Dog Tags (23 page)

Listen, if they'd crucified somebody, if there'd been any sort of grand finale, bugles, showgirls, we'd have had a right to hope. To infer a rhythm, a beginning, middle and end: here, students, after a long and some may say tedious development, the pace quickens and the themes converge to be resolved in a thunderous climax, after which a brief anticlimax and the show is over; the audience strolls home, the actors remove their masks and are revealed as healthy and personable young men, while the echoes of bravo fade. Nah. Nothing.

I'm not sure. Maybe in fifty years I'll see a rhythm to it. Stalin died the first week in March, in 1953, and it made no apparent difference; the Chinese announced the event with solemn sorrow, and we milled around wondering what they expected us to do or say; should we cheer or look gloomy or what? Nothing. But in a queer tickling way it did make a difference: the passage of an age, the final laying of some ancient curse; the world was infinitesimally but truly different, and any difference was to the good. We were only phantoms by then but that day we thickened slightly, grew a layer of skin, took on a misty, flesh-colored outline.

So that when, a month later, the gods commanded us to live, it was not too late. Strong men wept, you bet. It was called Operation Little Switch, the exchange of the badly sick and wounded. I had only twenty-odd of those, but the exchange itself, the event, was overwhelming. It was like thick meat soups and platters of spiced fish, fowl and beef in rich sauces (some of the men vomited the day after the announcement, as if to mark by an act of violence the precise moment of belief); like a trainload of fancy whores suddenly, whoopingly, attacking us (talk of women began immediately: projects, fantasies, minutely detailed descriptions). Anger blossomed, and affection; we cursed the progs, and slugged one another lightly on the arm in greeting. Ah, it took damn little! Hell, I got excited too, wise old doc, intimate of mortality; for a while there I simply forgot to be lugubrious.

It was our turn in July, and there were no sentimental farewells. Von Ou-yang and I made no plans for a cigar at the United Nations tearoom, where we would pursue our discussion of Nietzsche at leisure. Hell, I never even knew if he had a wife and kids. I suppose if I'd done what he asked I could have come to know him better, and maybe made more sense of the whole two and a half years, the whole century; but the price was too high. I'm not talking about the political price; I hope you understand that by now. What they were—communists or vegetarians or technocrats, utopians or sensualists or lovers of wildlife—was not the point. I had to say no;
that
was the point. I say no to you too, so as to remain myself, which is little enough.

They signed the truce on July 27, 1953. Operation Big Switch followed. It took us some ten seconds to pack. Yes, Ou-yang sent for me. His office was full of Chinese; I was the only Occidental. Which reminds me that in that whole damn war I saw hardly any Koreans. I stepped in and he said, “Well,” and there was a murmur of greeting. “Well,” I said. Failing altogether to seize the opportunity. Think: I could have been cold and unforgiving. Could have rhapsodized on the brotherhood of man. Could have extolled my country. Could have spat. Could have threatened to report them to the proper authorities. Could have laughed or cried or wet my pants. I just said, “Well.” Then Ou-yang said, “Here is a man who wishes to
meet
you.” An officer smiled warmly. “He speaks no English,” Ou-yang said. “Chang Ting-hua. Pee-joe Die-foo.”

The officer stepped forward and held forth a hand. I took it. Why not?

“This is the man,” Ou-yang said, “whose life you saved. Before your capture.”

Chang Ting-hua spoke.

“He asks me to thank you,” Ou-yang said.

“Thank him for the cigarettes and the food,” I said. “It was a bad time for us, and the dried peas saved lives.”

Ou-yang did so, and Chang nodded some more. He spoke, and handed me a small cloth-covered box, about four inches by two by one.

“He would like you to have this,” Ou-yang said, “to thank you and to hope that this will not come again.”

The box was fastened by two little ivory teeth that passed through loops in the cloth. I disengaged them and raised the lid. Inside was a tiny covered dish, of porcelain, and in the dish a gummy red wax; beside the dish was a square-sectioned shaft of ivory, with characters in relief on one end. Awkwardly I dipped the end in the wax and held it up. Chang smiled. Ou-yang braced a small pad of paper and I stamped it. The characters were delicately carved; they might have been dragons and birds.

“It is called a
chop
,” Ou-yang said, “and that is his name. Chang, here, and ting, and hua. He wants you to have that.”

“Well,” I said, “I'm grateful. It's very beautiful. I'll take good care of it, and I'll keep it all my life and give it to my son when I die.”

Ou-yang translated, and Chang was pleased. I covered the dish and laid the chop in place and closed the box. What the hell, I thought. I remember grinning, and I remember thinking that: what the hell. I reached inside my collar and tugged the necklace of dog tags over my head, and offered them. It was clearly a classic and refined gesture: the exhalation of approval was celestial music. Chang beamed and accepted the tags. The officers were murmuring, “How, how,” which meant good, good, and a patter of applause rose. Then Chang began to laugh. He laughed loud, in great booming gusts, and his eyes sparkled at me, and I figured I knew why he was laughing. These damn fools, he was saying, these imbeciles, every damn one of them, yours and mine, these
shits
—and then I was laughing too. The others fell silent and then giggled politely. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps Chang merely thought I was funny-looking, with the big nose and the round eyes. Anyway, we laughed for some time. Then we shook hands again and I said, “Ding how,” and he said, “Okay,” and we laughed a bit more. I waved a silly salute at the company and said, “Good-bye.” They nodded and cackled. I shook hands with Ou-yang. “Good-bye,” I said. The impulse to say “thank you” was very strong, which made me feel foolish and angry and moderately demented, but I smiled and smiled. “Goodbye,” he said. “Good luck.” I nodded and backed off, bowing and ducking and waving, and shot a last wink at Chang, who also winked, and then I was outside and shortly on a truck for Panmunjom and later Inchon and you know the rest.

16

“No hard feelings,” Cornelius said angrily. The bridge sailed by above them. Benny contemplated San Francisco with no great emotion.

“Colonels and up,” Benny said.

“The more I know the less I know,” Cornelius said. “There was one man who thought the Chinese were protecting him from the North Koreans.”

“No escapes,” Benny said.

“Not one. Not one in the whole war. And as far as we know only nineteen prisoners died after that first July. Only nineteen in two years.”

“What happened to Yuscavage?”

The question was for Alex, who shook his head cheerfully. “Classified.”

Secrets: good guys, bad guys. “Who killed Ewald?”

“Classified.”

“Yes. Poor kid. Thousands like him.”

“You said it was your fault.”

“I gave him ideas,” Benny said. “I saved his soul. I set him a good example. Never set a good example. It may kill somebody.”

Soon Gabol said, “San Francisco. How does it feel?”

“Never been there,” Benny said.

“See the world.”

“Benny,” Cornelius said, “I still think it was a just war.”

“There are no just wars,” Benny said. “There are only dead people.”

“Your country matters,” Cornelius said.

Country matters. Do you think I meant country matters? “On your own turf, then,” Benny said. “Otherwise you have to believe that everybody in the world is your enemy. Gabol can tell you what that's called.”

“Do me a favor,” Alex said. “Stay out of the army.”

Benny laughed ungrudgingly. “I promise. What about you?”

“Oh, there'll be a place for me somewhere,” Alex said.

A bank of fog thickened astern and flowed silently toward the hills. It blotted out the bridge. The hills of San Francisco stood bright, busy, unpocked. Benny weighed one seventy-five and was still hungry. Not a mark on him, not a scratch, no stories for Joseph. I was kicked once by a Chinese guard. I ate walnut soup and belched. “And you do me a favor,” he said. “Don't give me a medal.”

“It's not up to me,” Alex said. “If they give you one, you'll just have to put up with it.”

Melancholy stilled them; they leaned upon the rail—officers and gentlemen, ignorant, useless, mortal—and were borne home. An hour later Carol's miraculous face rose to meet Benny's, and he knew he had learned something about love.

The Oldest Boy in the World

17

It is no small thing for a man of forty-six to be roused at dawn by colic; so it befell Benjamin Beer, M.D., on his very birthday. He emerged from yearning infinities and pawed the telephone, remembering almost immediately who he was—existence precedes essence, but only by a second or so. His “Doctor Beer speaking” was grave, sympathetic, unresenting; he heard the complaint, prescribed, comforted the young mother, and rang off. Gray light, mizzle: six o'clock. He rose ponderously, a bear at winter's end, and sprang the shades; the lake lay gray, pocked by raindrops, treetops poking up, gnarled diluvian hands; on a black branch a kingfisher ruled.

Benny stretched. He inhaled strenuously. He touched his toes, again, again. He twisted his torso left and right. He scraped his coated tongue on furred teeth, and resolved again to resist cigars. Barefoot he padded to the bathroom, answered other calls, showered. He shaved, whipping a bowl of soap with a badger-hair brush. He scoured his perfect teeth. He combed his undiminished hair, modestly shaggy now in the new fashion, edged artistically in silver. The finished product, naked, groomed, pleased him. Presentable and racy still, though graying much within.

He costumed himself in shorts, a T-shirt, dark brown woolen socks, tan corduroy trousers, a shirt of wide brown and white stripes, and a classic, ageless brown jacket of herringbone tweed. He thrust his feet into ankle-high brown suede shoes. He filled the customary pockets with the customary minor baggage, including a monogrammed handkerchief, gift of Joseph Beer on a previous birthday. He passed quietly through the hallway, with the customary bittersweet glance at Carol's door, the customary twinge of mad, melancholy lust for that dearest of dolors, and stole successfully downstairs.

Outside and squinting, spattered by rain, he paused for an invocation: “Wheat and soybeans,” he told the sun god, “closed higher.” He dashed for his car. He had told Jacob it was a Fiat luxe, and Jacob had believed. He peered out over the new lake at the roc's nest, barely visible in the rain, a tangled mass of twigs and withes woven patiently by a thousand years of auks, dodos, moas, phoenixes and pesky crows. For fifteen years Benny had wondered what secrets its prickly bowl cradled, what riddles universal and eternal lay raveled and revealed within: riddles of spring, of migration, of survival, of love. Tomorrow he would see; he would row to that nest in his own boat, and the man-made lake would be, at last, high enough. He assumed, always, that he would be present tomorrow.

He had thickened with the years and now trudged through his days heavy and sad, though still a handsome dog and shamefully susceptible to the tawdriest impulses. Within him there dwelt a raddled, stunted monster, rearing hoarsely to ogle and scratch. This fiendish skink inhabited a small but growing void at the center of Benny, and was perhaps a native of Korea. Once a year or so Benny let him out for exercise.

Fifteen years Benny had driven this road! He drove toward town, crossed the wooded ridge, admired the undulating fall of a dozen dingles behind the scrim of rain; he let the road carry him downhill, and left the dam behind, and the drowned houses. Fifteen years. His vision had blurred a bit, a recent annoyance, but otherwise he lived in a serviceable body, its tone maintained by recurrent orgies of rage, despair and romantic fizz: he had committed himself to the preservation of a species he despised.

“Man is the only animal that commits moral nuisance,” the old doctor had pointed out. Bartholomew drove slowly, with kindness and deliberation, as if the comfortable automobile were a friend, a partner; Benny sat loose and unworried beside him and admired the fine fluffy white hair, the sharp blue eyes, the tangled white brows. Bartholomew wore a white linen suit and a blue denim shirt, and his hands were light on the wheel, the pink nails shiny. Benny, restored to fighting weight, felt gross.

“We can see it all from here,” Bartholomew said, and drove onto the shoulder and let the engine die.

They contemplated many miles of green valley, and dots that were dairy cows, and a thin winding line of blue river. The lighter blue sky was cloudless and endless. Two hawks hovered a mile apart. The two men sat for some time without speaking. Birds sang, twittered, chawked. Grasses rippled. “Indian country,” Bartholomew said. “The names. The river's called Mill River, but it used to be the Misqueag. That hogback, above those red barns there, that's Quaggin Ridge. See a nose now and then, among the farmers, like that fellow on the nickel.”

“It's beautiful,” Benny said. “I don't believe it.”

“You may be bored here.”

“Not for a while,” Benny said, “and maybe never.”

“Got a few weekend commuters. They liven things up. Your neighbors, some of them, if you take that house. Got a painter too. Fuzzy squares, orange, yellow. Not my style, but then I go back some.”

This valley too went back some, this pastoral Eden, macadam roads and eaved roofs. The shadows of mastodons, and files of phantom redskins. “That's a sawmill.”