Losing Julia (26 page)

DANIEL, PAGE,
Lawton and I got passes to go to Paris for three days that August. Actually we won them for capturing three German soldiers dressed as Americans and attempting to cross over into our lines near Vierzy, south of Soissons. We were elated: passes to Paris were extremely hard to come by, especially for doughboys, who, if sent anywhere for relief, usually ended up in official “leave areas” run by the YMCA like the one in Aix-les-Bains (“Aches and Pains”).

None of us had ever been there of course, and we were like giddy children when we got off the train and waded into a crowd of soldiers and civilians and women in beautiful long dresses all kissing and hugging and shaking hands. I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t like anything I imagined. The stores were filled with goods while kiosks offered every possible thing you could want—at a price—including souvenirs like German helmets and belt buckles and medals and swords. Though many of the women wore black and hundreds of amputees sold pencils and newspapers on the streets, Paris seemed impervious to the war; smug in its certainty that such mindless destruction was beneath its massive, corniced dignity. The few buildings that were damaged from bombings by zeppelins and the long-range guns were already surrounded by scaffolding and there was no sign that only weeks earlier the German spring offensive had come close enough to the city to cause evacuations.

Somehow the dense beauty of the city disturbed me. I think it was the gaiety of it all, the picnics in the parks alongside perfect rows of flowers and the brightly colored parasols and neatly pressed livery and the theaters and the perfumes and the art shows; all this a few hours from mankind’s greatest agony. Was Berlin like this too? Were the beer halls full of laughter and was a good seat at the opera still the height of achievement? I was suddenly seized with the awful sense that the war could go on indefinitely. That it wasn’t
that
bad.

Lawton made it clear that he was not leaving Paris without getting laid, and hopefully more than once, but Page insisted that he first join us for some sight-seeing.

“It’ll be good for you,” said Page, putting his arm around Lawton as we walked. “Broaden your interests.”

“A good fuck will be good for me,” said Lawton, reaching for his groin and walking with his knees out wide.

“Come on, Lawton, just try to keep your pants on for a few more hours,” I said.

“I’ll give you until five o’clock. That’s all I can last,” he said.

We walked in silence at first, just wandering and staring. Everything seemed remarkably old to me, so weathered and tempered and ornamental and written about. I couldn’t pass a single street or church without thinking of the millions who had gone before me, all those footfalls of forgotten history.

As we walked toward the Seine and stared across at the looming Conciergerie I wanted to ask Daniel what he was thinking but he seemed too absorbed in the sights to disturb. I watched the awed expression on his face as we entered Notre Dame, which was first on our list not so much to give thanks as to be able to write home and say we went to Notre Dame to give thanks. Then we headed toward the Dome des Invalides to look at Napoleon’s tomb.

We entered single file and stood in silence before the huge red sarcophagus.

“I read that he’s buried in six coffins,” said Page, who loved European history, at least up until 1914. “Like a pharaoh. The first one is tin, the second mahogany, the third and fourth lead, the fifth ebony and the sixth oak. All that was put into this sarcophagus. It’s a single block of red granite.”

“What do you suppose he’d make of the trenches?” asked Daniel.

“Hard to imagine him in a gas mask,” I said.

“You don’t see the Kaiser in no gas mask,” said Lawton.

“How did Napoleon beat the Germans?” asked Daniel.

“Beats the hell out of me,” said Lawton. “No way he had them outnumbered.”

Afterward we walked to the Eiffel Tower, which was guarded by soldiers and closed to the public. Daniel looked up at it and laughed. “My parents would consider this just about the ugliest thing they ever saw,” he said.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think it’s great,” he said, still staring up.

As we crossed the Seine again I noticed a large number of painters with their easels along the shoreline and I thought what a ludicrously peaceful thing that was to do. At the Place de la Concorde a tall juggler in a red hat was performing for a large crowd of mostly women and children and old men. The front of the circle formed around him was reserved for men in wheelchairs who smiled and clapped and twisted their wheelchairs left and right as they watched. After the performance we tossed a few coins into the juggler’s hat and then stopped at a cafe for lunch before continuing on to the Arc de Triomphe, pausing to look at the captured German artillery on display along the Champs-Elysées.

“God I’m horny,” said Lawton, who was now leading us toward the Bois de Boulogne, which he assured us was teeming with prostitutes. When we reached the edge of the park he turned to us and asked, “Any of you ladies care to join me?”

We shook our heads.

“Come on, Page, it’ll be good for you. Broaden your interests.

“Not my class of women.”

“Oh the dumb ones are the best, trust me.” He pulled out his wallet and began counting out his money. “I know Daniel’s hopeless. How about you Patrick? Get your pecker wet. How about it?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, feeling unsure of myself.

“Get your pecker wet in there and it’s liable to fall off,” said Daniel, who found Lawton’s farmlike libido amusing.

“I’ve come prepared,” said Lawton, tapping his pocket. “Come on, Patrick, what have you got to lose but your virginity?”

“No, I think I’d rather sightsee.”

“Sightsee?
Well, what do you think I’m going to be doing, closing my eyes? You’ll have your pick, Paddy! France
owes
you. Then we’ll get drunk.”

“Maybe you should have gotten Patrick drunk before you asked him,” said Page.

Lawton stood waiting for me.

“You go on,” I said. “Anyway, we’ve got two more days.”

“Meet you at that Vendome thing—it’s on the map—around seven o’clock,” he said, turning and walking off rapidly.

We stood and watched him disappear into the park, then Page headed off to meet up with an old friend who worked at the American Embassy. Daniel and I walked around aimlessly for a while, then stopped at an outdoor cafe and ordered two beers.

As we sat there I tried to point out some of the prettier women passing by but Daniel seemed distracted, staring down at his glass with a sullen expression on his face.

“Something bugging you?” I asked.

He shrugged, then signaled the waiter for another round.

“Tell me.”

“It’s Julia. God, I hope she’s all right.”

“Sure she is.”

“But who will help her with the baby? Her mother’s not well, and she’s got no one else. And God knows she has no money. And what if something happens to me?”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

He looked at me, as though studying my face for assurance.

“’Cause if it did I’d have to kick the sorry shit out of you for abandoning your sorry-assed squad, and we can’t have that happen now can we?”

He smiled in a way that reminded me of how handsome he was.

“Come on, let’s get drunk,” I said as the beers arrived.

“Yeah, let’s get drunk.”

I mustn’t be shown any more such spectacles… I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack.

—French Marshal Joseph Joffre, after pinning

a medal on a blinded soldier.

THERE IS A
German helmet in my closet. The one I found in the dirt when Julia was painting her portrait of Daniel. It’s my last souvenir.

That’s why I made such a fool out of myself this afternoon. I was sitting in my orange chair looking at the helmet, just feeling its cold gray dead weight in my lap and running my hands along the dents and scratches, when I started crying. Nurse Cindy found me. “Gimme that stupid thing,” she said, taking the helmet and tossing it back into my closet, where it landed with a crash. “Aren’t you supposed to be at woodworking today? Stop your crying and let’s get you to woodworking.”

She pulled me up and then got me a tissue for my face before escorting me into the hallway and aiming me toward woodworking.

I AM DRAWN
to Germany as one is drawn to a car accident or a crime scene or a great big scab. It’s a generational thing, I suppose, but I instinctively divide all German men into former soldiers and future soldiers. As for the Nazis, well, who isn’t fascinated by the Nazis? (To think that the Germans I fought were comparatively decent folk.) Who can resist staring at those photos of Hitler and Goering and Goebbels and Himmler and searching their eyes and skin and hair for clues? It’s the Devil we’re looking at, isn’t it? The once allegorical fury of fire and brimstone now finally and forever has a human face; many faces, faces that look not so different from our own faces.

The Devil doesn’t have horns after all.

I went to Germany in 1965, one of the yearly trips abroad I made after I turned fifty and decided I’d better not wait to fall in love again to travel. I remember taking the train from Munich to Dachau and getting off at the station and sure enough the signs still said Dachau only now there were schoolchildren with book bags playing beneath them. There was a bus to the concentration camp but I chose to walk, studying the neatly gabled brown and white houses as I passed and imagining perfect little Reich children playing out front as men were being tortured and shot only a few thousand yards away. They say that a man who lives by a river no longer hears it. Is that also true for concentration camps?

The moment I walked through the stone and iron gate beneath the sign that read
“Arbeit macht frei,
” I felt a tightening in my stomach; not just revulsion but actual fear, as though I had entered the den of a dragon to examine the piles of bones in the far recesses, only I wasn’t sure whether the dragon had really been slain.

I stood on the
Appellplatz
or roll call square in the gray drizzle and imagined thousands of men in perfect straight lines ordered to stand at attention in the freezing cold all night because a prisoner had attempted to escape. Did it always rain here? I thought of asking one of the guides if there was always a dark gray cloud above Dachau and was this rain or tears on my face?

Then I heard music in the distance, soft at first, then louder and louder. I turned and looked and from behind the
Strafblöcke
a prison marching band appeared; men in dirty white shirts and black-and-gray-striped pants with stains from dysentery down their backsides playing violins and accordions as they escorted a condemned prisoner to the
Lagerarrest.
Behind them two guards laughed and smoked cigarettes. And near a guard tower a man was hanging from his wrists with his hands tied behind his back.