Children of War
In the Fields or in the Towns, they were Everywhere
A full day of research at the University of New Mexico's music library ends with my remembering that I had promised Ellen to pick up two volumes of Camus she needs from the college bookstore. During the short walk across campus, I observe with much interest the hurrying young students. I feel alien in their world, a bit uncomfortable with their casual dress and undress, careless grooming and indifferent hygiene. It is better in the bookshop, where my generation fuses with theirs in a silent, serious perusal of the world's great literature. Art, once again the common denominator to men of all ages -- or so I enjoy thinking.
Across the racks in front of me, a young woman sporting a short haircut is discussing Solzhenitsyn with a male escort tossing shoulder-length curls. They have recently read excerpts of The Gulag Archipelago , in translation, and the young man is arguing that the prisoner-of-war accounts "lack final credibility. They're superlatively written, of course, but the atrocities in them seem more literary than historic. Solzhenitsyn's a man who obviously loves words, language, and like so many great writers takes license to exaggerate, distort historical facts. We have to keep that in mind when reading his passionate, dramatic catalogue of terrors."
I study the couple with closer interest. The girl looks confused but is absently nodding agreement to her friend's thesis. They have dropped years in the past few seconds. I see them as children, hardly young adults; soft and petulant, untempered. The boy's casual sophistry closes an invisible wall between us, blots them from view. I turn my eyes to bright book-jacket designs, their patterns and colors suddenly whirling kaleidoscopically, radiating about a nimbus wherein materializes the face of Stefan with its familiar grin and mockery.
He was a Pole, not more than seventeen, short and thickset, with broad rude features capped by a wild shock of yellow hair. I resented his being assigned to me, for sergeants did not rate orderlies, and I was accustomed to doing for myself. But our headquarters was employing, in those final weeks of the war, refugees of all nationalities who fought their way to the Colonel's desk and stubbornly demanded American sanctuary. The army had an instinct about the future need for such resourceful people once hostilities ended and Occupation began.
My quarters were luxurious for wartime, two small rooms that I had outfitted with appropriated furnishings, radio, books, an electric cooker, a stocked bar. Stefan's duties included policing the rooms, washing and ironing uniforms, shining boots, heating bath water. He did the work well and without a sense of servitude, but it was obviously a lark to him, a means toward richer gleanings. Too smart to steal and risk expulsion by the Americans, he never hesitated to ask for anything that caught his fancy. He accumulated a store of loot that was constantly being exchanged for essentials from the black market. Any meals he prepared for me or my friends included generous portions for the chef out of rations liberated from the mess hall. Stefan knew how to suvive.
I had a hard time liking him. He talked incessantly, always with a wide grin that masked a terrifying barbarism. He had escaped both German and Russian refugee prison-camps, and he despised both nationalities. He was constantly advising me, or any American who could not escape his vitriol, not to end the war but to obliterate Germany, "men, women, and children, Nazi babies and all," and with that accomplished, roll on to annihilate, through arms and castration, all of Russia. On the eve of peace, he hungered for more bloodshed, total vengeance. After a while, my rooms seemed never free of his ravings. Or of a presence thoroughly malevolent, lurking behind the laughter of a teenaged boy.
Our orders to move out shattered him, and Stefan became morose. We were not taking him with us, so he had nothing to lose in turning light-fingered. Friends and I returned to the rooms one night to find him, sodden with schnapps he'd pilfered, hudddled in a corner in the dark. We jokingly tried to get him to bed. But for the first time, Stefan's horrible grin would not surface. He wept, crying that he loved us, that we were the only family he had now -- where would he go and what would he do without us? Long exposure to his devious ways kept us cynically cool to these entreaties. He spoke of his parents, wailing about their persecution at the hands of all armies, allied and enemy. He piled atrocity on atrocity, describing the execution of mother and father by Russians as he watched from a nearby hideout in a clump of bushes. Again and again, he begged us not to abandon him.
One of our soldiers, cradling a glass of Cointreau, remarked that Stefan was an expert con-man; these histrionics were not to be taken seriously. With a wild cry, the young Pole jumped to his feet, three himself with outstretched arms against a wall, and defied our disbelief.
"Is it fiction," he pleaded, "that my sister, after being raped, was nailed to a barn door and crucified? Didn't I see it? Is that what you're saying? Are those nails through the hands something I only imagined? Is a lie driving me crazy?"
The silent embarrassment of the Americans hit him harder than physical blows would have. He slumped to the floor, whimpered himself to sleep, and we carried him to bed.
I have dropped one of the Camus books. Stooping to retrieve it, I see the young man and woman moving off down a bookstore aisle, heads together, still intently evaluating the poetic exaggerations of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I resolve to read his Archipelago. Perhaps, in some small way, the book will help me live more peaceably with the memory of Stefan; will serve as an infinitesimal credit to a human debt that was fully acknowledged only too late and can never now be repaid.
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