The Girl on the Via Flaminia by Hayes Alfred Page B

that was almost matrimonial, too, her saying the yes. She had gone out of the room then. He sat there, on the bed, unbuckling his boots, thinking how heavy and awkward they were, putting them carefully and noiselessly beside the bed. It was a very married gesture. The bed was frozen but the sheets were clean and he lay on the icy pillow, waiting for his own warmth to warm the bed, and for her return.
    It was a real pillow. That was what impressed him most that first night. In Piombino, a town north of the city, he had been in a house. It was a ruined house and there had been an orchard outside. An orchard of fig trees and peach trees and there had been some grapes growing in an arbor and there had been a vegetable patch with tomato vines. It was a week he had eaten more tomatoes than he ever had in his life. He put the tomatoes in the sun and let them ripen and they were wonderful. The sea had been visible, too, from the top of the main street of the town and there was a little island that turned out to be Elba in the bay, blue, misty and unapproachable. The pillow in that house had been his raincoat under the blanket. But this was a real pillow, and clean.
    He would have liked to have been casual and funny and to have said perhaps, “Come on, warm the bed up,” but he did not say it. It was because he was hoping that nothing would damage the very temporary truce between them.
    He lay there in the cold clean darkness.
    He could hear her undressing in that darkness. She was standing on the small rug next to the bed, undressing, and as he lay there he listened to and followed the sounds of her clothes.
    She must be shivering, he thought.
    Once on a road in the south when he was marching, there had been an oxcart. Oxen, slow, white, sacrificial. And the wooden cart, driven by an old man in a black hat. The heat, the green fields of early summer. It was near a village where the Madonna in a roadside shrine had been broken by a shell. And on the back of the creaking and slow-moving cart, on the hay in the cart, there had been a woman. Young. And the strong brown naked legs and the naked shoeless feet under the black full-aproned skirt. That, and her smile. In that brown strong beautiful face, that smile. In the heat, during the marching. Coming back into the area, after the twenty miles they had marched, and after passing the light British tanks with their regimental pennants and their drivers, goggled, dusty, and in crash helmets, leaning out from the turrets between their machine guns, he remembered that smile. Its whiteness.
    There had been, of course, the whores. And he had tried. He drove up, in the carriage they had hired, to the end of town, and outside the white stone peasant house there was a line of soldiers. They were very patient. The sun was hot, and the heat came up from the dust, and they squatted down on their heels in that line, waiting. There were two women in the white stone peasant house. The line moved about every ten minutes closer to the house and everybody was very patient, waiting in the dust and the sun, for the line to move up, like a chow line, and while they waited they squatted down on their heels and they smoked and then after about ten minutes the line moved up one man and they moved up with it and then they squatted down again, smoking and waiting. Even all the cognac he had in him at that time, and all the loneliness, had not been enough to get him to wait out that kind of line for what must have been at the end of it, and he walked back to town, and back to the bar near the Air Force club, and finished up the afternoon with cognac.
    Now he could not stand the waiting.
    He turned in the cold bed and found his matches on the small table and struck a match, the match flaring, cupping the light, and she stood there in the light of the held match for just a moment, her back toward him, looking at him over her shoulder, startled, for only a moment, then he blew the match out.
    In the darkness he