At close range, he had been exposed to the horror of the human body’s fragility, its liability to burst open, to be ripped in two, to deliver up its pulp through a split in the outer peel. He had suffered bombardment, gun barrage, loneliness, foolish commanders, and a two-month case of the GIs. He had lost Aughenbaugh. He had killed a boy who was shooting at him with a burp gun. Apart from the fact that he was, as a result, still alive, that was one person more than he ever wanted to kill again. Along the way he had captured or had a hand in the capture of men of science—one who had taught chemistry at Princeton before the war, another whose medical research had been funded by a Rockefeller—in laboratories and proving grounds dedicated to the cultivation of fatal toxins and missile-borne plagues.
In the face of all that, my grandfather had come down on the side of numbness. Even when Aughenbaugh had died in the back of that jeep, blood soaking his cardigan, calling for his sister, Beatie, in a voice of boyish plaintiveness, my grandfather had permitted himself to shed only a few tears. Now, watching the old priest comfort the dying man in low, musical Latin, my grandfather felt some inner tether come unlashed. His cheeks burned. His eyes stung. For the first and only time in his life, he felt the beauty that inhered in the idea of Jesus Christ, in the message of comfort that had managed to survive, reasonably intact, despite having been so thoroughly corrupted and profaned over the past two thousand years by Christians.
Relief spread across the face of the dying man. He closed his downcast eyes. The old priest looked up at my grandfather without apparent reproach or emotion of any kind. He tried to get up from the paving stones beside the corpse but did not seem to have the required flexibility. My grandfather offered his hand and hoisted the old priest to his feet. The priest studied my grandfather’s face for a moment, his jowls powdered with plaster dust, his expression unreadable but not unfriendly. He reached again into the slit of his cassock, felt around. My grandfather took a step away, thinking this time the priest might be reaching for a gun. He reached back to put a hand on Diddens’s chest, ready to shove the Alabaman to safety.
The old priest’s hand reemerged from the slit in the cassock holding a white handkerchief, ironed flat with crisp corners. He passed it to my grandfather. The fresh linen smelled of lavender.
“I’m sorry,” said my grandfather. He meant to apologize for spoiling the handkerchief, but it came out sounding like regret for the body at their feet. That was all right with my grandfather.
The priest looked at the damp bit of linen and then searched my grandfather’s face. “Keep it,” he said.
“What was he saying, Father?” Diddens’s German was more correct but less fluid than my grandfather’s. He pointed to the dead man. “What was he telling you?”
The old priest glanced over his shoulder at the body of the archer. “What was there to say?” he said.
13
The old priest’s name was Father Johannes Nickel. He had been the rector of St. Dominikus-Kirche until the Lord, in the form of an 88mm shell from a King Tiger, had seen fit to deprive him of his home and place of employment. For the past week he had been living with his aged sister, a widow, on her farm a few miles to the northeast of Vellinghausen. The farmhouse was a long walk for an old man but not so far—here Father Nickel heaved another sigh—on a bicycle.
My grandfather offered the services of their jeep and driver, Private Anthony M. Gatto, who was susceptible to spasms of prayerfulness. Gatto and Father Nickel solemnly shook hands.
“It will be dark soon,” Father Nickel said. “I invite you to stay the night with my sister and me. There is no room in the farmhouse, but you would be more than welcome to sleep in the hayloft. The straw is clean and you would be warm.”
In his fitful eastward progress through Belgium and Germany that winter, my grandfather had shared all manner of billets: with dogfaces and officers, in misery and in comfort, in attack and in retreat, and pinned down by snow or German ordnance. He had bedded down under a bearskin in a schloss and in foxholes flecked pink with the tissue of previous occupants. If an hour’s sleep were to be had, he seized it, in the bedrooms or basements of elegant townhouses, in ravaged hotels, on clean straw and straw that crawled with vermin, on featherbeds and canvas webbing slung across the bed of a half-track, on mud, sandbags, and raw pine planks. However wretched, accommodations were always better or no worse than those on the enemy side. If that was not written down in the field manual or stipulated by some tribunal in Geneva, it was nevertheless an iron law. When Allied soldiers came knocking at the door of a German farmhouse, they would not be planning to sleep in the hayloft. If the farm folks did not relish a night in the barn, there was always the cellar.
“That is very kind of you, Father,” my grandfather said. He found the old priest’s self-regard oddly touching. “Unfortunately, we need to keep on.”
“Your friend’s foot is injured.”
“Nevertheless.”
“When I left the house this morning to come here and look for my bicycle, my sister was killing a chicken. I believe she plans to cook it in a stew. There are carrots and potatoes and a bit of flour for dumplings.”
My grandfather turned to consult Diddens and Gatto, knowing what he would find in their faces yet surprised all the same by the depth of its canine abjection.
“Lieutenant’s foot is hurting pretty bad,” Gatto said.
Diddens nodded. “Ow,” he said.
“It’s better not to travel after dark,” my grandfather said.
The Germans were in retreat north and east, and the general feeling was that they would not be returning to Vellinghausen anytime soon. The town was held by some bone-weary somnambulists from the 7th Armored Infantry and a few bewildered-looking sappers from the 53rd Combat Engineers. Troops were few and scattered, and to a passerby it might appear that the invasion had been conducted not by soldiers but by clouds of smoke, the gray sky pouring into the roofless houses, and a hunger so profound it had gnawed the houses to their foundations and the trees to stumps. Here and there a baker or a butcher had opened for business, but this apparent optimism or bravado was nothing more than the robotics of habit. There was nothing to buy, nothing to sell, nothing to eat. Smoke had left the eye sockets of houses with black eyebrows of astonishment. Cats hugged corners leaving brushstrokes of ash on the stucco.
Gatto steered their jeep around the blown carcass of an M4 tank, a human leg (German) in a gray pant leg and a black boot, a bathtub with its feet in the air, and an erect dame whose high-button shoes and widow’s weeds must have dated from the Franco-Prussian War. The old lady had her hands over her mouth. She was staring at a heap of rubble, pipe, and wire that to the observer looked no different from any of the other heaps that artillery fire had spilled into the street. Staring old people, staring children, staring women and girls. Staring amputees on crutches. The stares did not seem hostile, sullen, or resentful. Nor were they the stares of people watching their fondest wish come true. Some people smiled. Others turned bright red as though fighting tears or shame. Some did both at once.
One night the month before, back on the other side of the Belgian border, Aughenbaugh had delivered a lecture on the etymology of the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an ancient Indo-European root signifying confusion. That was a foxhole night, bitter cold. The 5th Panzer Army was making its last great push west. You had to hand it to those Indo-Europeans, my grandfather thought, rolling through Vellinghausen. Confusion shone on the faces of the townspeople. War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs. It confounded conquest with liberation, anger with heartache, hunger with gratitude, hatred with awe. The 53rd Combat Engineers looked pretty confused, too. They were milling around at the edge of town, contemplating the long stretch of road between there and beautiful downtown Berlin, trying to figure out if they ought to mine it or clear it of mines.