Six Graves to Munich - Mario Cleri [10]
He got a job with one of the mammoth insurance companies. The work was one of simple statistical analysis, but to his amazement he found it was beyond him; he could not concentrate. He was discharged for incompetence, a humiliation that set him back physically as well as mentally. It also increased his distrust of his fellow human beings. Where the hell did they come off, firing him after he had had his head blown apart protecting their skins during the war?
He took a job as a government clerk in the Veterans Administration building in New York. He was given a GS-3 grade, which paid him sixty dollars a week, and asked to do only the simplest of tasks in filing and sorting. Millions of new files were being set up on the new veterans of World War II, and it was this that started him thinking about computers. But it was to be two years later before his brain could really work out the complicated mathematical formulae that such computer systems needed.
He lived a drab existence in the great city. His $60 a week was barely enough to cover necessary expenses, such as the little efficiency apartment on the outskirts of Greenwich Village, frozen foods, and whiskey. He needed the whiskey to get drunk enough so that he would not dream when he slept.
Spending every working day filing dreary documents, he would come home to the shabby apartment and cook frozen foods to warm, tasteless pulp. Then he would drink half of a bottle of whiskey and sink into a sodden slumber on his rumpled bed, sometimes without taking his clothes off. And still the nightmares came. But the nightmares were not much worse than the reality had been.
In the Munich Palace of Justice they had stripped him of his dignity. They had done what the boys had threatened to do to him when he was thirteen years old, the harsh adult equivalent of taking off his trousers and hanging them on the lamppost. They had mixed laxatives with this food and that, along with the fear and the thin gruel that was called oatmeal at breakfast and stew at night, made his bowels uncontrollable; the food ran through him. When he was dragged out of his cell for the daily interrogation at the long table he could feel the seat of his pants sticky against his buttocks. He could smell the stench. But worse, he could see the cruel grins on the faces of his interrogators, and he would feel ashamed as a little boy feels ashamed. And yet in some way it made him feel closer to the seven men who were torturing him.
Now, years later, alone in his apartment, he would relive the physical indignities. He was shy and would not go out of the apartment to meet people, nor would he accept invitations to parties. He met a girl who worked as a clerk in the VA building, and with a tremendous effort of will made himself respond to her obvious interest. She came to his apartment for a drink and dinner and made it plain that she was willing to stay the night. But when Rogan went to bed with her, he was impotent.
It was a few weeks after this that his supervisor called him into the personnel office. The supervisor was a World War II veteran who thought that his job of supervising thirty file clerks proved he was mentally superior to the men under him. Trying to be kind to Rogan, he said, “Maybe this work is just a little too hard for you right now; maybe you should do some kind of physical work, like running the elevator. You know what I mean?”
The very fact that it was well intentioned made it more galling to Rogan. As a disabled veteran he had a right to appeal his discharge. The personnel officer at the conference advised him not to do so. “We can prove that you’re just not bright enough to do this job,” he told Rogan. “We have your Civil Service exam marks, and they just barely qualify you. So I think you’d be wise to take the medical discharge from government service. Then maybe if you go to night school you can do a little better.”
Rogan was so astonished that he burst out laughing. He reasoned that part