Mother Night

26: In Which Private Irving Buchanon and Some Others Are Memorialized ...

Resi and I didn't get home until after supper, after dark. Our plan was to spend another night at a hotel. We came home because Resi wanted to have a waking dream of how we would refurnish the attic, wanted to play house.

'At last I have a house,' she said.

'It takes a heap of living,' I said, 'to make a house a home.' I saw that my mailbox was stuffed again. I left the mail where it was.

'Who did that?' said Resi.

'Who did what?' I said.

'That,' she said, pointing to my namecard on the mailbox. Somebody had drawn a swastika after my name in blue ink.

'It's something quite new,' I said uneasily. 'Maybe we'd better not go upstairs. Maybe whoever did it is up there.'

'I don't understand,' she said.

'You picked a miserable time to come to me, Resi,' I said. 'I had a cozy little burrow, where you and I might have been quite content — '

'Burrow?' she said.

'A hole in the ground, made secret and snug,' I said. 'But, God! — ' I said in anguish, 'just when you were coming to me, something laid my den wide open!' I told her how my notoriety had been renewed. 'Now the carnivores,' I said, 'scenting a freshly opened den, are closing in.'

'Go to another country,' she said.

'What other country?' I said.

'Any country you like,' she said. 'You have the money to go anywhere you want'

'Anywhere I want — ' I said.

And then a bald, bristly fat man carrying a shopping bag came in. He shouldered Resi and me away from the mailboxes with a hoarse, unapologetic bully's apology.

''Scuse me,' he said. He read the names on the mailboxes like a first-grader, putting a finger under each name, studying each name for a long, long time.

'Campbell!' he said at last, with massive satisfaction. 'Howard W. Campbell.' He turned to me accusingly. 'You know him?' he said.

'No,' I said.

'No,' he said, becoming radiant with malevolence. 'You look just like him.' He took a copy of the Daily News from the shopping bag, opened it to an inside page, handed it to Resi. 'Now, don't that look a lot like the gentleman you're with?' he said to her.

'Let me see,' I said. I took the paper from Resi's slack fingers, saw the picture of myself and Lieutenant O'Hare, standing before the gallows at Ohrdruf so long ago.

The story underneath the picture said that the government of Israel had located me after a fifteen-year search. That government was now requesting that the United States release me to Israel for trial What did they want to try me for? Complicity in the murder of six million Jews.

The man hit me right through the newspaper before I could comment

Down I went banging my head on an ash can.

The man stood over me. 'Before the Jews put you in a cage in a zoo or whatever they're gonna do to you,' he said, 'I'd just like to play a little with you myself.'

I shook my head, trying to clear it

'Felt that one, did you?' he said.

'Yes,' I said.

'That one was for Private Irving Buchanon,' he said.

'Is that who you are?' I said.

'Buchanon is dead,' he said. 'He was the best friend I ever had. Five miles in from Omaha Beach, the Germans cut his nuts off and hung him from a telephone pole.'

He kicked me in the ribs, holding Resi off with one hand. That's for Ansel Brewer,' he said, 'run over by a Tiger tank at Aachen.'

He kicked me again. 'That's for Eddie McCarty, cut in two by a burp gun in the Ardennes,' he said. 'Eddie was gonna be a doctor.'

He drew back his big foot to kick me in the head. 'And this one — ' he said, and that's the last I heard. The kick was for somebody else who'd been killed in war. It knocked me cold.

Resi told me later what the last things the man said were, and what the present for me was in the shopping bag.

'I'm one guy who hasn't forgot that war,' he said to me, though I could not hear him. 'Everybody else has forgot it, as near as I can tell — but not me.

'I brought you this,' he said, 'so you could save everybody a lot of trouble.'

And he left.

Resi put (he noose in the ash can, where it was found the next morning by a garbage man named Lazlo Szombathy. Szombathy actually hanged himself with it — but that is another story.

As for my own story:

I regained consciousness on a ruptured studio couch in a damp, overheated room that was hung with mildewed Nazi banners. There was a cardboard fireplace, a dime-store's idea of how to have a merry Christmas. In it were cardboard birch logs, a green electric light and cellophane tongues of eternal fire.

Over this fireplace was a chromo of Adolf Hitler. It was swathed in black silk.

I myself was stripped to my olive-drab underwear, covered with a bedspread of simulated leopard skin. I groaned and sat up, skyrockets going off in my skull. I looked down at the leopard skin and mumbled something.

'What did you say, darling?' said Resi. She was sitting right beside the cot, though I hadn't seen her until she spoke.

'Don't tell me — ' I said, drawing the leopard skin closer about me, 'I've joined the Hottentots.'