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David’s War
HERBERT KASTLE
David’s War
Copyright © 1982 by Herbert Kastle.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
In memory of my mother and father, Eva and Meyer Kastle
‘While I was musing,
The fire burned.’
Old Testament Psalms
‘Dum tacent, clamant.’ (Though silent, they cry aloud.) Cemetery Monument Inscription
PROLOGUE: Wednesday, 12 December, p.m.
It was eight o’clock, dark and wet, and people were just beginning to emerge from shelter after the sudden rainstorm. The truck came down Fairfax Avenue, street of kosher butchers, restaurants, delicatessens; spinal column of Los Angeles’ one true Jewish neighbourhood, the California equivalent of Brooklyn’s old Pitkin Avenue and Manhattan’s Delancey Street.
It was an open flat-bed truck with waist-high wooden slat sides, and two men stood in the back, in what was now a fine drizzle, scattering leaflets into the street. It moved slowly, music blaring from somewhere under the frame – ‘God Bless America’, Kate Smith’s recording.
At first the still-sparse flow of pedestrians paid it no attention; then there were shouts and three young men burst from a doorway where they’d sought shelter. They were raging, pointing at the truck, and it was then that other people realized Fairfax Avenue was being desecrated. It was then they saw the large swastika banners hanging on the slat sides; realized the men in back were ski-masked, uniformed Nazis with swastika armbands. And when one old woman picked up a leaflet, she turned white with shock at the blatant message of hatred aimed at Fairfax and its people.
The three young men chasing the truck were also part of an organization, though their only items of uniform were black berets. One managed a gasped ‘Never again!’; then they were running too hard for slogans.
The fastest, a wiry youth, reached for the open end of the truck. Before he could grasp the edge, he was struck across the shoulders with a bat wielded by the larger of two very large masked Nazis. The way he went down, in an agonized heap, indicated there was more than wood in the end of that bat.
The other two pursuers split up, each taking a different side of the slow-moving truck, sprinting to get to the cab and the driver.
As Kate Smith’s powerful soprano sang Stand beside her, and guide her, the huge Nazi with the bat leapt to the street, running around to the left, chasing the short youth coming up on the driver. The short youth began to turn, but didn’t make it. The bat described a clean up and over arc, striking the black beret dead centre. There was a splatting sound, a melon-bursting-on-pavement sound, and the youth crumpled straight down, his legs no longer motivated by brain impulses.
Meantime, the third youth had managed to grasp the door-handle on the other side of the cab, the passenger’s side. He was a muscular, thick-bodied man and his round face lighted with savage delight as he prepared to enter the cab and get at the uniformed Nazi behind the wheel. But the truck suddenly swerved, first towards him, jamming his arm, face and shoulder against the metal door, then violently away, breaking his grip and sending him sprawling in the wet gutter.
The youth struggled to his feet, in time to face the huge Nazi coming past the receding back of the truck, bat already swinging. The youth managed to twist aside, catching only a glancing blow on the right arm. Still, he went to his knees, and the bat came up for the finishing blow.
The truck skidded to a stop, its lights and music going off. There was a shout from the cab. The huge Nazi aborted his swing, ran to the truck and leapt in beside the driver. Before he could close the door, the truck jerked forward, tyres spinning and screeching on the wet pavement. The Nazi in the back held to the slat siding with one hand and flung a bound packet of leaflets at someone on the sidewalk, shouting, ‘Jew bastards!’ An old man fell and a woman screamed, ‘Hitler leibt!’ Hitler lives! The truck was speeding now, swinging around cars. It turned off Fairfax and was gone, leaving four men prostrate. Leaving others stunned, outraged, humiliated, fearful.
Leaving one man determined to wage war.
This was the catalyst for that one man, but not quite the beginning. The beginning could be said to have taken place in 1943 . . . or just two days ago.
ONE: Monday, 10 December
The dream was remarkably constant all these years, varying only in length. Sometimes it ended with the woman and child walking away from him, the train rocking through the Pennsylvania countryside, the smell of coal-ash strong in his nostrils, the boy staring back with big eyes at the ‘Filthy Jew’.
Sometimes it went on, beyond the true reflection of reality, to the satisfaction he had wanted since 1943, and he followed and caught the hateful young woman between cars and threw her shrieking to her death. In this version the boy had usually disappeared, but not always.
Tonight the boy was there, and the problem of what to do when he screamed his mother’s racial epithet, and turned to run and tell, brought David to an excruciating dilemma.
He had never dreamed the boy to a conclusion. He had begun to conclude, most often speaking of brotherhood, then realizing it was impossible since he had murdered the mother before the child’s eyes . . . at which point he would awaken.
A few times, just a handful over the years, he had begun to throw the seven- or eight-year-old after his mother. And awakened, horrified.
As he awoke now, sitting bolt upright in bed, choking on his own voice: ‘Wait!’
He was shaking.
That woman had been a good Pennsylvania German parent; the boy had been pink-cheeked and well dressed, and smiling before her voice turned hard and she pointed to the thin, uniformed, eighteen-year-old David as they passed his seat and stunned him by saying, “. . . like that filthy Jew there.’ She had gone on, pulling her child to the next car as David sat frozen, as he then looked around to see if anyone else had heard or noticed, as his heart flared with rage as much at her daring to guess at his race that way (because she couldn’t know, could she?) as at what she had said.
He had considered following and confronting her, but had done nothing because two stops away was Reading and the Army Air Corps pre flight training school at Albright College, and he’d wanted a clean record in order to become a bomber pilot and drop fire and death on Germany. So he had allowed the woman and her child to remain unexorcized, to drift into the memory banks, the recesses of his brain, and fester there.
He sighed, losing the sense of immediacy and pain. It was growing light. He had an early meeting – that dragged-out Canadian deal. He got up and walked to the bathroom and turned on the wall heater, then the shower.
He scrubbed his body, thickening around the middle, especially since he had given up the sit-ups and winter swimming. He washed his dark hair, thinning gradually in front and more perceptibly at the crown.
Vanessa had suggested a gym and transplants. He had considered it because he had wanted to please Vanessa. That was a year ago, and he was no longer sure he wanted to please her.
He was beginning to fail sexually with her, that Ten, that epitome of sexuality – which should have frightened him, and didn’t. That frightened him, and he had begun reading the personal columns of the New York Review, checking ads that had West Coast or Los Angeles in the text, telling himself it was more or less a joke because who could take those pathetic paragraphs seriously?
‘L.A. slim mature lady with Masters in Lit. desires intellectual non-smoking male for enrichment