* * *
He caught the arrow in midflight and turned to the yellow house, looking up. Swagger in the angle of his head, taunting the archer, a red needle of Philadelphia climbing inside him. He saw a flicker of white in one of the third-story windows: a shirtfront. A brown sleeve. A pink hand. A gaping mouth. A man leaned out of the window, propped at the hip against the window ledge, half-bracketed with a dark brown bow. Something loose and careless in the way he was hanging himself out the window suggested that he was not much older than my grandfather. He dangled an arrow like a long cigarette between the fingers of one hand. He nocked the arrow and shifted himself a little. My grandfather raised the gun and then, to satisfy the strange code duello of Vellinghausen, they fired off their respective shots.
A sharp hammer, or maybe a pickax, took a sudden whack at my grandfather’s helmet, front and center. The archer sagged and let go of the bow. It dropped and hit the street with a twang. The archer listed and hung balanced on the window ledge for what felt to my grandfather like a very long time, as if making up his mind whether to go after the bow. Then he tumbled from the window and hit the cobblestones with a doubled sound: a drum crack, a carpet beater smacking against wool.
My grandfather holstered his gun and took off his helmet. It looked like the prop from a movie comedy, some kind of farce in which GIs fought Indians. He turned the helmet upside down. The arrow had pierced to a depth of not quite an inch. Later he would find a dot of dried blood beaded at the center of his forehead.
He yanked out the arrow and put the helmet back on his head. He walked up the street to the bow and picked it up, then turned to the young man. My grandfather guessed he might be about Ray’s age. He lay twisted into a swastika under the bakery window. His skull leaked blood at the back where it had smacked against the stone street. He wore dark suit trousers, a dark tie, and a shirt with a tab collar and pearl snaps. There was nothing about his clothing or face to suggest that he was the kind of man who would try to kill you with a bow and some arrows.
My grandfather was about to kneel beside the young man to see if he was dead when he heard from behind a long, soft exhalation that might have been despondent, angry, or both. There was no time to draw the pistol, so he raised the bow and fitted the nock of the arrow he’d caught to its string. He was ready to let fly. He had never shot an arrow, but he was willing to try. He had managed okay, after all, with a canoe.
It was an old priest in a cassock that reached almost to the tops of his pointed shoes. White dust patterned the black cassock in big splotches like continents or the spots on a cow. He was standing by the white bicycle that the shock wave of a bursting shell had wrapped around a pole, mourning its loss. He reached out to run his spider hand along the tubes of its frame. He might have been bidding it farewell or trying to puzzle out the geometry of its torsion. He did not seem aware that in principle he was within arrowshot of an American soldier.
“Good morning, Father,” my grandfather said, lowering the bow.
The white-haired priest looked up. His mouth fell open. He took note of the bow and arrow, and his eyes went a little dull with understanding. He closed his mouth. His gaze traveled the street until it found the body of the archer. “Is he dead?” the priest said.
“I don’t know. I think so.”
The priest approached the body. He moved quickly for a man of his age and with a doctor’s officiousness. Screwing up his face, he worked himself into a crouch alongside the body and laid a ruddy hand on the archer’s chest. He lowered his head to the archer’s until his left ear nearly brushed the archer’s lips.
My grandfather heard a scrape behind him. Diddens limped up the street, his left foot printing the paving stones with roses. “He dead?” Diddens said.
There was a first aid kit back in the jeep with the driver, who had completed his medic’s training. Unless of course the driver had been killed by an arrow, or a blunderbuss, or some retired merchant seaman with a blowgun.
The archer opened his eyes, two pannikins of water stained with two blue droplets of gouache.
“Apparently not,” my grandfather said.
The archer’s face was aimed at the sky, but he fixed his pale eyes on the old priest’s head, the pink pate, the milkweed-tuft hair. This gave the archer a downcast or shy expression. The old priest’s ear was angled to catch the sentences emerging from the archer’s lips in softly popping bubbles of blood. The words were spoken too low for my grandfather to hear and, in any case, seemed to be in the local dialect, which gave my grandfather difficulties. The old priest nodded, said something, nodded again. He folded the archer’s hands between the bones of his own, clasped them, and began to speak. It was not a reply, or not a direct one, at any rate.
The old priest spoke the requisite Latin and drew a hasty cross with his fingertips curled at his chest. He reached into a slit in his cassock. His hand moved around inside the dusty fabric. He wore the universal expression of a man searching his pants pocket for something that must be there. When his hand reemerged, he was holding a small brown medicine bottle with a black cap. His right hand shook as he worked to get the bottle unstoppered.
In the gray and cold of that place, the smell that came from the little bottle alarmed my grandfather. It was overripe as fruit and acrid as summer. It made the heart leap. It smelled the way the word sacrament sounded.
The bottle shook as the priest dripped a dime of golden liquid into his left palm. Now the left hand started to shake. The oil trembled. It found a crease in his pink palm that drained it all down the side of his hand. It drizzled down onto and stained the dying man’s white shirt.
“Shit,” said the old priest. Aughenbaugh would have been scandalized. “Idiot.”
The priest smeared a thumbprint of oil onto the dying man’s forehead. The archer made a sound of animal contentment.
As a young man, my grandfather seems to have had no higher regard for religion than he displayed in the days when I knew him. I have his old black hardback copy of The Magic Mountain, his favorite novel. Across its front flyleaf in block capitals, under his name and the date (March 11, 1938), as though announcing to the world some kind of solemn verdict or choice, my grandfather printed the word HUMANISM. By the spring of ’45 he had lost that all-caps certainty about his choice of worldview. Cold, hunger, darkness and blood, and the random assignment of death as the coefficient to victory and defeat alike had conspired to bankrupt his humanism. The only choice that seemed to remain, seven years after he inscribed his copy of The Magic Mountain, was a choice between faith and numbness.
At close range, he had been exposed to the horror of the human body’s fragility, its liability to burst open, to be ripped in two, to deliver up its pulp through a split in the outer peel. He had suffered bombardment, gun barrage, loneliness, foolish commanders, and a two-month case of the GIs. He had lost Aughenbaugh. He had killed a boy who was shooting at him with a burp gun. Apart from the fact that he was, as a result, still alive, that was one person more than he ever wanted to kill again. Along the way he had captured or had a hand in the capture of men of science—one who had taught chemistry at Princeton before the war, another whose medical research had been funded by a Rockefeller—in laboratories and proving grounds dedicated to the cultivation of fatal toxins and missile-borne plagues.
In the face of all that, my grandfather had come down on the side of numbness. Even when Aughenbaugh had died in the back of that jeep, blood soaking his cardigan, calling for his sister, Beatie, in a voice of boyish plaintiveness, my grandfather had permitted himself to shed only a few tears. Now, watching the old priest comfort the dying man in low, musical Latin, my grandfather felt some inner tether come unlashed. His cheeks burned. His eyes stung. For the first and only time in his life, he felt the beauty that inhered in the idea of Jesus Christ, in the message of comfort that had managed to survive, reasonably intact, despite having been so thoroughly corrupted and profaned over the past two thousand years by Christians.
/> Relief spread across the face of the dying man. He closed his downcast eyes. The old priest looked up at my grandfather without apparent reproach or emotion of any kind. He tried to get up from the paving stones beside the corpse but did not seem to have the required flexibility. My grandfather offered his hand and hoisted the old priest to his feet. The priest studied my grandfather’s face for a moment, his jowls powdered with plaster dust, his expression unreadable but not unfriendly. He reached again into the slit of his cassock, felt around. My grandfather took a step away, thinking this time the priest might be reaching for a gun. He reached back to put a hand on Diddens’s chest, ready to shove the Alabaman to safety.
The old priest’s hand reemerged from the slit in the cassock holding a white handkerchief, ironed flat with crisp corners. He passed it to my grandfather. The fresh linen smelled of lavender.
“I’m sorry,” said my grandfather. He meant to apologize for spoiling the handkerchief, but it came out sounding like regret for the body at their feet. That was all right with my grandfather.
The priest looked at the damp bit of linen and then searched my grandfather’s face. “Keep it,” he said.
“What was he saying, Father?” Diddens’s German was more correct but less fluid than my grandfather’s. He pointed to the dead man. “What was he telling you?”
The old priest glanced over his shoulder at the body of the archer. “What was there to say?” he said.
13
The old priest’s name was Father Johannes Nickel. He had been the rector of St. Dominikus-Kirche until the Lord, in the form of an 88mm shell from a King Tiger, had seen fit to deprive him of his home and place of employment. For the past week he had been living with his aged sister, a widow, on her farm a few miles to the northeast of Vellinghausen. The farmhouse was a long walk for an old man but not so far—here Father Nickel heaved another sigh—on a bicycle.
My grandfather offered the services of their jeep and driver, Private Anthony M. Gatto, who was susceptible to spasms of prayerfulness. Gatto and Father Nickel solemnly shook hands.
“It will be dark soon,” Father Nickel said. “I invite you to stay the night with my sister and me. There is no room in the farmhouse, but you would be more than welcome to sleep in the hayloft. The straw is clean and you would be warm.”
In his fitful eastward progress through Belgium and Germany that winter, my grandfather had shared all manner of billets: with dogfaces and officers, in misery and in comfort, in attack and in retreat, and pinned down by snow or German ordnance. He had bedded down under a bearskin in a schloss and in foxholes flecked pink with the tissue of previous occupants. If an hour’s sleep were to be had, he seized it, in the bedrooms or basements of elegant townhouses, in ravaged hotels, on clean straw and straw that crawled with vermin, on featherbeds and canvas webbing slung across the bed of a half-track, on mud, sandbags, and raw pine planks. However wretched, accommodations were always better or no worse than those on the enemy side. If that was not written down in the field manual or stipulated by some tribunal in Geneva, it was nevertheless an iron law. When Allied soldiers came knocking at the door of a German farmhouse, they would not be planning to sleep in the hayloft. If the farm folks did not relish a night in the barn, there was always the cellar.
“That is very kind of you, Father,” my grandfather said. He found the old priest’s self-regard oddly touching. “Unfortunately, we need to keep on.”
“Your friend’s foot is injured.”
“Nevertheless.”
“When I left the house this morning to come here and look for my bicycle, my sister was killing a chicken. I believe she plans to cook it in a stew. There are carrots and potatoes and a bit of flour for dumplings.”
My grandfather turned to consult Diddens and Gatto, knowing what he would find in their faces yet surprised all the same by the depth of its canine abjection.
“Lieutenant’s foot is hurting pretty bad,” Gatto said.
Diddens nodded. “Ow,” he said.
“It’s better not to travel after dark,” my grandfather said.
The Germans were in retreat north and east, and the general feeling was that they would not be returning to Vellinghausen anytime soon. The town was held by some bone-weary somnambulists from the 7th Armored Infantry and a few bewildered-looking sappers from the 53rd Combat Engineers. Troops were few and scattered, and to a passerby it might appear that the invasion had been conducted not by soldiers but by clouds of smoke, the gray sky pouring into the roofless houses, and a hunger so profound it had gnawed the houses to their foundations and the trees to stumps. Here and there a baker or a butcher had opened for business, but this apparent optimism or bravado was nothing more than the robotics of habit. There was nothing to buy, nothing to sell, nothing to eat. Smoke had left the eye sockets of houses with black eyebrows of astonishment. Cats hugged corners leaving brushstrokes of ash on the stucco.
Gatto steered their jeep around the blown carcass of an M4 tank, a human leg (German) in a gray pant leg and a black boot, a bathtub with its feet in the air, and an erect dame whose high-button shoes and widow’s weeds must have dated from the Franco-Prussian War. The old lady had her hands over her mouth. She was staring at a heap of rubble, pipe, and wire that to the observer looked no different from any of the other heaps that artillery fire had spilled into the street. Staring old people, staring children, staring women and girls. Staring amputees on crutches. The stares did not seem hostile, sullen, or resentful. Nor were they the stares of people watching their fondest wish come true. Some people smiled. Others turned bright red as though fighting tears or shame. Some did both at once.
One night the month before, back on the other side of the Belgian border, Aughenbaugh had delivered a lecture on the etymology of the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an ancient Indo-European root signifying confusion. That was a foxhole night, bitter cold. The 5th Panzer Army was making its last great push west. You had to hand it to those Indo-Europeans, my grandfather thought, rolling through Vellinghausen. Confusion shone on the faces of the townspeople. War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs. It confounded conquest with liberation, anger with heartache, hunger with gratitude, hatred with awe. The 53rd Combat Engineers looked pretty confused, too. They were milling around at the edge of town, contemplating the long stretch of road between there and beautiful downtown Berlin, trying to figure out if they ought to mine it or clear it of mines.
In a smaller square a little to the north of the main street, the priest begged Gatto to stop the jeep in grave but halting English. The square was pegged with the stumps of what might have been elm trees. The stumps were cut clean and all to the same height. They had been felled by ax and not artillery. The cuts looked recent but not fresh.
“We’ve had a very cold winter,” the old priest said. He was sitting up front, next to Gatto. Everyone agreed that this was unquestionably the case. “I gave out the pews and reredos and so forth. The beautiful oak pulpit, which a professor-doctor from Tübingen dated to the thirteenth century. I told them to take the crucifix, too. It was quite large. Used prudently, it might have heated a dozen homes for a night or two. But there they drew the line. They were shocked, I think. I tried to explain that if He would give His life to save their souls, He would not mind parting with His image to warm their bones.” He shook his head, looking at the ruin of his church. “Of course, in the end it went to waste.”
The stray 88 had knocked the square tower off the shoulders of St. Dominic’s Church. The beams holding up the roof, which was clad in metal, had collapsed and caught fire. In their collapse, the roof beams had formed a kind of bowl or funnel into which the metal roof, now a molten pool, had poured. The glowing drizzle had burned a hole in the sandstone floor, then flowed through to fill the crypt. What missed the hole spread in ripples across the floor, setting fire to everything it touched that was not made of stone. The dislodged tower, with lacework iro
n steeple, had slid onto the parsonage behind the church, landing square on its four corners like a gymnast sticking a dismount. Half the old half-timbered house had been flattened, killing the old priest’s housekeeper but sparing Father Nickel for as yet unknown purposes. When the tower sat down, the counterforce of its impact with the ground had sent the steeple heavenward in a skewed arc that ended, as with so much of St. Dominic’s business over the centuries, in the churchyard. The steeple broke into three large and many small pieces, some of which still smoldered in the churchyard. Smoke rose in plumes to haunt the gravestones.
“So He is in there, buried under all of that,” Father Nickel said. “Saying, ‘Tsk, tsk, silly people, now, why didn’t you burn me when you had the chance!’”
The American soldiers exchanged looks. Private Gatto helped the old priest down from the jeep, and Father Nickel promised to return in a few minutes with something they would be happy to have for the celebration. He had decided that the German retreat across the Ruhr meant the war was over, and he was not interested in counterargument. He dismissed Diddens’s halfhearted insistence that in fact they were still enemies, saying he could not speak for Diddens but that a priest could not have enemies any more than a hog butcher could be a vegetarian.
He had gone half the distance to the gate of the churchyard when he seemed to remember something, a possible difficulty. He turned back to the jeep, considering the three Americans. He pointed to my grandfather. “You will find a shovel in the toolshed,” he said. “An excellent shovel with long experience.”
The iron gate of the churchyard hung half-hinged and twisted, like the bicycle, into a glyph signifying something unknown. Father Nickel lifted the latch nevertheless and swung it open with a certain ceremony. My grandfather went to fetch the gravedigger’s shovel from the toolshed.
One of the headstones was engraved with a name and dates that made some kind of learned Latin joke, one my grandfather did not understand. My grandfather hesitated a moment when the old priest encouraged him to start digging at its foot. He was concerned not about desecrating a grave but about detonating a possible mine that this old coot knew to be buried here.