Dog Tags (3 page)

“Represents me?”

“Yes. We're legal officers.”

“Oh?”

“Now. Pay attention. We're trying—”

“Pencils ready,” Benny said.

They blinked.

“We're trying,” Parsons said patiently, “to piece together the day you were shot. The two days, I should say. By the way, you may have an independent witness, but it isn't really necessary. This is just questions, not under oath or anything, and anyway we have Pistol and Bardolph.”

“Not under oath,” Benny mused. “So you figure it's all right if I lie.”

“Well,” and Parsons laughed ineptly, “I wouldn't advise it. I was merely explaining the procedure.”

“Yes. I see,” Benny said. “I don't need a witness. I'll tell you exactly what happened.”

He did so. The farmhouse, the mill and the small bridge. “The farmhouse was full of them. So we fell back across the little bridge and the rest hauled ass down the road while I covered our end of the bridge. But the Germans ran downstream and crossed and cut the road between me and the others. So I just tiptoed into the woods, and figured to circle around and find them later. And all of a sudden Europe was empty. I couldn't find anybody on either side.” He went on: the village, the tavern, 57359, the morning's journey. They listened with identical frowns. “And that's all I remember. What happened to the little fellow?”

“I have no information about that. I'm only gathering facts.”

“I'd like to find him. Will you note that, please? Corporal Beer would appreciate any information about this little civilian prisoner from some camp, number five seven three five nine. Maybe the lieutenants could note it too.” They all nodded; Parsons scribbled. “So that's it,” Benny said. “What happened to me afterward?”

“They pumped some blood into you and dumped you aboard a plane. Nobody knew who you were or even which side you were on.”

Benny stared.

“You were half naked at the side of the road, and you had no dog tags.”

“My weapon?”

“No weapon.”

“I'll be damned.” Much to think about. “How come they flew me here?”

“I suppose to keep an eye on you,” Parsons said, “until they could establish an identity for you.”

“Well what the hell,” Benny said. “You know now. You have my prints. I'm not a German spy or an escaping Gauleiter. So what's it all about?”

“How do you know a word like ‘Gauleiter'?”

Benny understood that he was in the presence of the police, and was properly impressed. Forlornly he cocked his head at each lieutenant in turn. Pistol pinked; Bardolph was lost in thought. “It was in all the papers,” Benny said. “Captain, I know about forty words of German, a couple of hundred of Yiddish. You know much Yiddish?”

Parsons crossed his legs. “None at all, I'm sorry to say.”

“It's a rich tongue. How about German?”

“I have a rudimentary working knowledge.”

“Acquired before the war?”

“No.” Parsons was nettled.

“Italian? Did you serve there?”

“No.”

“Japanese?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“I'm staving off the moment of truth,” Benny said. “I don't think I'm going to like it. I suppose the doctor told you about my rages.”

“Rages.” Parsons wrestled with belief.

Benny sighed. “Oh I'm in pain. Why are you here?”

“Your platoon,” Parsons said, “was badly shot up that afternoon and there is some question of desertion.”

Benny bawled like a bull and roared fire. “Nurse! Doctor!”

Parsons expressed dismay.

“Where's my Purple Heart?” Benny bellowed. “And where the hell would anybody desert
to?
Are you crazy? Who was killed? Tell me that anyway.”

“Four were killed, two wounded,” Parsons said. “I don't have the names.”

Benny mourned. They were bumblers, pimply lechers, Jew-baiters, goldbricks, but they were his. He hoped Haas was not dead. He had once lifted a jeep off Haas, the poor man shrieking and blubbering; Haas had sustained minor bruises and Benny had simulated hernia for some hours, falsetto and tottering.

“Well sir,” he said, “you're officers and I'm only a dumb corporal but anybody who knows me will tell you that I don't desert. It's that easy. I was a good boy and I done all they tole me and only a moron would cut and run with the war just about over. Furthermore when a man is blown to bits in action the presumption ought to be in his favor.”

“That's true,” Parsons said. “You command quite a vocabulary. I was a spelling champion in high school.”

Benny stared again.

“Presumption.”

After a moment Benny nodded slowly. “I know another one.”

Parsons smiled happily.

“Tatterdemalion.”

Parsons nodded. “Not really hard.”

“But think of all the words you can make from it. Three letters or more.”

“Good Lord yes! But perhaps later,” Parsons said briskly. “We've got to take this statement.”

“You've taken it,” Benny grumbled. “I don't enjoy this, Captain. It's like being called a bad name.” None of the three, Benny saw, wore the badge of a combat infantryman. Snob!

“I suppose it is. I'm sorry.”

Benny shrugged. His anger was gone. Mugs and shits, as an Anzac drinker had once described politicians and such. Mugs and shits and nothing to be done about them. They were not merely an aspect of life, they were life itself, and the rare souls who boasted nobility and true intelligence, like himself, Benny thought, were freaks.

The three scanned their notes. “I'm sorry,” Parsons said amiably. “I am indeed. Somebody got a bee in his bonnet. I don't blame you for—well, for that look on your face.”

“I just want my Purple Heart,” Benny said. “I promised my father I'd come home with a medal. It's important to us because we've been military folk for many generations.”

“I certainly won't put any obstacles in your way,” Parsons said, bluff and hearty, and Benny remembered someone saying, All's well, my lad. He caught a gleam of humanity from Pistol, who immediately suppressed it.

“I thank you for that, sir.” He shook hands with Parsons. “I do indeed. You've been very civil.” He shook hands with Bardolph. “Lieutenant.” And with Pistol, who did not meet his eye. A Jewish grandparent? “I really ought to sleep now,” Benny said. “My leg hurts.”

He was not to hear from them again for some time. But a week later a new set of dog tags adorned his hairy chest, and when he left the hospital a Purple Heart made his theater ribbon less lonely. That was after a day of farewell to Miss Nattier, as she insisted he address her. He asked her if she was descended from the painter, but she had not heard of the painter. They clung together and she said she would never forget him, which was true enough; they knew that the memory would be sweet, and warm, and outlast lust; and for the final hour of her shift they stood at the window in harmony and innocence while night flittered down on the chimney pots like a flight of bats.

2

At the end of spring Benny Beer came home. He arrived in New York standing one meter eighty-five, weighing in at ninety-three kilos; disembarked with seven hundred others onto an empty pier, no bouquets, no brass bands; and took the subway to Union Square in late morning. Jacob Beer, custom tailoring for men. Mirages rippled off the hot tar. Benny marched up Broadway limping slightly, duffel bag perched heroically on one shoulder. Women noticed. Benny beamed and ogled. Dazzling. Downy forearms. Ambushed behinds. Benny ached. The sun lay on his nape like a woman's hand. Summer breasts. He stared, chirped, swooned. Thighs, nests. The sun slanted off cool stone sills, shadowed grooves. Pigeons paraded, flapped welcome. The smell of doughnuts, of exhaust. Shoppers, earrings, sandals. Old men, sad, canes. Benny swelled. The women were imperfect and he loved them for it: a wrinkle behind the knee, a rabbity smile, tiny eyes, faces bred to filing as ewes to wool, upswept hair lacquered stiff, hanging hems, slipping slips, faint mustaches—so?
So?
He wanted them all.

Yet he dawdled, smiling tolerantly at his own childishness. A policeman saluted casually, noting Benny's small rainbow of ribbons; Benny nodded, limped, allowed a glaze of hollow horror to dim his bright brown eyes, and moved on, stifling unseemly mirth. Were all women beautiful? He had trod God's country for an hour now and seen none beneath his notice. Once off the lugger and I am theirs! He had survived. He lived again, sap and rod rising, death and killing past. Time to rejoice. Create! Let joy be unconfined! Any race, color, creed, age, shape or previous condition of pulchritude. Benny is home! Wearing his sex at a rakish angle.

And there he was: the doorway took him by surprise. The plaque:
Jacob Beer
. The lobby was cool, eternal, marbled. A new elevator boy, perhaps sixteen, already pinched and pale, petty thief, cigarette complexion, the
Daily News
wedged behind his Otis joystick. Benny was levitated to the seventh floor and stepped into the familiar corridor, strode to the familiar door, entered, passed through a short hallway of felt screens, and approached two men standing before a triptych of mirrors. He dropped the bag and embraced the smaller man, kissing him once on each cheek and then on the mouth.

Jacob Beer bawled. He honored his son by bawling: stood in the presence of his client Croesus and performed a cloudburst. When he could speak, still in the circle of Benny's arms like a bride, he said, “My son. You'll excuse me, Feldman. My son Benjamin. Home from the war. Wounded. My son. My son Benjamin.” Benny grinned at him and mussed his hair. Jacob was so small. Three cubits twelve, weight barely over a Babylonian talent. In age two score eleven. In palaver English, Yiddish, childhood German and Polish, and Italian numbers, the last from haggling with cutters and stitchers and buttonholers. (“The rest, all right, but God spare me buttonholers. Specialists. Right away a buttonholer is Victor Emmanuel.”) Because in the early years there had been as many Italians as Jews in the trade. An Italian Jew was the highest trump. The Beers boasted a tradition: that in the year 1400 A.D. (whose D., Jacob asked darkly) a direct male ancestor had been the Grand Rabbi of Padua. Jacob made the most of that. “Galleazo,” he would say, “a buttonholer you are, the best, no question, but did you know that in the year fourteen hundred …”

Jacob's tears were of joy, but behind them lurked a grief and Benny read it immediately: that Benny's mother had not lived to see this day. She had not lived to see his departure either, having died of cancer when he was ten, but that was irrelevant. A moment of joy was a moment of joy, two, three, five in a lucky lifetime, and bad enough they came so seldom without the pain of rejoicing alone. Feldman effaced himself, shaking Benny's hand and taking gracious leave. Jacob nodded gratefully and waved in farewell. When he was alone with his son he bawled a bit more. He recovered, donned his sharkskin jacket, speechless, shaking his head and gulping; he embraced Benny again and found his voice: “We'll go to Pinsky's for lunch. Wait till Karp sees you. Karp! Ha! He said everything wrong. He said Leningrad would fall. Stalin would be assassinated. Trotsky makes a comeback. Alevai, but it won't happen. Karp! Benny, Benny! How are you? Does it hurt? What's the ribbons there? A hero? You a hero?” They bustled to the door, where Jacob turned, said, “Thank God. Thank God,” and flung his arms again about his son. Dementedly he jigged, whirled, clapped his hands. “Benny! Have I got a flannel for you! And a Harris tweed from pre-war. And my God, Benny, I can cut a suit! For four years I haven't cut a suit. In the war I have only Feldmans to cut for. Feldman doesn't wear a suit, he wears a slipcover. Look, a waist! I'll make you a vest. With lapels. A veteran should wear a vest. Time now for dignity, something formal.” They were in the elevator. “O'Brien,” he said, “this is my son Benjamin. Home from the war safe and sound, and with medals.”

“O'Reilly,” the boy said.

“You must have big plans,” Jacob was saying. “No, no, not now, you're right. Lunch, some new clothes, you can tell me your war stories, you probably have a girl you wrote to, hey?” He dug Benny in the ribs. Only in the movies, and Jacob Beer: the elbow in the ribs, the wink, “Hey, sport?”

From the doorway of the delicatessen they contemplated the elders of Zion. “All men are second cousins.”

“These are the grandpas,” Jacob said. “The real eaters are still in uniform. And a good thing, too, with the rationing. Pinsky makes miracles. Not little ones like Joshua but big ones, chopped liver with egg yolk and onions.”

Gray heads, pepper-and-salt, brown and bald, bowed or nodding, hairy ears, hairy nostrils, pouched eyes. Scrawny arms in short sleeves. Benny heard Yiddish, German, Hungarian and was swept back in time on a flood of perfumes, pastrami and corned beef, eddies of derma and chicken soup, a ripple of sturgeon; above the flood a light mist of beer and tea. He remembered an overheated, overupholstered living room in Brooklyn, a congregation of uncles and aunts orating a lost revolution, tea in glasses, exotic names. From infancy, it seemed, he had thought of Lenin as Ilyich. The day will come! When anybody can have in a shvarzeh one day a week! When no man will worry for food, shelter, a winter coat! What would it take, two thousand, three thousand a year? Nothing. With
machines
.

Uncle Isaac: “And a pair teeth that
fit
.”

Aunt Rose: “More sponge cake.”

Uncle Jeremiah of the silky white mustache: “In the country. With chickens. You'll see.”

All: “Herzl.”

Now Pinsky billowed toward them, all two hundred pounds, all five feet eight, Man Mountain Pinsky. Benny had remembered him as a Renaissance caricature, the harvest figure, carrot for nose, raisins for eyes, apples for cheeks, melon for chin, but Pinsky in the flesh surpassed his fantasy, Pinsky was a rebus, pickle-nosed, egg-eyed, beet-cheeked, potato-chinned, pumpkin-bellied: Pinsky and his life's work were one.