James Salter - Burning the Days

Then we were separated. I went to Washington and he was sent to Europe. Paris was all that anyone ever said it was, the showgirls don’t believe in wearing clothes, he wrote. I visited Europe for the first time in the winter of 1950 and found him comfortably lodged in rainy Wiesbaden in the best surviving hotel — thick carpets, once-white curtains; it had been requisitioned by the occupation forces. Around it were houses that had been flattened. Cities, like women, are tender to the victors. Wiesbaden was shabby but everyone — chambermaids, drivers, shopkeepers — was deferential and hardworking. They should have been on our side, Farris told me; they had wanted to join us at the end and fight the Russians together, not a bad idea. Did he really mean that? I asked. We’d be doing it eventually, he told me. I wondered, did he have a German girlfriend; there was none in evidence.

In the old-fashioned plush rooms we drank with women officers and secretaries, and towards the end of the visit I borrowed his car and drove to the south of France, my ignorance such as to make me think it would be summery there. From the empty Hotel Martinez I looked out on gray sea and tried to talk to the barman in French.

I was going to come over again in July or August; we would go to London or down to Greece. The glorious, vacant summers of youth. I never went; more important things came up, I forget of course what they were. I saw him about two years later in South Carolina when I had returned from the Korean War. He was still in Troop Carrier and I may have even worn a ribbon or two, feeling they would be admired. I had the idea I had done something he had not.

Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it’s the same with people. From those days his seems to be, above all others, the face that remains. He rose to be a brigadier general and died unexpectedly, of a heart attack, soon after he retired. With it, something passed out of the soul of the class for me. Occasionally on the street or in an audience, a crowd, you see a person who has died, the replica — nature has made a second version. I have never seen Farris, however. I had never known anyone like him nor would I again. We old first captains, Pershing is supposed to have said to MacArthur, must never flinch. He never would have flinched, I was sure of that.

As to what he was made of, what rare element, perhaps in the end I’ll know, perhaps he’ll tell me in the obscurity, the shade where he has gone. We will stroll aimlessly, as by rivers in France beneath the trees with their huge flat leaves, or along the Rhine, freed from desire and time, like patients in some hospital, never to leave; he’ll tell me what he remembers and I will finally understand.

—

Images remain, Army-Navy games in Baltimore and the morning’s staticky excitement, the first snow falling on the Plain, the voices of the choir angelically rising from the dark Area at Christmas. I remember the long walk back from the Thayer, half-run as it drew close to midnight, the walk to classes, to the old cemetery, the stadium, to everywhere. The geography of West Point was the sum of its distances. We could not be married, drink, or have a car, though we were permitted to drive. One of the school idols was said to have smuggled a girl onto the post in the trunk of a car. She spent the night in barracks and even attended reveille the next morning in a raincoat with her long hair concealed. This was daring of the highest sort, far above mere drinking. One of the few acts I admired more took place in the mess hall and involved a classmate named Benson. He was then a yearling. The table commandant, a first classman, was a Southerner and one of the plebes at the table was black — there was barely a handful of blacks in the Corps. The first classman, speaking as if the plebe were not there, was talking about niggers. If he ever heard of anyone, a yearling particularly, being nice to one, he said, he would see that he was run out of school. Without a moment’s hesitation Benson reached across the table to the plebe, “My name’s George,” he said, shaking his hand. I had heard of few things more instantly brave.

—

There was a special physical examination in the winter of 1944 that included the eyes: aligning two pegs in a sort of lighted shoe-box by pulling strings—“Am I good enough for the Air Corps, sir?”—and identifying colors by picking up various balls of yarn. In April, those who had passed, hundreds, that is, including my two roommates and me, went off to flight training in the South and Southwest. Hardly believing our good fortune, we went as if it were a holiday, by train. Left behind were classes, inspections, and many full-dress parades. Ahead was freedom and the joy of months away.

PASSING THROUGH darkened Virginia, lips eager and sticky from Southern Comfort, a girl and I talked intently in the vestibule. She was married, her husband was off in the army. I don’t remember where the bottle came from — it was either hers or we’d gotten it from the porter. The floor was trembling beneath our feet, the threshold between the cars creaking. She was from a small town somewhere and was wearing a cotton dress. The train leaned into slow, lurching curves, the metal squealing like a message passed along it. We saw nothing but each other’s faces. I was nineteen years old, on my way to primary flight training. The others were in the sleeping cars behind us; most had gone to bed. Soon we were embracing fiercely. A married woman on a train at night, her body tight against mine. “Pete,” she moaned, “oh, Pete …”

I had told her my name was Peter Slavek — it came from a book by Arthur Koestler. I was linking everything together, fatalism, sex, war. In my imagination I was already a pilot, handsome, freedom reeking from me, winds coiled round my legs. I had no real idea of what lay ahead, vast southwestern skies with their clouds and shafts of light, towns with railroad tracks running through them and Masonic lodges, dejected country with little lakes and fading cabins amid the pines, Bible country, the air pure with poverty and religious broadcasts. It didn’t matter, I was going.

Arthur Koestler had also written about an RAF flyer named Richard Hillary, well known at the time. Hillary had been a pilot in the Battle of Britain — grass fields and the insectlike planes bouncing across them, the sky dense with fights. He was nearly killed when the canopy on his burning plane jammed and he could not bail out. I knew his beautiful scarred looks by heart. He had written a book about his experiences called Falling Through Space. The chapters often closed with a knell: from this mission Peter Pease, from this mission Rupert someone, from this mission still another, failed to return.

Hillary, Koestler noted, was burned three times — it was only the first when his canopy would not open. They patched him up — his face would be a glossy reminder as long as he lived — and he returned to flying and a second crash, which was fatal. He burned to death. His wish had been that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered in the sea, and to complete the cycle this was done. He was twenty-three when he died. I do not recall whether or not he was married, but there were many moving love letters to a particular girl.

We have long forgotten those girls, doomed to go alone or with their parents down the lane to the village church, girls whose hopes had vanished. They were the fruit that had fallen to the ground. I longed to know these girls but also to bear the guilt for having robbed them, to have my ashes be the cause of their grief.

Then there was St.-Exupéry. He seduced me as well. I had read him, joylessly at first, in French, line by line and forever looking up words. He was a favorite of the French teacher. Eventually I came to like him on my own — it was his knowledge I admired, his wholeness of mind, more than his exploits — and years later my feeling was confirmed by a woman who told me that her youthful love affair with him was the most cherished episode of her life.