Night Soldiers

buy their clothing. All of it-even the underwear and socks. Not only had he paid them, he had given them excellent American clothing in exchange. After that experience, who could convince them that they were not in the promised land?

Her own news was that she was engaged to be married. His name was Leon, he was from Brooklyn, and he was finishing up law school at New York University. He was a very good and decent fellow who would take excellent care of her-really, he gave in to her a little too much. Her father more than approved of the match, since Leon shared his political views and, well, a lawyer. Even the owner of Bernstein’s, the second largest department store in Flat-bush, thought the seas would part for him. On consideration, they probably would, Leon was just that kind of person. She had not yet told him of her “other life.” Perhaps she wouldn’t, she wasn’t sure he would understand it. He was very anxious to have children, once his practice was established. Children? Well, that would be another adventure, certainly. She had seen a few of her friends from Pembroke, and most of them already had their first child.

She closed the letter by saying she hoped he would write again. Their day together had been very important to her. She thought of him often.

He read the letter many times and spent a long time considering his reply. Finally, he chose not to write back. What would be the point? In July, after three days in a detention cell, he had been taken to a small room and “tried.” The judge had apparently come in from a country house and was wearing white shoes, as for a garden party, beneath his robes. Over a fifteen-minute period, several documents had been read aloud in rapid, legal French. Then the judge sentenced him to spend the rest of his natural life in Sante prison.

Prisoner 16–28 was, in the French custom, isolated in his cell. This was believed to encourage penitence, which was, after all, the intent of a penitentiary. Cell 28 was six feet long and four feet wide. A bed folded up against the wall in the daytime and there was a chair, chained to a ring in the wall. There was a toilet, and a water spigot for washing. The cell was painted brown halfway up the wall, then yellow to the ceiling. In the door was a Judas port that served two purposes: surveillance once an hour and food three times a day, almost always mashed lentils and black bread. Drinking water was poured into his “quarter,” a tin cup that held a quarter of a liter, at mealtimes. Twice a week, for one hour, he was taken into a courtyard and allowed to walk the perimeter and converse with other prisoners. For the rest of his time he remained alone in his cell, allowed one book a week. These were usually boys’ adventure stories with morally improving points of view or, sometimes, religious tracts. Behind a fine mesh grille was a window made of thick, opaque green glass that bathed the cell in a milky light yellowed by the colors on the walls.

In one corner of the window, however, was a hole about the size of a one-franc piece, with a fine web of fracture lines about it-something had been poked through the wire mesh by a former occupant. Khristo was thankful to the man, whoever he had been, because it meant he could see a tiny piece of the sky over Paris. At dawn, when the bell woke him up, it was the first thing his eyes sought and, again and again, in the course of the endless days, he spent hours staring at it. Sometimes it was a pale and washed-out blue, after a rainfall, perhaps. Other times it was a vivid blue, which meant cool, sunny weather. Sometimes it was gray. Sometimes, the best of all times, a part of a white cloud could be seen.

Plaque tournant

Brush your teeth with Deems

Your smile needs those gleams!

Robert Eidenbaugh leaned back in his swivel chair and promised himself for the hundredth time to oil the squeak. Bister, the poisonous little snake in the next cubicle-the corner cubicle, from which he could see both Lexington Avenue and East Forty-second Street-could hear him every time he sat back in the chair. He’d said so, one day at the water cooler: “Heard you squeaking away this morning, Eidenbaugh. Leaning back again?” Clearly, he meant leaning back in both the physical and metaphorical senses of the expression.

Bister had done well at Princeton and wore a bow tie-just a little frivolous for the J. Walter Thompson advertising company-and definitely saw himself as a man on the way up. Following his remark, he’d shot a furry eyebrow and smiled coldly, confirming his own wit. Confirming his own progress in the world. Bister didn’t lean back. Bister stayed hard at it all day long, pounded his typewriter, talked on the phone, went to meetings-he quite loved meetings-or thought up ways to apple-polish Mr. Drowne, the copy chief. Bister was on the way up.

He was not. After the snotty remark at the water cooler, he’d let the conical paper cup fill to the brim and, just about the time the great bubble broke the surface with its characteristic blurp, squeezed the sides violently so that a miniature waterspout leapt into the air, narrowly missing Bister’s dazzling brogans on the way down. “Sorry, Bister,” he’d said as the little man jumped backward, “do you melt?”

But Bister was correct. He did sit back in the chair-squeak-and gaze out onto Lexington Avenue, eleven floors below. It was December, and it was snowing. Soon it would be Christmas, which meant that 1941 was almost over. Good! Next there’d be 1942. Hooray! During which time he would undoubtedly do exactly what he’d done in 1941, which was very damn little.

For the last year, the only thing that had truly engaged his attention was the war in Europe. The high point of his day had become the morning delivery-just after the milk-of the New York Times. Over coffee he would read of Polish lancers attacking German tank units. Of the rules of the German occupation: Poles forbidden to ride in taxis, carry briefcases, have their teeth filled with gold, use railroad waiting rooms, walk in parks, call from phone booths, enter athletic events, or wear felt hats. But it wasn’t only the Germans, the newspaper told him. Forty Russian divisions had invaded Poland from the east, along a thousand-mile frontier. The Russian armor flew white flags, and the tank commanders yelled down from their turrets that they’d come to help the Poles fight the Germans. Thus they were unopposed.

When it came the turn of France to be subdued, he was enraged. He had spent his childhood in France and the thought of the jack-booted Nazis striding arrogantly down the streets of Toulon, where he’d played as a child, was nauseating to him.

Guilt pricked him and made him lean forward over the hateful Remington as the chair complained. Brush your teeth with Deems /Says the girl of your dreams! Not so bad. But then they’d need a girl of your dreams in the layout, and he knew that old Dr. Deems-a dentist from Rye, New York, before he became a tooth powder millionaire-wasn’t having anything quite so daring in his advertising campaign. There would be a sparkling illustration of the tooth powder can-an example of which sat on his desk-in its brand-new blue and white colors. The art director had tried for a dream girl in one of his mock-ups, but Dr. Deems had labeled the notion “prurient.”

Prurient!

Brush your teeth with Deems / It’s prurient, it seems.

Pretty good, he’d have to share that with his friend Van Duyne when they met for breakfast on Sunday.

Squeak. He watched the snow wander aimlessly past the window. Tonight would be dinner with his fiancee, whom he didn’t especially like, and her visiting parents, whom he absolutely detested. Her broad-bottomed “Daddy,” whom she “utterly adored,” was a shoe manufacturer from Dayton, Ohio, and a rabid isolationist. “War in Europe?” he’d said at their last dinner, a two-hour nightmare at Longchamps. “Don’t bet on it, kiddo. Not for us.” He’d paused to attack his roast beef, then added, “You know who wants that,” while tapping his nose and winking. Jews, he meant. The International Zionist Conspiracy to embroil the USA in a foreigners’ war.

Maybe, he thought, if I move very slowly. He tried to get back to the typewriter without communicating his ennui to Bister, but no, it would have to be oiled. Brush your teeth-oh why in God’s name had he slept with the girl? A hot August night at the Walker vacation house on a Michigan lake, the Walkers gone off to their bridge evening at the public library, alone in the house, a little necking, a little petting, a little more, the way her breathing changed, then the sudden, caution-to-the-winds disencumberment of her Helen Wills tennis costume, blousy and Grecian … and then the rest of it.