Battle Fatigue Page 5

  Or I could use this diary as an imaginary friend to talk to about the things I can’t talk to my friends about. Like my fear of nuclear war or the shape of Susan Weller’s no-longer-horselike body. Maybe I should write about sex. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I am not going to talk to anyone about it.

  I don’t know how to write a diary.

  The most famous diary, the one I have heard the most about, was written by a girl not much older than me, named Anne Frank. Anne Frank was a German Jew in hiding with her family in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. She wrote in her diary while in hiding. She wrote about her family and the other people in hiding and her thoughts and her feelings. She could express herself. Her diary was her friend. And all of it is particularly stirring because I know that in the end, no one will save her. Someone will give up the hiding place, the Germans will come and take the family away to be gassed to death, and no one will do anything to help them.

  I start spending late afternoons after baseball on the screened-in porch, lying in a glider, a sort of rocking couch, reading the carefully written feelings of this German girl, soon to be killed by Germans.

  Suddenly there is the flat slapping sound of someone trying to knock on the screen door. With my book still in my hand, I walk over to the door.

  There stands a boy of about my age, with short-clipped dirty-blond hair and gray eyes. I have not met many foreigners but I can tell that he is one. His haircut, half-inch spikes of hair sticking out evenly all over his head, is not an American haircut. His baggy gray shorts pulled in tight at the waist and ballooning out around his thin legs are definitely not American. Nor are his leather sandals with long straps that wrap several times around his bony ankles.

  “Hello,” he says with a slight accent. “My name is Karl Moltke. I am zeh new Gehman exchange student.”

  He explains that he is staying with the Hargroves. They live down the street but I don’t know much about them because they don’t have any kids. I think Mr. Hargrove was in the Pacific.

  Karl holds out his right hand to shake mine and I quickly take the book into my left hand and hide it behind my back, hiding Anne Frank from the German. As we lock hands to shake, he gives one stiff jerk and nods his head, at the same time swiveling his feet to make his heels hit each other. After a childhood of German ghosts, this is my first live German.

  Chapter Nine

  Taking a Stand

  “Mom,” I say. “This is Karl. He is from Germany and he is living here now.”

  My mother extends her hand but Karl does not take it. Instead he makes a slight bow and swivels his feet so that the sides of his heels slap together. My mother backs slightly away from him. I look across the lawn at the Panicellis’ house. Popeye Panicelli might shoot him if he acts like that. What is Mr. Shaker going to do when he sees Karl click his heels? The new exchange student doesn’t know it, but he’s in danger. He needs to be a lot less German to live in Haley. I better teach him quickly.

  I teach Karl how to shake hands, not to click his heels, and how to dress. I will have to teach him baseball. That is the quickest way to be an American. But as I think about it, baseball is not that easy to explain. In the fall there will be soccer and he will probably be the best player in school. Germans are good soccer players. That is the answer. Soccer will be his savior, just as baseball had been mine. In my school, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. None of the other kids care what kind of grades you get. Good looks are not that important. Where your family came from, how much money they have, what your father did in the war, the clothes you wear—all that is secondary. But if you play a sport well, you are in.

  This summer I am teaching Karl how to act more American, starting with a good batting stance. The other kids don’t treat him badly. They always call him “Kraut,” but they use a friendly tone. “Why don’t you put the Kraut in?” Rocco and the other pitchers shout from the mound. They all do the same thing. They blow two pitches right past him and then with a two-strike count, instead of striking him out, they fire a fastball right into his left shoulder. It doesn’t hurt him very much except when Rocco is pitching. Karl never has enough sense to get out of the way. He seems to think it would be unmanly to dodge a pitch. Besides, he likes being hit because it means he can go to first base and he knows that he would never be able to hit a single. He isn’t a very good base runner and he almost never scores. His running has improved a little since I got him to get rid of those weird sandals and get some cleats.

  I thought things would start going well for Karl once soccer season began. But something terrible happens. We are walking to school together, and just before we enter the school yard I see Tony Scaratini just standing there, smiling. Tony doesn’t smile very much and when he does it is never good. As we approach he raises two fingers to his smirking upper lip as though they are Hitler’s mustache, thrusts his other hand straight into the air, and shouts, “Sieg Heil!”

  It is the Nazi salute. He is calling Karl a Nazi. What difference does it make? Tony Scaratini is the biggest jerk in the school. Everybody knows that.

  Except maybe not the two kids by the gate to the school yard who seem to think that Tony has made a great joke and are now doing the same thing. More and more kids join in. We are surrounded by dozens of boys mocking Karl, making fun of him for being German. Karl just looks at the ground and keeps walking.

  The same thing happens on the way home from school and on the way to school the next morning. It happens twice every day. Mr. Shaker seems to see it. You can never tell with him but he is standing in the doorway of the school watching kids make fun of Karl, calling him a Nazi and shouting “Sieg Heil!” Looking at Mr. Shaker, I think he is very angry. As I get closer I can see that he is shaking a little bit.

  “It isn’t fair, is it, Mr. Schacter?” I say, thinking for once there is something we can agree on.

  Mr. Shaker’s eyes look like he can see for hundreds of miles. All he says is, “Who can say what is fair after what they did?”

  I want to say that Karl hasn’t done anything, but I am late and have to get to my homeroom. At my locker there is a group of boys giving Nazi salutes and telling Nazi jokes. Stanley is there and he laughs uncomfortably at the jokes.

  “It isn’t fair,” I say. “Karl didn’t do anything.” But the other kids just laugh. And then Stanley, still smiling and looking uncomfortable, says, “Ah, Aramis, have you gone over to the Cardinal’s side?” And he looks around for approval but the other kids ignore him because they do not understand. I do, of course. The Cardinal was the Musketeers’ enemy.

  Karl isn’t going out for soccer. He wants to spend as little time at school as possible. I tell him that it might make a difference if he did well at a sport but he only says, “It’s not even an American sport.” He is right. Playing soccer better than everyone else would be like wearing weird clothes or having an accent.

  Dickey Panicelli has moved up from go-karts. He is working on a big eight-cylinder engine in an old green-and-white Chevy, black grease smudged on his white T-shirt, his long sandy hair falling in front of his eyes as he leans over.

  “Dickey, did you ever notice the way they treat Karl?”

  “The German exchange student—” He says more, but he revs his engine and I can’t hear it.

  “But it’s not fair, don’t you think?”

  The engine shouts, covering Dickey’s voice for a few seconds. “… the whole problem with Germans. They can’t stand up for things. My father says that if a few Germans had stood up and said Hitler was wrong there would not have been a World War II.”

  “But I thought it started because of Pearl Harbor.”

  I can’t hear his answer. So is that it? Not standing up against something wrong is so bad that even the children who had not yet been born are guilty? Maybe that is why I have to stand up for Karl. He didn’t do anything. Probably his parents didn’t do anything either. I want to stand up for him but I also don’t want to because this is the kind of thing that can turn
the whole school against you. Karl’s is not the side to be on.

  I wonder what my uncle, whose whole life seems to have been shaped by killing Germans, thinks. I tell him the entire story and he says, “Do you know what the Germans drank?”

  He insists on waiting for an answer. “No,” I say.

  “Ice wine, Joel. Wine made from ice. We moved into this Schloss and the cellar was full of this Eiswein. We drank three bottles a day. It was pretty good stuff.”

  My mother says that there is no such thing as a good German, that they are all bad. But I don’t see how that is possible. “Karl didn’t do anything,” I insist.

  “No,” my mother says, “but what about his parents?”

  My father has gotten into the habit, when he wants to talk to me, of saying “Let’s go to the shelter and get some tuna.” Down we go, and we lightly stroke the roundness of the cans while we talk.

  “Even if the Germans didn’t do anything,” my father says, “there are times when not doing anything is a crime too.” He seems to think this is an important point, something he wants me to get. But I am wondering why we have so much tuna fish.

  I need somebody to help me, to help Karl. I write about it in my diary but, of course, a diary never answers. Mr. Bradley is younger than the World War II generation and increasingly I feel that if you want to talk through something you need to talk to people who haven’t been in World War II.

  Mr. Bradley says that I am right, that it isn’t fair. “You should have him come out for baseball this spring. Tell him that there are not going to be any Sieg Heils on my ball field.”

  I wonder if I could talk Karl into it. Baseball is a long way off. It is still soccer season. I say to Karl—we have never really talked about it—“I think it is so unfair the way these kids treat you. You didn’t do anything. It wasn’t your parents.”

  He looks at me with his gray eyes pale as chalk.

  “Your parents didn’t do anything, right?”

  “As a matter of fact …”

  “What?”

  “My Vater.”

  “What about your vater?”

  “I don’t know. I never knew him. After zeh war, zey were going to put him on trial. Za Americans. For sings he did.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I don’t know,” Karl says. “But he killed himself. I was a baby.”

  I am quiet for a very long moment trying to think of what I can say.

  “You know,” Karl says, “it’s very funny. I must tell my Mutter when I write her.”

  “What’s funny?”

  “Isn’t it funny zat I come to America and everyone treats me badly because I am German and zeh only one who is nice to me is za Jew. Za only Jew I’ve ever known.”

  We both smile uneasily.

  Karl never makes it to baseball season. He writes his mother and tells her the “funny” thing and suddenly Karl is packed off. His only explanation is that his mother told him he had to go back to Germany. I don’t know if she is calling him back because the other kids treat him badly or because his only friend is “the Jew.” What is his mother like?

  I have another big-hitting baseball season and I am getting a varsity letter and Tony Scaratini isn’t getting one. His response is to try to club me with a baseball bat. He takes a good swing but I move out of the way and he misses. You can never please everyone. But maybe I should stand up to him more. I do not want to be like a silent German. Since Karl left I have been thinking a lot about Germans. Shouldn’t I have said something more to him? It’s bothering me. In a way I am glad he left so that I won’t have to stand up for him, but that is bothering me too. Finally I have something to write about in my diary. I write a lot about the Germans, which is funny because my diary inspiration, Anne Frank, did not write much about them at all.

  Chapter Ten

  My Diary

  November 23, 1963

  Dear Diary,

  I know that I have not written to you very much. I started but then I stopped. I can’t do this every day, but today I wanted to write to you because yesterday was a different kind of day. I went to school and it seemed like a normal day and then, on my way to lunch, I passed Mr. Bradley, the baseball coach. We have become pretty good friends, especially since my batting average has gone up, but I was surprised when he motioned to me in a kind of secretive way to come talk to him. It is November and baseball season is a long way away. What could Mr. Bradley have to talk to me about?

  He opened the door to an empty classroom. Everyone was heading for lunch. He turned the lights on and looked at me as though he hadn’t decided what he was going to say. And then he said it.

  “I’ve just heard over the news that somebody has shot President Kennedy and Governor Connally of Texas.”

  I looked at him. He was not joking. Is this how it all ends? How could this be? “Is he dead?” I asked.

  Mr. Bradley shook his head. “I don’t know.” He looked down at the floor for a moment without saying anything. Then he said, “I’ve got to go.” He walked out into the hallway.

  He would be all right, I thought. John Kennedy is not going to end this way. Not now. I must have stayed in the room for longer than I thought because when I came out Mr. Bradley was nowhere in sight. I walked through the hallway looking at faces and it was easy to tell who knew and who didn’t. Even Tony Scaratini had a worried look on his face. He had never had that face before—he generally looked too stupid to be worried—and that new face told me he knew. But Donna Belini, who had been interested in me ever since I started hitting home runs, didn’t know. She had a big smile for me that I didn’t want at the moment.

  Mr. Shaker looked angry. It was the way he always looked so I could tell that he didn’t know. “Mr. Schacter,” I said. “President Kennedy has been shot.”

  He looked at me as though I had shot him and he started shaking. He said, “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “No,” I said. That was all I felt like saying. He looked around as though he was looking for help. I guess he was looking for another teacher, a grown-up, someone he could trust. All he saw was Mrs. Harmon, the math teacher. Mrs. Harmon turned everything into a math problem. If you asked her what time it was she would say something like “Ten minutes ago it was 11:57.” If you asked her when the homework was due she would say “There are eight problems. I expect each one to take a day and a half.”

  Everyone avoided talking to Mrs. Harmon. But she was the only grown-up Mr. Shaker could see and so he turned to her. But she did not give him a puzzle, she just nodded her head. It was true.

  Then I realized that Mrs. Harmon was crying. And Mr. Shaker was too.

  For some reason, I was looking for Susan Weller. Since you are my diary, I will be honest. I wanted to be the one to tell her. Everybody will remember who told them and I wanted Susan Weller to remember it was me, which is not what you should be thinking about at a time like this. I will only tell this to you. But then I saw Angela Pizzutti. Her face was wet and shiny, not just a few tears running down. She was covered in tears and her eyes looked up at mine completely red where they should have been white. She just grabbed me and held on to me and I held on to her. I liked her for feeling so much though a lot of people were holding each other that day. It felt good to be holding someone because I felt really scared. But that is another thing that I am only telling you, Diary. I am not going to make that mistake again.

  I was the one who told Donnie LePine. We will both always remember that. He was looking smooth, in charge, the way he always looks. And then I told him and for the first time ever he looked lost, confused, scared like me. We held on to each other for just a second or two, long enough for me to realize that there was still a truth to our old Musketeers joke—for all his varsity letters, we were friends, guys of the same age with the same struggles and the same frightening future. Even if we can’t really talk about it.

  President Kennedy didn’t get better. He died. And a lot of people are crying. When I got home I
could tell that my mother had been crying. My father didn’t say anything when he got home and I couldn’t tell if he had been crying too.

  And so, dear Diary, I am writing to you today because I realize that yesterday was the last day of my childhood. The last day I will ever believe that things might go right. They might start to, but someone could just take a gun and end it. Maybe that’s what people do in this country. They have weapons, they have missiles, they have armies, and wars, and they kill people and that is how they end everything. That doesn’t really make any sense. I can’t think clearly. That is why I am writing to you, because if I told anyone else the things I’m thinking they would just get mad. My fellow Musketeers would say I was betraying them.

  Some people thought that John Kennedy was hope. I wasn’t so sure. To me, President Kennedy was not a sure thing. He just offered the possibility that the future would be better. And even if you didn’t feel that hopeful, he was the only hope we had. So now we have nothing. Who will they shoot next? I think bad things are going to happen. Thank you for listening to me. I will try to write you more often.

  Joel

  Chapter Eleven

  That One Wrong Swing

  They say every baseball player has taken one swing that he wishes he could take back and try again. The one that is always talked about is Willie McCovey’s swing that made the last out of the last game of the 1962 World Series. Matty Alou was on third and Willie Mays was on second. The Giants were beating the Yankees one run to zero. Any kind of outfield hit could have scored both of them and won the series for the Giants. It was one ball and one strike so McCovey didn’t have to swing. He could wait for the right pitch. But he swung and drove it straight to the second baseman and lost the series. For me it was all made right the next year when the Dodgers, thanks to the unbelievable arm of Sandy Koufax, swept the Yankees in four games. It ended the Yankees and I don’t even think about them anymore. But I’ll bet Willie McCovey is still thinking about that swing.