Here is an excerpt from the book:
Stroud had been listening in silence. He bad come along only to help Peter in case some unforeseen difficulty arose in dealing with Storm Trooper Meister. The whole thing was no concern of his: the fetid night club amid the ruins; Berlin itself, a city unlike the one he had known before the war; the German floozies in their wretched finery; the drunken soldiers and the ear-splitting jazz that sounded like martial music. It had been months since he had felt any homesickness. Now, in the Femina Casino in Berlin, nostalgia came to him in a way that he had never before experienced. It was not a yearning for his wife, his children, his home, nor for Spokane itself. It was simply as if he had befouled himself in the depths of some pit or in the slime of a trench, and needed to bathe quickly and thoroughly. He yearned for America as if his homeland were one huge bathtub.
Then the girl across from him had spoken of being raped fourteen times, and the other girl once, right after she had been liberated from a concentration camp. That was certainly just so much bunk, Stroud thought; she was a whore, after all, and whoever heard of a whore being raped? The other girl's story of the concentration camp was probably a lie too. But be found himself listening with attention as the girls talked, and gradually the urgency of his desire for home and cleanliness seemed less and less important. What did seem tremendously important was that this sort of rottenness stop once and for all-the mutual murdering and plundering, and the victors using the women of the defeated as their natural prey. In the sick, white face of the half-Jewish girl he now discovered features that he seemed to know, and in the empty blue eyes of the drunken soldier he imagined that he saw the same brutish glint that he had detected in the eyes of the SS officer in the prison camp at Bad Reichenhall. In the smoky haze of the Femina the real faces before him blurred into faces his memory conjured up, and for an instant he could not tell which was which.
Meanwhile, all through the conversation, Peter had been surveying the night club. During the past few days he had studied the photographs of -Michael Meister with such attention that he felt he could recognize the man even in a good disguise. So far he had seen no one among the waiters who resembled the pictures and descriptions of Hitler's former bodyguard.
"I'm going to the bar," he said to Stroud. "I'll be right back."
Wriggling through the press of dancers, he crossed the floor, bumping into the soft bodies of the women and against the hard ammunition pouches of the men who were dancing with pistols on their hips. Some soldiers, who carried no pistols, had come with rifles that were now leaning against the bar. Now Peter, too, was overcome with an emotion like homesickness, an aching desire for tidiness and lightness of heart, for women who had suffered no disasters and men who carried no weapons.
He ordered another glass of wine at the bar. The bartender was a wizened Italian who immediately began talking English and telling Peter about his fifteen years in Brooklyn. Peter chatted with him while watching the door behind the bar through which the waiters and waitresses passed on their way to and from the kitchen.
The atmosphere had become intolerably stifling. The big window at the right of the bar was boarded up, and not a breath of air was getting through.
"Isn't there some way to get a window open?" Peter asked the barman.
"That one opens."
Peter pushed the window open. He was startled to see that it was still broad daylight in the street. Curfew was at nine o'clock in Berlin; the "night clubs" opened at three in the afternoon and were required to close at eight in the evening. While the men and women inside gave themselves the illusion of night-time revelry, the hot sun of the summer afternoon beat down outside.
Peter remained at the window, breathing in the fresh air. There were ruins, and nothing but ruins, wherever he looked. Nowhere was a whole house still standing. But in the strong sunlight the buildings did not, somehow, look shattered, but rather as if they were in the process of being built, or as if they were half-finished sets on a movie lot. One wall of a many-storied department store across the way was still standing, and the dirty rubble was piled up in its long show window. The tall thick letters that spelled out the name of the store had strangely resisted destruction. They still hung between the third and fourth floor, and there was something ,almost alive in their drunken appearance. The two upright pillars of an "M" hung from the wall like the legs of a man dangling out into space from a window.
| Price | $3.00 |
|---|---|
| Shipping & Handling | $3.00 |
| Total | $6.00 |
