Lilith (11 page)

Yet the war had a single compensation for me, in that I made the first close and genuine friend of my life. He was a hut-mate of mine, another radio operator, who had also trained at Sioux Falls and been assigned, a few months before me, to the same squadron. His name was Eric Sladek. He was a huge Texan, very nearly seven feet tall, of Czechoslovakian descent, with bright red hair and a broad, gentle, jolly face. When he smiled, two gold teeth were revealed in the very center of his mouth. He had a charming, robust and very nimble personality, being able to assume, for social purposes, the callous self-sufficiency which was the conventional military attitude without having it impair or displace in the slightest degree the perceptive and generous serenity of his nature.

I do not know on what our friendship was based, for we were really very different; but we fell easily into that happy bantering masculine intimacy which I had so often envied in the relations of my schoolmates, and I learned for the first time in my life the delightful and surprising manner in which the spirit grows in the sunlight of friendship. My nature seemed to enlarge and include his own; I had his strength, his wit, his poise to defend me; I became less tense and painfully sensitive; I even found an unsuspected element of gaiety in myself; indeed, I think it was largely by virtue of Eric’s friendship that I was able to endure the war.

Although he came from a very thinly populated and provincial part of the Panhandle and spoke with a deep, indestructible (and, I thought, fascinating) vernacular, he was in fact one of the few educated men in our squadron. He had gone for three years to Texas A. & M., where he was taking a degree in Agriculture and minoring in English literature, but had left, before his graduation, to join the army. It was Eric who taught me the joy of reading. My exposure to literature in high school had been so desultory and academic that I had never afterward been stimulated to pursue it of my own accord; but I learned from him that it was something very different from the store of abstract rhetorical luxury which I was accustomed to consider it. The first time he made me aware of this was on a hilltop at Wau, New Guinea, where we had landed with both our planes damaged on a small emergency strip after a daylight raid in support of infantry action on the slopes below. While we waited for the ground crews to repair our planes we sat on a gasoline drum and watched the fighting in the hillside jungles beneath us. Half a mile to the south troops of an Australian Commando division were attempting to take a Japanese-held plateau, to which the only passable approach was a narrow trail, cut out of the banyan jungles of the hillside. On this trail the Japanese had zeroed in 38-millimeter guns, withholding their fire until our troops were halfway up—after which they proceeded systematically to decimate them. Eric watched this carnage in silence for about ten minutes; then, staring down at the black-and-scarlet shell bursts among the shattered trees, he said softly, more to himself than to me, a few lines from a poem by Wilfred Owen:

“What passing-bells for these that die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers
or bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.”

“What does ‘orisons’ mean?” I asked him.

“Prayers, kid.”

“That’s a pretty good poem, isn’t it?” I said after a moment of revelatory consideration.

“Boy, it’s better than pretty good,” Eric said.

Fortunately, there was ample sustenance for the passion for literature that he created in me. During the war the government printed and distributed through the U. S. O., the Red Cross and other service agencies an extensive library of popular novels, modern and classical, which I read, I think, almost in its entirety. They were printed on “pulp,” bound in paper covers, and were small enough to fit into a pocket, so that I was literally never without one. How well I remember those plump narrow booklets, bulging snugly and promisingly against the breast pocket of my fatigues or flying suit, through whose pages I came to know Ethan Frome, Lt. Henry and his doomed Catharine, Rima the Bird Girl, and poor, reckless Madame Bovary. Most of the books Eric had read before, but those which he had not we had the pleasure of discovering and discussing together, and he taught me many things about them of which I should never have been aware without his guidance. (I remember, for example, when I was reading
A Passage to India
, his pointing out to me the beauty of Forster’s description of the Marabar Caves, a passage which was one of his great favorites and whose many pages he could recite entirely by heart. I had read it with only cursory attention, but Eric’s interpretation revealed it to me—I still believe it to be so—as one of the most beautiful prose-poems of modern literature.)

It was my growing interest in literature that led me, while on leave with Eric once in Sydney, to formulate the plan which represented the first truly constructive and enthusiastic effort I had ever made to solve the problem of my destiny. This was, in partnership with him, to open and operate a book shop in Stonemont after the war. The government was at this time offering loans to ex-servicemen with which to start small businesses, and it was our intention to pool the resources, after our discharge, to which we might be entitled by this provision. We chose Stonemont for our location because of its proximity to Washington and the number of highly literate people—college students, high-level government employees and retired people of means and culture—who might be expected to make up our patronage—Eric’s home town of Blackwater being excluded by its provinciality from any of these assets.

That it was an essentially realistic plan is confirmed, I think, by the fact that it not only survived repeated discussion and examination but grew in exuberance upon it. It seemed to me that nothing could have come closer to the requirements of my temperament or so perfectly have satisfied the searching of my imagination: handling, examining, displaying (and inveterately perusing!) the things I most loved and respected in the world, with the one close companion of my life, in the quiet town where I was born. Knowing the limitations of my own practicality, I do not think I would ever have considered entering into such an enterprise by myself, but I felt that with Eric’s assistance I would be able, by my enthusiasm and my love and growing knowledge of books, to make a real contribution to its success. I was quite transformed by the prospect. I went so far as to announce my intentions to Laura in a long and garrulous letter and even to begin speculating as to the most appropriate site for our venture—perhaps the empty candy store next to Davidson’s market, or even the abandoned music shop at the end of Main Street! This state of felicitous anticipation was as short-lived as it was remarkable, for less than two months after the conception of our plan Eric disappeared forever into the Philippine Sea.

The last time I spoke to him it was in code, with a telegraph key, from the radio compartment of a grounded B-24, during the fighting for Manila in the winter of 1945. We had been forced down onto an emergency strip by bad weather after a low-altitude napalm attack on Japanese gun positions in the Zambales foothills. Eric’s plane had left the engagement half an hour before the rest of our squadron with one of its port engines shot out, heading for our home base on Leyte. We had been threatened all morning with a rain front from the south, and by the time our own bomb bays were empty and the mission completed, the weather had deteriorated so badly that we were forced to land at Murphy Field, a small, hastily patched runway a few miles from Manila. When we had landed I sat in the parked plane and tuned my liaison radio until I had managed to pick up the sound of Eric’s transmitter.

It was very difficult to hear, because the headphones were full of a crashing roar of static from the storm and there was heavy traffic on the frequency; but very faintly, distorted by the static and feeble with distance, I heard the sound of his key. An operator’s “fist”—the style and rhythm of his code—is very nearly as individual as his voice, so that, although his call letters were indistinct, I could recognize his signal instantly. It was hurried and erratic, as if the plane were lurching violently in bad weather, causing his hand to stumble on the key. He was transmitting V’s with very long final dashes, alternating with his call letters—a procedure used only to enable a ground station to take radio bearings—and from this I knew that he was lost. When he had finished sending I heard the ground operator at Samar acknowledge his transmission and ask him to stand by. In the interval I began to call Eric myself, sending our call letters repeatedly until, many minutes later, I heard him answer, his signal now barely audible above the roar: “Lost, Vince.”

“Over land?” I asked him. (We spoke in Q-signals, three-letter code groups, each standing for a phrase or sentence, so that it was possible to express a great deal of information very briefly and swiftly.)

“Over water. Two engines inoperative. Fuel low.”

“Radio compass operative?”

“Negative.”

“Celestial navigation?”

“No visibility.”

“How much fuel?”

“Twenty minutes.”

There was a long interval, during which his signal blew away entirely in the noise and distance, and then, even more faintly, I heard the end of a message he was sending in uncoded English: “. . . give Moose my guitar. You keep the Oxford book. Good luck, kid.”

After a short silence in which I tried very hard to think of what to say I sent back to him: “We need the Oxford book to start the shop. Get the hell back here.” I waited for a moment, but he did not reply. Hoping that I had missed hearing his acknowledgment, I went on sending: “Ditch and sit tight. Samar has fix on you. Light flares when you hear motors. Stay with it.”

There were then many minutes of silence in which I retuned the whole frequency area without hearing Eric’s call again. I heard the base operator at Samar sending his position, and copied the figures in my log. Eric did not acknowledge the bearing. About five minutes later I heard his last transmission. He began sending very rapidly and erratically, as if the plane were now entirely out of control, so that I had automatically to correct the errors in his code: “Samar Base from 416. Samar Base from 416. I have a message for you . . .” His key sputtered for a moment and then stopped suddenly. There was a long pause, after which the Samar operator sent: “Proceed with message.” He repeated this many times, waiting after each transmission for Eric to reply, but there was no answer. I sat listening for a long while, until well past the time that he had estimated their fuel would last; but I never heard him again.

Finally I switched off the radio and climbed out of the plane, jumping down onto the crushed coral of the runway.

I sat for some time under the wing, staring off at the great dark thunderheads above the hills in the north and listening to the distant bumping sound of the Japanese guns. In my breast pocket was a letter I had received from Laura three days before, and I took it out and reread it for the fifth or sixth time, not with any real interest or feeling but in a rather idle and abstracted way, as if in an effort to engage my mind with something:

DEAR VINCENT:

I have felt for some time that your letters to me did not really express any real affection for me in a romantic sense, but were more like letters that you might write to a very good friend, and when I received your last letter in which you wrote about your plan to open a book shop after the war with your friend, and did not refer to me in any way in writing about your plans
for your
future life, I decided that I was right about this. So I don’t think that what I have to say will come as any real surprise to you, or that you will be very much affected by it.

In my last letter I told you about the boarder who had been staying in Daddy’s old room leaving, and that
Mr.
Ashcott had moved into the room and seemed to be very nice. I think I mentioned that he was always very eager to help in any way that he could, and that he even used to help Mother with the cooking on weekends and things of that kind. Since that time my affection and respect for him have increased to the point where we have become quite intimate, and developed a very sincere and wonderful affection for each other. In fact he has asked me to marry him, and as he is a very sincere and wonderful person with very good prospects I think it would be foolish of me to refuse.

We are going to be married next week, and I look forward to a very happy and contented life with him. As I say, I do not think that you will be very much affected by this news, and I do not feel that I have been untrue to you in any respect, as we have never really had any understanding of a romantic nature, which I think you will agree. I hope that we can continue to be very good friends, as I have a very sincere respect for you, which I am sure I will always have. I hope when you return to Stonemont you will come to visit us. Norman joins me in expressing our very best wishes for whatever you decide to do in the future, and says that he is looking forward to meeting you some day.

With very best wishes for your future life,

LAURA

I crumpled the letter in my hand and tossed it out onto the coral, watching it blow away in the rainy wind. At the edge of the airstrip I could see a huge water pipe stretching away across the flat grassland toward Manila. It was about four feet in diameter and supported by heavy concrete abutments at intervals of a thousand yards. Feeling a sudden restless desire to follow it, I climbed one of the concrete supports and walked along the top of the pipe for a mile or two in the rain. It passed over fields of swamp water, rice paddies, jungle scrub and, finally, a narrow muddy river at the outskirts of the city. There were cheap wooden buildings clustered around the riverbank, most of them burned out or blasted by shells, with heaps of rubble strewn about them: the twisted frames of brass beds, disemboweled mattresses, shards of pottery, calendars with charred and fluttering leaves. There was a road beside the river, pitted with shell craters, and along it a line of refugees was moving slowly through the yellow mud toward the capital. Many of them had crouched at the riverbank to rest and sat huddled in the rain beside their shabby bundles of clothing, pots and pans, sullen, soaked chickens, their legs bound together with twine, oil lamps and water jugs. There was a sour smell, like stale garbage, from the riverbank, and a choppy, high-pitched babble of Tagalog. Beneath the water pipe I saw an old man kneeling and sobbing beside his wife, whom he had been pushing along the road in a home-made two-wheeled wooden cart. Both her knees were bound with dirty bandages, and I guessed that she had had the backs of them seared by the Japanese—a form of punishment which they inflicted commonly upon hostile Filipinos and a particularly brutal one in that, even when the burns were healed, the victims were permanently crippled. The woman had died, or was dying, and the old man knelt beside her in the mud, holding her face in his hands and trying to brush the rain out of her eyes, rocking slowly back and forth from his hips and crooning softly, his face contorted with grief. I stood watching them for a moment and then walked back along the water pipe toward the airfield, staring sightlessly into the gray cloud masses above the hills and murmuring across the thousands of miles that separated us, “Not this, either, Grandfather.”