Short Stories: Five Decades (39 page)

Peter hazily watched the flashing plump white dress among the brave khaki and brass pips. He passed his hand over his eyes, thinking, as he remembered his outburst, God, I must be going crazy.

He saw a captain step in and dance with Joyce, then an American major. “The world,” he said softly to himself, “is full of American majors.” He laughed gently to himself, stood up, walked slowly out of the night club. Outside, with the music thin and distant in his ears, the Pyramids loomed, crumbling in the darkness, in memory of the unremembered dead.

He got into a cab and started for Cairo.

When the cab got to Gezira Island, he tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Sporting Club,” he said.

The old, wheezing taxi laboriously turned. “I need a drink,” Peter told himself seriously. “I need a drink very badly.” He thought of old Mac caught there with two girls and the tremendous bill. He felt bad about it, but he’d pay his share, although it would mean considerably less drinking for the rest of the month. But he couldn’t stay with that damned girl. The truth was he couldn’t stay with any girl. Anne, unphotographed, in Manchester … Still, she should write more often than once every two months.…

The bar at Gezira was still open. There were some South Africans and some American fliers lounging against it. One of the American fliers was singing, in a soft Southern voice, “Oh, Susannah, don’t you cry for me …”

“Scotch,” Peter said to the bartender, feeling for the first time that evening a cessation of loneliness, his constant climate.

“Fo’ Ah’m gawn’ t’ Alabama, with mah banjo on mah knee …” the American pilot sang sweetly and happily.

“Gin and lime,” said one of the South Africans, a gigantic captain with huge, bare arms, whom the others called Lee. “Gin and lime all around.” He turned to Peter. “What’re you drinking, Captain?”

“I’ve ordered, thanks.” Peter smiled at him.

“Man says he’s ordered,” the American pilot sang. “What do you know about that? British captain says he’s ordered. Order again and order again, oh, Captain, order again.…”

The bartender put two Scotches in front of Peter, grinning. The huge South African captain poured it all into one glass. They lifted their glasses.

“To South Africa,” one of the Americans said.

They drank.

“To sergeants.” The American who had been singing grinned at a large South African lieutenant with a mustache. The lieutenant looked around him uneasily. “Quiet, please,” he said. “I’ll be in jail five years.”

“This gentleman looks like a gentleman.” Lee put his arm around the lieutenant with the mustache. “Doesn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Peter.

“Jail,” said the lieutenant with the mustache.

“He’s not a gentleman. He is a sergeant. He is my bloody sergeant from my bloody company.”

“Ten years,” said the lieutenant with the mustache.

“We’re all AWOL, Sergeant Monks, lieutenant for the evening, Lieutenant Fredericks …” He waved to a slightly smaller red-headed South African down the bar. “And myself. We’re farmers. Independent men. When the bloody O.C. said ‘no leaves,’ we said farewell. Sixty miles out on the desert for three weeks. Miserable little clerk of an O.C. Sergeant, I said, here’s a pip. Take off those bloody stripes. We wish to show you the glories of Shepheard’s and Gezira, so that you can come back and dazzle the poor bastards in the other ranks with tales of the high life of Cairo.”

“I’ve been talking to brigadiers all afternoon and evening,” Monks complained. “Wearing on the nerves.”

“If the O.C. shows up, it’s all taped,” Lee said. “I grab Monks by one arm, Freddy grabs him by the other. ‘We’ve just arrested the bugger, sir,’ we say. ‘Impersonating an officer.’”

“Ten years,” Monks said, grinning. “This round is on me.”

Peter laughed. He lifted his glass. “To sergeants everywhere.” They all drank.

“On my right,” said Lee, “is the American Air Force.”

The American Air Force raised its glasses at Peter and the pilot who sang started in on “Chattanooga Choo-choo.” There were two lieutenants and a twenty-four-year-old major.

“The American Air Force is going home,” said Lee. “Their tour is over. Home by way of England. The infantry’s tour is never over. Oh, the poor, stinking, bloody infantry, their tour is never over …”

“Unskilled labor,” one of the pilots said calmly. “We’re delicate and highly sensitive mechanisms. We are war-weary. Our Schneiders are low as an Egyptian whore. We’ve bombed too many places. We’ve seen too much flak. We are lopsided from wearing ribbons. We are going home now to instruct the young how to shoot.”

“I am going home to play with my wife,” the twenty-four-year-old major said soberly.

“The infantry is not under the same Awful Strain,” said the pilot who had been singing. “All they have to do is walk in and be shot. Their nerves are not stretched to the breaking point like ours. Captain,” he said, leaning back and talking to Peter, “you look a little war-weary yourself.”

“I’m pretty war-weary,” Peter said.

“He looks sensitive,” the major said. “He looks fine and sensitive enough to be at least a navigator. He looks like Hamlet on a rough night.”

“I was in the tanks,” Peter said.

“It’s possible,” said the major, “to get war-weary in a tank, too, I suppose.”

“It’s possible,” Peter said, grinning.

“… breakfast in Carolina …” sang the musical pilot.

“When’re you leaving for home?” Peter asked.

“6
A.M.
tomorrow. 0600 hours, as they say in the army,” said the major.

“Five or six glorious days in London among our brave English Allies and cousins,” said the other pilot, “and then the Stork Club, the Harvard-Yale football game, all the blonde, full-bosomed, ribbon-conscious, lascivious American girls …”

“London,” said Peter. “I wish I were going with you.”

“Come along,” said the major expansively. “We have a nice empty Liberator. Pleased to have you. Closer relations with our British comrades. Merely be at the airport at 0600 hours, as they say in the army.”

“Did you see,” asked the singing pilot, “in the
Mail
today? Some idiot wants Princess Elizabeth to marry an American.”

“Excellent idea,” said the major. “Some upstanding representative citizen of the Republic. Post-war planning on all fronts. My nomination for Prince Escort is Maxie Rosenbloom.”

Everyone considered the suggestion gravely.

“You could do worse,” the pilot said.

“Infusion of sturdy American stock into an aging dynasty,” the major said. “The issue would be strongly built, with good left hands.…”

“Do you mean it?” Peter asked. “You really could take me?”

“Delighted,” the major said.

The singing pilot started in on “All Alone,” and everyone but Peter joined him. Peter stared unseeingly at the glasses and bottles behind the bar. In three days he could be home. Three days and he could walk into Anne’s room, quietly, unannounced, smiling a little tremulously as she looked up unsuspectingly. Maybe it was possible. He had had no leave since he’d come to Africa, except for two weeks’ convalescence. He could go immediately to Colonel Foster’s apartment, explain to him. Colonel Foster liked him, was very sympathetic. If he gave him a written order, releasing him from duty for twenty-one days, he, Peter, would undertake to get transportation back. Somehow, somehow … He would take all the responsibility himself. He was sure that Colonel Foster, who was a good soul, would do it.

Peter stood up straight. He spoke to the American major. “Perhaps I’ll see you at six o’clock.”

“Fine,” the major said heartily. “It’s going to be a great trip. We’re loaded with Scotch.” He waved as Peter turned and left the bar.

“All alone, by the telephone …” the wailing, mocking voices quavered in the night. Peter got into a taxicab and gave Colonel Foster’s address.

He felt he was trembling. He closed his eyes and leaned back. It was all absolutely possible. England was only three days away. Two weeks there and the desert and the guns and the dying and ruled paper and heat and loneliness and insane expanding tension would disappear. He could face the rest of the war calmly, knowing that he would not explode, would not lose his reason. It was possible. Men were going home to their wives. That American major. All so cheerful and matter-of-fact about it. England in three days, after the three years … Colonel Foster would most certainly say yes. Peter was sure of it as the taxi drove up to the dark building where Colonel Foster lived. Peter paid the driver and looked up. The colonel’s window was alight, the only one in the entire building. Peter felt his breath coming fast. It was a symbol, an omen. The man was awake. His friend, who could give him England tonight with five strokes of a pen, by luck was wakeful in the quiet night, when all the rest of the city slept around him. It would be irregular, and Colonel Foster would be running some risk, but he had rank enough and was independent enough to take the chance.…

Peter rang the night-bell to the side of the locked doors of the apartment building. Far in the depths of the sleeping stone and brick, a forlorn and distant bell sang weirdly.

As he waited for the hall-boy to open the doors, Peter hastily rehearsed his story. No leave in three years. The tension getting worse and worse. Medically graded, no chance of getting to an active unit. Regiment disbanded. Work deteriorating. Given to sudden fits of temper and what could only be described as melancholia, although a doctor wouldn’t believe it until it was too late. He knew the British Army couldn’t provide transportation, but here were these Americans with an empty Liberator. He’d get back somehow.

As he went over it, in the darkness, with the faraway bell sounding as though it were ringing at the bottom of a troubled sea, Peter was sure the logic was irrefutable; Foster couldn’t refuse.

When the hall-boy finally opened the door, Peter sprang past him, raced up the steps, too impatient to take the elevator.

He was panting when he rang Colonel Foster’s bell, and the sweat was streaming down the sides of his face. He rang the bell sharply, twice. He heard his breath whistling into his lungs, and he tried to compose himself, so that Colonel Foster would think him absolutely calm, absolutely lucid.…

The door opened. The figure at the door was silhouetted against the yellowish light behind it.

“Colonel,” Peter said, panting, “I’m so glad you’re up. I must talk to you. I hate to disturb you, but …”

“Come in.” The door was opened wider and Peter strode down the hall, into the living room. He heard the door close and turned around. “I …” he began. He stopped. The man who was standing there was not Colonel Foster. It was a large, red-faced man, bald, in a tattered red bathrobe. He had a mustache and tired eyes and he was holding a book in his hand. Peter looked at the book.
The Poems of Robert Browning
.

The man stood there, waiting, pulling his bathrobe a little tighter, a curious little smile on his weary face.

“I … I saw the light, sir,” Peter said. “I thought Colonel Foster would be up and I took the liberty of … I had some business with …”

“Colonel Foster doesn’t live here,” the man said. His voice was clipped and military, but tired, aging. “He moved out a week ago.”

“Oh,” Peter said. He suddenly stopped sweating. He swallowed, made a conscious effort to speak quietly. “Do you know where he lives, sir?”

“I’m afraid not. Is there anything I can do, Captain? I’m Colonel Gaines.” He smiled, false teeth above the old robe. “That’s why when you said Colonel, at the door, I …”

“No, sir,” Peter said. “Nothing, sir. I’m dreadfully sorry. This time of night …”

“Oh, that’s all right.” The man waved a little embarrassedly. “I never go to sleep. I was reading.”

“Well … Thank you, sir. Good night.”

“Uh …” The man looked hesitantly at him, as though he felt that somehow Peter should be helped in some dubious, obscure way. “Uh—perhaps a drink. I have some whisky I was just going to—for myself …”

“No, thank you, sir,” Peter said. “I’d better be getting along.”

Clumsily, they went down the passage together to the door. The man opened the door. He stood there, red-faced, huge, British, like a living Colonel Blimp, lonely and tired, with Robert Browning in the foreign night.

“Good night, sir.”

“Good night.…”

The door closed and Peter walked slowly down the dark stairs.

Peter started toward his hotel, but the thought of the disordered room and Mac lying there, steadily asleep, steadily and slightly snoring in the next bed, was impossible.

He walked slowly past the dark policemen standing quietly with their rifles on the street corners. Down the street garry-lights, small and flickering and lonesome, wandered past, and the sound of the horses’ hooves was deliberate and weary.

He came to the English Bridge and stood on the banks of the river, looking at the dark water swirling north toward the Mediterranean. Down the river a felucca, its immense sail spread in a soaring triangle, slowly made its way among the shadows from the trees along the shore. Across the river a minaret, poignant with faith, shone sharp and delicate in the moonlight.

Peter felt spent and drained. A nervous and hysteric pulse pulled at his bad eye and a gigantic sob seemed wedged into his throat.

Overhead, far away, there was the sound of a plane. It came nearer, passed across the stars, died away, going somewhere.

The wedge dislodged and the sob broke out like tears and blood.

Peter closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the wild pulse had stopped, his throat was clear. He stared across the river at the minaret, faithful and lovely in the light of the moon, by the side of the old river.

Tomorrow, he thought, tomorrow there may be a letter from home.…