The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [24]
Mosca would pick up sandwiches in the Red Cross, and they would go on, mingling with the stream of people on their way to Burger Park.
The enemy on Sunday still took their traditional afternoon strolls. The German men walked with the dignity of family chiefs, some with unfilled pipes in their mouths. Their wives pushed baby carriages and children gamboled sedately and somewhat tiredly before them. The summer sun caught the loose dirt raised by the light afternoon breeze that swept through the ruins, imprisoned it, flooded it, so that over the whole city hung an almost imperceptible veil of golden dust.
And then, finally, after they had crossed a great, reddish prairie of ruins, an earth of leveled homes, a soil of crushed brick and dust and iron, they would come out into the countryside, and walking until they were tired, would come to rest in a green and heavily grown field. They would rest and sleep and eat the sandwiches they had brought, and if the spot were secluded enough, make love peacefully in the empty world which seemed to surround them.
When the sun faced them across the sky, they walked back into the city. Over the prairie of ruins dusk would fall, and coming into the square they could see the GIs leaving the Red Cross Building. The victors had had their fill of sandwiches, ice cream, Cokes, Ping-pong and the professional, sterilized friendliness of the hostesses. In the street the soldiers would lounge just as if they were on the street corners back home. The lines of Frauleins passing up and down would thin out, enemy and conqueror disappearing together down the rubble-filled side streets to half-destroyed rooms in shattered buildings, or if time pressed, to cavelike cellars. In the square, black and almost still, there were only a few hopeful beggars, a child, tired and now stationary girls. As from a dying carnival, the blurring music would filter out of the building and wash gently over the silent figures in the darkened square, sift through the ruins down to the Weser, as if following them to the quiet river, and as Mosca and Hell a walked along the bank, they left the music behind and gazed across the water to the moonlit skeletal city on the other side.
In the Metzer Strasse Frau Meyer and Eddie Cassin would have tea and cookies waiting for them; sometimes Eddie would be in a drunken stupor on the couch but come alive when he heard their voices. They would drink their tea and talk quietly, feeling the new raw peace of the gentle summer night and the slow, rising drowsiness that would lead to safe and dreamless sleep.
six
In the billet, the room next to Mosca's was occupied by a short, heavy-framed civilian wearing the usual olive-green uniform. But on it was a blue-and-white patch stitched with the letters AJDC. They saw him rarely, and no one in the billet knew him, but late at night he could be heard moving around his room, the radio playing softly. One evening he gave Mosca a lift in his jeep. They were both going to the Rathskellar for supper. His name was Leo, and he worked for the American Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish relief organization. The initials were also painted on his jeep in great white letters.
As they were driving through the streets, Leo asked Mosca in a high voice with an English accent, “Have I met you some place? You look familiar to me.”
“I used to be with Mil Gov right after the war,” Mosca said. He was sure they had never met.
“Ah, ah,” Leo said, “you came up to Grohn with the coal trucks, eh?”
“That's right,” Mosca said surprised.
“I was an inmate there, a DP.” Leo grinned. “You didn't do such a good job. Many a week-end we went without hot water.”
“We had trouble for a while,” Mosea said, “It got straightened out”
“Yes, I know.” Leo smiled. “A fascist method but perhaps necessary.”
They had supper together. Leo in ordinary times would have been fat. He had a hawk-nosed, big-boned face, the left side of which twitched