Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

For the past several months, whenever Hawkins was waiting somewhere, and closed his eyes, as he was doing now, he had had a recurrent daydream. It was winter in the dream, a cold, windy night, and he and Esther were sitting before a warm fire in their own house. He could never decide whether the house was in England, in a quiet village, or on a farm in Palestine, cupped in the small, old hills, among the orange orchards. They were reading, and occasionally they looked up from their books and smiled at each other, not having to talk, in the firelight. After a time, there was a knock on the door and guests began to come in; not many of them, just good friends. Hogan, with his wild hair plastered down politely. Fleming, with the schoolteacher wife from Leeds he talked about so often. Robinson, who had been in Hawkins’ platoon in Africa—it was always hard to remember, especially in a daydream, that Robinson was dead, buried in the small, windy cemetery near Constantine. They talked quietly in the warm room, and Hawkins opened up the tall bottles of heavy beer, and after a while Hogan sang, in his hoarse, accurate boy’s voice, the sad, thrilling songs his grandfather had taught him in his father’s honor, songs whose words no one understood but whose melodies made you somehow melancholy and proud.

Hawkins blinked and refused himself the pleasure of taking the daydream through to its quiet ending. It was ridiculous to allow himself to moon like that, and it only made it worse when he finally opened his eyes and looked around him. There he was, on the dock, in the hot, bare sun, with the nightstick, waiting for Lieutenant Madox to order him to fight. And in the hills behind him, among the orange groves, people were hiding rifles and knives and machine guns to murder each other in the long winter nights. And in England, from all the letters he got from his family, they were preparing to starve and freeze to celebrate their victory in the war. He was sorry he was not older. Perhaps if he were thirty or forty or fifty, he could understand it better. During the war they had been warm, during the war they had been fed, during the war the Russians had loved them, the Americans had admired them, the French had kissed them when they came into a town; wherever they had gone, they had been heroes and saviors. He remembered the day that the election returns came out. He was still in Germany, in Hamburg, and an American sergeant had come over to him and said, very solemnly, “Soldier, my name is McCarthy. I’m a paid-up C.I.O. member from Indianapolis. I decided I wanted to tell some Englishmen how wonderful I think they are, and you’re the first one I’ve come across since I made the decision. You’ve shown the whole world how civilized human beings should behave.” The American had been drunk, of course (was it possible that Americans appreciated other people only when they had ten drinks under their belts?), but he had shaken Hawkins’ hand sternly and clapped him on the back, and Hawkins had walked away grinning and feeling proud because he had voted for Attlee and the others who were going to prove that a country could be run for the benefit of the workingman without violence or disaster. He was glad the American wasn’t around to see him standing on the dock today with helmet and nightstick, in this land of widows and orphans, in this land where there were no whole families, only survivors, in this land where everyone—every girl on the street, every child in a schoolroom, every farmer plowing a furrow—had a story like Esther’s, memories like Esther’s, nightmares like Esther’s, where the memory of the furnace flickered across every face, the knocking of the midnight arrest broke into every dream, where agony was so commonplace that no one even remarked it. What a puzzling, sad thing it was to be an Englishman today, Hawkins thought, staring at the boat, which was so close now. If he was in England, he was caught between cold and hunger, in Palestine between Jew and Arab, in India between Hindu and Moslem, in the East Indies between Dutchman and Javanese, and no friends anywhere, no approval anywhere, just the helmet and the nightstick, the barbed wire and the Lieutenant, the songs in the strange languages hurled at your head like hand grenades. You could read all the pamphlets, vote all the elections, pray all the Sundays, and each day it became worse, each day made you more of a villain, each day your uniform was cursed on the streets of more cities, in more languages. He closed his eyes.

“Hawkins!”

Hawkins jumped and straightened up. Lieutenant Madox was standing in front of him. “Damn you, Hawkins!” Madox was saying. “Will you keep your bloody eyes open! Get over here!”

“Yes, sir,” said Hawkins. He gripped his club and moved to where two sailors were swinging a gangplank up to the railing of the boat. The boat was tied to the dock now, and a terrible stillness had settled over the people on it.

“Spread out, spread out,” Madox was shouting to the platoon “Don’t let anyone jump onto the dock. Make ’em all come down the gangplank.”

The smell was awful now, and in the silence the Jews stared down at the Lieutenant and the men of the platoon with cold, devouring hatred. Over a loudspeaker came a cool, pleasant voice.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the voice said, and it sounded like at least a colonel in the Guards, “we wish to do this in as orderly a fashion as possible. You will please come down the gangplank in twos and march to your right and go aboard the vessel moored directly behind your boat. You are going to be transferred to Cyprus, where you will be taken care of in British Army camps. Your sick will be treated and you will be given every consideration possible. Now, if you please, start leaving your vessel.”

The voice halted in a mechanical crackle. No one moved.

“All right,” Madox said. “Let’s get on board.”

Slowly and deliberately, the men of the platoon started up the gangplank. Hawkins was right behind the Lieutenant, with Hogan at his side. For a moment, at the top of the gangplank, he stopped. He looked down at the deck of the schooner. There was a blur of eyes, dark, staring, wild; a confusion of gaunt, ravaged faces; a wavering mass of tattered clothing such as might have been recovered from the corpses of a dug-up graveyard. Hawkins tottered momentarily, feeling, dizzily, this has happened to me before. Then he remembered. Belsen, he thought—wherever you turn, it is Belsen. In Belsen, he remembered, there had been the smell, too, and the same eyes, the same clothes, and there had been the old man (although later Hawkins had found out the man was only thirty) who had opened a door of one of the huts and come slowly out, holding his hands in front of him, his hands like claws, his face twisted skull-like and horrible in what Hawkins had later realized the man had meant as a glorious smile of greeting but which at the moment had seemed weird and threatening. Then, just as he had reached Hawkins, he had dropped to the ground, and when Hawkins had bent over him, he had died. But no one here approached Hawkins; there was no expression here that might later be deciphered into a smile. On the other side of the deck, there were the women, and standing, facing the gangplank, were the young men, and then Hawkins knew there was going to be a fight. Crazily, he thought: I’ll bet there are some of these people here who will recognize me from Belsen. What will they think of me?

“Come on!” Madox was shouting furiously. “Come on, Hawkins, get in there!”

Slowly, with dreamy obedience, Hawkins moved toward the first line of men. I am not going to hit them, he thought as he walked through the stinking, unreal silence. No matter what, I am not going to hit them. Then he saw Hogan swing and there was the flat, awful noise of the stick hitting a shoulder. Then the screams began, and the shouting, which closed around you in a savage, wild, echoing vault of sound, and the bodies slamming into you, and the spurt of someone’s blood, hot and slippery, in your face, and the confused flailing of arms and the black gleam of wood flashing against the yellow sky and a form dropping with a scream out of the rigging. Hawkins tried to keep his arms over his head, so that he wouldn’t be pinned in helplessly, but hands grabbed at his club, and stabbed into his face, and he had to move his arms furiously to keep the club from being torn away. Then, suddenly, there was a pair of hands at his throat and he was staring into a dark, grimacing face, the eyes, just six inches from his, pitiless, mad, as the powerful fingers pressed and pressed. Hawkins tried to pull away, but there was no escaping the hands. Oh, God, Hawkins thought, feeling the blood pounding in his head, oh, God, he is going to kill me. No, he wanted to say, you don’t understand. I am not doing anything. I was at Belsen. I was one of the people at Belsen. But the hands gripped firmer and firmer, the eyes stared coldly and triumphantly close to his own, as though the man who was choking him were finally taking vengeance for the ghetto in Poland, the death of his children, the locked cars, the whips, the furnaces, the graves of Europe. Hawkins felt his eyes clouding, his throat being torn, his knees slowly crumpling, as he pressed back and back, with the screams and the wet smashing of blows all around him. With his waning strength, he wrenched away. Then he hit the man. The man did not let go. Hawkins hit him again, across the face, and the man’s face disappeared in a fuzz of blood, but still the fingers gripped, as strong as ever. Then, again and again, with all the desperate strength in his arms and body, Hawkins lashed out at the man who was trying to strangle him. The man’s face seemed to crumble in a red, dissolving tissue, his jaw hanging queer and sidewise in a broken leer, only his eyes, steadfast and full of hatred, still glaring into Hawkins’ own. There was a last, convulsive spasm of the fingers at Hawkins’ throat; then the man slowly and silently slid down and away. Hawkins stared at him, then fell on top of him, and something crashed across his head, and when he opened his eyes again, he was lying on the dock and everything was very quiet, except for the weeping of women, soft and far away.