Articles of War (17 page)

His thoughts became lost in the bitter rhythm of walking. In his bunk again he cowered under his blankets, rubbed his hands and feet, and soon fell into a deep unconsciousness.

Over breakfast the next morning word was softly passed around that Slovik had arrived. Heck recalled his actions of the night before in a kind of confused horror. In the bathroom he stood over the toilet and disgorged his breakfast. He thought of complaining of illness. But this seemed cowardice. He could see no path before him that was not stained with cowardice.

When they went out to the truck the snow had stopped and the world appeared extraordinarily clean, the air filled with a crisp, blank odor.

They returned to the house with the stone fence and the iron gate. General Cota was there and he gave another little speech, which Heck failed to hear. The men had their M-1s with them, and the lieutenant collected these and took them into another room to be loaded. When he came out he told the men to go in and pick out their rifles by serial number, then await further orders.

They stood holding loaded rifles and wondering who had the blank. The lieutenant had closed the door, and the only window faced a short stretch of snow running to the black-gray of a stone wall. One of the men sniffed and coughed. No one spoke. When the lieutenant returned he appeared to be in a hurry, but once he had lined them up in the hallway he said to wait and vanished again.

The chaplain appeared. He said he had performed a confession and mass for the condemned man. “All that can be done for this man's soul,” he said, “has now been done. Also, I have a special personal message from Slovik. He said he doesn't blame you fellows for anything, and you should not feel badly about it. He asked me to tell you he hoped you would shoot straight, to end the matter quickly.” The chaplain added, “I don't think any of us wants to see him suffer any longer than necessary.”

The chaplain went away; occasional, undefined movements could be heard elsewhere in the house; Heck shuffled his feet and clenched his toes. Time now moved forward no more quickly than the cold moving into his flesh. His breath condensed and bloomed slowly before him. His thoughts dwelled on the color of blood, anticipating it. If the eleven others performed their task, what would it matter whether he did as he was supposed to? It wouldn't matter. Ten bullets were surely enough to kill a man. What difference was there between this task and the task of killing Germans? Shoot the Germans who don't desert, shoot the American who does, sides of a single coin. He thought of the sea-colored eyes of German sniper who had killed Obie and been killed by Conlee and the others.

No, he thought, no. He could not do it. It would be easier to turn the gun on himself. He could not execute a man for doing exactly what he himself had tried to do, except that he hadn't had the courage to be so forthright. He had wanted a wound and an honorable discharge. In Iowa he would have gotten a hero's welcome.

It struck him that he should stride forward, once they were out there, and possibly stop this.

The lieutenant returned and ordered arms at trail. They marched outside and there stood a large group of uniformed officers and MPs, waiting. They stood at ease in a cleared area in the snow behind the firing squad's position. At the post a man stood stiffly, alone, a black hood over his head. It set Heck aback to see the condemned man—he had expected to watch as the deserter was marched out and tied to the post, and he realized now how much he had prized that delay—and the crowd of witnesses further confounded him. This is happening, he told himself, while the steel of his M-1 grew cold under his fingers.

The squad reached the designated position. Weapons were ordered to port and unlocked. Heck couldn't see any reaction in Slovik at the post; if he was nervous he gave no sign. Heck felt himself faced with impossibilities of such scale that it was strange to find himself merely here, in a frozen garden, his fingers cold on the cold gun, the cold creeping inward, the sun pressing down a comfortless winter light. Someone behind him adjusted his feet, creating an extraordinarily loud, crisp scrape and crunch. Over the mountain slopes lay a sun-glowing vapor. Briefly Heck experienced a distanced curiosity, as if he had simply to wait and watch to see what he would himself do, whether he would aim and pull the trigger, a point of question amid a sensation of floating. Behind the squad an officer said, in rapid succession, “Squad, ready. Aim.” Despite the speed of the orders—which Heck followed, raising his rifle, guiding the trembling sights of his rifle toward Slovik's imagined heart—there was time enough for the making and dismantling of innumerable decisions. “Fire.” And Heck squeezed the trigger in an intimate convulsion. There was a fleeting and terrible omnipotence. And the bullet itself was moving away, the air had an uncommon transparency, and time was drifting down a slant. Soon he was empty of feeling except for a mild curiosity, which perhaps was the elemental emotion, the background color that remains when all the others have been wiped away. With curiosity he watched bullets beat into the flesh of the man tied to the post, watched the body spasm. With curiosity he heard the distorted thunderous noise of twelve rifle shots returning off the hills. He heard, he thought, the echo of his own shot lagging a fraction behind the others. It was a curious thing, that in the time between the shots and the echo of the shots a man could die, that so monumental an event could occur in so trivial a passage.

There was a dull, faded noise of the shots echoing once again off another slope. The deserter hung forward against ropes that bound him to the post. Heck had not had the time, in the combination of the officer's rapid orders and the cold stiffness of trembling hands, to sight carefully, and he knew his shot had been off to the right, perhaps in Slovik's arm. His rifle had kicked and the shell had ejected—the blank had not been in his gun. The echo of the shooting oscillated until finally it surmounted into the firmament, and yet still the echo seemed to resonate in the earth and through Heck's slowly freezing feet. There was nothing else to hear.

The man at the post lurched, tried to straighten, to stand upright, then slumped again into the ropes. Someone behind Heck whispered, “Fuck!” The tall doctor strode out of a little garden shack to the right. No one had shoveled a path between the shack and the post, and the doctor had to high-step through knee-deep snow, with each step crashing though an icy layer beneath the previous night's snowfall. His pace was agonizing. The prisoner once again struggled upright, then fell. The doctor crashed and crashed ahead through the snow. When finally he reached the prisoner, he took a stethoscope from a pocket in his coat.

The officer who had given the order to fire called, “Is he dead?”

“There is a faint heartbeat.”

The order was given to reload, and someone—it sounded like the chaplain—said, “Sure, give him another volley if you like it so much.”

The major hissed something unintelligible.

The doctor, with the stethoscope in his ears, turned and said, “Please, none of us is enjoying this.”

Heck did not understand how anyone could speak a word. But when he was commanded to hold his rifle behind himself, so that he would not see the shell, live fire or blank, that the lieutenant put in, his arms and hands made to obey. The loading of shells was an arduous, infinite process. Someone hissed to the lieutenant that he should not point the weapons at people as he reloaded them. The doctor stood with his stethoscope on the prisoner's chest. Except for the noises the lieutenant made loading the weapons, the quiet was crystalline and nearly visible. Heck was startled by his rifle as it was returned to him. It was heavy and real, and for a moment he believed it would pull him down into the snow.

Then, the rifles reloaded, the lieutenant returned to his position, and a major barked, “Doctor, either pronounce him dead or step back so we can provide another volley, per SOP.”

The doctor looked around, slightly startled, or bewildered, as if he thought he'd been alone with the dying man. “No. A second volley won't be necessary,” he said. “He's dead.”

Breaths steamed out up and down the line of the firing squad. The lieutenant ordered the squad about and marched them into the house.

They stood waiting in the foyer. Cigarettes were passed around. One man said, “Thank God that's over.”

Another said, “He didn't look like no coward out there today, did he? He just stood there and took it.”

A GI beside Heck sniffled. The lieutenant came in and told them to go back to the truck. They would get food at the schoolhouse, then be returned to their various units.

They trooped out in ones and twos, without organization. Sitting in the truck, Heck watched the little freckled man who hadn't wanted the blank go vomit into the leafless bushes along the road. Then he got in and sat on the bench beside Heck.

Returned to his squad that night, Heck lay on a wool blanket on the wooden floor of the farmhouse. Conlee nodded to him and said, “Welcome back.”

He felt vacant. He didn't feel even a nausea. He tried to move himself toward what had been in the mind of the man under the hood in the moment before he died, the moment when the last heartbeat was heard faintly in the doctor's stethoscope. But he had no access to imagination and could conceive only emptiness.

8.

HECK PASSED FROM THE AGE OF WAR INTO THE AGE OF AFTER
the war befogged by unbelief—he knew the war had ended because he was told this, but it was difficult to believe. War was a universe unto itself; it didn't make sense that it could be banished in a moment by the say-so of a few men, the scribble of a few signatures. And he had at some point ceased to think it possible that the war would stop with himself still alive. Only when he read of the bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki did he begin to understand that he was not dead, but he was nevertheless in a new world.

Everyone wanted to go home, back to the States, back to Arkansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Montana, New Jersey, Georgia, and all the others. Heck didn't understand why, didn't care to think about home or why someone would want to go back. The talk was all of schemes and stratagems for getting released more quickly, and Heck ignored it. He felt he had nowhere to go. To face his father was unimaginable.

At the same time that everyone wanted to leave, the army badly needed people to stay. Large bonuses were offered to anyone willing to remain in the service in Europe. Heck signed up. He was returned to France.

He worked in an office in Amiens, a city north of Paris that had been bombed and attacked by the artillery of both sides. Entire neighborhoods lay in rubble, and people made their homes where they could. The city's Gothic cathedral had survived largely intact, and it brooded huge and dark over the destruction, a blocky shape with a single narrow spire upthrust from it. The stained glass was destroyed, but the statuary had survived; over the front doors were carved hundreds of sinners and saints, the sinners in grotesque contortions as they strained to hold upward the pedestals of the saints. Below the cathedral ran the Somme, carrying a steady flow of garbage.

Heck's work was easy, sorting files, some typing. After typing for an hour or two his wrist would begin to ache where he had been shot. Sometimes he only had to flex it just so, and it would flash with pain. Sometimes minutes would pass unnoticed while he sat gazing at it. He thought of the execution every day, every hour. When he had returned to battle after Slovik's execution, he found he had no fear—or at least he could very easily control himself in spite of it—and fought reasonably well until the end of the war. He didn't understand this change, did not want to understand it, and took no pride in it.

Many in the city had fled and had not yet returned. In places there was no one alive to be seen, and the heaped rubble and the hollow-eyed, roofless buildings on all sides were silent but for the buzzing of flies. A trickle of grim and wary refugees moved through the streets, carrying their things in bags, pushing them in overburdened wheelbarrows and baby carriages. Along some streets the cobblestones had been stolen—pried out one by one and carted away. There were many rats, brazen in their numbers and indifferent to Heck. Around the peripheries of the city wandered packs of stray dogs. Each time Heck saw them, or heard their howls, he wondered what had become of Pooch.

Here and there, however, attempts at clearing the rubble and rebuilding had begun, and people grappled with and reduced the piles, erected new framing, poured concrete, planted trees. Posters for politics and parties of all sorts were plastered onto the walls, and many of the abandoned structures hosted densities of graffiti. The news said that the Russians and Americans were already fighting skirmishes in Berlin. Among the men who Heck worked with, the talk was all of the Russians. The weeks passed in bright, splendid days and gray ones without sun, and these all were much alike to Heck's withdrawn awareness. Certain memories clutched at him again and again, demanding his attention. His hand slipping inside a dead man. Obie stiffening, and the sea-colored eyes of the German who had shot him. The tall soldier exploding. The body of the woman under the bushes. The icicle. It was, however, the memory of Slovik's lurching to life against the post and ropes that struck him most often and most abruptly, like a punishment of his conscience upon him.

Each morning his route to work took him alongside the cathedral and through the plaza before it. Some mornings a forlorn organ grinder swayed in the center of the plaza, grinding a tune slowly. He had a leashed monkey, which danced at his feet with weird abandon. Just past the plaza lay a row of bomb-demolished shops before which the beggars huddled, gathering into themselves as if fearing to take up too much space in the world, their backs hard against broken walls and piles of fallen stones. Many wore ragged suits and coats that had once been finely tailored, or hunched under filthy, ornate shawls. Some of the men still wore their army uniforms. They appeared desiccated, they were missing a foot or a hand or their faces were waxy with burns, they had no eyes or no teeth or no ears. Thin, staring children sat among the women. Tiny infants were bundled in old towels or curtains. Heck offered his coins to the children. Some accepted the coins with grave solemnity; others snatched at the glint of metal like birds, hungry and wary.

One day he noticed a woman among the others watching him with particular intensity. A little swaddled creature sat nestled under her arm, and she did not hold out her hand toward Heck, pleadingly, as the other beggars did. She only gazed at him, undeniably at him, meeting his eyes without any evident expression of anger or hope. He seemed to rise toward knowledge in steps: he thought he knew her; he knew he knew her; he knew her. It was Claire. The child beside her made an odd mewling sound. A man with no legs rocked forward and hissed at him. Empty, upturned hands pushed vaguely toward him. Heck kept walking. She continued to gaze at him. He passed her and felt her gaze still, a soft pressure on his back. He continued walking, walking until he knew she was out of sight. He needed to report to work, and he did.

In the office, a lieutenant snapped his fingers in front of Heck's face to break him from a reverie. He was amazed by himself, by the realization that for months he had ceased to think of Claire, that he felt no love for her anymore, only a soft pity. As he returned to his quarters that evening he took a longer route to avoid the beggars. The following morning he again took the longer path, and soon the new route, which went under a series of large, disfigured plane trees, had become a habit.

The fervent emotion he had felt toward her during the war was strange to him now. He dug to the bottom of his footlocker searching for the music box, fearing he had lost it. He found it inside a knotted sock. He wound the tiny key and listened to the thin, plinking music and remembered with a feeling of dull sickness his notion, long ago, that if he survived the war he would wander France in restless melancholy, searching for his love.

One day the gardens were full of enormous cabbages. Soon after they were empty of anything but dirt. New poles strung with electric and telephone cables were being erected in the ruined portions of the city. Heck, watching these poles swing up into place, discovered himself trying to understand how a torso might become tangled there. When it rained he watched the rain move wavelike over the streets, and it made him think of the sea and of Claire. Instead of his old passion he felt a somber guilt, and as the days passed this feeling grew stronger. It seemed to him that he had behaved poorly toward Claire, from beginning to end. He wondered also, though, whether it truly had been her he had seen among the beggars. It seemed just as likely to have been delusion.

Nevertheless, he was unsurprised to look over one day and see Albert just across the river, standing at the top of the embankment and watching the gray-brown water. There was only a question of reality. Heck examined the purpled dents in the man's cheeks, his uneven beard, the empty, pinned sleeve. Albert looked up and smirked, very much as if he had expected to see Heck there. “It's you,” he called across the water. His eyes were sunken and dark. “Well, won't you come across and join me?”

Heck walked to the next bridge. He thought then of running onward, but the thought embarrassed him, and it had no power. He crossed the bridge and waited for Albert to join him. Soft thin mists hovered over the water of the river, and below these wisps moved occasionally the color of an autumn leaf. Albert was strolling with an odd, forced languor. “I must admit,” Albert said as he came up, “I did not expect you would survive. But here you are, just walking along, with two arms, two legs.” He stopped and stooped, picked a cigarette butt off the street and put it into his pocket. “You know, you always look very lonely.”

He touched Heck's elbow, and they walked on alongside the river. The buildings were of stone and narrow. Fallen foliage lay over the street and smoke rose from the chimneys. It was early morning, and there were few people out. “I saw Claire,” Heck said, “among the beggars, some time ago.”

“I know. She mentioned it.”

“How is she?”

Albert shrugged. “As well as can be expected.”

“Ives?”

“Him too.”

They walked a time quietly. Heck could hear, faintly, the scuttle of rats pacing them in the shadows below, by the river. Albert said, “Have you any money?”

Heck pulled out the francs he had in his pockets and counted them. In value, it amounted to a little more than a hundred dollars. He held the bundle toward Albert. Albert accepted it and counted with a deft movement of finger and thumb. Then the bundle vanished inside his coat.

Heck asked, “Is there really a child?”

“Her name is Genevieve. Pretty, isn't it?”

“She's not mine, Albert.”

“Of course not. She was two months too early to be your child.”

Heck thrust his hands into his pockets. He found the music box there, and he gripped it until the corners cut into his fingers. He said, “Whose then?”

“Some damned Nazi.” Albert smoothed the scruff of his beard with his hand. He glanced at Heck. “He raped her, of course. But people already thought we were collaborators.” He shrugged. “We were struggling for bread each day.”

After a moment Heck took the music box from his pocket and held it out. “You'll give this to Claire.”

“This,” Albert said as he took it. He opened it and closed it with the fingers of his hand. “It was her mother's.” He gestured a small, unhappy arc with the music box. Then, abruptly, he shrugged. “Well,” he said, and without another word he turned and started back in the direction they had come. Heck, with hands in emptied pockets, watched him go.

He never saw Albert again. He had no idea if what Albert had said was true. Such confusion now appeared to him unsurprising in the fogged world. He often had trouble taking his thoughts to any conclusion. Perhaps he really had seen Albert. Perhaps Claire had had a child by some German. Perhaps they had been collaborators. Perhaps not. Perhaps he might still have loved her, in some other world.

A week after the encounter with Albert the streets were filled with inches of snow. The trucks moving through the city left thick, paired black lines, while men in hats and dark coats on bicycles traced thin, wavering impressions. The snow stood gleaming on the steep roofs. Slovik shuddered and strained in his ropes again, unwilling to accept even the duty to die. Heck returned to the wall of beggars, who were arrayed as on any other day, squatting in the snow and slush in their torn and rag-bound shoes. They looked at Heck without expectation or hope, and Claire wasn't among them. He felt he had deserted her, again. As surely as he had abandoned everything else, he had abandoned her.

Winter took firm hold. The beggars grew fewer, and those who remained were wrapped more deeply into their rags. The radio said that, in Paris, de Gaulle had resigned. The eaves were draped with the shimmer of icicles. People who had homes and offices and shops to go to scurried through the streets, chased by the chill toward warmer doorways, but Heck lingered longer and longer, unmindful of the weather except when the falling snow obscured his view as he examined darkened alleys, shadowed corners, abandoned structures. Sometimes when he had a day free he traveled to towns where he had been during the war, or to other places, selected more or less randomly, and wandered the streets, looking. So, he thought, I am searching for her after all. He saw others who were also searching, people with a flickering gaze, people who were always watching the faces in the street, studying the windows and doorways, looking. It seemed there were a great many of these people, marked by the same probing, yearning gaze.

When he was not working or wandering about, he lay in bed, smoking. And he was there one day when a knock started him from a listless, inward preoccupation. He thought it might be Albert, hoping for more money. He was glad, and he opened the door eagerly. However, there was no one. He scanned the street, and it was empty and quiet. Dusk had dimmed the sky to a battered yellow. From the far side of the city came the sound of a train tapping slowly along tracks.

Then he heard a soft noise, and he looked down. Beside the doorway was a cardboard box holding a rough bundle of blankets, and among the folds of the blankets was a tiny child, less than a year old. She sat in a kind of collapse, like a sodden towel. Then she peered up at Heck, frowning and blinking. Nestled beside her was the little silver music box. Gently, Heck picked it up and opened it. Inside was a note. “Please, please, Iowa, take her.”

In the street a platoon of schoolboys swarmed by, running hard, sliding on patches of ice, hooting and howling to one another. The child in the box, looking up at Heck, drew a rasping breath, raised one arm vaguely, then began to bawl. Heck crouched over the child, but he didn't know what to do. He reached in to try to soothe her, but she began to scream. Her face became a harsh red, ugly, disfigured as if in pain. Her tortured breaths steamed in the cold. She looked very tiny and helpless. Heck looked at the street. He felt the cold in his hands. A light went on in a window at the corner. A door opened. The screams echoed in distortions off the buildings.