Prague (34 page)

With their identical crew cuts, polo shirts, and Bermuda shorts, the four marines thrilled the new restaurant's young management with the priceless American authenticity they exuded. The five men poured pitchers of Czech beer and pulled apart unwilling slices of pizza decorated with ham, corn, canned pineapple chunks, tiny frozen rock shrimp, whole fried eggs, blood sausage, paprika, and other standbys of New York pizzerias. John, tipping back the press fedora Mark had given him, flipped through his notebook and settled on one of the very few questions he had managed to think of all afternoon.

"Okay, so are you guys all into Rambo?"

Through gulps of pilsner and melting cheese, three marines made derisive comments: pretty cool but unrealistic... all about ego .. . totally stupid. Gunnery Sergeant Marcus added, "I've read some of it, but I prefer Verlaine," and John did not quite see what he meant.

"Okay, look. Here's what I want to write about. You guys are marines, soldiers, trained to kill. I want to write about what that means to you. About, you know, duty and courage and death. All that stuff. That sort of deal." John looked from one to another expectantly. Kurt, a twenty-two-year-old sergeant, very politely excused himself and went to the counter for hot pepper flakes.

"Dude, get napkins," said Luis.

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John began again. "So what would you guys fight for?"

The chewing paused to allow for the securing of more slices and disbursement of more beer, and John thought he could see something amused or scornful in Todd's expression. "I gotta tell you," said Kurt, returning from his forage. "I love this place. Craziest pizza I've ever seen, but I do love this place."

"Yeah, okay, but seriously. What would you guys fight for?"

"You mean, like, what are we paid?" asked Danny.

"Not much, dude," said Kurt. "Way below minimum wage."

"No, no, what would you fight for? What causes? You might die, right, in a war?" He turned from one placid chewing face to another. "So what would get you out of the foxhole?"

The feeding military men said nothing until, at last, Luis—a particularly muscular Latino-Wisconsinite of twenty—wiped his mouth and looked at John as if he had to explain something to a child. "Dude, dude, no. That's not cool. First of all, nobody at this table would die. We take care of each other. And then, so second, it's not like you can choose, you know. It's not, like, optional. We don't get to vote on it. We're the Corps, man. And I thank God for the privilege." He pulled another slice from the tray and wound the straggling, sagging cheese around his index finger.

Kurt nodded. "Jack, when you sign up, you say, 'I'm yours, man.' And, besides, the officers know what's what."

"Right. Of course," John said. He could not think of another question. The three across the table were all looking high over his head at pop music videos playing mutely on three TV screens behind him." But maybe an example," John tapped his teeth with his pen. "Okay, Hitler was bad, obviously, but what about—"

"Madonna was better-looking when she did 'Like a Virgin,' " said Kurt.

"If the Russians invaded Latvia, would you give your life to save it?"

"I'd do Madonna to save Edlatvia."

"I'd invade Slovakia, Slovenia, and Slavonia to do Madonna."

Todd spoke quietly: "The world works because people—bad people, John— believe we'd fight for anything the president says we'll fight for. We're the best-equipped, best-trained fighting force in the world, and that about covers that, as my mom used to say."

"Dude!" The soldiers slapped greasy hands. "Yo, yo, write that down!"

"Hey, will your paper pay for another pizza?"

John struggled to rephrase his question, but the more he thought about it,

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the less he was able to hold on to it. It had seemed obvious—as he sat in the Ger-beaud drowsily preparing for this interview and preplaying the definitive date that would follow it—that the marines would quickly see things as he did, would agree that war was total futile insanity, that (short of defending rape-threatened loved ones or something) nothing was worth dying for, that they were gambling their limbs and blood to pay for college or to learn electronics, and the resulting column would be called something like "You Bet Your Life!"

He would go to war for Emily, of course, silently answering his own question as the men obscenely derided the video of a Spanish pop singer dressed as a toreador weeping over the naked dead body of a woman with the head of a bull, a sword stuck between her lovely shoulder blades. Not only to protect Emily, but if she just asked him to go to war, he would. He would fight and kill if she would watch. What would she want to see him do? He could sit behind a machine gun, grit his teeth, shake as the force of his weapon tore into wave after wave of oncoming men, shredding them, yanking their arms up and their heads back, skewing their bodies into intriguing zigzags. Was she still watching him? Then he could fight close, crack the butt of his rifle against another man's face, crush his nose, rupture his eye, crumple his jaw, and, when the enemy fell and tried to cover his head with his hands, John could shatter the skull at the temple, which, he had once heard, is only the thickness of an eggshell, drive shards of bone into the man's brain and continue pounding still. Would she watch? Would she stand close, stand somehow out of danger but right next to him, close enough so that he could feel her breath in his ear, urging him on, pleading with a soft sigh that he not finish yet? Could he fall on top of an enemy, pull back his head by the hair, drag the blade across the neck, feel the tight skin at the throat give and peel away, uncurl from the blade like paper yielding to flame?

"You got any more questions, guy?"

Three of the marines departed together, but Todd asked John which way he was headed. With an hour to kill before his date, he and the marine walked toward the Corso. "Don't feel bad. You can't be too surprised you don't get the answers you're looking for. Pacifists don't usually enlist. At least not in the Corps." Todd walked with his hands in his shorts pockets and happily inspected the buildings, the good views, qualifying female pedestrians. "You ever notice I'm the only black man in Budapest?"

John reflexively turned his head to scan the crowds. "Are you? I suppose I

hadn't—no, there's a jazz singer, a bald guy. There're two of you. Does it bug you?"

"No. I'm exotic here. That's cool. I was posted at the embassy in the Sudan before this. Down there, I was just another well-armed black guy. So this is all right."

They reached the riverfront. Docked below them, casino boats lit up the July evening haze, and across the river the lights of Castle Hill floated over the tourist funicular creeping up and down the slope.

"Hey, newspaperman, do you know how many men died at Verdun?"

"World War One? No idea."

"Six hundred thousand in four months. About five thousand a day. About three or four guys every second, for four months. The English used to let guys from the same towns stay in the same units together, as a recruitment incentive. You know: 'Sign up with your chums and you can go off together on the great adventure.' " John had no idea what Todd was driving at, and found it difficult to concentrate on the details of World War One while the marine was smiling at every passing woman. Todd said "Hey there" to a blonde. He walked backward to watch her receding figure melt into the crowd, and she looked at him over her shoulder and fluttered her fingers at the huge, dark foreigner. Todd waved and laughed and returned to forward motion. "It kills me," he said. "I can't fraternize with listed nationals, and these sweet little Hungarians are still listed. Can you believe that? Still officially Red. That's a nice view, isn't it?" Todd pointed to the Chain Bridge just as its strung lights illuminated and buzzed white against the lemon-lime and pigeon sky. The wind snapped alive the canvas tarps that—until sandblasters and masons could be paid for— modestly covered the Communist emblems carved into the highest points of the bridge's stone arches.

The two men sat on a wooden bench in front of the modern hotels that had replaced the Hungaria, Carlton, and Bristol (all bombed to pieces), and they watched the passing girls and the antics of a sparsely talented sidewalk caricaturist, all of whose scribbled examples of movie stars seemed about the same: buck teeth, rippling waves of jaw muscle, tiny little legs. Todd smiled at two women strolling arm in arm. "You can tell by their clothes," he said. "The trick is to find Western European or American tourists. Those you can fraternize with. And with them you're exotic, because you live here but you're not Hungarian, so you're not too exotic." He shifted his weight. "So after a battle like Ver-

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dun, you could lose a whole village of English guys—everybody. They signed up together, they trained together, their unit went to the Somme together, they got stuck in the mud together, and—boom. Bad luck. The village now has no men between eighteen and forty. In one second. Every son, boyfriend, brother, you know. Boom."

John was pleased at last to have won, to hear a soldier admit that war was useless. Now he could explain to Emily his principled refusal to enlist. He pulled out his notebook, and Todd continued: "Who thought up that policy? Honestly makes you wonder about the English, you know? Whoa, don't write that." Todd's fingers tapped a martial rhythm against the bench's wooden slats. "But really, it's like they wanted to turn people against the war. I'm always amazed there wasn't a big protest thing during the First one. Of course, they were a little queasy about jumping into the Second."

'All right then," John pursued as Todd moved the drumming to his leg. "So how can you not wonder what's worth fighting for? Those guys from the same village. They all die one day for nothing. Verdun was basically a draw, right? Six hundred thousand meaningless deaths. How can you know all that history and still enlist in the marines?"

Todd smiled at John serenely, with parental amusement. "They didn't die for nothing. I didn't say that. That's not my point at all. They died in one small action of a draw that tore the hell out of the German Army too. If they hadn't been there and fought, it might not have been a draw."

"Who cares? Dead at twenty-four from, from mustard gas? Under a general who waged a trench war because that's what he learned twenty years before? Did you see her? She's definitely not Hungarian. But dead at twenty-four: no wife, no growing old, no kids. And for what? Who cares? World War One is like a history-class joke: Nobody knows why it was fought. It's positively medieval."

Todd listened politely but now answered with some heat. "That's not his point of view, the English kid. That's yours and you've got no right to it. You sat at the pizza place and you acted like my guys should make decisions based on what people like you will think of them in seventy-five years. That's how people should think? You don't know what those English guys fought for; they were individual people. It's way too easy for you to say World War One was a joke. You're not Belgian. Your farm wasn't overrun by Germans. Your sister wasn't raped by them. Name any war you want. Every single war—somebody had a damn good reason at the time, and they don't owe you an explanation for it. Here's what I know, John, and you can print this and you can write one of your

smart-ass columns around it, okay? You ready? Here goes: There is no 'grand scheme of things.' That's just a bullshit disguise for cowards. The present has no right to judge the past. Or to act in order to win the future's approval. They're both irrelevant when an enemy's at the door. That's why I'm a marine. Whoa, how about that one? Do you think she's Hungarian? Hold on a sec." The marine trotted toward a young blonde smoking a cigarette and leaning against the railing, one leg crossed behind an ankle bare under black capri pants. John watched their conversation, too distant to be audible, saw the girl nod, blow smoke away from Todd, and shift the cigarette to shake his hand. Minutes passed before the marine returned to John, and she waited.

"Good talking to you, man. Check this out: That girl is Belgian. How about that? I do enjoy fraternizing with the unlisted." He shook John's hand and returned to his Flemish milkmaid, offered her his arm, rescued her from the invading Krauts, guided her along the riverside, and disappeared into the protective cover of tourists, caricaturists, street performers.

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"The famous Miss Oliver! I have heard so very much of your charms." Nadja's raspy voice carried an archness that bothered John.

He had invited Emily here so she would see the sophisticated (more relevant, more authentic, more European, more engaged, more whatever) life he led when away from their mutual friends. He had invited Emily here so that Nadja could judge her for him and either cure him of his affliction or tell him how to win her. He wanted Emily to sit next to him while Nadja lifted them both high in the air, and they would sit together in the old woman's palm and let their heads brush, side by side, against the ceiling, and from the same high vantage point she would see what he had seen and all manner of things would be clear.

Instead, after a few minutes of sterile, sputtering small talk, John despaired: The decrepit old pianist was not strong enough to hoist them both; she was too feeble tonight to lift even him alone. He grew grouchy to find himself in a rotten jazz bar between a tiresome old woman and a girl who tolerated his presence only out of some Midwestern politeness. Waiting for Nadja to find Emily ideal, waiting for Emily to find Nadja significant, he found them both insufferable. He offered to go for drinks and, as he emptied his first two Unicums standing out of sight at the bar, he was slow in returning.