Comrades of War (16 page)

‘Markedly bad breath and tongue heavily coated.’

Tiny’s tongue hung far out of his mouth. A huge piece of grubby meat, almost ruined by tobacco and alcohol.

‘How are things otherwise, my friend?’ Dr Mahler asked sarcastically, looking into Tiny’s deeply suffering face.

‘
Herr Oberstarsarzt
, when I’m lying like this I’m really quite all right,’ Tiny breathed in a dying voice. ‘But as soon as I’m up and about I’m no good any more.’ He waved his hand in an expressive gesture. ‘Then I feel cockeyed,
Herr Oberstabsarzt
, sort of woozy in my head. My paws turn to jelly, like when you’re getting back to the flea-bag at four o’clock in the morning after hitting all the joints in town. Rotten,
Herr Oberstabsarzt
, really rotten. Only the horizontal agrees with me.’

‘H’m.’ Dr Mahler nodded, while pensively humming the Radetsky March.

For a moment it looked as if Tiny intended to join the humming, but before he managed to start, Dr Mahler nodded. ‘I understand. No appetite, only thirst?’

‘No, none,’ Tiny groaned feebly, not having the slightest idea of what appetite meant.

Dr Mahler nodded with a smile and went on to dictate: ‘Patient on fever diet for a week. Strict confinement to bed. Hot pads. Warm compresses. Contrast baths. Enemas. Also, we’d better have a test meal, with the rubber tube.’

The Battleship smiled maliciously, baring her yellow teeth. Dr Mahler nodded to Tiny and sailed on to other patients.

Tiny didn’t realize the full horror of what had happened till inspection was all over. He cursed and swore, but knew there was no reprieve for his fate.

The Battleship was personally in charge of the enema, and she didn’t handle him with kid gloves.

They shouted, growled and threatened. The two of them were only conscious of each other and of the injector. Tiny had to hold the tube. The water sloshed over. The matron fumed but refused to give in. Tiny roared he would take a crap at her and meant it literally.

‘I’ll let the MPs come and get you and have you court-martialed,’ the Battleship cried, swinging the injector. Her face was red and puffy.

‘There isn’t a single court-martial in the whole world that’ll care whether I crap on you or not,’ Tiny bawled.

The Battleship howled, Tiny hissed. But he received his enema, every drop of it, though it took some time.

‘Don’t lose it now,’ the matron thundered before she strode out of the ward with the dry injector.

Knowing full well that the matron would be back to give him his injection again, he kept it for the hour, while emitting a ceaseless stream of blasphemy. Tiny was the only patient who received his injection from the matron personally. She used the oldest and thickest needle she could find for the injection and pushed it in extra slowly so she could hear him roar. To her it was a very sweet music.

She had no sooner bent over Tiny and shot the needle into his hairy behind than it happened. An oozing discharge and a couple of detonations. By comparison, an eruption of the Vesuvius was like the small summer fireworks in an allotment garden. But she held her ground, though her apron stank horribly already. Then the volcano erupted in full force. She gave a howl of terror and started back coughing, while Tiny laughed till the whole bed shook. He pulled out the injection needle and hurled it crashing against the wall.

‘Disgusting pig,’ hissed the defeated Battleship. ‘You’ll answer to a military court for this. I’ll have you locked up till you rot.’

‘Shit-piece,’ Tiny decided and discharged a stream of tobacco juice through the open window.

Growling like an animal, the Battleship rushed at Tiny, grabbed him by both ears and pounded the back of his head against the edge of the bed.

‘
Merde
,’ the Legionnaire said laconically and went on reading the Koran.

The Battleship wasn’t the only one who had profited from the volcanic eruption. Lava was lying everywhere in the ward. Even the clock on the wall ran irregularly for the next few days, a clear sign that the mechanism had been hit.

Tiny didn’t receive any more enemas.

Eight days later he got prodigiously drunk and forced his way to the Battleship, who was sitting in her room reading her favorite novel,
The Wife with Two Husbands
.

There was a fantastic uproar, which nobody wanted to get mixed up with. The doctor on duty, who was new, was warned at the last moment by a nurse in the ward. He was smart enough to take her advice and avoid getting involved in the battle of the giants.

After an hour had passed there was complete quiet.

We figured that one of them had been killed. When the silence extended to two and a half hours, we started wondering if we should check what had happened. But suddenly we saw them coming down the stairs, walking arm in arm, Tiny with a black eye and an incredibly well-brushed uniform. His boots and his belt sparkled as never before.

The Battleship was dressed in a red coat fitting her like a bursting potato sack. On her head she had a blue hat with a pheasant feather in back. Without even bothering to glance at us they rumbled down the stairs and vanished on Zirkusweg in the direction of the Reeperbahn.

They returned in the early hours of the morning. Tiny was impossibly drunk. The Battleship giggled like a teenager. She had a red balloon around her wrist.

Babbling away, Tiny tumbled into the wrong bed. When the owner made objections, he was hurled to the other end of the room. Tiny grinned in his sleep and smacked his lips like a glutted boar. The saloon smell penetrated far and wide.

Mouritz, the Sudeten German, was praying. Intermittently he would stop praying and curse that scum Tiny.

Tiny was in love. His behavior was peculiar. If we had dared we would have laughed at him, but we didn’t dare.

It was great fun to look at him getting ready to go out. Up to now he had looked at any kind of soap as pure crap, used only by fools and sissies. A comb was a sign of far-advanced degeneration. He looked at perfume and hair tonic in the same way.

At the moment he was standing in the middle of the ward trying to part his hair in the back. But it didn’t quite come off. Despite all his efforts, the cowlick still bristled up.

‘Give me some perfume, or whatever the hell they use,’ he muttered and turned his head in front of the mirror with a helpless look in his eyes.

‘Hair tonic,’ the Legionnaire helped him out and chucked a quart bottle to him.

Promptly, Tiny poured the whole bottle over his head. All for love. He spat on a clothes brush and tried to get the cowlick to come round by massaging with the brush, but to no avail. He looked about him despairingly, grabbed a pair of scissors and cut off the bristly wisp of hair.

He looked dangerous, even more so than usual.

After forcing one comrade to polish his boots, another to press and brush his uniform, he placed himself in front of the little Legionnaire. He resembled a slightly overgrown boy who’d been scrubbed and dressed up by his mother and then sent to a Sunday School Christmas party.

‘Do I look good now, Desert Rambler?’

The Legionnaire pursed his lips and slowly swung his legs out of bed. He circled him with a scrutinizing glance, giving him a thorough overhauling.

‘Hell, you look great,’ the Legionnaire decided and gave a nod of satisfaction. ‘Maybe the trousers are a bit full over your buttocks.’

‘You think so?’ came from Tiny in an anxious voice, while he passed his hand over the great mass of excess material in his trouser-seat.

‘But, damn it, that isn’t noticeable,’ the Legionnaire reassured him. ‘Just take off and you’ll go over big. You really look sharp. And I assure you, you have a rich fragrance.’

He threw himself on his bed again, pulled a bottle from under the mattress and drank in long gulps.

‘Well, I’m running up to Emma,’ Tiny grinned and once more adjusted his tunic.

He stopped by Mouritz’s bed and pointed a commanding index finger at the horror-struck volunteer from the Sudeten.

‘You lousy fink will say a nice prayer for me, or I’ll break your neck, you little pig.’

To underscore the seriousness of the command he gave Mouritz a smack in the face with his forage cap. Then he vanished.

A few minutes later he came rushing back to the ward like a mad bull, tore Mouritz out of bed and hurled him from one end of the room to the other. Three others took the same ride before he managed to blow off some steam.

He sat down by the Legionnaire’s bed, scowling, hatefully around the room.

‘Lice, scab-mites,’ he grumbled. ‘A pig like that from a ramshackle cow barn throws me, Tiny, out saying I stink like a bankrupt whorehouse!’

‘You stood for that?’ the Legionnaire asked, astonished.

‘Only because I was surprised. I’ll be damned if I’ll stand for it a second time,’ Tiny said, urging himself on. ‘An over-stuffed plant louse like that! Throwing me out because I smell like a gentleman – that’s going a bit too far.’

Tiny slumped down a bit, propped his heads on his hands, and gazed up at the Legionnaire, his idol, who followed the dumbshow as he was lying on his stomach in bed.

‘I’ll grab her by the throat and throw her down from the third floor so she’ll land in the cellar like a bomb. A real man has to show what he’s good for to someone like that, don’t you think? Simply as a matter of discipline. Don’t you agree?’ he added, with a note of uncertainty.

The Legionnaire nodded.

‘Absolutely. You have to stand up for yourself, or she’ll play pranks on you, like taking other tramps to bed and dirt like that.’

‘I wouldn’t give a shit about that, Desert Rambler. That’s nothing to take to heart. Everybody should have the right to amuse himself and to take the little pleasures along with the rest. And Emma isn’t likely to wear out so easily. But to be snotty and use mean words—’ he was getting excited – ‘hell, that’s going too far. What a mean little turd! I knocked politely on her door and spoke to her like a well-bred and respectable man: “My beloved Emma” – you know, just like that book you read to me about how to behave when you’re cultivated, like you and me. And d’you know what that bag answers? “Get out, you pig! Why, you stink like a corpse.” Well, I still keep cool and say, like you taught me: “Will you permit me to sit down beside you, my beloved Emma?” The fat crab sets up a grin and asks if I’ve gone nuts. Then I blew a fuse in my top and forgot everything you read to me about polite behavior. Naturally I socked her one and she’s still walking around sneezing from it. But she’s a coarse-grained woman, a real piece of sandpaper, and you can’t expect to bring her to heel simply by socking her in the teeth. “What the hell, you’re a walking cliché,” she says. What’s a cliché, Desert Rambler? And then she kicked me right here, the most sensitive spot, you know, so I had to curl up. Then she grabbed my hair and, bang, mashed her knee in my face. Next I knew, I was sitting on the stairs. Thank God I didn’t fall down. I could have hurt myself something terrible.’

Tiny didn’t stop to think how the matron would’ve gotten hurt if he’d thrown her down.

‘Give her up,’ the Legionnaire recommended. ‘She gives you far too many worries. Women are unpredictable. Go down to the cathouse and find a whore for yourself. That’s much better. She doesn’t deserve you. Down there you pay and that’s the end of the trouble. It’s understood of course that you pay what you owe and with your own money.’

‘No, I’ll go to holy hell first,’ Tiny swore. ‘I’m not going to give up that mare. Damn it, there’s plenty of fire in her. But the fat pig will find out what I really am. I’m not going to give an inch. After all I’m a fighter.’

‘You’re an ass,’ the Legionnaire said kindly. ‘And sooner or later you’ll be sure to find it out for yourself.’

‘Who’s an ass?’ Tiny exploded and stood up menacingly.

‘You,’ the Legionnaire smiled, ‘and I, Alfred Kalb, former corporal in the 2nd Foreign Regiment, feel free to tell you so.’

Tiny chomped and alternately turned red and pale. Both his fists were clenched, ready to strike. His small mean fisheyes blinked cautiously. Then all at once he went flat.

‘That’s what
I
am?’

With a jolt he fell down by the Legionnaire’s bed and pounded the floor with both fists. He had to hit something.

‘She’s a dud, I swear she is,’ he affirmed reflectively. After a short pause he went on: ‘When she comes around to invite me for some sweating night work, I’ll say: “Emma, you bloated whore . . .” – is “overblown whore” better? – “. . . you may give me a mighty kiss in the ass, I’ll have nothing more to do with you, you mushroom fly.”’

‘Are you really going to say that?’ the little Legionnaire asked skeptically.

Cursing and swearing, Tiny nodded. He rumbled across the floor, kicked a wash basin, for precaution smacked Mouritz in the face, and threatened to hit Stein. Then he roared out of the window after a cyclist who unsuspectingly came down the Zirkusweg dragging a pair of tires he must have stripped off some bike.

‘Are you trying to show off, you mutt?’

With satisfaction Tiny noted that his roar had knocked the guts out of the cyclist. He spat and started whistling a tune remotely reminiscent of something from ‘The Merry Widow.’ When he got it all mixed up, Mouritz was ordered to sing a hymn. The first three were turned down.

‘The song is over! Another song! One, two, three, four!’ He kicked time against Mouritz’s bed.

When Mouritz didn’t quite succeed in satisfying the aesthetic appetite that had suddenly hit Tiny, he was chased under all the beds three or four times. He ended up in his own bed, where he bawled out his hymn in a cathedral voice. He resembled a Christian on his way to the lions.

Puffing, Tiny stuck his head under the faucet and wiped himself on the first sheet he could get his hands on. Both patient and bedclothes were dragged to the floor.

‘Stein, Bauer, the two of you will come along to pound those tramps in the cathouse,’ he decided.

‘So early?’ Stein asked in surprise while Bauer started dressing without a word.

The Legionnaire chuckled. ‘
Bon
, let’s get going. We need some exercise.’