Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

They had seemed more related in Europe. Again and again in the towns that had been taken back from the Germans, gaunt, gray-faced men had stopped him humbly, looking searchingly at him, and had asked, peering at his long, lined, grimy face, under the anonymous helmet, “Are you a Jew?” Sometimes they asked it in English, sometimes French, or Yiddish. He didn’t know French or Yiddish, but he learned to recognize the phrase. He had never understood exactly why they had asked the question, since they never demanded anything from him, rarely even could speak to him, until, one day in Strasbourg, a little bent old man and a small, shapeless woman had stopped him, and asked, in English, if he was Jewish.

“Yes,” he said, smiling at them.

The two old people had smiled widely, like children. “Look,” the old man had said to his wife. “A young American soldier. A Jew. And so large and strong.” He had touched Seeger’s arm reverently with the tips of his fingers, then had touched the Garand he was carrying. “And such a beautiful rifle …”

And there, for a moment, although he was not particularly sensitive, Seeger got an inkling of why he had been stopped and questioned by so many before. Here, to these bent, exhausted old people, ravaged of their families, familiar with flight and death for so many years, was a symbol of continuing life. A large young man in the uniform of the liberator, blood, as they thought, of their blood, but not in hiding, not quivering in fear and helplessness, but striding secure and victorious down the street, armed and capable of inflicting terrible destruction on his enemies.

Seeger had kissed the old lady on the cheek and she had wept and the old man had scolded her for it, while shaking Seeger’s hand fervently and thankfully before saying good-bye.

And, thinking back on it, it was silly to pretend that, even before his father’s letter, he had been like any other American soldier going through the war. When he had stood over the huge dead SS major with the face blown in by his bullets in the warehouse in Coblenz, and taken the pistol from the dead hand, he had tasted a strange little extra flavor of triumph. How many Jews, he’d thought, has this man killed, how fitting it is that I’ve killed him. Neither Olson nor Welch, who were like his brothers, would have felt that in picking up the Luger, its barrel still hot from the last shots its owner had fired before dying. And he had resolved that he was going to make sure to take this gun back with him to America, and plug it and keep it on his desk at home, as a kind of vague, half-understood sign to himself that justice had once been done and he had been its instrument.

Maybe, he thought, maybe I’d better take it back with me, but not as a memento. Not plugged, but loaded. America by now was a strange country for him. He had been away a long time and he wasn’t sure what was waiting for him when he got home. If the mobs were coming down the street toward his house, he was not going to die singing and praying.

When he was taking basic training he’d heard a scrawny, clerk-like-looking soldier from Boston talking at the other end of the PX bar, over the watered beer. “The boys at the office,” the scratchy voice was saying, “gave me a party before I left. And they told me one thing. ‘Charlie,’ they said, ‘hold onto your bayonet. We’re going to be able to use it when you get back. On the Yids.’”

He hadn’t said anything then, because he’d felt it was neither possible nor desirable to fight against every random overheard voice raised against the Jews from one end of the world to another. But again and again, at odd moments, lying on a barracks cot, or stretched out trying to sleep on the floor of a ruined French farmhouse, he had heard that voice, harsh, satisfied, heavy with hate and ignorance, saying above the beery grumble of apprentice soldiers at the bar, “Hold onto your bayonet.…”

And the other stories—Jews collected stories of hatred and injustice and inklings of doom like a special, lunatic kind of miser. The story of the naval officer, commander of a small vessel off the Aleutians, who, in the officers’ wardroom, had complained that he hated the Jews because it was the Jews who had demanded that the Germans be beaten first and the forces in the Pacific had been starved in consequence. And when one of his junior officers, who had just come aboard, had objected and told the commander that he was a Jew, the commander had risen from the table and said, “Mister, the Constitution of the United States says I have to serve in the same navy with Jews, but it doesn’t say I have to eat at the same table with them.” In the fogs and the cold, swelling Arctic seas off the Aleutians, in a small boat, subject to sudden, mortal attack at any moment …

And the two young combat engineers in an attached company on D Day, when they were lying off the coast right before climbing down into the landing barges. “There’s France,” one of them had said.

“What’s it like?” the second one had asked, peering out across the miles of water toward the smoking coast.

“Like every place else,” the first one had answered. “The Jews’ve made all the dough during the war.”

“Shut up!” Seeger had said, helplessly thinking of the dead, destroyed, wandering, starving Jews of France. The engineers had shut up, and they’d climbed down together into the heaving boat, and gone into the beach together.

And the million other stories. Jews, even the most normal and best adjusted of them, became living treasuries of them, scraps of malice and bloodthirstiness, clever and confusing and cunningly twisted so that every act by every Jew became suspect and blameworthy and hateful. Seeger had heard the stories, and had made an almost conscious effort to forget them. Now, holding his father’s letter in his hand, he remembered them all.

He stared unseeingly out in front of him. Maybe, he thought, maybe it would’ve been better to have been killed in the war, like Leonard. Simpler. Leonard would never have to face a crowd coming for his mother and father. Leonard would not have to listen and collect these hideous, fascinating little stories that made of every Jew a stranger in any town, on any field, on the face of the earth. He had come so close to being killed so many times, it would have been so easy, so neat and final.

Seeger shook his head. It was ridiculous to feel like that, and he was ashamed of himself for the weak moment. At the age of twenty-one, death was not an answer.

“Seeger!” It was Olson’s voice. He and Welch had sloshed silently up behind Seeger, standing in the open field. “Seeger, mon vieux , what’re you doing—grazing?”

Seeger turned slowly to them. “I wanted to read my letter,” he said.

Olson looked closely at him. They had been together so long, through so many things, that flickers and hints of expression on each other’s faces were recognized and acted upon. “Anything wrong?” Olson asked.

“No,” said Seeger. “Nothing much.”

“Norman,” Welch said, his voice young and solemn. “Norman, we’ve been talking, Olson and me. We decided—you’re pretty attached to that Luger, and maybe—if you—well …”

“What he’s trying to say,” said Olson, “is we withdraw the request. If you want to sell it, O.K. If you don’t, don’t do it for our sake. Honest.”

Seeger looked at them, standing there, disreputable and tough and familiar. “I haven’t made up my mind yet,” he said.

“Anything you decide,” Welch said oratorically, “is perfectly all right with us. Perfectly.”

They walked aimlessly and silently across the field, away from camp. As they walked, their shoes making a wet, sliding sound in the damp, dead grass, Seeger thought of the time Olson had covered him in the little town outside Cherbourg, when Seeger had been caught going down the side of a street by four Germans with a machine gun on the second story of a house on the corner and Olson had had to stand out in the middle of the street with no cover at all for more than a minute, firing continuously, so that Seeger could get away alive. And he thought of the time outside Saint Lô when he had been wounded and had lain in a minefield for three hours and Welch and Captain Taney had come looking for him in the darkness and had found him and picked him up and run for it, all of them expecting to get blown up any second.