‘Dear God, how angry you are!’ she cried.
Her husband ĄX a haggard civilian with a patch over one eye, with the recognition button of the Nazi teachers union on his lapel ĄX spoke to her warningly.
She did not hear him.
‘What is it you want us to do?’ she said to the ceiling and all that lay above. ‘Whatever it is you want us to do,’ she said, ‘tell us, and well do it!’
A bomb crashed down close by, shook loose from the ceiling a snowfall of calcimine, brought the woman to her feet shrieking, and her husband with her.
‘We surrender! We give up!’ she yelled, and great relief and happiness spread over her face. ‘You can stop now,’ she yelled. She laughed. ‘We quit! It’s over!’ She turned to tell the good news to her children.
Her husband knocked her cold.
That one-eyed teacher set her down on the bench, propped her against the wall. And then he went to the highest-ranking person present, a vice-admiral, as it happened. ‘She’s a woman … hysterical… they get hysterical … she doesn’t mean it … she has the Golden Order of Parenthood …’ he said to the vice-admiral.
The vice-admiral wasn’t baffled or annoyed. He didn’t feel miscast. With fine dignity, he gave the man absolution. It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s understandable. Don’t worry.’
The teacher marveled at a system that could forgive weakness. ‘Heil Hitler,’ he said, bowing as he backed away.
‘Heil Hitler,’ said the vice-admiral.
The teacher now began to revive his wife. He had good news for her ĄX that she was forgiven, that everyone understood.
And all the time the bombs walked and walked overhead, and the schoolteacher’s three children did not bat an eye.
Nor, I thought, would they ever.
Nor, I thought, would I
Ever again.
43: St. George and the Dragon …
The door of my ratty attic had been torn off its hinges, had disappeared entirely. In its place the janitor had tacked a pup-tent of mine, and over the pup-tent a zigzag of boards. He had written on the zigzag boards, in gold radiator paint that reflected the light of my match:
‘Nobody and nothing inside.’
Be that as it may, somebody had since ripped a bottom corner of the canvas free of its tacks, giving my ratty attic a small, triangular flap-door, like a tepee.
I crawled in.
The light switch in my attic did not respond, either. What light there was came through the few unbroken window panes. The broken panes had been replaced with wads of paper, rags, clothes and bedding. Night winds whistled around these wads. What light there was, was blue.
I looked out through the back windows by the stove, looked down into the foreshortened enchantment of the little private park below, the little Eden formed of joined back yards. No one was playing in it now.
There was no one in it to cry, as I should have liked someone to cry:
‘Olly-olly-ox-in-freeeeeee.’
There was a stir, a rustle in the shadows of my attic. I imagined it to be the rustle of a rat
I was wrong.
It was the rustle of Bernard B. O’Hare, the man who had captured me so long ago. It was the stir of my own personal Fury, the man who perceived his noblest aspect in his loathing and hounding of me.
I do not mean to slander him by associating the sound he made with the sound of a rat. I do not think of O’Hare as a rat, though his actions with regard to me had the same nagging irrelevance as the rats’ scrabbling passions in my attic walls. I didn’t really know O’Hare, and I didn’t want to know him. The fact of his having put me under arrest in Germany was a fact of submicroscopic interest to me. He wasn’t my nemesis. My game was up long before O’Hare took me into custody. To me, O’Hare was simply one more gatherer of wind-blown trash in the tracks of war,
O’Hare had a far more exciting view of what we were to each other. When drunk, at any rate, he thought of himself as St George and of me as the dragon.
When I first saw him in the shadows of my attic, he was seated on a galvanized bucket turned upside down. He was in the uniform of the American Legion. He had a quart of whisky with him. He had apparently been waiting for me a long time, drinking and smoking the while. He was drunk, but he had kept his uniform neat. His tie was straight His cap was on and set at the proper angle. The uniform was important to him, was supposed to be important to me, too.
‘Know who I am?’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I’m not as young as I was once,’ he said. ‘Haven’t changed much, have I?’
‘No,’ I said. I’ve described him earlier in this account as having looked like a lean young wolf. When I saw him in my attic, he looked unhealthy-pale and stringy and hot-eyed. He had become less wolf than coyote, I thought His postwar years had not been years of merry blooming.
‘Expecting me?’ he said.
‘You told me I could,’ I said. I had to be polite and careful with him, I supposed correctly that he meant to hurt me. The fact that he was in a very neat uniform, and that he was smaller and much lighter than me, suggested that he had a weapon on him somewhere ĄX most likely a gun.
He now got off the bucket, showing me, in his ramshackle rising, how drunk he was. He knocked the bucket over in the process.
He grinned. ‘Ever have nightmares about me, Campbell?’ he said.
‘Often,’ I said. It was a lie, of course.
‘Surprised I didn’t bring anybody with me?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Plenty of people wanted to come along,’ he said. ‘There was a whole bunch wanted to come down with me from Boston. And after I got to New York this afternoon, I went into a bar and got talking to some strangers, and they asked if they could come along, too.’
‘Um,’ I said.
‘And you know what I said to them?’ he asked me.
‘Nope,’ I said.
‘I said to them, “Sorry, boys ĄX but this is a party just for Campbell and me. That’s the way it’s got to be just the two of us, face to face,”’ he said.
‘Um,’ I said.
‘“This thing’s been a building over the years,” I told ‘em,’ said O’Hare. ‘“It’s in the stars ĄX ” I told ‘em, “in the stars that Howard Campbell and me meet again after all these years.” Don’t you feel that way?’ he asked me.
‘What way?’ I said.
‘It’s in the stars,’ he said. ‘We had to meet like this, right here in this very room, and neither one of us could have avoided it if we’d tried.’
‘Possibly,’ I said.
‘Just when you think there Isn’t any point to life ĄX ‘ he said, ‘then, all of a sudden, you realize you are being aimed right straight at something.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said.
He swayed, steadied himself. ‘You know what I do for a living?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Dispatcher for frozen-custard trucks,’ he said.
‘Pardon me?’ I said.
‘Fleet of trucks goes around to factories, beaches, ballgames ĄX anywhere there’s people ĄX ‘ O’Hare seemed to forget all about me for a few seconds, to reflect murkily on the mission of the trucks he dispatched. ‘Custard machine’s right there on the truck,’ he murmured. Two flavors is all ĄX chocolate and vanilla.’ His mood was exactly what poor Resi’s mood had been when she told me about the ghastly pointlessness of her job at a cigarette-making machine in Dresden.
‘When the war ended,’ O’Hare said to me, ‘I expected to be a lot more in fifteen years than a dispatcher of frozen-custard trucks.’
‘I guess we’ve all had disappointments,’ I said.
He didn’t respond to this feeble try at brotherhood. His concern was for himself alone. ‘I was going to be a doctor, I was going to be a lawyer, a writer, an architect, an engineer, a newspaper reporter ĄX ‘ he said. ‘There wasn’t anything I couldn’t be,’ he said.
‘And then I got married ĄX ‘ he said, ‘and the wife started having kids right away, and I opened a damn diaper service with a buddy, and the buddy ran off with the money, and the wife kept having kids. After the diaper service it was Venetian blinds, and after the Venetian-blind business went bust, it was frozen custard. And all the time the wife was having more kids, and the damn car breaking down, and bill-collectors coming around, and termites boiling out of the baseboards every spring and fall’
‘Sorry,’ I said.