Very deliberately, Noah put the letter he was writing back in the olive-coloured box and tucked the box away in his locker. He was conscious of the other men watching him closely, measuring his every move. As he walked past them, keeping himself from hurrying, Silichner said, "They're going to give him a medal. The Delancey Street Cross. For eating a herring a day for six months."
Again there were the rehearsed, artificial volleys of laughter.
I will have to try to handle this, Noah thought as he went out of the door into the blue twilight that had settled over the camp. Somehow, somehow…
The air was good after the close, heavy smell of the barracks, and the wide silence of the deserted streets between the low buildings was sweet to the ear after the grating voices inside. Probably, Noah thought, as he walked slowly alongside the buildings, probably they are going to give me some new hell in the orderly room. But even so he was pleased at the momentary peace and the momentary truce with the Army and the world around him.
Then he heard a quick scurry of footsteps from behind a corner of the building he was passing, and before he could turn round, he felt his arms pinned powerfully from behind.
"All right, Jew-boy," whispered a voice he almost recognized, "this is dose number one."
Noah jerked his head to one side and the blow glanced off his ear. But his ear felt numb and he couldn't feel the side of his face. They're using a club, he thought wonderingly as he tried to twist away, why do they have to use a club? Then there was another blow and he began to fall.
When he opened his eyes, it was dark and he was lying on the sandy grass between two barracks. His face was collapsed and wet. It took him five minutes to drag himself over to the wall of the building and pull himself up along its side to a sitting position.
Michael was thinking of beer. He walked deliberately behind Ackerman, in the dusty heat, thinking of beer in glasses, beer in schooners, beer in bottles, kegs, pewter mugs, tin cans, crystal goblets. He thought of ale, porter, stout, then returned to thinking of beer. He thought of the places he had drunk beer in his time. The round bar on Sixth Avenue where the Regular Army colonels in mufti used to stop off on the way uptown from Governor's Island, where they served beer in glasses that tapered down to narrow points at the bottom and where the bartender always iced the glass before drawing the foaming stuff from the polished spigots. The fancy restaurant in Hollywood with prints of the French Impressionists behind the bar, where they served it in frosted mugs and charged seventy-five cents a bottle. His own living-room, late at night, reading the next morning's paper in the quiet pool of light from the lamp as he stretched, in slippers, in the soft corduroy chair before going to bed. At baseball games at the Polo Grounds in the warm, hazy summer afternoons, where they poured the beer into paper cups so that you couldn't throw the bottles at the umpires.
Michael marched steadily. He was tired and ferociously thirsty. His hands were numb and swollen, as they always were by the fifth mile of any hike, but he did not feel too bad. He heard Ackerman's harsh, grunting breath, and saw the way the boy rolled brokenly from side to side as he climbed the gentle slope of the road.
He felt sorry for Ackerman. Ackerman had obviously always been a frail boy, and the marches and problems and fatigues had worn the flesh off his bones, so that he now looked like a stripped-down version of a soldier, reedy and breakable. Michael felt a little guilty as he stared fixedly at the heaving, bent back. The long months of training had thinned Michael down, too, but with an athlete's leanness, leaving his legs steel-like and powerful, his body hard and resilient. It seemed unjust that in the same column, just in front of him, there was a man whose every step was suffering, while he felt so comparatively fit. Also, there had been the sickening hazing that Ackerman had been submitted to in the last two weeks. The constant ill-tempered jokes, the mock political discussions within Ackerman's hearing, in which men had said loudly, "Hitler is probably wrong most of the time, but you've got to hand it to him, he knows what to do about the Jews…"
Michael had tried once or twice to interrupt with a word of defence, but because he was new in the company, and came from New York and most of the men were Southerners, they ignored him and continued with their cruel game.
There was another Jew in the company, a huge man by the name of Fein, who wasn't bothered at all. He wasn't popular, but he wasn't annoyed. Perhaps his size had something to do with it. And he was good-natured and dangerous-looking. He had large, knotty hands and seemed to take everything easily and without thought. It would be hard to get Fein to take offence at anything, or even realize that he was being offended, so there would be little pleasure in baiting him. And if he did take offence he probably would do a tremendous amount of damage. So he was quietly left in peace by the men who bedevilled Ackerman. The Army, Michael thought.
Perhaps he'd been wrong to tell the man who had interviewed him at Fort Dix that he wanted to go into the infantry. Romantic. There was nothing romantic about it once you got into it. Sore feet, ignorant men, drunkenness, "Ah'm goin' to teach you how to pick up yo' rahfle and faght f' yo' lahf…"
"I think I can put you into Special Service," the interviewer had said, "with your qualifications…" That would probably have meant a job in New York in an office all during the war. And Michael's self-consciously noble reply: "Not for me. I'm not in this Army to sit at a desk." What was he in the Army for? To cross the state of Florida on foot? To re-make beds that an ex-undertaker's assistant found not made to his liking? To listen to a Jew being tortured? He probably would have been much more useful hiring chorus girls for the USO, would have served his country better in Shubert Alley than here on this hot, senseless road. But he had to make the gesture. A gesture wore out so quickly in an army.
The Army. The Regular at Fort Dix who had been in the Army thirteen years, playing on Army baseball and football teams in time of peace. Jock-strap soldiers, they called them. A big, tough-looking man with a round belly from beer drunk at Cavite and Panama City and Fort Riley, Kansas. Suddenly, he had fallen into disfavour in the orderly room and had been transferred out of the Permanent Party and had been put on orders to a regiment. The truck had driven up and he had put his two barracks bags on it, and then he had started to scream. He had fallen to the ground and wept and screamed and frothed at the mouth, because it was not a football game he was going to today, but a war. The Top Sergeant, a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Irishman who had been in the Army since the last war, had come out of the orderly room and looked at him with shame and disgust. He kicked him in the head to quiet him, and had two men lift him and throw him, still twitching and weeping, into the back of the truck. The Sergeant then turned to the recruits who were silently watching and said, "That man is a disgrace to the Regular Army. He is not typical. Not at all typical. Apologize for him. Get the hell out of here!"
The orientation lectures. Military courtesy. The causes of the war which You Are Fighting. The expert on the Japanese question, a narrow, grey-faced professor from Lehigh, who had told them that it was all a question of economics. Japan needed to expand and take over the Asian and Pacific markets and we had to stop her and hold on to them ourselves. It was all according to the beliefs that Michael had had about the causes of the war for the last fifteen years. And yet, listening to the dry, professional voice, looking at the large map with spheres of influence and oil deposits and rubber plantations clearly marked out, he hated the professor, hated what he was saying. He wanted to hear that he was fighting for liberty or morality or the freedom of subject peoples, and he wanted to be told in such ringing and violent terms that he could go back to his barracks, go to the rifle range in the morning believing it. Michael looked at the men sitting wearily beside him at the lecture. There was no sign on those bored, fatigue-doped faces that they cared one way or another, that they understood, that they felt they needed the oil or the markets. There was no sign that they wanted anything but to be permitted to go back to their bunks and go to sleep…