The Eighth Dwarf

12

The General’s wife didn’t like her seat in the DC-4, and so she ordered the steward, a harried Air Corps buck sergeant, to change it for her. A squabble resulted, because the Lieutenant Colonel’s wife didn’t Want to be moved and protested bitterly until the General’s wife pulled rank, using a harsh whiskey baritone to pull it with. The Lieutenant Colonel’s wife, the lowest-ranking officer’s wife aboard the packed plane, turned white at some of the words that the General’s wife used, but said nothing and meekly settled into her new seat.

When the squabble started, the plane was nearly an hour out of New York, heading for its first stop at Gander, Newfoundland. The whiskey baritone had awakened the man sleeping in the seat next to Jackson. He was a stocky, red-faced civilian of about forty who had been asleep when Jackson came on board and had even slept through the takeoff. Now he was awake, irritably so, and smacking his lips as though something tasted bad.

“Bitches,” he said and looked at Jackson. “I had it all measured out, you know.”

“What?”

“The booze. I drank just enough so that I could make it to the plane, sack out, and then not wake up till Gander. Now I got a head and mouthful of wet sand. You Government?”

“No.”

“Good. I’m Bill Swanton, INS. One of Willie Hearst’s drudges.” Swanton held out his hand, and Jackson shook it.

“Minor Jackson. I’ve seen your by-line.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“I didn’t think you were Government. With that tan, maybe an actor or a comic that the USO was sending over; but you’re not an actor either, are you?”

“I’m sort of a glorified tourist, really,” Jackson said, deciding to get the labeling out of the way. “A publisher in New York thought I might write him a book about post-war Germany. I don’t know if I can or not. I’ve never written a book. But he was willing to pay me a little money to find out.”

That satisfied Swanton. “There’s a hell of a book to be written about it,” he said. “You speak German?”

“Yes, I speak it.”

“Then you got it made. Ninety-nine percent of the dopes they send over here don’t speak a word.”

“Where’re you assigned now?” Jackson said. “Berlin?”

“Yeah, that’s where the news is, because that’s where they run it from, although God knows why. Berlin’s a mess. But so’s the whole fucking country.”

“So I hear.”

Swanton produced a cigarette and then made a face after he had lit it. “Jesus, that tastes awful. I’d give my left you-know-what for a drink.”

The last thing that Jackson had done in New York was to buy a topcoat at Tripler’s. It was a warm, fleecy lamb’s-wool coat with small houndstooth checks and raglan sleeves and big, deep pockets. Because the plane was chilly, he was still wearing it. He reached into one of its pockets and brought out the flask that Ploscaru had given him.

“Here,” he said. “Try this.”

The smile that appeared on Swanton’s face was one of pure gratitude. “By God, Brother Jackson,” he said, accepting the flask, “they’ll canonize you for this.”

Swanton took a long drink and sighed. “That’s better,” he said after a moment. “Much better.”

“Have another.”

“No, that’s enough for now.”

“We’ll keep it handy, then,” Jackson said, took a small swallow, and placed the flask in the space between them.

Swanton settled back in his seat, took a musing pull on his cigarette, blew the smoke out, and in a philosophical tone that seemed much practiced said, “You know what one of the real problems is?”

“With Germany?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“Them,” Swanton said, and made a gesture with his cigarette that took in the entire planeload of women. “The bitches. Or rather, their husbands. You know who their husbands are?”

“Officers, it would seem.”

“Yeah, well, you know which officers they are?”

“No.”

“They’re the contemporaries of Eisenhower, Bradley, and Mark Clark, guys like that. Except when the war came along they didn’t get jumped from lieutenant colonel to four-star general. No, these were guys who’d sat around for ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty years as first lieutenants and captains. But when the war started we had to have officers, so these guys got jumped up to light colonel, or colonel, or maybe even buck general. But they weren’t given a line outfit. Instead they got shipped out to Wyoming to run Camp Despair, or whatever it was called. Or maybe they rode a desk in Washington. A lot of them were Cavalry types.”

Swanton took another deep pull on his cigarette, blew out the smoke, and continued. “So when the war ended, these guys had a choice. They could either go back to their permanent ranks of captain or major or whatever, or they could keep on being colonels and generals, provided they got themselves sent to Germany to take over the occupation. Well, shit, you never saw such wire-pulling. Some of them even resorted to blackmail, except I can’t prove that. And so that’s who you’ve got running the occupation — a lot of it, anyway — guys who can’t see how running a destroyed town of 10,000 or so with no heat, no lights, no water, and people starving to death can be much different from running a Cavalry remount post in West Kansas, which was probably their last job.”

Swanton lapsed into a brooding silence for a moment, but brightened when Jackson offered him the flask again. After a drink, Swanton lit another cigarette and said, “Remember nonfraternization?”

Jackson nodded. “It didn’t work out too well.”

“It didn’t work because the GI’s wouldn’t stand for it. So Ike, the great compromiser, decided that it was okay for GI’s to fraternize with children — little kids. Real little ones. But that rule didn’t last long either, so now the GI’s can screw anyone they want to, although there’re still some kind of dumb rules about not having Germans into your home.”

Swanton was silent for a moment and then asked, “You know what the burning issues are now?”

“What?”

“Denazification and Democratization.” He shook his head over the awkwardness of the words. “I’m no Nazi sympathizer, but the fucking country’s half starving and it’s going to be another cold winter and there’s not going to be any coal again and a lot of ’em haven’t got any place to live, so I’ve decided that maybe the Russians are right.”

“How?”

“Well, everybody in the American Zone had to fill out the Fragebogen.” He looked sharply at Jackson to see if he understood the German word.

“Questionnaire.”

“Yeah, questionnaire. It’s a six-page job with a hundred and thirty-one questions to determine if you are now or ever were a big, medium, or little Nazi or none of the above. Some Scheisskopf has even decided that if you joined the Nazis after ’37 or so, it’s not as bad as if you joined back in ’33. Well, shit that doesn’t make any sense, if you think about it for half a minute. Back in ’33 there was a hell of a depression in Germany. You might have joined then out of desperation more than conviction. But by ’37 it wasn’t so easy to join, and by then, by God, you had a pretty good idea of what being a Nazi meant. But the Russians, well, they don’t give much of a shit whether anybody was a Nazi or not. What they did was, they shot a lot of them, if their records were real bad, and put the rest to work. They’d say ‘You guys used to be Nazi engineers, right? Well, you’re not Nazi engineers anymore, you’re Commie engineers, understand?’ And, like always the Germans would say, ‘Führer befehl — wir folgen’ and go out and fix the steam plant.”

Swanton shook his head again. “So that’s how it stands. We’re denazifying them, whatever that means, and the Russians have got ’em out fixing the gas works. As for how we’re gonna make small-d democrats out of ’em, I don’t know.”

“You like them, don’t you?” Jackson said.

“Who?”

“The Germans.”

Swanton thought about it. “I like people. They interest me. I have a hard time blaming Hitler on a six-year-old kid with malnutrition and no place to sleep. No matter how you slice it, it’s really not his fault. But he’s going to be paying for it all his life. So that’s why I had to go back to New York. They had to cut ’em out.”

“What?”

“My ulcers,” Swanton said,