She was the most beautiful girl Beame had ever seen. She looked no older than twenty-one or — two, perhaps only seventeen. Though it was difficult to judge her height from this angle, he thought she must be tall for such a slender girl, maybe five-seven. Her complexion was Mediterranean, dark and smoky. Great masses of black hair cascaded around her face and fell to the sharp points of her widely spaced breasts. All this took Beame's breath away. He was affected by the way she stood: shoulders back, head up, exuding grace, a serene and almost Madonnalike figure.
Though Beame was no womanizer, he knew he had to meet her.
He went down the rubble heap too fast, lost his footing. He tottered and fell into the spume, flailing. He swallowed a mouthful of water, tried to spit it out, swallowed more. He was drowning. He felt himself swept around the rubble. He banged into a steel girder, shoved desperately away, scrambled for the surface, realized that he did not know where the surface was. Then, abruptly, he was in calmer water. He bobbed up, sputtering, shook his head, swam a few strokes to the shore, and crawled out, amazed that he was still alive.
The girl had not gone away. She was up there, watching him now.
Had she been anyone else, he would have run away and hidden until she was gone. But she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Wiping his hands down his sodden trouser legs to press the water out of them, he surreptitiously checked to be sure his fly was closed. It was. He started up the slope.
He did not make it to the top as easily as Danny Dew had done. He slipped and fell twice. His wet clothes took on a patina of mud, and his face was smeared with long brown streaks of topsoil. What did the girl think? She had seen Danny Dew come off the rubble, across the water, and up the hill as if he were walking across a room — and now she saw Beame floundering like the first legged fish that crawled out of a prehistoric sea. He felt like an ass.
But she was smiling. And it was not a cruel smile.
Beame waved and started towards her. The closer he got, the more he saw how beautiful she was. By the time he was standing in front of her, he was numb, speechless in the aura of her radiant beauty. Her hair was really black, not just dark brown. Her complexion was Spanish and flawless, her eyes as large as olives and as black as her hair. Her nose was small, fine-boned, exquisitely arched. Her smile was wide and warm. Her teeth were square and white, her lips two ribbons tied in a sensuous bow.
“Hello,” he said, clearing his throat. “My name's David Beame.”
“Nathalie,” she said.
“What?” He thought she had told him, in French, to get lost. Or worse.
“That's my name,” she said. “Nathalie.”
“You speak English,” he said, relieved that she had not been insulting him. “I'm pleased to meet you, Nathalie.” She was gorgeous.
She was flattered by his ill-concealed admiration. She blushed. Beame was happy he had flattered her. He knew he was blushing too, and he wiped his face with one hand, never realizing his hand was muddy.
“How is it you speak English?” he asked.
“Father taught me.”
“And who is your father?”
“Maurice,” she said.
Could this be true? Could greasy, conniving Maurice Jobert give half the seed to make a girl like this? “I've never seen you before. You weren't at the village dance a couple of weeks ago.”
“I had a summer cold. Papa made me stay in bed until the fever broke.” She cocked her head and looked at him. “You are staring — so intently.”
Startled, Beame wiped a hand across his face to cover another blush.
“You're getting mud all over your nose,” she said, putting one finger to his face, taking it away, showing him the mud.
“Oh,” Beame said, feeling like an ass. He wiped his muddy nose with his muddy hand. Realizing his error, he used his shirttail next. But that was even muddier than his hands. Suddenly, he wished that he had drowned when he fell into the river.
“Are you nervous?” Nathalie asked.
“Me? No. Why should I be nervous?”
“Father says you are all scared of dying. Father says you are the only soldiers he's ever seen who are aware of their own mortality.” She smiled. Just gorgeous. “He likes doing business with you, because you have no illusions.”
“You mean it's good that we're nervous?” Beame asked, surprised.
“Oh, yes. Very good.”
“Well,” Beame said, “I'm very nervous.” He let her see how his hands were shaking. “At times, I'm so terrified I'm not functional. I haven't had a good night's sleep since we landed here.” When she nodded sympathetically, Beame could not let go of the subject. “I have awful nightmares. I can't eat. I pick at my food and get indigestion, and the worst gas… I've been constipated for three weeks. If I could have one good shit, I think—” He realized what he was saying, and he wanted to leap off the edge of the ravine.
She looked down at the workers again, embarrassed for him. She presented Beame with a lovely profile which soothed him and made him feel like less of an ass. Indeed, he felt as if he had been transformed into a spirit by the white heat rolling off her. If she turned and touched him, her hand would go straight through.
After a long silence, he heard himself say, “You're beautiful.”
She looked at him timidly, blushing again. “Thank you.”
Beame's heart rose. She was just what he had thought she was! A flower, an innocent, a girl-woman as precious as anything he had ever wanted. And if he just did not start talking about his constipation again, he might be able to win her.
2
Sergeant Emil Hagendorf had a voice like a 78 rpm phonograph record playing on a turntable forever moving at 60 rpm, and he always sounded morose. “You don't know what it's like,” he said, morosely.
Major Kelly sat down on one of the rec room chairs. “What what's like?”
“Chaos,” Hagendorf said. His pasty face grew paler at the word.
“I live in chaos,” Kelly said.
But the major knew his own ability to cope with the chaotic did not help Hagendorf. Before the war, Emil, the unit's chief surveyor, had developed a comfortable philosophy of life. He believed there was a precise order and pattern to everything in the universe. He thought he could look dispassionately at anything—religion, sex, politics, money — survey it as he would a roadbed, stake it out, and eventually understand it. He had lived by his philosophy, a man of order and routine. He rose at the same hour each morning, neither smoked nor drank, and took a woman only as often as his system demanded one. He planned his future as carefully as he surveyed land, and he was able to cope with whatever came along. Drafted, he went through basic training with high marks, was quickly promoted, seemed at home in the Army. Then, when he was behind the lines with the unit for one week, he became a sloppy, inefficient, falling-down drunkard. And Major Kelly had not been able to rehabilitate him.
“You've got to stop drinking,” Kelly told the chief surveyor when he confronted him in the rec room that morning.
Hagendorf picked up his bottle of wine and went over to the dart board that was nailed to the rec room wall. “See this? It's divided into all these little sections.” He pointed to each of the sections on the board, which took a while. “Throw a dart here, you get five points… or here, you get ten. Or a hundred, here. I once thought life was neat and compartmentalized like that.”
“Life isn't like that,” Kelly said.
“I know, now.” Hagendorf took a long swallow of wine, his whiskered neck moving as he drank, sweat beading on his white face. “My whole philosophy — gone. My sense of direction, fundamental beliefs — destroyed by General Blade. And you.”