The Pacific and Other Stories (48 page)

Because he wanted to order the best thing on the menu, he asked for haricot beef, which was actually corned beef, and then for the chocolate cake—“1 good oz. Bournville Cocoa”—with mock whipped cream. Father
and daughter seemed the picture of strength. In ordinary times he would be looking forward to a slow unfurling of the years, with London their background. He was a barrister, and would have been content to move from case to case as if on rocks that make a path across a stream, with a remote but watchful eye out for Charlotte—and presents for the baby, a drink in town with his son-in-law, his shotguns going eventually to the grandchildren if they were boys. Death slowly brought out was easier because of all that led up to it and filled in after it, which is why, when he fell to his knees on the Utrechtseweg after the first bullets cut into his abdomen, he stayed up.

Even from behind the far revetments where the enemy was firing it was clear that this figure, sunk to its knees, rifle splayed beyond reach, was finished. He had so much about him of hesitation that it could be read at a mile. He did not want to go down, not because he didn’t know that he was dying, but because to collapse so quickly did not seem right. Something was happening. Something had to happen. And it required that, for a while, even if they shot him because for them it seemed inappropriate that he would not collapse, he simply could not go down.

Life was, after all, timing. “Without doubt, all my patients will die,” the surgeon had told him when reporting to the battalion, “the question is when.” When to leave a dinner party, when to cast a fly, when to catch the eye of a woman and when to disengage. You would not stay locked, eye to eye, forever, so the disengage was just as important as the engage, and would in the end determine the beauty of the moment. The Germans firing at him to make him as neat as the others they had put down might not understand, but he had to stay up because it was like music. The song should not end too abruptly. He wasn’t ready for the last notes, which would come as he lay on the pavement, soon enough, and to do justice to the music he had to stay on his knees. How strange for a man on his knees to be an emblem of defiance.

It would have been defiance if, swaying slightly, he had held his position for the sake of the enemy, but it was hardly the enemy for whose sake he held. Something was happening, time was being knit up, sense was being made, chapters closed, chapters opened, visions of Charlotte rising.

In June he had proposed to his division commander, albeit informally at
tennis, that his paratroops, if not all others, be equipped with flotation bladders. “With what?” the general had responded, in a way that meant that the proposal had been spoken in vain. Alliances are difficult to run, officers to influence. Millions die because bureaucracies are naturally immobile. Because bureaucracies are naturally immobile, families perish, lines end, names vanish, hopes expire.

“Flotation bladders for paratroops?”

“Yes, sir. West to east, from Normandy to Berlin, we’ll have to cross countless rivers, and we would be much better off if each man could swim with his weapons and ammunition. Where there are neither boats nor bridges, we would be able to surprise the enemy with unexpected crossings, and we could avoid being trapped against water obstacles.”

The general took some more scotch. “How much would these ‘flotation bladders’ weigh?”

“Less than a pound. Collapsed, they would be about the size of several pairs of socks.”

“I’m sorry. That small addition to each kit would require subtraction from the division of thousands of pounds of ammunition, food, or medical supplies, for an advantage that is hypothetical at best. Can’t do it.” Then they volleyed in the hot sun.

South of the Utrechtseweg and the Onderlangs was a bridgeless curve of the Rhine that made one of the natural walls of what quickly became known as “the sack.” The other natural wall was the hill to the north, and it and the river narrowed the sack to the east. The Germans had laid their defenses on all sides but the western entrance: south across the river, in a brick works; north on the hillside; and east at the neck. Right in the center of these fields of fire ran the Utrechtseweg, where he would die.

But had the battalion been able to float across the Rhine, to the west of the sack, they could have outflanked the Germans at the brick works and come from behind at the neck. They would not have had to die in such great number. Nor would they have been stalled, or driven back. Because there were many piers, no one would have had to swim more than six hundred feet, and even without the piers the river was nowhere more than a thousand feet wide. One of the placid visions he had as he rested upon his knees
on the pavement of the Utrechtseweg, a curiosity of not falling, was of floating. It was as if it had happened and he were remembering it; that is, silently, delicately, floating across the Rhine, sometimes twirling, fully laden, pushed west by the flow, at the head of three-quarters of his battalion now that the colonel had been killed.

He knew from the way the battle had unfolded that had they been able to float they would not have been detected; that, emerging on the south bank, they would have been able to rout the Germans; and that they would have lived. He would have lived. Charlotte would not have been left alone in a world still overwhelmed by war, nor in war’s difficult aftermath. He knew it, and had known it even at the tennis court at Aldershot, and as he stood on his knees upon the Utrechtseweg it broke his heart that he had not been able to make a better argument at tennis, that he had not pressed, that he had not brought it up again, that he had not been more socially prominent, or of a higher rank. For thus, in all these ways, he had failed Charlotte.

But, then, the men around him who would die that day had failed their children, too. For the sake of one’s child, one was supposed to be able to accomplish superhuman feats. That was the universal story arisen from the universal will, but it was not so any more than that animals can save their offspring or themselves from slaughter, or prisoners always escape, or parents take every precaution, or soldiers live through every battle.

A momentary cessation of fire surrounded the major with quiet as he rested on his knees on the Utrechtseweg. Three men who had ignored his signs not to come for him lay dead just beyond his reach, or he would have touched them gently. Scores of others—his captains, his lieutenants, and the ranks—watched from cover. Some cried from pity and frustration. Some were angry at the enemy for using their major as bait. And almost to a man, except for those new to the battalion, they remembered a parade the summer before the summer that had just passed, when Charlotte, who still lived with her father, had decided to cut quickly across the parade ground because, although several battalions were drawn up and waiting, the general had yet to arrive and was nowhere in sight.

Among many of the hundreds of men in his battalion, who saw her most often, and the thousands in other formations, who glimpsed her on occasion,
she was regarded with a protective tenderness that could transcend even the most rapacious and brutal natures. Most of these men were very close to her age: they saw her as a sister. Others, who were older but not yet old enough to have children of their own, or at least not children of her age, thought of her nonetheless as a daughter.

She was the daughter of this regiment, the child of the battalion, and each man was respectful and protective. And when Charlotte—nearsighted, physically ungraceful, and nervous—dashed across the parade ground rather than spend fifteen minutes skirting it with a heavy load of books in her arms, she tripped and fell forward. All the books, their pages opening like wings, flew from her like released doves, and as they and the contents of her purse landed in a jumble spread out hopelessly before her, she, too, fell to her knees in shock, and her round, thick spectacles, with gold rims the color of her hair, were knocked from her face.

Her father, who had often seen her fall, and suffered the pain of a father who sees his child fall many times more than she should, instantly ran to her. The faster he could reach her and get her on her feet, the less her embarrassment, the quicker it would be over, perhaps the fewer twitters in the vast assemblage of men who, now perfectly turned out, seemed in contrast to be perfectly graceful. But he was unable to reach her, for a dozen men had fallen out of line and blocked his way. Surrounding the fallen Charlotte, they lifted her up, gathered her books, and offered encouraging words.

Though her father could not see, she accepted these attentions with the preternaturally endearing quality that had drawn them in the first place, and, flustered and embarrassed, went on her way. But within seconds, she fell again. Every heart went out to her, and this time the escort that came to her aid walked with her—as if the prime minister had been walking in the East End after a bombing raid—and saw her across the parade ground and to the street, while the formations looked on. As Charlotte disappeared among the trees flanking the road, the parade was perfectly silent, ordered, and content.

These were the men who witnessed her father’s refusal to drop further than his knees on the Utrechtseweg. For him—and for Charlotte—three had already given their lives in trying to fetch him back. And after his unequivocal
order, if only by sign, that no more were to try, they were willing and they wanted to, but they were good soldiers and, understanding him exactly, they watched, knowing that it could not be long.

The force of balance that had kept him on his knees had left him: a strong breeze could have blown him down, and he stayed up merely by the grace of circumstance. He swayed slightly, with the alarming disconnectedness of a tree that has been cut all the way through and moves at first minutely in one direction and then minutely in another, as if realizing that it is about to fall but, never having fallen, does not know how.

He looked up, throwing his head back to take in the sky for the last time. Clouds at a high and windy altitude passed by as if to avoid the war on the ground. Though the sky was blue, bits of paper and ash floated in the air like snow. It seemed natural that the town was burning. For years, as London had burned at close and common intervals, raining ash was something quite ordinary.

The honor of toppling him was taken by a German soldier who, objecting perhaps to the incongruous, plinthlike shape rising from the flatness of the Utrechtseweg, fired a bullet into his back. As it passed through his left shoulder, the impact spun him around and sent him to the pavement.

His men made sharp gestures and showed on their faces the painful expressions that acknowledged his death. But they had to attend to their own survival and to the fight. His death would be the turning point. They would go no farther, and the Utrechtseweg would be abandoned.

But he was not dead. He was lying flat and facedown on the pavement, looking at his right hand, which was covered with dried blood from having been pressed to his abdomen after he had first been shot, and had now curled around something invisible, as if from the muscle tone that still remained, that, ordinarily, when he slept, curled his fingers around something nonexistent.

Now he felt no pain, having passed the apprehension of pain some minutes before while still on his knees. Though the life was draining from him, he felt comfortable, giddy, and grateful. He thought of the civilians on the Utrechtseweg to the west of Arnhem, who had met the masses of nervous British soldiers as if the battle were already over, offering flowers and pitchers
of milk. The children had had patches of orange cloth pinned to their clothing. People danced. The British had been happy but uneasy. They had begged the civilians to go back to shelter, but had been unable to turn down their hospitality or disapprove of their joy. After the German snipers had opened fire, as was inevitable, the Dutch had scattered, and three paratroopers had died.

How the holy and the profane mix in the light of day and at the end of life is sometimes the most beautiful thing in this world and a compassionate entry into the next. After failure and defeat, a concentration upon certain beauties, though forever lost and unretrievable, can lift the wounded past woundedness and the dying past dying, protecting them with an image, still and bright, that will ride with them on their long ride, never to fade and never to retreat.

When Charlotte was not yet two, she had mounted a step to reach the top of a small Christmas tree in front of the fireplace. In little velvet pumps, white tights, and a red dress, she had reached out with her right hand to touch a ribbon at the crown of the tree. Her left arm hung straight down for balance, hand pressed against her thigh. Very proud of how high she was, she had turned to her father and mother, fear gone, in triumph and joy. Her smile was evident as much in her eyes as in the smile itself. How he loved her. He had always loved her. He would always love her. She was there with him on the Utrechtseweg, and yet she was protected and safe. He closed his right hand with great tenderness, for this was now all he could move, his last embrace of the little girl in the red dress, and it was as if he really were embracing her, as if she were there.

Down by St. Elizabeth’s, up from the river and toward the museum, and just beyond where the Utrechtseweg parts from the Onderlangs, he died with the vision of his daughter Charlotte in his eyes.

I
T SEEMED TO THE INSTRUCTRESS
that the tall, red-haired Australian in her class would never, could never, properly pronounce a single word of Hebrew, and so she began with unusual care for the sound of things. “Let’s start,” she said, “with the place where we find ourselves. The first word is not pronounced, as it is spelled, like the English word
bat
, but, rather, like the name of the currency of Thailand. Who can tell me what that is?”

Although the Canadians, Americans, South Africans, and British in the class did not know, the Australian did, and he pronounced it perfectly—perhaps not perfectly in Thai, but perfectly in Hebrew:
“Baht,”
he said, shyly.