Bluebeard (35 page)

So he did that as best he could, and he couldn’t talk without ruining everything. But, like a dentist, I was prefectly free to go on jabbering. “Good! Wonderful!
Perfect! Don’t move anything!” I said. And then I added almost absentmindedly as I laid the paint on: “Every branch of the service is claiming camouflage from the air as their specialty, even though it’s obviously the business of the Engineers.”

And I said a little later: “Artists are so naturally good at camouflage, I guess I’m just the first of many to be recruited by the Corps of Engineers.”

Did such a sly and smarmy and Levantine seduction work? You be the judge:

The painting was unveiled at the General’s retirement ceremonies. I had completed my basic training and been promoted to private first class. I was simply another soldier with an obsolescent Springfield rifle, standing in ranks before the bunting-draped scaffold which supported the painting on an easel, and from which the General spoke.

He lectured on aerial photography, and the clear mission of the Engineers to teach the other branches of the service about camouflage. He said that among the last orders he would ever give was one which called for all enlisted men with what he called “artistic experiences” to be assigned to a new camouflage unit under the command of, now get this: “Master Sergeant Rabo Karabekian. I hope I pronounced his name right.”

He had, he
had!

I was a master sergeant at Fort Belvoir when I read of the deaths of Dan Gregory and Fred Jones in Egypt. There was no mention of Marilee. They had died as civilians, although in uniforms, and they both got respectful obituaries, since the United States was still a neutral nation in the war. The Italians weren’t our enemies yet, and the British who killed Gregory and Fred weren’t yet our allies. Gregory, I remember, was bid farewell in the papers as possibly the best-known American artist in history. Fred was sent on to Judgment Day as a World War One ace, which he wasn’t, and an aviation pioneer.

I, of course, wondered what had become of Marilee. She was still young and I presumed beautiful, and had a good chance of finding some man a lot richer than I was to look after her. I was certainly in no position to make her my own. Military pay was still very low even for a master sergeant. There were no Holy Grails for sale at the Post Exchange.

When my country finally went to war like everybody else, I was commissioned a lieutenant and served, if not fought, in North Africa and Sicily and England and France. I was forced to fight at last on the border of Germany, and was wounded and captured without having fired a shot. There was this white flash.

The war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. My prison camp had not yet been captured by the Russians. I, with hundreds of other captured officers from Great
Britain, from France, from Belgium, from Yugoslavia, from Russia, from Italy, which country had switched sides, from Canada and New Zealand and South Africa and Australia, from everywhere, was marched at route step out of our prison and into the still-to-be-conquered countryside. Our guards vanished one night, and we awoke the next morning on the rim of a great green valley on what is now the border between East Germany and Czechoslovakia. There may have been as many as ten thousand people below us—concentration camp survivors, slave laborers, lunatics released from asylums and ordinary criminals released from jails and prisons, captured officers and enlisted men from every Army which had fought the Germans.

What a
sight!
And, if that weren’t enough for a person to see and then marvel about for a lifetime, listen to this: the very last remains of Hitler’s armies, their uniforms in tatters but their killing machines still in working order, were also there.

Unforgettable!

     
A
T THE END
of my war, my country, where the only person I knew was a Chinese laundryman, paid in full for cosmetic surgery performed on the place where my eye used to be. Was I bitter? No, I was simply blank, which I came to realize was what Fred Jones used to be. Neither one of us had anything to come home to.

Who paid for my eye operation at Fort Benjamin Harrison outside Indianapolis? He was a tall, skinny fellow, tough but fair-minded, plain spoken but shrewd. No, I am not speaking of Santa Claus, whose image in shopping malls at Christmas time nowadays is largely based on a painting Dan Gregory made for
Liberty
magazine in 1923. No. I am speaking of my Uncle Sam.

As I’ve said, I married my nurse at the hospital. As I’ve said, we had two sons who no longer speak to me. They aren’t even Karabekians anymore. They had their last names legally changed to that of their stepfather, whose name was Roy Steel.

Terry Kitchen asked me one time why, since I had so few gifts as a husband and father, I had gotten married. And I heard myself say: “That’s the way the postwar movie goes.”

That conversation must have taken place about five years after the war.

The two of us must have been lying on cots I had bought for the studio space we had rented above Union Square. That loft had become not only Kitchen’s workplace but his home. I myself had taken to spending two or three nights a week there, as I found myself less and less beloved in the basement apartment three blocks away, where my wife and children lived.

What did my wife have to complain about? I had quit my job as a salesman of life insurance for Connecticut General. I was intoxicated most of the time not only by alcohol but by the creation of huge fields of a single color of Sateen Dura-Luxe. I had rented a potato barn and made a down payment on a house out here, which was then a wilderness.

And in the midst of that domestic nightmare there arrived a registered letter from Italy, a country I had never seen. It asked me to come to Florence, all expenses paid for one, to testify in a lawsuit there about two paintings, a Giotto and a Masaccio, which had been taken by American soldiers from a German general in Paris. They had been turned over to my platoon of art experts to be catalogued and shipped to a warehouse in
Le Havre, where they were to be crated and stored. The general had evidently stolen them from a private house while retreating north through Florence.

The crating in Le Havre was done by Italian prisoners of war, who had done that sort of work in civilian life. One of them evidently found a way to ship both paintings to his wife in Rome, where he kept them hidden, except to show to close friends after the war. The rightful owners were suing to recover them.

So I went over there alone, and I got my name in the papers for accounting for the trip the paintings made from Paris to Le Havre.

But I had a secret, which I have never told anybody before: “Once an illustrator, always an illustrator!” I couldn’t help seeing stories in my own compositions of strips of colored tape applied to vast, featureless fields of Sateen Dura-Luxe. This idea came into my head uninvited, like a nitwit tune for a singing commercial, and would not get out again; each strip of tape was the soul at the core of some sort of person or lower animal.

So whenever I stuck on a piece of tape, the voice of the illustrator in me who would not die would say, for example, “The orange tape is the soul of an Arctic explorer, separated from his companions, and the white one is the soul of a charging polar bear.”

This secret fantasy, moreover, infected and continues to infect my way of seeing scenes in real life. If I watch two people talking on a street corner, I see not
only their flesh and clothes, but narrow, vertical bands of color inside them—not so much like tape, actually, but more like low-intensity neon tubes.