THE HOME FRONT
167
attached themselves with imbecilic fixity upon one trivial object. For
a long time he studied a minute fissure in the plaster of the wall beside
the window. Later, he meditated intently upon the small, dispirited
American flag on a p9le beside the Sikorsky plant, and when at last
he broke from this trance, it was only to become absorbed in the spec–
tacle of a fouled old
fish~bucket
raffishly perched on a stump at the
water's edge. Once, from some remote region of the house, there came
the sound of a music box tinkling over a radio and at least a hundred
times he stubbornly reiterated the words he knew
it
heralded:
"PEPSI COLA HITS THE SPOT." At last, passing his hand over
his cool forehead, he closed his eyes. The sounds cohered as in
delirium. He could still visualize the blackbirds and fancied them to
be a deathless band of flies which refused to walk upon the glass
where they could be swatted. Heariug a train screaming in the station
for passengers to Boston, he tried to imagine that he stood in the Bis–
marckgarten waiting for the yellow tram to Mannheim, but all he
could see, in his mind's eye, were the shabby girls at the ftowerstall
deftly plucking daffodils from the pails of water. Next, he pretended
that the train he heard was the express to Munich, and this time the
recollections spun out effortlessly. He had gone to Salzburg once for
a fortnight at the house of a class-mate, a yellow-haired boy named
Heine Waffenschmidt. He remembered that in the compartment
there had been two soldiers on leave who had played chess the whole
journey and had gladly drunk the wine offered to them by a tipsy
letter-carrier on his way to Garmisch-Partenkirchen to see his tuber–
cular daughter who was .dying. The old man's blue coat glistened
with age and the brass buttons on it were so tamished that when the
light fell on them they did not shine.
«Danke,
Papa," the soldiers
had said. Once, at the end of a game, they stre.tched and yawned
and told the old man what they were planning to do. "And Papa,"
said one of them, "What do you think? We have hired a cafe and
ordered a keg of Lowenbrau and we'll have Scotch whiskey besides."
Dr. Pakheiser remembered how whenever the train stopped at a sta–
tion, the pause seemed as clearly defined as a box; his eyes burned
now as if he were looking up at the bright blue ceiling light. It was
hard to redeem much of the two weeks in Salzburg. He had been
happy, he was quite sure, and dimly he recalled a ski tournament
after which he and Heine had gone to a rathskeller for
Gli1hwein.
There had been a troop of players on their way to Danzig and one of
them, an effeminate young man, had described the jumpers he had
seen that afternoon.
«Und er geht so und so und so!"
he said, gestur–
ing with his hands. ''
'Swar unglaublich wunderbar."
