Old Men at Midnight (26 page)

The ground mist soon lifted. We advanced toward a slight rise. Behind us came our tanks. There was not an enemy soldier in sight. Then we spotted smoke beyond the rise.

When we got to the rise we saw some sort of encampment about a mile away: tall fences and low buildings and guard towers with machine guns. We advanced toward it slowly and could smell it, and most of us gagged and some vomited as we went along.

From a distance we could see that the gates were open. We leapfrogged, doing reconnaissance by fire, toward the guard towers. It turned out they were deserted. Bodies lay on the perimeter fence. We charged through the gates.

Half-human ghoulish creatures stood near the buildings, staring at us as we entered. They seemed not to know what to do or say. It had rained recently; the ground was a quagmire. There were hard, narrow paths through the mud, and duckboards had been laid down, and we deployed rapidly.

The stench was horrendous: the foulest of pigsties; an open cesspool of reeking excrement. Hot, thick, pungent. A putrid, cloying, acidic smell that seemed to coat our palates and throats. The camp was about a half-mile long by a half-mile wide. We went past squalid buildings that looked to be barracks, and then a broad open space, and an inner encampment of well-kept buildings, and a brick
building with a chimney that turned out to be a crematorium, and beyond that we came upon the most heart-numbing sight I have ever witnessed: a vast graveyard, trenches upon trenches of putrefying whitish bodies stacked one on top of the other like wood.

And there I found Mr. Zapiski.

He lay half covered with earth and quicklime in a trench in the mass cemetery; and facedown on the ground, reeking and begrimed, alongside a duckboard; and rotting into the mud near the fence, decaying in his urine and excrement; and among the murmuring phantoms we found in the barracks who gaped at us when we entered and began a low keening when we told them we were Americans, one of them crying out in a broken voice, “Why did you take so long to get here?”

“Warum?” I heard him say. And again, “Warum?”

The lieutenant asked them, “Where are the guards?”

They did not understand him.

I translated his question into Yiddish.

They stared at me, stunned. A soldier with a weapon, in an American uniform, speaking Yiddish!

“Most ran away,” one answered. “A few are still in those houses.” He pointed toward the rear of the camp.

The lieutenant sent our squad over to secure the houses.

Two of the houses were empty. We found six guards inside the third, all drunk, their holsters empty, but still wearing their helmets.

The sergeant asked them, “Where are the others?”

They stared at him, muttering in German.

“You fucking bastards,” the sergeant said. “Where are the others?”

“Where are the others?” I said to them in Yiddish.

One of them, a corporal, stiffened and looked at me.

“Where are the others?” I asked again.

He said, drunk and sullen, “They took the vehicles and ran off. There wasn’t enough transport for all of us.”

“He says they took off and left them behind,” I said to the sergeant.

“Tell him if he’s lying I’ll have his ass,” the sergeant said.

“If you are lying we will kill you,” I said.

The corporal trembled. “It is the truth.”

“He says it’s the truth.”

One of the guards, a tall heavy-shouldered man with a jutting lower jaw and a pockmarked face, suddenly said, “What kind of German do you speak?”

“New York German.”

“That’s not German.”

“Warum? Is that okay German?”

“You are not speaking German.”

“What’s going on?” the sergeant said.

“Go fuck yourself, you piece of shit,” I said to the guard. “Is that good enough German for you?”

He muttered something, his fingers twitching.

“I am one of those you were killing!” I suddenly shouted.

He stiffened. His face grew red. A Jew shouting at him! He reached for his empty holster.

Absently, as if in a dream, I heard scurrying sounds and shouts.

An M1-Garand rifle is a semiautomatic weapon, with eight bullets in a clip. The rounds have a muzzle velocity of 2,800 feet per second and an impact velocity of one and one-half foot-tons per square inch. That amounts to ten to fifteen tons of pressure at the point of impact.

I did not have to raise my weapon but simply pointed it at him.

I fired twice. Both bullets hit him in the chest. The second must have struck bone; he was lifted about six inches off his feet and thrown against the wall behind him and fell dead. On the wall were blood and bone from the exit wounds.

There had been only two rounds left in my clip. It had ejected with its characteristic clink. I shoved another clip in.

“Was that good German?”

The other guards shrank back.

Faintly, through the pounding in my head, I heard the sergeant say, “Cease fire!”

I turned the weapon upon the cringing guards.

The sergeant said, “As you were, soldier!”

I pointed the weapon downward.

The sergeant said, “What the fuck was that all about?”

“He reached for his pistol.”

“What pistol?”

“His holster. And he was wearing his helmet.” I turned to the guards and asked in Yiddish, “Are there more camps like this?”

They glanced at each other.

“I asked them if there were more camps like this,” I said to the sergeant.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” the sergeant murmured.

He ordered me outside.

I walked around the camp. Everywhere I went I saw Mr. Zapiski, dead and dead and dead in the vile exhausted earth.

The sergeant, reporting the incident to the lieutenant, made a point of the German’s threatening gesture and the fact that they hadn’t fully surrendered because they were still wearing their helmets, and the lieutenant determined that my reaction was justified, and the matter was dropped.

Ten days later, I came down with a bad case of diarrhea. Within twenty-four hours I was burning with fever. Terrible hallucinations accompanied the fever. Lights kept flashing on inside my head illuminating frightful scenes: I was shooting the German guard over and over again; then I was killing the other guards; then I was running through the camp chanting at the top of my lungs the trope to the biblical account about the attack of the Amalekites, and the melody drifted through the meadows along which we had advanced; it penetrated the ruined woods, and there the human shadow who had grabbed my arm heard it and threw back his head as he walked shuffling and staggering and began to chant it too in his croaky voice, sounding precisely like Mr. Zapiski, and he stumbled against a shell-blasted tree and the tree opened itself to him and he vanished inside.

It turned out that I had contracted typhus.

From the field hospital I was evacuated to an American
hospital in England where I lay ill a long time. Then I was sent for convalescence to a place in the English countryside. I remember sleeping a great deal and being fed and waking once after a bad dream about Mr. Zapiski and seeing a lovely face gazing down at me with profoundly earnest concern. The face of Mr. Zapiski slowly dissolved and the face of a young English nurse took its place, creamy white skin, pink islands on her cheeks, no makeup, straight nose, full lips, and sad gray eyes. In time I discovered the reason for her sadness: she had lost her fiancé during the Ardennes offensive. She was of the English upper class, her family going back centuries. I had lost my trope teacher and fallen in love with her; she had lost her fiancé and fallen in love with me. Both of us were sick to death of the worlds from which we had come, where disgrace seemed to stare at us from nearly every human face, and so we made our own new creation. I crossed the threshold of my young life; the man deserted the boy. I did not return home, and no doubt broke my parents’ hearts. I married in England, took my degrees in England. Quite trying at times, those postwar years, everything scarce and no true acceptance of me by her family—but how happy we were! I did not return to America for the funerals of my parents, who had disowned me, had actually sat in mourning over me and recited the Mourner’s Kaddish, because Evelyn would not think of converting out of the Church of England. Finally, I returned to America to teach, and discovered, during a telephone conversation with my sister, that my father had given Mr. Zapiski’s library to a local
high school. I have no idea what the school did with the many Yiddish, German, and French books. My brother has in his possession Mr. Zapiski’s Bible, the one from which he taught me the trope. He intends to use it, he says, when he teaches his two sons the trope.

There you have it, Davita. My narrative.

A silence followed. Benjamin Walter nibbled at a donut, sipped coffee.

“No comments?”

“I’m a little breathless, Benjamin. That’s a knockout story.”

“May I use your bathroom? Among the many things ailing me these days is a swollen prostate.”

He returned to the kitchen some minutes later to find her at the window looking out at the woods.

“Your story will keep me awake tonight, Benjamin.”

“My apologies.”

“No, no. Stories that keep me awake are my life’s blood.”

“I should go back.”

“Did you really forget about your Mr. Zapiski?”

“Oh, yes. Entirely.”

“And now you’ll be able to sail right through to the end.”

“I’ve already written the end. It was the beginning I couldn’t write.”

“The story you just told me is part of your beginning?”

“It is the myself that predates what I am now. And having
recalled Mr. Zapiski for my memoirs, it is my intention to put him out of mind again as quickly as possible.”

She was still looking out the window. “A pity.”

“Mr. Zapiski? An antique, a disgrace. He should never have gone back to Europe.”

She pointed out the window. “I meant the tree.”

“The oak?”

“It will have to be taken down.”

“The oak will have to be taken down?”

“It will be dead in two or three years. The tree surgeon said the lightning seared through it, crown, core, and root.”

Frightful images of broken trees, shattered woods. “How very sad.”

“Benjamin, did you leave the lights on in your study?”

“I don’t recall.”

“There’s no one in your house?”

“Except my wife.”

“I thought I saw someone in your study.”

“Not likely.”

“I look forward to meeting your wife after her recovery.”

“I’ll tell her. But there’s no chance of full recovery.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Benjamin. Is it cancer?”

“No, it is, I regret to say, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, from tainted blood she received some years ago during a surgical procedure. We take it a crisis at a time.”

“I’m truly sorry to hear that.”

“Yes, well, we rarely get to choose our own destiny, though this borders a bit on the absurd. I should go.”

“Come back anytime for coffee and donuts, Benjamin. An open invitation. You needn’t bring more stories.”

“It occurs to me, Davita, that our ram has not appeared.”

“But you say your wife is better.”

“The future, as I told you, is bleak.”

“A ram comes always as an astonishment. Do you know what a ram is, Benjamin? R-A-M. A random act of menschlichkeit.”

“You know about rams.”

She turned to look at him. “My stories are about what the world is like when there are no rams. Benjamin, as a person whose specialty is war, doesn’t the ram interest you?”

Evelyn stirred as he entered the bedroom; she opened her eyes, raised her arms to him. He went to her bedside and held her. Frail, thin almost to emaciation, but the fever gone. She would regain much of her strength and weight; for how long, no one knew. They had been told about the hazard of a third pregnancy. The surgery and the transfusions, everyone had then thought, saved her life. Now, as it turned out—a life for a life. Roar with rage against the void. The very day of the diagnosis she’d said, “We’ve given each other the entire middle of our lives. I’ve no regrets, I’ve had a truly wonderful life with you, but one’s end, you know, belongs with one’s beginnings. We’ve little control over our beginnings and endings; we’re in the hands of others. So I ask you to promise me that you’ll send my body back to my family for burial in England.”

He had given his word. They had trusted each other with their lives; she would trust him with her death.

He waited until she was asleep and went into his study. The halogen lamp on the desk was on; it sent a focused light onto the area where the manuscript lay and left the rest of the room dim. He stared at the framed headlines on the walls, barely able to make out the words, and remembered, with a lucidity that forced upon him a sharp intake of breath, Mr. Zapiski’s stumbling walk and rasping voice and dusty war library. He noticed that the kitchen in the Tudor was dark, the house itself, exterior lights off, seeming to fade into the night. He leaned across his desk to open the window. A light came on in a third-floor window of the Tudor and he saw I. D. Chandal at a table, writing. He glanced at the clock on the wall over his desk—a few minutes after eleven.

He found himself at the ornate wooden front door of her house. The old-fashioned doorbell echoed dully inside.

There was no answer.

Above the doorbell was an antique knocker. He used it a number of times and stood listening.

No one came to the door.

He walked to the side of his house and looked up. There she was, visible through the closed third-floor window. How attract her attention? A shout might be overheard and bring the police.

He walked to the rear door that led to the kitchen and tried the knob. The door swung open.

Inside he stood still until his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. He moved through the dining room and living
room. At the foot of the stairway, in the entrance hall, he called, “Davita,” and listened as her name rose, echoing.

How could she not have heard? Possibly the door to the third floor was closed. He could go to his own house and telephone her from there. But he didn’t know her number. Certainly the operator would give it to him. But he craved to see her as she sat at her desk. A craving beyond lust. A view of the act of creation, the forging of connections.