New Lives (73 page)

[Letter of March 24, 1990]

         

Hundred-year Summer

His hands in the pants pockets of his dress uniform, Salwitzky is standing between the door and the table, staring out the window. Because of the afternoon sun and the heat, the blackout drape has been drawn halfway. Vischer is sitting with his elbows on the broad windowsill, his back to the locker, a book in his left hand. It's as quiet as a day in the country. Except occasionally you can hear the shuffle of boots or the high-pitched whine of the troop carrier's fly-wheel. The company is out taking target practice.

“Quarter till five,” Salwitzky says, pushing the bill of his cap back even farther and wiping his brow with his hand. “And?”

“Nothing,” Vischer says.

“You're not watching.”

“I can see if anything moves.”

“If you don't keep an eye out, you can't see anything.”

There's a whistle, but not from their hallway, then the scraping of stools upstairs.

“If they come back and see us here and laugh themselves silly, I'm going to raise hell.”

“Go ahead,” Vischer said softly, laying his open book aside. He gets up and takes a writing pad and ballpoint from the locker, sits back down. He shifts the lined paper into position.

“What're you doing now?” Salwitzky walks just far enough around the table to be able to see the grayish blue door of the officers' barracks—the handle is broken.

Vischer's head is cocked down over the page.

“What're you up to?”

Vischer glances at his book and then goes on writing.

“I asked you something.”

“Dammit, Sal, you can see for yourself.”

Salwitzky turns around. He jiggles the lock on his locker, moves his briefcase from the stool to the table, unzips it, and then zips it back up again. He airs his cap and wipes his forearm across his eyes and brow. The armpits of his light gray shirt have darkened.

“You writing an official protest?”

“Nope,” Vischer says, turning the page. He crosses his legs and bends down again.

“I'll never do it again,” Salwitzky says, “this sort of thing's not for me. I want to take my leave with the whole company or not at all.”

“You'll get home all right.”

“I don't believe it, not when I see you sitting there like that.”

“Nothing's going to happen before five o'clock, you know that.”

“If I don't catch the eight twenty…”

“You won't make it, you know.”

“You're right. Shit!” Salwitzky gives his stool a kick, sending it crashing into the bed and toppling over. Salwitzky sets it upright and gives it another kick. The stool ends up just short of the door.

“This is what they call a hundred-year summer, Visch. A hundred-year summer, but not for us! We're hanging around here, and out there…Never be another like it!”

“Nothing you can do. Not even if you stand on your head, Sal…”

Salwitzky whips around. “That's just like you. Sal standing on his head, you'd go for that.” Salwitzky picks the stool up and shoves it back to the table. “You'd really go for that, man oh man!”

Salwitzky throws himself onto one of the lower bunks in the middle of the room; his dress shoes are on the cross brace at the foot of the bed. “Got problems, Visch? Did she dump you?”

Vischer thumbs some more in his book.

“You can tell me, Visch. She did, didn't she?”

“Bullshit.”

“It's okay, Visch, you don't have to tell me.” Salwitzky presses his hands together and cracks his knuckles one after the other. “You need to get out of here more often, Visch, then you wouldn't have these problems.”

Vischer goes on writing. A radio is booming in the hallway overhead. Salwitzky sings along while the tune lasts.

“No, really,” he then says. “About as talkative as a screwdriver—read, write, read. Probably don't do anything different at home either.” Salwitzky presses his hands against the mattress above his head.

“Out of cash? Need some?”

“No thanks.”

“Really?”

“You haven't got any anyway.”

“Not here, I don't need any here. But at home. Try guessing how much I've got at home. You need some? Only have to say the word.”

“I don't have to do anything, Sal.” Vischer leans back and reads, the ballpoint still between his fingers.

“There's plenty of stuff you'd like, I'm not that stupid.”

“Peace and quite, for instance,” Vischer says. They can no longer hear the radio overhead.

“For me to stand on my head. You go for that. You really do like it here, don't you?”

“What?”

“You couldn't have it better anywhere else, what with boys always standing on their heads.”

“What's with ‘standing on their heads'?”

“You know what I mean, you know very well. Plus your little vase of flowers and the tablecloth and all the rest of the shit.”

“You mean this?” Vischer pointed to a milk bottle behind the blackout drape, with a couple of withered wildflowers still stuck in some water.

“You ooze your way up to everybody here like a grease gun. ‘Can I bring something back for you? Coffee, vodka? Ring-a-ding-ding and thanks a bunch too.' It pisses me off!”

Vischer shakes his head and goes on writing.

“But you just bring the stuff back, never take a drink yourself. It's your way of paying them off.”

“For what?”

“Cocks and balls.”

Vischer bursts into laughter. “Head fulla shit, Sal, nothing but shit.”

“Didn't you let that pansy give you a massage, I saw it myself, you stretched out here, couldn't get enough.”

“You mean Rosi?”

“Moaning the whole time. Hey, I was there.”

“And you stretched out on your bed, too, Sal, don't forget,” says Vischer, and looks up for the first time. “Somebody was all hot to get himself a massage from Rosi.”

“I had my shirt on and didn't moan and carry on.”

“Undershirt pushed clear up, Sal, and remember what you said, about how somebody could sit on your ass?”

“You really like it here, Visch, just like our flamer. Rosi himself said so, because he's not the only one, the place is fulla ripe boys who stand on their heads for him, Rosi said. And you, Visch, are just like all the rest, like all of 'em.”

“Shut up, Sal,” Vischer says, standing up and pulling the drape back. “Just shut your mouth.”

There's a flash of lightning above the officers' barracks. Vischer sits down, uses the windowsill as a table, his knees against the cold radiator, his back to Salwitzky, who goes right on talking.

[Letter of March 30, 1990]

Vischer didn't turn around again until the squeaks began. Salwitzky is holding on to the metal frame with both hands behind his head, pressing his feet against the cross brace at the other end, and thrusting so that the bed frame shakes back and forth. “Rosi, you hot little piggy,” Salwitzky cries, and loses his rhythm, braces his feet against the mattress of the top bunk, and then, getting into the swing of it, kicks first against the cross brace and then the mattress. He rocks back and forth. “You hot pig!” he shouts. The springs squeak, the frame scrapes the floor. “Piggy, piggy, you hot pig!”

Suddenly a high screech—the metal poles disengage, Salwitzky shouts, holding the bed above him with his feet, shouts again. Salwitzky is an acrobat, a shouting acrobat. He can't see Vischer because his legs, the bed, the mattress are in the way. “Have you got it?”

Vischer doesn't answer. “Have you got it?” Salwitzky shouts, and, with what looks like incredible effort, sticks his head out to one side, so that he can finally see Vischer, who is supporting the top bunk now and smiling.

Salwitzky rolls to one side and stands up. Together they relink the poles at the foot of the bed. Salwitzky bends down and pinches the crease of his right pants leg, but so cautiously it looks like it hurts him to do it. Then he inspects the crease of his left pants leg. Little sweat stains dot his back and shoulders.

Vischer goes back to writing, his head cocked down close to the page. Salwitzky is standing behind him. Only the clumps of grass reveal how windy it is.

The first raindrops are so big you can see each one strike the pale gray asphalt, which is almost bluish in this light.

Salwitzky bends down across Vischer's shoulder, cranks the window handle to open one of the panels. Like snowberries, the drops hit the asphalt with a loud slap. The sound even drowns out the trampling of boots, at least until the grid of the boot scraper starts resounding with a steady, almost rhythmic rattle.

Vischer sees a hand in front of his eyes, a strange, heavy hand with fat fingers, which as they spread reveal the tips with fingernails only half grown back and which remind Vischer of worms, or worse. Tendons and veins bulge, and the scar under the wedding ring turns white. Slowly the hand sinks down onto Vischer's sheet of paper, and as the trampling of boots and the voices out in the hallway grow louder and doors bang and the asphalt turns black, the hand soundlessly crumples up the page before Vischer's eyes.

The Spy

“Don't we have to make the spy talk if the spy won't open his mouth? What you say, spy? That's logical enough. Doesn't the spy think that sounds logical?”

Edgar was pushing the floor waxer back and forth in the hallway. Inch by inch he came closer again to the pack crowded before the open door of their room. To get a better look some used the shoulders of the man in front to jump or yanked a guy back who was doing the same thing. If it wasn't a yowl or a bellow, Edgar could understand every word.

“Great idea! Okay, spy, why so tongue-tied?”

“He's not tongue-tied. If there's one thing he isn't, it's tongue-tied—that he ain't.”

They were ranting on just like before. Edgar had thought it would last ten, fifteen, at most twenty minutes. Twenty minutes waxing floors is a long time, the whole hallway: from the polit officer's room and the johns past the doors of the floor leader, supply room, and weapons store, past the stairway and the orderly room, then two doors for the first squad, two for the second, two for the third, washroom, stairway, noncoms, TV room, club room.

“Did you hear what he said, spy? Why's the spy holding out?”

“He only talks to the polit officer—chooses his words well, pot of coffee, milk, sugar, Duetts, the best of the best.”

“I'll bet you anything he won't open his trap, won't do it.”

Edgar didn't recognize the voice. The other two had been Mehnert and Pitt—Pitt, the little pink asshole with his jokes.

“Then we'll just have to cram something in it,” Mehnert says.

“Unzip his zipper,” shouted the voice he didn't recognize.

Edgar had figured there'd be a lot of talk but no real action. Which was why he had had no problem continuing to speak with the spy. “Don't do anything to make them suspicious,” Mehnert had said. “If they get wind of it, they'll transfer him or whatever,” although no one knew what Mehnert meant by “whatever.” Mehnert had gone so far as to borrow money from the spy. As compensation he'd offered to see that he got a pass. The spy had given him thirty marks, but turned down the pass. “That's proof,” Pitt had said. “Now that all hell's broken loose in Poland, they need all the eyes and ears around here they can get.” The spy had grown more cautious. He was writing less and then only when he was alone. But just now they had caught him at it again.

Today was the ninth day. For nine days now, Edgar had known what was going to happen to the spy—to the spy in his section, third squad, second section.

“We want to hear your voice, spy, you know so many words, fancy words, real pretty spy man's words.”

“I told you, spy won't answer. Spy needs help, spy needs motivation, spy needs us.”

As unpleasant as the affair with the spy was, it kept you from thinking stupid stuff. At least better than the singing did. Edgar couldn't understand how anybody could volunteer to go from company to company singing Christmas carols, as if this were an old folks' home. The reserve first lieutenant, who took over the quartermaster's job at Christmas, joined up—carols in harmony. Then he had gone with them, just picked up and went, as if they were going for a beer, and the noncom on duty had left to go eat, and his second-in-command had put his fingers to the corners of his mouth and whistled, a secret whistle, so to speak. And then he'd turned the radio up loud, some station in the West, and that had gotten them all in the mood—I wanna be a polar bear, up in the cold, cold north—and they'd all walked along the shiny hallway to the door of the spy's room and waited until the song was over.

Edgar had thought that the way they were standing silently at the door had actually meant they'd come to an agreement. Discipline, Mehnert had demanded it. It had been a victory for discipline, the way the entire company gathered outside the door in silence.

“He'll start bawling, but that'll be all he'll do, you'll see.”

“There'll be more to it than that. Just wait and see what all he'll try.”

Edgar kept on working, with even more regular, more rhythmic strokes, he thought. Like a musician Edgar could close his eyes, concentrating just on the rustle of the brush weighed down with metal plates and on the clicking sound when he changed directions. His arms knew, his whole body knew when he needed to brake the waxer so it wouldn't bang into the wall. Whenever a corner of the brush hit, it left holes in the plaster, which trickled down and was then evenly distributed by the brush. The only thing that bothered Edgar was how he couldn't help thinking about Pitt's stupid joke about waxing and stomach muscles and screwing.

The spy's weapon was a submachine gun. Edgar would have loved to trade with him, although a machine gun was heavier. But his own grenade launcher looked like a bassoon or something. He always felt ridiculous crawling through the sand with an instrument like that on his shoulder, even if it was the only weapon that could take out a tank. So they said, at least. In the APC they sat next to each other on the bench behind the first gunner. They could stretch their legs there or change off lying on the floor. But Edgar was quartered in a different room. Otherwise it might well have been him instead of Teichmann and Bär who had to testify as his victims: Yes, I said that, yes, I said that, in a regular rhythm, so that it took Edgar three swipes with the waxer, left, right, left—yes, I said that, three times across the width of the hall, click, click, click—yes, I said that. The spy had written it all down, word for word. And Mehnert had the proof in his hand, Private Mehnert, a “junior,” driver, room corporal.

Teichmann—who because of his ponderous gait and gray hair everyone assumed was from the reserves—didn't want to have anything to do with this circus. It was different with Bär, who approved of what Mehnert was doing. But Bär didn't want any blows struck either, at least that wasn't part of the plan.

“Nobody said anything about ‘at ease.' Did some one say ‘at ease'?”

“Hey you, hey spy, that's a question, did anyone give the order ‘at ease'?”

[Letter of March 4, 1990]

They had kicked the spy's legs out from under him.

Edgar pushed the waxer up close to the first pair of boots and past some slippers, and Frank—the first gunman from his group, who always said he was the lucky one, because during an attack he wouldn't have to get out and run across an open field—offered Edgar his stool. “He wants it this way, he's provoking it,” Frank exclaimed as he ran to the john.

The spy doesn't know anything about a plan, and so he's not scared. And you can always tell if someone's scared or not. They don't have to say anything. Just a glance will do. And a glance like that is the worst sort of provocation. Or a gesture of the hand. His hands aren't bound tight, although his wrists are tied even with his head to the cross brace where it joins the frame at the foot of the top bunk. Bär had moved his hands during the dry run, as if he were trying to wave or fly—at any rate it had been so funny that even Mehnert and Pitt had laughed.

That cracking sound was slapping. It was perfectly natural for all this to escalate. Kicking his feet out from under him was childish. If you hit the heel just right, the guy went sprawling. But the spy couldn't fall, he was bound to the bed. Slaps hurt.

“Stuff his mouth with the shit!”

“Swallow it, spy.”

“Dicks on parade, dicks on parade!”

When the spy didn't open his mouth, they tried to force him with slaps. Mehnert wanted to rip the page in pieces, three times, not too small and not too big, the spy should have to chew a little.

Edgar had held the page, scribbled full of slanted lines, in his own hand. Mehnert had given it to anyone who wanted to see. But whoever wanted to read it would have to join in, it was as straightforward as that—straight straightforward, Bär had said. Edgar tried to imagine what it looks like when you stuff paper into somebody's mouth. Crumpled up or in a stack of little slips like a piece of pyramid cake. Edgar had once cut his tongue licking an envelope. But how did you force him to chew and swallow? And what if he spit it all out? Who would pick up the soggy pieces? Did you then start all over again? They were bellowing so loud now it was as if there weren't an officer anywhere in the whole regiment.

Edgar shoved the waxer along behind the pack of them. When he had room again, it took a while for him to get his rhythm back.

Edgar stopped humming once he noticed that it was the melody of “I Wanna Be a Polar Bear.” He didn't like the song any better than he liked Pitt's joke about it. But what with all the noise, he couldn't come up with another tune. Edgar was working much too fast now, as if trying to get away from the yowling. But he didn't want to get away. He wasn't afraid. He knew the plan and he knew Mehnert's laugh—the way his mouth repeated the curves of his chin, a clownish laugh. Maybe Mehnert would laugh like that when he removed the spy's belt and pulled down his pants—laugh with pride at how his plan had been no empty promise. With uniform pants all you had to do was unhook the front and pull the suspenders aside, but he'd have to take hold of his own long johns and pull them down. Or were Mehnert and Bär already rubbing the spy's butt with shoe polish? No, Mehnert would spare himself that—that was dirty work for somebody else he'd call forward, somebody who would make the others laugh. The spy wouldn't laugh, even if it tickled. Who knows what a shoe brush feels like on your naked ass and if you might not get used to it—or whether the spy's cheeks would pinch tight in reflex. And if he did laugh? He'd regret it. Or start bawling? What do you do with a bawling spy? He wouldn't bawl. The spy keeps his eyes down or looks at the ceiling. And what if he looked at the others, looked them in the eye? What would be the point? To memorize their names? To swear revenge? The whole affair was too cut-and-dried for that. If there was such a thing as hard proof, that was the case here. The spy was being served his just desserts, taught a lesson. Edgar wondered how much Mehnert was risking in deciding to do this. Mehnert had guts, he was the ringleader, he'd be the first to be punished.

Where the hallway opened onto the stairwell, Edgar gave the waxer more of a free rein. He could in fact feel his stomach muscles. The second-in-command stood up from his desk as if to make way for Edgar, and then headed to join the pack.

Why hadn't the spy yelled for some noncoms? Two of them had watched, Detchens and Freising, the good-looking Spaniard. Someone brought them a stool. But even if they were to say something, give the order to cease and desist, it wouldn't have made any difference. It would only impair their authority. And if the spy begged for them to help free him? Let him try it, just a simple “Comrade officer, help me!” That would put Freising and Detchens on the hot seat.

“Mehnert's painting his dick,” the second-in-command said as he passed Edgar on the way to the john.

They were really into it now. Mehnert dabbed the tip of the spy's cock with a brush. Like an animal trainer Mehnert would get the spy's cock to rear up. And every one of them wanted to see some other guy get hard, since his was the only dick he'd ever had in his hand. Edgar forced himself to think of soccer, school, hiking trips. “I wanna be a polar bear, up in the cold, cold north, wouldn't have a single care…” Mehnert in the role of his life. The spy's cock would rise above right angle, like an obscene salute. Mehnert planned to hang the spy's belt over his hard-on and then count how long it would hang there, like a boxing referee. Then it would be time for photographs—of the woman the spy claimed was his girlfriend, although he never wrote to her. The spy hadn't thought about that. The only letters he gets, Mehnert said, are from his mother and some other guy.

Maybe the best thing the spy could do would be to start bawling or fight back, really fight back, screaming and spitting—whatever he could still manage. The pack suddenly closed ranks, everything got quiet, then whistles, applause.

Edgar let the waxer swing back and forth between the polit officer's door and the john. He'd have to turn around soon. Mehnert wanted to “milk the spy.” But maybe the spy was so intimidated that his cock wouldn't give any milk, no matter how Mehnert went about it, with gloves or without.

Edgar tried to think of something else. But not of home.

Actually Teichmann and Bär were to blame. If they had just punched the spy out, they wouldn't have had to tie up a guy lying writhing on the floor, or blacken his ass or milk his cock.

Edgar reversed direction and saw the pack up ahead. That's our Christmas party, he thought—and the moment he saw them and thought of the Christmas party, Edgar knew that from now on there would never be a Christmas when he didn't think of this Christmas party. He realized it was like the sentence of a condemned man: he would never be able to celebrate Christmas without this pack, without Mehnert, without Pitt, without Bär and Teichmann, without the spy and the plan. Step by step, word for word, the plan was imprinted in his mind—he'd thought of it too often. The plan would stick with him just like this polar bear song and Pitt's joke about stomach muscles. Just as he would never forget the moment when all this had become clear to him—even though he hadn't joined in, wasn't even watching. All he could hear was the steady barrage of roaring laughter. Should he clamp his ears shut? There was no way he could keep the whole thing from being imprinted on his mind.

He wanted to do something else, fix his mind on other things. But he couldn't stop now, what else could he do? It was absolutely impossible to stop now.

At first he didn't realize that boots had ended up in the path of his waxer. But then it was like a herd in flight—slippers, gym shoes, socks, boots, leaping and hopping in front of the waxer, and those that didn't leap or hop got bumped. It was like a children's game, like tag. The faster he worked the more he hit. Eeny, meeny, miney, mo! I wanna be a polar bear. He gave the waxer its head. The “mo” hasn't landed on you yet, up there in the cold, cold north.