Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [51]
“Not a simple design. It’ll take a while,” I said. “Not as simple as a swastika or a hammer and sickle, eh?”
I’d dreamed for weeks of sharing the joke of the desk with the Americans, of telling them about the secret drawer I’d built in for the Russian commandant, the richest joke of all. Now, the Americans were here; and I felt little different than before—rotten and lost and lonely. I didn’t feel like sharing anything with anyone but Marta.
“No,” I said, answering the major’s poisonous question. “No, sir.” What was I supposed to say?
The Scotch stayed under the floorboards, and the secret drawer in the desk remained a secret.
The American garrison in Beda was about a hundred men, almost all of them, save Captain Donnini, veterans of years of fighting in the same armored division from which Major Evans had come. They behaved like conquerors, with Major Evans encouraging them to do just that. I’d expected a great deal of the coming of the Americans—a rebirth of pride and dignity for Marta and me; a little prosperity and good things to eat, too; and for Marta, the better part of a lifetime worth living. Instead, there was the bullying distrust of Major Evans, the new commandant, multiplied a hundred times in the persons of his men.
In the nightmare of a warring world, it takes peculiar skills to get along. One of these is the understanding of the psychology of occupation troops. The Russians weren’t like the Nazis, and the Americans were very different from either. There wasn’t the physical violence of the Russians and Nazis, thank God—no shootings or torture. What was particularly interesting was that the Americans had to get drunk before they could make real trouble. Unfortunately for Beda, Major Evans let them get drunk as often as they liked. When they were drunk, they were fond of stealing—in the name of souvenir hunting—driving jeeps through the street at breakneck speeds, firing guns in the air, shouting obscenities, picking fistfights, and breaking windows.
The people of Beda were so used to keeping silent and out of sight, no matter what happened, that it took us a while to discover the really basic difference between the Americans and the others. The Americans’ toughness, callousness, was very shallow, and beneath it was grave misgiving. We discovered that they could be embarrassed easily by women or older men who would stand up to them like parents, and scold them for what they were doing. This sobered most of them up as quickly as buckets of cold water would have.
With that insight into our conquerors, we were able to make things a little more bearable, but not much. There was the crushing realization that we were regarded as the enemy, little different from the Russians, and that the major wanted us punished. The townspeople were organized into labor battalions, and put to work under armed guard, like prisoners of war. What made the labor particularly deadly is that it wasn’t concerned with repairing the war damage to the town so much as with making the American garrison’s quarters more comfortable, and with building a huge and ugly monument honoring the Americans who had died in the battle for Beda. Four had died. Major Evans made the atmosphere of the town the atmosphere of a prison. Shame was the order of the day, and budding pride or hope was promptly nipped. We weren’t entitled to them.
There was one bright spot—an American unhappier than any of us—Captain Donnini. It was up to him to carry out the major’s orders, and getting drunk, which he tried several times, didn’t do for him what it did for the others. He carried out the orders with a reluctance I’m sure he could have been court-martialed for. Moreover, he spent as much time with Marta and me as he did with the major, and most of his talk with us was a guarded apology for what he had to do. Curiously, Marta and I found ourselves comforting this sad, dark giant, rather than the other way around.
I thought about the major as I stood at my workbench in the back room, finishing up the American eagle