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Bewarne’s Novel: First draft of beginning





	

	 Chapter 3: Day 2
	Filed under: General — bewarne @ February 23, 2008 9:01 am 
	
	
		(Last update February 23, 2008 - okay, this may be ready for some editing as well)
“The De-Lovely Italians”
The next day was the same thing over again except longer.  Much longer; longer than the eternity of  the previous day.
They started out at dawn after just a few hours sleep - dawn came early in the desert’s summer. They stopped for a couple of hours during the hottest part of the day. She didn’t find that all that better – it would have been great to lie down but after her experience yesterday with the scorpion, she didn’t feel easy enough to do that. Still she could sit on her coat and stretch her legs out and since the sand was solid under her, she fell asleep sitting up even in the overwhelming heat.
Then they took off again. And then the wind picked up. Fine, tiny grains of sand got through to everything - there were no barriers to it. Wearing a scarf over her mouth didn’t seem to help at all - maybe it kept out some larger grains. She felt she had swallowed most of the Sahara; okay, only most of the Sahara within a few miles of their location.
She became desperate for the convoy to stop. But she didn’t consider asking them to do so. Instead she started thinking of other methods and she focussed in on violence. All she would have to do is grab someone’s pistol. If she could do the impossible with the mortar, she could surely grab someone’s pistol. Not the captain’s. He’d be prepared. Maybe the guard behind her. Or the driver.
But there was little possibility and she knew she was no longer the person she had been yesterday. Today she was barely able to stand or walk, no way could she run to pick up that ammo shell like she had done yesterday. She couldn’t even focus on a goal like she had done yesterday. She was so desperate that later she actually considered asking the captain to stop. She could just tap him on the shoulder. Right, that would work. Like he cared what she felt when he was obviously on some kind of schedule. No, let’s rethink the pistol angle. Or maybe she could make them shoot her. It would stop this relentless blowing sand. Death - theirs, hers, she didn’t care. Just make it stop!
Then the wind let up. Her mind came back to some sort of reason. The heat of the sun became her enemy and she forgot how much worse the wind had been — except that crazy thoughts she had had she now knew for what they had been - off the wall insane.
After a while she started wishing for the bone killing cold of the night just for a change. That was crazy, but surely any change would be preferable.
She was sure the day would never, ever end. But end it did in a most unexpected manner. Right around dark, they came over a small rise and found themselves at the edge of a compound facing a car full of Italians.
Kichner was obviously disconcerted and since Katherine was beginning to recover from the heat in the coolness of the evening, she had enough energy to be pleased about that. She assumed this place was either not on his map or they were off the path the column had been planning to take or maybe the place was known but the new settlement was not.
What were these people doing here?  New settlers? She realized that Kichner was speaking Italian. Why did he learn Italian? For opera? Dante in the original? Was he stationed there once? Italian girl friends? He didn’t seem like a person who would learn Italian, maybe French or Russian.
Her own Italian was nonexistent as she didn’t even know any related language like French or Spanish. The two young women in the party had obviously seen her and were motioning in her direction as they talked. There was an older Italian as well – their father? And they had in their company a German colonel.
The captain made some arrangement with them and came back to the truck and the Italians turned their car around and headed back to their compound.
“Dr. Maurizzi recently built this compound and his two daughters, Lucia and Sophia are visiting along with a German colonel who is an old friend and on vacation, I gather. They invited us to dinner.”
“All of us?” asked the major.
“Myself and the commanding officer of the prisoners and the woman prisoner.”
“Why would a German colonel be taking a vacation here?”
“I don’t know.  We will have to meet him. You can probably beg off if you don’t feel up to it.”
The major understood the dare but was cautious. She wondered why.  They were already in the hands of the Germans.
Kichner went to get some things and the major whispered to her, “It might be wise to not draw the attention of this German colonel.”
“Well, I do try to be wise,” she smiled, the smile of a naïve, helpless woman.
The captain came back just in time to hear the last part, “Why don’t I believe you?”
“Because you are suspicious by nature.”
“That may be.”
The major then seemed to draw the captain into the conversation by saying that he had been telling her not to draw the attention of the colonel. “I don’t think you are worst person into whose hands we could fall.”
“I think your compatriot isn’t so sure about that.”
“Never said you were the worst,” she said raising her left hand to her jaw.
“You might as well stop that as I am not going to feel guilty about it any more than you will feel guilty about what you did. But there is no need to mention it until I turn you over to those Field Marshal Rommel has designated to deal with prisoners. This colonel is not in my chain of command.” He paused. “I do not want to make it plain that I don’t trust you but I still don’t trust you. So, I have arranged for the major and me to go ahead and take the hot bath they have offered. I will bring the major back and pick you up and be a guard who isn’t quite a guard while you are able to bathe and change clothes. Do not give me any reason to make my lack of trust of you too obvious. Do you understand?”
“Right. I am to play sweet and innocent for which I get a bath and real food. As long as a British column doesn’t appear, I will try not to deviate too much from that. I can’t see how I can use this anyway – these people are also the enemy.”
“If you could see an opening, you would say the same thing.”
She got out the spare uniform she had brought and had everything ready to go when the captain brought the major back. They both looked all clean and fresh. Although, she didn’t have a mirror, she knew she was dirty and sweaty and smelled bad and look the opposite of fresh. What was the opposite of fresh?
Kichner took her up to a bedroom where the door was open and Lucia and Sophia came forward to welcome her. They tried their English on her. Lucia took the lead. Katherine estimated that she was the oldest at about her own age.
“Oh, your face has been burnt by the sun. You must be careful in the bath.”
Katherine put her hand to her cheek, not having realized she was sunburnt. “No matter how sunburnt I am, I am grateful for the chance to take a bath. Thank you so very much.”
Sophia, who was maybe 20 jumped into the conversation, to tell her, “Captain Kichner insists we leave nothing in the bathroom except soap and shampoo.” She looked at him accusingly then back to her, “But if you need anything else, just tell us.” She had started the hot water running.
“Soap and shampoo and hot water will be sufficient.”
“Oh and we have a dress for you.” Lucia held up a shapeless brown dress that Katherine would have been surprise if either of them had ever worn – maybe it had belonged to their mother in middle age. Still, it looked clean and warm even if those were its only virtues. She felt it was fortunate that she didn’t want this captain to think she was even slightly attractive. “That’s lovely. Thank you so very much for the loan.” Kichner watched her closely and saw no sign that she knew the dress was ugly. He wondered how that could be, but he had become attuned to her sarcasm and saw none of it here.
She put her spare uniform aside and took the dress.
Kichner told her, “You have 15 minutes.”
“Could one of you tell me when 8 minutes are up?”
“I’d be glad to, “ Sophia volunteered.
Katherine got privacy but there was no lock on the door. But the hot water was wonderful – at least until she started to wash her face. Parts of it were sensitive to the heat – so she really was sunburnt. The rest of her had been covered from the sun. But the cap, goggles and scarf had left some openings for the sun that she hadn’t realized. There was no mirror in the bathroom to check. She unwrapped her long hair from the braids that she wore around her head and washed her head and hair thoroughly. No sunburn there. She hoped they had a good sturdy comb. Far too soon Sophia knocked at the door; her 8 minute warning and she got out and put a towel around her head and got dressed. She stuck her head out and asked for a comb.
“You can comb your hair out here.”
Sophia objected to the impropriety of that.
“What could be improper about it?” the captain wanted to know. Lucia agreed with him. Katherine suspected that Lucia would agree with anything the captain said. Oh well, she got her comb.
All three of them were surprised about how long her hair was. It was no longer all that normal for women to wear their hair long. And as she combed through the tangles, she could see why. Just in two days of that horrendous travel her long hair had tangled so that most of the time she spent in getting ready was in getting through those tangles.
When she finally got through the last tangle, she just combed her hair out and left it free – that was the only way it would dry this evening but she knew she would need to braid it before going to bed or it would tangle beyond help.
“Can I wash the uniform I was wearing in the bathwater?”
“Oh, we have servants for that.” Lucia called out and a woman native to this area came in and she was told to wash the uniform and see if she could get it as dry as possible as quickly as possible. It was now time for dinner – in fact they were going to be late, it seemed.
As they walked to dinner, Katherine found out that the two young women spent most of their time back in Italy and were only visiting. That their father was one of the 100,000 Italian settlers who had moved to Libya in the past decade or so. And wasn’t it hot during the day and cold at night. As they got to the bottom of the stairs, they heard the piano, the two young women rushed forward. It was Cleere. The sergeant was standing by him until they entered and the captain nodded to him that he could leave.
He was dabbling with “Rapsody in Blue,” probably knowing he was going to be interrupted in just a minute and he was as Lucia and Sophia got to him gushing about the music he could play, do you know this and do you know that. And didn’t he play well. Katherine also moved to the piano but she noticed that Kichner join them instead sitting in an easy chair and stretching out his legs, though he verbally jumped in to help occasionally when communication failed over a language problem.
Then the colonel - his name turned out to be Runstedt - joined them and the first thing he did was denigrate what he called decadent American music. Katherine wondered if he recognize Gershwin? Lucia and Sophia objected and said how much they loved it. He backed off a little, as a guest should. They brought out a music score and asked Cleere to play it. He stumbled a little over a whole new piece he had obviously never heard. “De-Lovely” wasn’t the easiest one to pick up from sheet music, Katherine knew. The two young women lamented about the words and after Cleere couldn’t help with the parts they had problems with, they brought the music to Kichner who was baffled for a translation of some words like “TinPantheisis?”
Katherine was constitutionally incapable of letting this go unexplained. “The songwriter was having fun with words. These are not English words or even American words. They are words invented just for this song.” “
“People are allowed to invent words? How will anyone understand?”
“So,” said the colonel, “he cheated when he wasn’t good enough to find the right words.”
“In the hands of a lesser song writer, it might have been a cheat but what Cole Porter did was a one-off for this song and it worked. The song is turning up everywhere. ’TinPanthesisis’ is a combination of words, one of which is slang and the other of which is chopped off of a real word and the skill that it took just to come up with this one word to mean what it does, is extraordinary.”
Dinner interrupted but the girls weren’t satisfied and would only go to dinner if they were promised a complete playing and explanation of the song after dinner.
The only common language of the six people for dinner was English. Dr. Maurizzi understood more English than he spoke, Colonel Runstedt was really quite fluent. The two young women seemed to be able to speak most of what they wanted but needed you to speak slowly and simply for them to be able to follow along. Katherine who had spent considerable time in her life around people who barely spoke a common language, thought hard about her words when she spoke to them: using common words and declarative sentences. When the girls had problems understanding, they appealed to Captain Kichner who helped them out with a translation.
The young women also asked Captain Kichner about himself. Seems he had a scar on his cheek which Katherine hadn’t noticed. Lucia and Sophia had noticed and Lucia ask him if it was a war wound.
“Heidleberg,” Kichner said.  When he saw they didn’t understand the reference, he said, “Fencing at Heildeberg University.”
“There was an accident? But surely you wear masks when fencing.”
Kichner shook his head.
Katherine couldn’t resist so she leaned across the table and held up her hand to supposedly hide her words from the captain, “The Heidleberg fencing scar is really a famous thing. It is desired. I heard, they do wear special fencing goggles and I would have thought that the really good fencers wouldn’t get scars but the students want them. Although there are rumors of a test where someone stands still and has a blade flashed at his face.” She paused and then was forced to be fair. “But I have also heard that there have been serious injuries as well.”
She hadn’t paid that much attention to using common words so Kichner had to translate some of this. He admitted that they did protect their eyes but was less than forthcoming about exactly what went on at Heidleberg behind the scenes. He did not seem upset by her interference, but the Colonel objected, “I would think that you wouldn’t want to annoy your captor.”
“Have you ever been a prisoner, Colonel?”
“No.”
“Well maybe you will get the chance to see how you react to it, but I find a real desire to assert some will of my own will even if it is only in little things. Something that reinforces to myself that I am not completely under the control of another person or group. So, far, I admit that the captain has been reasonably understanding of my little off-hand comments. Major Cleere doesn’t engage in this behavior so I may not be able to speak for all prisoners and I have only been a prisoner for a little over 30 hours so maybe it just hasn’t sunk in yet and is just me acting pretty much as I always have to give my opinion freely.”
Sophia then noticed something else.  “That isn’t a sunburn on your left jaw, is it?”
“Ah,” she said drawing it out and then pausing and then without ever looking at the captain or giving any indication that she was debating what to tell them, she went on. “I was in a plane crash only yesterday and I do have a number of bruises, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, Captain Kichner told us that.  How awful.  You could have been killed.”
“Risking being killed is a part of living.”
“Really?” asked Dr. Maurizzi
“I don’t know. That just occurred to me. I thought it sounded a little profound until I said it, when I decided it sounded a little disingenuous.”
“Another ‘D’ word we don’t know. The De-Lovely song goes on into many words that beginning with ‘D’.What does this one mean?” Katherine looked at Kichner to see if he knew the English and the Italian enough to translate it, and he gave a translation that seemed to satisfy them.
The colonel objected to even the name of the song, “But ‘de-lovely’ is not an English or an American word. I spent time at a university in America and there is no such word. I never heard it.”
“I doubt many Americans could define many of Cole Porter’s words in this song - they would mostly understand the points he is making but he is playing with the words. It is supposed to be a song about,” she paused. “About not really love nor passion, but the fun side of romance, or rather about the fun side of songs about romance.”
Lucia frowned at this. “But not love or passion?”
“If the song was about love or passion, it wouldn’t start with an introduction about the song itself which actually insults the song it is about to present.”
Colonel Runstedt again objected to the nonsense. “It sounds decadent.  Is this Cole Porter Jewish?”
“I actually know a lot about Cole Porter’s music but I have no reason to know anything at all about the person. Why should I care what ethnicity he is? I care whether he writes a good song.”
“But it could be part of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the moral fiber of the young people who listen to it.”
“It’s a song not a political statement.”
“These people have a plan for world domination and they are really smart. They have a world wide conspiracy that organizes all aspects of life and sneak things in that you don’t expect.”
“Who does?”
He looked at her as if she was retarded. “Jews.”
“Isn’t world domination the express goal — in words and deeds — of the Germans? Why claim there is someone else attempting it when you make it plain that is exactly what you are currntly attempting. And do you really want to claim that people you consider to be less than you are really smarter than you are. I like smart people myself. No wonder they are the best scientists. “
“They are not the best scientists. They have been holding back the good German scientists.”
“Since science is based on hard evidence, I don’t see how one scientist can hold back another exccpt by doing the work better and more quickly. Why punish a people for adding to the general culture? And I might also warn you that the Bible indicates that these people have been major warriors - on the level of the ancient German barbarians.”
“Nonsense. Lies. They readily becomes slaves.”
“Everyone does when they have certain death as the alternative. If you and your family were surrounded by armed men, wouldn’t you surrender and while under the threat of guns, wouldn’t you do as you were told? Besides peacefulness is hardly a synonym for weak and violence is not the same thing as strength. But you should re-read the Biblical book of Joshua.  The ancient Hebrew people either had a very powerful God helping them or they were skilled warriors. Personally, I think the latter is more likely but either way, they may not turn out to be consistently subservient.”
“Well, we know they are trying to take over the world?”
“Who is?”
“The Jews! Germany is trying to save the world. They caused Germany to lose the world war.”
“How?  I read a flyer once that enumerated the reasons Germany lost the war. It had footnotes to German documentation on what caused the Germans to sue for peace at the end of the last war. For instance, its allies were starving and their governments were falling apart.”
“We didn’t need them.”
“Then there was the fact that in Germany, the women had turned on the war due to the loss of their menfolk and at the end the pipes in their streets were being torn up to turn into bullets, ancient bells melted down for bullets, etc.”
“That was just temporary. We were winning and moving Westward across France.”
“Battles on the Western Front that had been won had gained only useless territory - when German soldiers tried to take Amiens, the British and French forces held.”
“The next wave would have broken through.”
“Staving soldiers weren’t as capable as you might think.  With all the problems, there was really no room for anyone else, Jews or anyone, to add to the fact that Germany had lost, it was alone against the world at the end, no allies, no food, nothing left.”
“Jews were behind the strikes back home.”
“I’m sure there were Jews involved in the strikes.  But those strikes were the least of Germany’s problems.”
“And Jewish bankers were bleeding the government dry.”
“All the bankers, Jewish and Germans were doing the same things, pretty much writing off their losses.”
“Lies.”
“German documents prove it all.  The Austrians stole barges of food going to Germany because Vienna was starving.  Their army had nothing having lived off the land and now the land was baren.  Turkey was in worse shape.  And the Bulgarians had just sued for peace.  Germany had lost a million men in five months.  How could it go on? Especially after the Americans were arriving with what seemed like unlimited additional manpower for the Allies. Meanwhile, Jews were fighting and dying for Germany, winning medals for valor, etc.  And on the Eastern front, the Jews had welcomed the Germans as they had suffered terribly under the Russians.”
“Lies.”
“Strange how you accuse others of trying to dominate the world when everyone can see that that is exactly what Germany is doing and then you accuse of others of lying when Germany has made lying an major governmental office.”
Dr. Maurizzi murmured, “Fatti maschi, parole femmine [3],” and Kichner asked him if he would like him to translate that for her, and he agreed.
“Facts are masculine, words are feminine.”
“In other words, whatever facts I have can be ignored as just the words of a female.”
Dr. Maurizzi claimed, “That is not what I meant.”
Katherine was about to respond when Captain Kichner leaned over to her and said, “You are a guest at a dinner party and this is boring everyone else.”
Without looking at him, she frowned then swallowed and resigned herself and turned back to the others, “Quite right. I am so sorry. Especially since it is impossible to argue when facts don’t serve as common ground, anyway. But we can play the song and define the words after dinner.”
Lucia ignored all the conversation about Jews and jumped back to the words in the song, “So even though we have all the word written in front of us we may still not know what they mean?”
“That’s because they don’t all have a meaning – or at least not a commonly accepted meaning. The writer is playing with the words and saying that even if you don’t recognize the words, you will still know what he means.”
“Decadent.” Seemed like the colonel was going to get the last word in their previous argument after all.
After dinner, they adjourned to the piano and Major Cleere played a line at a time and Katherine spoke it:
“‘I feel a sudden urge to sing the kind of ditty that invokes the Spring’. The most unusual word in this line is ‘ditty’ which means a short, little song of no consequence. Are there any other words you don’t know?”
Lucia and Sophia shook their heads.  “All the others were in the dictionary.”
“‘So, control your desire to curse while I crucify the verse.’ Okay, here it isn’t the words so much as the concept. It means, please don’t get upset although I am going to make a mess of this verse.”
Lucia said, “Really?  I couldn’t understand how you could crucify a verse.”
“Because no one else may have previously ever expressed this concept in just this way.  The next line is, ‘This verse I’ve started seems to me the ‘Tin Pan-tithesis’ of melody’ and this way, I think a big problem for any translation.  First off you have to know that modern American music became mass marketed on a street in New York which a journalist nicknamed Tin Pan Alley. This was a derogatory term for the kind of popular music that came out of it but there were some song writers who were so sure of what they were doing that they felt comfortable even using derogatory terms about it.  Both Cole Porter and Gerswhin are known to have done so.  So Tin Pan-tithesis is something related to Tin Pan Alley, a minor, not quite respectable attempt at melody. Please realize that I am not representing the writer here, just giving you an off-the-cuff translation.”
Sophia asked, “What is off-the-cuff?”
“It is an idiom, something that has come to mean something totally unrelated to the words in the phrase.  The Americans make up more than any other people I know of. A cuff is the end of a shirt sleeve and off-the-cuff is not fully thought through or researched. The next line is ‘So to spare you all the pain, I’ll skip the darn thing and sing the refrain’ which just introduces what someone might call the center of the song although Porter is committed to the previous introduction since you can see that he could have left it out and chose to just have the rest. The next three lines go together and I think you may already understand all but the third line:
The night is young, the skies are clear
And if you want to go walkin’, dear
It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s de-lovely
‘Delightful’ is a real word meaning that something or someone is pleasantly wonderful.  It could be used about food.  As in ‘That was a delightful dinner we just had’ and it was, by the way but it could also mean that the conversation and the entire feel of the get together was also great. ‘Delicious’ is almost always used about the taste of food.  But the brand new word ‘De-Lovely’ is a new word and would have to be a word about how something looks, I think. So he is mixing his senses here while using all ‘d’ words. Then we have:
I understand the reason why
You’re sentimental, ’cause so am I
It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s de-lovely
You can tell at a glance what a swell night this is for romance
You can hear, dear Mother Nature murmuring low ‘Let yourself go’
So please be sweet, my chickadee
And when I kiss ya, just say to me
‘It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s delectable, it’s delirious,
It’s dilemma, it’s de limit, it’s deluxe, it’s de-lovely’
On the first of these two parts is basically a repeat of what has come before, the second is fairly straight forward, and in the third section, you have ‘chickadee’ which I think is some kind of bird but which some people, like the movie actor W.C. Fields, made popular as a term of endearment.  And then we have a series of ‘d’ words. We have discussed delightful and delicious and then he adds another word that can be used about the taste of foods.” She turned to Kichner to see if he could come up with a translation and he came up with something. “Then he put in ‘delirious’ which is about feeling that you are outside of reality. A ‘delemma’ is a puzzle. ‘De limit’ might mean past the limit. ‘Deluxe us a real word meaning top of the line, luxurious. So, now, Lucia or Sophia, would one of you two like to sing it for us?”
Lucia jumped up immediately and did just that and she did a passable job - especially at what Katherine thought was her real purpose, which seemed to be trying to impress Captain Kichner.
At the end of the song, the captain insisted that his prisoners return to camp. The Italians thought that was cruel and they should both stay for a nightcap.
But Katherine jumped in to say that she was really dead tired and would like to forego the nightcap and go to bed. “But I would like to thank you all so very much for the bath and the dinner and company.”
The two young women took her to their rooms where she braided her hair, changed into her clean second uniform, gathered the uniform she had worn coming in and which had been washed. It was still wet but she was sure it would dry quickly in the heat of the next day. She thanked everyone again and went off back to camp with the captain, got into her sleeping bag and was duely handcuffed up to the cot. The captain turned her over to the sergeant and the major and as he turned to leave, she said to him, “Good luck.” He looked back at her as if to ask what she meant but she was already asleep. He returned to the tent just in time for them to leave at dawn.
Go on to Chapter 4, Day Three
Copyright 2007-2008 by B. E. Warne: All rights reserved.
	
	
	
                        	




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PagesAbout / Introduction
Acknowledgments
Chapt 1: Day 1-Begin
Chapter 2: Day 1-End
Chapter 3: Day 2
Chapter 4: Day 3
Characters
Title Suggestions
X-notes
Copyright Notice
	Footnotes
	Inspiration
	References/Sources
	Songs & Music

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