Beautiful Ruins

I knew this was what Richards would ask for. He coveted that Luger as much as I coveted dry socks. He wanted it as a souvenir for his son. And how could I blame him? I had been thinking of the son I didn’t have when I bought the Luger at a little Italian market outside Pietrasanta. With no son back home, I’d figured to show it to my wayward girlfriends and my lousy nephews after too many whiskeys, when I’d pretend not to want to talk about my war, then would pull the rusted Luger from a bureau and tell the lazy shits how I wrestled it from a crazy German who killed six of my men and shot me in the foot. The black-market economy of German war trophies depended on such deception: retreating, starving Germans trading their broken weapons and their identifying insignia to starving Italians for bread, and the starving Italians in turn selling them as trophies to Americans like Richards and me, starved for proof of our heroism.

Sadly, Richards never got to give the Luger to his boy, because six days before we shipped home, me to listen to Cubs games on the radio, him to his wife and son, Richards died ingloriously of a blood infection he acquired in a field hospital, after surgery for a ruptured appendix. I never even got to see him after he went in for a fever and gut ache, our moron lieutenant simply informing me that he’d died (“Oh, Bender. Yeah. Look. Richards is dead”), the last and best of my friends to go in my war. And if this marks the end of Richards’s war, I offer this epilogue: A year later I found myself driving through Cedar Falls, Iowa, parking in front of a bungalow with an American flag on the brick porch, removing my cap, and ringing the doorbell. Richards’s wife was a short, boxy thing and I told her the best lie I could imagine, that his last words had been her name. And I handed his little boy the box with my Luger in it, said his daddy had taken it off a German soldier. And as I looked down on those ginger cowlicks, I ached for my own son, for the heir I would never have, for someone to redeem the life I was already pla

And he was, because on the day I met the girl, Brave Richards said, “Just go. Keep your Luger. I’ll cover for you. Just tell me all about it afterward.”

If, in this confession of fear and discomfort during my war, I have portrayed myself as lacking in valor, I offer this evidence of my Galahad-like heart: I had no intention of laying a hand on that girl. And I needed Richards to know it, that I risked death and dishonor not to nick my willy, but simply to walk with a pretty girl on a road at night, to feel that sweet normalcy again.

“Richards,” I said. “I’m not go

I think he could see I was telling the truth, because he looked pained. “Then Christ, let me go with her.”

I patted his shoulder, grabbed my rifle, and ran down the road to catch her. She was a fast walker, and when I came upon her, she had edged over to the side of the road. Up close, she was older than I’d thought, maybe twenty-five. She took me in warily. I put her at ease with my bilingual charm: “Scusi, bella. Fare una passeggiata, per favore?”

She smiled. “Yes. You may walk with me,” she said in English. She slowed and took my arm. “But only if you stop wiping your ass on my language.”

Ah. So it was love.

Maria’s mother had raised three sons and three daughters in this village. Her father had died early in the war and her brothers had been conscripted at sixteen, fifteen, and the last at twelve, dragged off to dig Italian trenches and, later, German fortifications. She prayed that at least one of her brothers was alive somewhere north of what was left of the Linea Gotica, but she didn’t hold out much hope. Maria gave me the quick history of her little village during the war, squeezed like a washcloth of its young men by Mussolini, then squeezed again by the partisans, again by the retreating Germans, until there were no males between the ages of eight and fifty-five, the town bombed, strafed, and picked clean of food and supplies. Maria had studied English at a convent school, and with the invasion found work as a nurse’s aide at an American field hospital. She was gone weeks at a time but always returned to the village to check on her mother and sisters.

“So when this is all finished,” I asked, “do you have a nice young man to marry?”

“There was a boy, but I doubt he’s alive. No, when this is over I will care for my mother. She is a widow whose three sons were taken from her. When she’s gone, maybe I’ll get one of you Americans to take me to New York City. I’ll live in the Empire State Building, eat ice cream every night in fancy restaurants, and grow fat.”

“I can take you to Wisconsin. You can get fat there.”

“Ah, Wisconsin,” she said, “the cheese and the dairy fields.” She waved her hand in front of her face as if Wisconsin lay just beyond the scrub trees alongside the road. “Cows, farms, and Madison, moon over the river, and the college of Badgers. It is cold in the winter but in the summer there are beautiful farm girls with pigtails and red cheeks.”

She could do that for any state you named, so many American boys in her hospital had taken time to reminisce about the place they came from, often before they died. “Idaho? The deep lakes and big mountains, endless trees and beautiful farm girls with pigtails and red cheeks.”

“No farm girl for me,” I said.

“You will find one after the war,” she said.

I said that after the war I wanted to write a book.

She cocked her head. “What kind of book?”

“A novel. About all of this. Maybe a fu

She became somber. Writing a book was an important thing to do, she said, not a joke.

“Oh, no,” I said, “I don’t mean to joke about it. I don’t mean that sort of fu

She asked what other kind of fu

“The sort of fu

She looked at me curiously and just then, a bird or a bat flushed from the bushes ahead and we both started. I put my arm around Maria’s shoulder. And I can’t say how it happened, but suddenly we were off the road and I was on my back and she was lying on top of me in a grove of lemon trees, the unripe fruit above me like hanging stones. I kissed her lips and cheeks and neck and she quickly undid my pants and held me between her two hands, stroking me expertly with one soft hand and caressing me with the other, as if she had read some top secret army manual on this maneuver. And she was exceptional at it, far better than I’d ever managed to be, so that in no time I was making snuff ling noises and she pressed against me and I smelled lemons and dirt and her, and the world fell away as she shifted her body and aimed me perfectly away from her pretty dress, like a farmwife directing a stream of cow’s milk, toward the unripe lemons, all of this happening in less than a minute, without her having to so much as loosen the bow in her hair.

She said: “There you go.”

To this day, these three words remain the most lovely, sad, awful thing I have ever heard. There you go.

I started crying. “What is it?” she said.

“My feet hurt,” was all I could manage. But of course I wasn’t crying because of my feet. And while I was overcome with gratitude toward Maria, and with regret and nostalgia and relief over being alive this late in my war, I wasn’t crying for those reasons, either. I was crying because clearly I wasn’t the first brute that Maria had so efficiently and delicately brought to fruition using only her hands.

I was crying because, behind her speed and skill, her mastery of technique, there could only exist an awful history. This was a maneuver learned after encounters with other soldiers, when they pushed her to the ground and she wasn’t able to deflect them using only her hands.