Refiner's Fire (55 page)

“It is not our fault,” answered Wilson, “if the Army makes all these stupid things for great big giants.” They went back to opening cans, and devised a plan whereby the Bengalis could take a bath.

“You foolish Americans!” said Wilson as Marshall and the other two Americans were ordered back to the kitchen. “You are a great imperial power, but God makes you wash dishes. Good. Good good good!”

It worked. The sergeant did as expected and ordered the Bengalis into the dishroom. But in twenty minutes the Americans heard shouts and high-pitched screams. Then they saw the Bengalis being marched down a corridor, naked, crying, their clothes in their hands. The worst criminals—who had been given the better jobs of setting table and sweeping the dining room—clustered about and derided the Bengalis. Then Marshall, Robert, and Lenny were taken back to the dishes. The sergeant propped open the door and said, “I look in every ten minutes, criminals.”

Lenny slipped out and spoke to an egg peeler. “It seems,” he reported, “that the Bengalis decided to take a bath
first,
and jumped in the sink immediately. The sergeant came back to give them fresh scour sand, and there they were, the three of them, naked as the day they were born, curled up in one steaming sink, fast asleep.”

“What happened to them? It looked as if they were being marched out to be shot.”

“There was some sort of a mini-trial in which an officer sat on an upside-down cooking cauldron. They have to work in the refrigerator, stacking cheese. They're completely unaccustomed to cold, and the blocks of cheese are much too heavy for them. The stacks have to be seven feet high. How are they going to lift a thirty-pound block of cheese seven feet in the air?”

Marshall began to feel all his days without sleep. His body ached, and time seemed to have fashioned itself after infinity.

T
HE FIRST
day in the kitchen they worked from 3:45 in the morning until 10:30 the next night. They helped the Bengalis stack the cheese, and washed walls between rounds of dishes. When there was nothing to do, a sergeant dumped garbage on the floor and made them pick it up. When that was done, he took them outside in the rain and ordered them to sweep the mud. Staggering as he served dinner, Marshall thought that perhaps he was dreaming when officers overturned plates of food and demanded that the company of misfits clean up the mess.

The dining hall smelled like wet wool, and the rain poured down outside in the dark. Officers and drill sergeants shouted as they ate; they had wet, shiny black hair; they seemed to hold all the power in the world. It was they, after all, who had denied Marshall sleep for four days. Reeling from table to kitchen for food, retching as he cleared off plates, tripping over deliberately outstretched feet and then being forced to apologize, Marshall began to conceive an active dislike for nearly everyone around him.

Being what they were, the criminals could not help each other. In trial, they turned against their companions, making any ordeal worse. One went on a brief rampage with a kitchen knife. Others threw food, carried on petty feuds, or told the officers when someone had found a comfortable hiding place in a dark storeroom.

Marshall kept falling. A captain told him to bring a lemon. When, in confusion, he brought an orange instead, the captain screamed at him as if he were going to kill him. The more Marshall fell, the more they thought it funny to trip him. Finally, he hit his head on a boot, and blood streamed down his face. He felt a fluttering inside, and couldn't get up. Everything above him seemed like men and devils and sounds and smoke moving in hostile whirlwinds. He crawled forward, trying to reach the kitchen, but Robert and Lenny picked him up and brought him into the bakery, where they gave him some tea, and meat they had stolen from the Major's table. Marshall ate for strength, crying all the while like a drunk. He thanked them and thanked them and would not stop thanking them.

“That's all right, Marshall,” they said. “You can do the same for us.”

Baruch came by, with a broom in his hand and a tentlike apron draped across his middle. “It hurths,” he said. “I know. Insthide.”

“I'm married,” said Marshall, his heart racing yet weak, his eyes glassy and acid. “I have a wife, and I left her out there in the rain and darkness.”

“Not tho,” said Baruch. “Not in the dark or the rain.”

“Yes, she is,” Marshall said, shaking. “Yes, she is. I left her alone there.”

“Not alone, in the kibbutths, with friendths. It'th warm and thafe there.”

A sergeant burst in and dragged Marshall to the pot room, a freezing cold cockpit lighted by a flickering candle. Wind whistled through the cracks and sometimes brought in rain. Marshall and a tea-colored Libyan who chanted again and again, “The moon, the moon, the moon,” had to wash five-foot-high cauldrons which came to them full of slop and caked food. The storm had knocked out the hot water. Their arms grew numb and blue. Because they had to crawl inside the cauldrons, their clothes and hair were soaking wet and covered with stinking garbage. Marshall wondered how long he could keep going. After two hours, the Major walked in, flanked by two younger officers whom he was trying to impress.

Perhaps they had just finished a long conversation over hot coffee and pastry brought by the animals in Marshall's platoon. The angles of the Major's jaw matched perfectly the brim of his peaked cap, and his face was cruelly symmetrical. The other officers screamed at Marshall and the Libyan to stand to attention.

Holding his breath, the Libyan stood with fists clenched and a crazed smile. Marshall didn't strain very hard to stand straight, and brushed something wet and soft from his forehead. Dirty water streamed down his neck. The wind howled darkness like a dog, and the candle nearly blew out. Marshall felt feverish. He saw the Major's stick, held under his arm like a riding crop. He remembered the Major's pompous gait and his vanity at table.

“I hope you do a good job,” said the Major, barely concealing his disgust at having to address two such repulsive creatures. “I want you to scour these pots perfectly. There's been a cholera epidemic recently in Ramallah and we've had a few cases here. I don't want to get cholera. So be clean. Make them shine. Is that understood?”

Marshall was so enraged that he felt as if he were going to float into the air.

“Yes, Commander,” answered the Libyan, but Marshall was trembling like a lunatic. He bared his teeth. The Major stepped back and took a tight hold on the stick. He too was mad.

“Soldier! I asked you a question!”

“You take your question...” answered Marshall, saying each word roundly and making it vibrate. “You take your question, and shove it, you stinking son of a bitch baboon-faced faggot bastard!”

The Major turned to his aides. They shrugged their shoulders. “In Hebrew please,” asked one of them.

“Oh,” said Marshall. “Yes, Commander!” After the Major left, one of the officers stuck his head back through the doorway and said quickly into the dim light, “Its lucky for you that I agree with what you said.
Shalom
.”

They were marched back in the rain. In the barracks, Ashkenazi sat surrounded by three candles, reading a pornographic magazine from Turkey. Yakov held it and obediently turned the pages. Everyone threw himself down and slept straight away, but several hours later, when the storm had passed, a fresh batch of sergeants circulated in the freezing darkness, waking the men. “Arise!” they said. “Arise!” Once again there was to be a night march around Ramallah.

Marshall awoke freezing cold and in pain, but when he got up and pulled on his battle gear he felt excited and happy. A great surge of energy passed through him, and everyone seemed to share in a feeling of well-being. Sleep had at last become irrelevant. He made his way to the cold-water tap. Nearby, people were urinating and it sounded like horses. Nonetheless, the air was fresh, and though it had been cold in the barracks, the night was filled with currents of warm air. The storm had vanished completely, and the stars and shooting stars (of which there are always many in the mountains near Jerusalem) seemed like a soft meadow of light.

As they marched on the road to Ramallah it was deathly quiet. Just a few bulbs sparkled low and yellow from the houses and the minaret towers, past which the air flew and wound and doubled over. Marshall thought of Lydia, and his love for her lifted him. It was only the fifth day and he had already learned their tricks. Though he might have seizures, fall to the ground, and bleed; though he might be taken for a criminal; though his face be cut and infected, his body sore and starving, his clothes greasy and malodorous; though he might break and weep and be driven somewhat mad; though he was at last and finally completely out of control—he would survive and make it through. Or perhaps he would die, but he would fight them at every turn.

If he could awaken in the middle of the night and find himself lost in a hundred million stars, if he could walk down a road in a tranquil bath of sweet air, and if things were so apt to be turned upside-down despite the designs of men, he could not lose in the end, for the will of the world was a most marvelous and independent thing.

That night they walked around Ramallah nine times until the sun came up and the wind rattled everything that could be moved.

T
HEY HAD
marched out of the Fourth Daughter in a great column of two thousand armed men, of which they had been able to see neither the beginning nor the end but just a powered line weaving the road. The three platoons of criminals had been shunted off in different directions after about four miles. Marshall remembered the featureless expressions of the peasant soldiers in back of him who had rushed, weapons in hand, to take up slack in the line. “Where are they going?” one of the criminals had asked a lieutenant.

“They are going to conquer Tulqarm.”

“Excuse me, sir, but didn't we already conquer that, in 1967?”

“It's an exercise, idiot.”

“Why aren't we going?”

The lieutenant looked them over. “Because you lice couldn't conquer a post office box, that's why.”

He was not entirely correct. Despite their seventeen languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Moghrabi, French, Italian, English, Russian, Turkish, Greek, Kurdish, Farsi, Hindi, Amharic, Spanish, Tuareg, Bulgarian, Rumanian), their communications were superb. They were so nervous and overactive that even innuendos traveled throughout the group like lightning along a well-watered synaptic pathway. Despite their ignorance and insanity, they were resourceful. In two weeks they had stolen everything halfway valuable in the camp, even if it had been bolted down and guarded. Despite their physical weakness, they were brawlers and dirty fighters, and they had terrible tempers. Easily a third of the criminals were epileptics, like Marshall, but in their seizures they grew terrifically violent, manifesting the strength of ten men. Marshall knew that in a battle, instead of pitching and whirling about like crazed trance dancers, Sufis, they would hold still and turn the world about them in fury. That, in fact, was why they were criminals. There was a tempest in them. Only when they applied it to others and the world beyond could they be still. Despite their poor marksmanship, lack of comprehension in regard to automatic weapons and specialized equipment, and absolutely maddening casualness about hand grenades—they kicked them around like soccer balls—they were just good enough with weapons to conquer a post office box, possibly even the post office itself, and maybe even a poorly defended small town.

Strung out along a stone wall, they were resting in a field, prior to an exercise of their own in which the fifty of them were supposed to take a distant hill defended by another platoon. About a thousand feet high, the hill was covered with rocky terraces and redoubts, and the sun shone from behind it, blinding the attackers. At various points officers were posted as judges, their field glasses sometimes glinting as they scanned the game board.

Marshall studied the hill. It was impossible to get to the summit alive via the light-lacquered west face, and he assumed that they would use an indirect approach. F-4 Phantoms and Mirages flew across the sun on runs in support of the troops taking Tulqarm, and the criminals were denuding a nearby fig orchard as three Arab women looked on gravely and impassively from the roof of their house. Marshall had learned not to interfere as his barracks mates stole. This was for them the holiest of activities, and, if interrupted, they would rage like jackals pulled away from meat. But he was angry and disgusted that they made off with half the crop of an innocent kitchen garden.

“Criminals will be criminals,” said Lenny.

“But they don't have to be taken into the Army.”

“If it's a little army fighting big armies, yes they do. More than half a million Egyptians, half a million others, and a few hundred thousand us.”

“That's not so. Numbers are not decisive in the case of war,” said Marshall. “For example, the two of us could take that hill and be waiting for the judges when they come to the summit to report to the citadel commander that all of us have been killed.”

Lenny looked at the blue flag waving from atop the seemingly unconquerable hill, and shook his head. “Ha!” he said.

“I'll show you,” said Marshall. “Just wait until the orders come through.”

They rested. Yakov loaded figs into Ashkenazi's knapsack. Some soldiers drank water and ate sunflower seeds, but most slept, their rifles and machine guns leaning against the wall. The Arab women continued to stare at the half-naked trees, thin from lives on rocky soil.

Marshall was half asleep, thinking about the beach at Amagansett. He saw Livingston, a younger, dark-haired man, showing him how to dive through the waves. “Like this,” he said, and dived into an eight-foot breaker, disappearing as if into another dimension. Livingston was forever puzzled because Marshall refused to do as he had done—taking instead the full force of the wave, being knocked down, pulled under, and swept along upside-down and backward thudding against the bottom, only to emerge fifty yards away choking with foam, sand, and salt. “Marshall. Dive
through
the waves,” Livingston said to the six-year-old. “You can dive into the pools of the Croton River. Go
through.
That way, you won't get battered each time.”