The Pledge Read Online Free

connected people I know.”
    â€œI didn’t see it tonight.”
    â€œGive it time. Give it time. Are you hungry?”
    â€œI had to force myself to eat that damn cookie or whatever. Now I’m starving.”
    â€œGood. I’ll take you to the Jewish restaurant.”
    Bruce didn’t know what to expect, and he thought of the various possibilities that would place a Jewish restaurant in blacked-out, famine-stricken Calcutta. Now, in Calcutta nothing surprised him, and he watched, intrigued, as Legerman conducted the jeep driver through a seemingly endless maze of streets, the more so as the jeep rode without lights, with only the moon to light the way.
    â€œWhat do you do when there’s no moon?” he asked Legerman.
    â€œNot a hell of a lot.”
    For Bruce, the city had become another world, a strange, ghostly place, painted over with silver. Families huddled together, asleep on the sidewalks; lean, half-starved cows were everywhere; and people awake moved slowly. An occasional streetcar thundered by, shattering the silver silence, and sometimes a taxi with the two fierce Sikhs sitting side by side, and sometimes an army vehicle, British or American, racing through the streets.
    â€œWhen they hit someone, they don’t stop,” Legerman said, and the driver of the jeep, a Pfc from the motor pool, said, “I had officers in here told me to hit a wog. I told the fucken shitheads that a jeep can’t do it. I told them to get an army truck, they wanted to hunt wogs.”
    â€œYou’re kidding,” Bruce said.
    â€œHe ain’t kidding,” Legerman said.
    It was ten o’clock when they reached the Jewish restaurant, a handsome building with a white stone front. Legerman told the driver to pick them up at midnight. The driver was dating a nurse at the general hospital, and he was pleased with the break. “This gives me an hour with Maddie. An hour is a challenge.” Bruce, recalling the Sixth Avenue Delicatessen and mountainous sandwiches of hot pastrami and corned beef, was unprepared for the elegant dining room, the fourteen-foot-high ceilings with their gently revolving fans, the tables with their spotless white cloths and the well-dressed Hindus and Bengalis as well as British and American officers, dining with Red Cross women and nurses.
    â€œNot the Sixth Avenue Deli,” Bruce said.
    The proprietor came to meet them and shook hands eagerly with Legerman and Bruce and ushered them to a table in a quiet corner, sitting with them for a few minutes and inquiring from Legerman what might be the progress of the war. His name was Abel Shar, a slender man with small, elegant features, a skin almost black, and silky black hair. When he left them, Bruce said, “I suppose he’s Jewish?”
    â€œThat’s right. They came here two thousand, three hundred years ago. He put on a big Passover dinner for Jewish GI’s, and he serves cold beer. What more can you ask for, twelve thousand miles from home? We manage to find potatoes for him, a sack here and there that the army loses. He’ll bring us Indian food if you want it, but mostly we have beer and potato pancakes when we’re here. His potato pancakes are better than my mother’s.”
    Bruce agreed that they were extraordinary potato pancakes, small, hot, and crisp, fried in deep fat; and he was also coming to the conclusion that Hal Legerman was an extraordinary man. His desire to be alone, to brood and weep over the immeasurable human suffering that was Calcutta disappeared. More GI’s drifted into the restaurant, until a dozen young men were pressed around the table, eating potato pancakes and drinking ice cold beer, and arguing hotly about the past, the future, Adolf Hitler, Burma, Assam, the Japanese, the British, the Americans, hopes, dreams, indignities, horrors, and Atabrine. They all took Atabrine, a yellow medicine that gave their skin a golden glow and served as a