Losing Julia Read online

  “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.

  I stood still and closed my eyes and rubbed my temples until all the prisoners and the guards disappeared and then walked over to the Totenkammer and the Krematorium, which I was afraid to touch in case it felt warm. Before I walked back to the train station I bought a postcard that said “Never Again” and tucked it into my pocket, but by the time I reached the station I had decided that never again was not nearly enough. Even if it was the best we could do it was not adequate at all; not even if not another single drop of human blood is spilled again in anger. But of course the blood keeps spilling, doesn’t it? And as I stood watching the train approaching, I thought that maybe the real horror is not what happened at Dachau but what didn’t happen after Dachau. Certainly we know now once and for all that humanity can never be brought to its senses.

  The dragon lives.

  “SO WHEN ARE you going to show us a picture of your girlfriend?” I asked, looking over at Page. “Aren’t you two engaged or something?”

  We were sitting with Lawton, Giles and Daniel in a humid, smoky bar on our last night of rest before returning to the front, which was still audible some twenty miles away, like a far-off storm rumbling across the Kansan plains. The room was crowded with a mix of French and American soldiers and it was difficult to hear across the rough round table where we sat. In the candlelight the dense air had an almost yellowish tinge and the room smelled of sweat and tobacco mixed with the sweetish aroma of spilled drinks that made the floor slightly sticky. I’d begun to feel a hint of nausea and I couldn’t decide if it was because of the smoke and drinks or because I knew I would soon be back in the trenches.

  “I don’t have it anymore,” said Page, taking a long drag of his cigarette. I looked at his hands wrapped around a beer mug and noticed that they were covered with various nicks and cuts, especially near the knuckles. I looked down at mine and they looked the same, with dirt buried deep under the nails and into the cuticles and a thin scar across the top of my left hand where I had snagged it on barbed wire. Trench hands. So different looking than I remembered them; all scrubbed for church, gripping the rake in the backyard and piling up the red and yellow and brown leaves, anxiously tapping a pencil at school. I raised them up and opened them wide and then squeezed them closed a few times before reaching for my beer.

  “You don’t have it?” asked Giles, signaling the plump, elderly French barmaid for a fourth round of drinks. In his left hand he fingered one of two Iron Crosses he had found on the bodies of German soldiers after we captured their trench. He’d been in good spirits ever since.

  “I don’t have it.”

  “What did you do, sell it?” asked Lawton, whose large face looked unusually haggard while his eyes were fiery red from drink.

  “She broke up.”

  “With you? She broke up with you?” asked Lawton.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “It’s just a little surprising, I mean, if Mr. Page here isn’t the catch of the century, then… ”

  “I’m sure you’ll straighten things out when you get home,” I said hopefully. I’d assumed that Page was as good as married and I had privately hoped to be invited to a big Boston Brahmin wedding after the war.

  Page shrugged.

  So that’s why he’d been so quiet lately. I was sorry I’d mentioned her in front of the other guys. I tried to imagine his sense of helplessness, being so far away.

  “That’s got to be tough,” said Giles, shaking his head. “I’m sort of glad I broke up with Meredith before I enlisted. That way I don’t have to think about her being unfaithful. Nothing worse than sitting in a fucking trench imagining some guy back home screwing the daylights out of your girl in some nice comfortable bed.”
r />   “Would you shut the fuck up?” I said. I noticed that Page had tightened his grip on his beer mug.

  “So who’s buying the next round?” asked Daniel.

  “I’m broke,” said Lawton.

  “So let me get this straight,” I said. “You expect us to buy your beers so you can save your money for whores?”

  “Seems reasonable to me,” said Lawton, smiling his big impish smile.

  “I’ll get them,” said Page, reaching for his pocket.

  I stared at the small flame of the red candle that burned in an empty green wine bottle in the center of the table. The bottle was almost covered with layers of different-colored wax that had dripped down its sides. I thought of all the other men who had sat around it laughing and talking and wondered how many were now dead.

  “I got a letter from my kid brother yesterday,” said Giles. “He wants to know how many Heinies I’ve killed.”

  “How many have you killed?” I asked.

  “No idea.” He looked around the table. “Do you guys count?”

  “I counted the first three,” admitted Page. “Then I stopped.”

  “ ’Course you can’t always be sure,” said Giles.

  “No, you can’t,” said Daniel.

  “Can’t beat Lawton here,” I said, slapping him on the back. A week earlier Lawton had shot a German spotter right out of a belfry from eight hundred yards.

  “What about those guys in the artillery, firing those fuckers all day and night,” said Lawton. “That’s gotta add up.” We shook our heads solemnly.

  “So what are you going to tell your brother?” asked Daniel.

  “I’m going to tell him that I’ll kick his ass if he signs up.”

  “Why don’t you just tell him what it’s like?” I asked.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I’m serious.”

  He looked at me steadily. “I’ve tried. I can’t.”

  “How about you, Page?”

  “I stopped trying.”

  “Daniel?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well shit, if none of you learned men are going to tell the good folks back home what’s going on, who the fuck is?” asked Lawton, raising his voice. I thought of a letter Lawton had recently dictated to me to write to his parents, how there was no mention of death or violence at all, as if the worst things were the inconveniences; as if we were all on a big camp-out and someone forgot the marshmallows.

  “I wonder what the Germans write,” I said. “‘Dear Pa, it’s just like shooting pheasant. Please send more schnapps.’”

  “Their letters are probably not much different from ours,” said Daniel.

  “Do you think they still believe they can win?” asked Giles.

  “I don’t think they believe they’ll beat us, but I don’t think they believe we’ll beat them either,” said Daniel.

  I pulled out a cigarette and lit it, then took a long sip of beer.

  “Do you suppose they have many deserters?” asked Giles.

  “Not nearly enough, as far as I can see,” said Lawton.

  “Does anybody ever get the feeling that this thing could go on forever?” I asked, looking around the table.

  “I’ll give it another year,” said Page. “Two at the most.”

  “Two? Christ, I’m not putting up with this shit for two years,” said Giles.

  I tried to imagine two more years but I couldn’t. The idea made my eyes redden so that I had to turn away. I reached for my beer and finished it off.

  Nearby a table of French soldiers began singing.

  “Fucking sheep to slaughter,” said Lawton, who was visibly drunk.

  We sat in silence, listening to the song. Watching the soldiers with their arms around each other and their drunken smiles and bleary eyes made me enormously sad. What if their mothers could see them now? Their girlfriends? And where would they be in a month? A year? And what about us? As I listened to them my sadness slowly transformed into intense anger; anger that we were here, that nobody who wasn’t here could ever understand us, that the rest of the world just went on without us. The anger came more often now. It was easier to deal with than sadness or fear.

  When they finished singing we clapped and turned back to our table. Giles pulled out a deck of cards and began shuffling. I tried to concentrate on the quick movements of his hands but my vision blurred. I slowly looked around the table; first at Daniel, then Page, then Lawton, then Giles. It struck me what fun I’d be having if only there wasn’t a war and how much I’d miss them when it was over.

  “Is life fucking absurd or have I been drinking too much?” I said finally, feeling a heaviness in my tongue.

  “It’s absurd,” said Daniel, who looked tired and thin.

  “Thank you.” I belched loudly.

  “Paddy here’s got a hell of a point,” said Lawton, both lisping and slurring. His red eyes flickered as he talked and his left knee bounced up and down under the table.

  “I get the feeling Lawton needs to get laid,” said Giles, as he began dealing. A cigarette dangled from his lips and after he inhaled he held the smoke in for a moment and smiled appreciatively before exhaling.

  “Bunch of fucking fodder is what we are,” said Lawton, leaning so far back in his chair I feared he would fall over.

  “Well shit, you might as well just stand on the parapet and whistle at the Germans,” said Page.

  Lawton began to whistle.

  “Give this man another drink,” said Giles.

  “Worm food. We’re fucking worm food,” said Lawton, leaning his shoulder against me and raising his glass. “To worms, who’ve never had it so good.”

  “The thing is, Lawton, the worms have always won in the end,” said Daniel. “Live, love and die. No answers. Little justice. Never has been, never will be.”

  “I feel so much better,” said Lawton.

  Daniel continued: “So you can say life is senseless and cruel or you can make a stand and try to impose your own meaning and values on it.”

  “I’m afraid I’m no good at that,” said Lawton.

  “What about the people that are important to you?” asked Page.

  “They keep dying off,” said Lawton, draining his glass.

  “So you think we’re all mad?” I asked.

  “Oh most definitely,” said Lawton.

  “To madness then,” said Giles, raising his glass.

  “To madness,” we said, clinking our glasses.

  What is happening to me now is more tragic than the “passion play.” Christ never endured what I endure. It is breaking me completely.

  —Isaac Rosenberg, British Army, in a letter written

  January 26, 1918. Killed in action, March 31, 1918.

  “LET ME ASK you something,” I said to Daniel as we sat in a dugout after spending the morning carrying ammunition boxes and Marmite pots of food along the communication trench to the firebay. Daniel had just finished shaving in a small mirror nailed to a wooden beam and now gently tapped out powdered toothpaste onto his toothbrush. “So do you think it’s worth it, all in all? Living, I mean. Do you think the good outweighs the bad in the long term?”

  “Most days I do,” he said.

  “I don’t,” I said. “I don’t think that all the happiness in the world can make up for the misery. Not for one moment. After the first child died in a fire or the first mother ran out of food I think the whole bloody thing should have been called off.”

  Daniel turned and looked at me and I felt my anger in my face and noticed that my hands had tightened around my metal coffee cup, which was cold. After he finished brushing his teeth he sat down and slowly untied his boots, which were caked with dried mud. Then he pulled them off, scraped them clean with a knife and slowly removed his socks, which had to be peeled from his skin like adhesive tape. After massaging and inspecting his feet, he pulled out a fresh pair of socks from his pack, put them on and laced up his boots. After rolling his wool puttees he stood, walked to
the entrance of the dugout and pulled aside the hanging blankets. Then he turned back to me and asked, “You’ve never been in love, have you Patrick?”

  “DANIEL?”

  “Patrick, it’s me Martin. It’s Martin, Patrick.”

  Martin? Ah yes, Martin. Great Oaks. Infirmity. Senility. I slowly raised my head and stared at my hands, which lay limp on my lap looking splotchy and mottled. I had fallen asleep in the corner chair of our room, my chin pressing against my chest with my head swung to one side at a cadaverous angle.

  “Hello, Martin,” I said, rubbing my neck. He smiled at me and patted me on the shoulder.

  I’ve grown to like Martin immensely in the months since he moved in. (I know, I promised I wouldn’t.) He is one of those gentle souls who are always at pains not to be in anyone’s way. His growing dependency on others embarrasses him immensely.

  Nobody visits him. Not his daughter the bitch—thank God—not his older sister Abby, who lives in Baltimore and is too sick to travel, and not his grandchildren, because the bitch never brings them.

  His wife Doreen died nine years ago of lung cancer. Martin had recently retired from his job as a floor manager in a printing factory where he worked for forty-three years, earning a little medallion etched with an old printing press and his name. (He keeps it on his side of the long dresser we share, along with a silver brush and comb set he got in childhood, a white clay mold of his grandson’s two-year-old hand and a picture of Doreen standing in the surf on the Jersey Shore and laughing with her head tilted sideways as she holds her yellow dress up around her knees.) Martin and Doreen had planned to travel on cruise ships and play golf and dote on their grandchildren; when she died they were booked to sail to the Bahamas. A year later, Martin lost most of his savings on a real estate deal pushed by a young broker whose father also worked at the plant. Then his health went.

  I took him along to Sean’s for dinner last weekend, where he played checkers for two hours with Kenneth and entertained Michael with sleight-of-hand tricks. Every time Katy approached him he made those funny clicking sounds accompanied by strange grimaces that old men like to make around small children. She loved it.