"Ich weiss. Ich hatte keine Gelegenheit zu uben."
"Why did you choose German?"
I gambled a smile when I told him I thought I would have a chance to speak it someday.
"You were right, you see," he answered dryly. "I am speaking English to you now because I don't want to waste time. Do you like it here, in the camp?"
"Nein, Herr Kommandant."
"Why don't you?"
I did not know the word for boring, but I knew how to tell him I
had nothing to do. "Ich habe nicht genug zu tun hier. Hier sind zu viele Manner die nicht genug Arbeit haben."
"I can propose something better. A work detail in the city of Dresden, which is not very far. Do you think you would prefer that?"
"I think I--"
"In German."
"Jawohl, Herr Kommandant. Entschuldigen Sie."
"You will be safe in Dresden, as safe as here. There is no war industry there and no troops stationed, and it will not be bombed. You will eat a bit better and have work to keep you busy. We are sending a hundred or so. We are permitted to do that. Yes?"
I was nodding. "Ich wurde auch gerne gehen."
"You would be useful to interpret. The guards there are not educated. They are old or very young, as you will see. The work is correct too. You will be making a food preparation, mainly for pregnant women. Does it still suit you?"
"Ja, das gefallt mir sehr, Herr Kommandant, wenn es nicht verboten ist."
"It is allowed. But," he said, with a pause and a shrug, to let me know there was some kind of catch, "we can put only privates to work. That is all that is allowed by the rules of the Geneva Convention. We are not permitted to send officers, not even noncommissioned officers. And you are a sergeant. Not even when they volunteer."
"Was kann ich tun?" I asked. "Ich glaube Sie wurden nicht mit mir reden, wenn Sie wussten dass ich nicht gehen kann." Why else would he send for me if he didn't know a way around it?
"Herr Kommandant," he reminded.
"Herr Kommandant."
He uncupped a palm on the top of his table and pushed toward me a single-edge razor blade. "If you cut off your sergeant's patch we could deal with you like a common soldier. You will lose nothing, no privileges anywhere, not here, not home. Leave the razor blade there when you go, the sergeant's stripes too, if you do decide to take them off."
Dresden was just about the nicest-looking city I'd ever seen. Of course I hadn't seen many then I'd call real cities. Just Manhattan, and then a few thin slices of London, mainly gin mills and bedrooms. There was a river through the middle, and more churches everywhere than I'd seen in my whole life, with spires and domes and crosses on top. There was an opera house in a big square, and around a statue in another place of a man on a horse with a big rump, rows of tents had been put up to house the refugees who were flooding into the city to get away from the Russians who were pushing ahead in the east. The city was working. Trolley cars ran regularly. Kids went to school. People went to jobs, women and old men. The only guy our age we laid eyes on had the stump of a missing arm pinned up in a sleeve. There were plays in the theaters. A big metal sign advertised Yenidze cigarettes. And after a couple of weeks the posters went up, and I saw that a circus was coming to town.
We were put in a building that had been a slaughterhouse when they still had cattle to kill. Underneath was a meat storage basement that was hollowed out of solid rock, and that's where we went when the sirens sounded and the planes came near to bomb somewhere else. They always went to places nearby that had more military value than we did. In the daytime they were American. At night they were English. We could hear the bombs going off very far away and felt good when we did. Often we could see the planes, very high up and in big formations.
Our guards were kids under fifteen or wheezing old men over sixty, except for one tough-looking supervisor they said was Ukrainian who looked into the factory or our billet every few days to make sure we were still there and to see that our uniforms were being preserved. Whenever one of us fell very sick, they took away the uniform and folded it carefully. The Russians were coming close from one side and they hoped, especially the Ukrainian, to escape to us as Americans. The women and girls in the factory were all slave laborers. Most were Polish and some of the old ones looked like my aunts and grandmother did, and even my mother, but thinner, much thinner. I joked a lot to pep things up and made flirting signs. When some joked back or gave those deep looks of longing, I began to think, Oh, boy, wouldn't that be something to talk about. I kidded with the guards about it too, to set me up with a place for a Fraulein and me to use for our Geschmuse.
"Rabinowitz, you're crazy," this guy Vonnegut said to me, more than once. "You do that once with a German woman and they'll shoot you dead."
I was glad he warned me. He must have spotted me eyeing the girls outside as they marched us back and forth.
"Let's have a dance," I decided one time. "I bet I really could get a dance going here if we could talk them into giving us some music."
"Not me," said Schweik, in his heavy accent, and told me again that he wanted only to be a good soldier.
Vonnegut shook his head too.
I decided to try it alone. The planes droned overhead almost every night, and the guards looked more worried every day.