Saul slumped back into the over-stuffed sofa cushions, but still visibly shrugged.
‘I don’t know. I’m not completely here yet.’
Sheldon nodded.
‘I took off with the camera when I got back. You might need to do something.’
‘I guess.’
‘You thought about it?’
‘I haven’t even started thinking about it.’ He paused, and then asked, ‘What do you think of it?’
‘I don’t think about it.’
‘It’s not a choice. I saw stuff, Dad. I did stuff. There’s no putting it in a box. I need to figure it out.’
‘You did what you did, and you saw what you saw, because your country asked you to. You did your service. You did what men do. And now it’s over. You try and get back to it all. That’s all there is.’
‘I know what burning people smell like.’
‘And now it’s over.’
‘It’s still in my clothes.’
‘Then wash them.’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘It has to be the point. You know what’s going on out there? There aren’t many like you. You need to step out of Vietnam, and step into America and get into character.’
‘There are tens of thousands like me.’
‘Not Jews.’
‘What the hell does that have to do with anything?’
‘Everything. We fought like hell in World War II. We tripped over ourselves to sign up. But in Korea, not as many. And now? Every Jew is in college. Out there, protesting the war. Civil rights, and rock and roll, and smoking pot. We’re not pulling our weight. We’re getting weak. We’re losing the ground we made.’
‘Dad,’ Saul rubbed his face. ‘For Christ’s sake, Dad. What do you think’s going on out there?’
‘What’s going on? America’s at war. And rather than get behind our country, we’re talking like the communists.’
‘Dad. Dad, this country’s a mess. There are different ways to try and make it better. And besides, we have nothing to prove anymore. I was born here. You were born here. Your parents were born here. How American do we need to be?’
‘There are still firms on Wall Street that won’t hire us. There are law firms that don’t want us.’
‘In the south they’re still killing black kids.’
‘This country has a lot of ground to cover. I know that. But we’ve still got ground to cover ourselves. Ground to hold.’
‘What happened to you in Korea?’
‘I did what I was told.’
‘Mom says you were a clerk.’
‘That’s what I want Mom to say.’
‘So, basically, men don’t talk about it. Who do you tell? What about Bill?’
‘Bill was there, too.’
‘Not with you.’
‘No. He was Armour. He was somewhere else. We met afterwards. On the street. Near the shops.’
‘You talk to Bill?’
‘I talk to Bill every day. I can’t get him out of my shop. I have to lock the door. And when I do, he just calls me.’
‘Maybe he has a crush on you.’
Sheldon snorted. ‘That’s the kind of thing your generation says.’
‘It happens.’
‘You take things and turn them into things they aren’t, and then insist you’re right and that everyone else is blind. That’s what the communists do.’
‘I don’t know who the communists are, Dad.’
‘They were the ones shooting at you. Who want you enslaved to their own view of the world. Who put people in the Gulag for independent thought. For being free. For not upholding the imperatives of the state and the revolution.’
‘Everyone was shooting at me. I don’t know why.’
‘You sound like Mario.’
‘Who’s Mario?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Who’s Mario?’
‘A friend.’
‘Anyone I know?’
‘He died before you were born. You don’t need to know about it.’
‘I saw a lot of stuff, Dad. I did a lot of stuff.’
‘I know. You hungry? You want coffee?’
‘I think I want to tell you what I did.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re my son, that’s why not.’
‘I want to tell you because you’re my father and you might understand.’
‘Your country is grateful, that’s all that matters.’
‘My country isn’t grateful, and it doesn’t matter at all. I need to figure out how to sit here.’
‘You need a distraction.’
‘Like repairing watches?’
‘That’s so awful?’
‘You can’t fix time, Dad.’
‘You should eat something. You’ve lost weight. You look sickly.’
‘I am sickly.’
Sheldon said nothing.
‘Where’s Mom?’
‘She’s sleeping.’
Saul hoisted himself up from the sofa cushions and walked up the stairs, two at a time. Sheldon didn’t move. He sat for ten minutes waiting for Saul to return. He assumed that Saul was seeing his mother. He wouldn’t learn for many years that he had simply gone upstairs to sit. To look over the banister as he did as a child to see who just rang the doorbell or what kind of mood Dad was in when he came home from work.
When he came back downstairs, he sat in the wing-backed armchair across from his father where his mother often sat with a book or to watch television.
‘How have you been?’ he asked his father.
‘Me? I’ve been working hard. Minding my own business. Trying to stay out of trouble.’
‘Yeah, but how have you been?’
‘I just told you.’
‘What did you think about when you came home from Korea?’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m home from a war, too, and I want to know what you thought about. I want to know if it’s the same.’
‘When I came back from Korea, I thought about Korea. Then I thought about thinking about Korea, and realised it was a waste of time, so I stopped.’
‘How long did that take?’
‘Don’t be a sissy, Saul!’
‘You took a camera and went to Europe.’
