A Perfect Madness (42 page)

When the guns turned silent, Julia
looked at the carnage around her. Bodies with arms and legs missing
were flopping up and down like fish pulled from the sea and left to
die on land. Eva was curled up next to her, trying to stem the
blood flowing from a large hole in her right thigh. Shrapnel from a
nearby explosion had ripped through her clothing and skin, missing
by inches the femoral artery and thighbone before lodging against
her thigh muscle. Julia moved quickly to help her. Using her belt
to fashion a tourniquet around Eva’s blood-soaked thigh, she
reduced the flow to a trickle, then doused the gaping wound with a
packet of sulfur. They would try to cleanse it again later when
safely in the mountains. Helping Eva to her feet, Julia turned to
where Django lay unmoving several feet away, his arms twisted and
bent horribly around his head and neck as if he were trying to rip
it from his body. Only the left eye remained of what had been a
beautiful man. All else was gone from his face. She had loved him
as a friend, though he wanted more from her. And now she would
leave him to rot in the fields for days until the Germans plowed
him into a mass grave with people who were not his own. Julia knew
no Christian words to say over his dead body, so kneeling beside
him, she took his bloodied hand and hurriedly recited the
Twenty-Third Psalm.

Later, when she and Eva had distanced
themselves from the field of the dead, Eva said to her, “You should
have screamed, ‘Oh Lord, Oh Lord, why has thou forsaken me,’
because He certainly was nowhere around Django and the rest of the
dead lying there.”

Julia looked sharply at
Eva.

“
Why do you say such
words, you are alive. He hasn’t forsaken you.”

“
I know. But only for
awhile perhaps.”

“
You mustn’t talk that
way. Your wound will heal fine,” Julia said, taking Eva’s arm to
steady her as they walked the narrow trail south away from Banska
Bystrica.

By the third day, though, Eva’s leg
had grown hot and stiff with infection. When night came and they
stopped to sleep, Julia rinsed clean the wound the best she could,
picking off the pus-laden scabs and sprinkling on the last dust of
sulfur. Two days of hard travel still lay ahead and all they would
be able to do was to rinse the festering hole with cold spring
water. At night she would hold Eva for hours as the fever chills
shook her body, singing to her every childhood song she could
remember until they both fell asleep from exhaustion. By the fifth
day, when they were standing looking down through the long,
shadowed valleys where Eva’s home lay hidden amongst a grove of
walnut trees, she had cried out during the night for her mother.
She was looking down on her from somewhere, Eva later told Julia,
but then her face had faded as quickly as it had come, back into
the darkness.

Exhausted and unable to stand any
longer, Eva sat down with Julia’s help, leaning her back against a
rotting tree stump for support. The gaping wound in her thigh had
turned a nasty color, oozing bloody pus and bits of black rotting
flesh and blood and shrapnel, soaking her pant leg a dark
reddish-yellow. The smell was worse, though. And when the mountain
winds stilled for a moment, the stench became unbearable. Eva knew,
as Julia did, that her leg was dying and her whole body would
follow soon without medical care; but the sweet scent of the rich
dirt in the fields spread out before Bratislava, which they could
now see in the distance, filled her nostrils and lungs, bringing
music once more to her soul. From where they were in the foothills
of the Carpathians, her farm home was less than four
miles.

“
We’ll be there soon,” Eva
said, her hollow eyes coming alive momentarily with
anticipation.

“
Yes, and you’ll get
better. We still have much to do together,” Julia said, helping Eva
to stand.

Julia struggled to keep from crying as
she looked at her old friend trying to steady herself so they could
begin the final descent to the valley. Unable to do so, Eva quickly
sat down again and looked over at Julia.

“
I don’t want it to end
here. Let me rest a while longer, and then we can go,” she said,
leaning once more against the tree stump and closing her
eyes.

Julia nodded and sat down next to Eva
and closed her eyes to rest, too. Soon she would have to carry Eva,
if they were to get to the farmhouse before dark. They had traveled
a long way together, and the thought that it might end soon
paralyzed her. The things they had done in the two years since
leaving the gypsy camp, fighting alongside the partisans as they
did, few people would dare to try. Such an odyssey would have
pleased the ancient Homer well, had he been traveling with
them.

Resting against the rotten stump, Eva
suddenly turned to Julia and told of her mother’s visit again and
begged to be left here should she return.

“
We will be in the valley
soon, and then I will carry you home. Your mother will be waiting
for you,” Julia said, looking at the setting sun drifting lower by
the minute. They needed to move now before darkness engulfed the
mountain.

The final descent to reach the valley
floor took longer than expected, but Julia was glad. It was
nightfall now and they would less likely be seen by German patrols
as they crossed through the vast open fields and vineyards leading
to Eva’s home. With Eva saddled on her back, Julia began the
arduous three-mile journey, all the while watching ahead as the
lights of hundreds of military vehicles raced back and forth in the
distance along the road to Bratislava. Julia knew that the Slovak
uprising had brought thousands of Germans to occupy Bratislava,
making it impossible for her to find a doctor who would come to
Eva, or even find what medicine she could to try and save her life.
When they neared the small stone home, Eva suddenly loosened her
grip from Julia and slipped to the ground. Leaning on Julia, she
struggled to remove her heavy boots and socks, crying all the time
from the piercing pain mixed with her joy in being home.

“
You must help me, please.
It’s the soil I want to feel,” she begged Julia.

Standing barefooted away from Julia,
Eva moved her toes back and forth in the rich, black soil, which to
her was the most wonderful feeling in the whole world. Time was
ending now for her, at a point when history seemed to be going
backwards, where wars were an everyday fashion, but she cared more
that time was ending before the warm spring rains came that she
loved so much, bringing new life to the land that was around her.
The dirt beneath her feet was all she really knew and was ready to
die for. Finally, she grew weary and collapsed in Julia’s
arms.

“
You mustn’t light a lamp,
they will see it,” she whispered to Julia. “Let me sleep here on
the ground tonight, so that I can see all that is above me. Right
there,” she said pointing skyward, “is where the morning stars
first began to sing. That’s true because my grandpapa told me so
when I was five.”

Julia nodded and began crying softly
as she stretched Eva out on the soft ground near the front door,
and then lay next to her. Looking upward, it did seem that every
star the heavens owned was looking down on them this night. She had
never seen so many, not even as a child.

“
It is beautiful,” she
said. “God has given us much to look at.”

Eva said nothing for a few minutes,
before turning her head to face Julia. “I have loved you much more
than as a friend. I think you knew, yet you didn’t turn away from
me or make me ashamed.”

Sobbing in great heaves, Julia put her
arms around Eva’s shoulders and held her close.

“
I know. You will always
be my precious friend.”

Julia had never experienced a night so
long, holding Eva until she stopped breathing. Death came to her
gently then, without a whimper or a sigh, but as it should be, in
the arms of love. Julia would wait until first light to carry Eva
into the house, laying her on the floor before the fireplace. She
had talked of the cold winter nights when she would lie there
watching, until she fell asleep, the dancing fingers of the burning
logs climb and disappear like magic up the chimney.

“
It would be a wonderful
way to go, drifting upward like a puff of smoke into the clouds,
rather than turning to bones and dust in the cold earth,” she had
said to Julia one night when they talked of death.

So Julia set about readying the house
for Eva’s pyre, piling anything that could burn into a large heap
around her that reached almost to the ceiling of the room. Then she
waited until dusk to light the fire before returning to the
mountains again. Free of Eva’s weight, she would reach them in less
than an hour. Looking back a mile away, she could see the flames
leaping to the sky, carrying Eva with them as she would have
wanted. The fire had spread, as Julia had hoped, to the small
outbuilding, causing it to burn brighter and longer. By now the
Germans were there. Such a fire was unusual and they would want to
know why. It would be the morning, though, before they could
uncover what had brought about the fire, and she would be hours
into the mountains by then, heading north once more to where the
partisans were.

Eva’s face seemed everywhere Julia
looked, as she hurried along the narrow mountain trail. At times
the grief pushed down on her chest so hard that it was impossible
to breathe, until she would stop and cry for several minutes. How
could Eva have died this way, when it was she who had promised to
bring her home to Anna? And she had believed her. Alone now, where
she would go and what she would do to stay alive were as unknown as
all the tomorrows gathered together. When Django was blown to
pieces, she had refused to accept Eva’s cry that God had forsaken
him; but now, with Eva dead, too, perhaps she was right that God
was nowhere to be found on the battlefields of war. What she had
learned from the two Jewish men who escaped from Auschwitz made it
seem even more so to her. All her family might have died there,
too, along with the thousands that did, making it easy to believe
that God was no longer interested in the mess that first began in
Eden’s garden.

At night, as she traveled north, Julia
came down into the valleys to gather what food she could find from
isolated farms backed up against the base of the mountains, always
leaving behind a few Reich marks in payment. Little could be found
though, this late into autumn—mostly wormy apples and rotting
potatoes and a few beets kept stored in barns to feed the pigs.
They were eaten though, worms and all, and the protein from them
kept her moving one more day closer north to Banska Bystrica, where
she hoped the partisans would still be camped. If the Germans were
there, she had decided, she would try to reach the dense forest
along the Polish border where many partisans had come from to join
the uprising.

On the day Julia neared the hills
above Banska Bystrica, she looked down on the small airfield
stretched out two miles south of the village to see the Slovak flag
still flying from the radio tower. It was what she saw next that
brought disbelief to her eyes, causing her to cry out in the cold
silence around her. Two B-17 Flying Fortress bombers had landed,
bringing supplies to reinforce the partisans and rebel Slovak army
still fighting the Germans. Two hours later she walked into the
command office where the American pilots were sitting drinking
coffee with several OSS agents that had flown in with the supplies.
She told them who she was and asked if she could fly back with them
to England. That was the only question she would ask the surprised
men. Forty-five minutes later, credentialed only by the stories she
told of Czech intelligence gone awry and the two years of fighting
with the resistance, Julia sat on one of the B-17s, glowing and
smiling as a new mother might do in the company of a group of
strangers. But her happiness was mostly for the sixteen Allied
pilots who had been shot down over Slovakia, who would be going
home to England with her. Yet they were as fascinated with her as
she was with them, trying to guess who the dirty and seedy young
woman was that smelled so bad, and why she was sitting on the plane
with them.

Julia, though, found it almost
impossible to contain the joy she felt and thought only of the
happiness that awaited her. Tonight she would take warm showers and
wear fresh clothes and dine with a knife and fork at a table,
becoming a young woman again.

***

TWENTY-NINE

Julia, England, 1944

T
he first hours of a
long night’s sleep came easily to Julia. Freshly laundered white
linens and the softness of the bed pulled her quickly into another
world she had been convinced no longer existed. It was when she
suddenly awoke in the early morning hours, unsure of where she was
in the strange new darkness surrounding her, that she began to weep
uncontrollably. The reality of Eva’s death had finally broken
through the shell of a deceptive grief that had shielded her until
she was safely home in England. Eva was gone, as was Django, their
songs silenced forever. And poor little Josh, too, whose song had
only begun. Through her tears, Julia wondered if somehow they might
all be together now: a Slovak Jew whose God labored in the fields
as she did and a gypsy Christian whose God was a magical fairy tale
and a little boy whose God was as real as all that he saw. Even
though their faiths were different, their humanity was of the same
blood. No longer trying to understand the silence that screamed at
her from within, Julia wept until the wells of her eyes were as dry
and empty as a desert, then fell asleep thinking of Anna and
Erich.