A Perfect Madness (34 page)

As they neared the final rise where
Julia had been earlier, looking down on the nightmare taking place,
her grip tightened on Josh’s hand. He would want to run to the
smoldering timbers and fires still burning brightly in every corner
of the yard to find his grandmother and sisters. But when Josh saw
the burning desolation, he stiffened and stopped. Looking neither
to Julia nor Eva, only staring straight ahead, his eyes locked in a
catatonic stare, not on the house, but the barn still covered in
great flames. His grandmother and sisters would be fine, but not
the furry pet rabbits he loved. They were there in a wire cage,
somewhere, that’s all he knew. What they would become later, to his
surprise, was a wholesome dinner for three—badly charred rabbits
with some half-cooked potatoes found in the smoldering ruins of
what had been the kitchen. At first he cried when the rabbits were
found lying huddled together in the smoking twisted cage and
refused to hear of anything like eating his pets, but he finally
settled on the meal when Julia convinced him it was their way of
showing how much they wanted him to stay alive.

As night finally came to the long day,
the heavens surprisingly cleared and filled with stars, all
twinkling brightly from their chosen place in the universe to the
earth below. It was a beautiful night by any measure, one that
would not quickly be forgotten. Julia cleared a small area on the
ground next to a large cone of glowing embers where the three could
bed down for the night. The immediate area around the crumbled
walls of the house was no longer frozen, and actually was
pleasurably warm to the touch. Josh’s eyes closed in sleep within
minutes after Eva stretched out next to him on the ground, holding
his body close to hers as she had before. She would sleep no more
than two hours before Julia would take her place. They would
alternate two times during the night, one sleeping, the other
watching for any distant lights of returning German patrols. Eva
had been right that the Germans wouldn’t follow their tracks
leading away from the railroad. Instead, once the tracks were
discovered they quickly increased their surveillance on the only
road Julia and Eva could exit on from the hills and fields they
were crossing. In one of fate’s strange ironies, they had become by
default the saboteurs the Germans were hunting to find and kill.
Julia believed that having Josh with them would help lessen
suspicion from patrols and the Gestapo who might be inclined to
question them. But she also believed the Gestapo would have the
patrols establish checkpoints at the road’s beginning and its
termination in Klatovy, and perhaps other places along the way.
They were good. And British intelligence had taught Julia that once
the hunt began, only a precious few agents escaped. Intelligence
had trained her to always anticipate the unexpected, placing her in
situations few people could imagine, daring her to go unnoticed,
not to be checkmated. This was done, she knew, because intelligence
and the enemy’s counterpart, the Gestapo, had always been a chess
game played out on a board as wide as the world. And it was in the
end game, when only a scattering of pieces and moves were left,
that the impossible must happen. Few in her training had ever
encountered an imagination as soaring and weird as Julia’s. Her
long childhood hours of pretending and playing with Rabbi Loew’s
golem had stored within her fertile brain a lifetime of all that
was unreal, yet could become real if one imagined it to be. It was
this same imagination that led her to the top of the class during
her university years in Prague, and then at British and Czech
intelligence. “A brilliance painted with two coats of common sense”
was the way Erich had described it. She was smarter than he was, he
believed, and everyone else around them, except maybe the
professors; but even then he wasn’t so sure. In analyzing a
difficult case, she would jump ahead to a tailored solution that
wasn’t always in the books, yet would work, while everyone else
continued fumbling around, trying to understand all the components
involved. She had no ego in her smartness, only a burning pride in
being who she was, a Jewish woman, and he loved her that much more
for it.

Julia looked at her watch—it was near
midnight. While Klatovy was temptingly near, five miles perhaps,
they would never go there as the Germans expected. They would
instead use the road for only a mile, leaving few tracks to follow.
Traveling with Josh would be an added burden, she knew, but not
before they turned from the road into the hills again for the long
trek south to the woods and the small mountains along the southern
border. Dawn would break through the darkness in six hours and the
early patrols would begin their journeys back and forth on the
road. None should be stirring until then. It was too cold and the
roads too dangerous with snow and ice.

The night skies were clear now, with a
million stars watching over them, so tomorrow’s day would be
beautiful, Julia whispered, gently nudging Eva awake for her turn
to sit and watch the road. Before she took Eva’s place next to
Josh, Julia discussed with her what lay ahead and the difficulties
facing them traveling with Josh. What was necessary though, they
both knew, and what would blacken the days to come for him, would
be their revelation to him about his grandmother and sisters’
deaths. Nothing in Julia’s past was there for passing such pain to
a child, and she would leave the sorrowful task to Eva, who seemed
willing. It seemed to go with Eva’s philosophy about death, that at
any time those who died were never more than a step away from
living. Like next-door neighbors, Eva would say whenever she
discussed it. She would tell Josh that his grandmother and sisters
would always be that close, where he could almost touch them,
waiting for the day when he would be with them again. It was far
from what her rabbi said a good Jew should believe about death, but
to Eva, it was far less complicated and soothed the living soul
better. Nothing would be told about the horrors of their deaths,
nor the burning of their bodies, only that they were dead. Should
he press them for the truth, they would lie. So while they were
there, staying the night, Julia and Eva carefully kept Josh away
from the smoldering ruins where the burned bodies of his family lay
looking like nothing more than three piles of simmering charcoal
and ashes. Only the glasses of his grandmother could be seen,
smudged and curled, resting atop the largest pile that hinted of a
body beneath it.

Julia awoke at three. Eva had graced
her with an extra hour of sleep before awakening her. They had
planned to leave their stay at five but Eva refused to take the
last turn at sleep, suggesting an earlier start because of the
German dogs, something they hadn’t discussed. She convinced Julia
that when the patrols returned, along with the Gestapo, they would
bring tracking dogs that seldom failed to find a trail. Nodding,
Julia quickly gathered together the rabbit bones left from their
meal and carried them back up the hill from where they had first
come, dropping one or two, here and there, in their old tracks.
Then she pulled down the two layers of pants she was wearing and
urinated several places alongside the tracks. It was the best they
could do to forge a false trail that might delay the dogs longer
should they come. While she was gone, Eva awakened Josh, walked him
back and forth a short distance and told him to pee. When Julia
returned, she wiped Josh’s face with a glove of snow, gave him the
last of her chocolate bars, and stepped into the road holding his
hand. With Eva in the lead to warn of black ice on the road, the
three moved at a steady pace toward Klatovy.

Josh asked nothing about his
grandmother and sisters, which puzzled Julia considerably as she
walked along beside him. Perhaps he heard them talking when they
thought he was sleeping. She decided nothing would be said until he
asked about them, and then Eva would tell him. No questions would
come, though, until the morning had passed and they had turned
south into the hills. “Did the Germans kill my grandmother and
sisters?” was his only question. And when Eva said, lying,
“Probably, when they took them away,” he said nothing further.
Death was no stranger to him. He had watched his mother bleed to
death giving birth to the younger of his sisters. And before that,
he had watched his grandfather, whom he worshipped, leave life from
blood poisoning. Death to him, like it was to Eva, was a natural
part of living, and had always been replaced by someone’s love.
After his father left, his grandmother became that love; now it was
Julia and Eva’s turn to become his dead grandmother’s
proxies.

Nine hours had passed and Julia kept
squinting her eyes, studying the distant horizon ahead, looking for
the first faint shadows of the woods and mountains to appear. The
weather was the blessing they had been waiting for. Cloudless, deep
blue skies that seem to have no end ran on ahead of them for miles,
no longer shielding the earth from the sun’s warmth. With each
passing hour there was less snow, until none lay on the hills and
valleys before them. Julia was amazed at the strength in Josh’s
skinny legs. He seemed less tired than they were, asking only twice
to stop for water and to squat away from them to relieve his
bowels. They would stop and pause, though, every thirty minutes to
listen for the baying of trailing dogs, should the Germans have
found their tracks. But none came. The Germans did return, bringing
dogs as Eva predicted, but they had followed the smell of rabbit
bones and the urine left by Julia, and then the old tracks of Julia
and Eva leading from the railroad. Sniffing along the road for a
clear scent they could follow, they found none. Trucks and
motorcycles had passed by earlier, erasing any evidence of Julia
and Eva and Josh’s smell. Julia’s quick decision to travel another
mile in the early morning darkness before leaving the roadway came
from her gut this time, a feeling that distance mattered most when
you were the prey and the hunter could only find you with his nose.
The dogs’ handlers let them sniff everything there was to smell
along the roadway toward Klatovy for no more than a mile before
turning back. A mile without a scent would stop any dog, Julia had
figured.

By late afternoon Josh was ready to
stop this strange adventure of his, and began questioning the
whereabouts of his grandmother’s body. What had the Germans done
with it? Would they keep it for him until he returned? Julia would
not answer him, nor Eva, except to say the Germans had buried her
and his two sisters somewhere in Klatovy. Josh extracted from them
a promise of no consequences, that when it was safe to return they
would go with him to find his grandmother and his sisters’ bodies.
His grandmother had left without kissing him, something she had
never done, and he wanted to ask her why, even though she was in
her grave.

Josh’s words stung Julia. She had felt
the same unsettled pain when her grandfather died without saying
goodbye to her. She loved him dearly, as any seven-year old would
their grandfather, and he had gone without a hint of a goodbye or
kiss for her. Hers was a selfish demand, Julia learned at the time
from her father’s wisdom, that it was she who should have said “I
love you,” and kissed her grandfather goodbye a hundred times and
more through his dying days.

Julia put her arm around Josh as they
walked along.

“
Where we are going is not
too far now, and we will rest and find something to eat,” she
said.

Finally, in the honeyed light of the
late afternoon, a time just before the evening shadows unrolled to
blanket the earth, Julia and Eva picked up the woods and the
mountains on the horizon ahead. It was a new kind of country they
were entering, the dark green of the forests and the gray of rocks
that lay ahead. It would be dark, though, when they reached them. A
small village was hidden somewhere in one of the deep valleys,
Julia knew from her map, but whether it was east or west from where
they were was impossible to know. The morning would be the time to
worry. For now, they would move into the woods and find the best
shelter they could away from the bitter cold the night would
bring.

After making their way slowly for
another twenty minutes, around thickening trees and brush in the
darkening forest, bright orange flames of campfires suddenly
appeared at a short distance ahead of them. Julia immediately
whispered to Eva to wait with Josh while she scouted the unexpected
scene. Moving closer to a small opening in the trees, she saw a
group of men and women, some sitting, others squatting, in a circle
around two campfires. Close to them were several children hopping
back and forth playing some kind of game. They were either gypsies
or Jewish refugees fleeing from the north, Julia believed. But who
they might be made no difference—they were warm and would have
food. Slipping back to Eva and Josh, she told them of the strange
sight.

“
They are gypsies. We will
be welcomed, for a while at least, but we must watch them. They are
not to be trusted,” Eva said, cautioning Julia. Josh nodded in
agreement. His grandmother had told gypsy stories too many times
for it to be otherwise.

Julia knew, too, the heavy mark the
gypsies carried in Prague, where they were considered the lowest of
the low, even by many Jews there. But never were they considered so
by her father. No man should be thought ill of without a reason.
And race and religion would never rise to the level of any sort of
reason in his mind. How Eva and Josh felt was of little consequence
now, because an old woman gathering slivers of loose bark for
tinder had noticed Julia peering through the trees at the
campfires. Saying nothing, she stayed hidden until Julia moved away
to return to where Eva and Josh were waiting. At that time, she
walked quickly to a man standing alone away from the campfires and
told him of her discovery. Together they walked to the edge of the
clearing near where Julia had been and waited in the dark. In a few
minutes Julia emerged from the shadows, followed by Eva and Josh.
As they exited from the woods, the shimmering light from the
campfires danced on their faces, creating a frightening ghostlike
appearance to their sudden presence. Julia looked past the man and
woman, carefully searching the scene before her for any threatening
moves from the other gypsies, all standing now in a half circle
facing her. Only the children, who had quickly stopped their
hopping game, seemed to be smiling at her. When Eva and Josh
stepped into the clearing from the woods and came to Julia’s side,
two women, one of whom was pregnant, approached Josh, eyeing the
yellow star on his jacket.