Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

And he thought of all the drinks they’d had together and the long marches and the cold winter together, and all the girls they’d gone out with together, and he thought of his father and brother crouching behind the window in Ohio waiting for the rockets and the crowds armed with Browning automatic rifles.

“Say,” he stopped and stood facing them. “Say, what do you guys think of the Jews?”

Welch and Olson looked at each other, and Olson glanced down at the letter in Seeger’s hand.

“Jews?” Olson said finally. “What’re they? Welch, you ever hear of the Jews?”

Welch looked thoughtfully at the gray sky. “No,” he said. “But remember, I’m an uneducated fellow.”

“Sorry, Bud,” Olson said, turning to Seeger. “We can’t help you. Ask us another question. Maybe we’ll do better.”

Seeger peered at the faces of his friends. He would have to rely upon them, later on, out of uniform, on their native streets, more than he had ever relied on them on the bullet-swept street and in the dark minefield in France. Welch and Olson stared back at him, troubled, their faces candid and tough and dependable.

“What time,” Seeger asked, “did you tell that captain you’d meet him?”

“Eight o’clock,” Welch said. “But we don’t have to go. If you have any feeling about that gun …”

“We’ll meet him,” Seeger said. “We can use that sixty-five bucks.”

“Listen,” Olson said, “I know how much you like that gun and I’ll feel like a heel if you sell it.”

“Forget it,” Seeger said, starting to walk again. “What could I use it for in America?”

“ I would like complete reports on these three people,” Captain Mikhailov was saying. He pushed a slip of paper across the desk to Garbrecht, and Garbrecht glanced at the names. “They are interpreters at the American civil affairs headquarters. The Americans have a charming habit of hiring ex-Nazis almost exclusively for those jobs, and we have found it rewarding to inquire into the pasts of such gentlemen.” Mikhailov smiled. He was a short, stocky man with a round, shielded face, and pale, unsmiling eyes, and when he smiled it was like a flower painted unconvincingly on stone.

Garbrecht recognized two of the three names. Mikhailov was right. They were Nazis. It would take some thinking out, later, though, to decide whether to expose them to Mikhailov, or exactly how far to expose them. Garbrecht watched Mikhailov unlock a drawer in his desk and take out some American marks. Methodically, Mikhailov counted the notes out in his square, machine-like hands. He locked the drawer and pushed the money across the desk to Garbrecht.

“There,” Mikhailov said, “that will keep you until we see each other next week.”

“Yes, Captain,” Garbrecht said. He reached out and pulled the money toward him, leaving it on the top of the desk. He took out his wallet, and, slowly, one by one, put the notes into the wallet. He was still slow and clumsy with things like that, because he had not yet learned how to handle things deftly with his left hand, and his right hand and arm were buried behind the field hospital in the brewery fourteen hundred miles away. Mikhailov watched him impassively, without offering aid.

Garbrecht put his wallet away and stood up. His overcoat was thrown over a chair and he picked it up and struggled to get it over his shoulders.

“Till next week,” he said.

“Next week,” Mikhailov said.

Garbrecht did not salute. He opened the door and went out. At least, he thought, with a nervous sensation of triumph, as he went down the grimy steps past the two plain-clothes men loitering in the dark hall, at least I didn’t salute the bastard. That’s the third week in a row I didn’t salute him.

The plain-clothes men stared at him with a common, blank, threatening look. By now he knew them too well to be frightened by them. They looked that way at everything. When they looked at a horse or a child or a bunch of flowers, they threatened it. It was merely their comfortable professional adjustment to the world around them, like Mikhailov’s smile. The Russians, Garbrecht thought as he went down the street, what a people to have in Berlin!

Garbrecht walked without looking about him. The landscape of the cities of Germany had become monotonous—rubble, broken statues, neatly swept lanes between piled cracked brick, looming blank single walls, shells of buildings, half-demolished houses in which dozens of families somehow lived. He moved briskly and energetically, like everyone else, swinging his one arm a little awkwardly to maintain his balance, but very little of what he saw around him made any impression on him. A solid numbness had taken possession of him when they cut off his arm. It was like the anesthesia which they injected into your spine. You were conscious and you could see and hear and speak and you could understand what was being done to you, but all feeling was absent. Finally, Garbrecht knew, the anesthesia would wear off, but for the present it was a most valuable defense.

“Lieutenant.” It was a woman’s voice somewhere behind him, and Garbrecht did not look around. “Oh, Lieutenant Garbrecht.”

He stopped and turned slowly. Nobody had called him lieutenant for more than a year now. A short, blonde woman in a gray cloth coat was hurrying toward him. He looked at her, puzzled. He had never seen her before, and he wondered if it were she who had called his name.

“Did you call me?” he asked as she stopped in front of him.

“Yes,” she said. She was thin, with a pale, rather pretty face. She did not smile. “I followed you from Mikhailov’s office.”

“I’m sure,” Garbrecht said, turning and starting away, “that you have made some mistake.”

The woman fell in beside him, walking swiftly. She wore no stockings and her legs showed a little purple from the cold. “Please,” she said, “do not behave like an idiot.”

Then, in a flat, undemanding voice, she said several things to him that he had thought nobody alive remembered about him, and finally she called him by his correct name, and he knew that there was no escaping it now. He stopped in the middle of the ruined street and sighed, and said, after a long time, “Very well. I will go with you.”

* * *

There was a smell of cooking in the room. Good cooking. A roast, probably, and a heavy, strong soup. It was the kind of smell that had seemed to vanish from Germany sometime around 1942, and even with all the other things happening to him, Garbrecht could feel the saliva welling helplessly and tantalizingly up from the ducts under his tongue. It was a spacious room with a high ceiling that must have been at one time quite elegant. There was a bricked-up fireplace with a large, broken mirror over it. By some trick of fracture the mirror reflected separate images in each of its broken parts, and it made Garbrecht feel that something shining and abnormal was hidden there.

The girl had ushered him without formality into the room and had told him to sit down and had disappeared. Garbrecht could feel his muscles slowly curling as he sat rigidly in the half-broken wooden chair, staring coldly at the battered desk, the surprising leather chair behind the desk, the strange mirror, the ten-inch high portrait of Lenin which was the only adornment on the wall. Lenin looked down at him from the wall, across the years, through the clumsy heroics of the lithographer, with a remote, ambiguous challenge glaring from the dark, wild eyes.

The door through which he had himself come was opened and a man entered. The man slammed the door behind him and walked swiftly across the room to the desk. Then he wheeled and faced Garbrecht.