible girls no one would ever look at in peacetime, just because there are a hundred men for every woman … Snobbish, overconfident … Bitches, all of them. A man has to sacrifice all decent, male pride to chase after one of these.…” He talked faster and faster, all the bitter observation of the past years flooding to his tongue. “They demand abasement, homage, the ugliest, horrible and meanest of them. Women,” he said, “have been among the most horrible of the war’s casualties. All humility’s gone, all normal value, all friendship. They’re man-greedy. They’re profiteering on the war, like the worst usurer and manufacturer of machine tools, except that their profits are lieutenants and generals, not cash. After the war,” he said, “we should have rehabilitation hospitals for women who have been in troop areas, just like the hospitals for maimed men, to teach them how to live normal lives again.…”

Mac was laughing by now, helplessly, into his beer. “Enough,” he said. “Enough, John Knox! All I wanted to say is that I have a date tonight, and my girl has a friend who’s just come from Jerusalem, and it might do you a world of good just to have dinner with a woman for once. Do you want to go?”

Peter flushed, looked down at the beer-ringed table. “I won’t even know how to talk to a woman any more.”

“Do you want to go?”

Peter opened his mouth, closed it. “All right,” he said. “All right.”

“Jerusalem is nice enough …” It was on the dance floor at the Auberge des Pyramides, under the stars, with the three great tombs standing huge and a rebuke to time in the darkness just outside the lights and the music. Joyce was talking as they went slowly and painfully around the dance floor. “The city’s clean, and the King David’s an amusing hotel, but the people’re simply dreadful.” She had a brittle, drawling voice, pitched just high enough so that everyone near by could hear clearly what she was saying. “There,” she said brightly, as Peter managed a full turn, “we’re doing much better, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” Peter said, sweating in the heavy Nile heat, only slightly tempered by night, as he tried to concentrate on the beat of the music. Joyce’s voice distracted him and put him off, and somehow she never seemed to stop talking. She worked in the consular service, and by nine-thirty Peter had a full store of information on the doings of the consulate in Jerusalem for the last year and a half, at which time Joyce had come out from England. He had hardly said a word all night, stammering, half finishing sentences, suffering, feeling like the clumsiest farmer. Still, she was pretty, most desirable in a full white evening gown (“We always dress in Jerusalem”), with full, sleek shoulders bare and daring under the gay lights.