Eroica
When the demobilisation notices come, Nixon pulls strings and arranges for a permit for Berlin. After all that had been said about parachuting into Berlin, the carrot held out in front of them for two years, he isn't about to go home without seeing the Brandenburg Gate.
He says goodbye to Winters and boards a train, leaving the country of Mozart for the home of Beethoven. American soldiers look at him strangely, the man going further north and east instead of westward and home. But they weren't raised on ideas of German culture, on the idea that of all Europe, German music and architecture held a special place in the history of all that was good in the world.
He walks the devastated streets of Berlin, sees the Brandenburg Gate and the ruins of the Reichstag. He sees the Soviet flag flying over the city, and something clenches within him.
The Berlin Philharmonic are playing, and Nixon knows the moment he sees the sign - roughly scribbled in chalk on a half-burnt door either fallen, blown, or ripped from its hinges - that this is the reason he has come to Berlin. That the Philharmonic are still playing is amazing: a testament to the German love of good music. The church where the concert is held has no roof, and parts of the walls are missing, too.
He's not the only soldier in the audience. They're mostly officers - American, British and the occasional French. No Russians. But there are German civilians too, dressed in shabby clothes that show the privations of war, solemn faces, weary from a long day of fossicking through rubble and dealing with the new bureaucracy instead of the old. And when the musicians walk out on the platform, there is a rustle among the civilians as they let the weight of the world leave their shoulders, even if only momentarily.
It's the Eroica. Von Karajan - the newly-crowned darling of the Allies - is conducting. Nix has heard the Fürtwangler recording at home and knows that it's better than what he's hearing tonight. But the music lifts him the way it always does. And like the Germans around him he lets himself slide into the music, be swept away from the rubble and destruction around him; from the loneliness now that he was away from Easy; from all the uncertainty in his future. He's helped, of course, with a sip or two from his hip flask, but it really is the music that affects him.
The boys in Easy like - liked - to think that the only good music was the current stuff. But Nix has seen their faces, seen them puzzling over why four grown men would sit down among rubble and play a string quartet on instruments they probably held close to their bodies through every bombing raid, instruments that are practically extensions of their own selves. Without those instruments and without music, they would be rudderless.
Nix understands. It's why he's so glad that Dick will be coming to New Jersey after a short visit home to Pennsylvania. It gives him something to hang onto, something other than Vat 69 to calm him down when he realises that the war is over and he has to go home. The world back home won't be the same as it was when he left, and he wouldn't want it to be. But he's so used to foxholes and bad coffee and ill-fitting khaki shirts made of rough cotton. He wonders whether tailored shirts will ever feel quite right again.
The final movement begins in a rush, and then fades to hushed pizzicato. Why should he ever leave Europe, this place where the world's great orchestras keep playing Beethoven in the face of disaster and ruin. Where the buildings that are still standing are older than anything in his own country. Where there is beauty like he saw Zell am See and endurance like he saw in the townspeople of Bastogne.
Nixon, NJ has none of that. But it will, eventually, have a red-headed ex-Major who only smiles when it's really worth it.
And his dog. Come hell and high water, he's not facing life in New Jersey without his damn dog.