Gone to Soldiers (98 page)

Of course we were not singled out for this largesse, as it has been divided by all the maquis groups congregated in the Montagne Noire region—the Jewish Army, the Jewish scout maquis, local farmers and Communists and men who would not go to Germany on the labor draft from Toulouse, Mazamet, Castres and Carcassonne, Eduardo's Catalonians who have been fighting the Fascists since 1936. The other groups outnumber us. From this area of rocks and trees, we have been harassing the Germans nightly and sometimes daily.
We
did not include me until this week, but I finally bludgeoned Daniela into taking off my cast. Now I am trying to regain the full use of my arm. I have been practicing shooting—with live ammunition, we are so rich now. When I first learned to shoot, I had to practice without bullets, because we had too few to waste. Eduardo showed me some tricks about loading the Marlin submachine gun and using the parabellum.

I have been serving my turn at guard duty at the outpost on the Labrugières Road, near Fontbruno, a tiny village on the hillside. Last night Papa showed up to take guard duty with me. Now he does not normally waste his energies at this outpost, so I figured at once he wanted to talk to me.

“How is your arm?” he began, as if he had not seen me shooting perfectly well that afternoon, and had not anyhow asked me about my arm five times already since the cast came off.

“Fine. What is it, Papa? What's on your mind?”

“You ought to talk to the Americans who came. One of them is a major. He calls himself La Mangouste. Another animal, I said, I am the rabbit. He said he was pleased because he'd heard of me. We haven't had a major before. I think something is getting ready to happen—all these supplies, feasting after famine.”

“Lev speaks English too. He can question them. He doesn't hate Americans the way he hates the British.”

“You always get more out of them. Your English is the best in the camp.”

“I'm tired of talking to Americans.” I sat down on a rock, looking down the road into the darkness. I did not feel like explaining that the American officers remind me of Jeff a little—enough to hurt—but they are nothing like him, and that too is a disappointment.

“This one is not naive. He has been with the maquis in Bretagne, and long before that, he was with the Greek Resistance. He is older than the children they've been sending us, and of more use. He knows something about fighting. He parachuted into France before their invasion in Normandy. When the front overran him, he went back to London, and now he's here. I want you to find out what you can. He asks a lot of questions, but I don't notice he answers any.”

“Tomorrow I'll talk to him. But, Papa, if he doesn't feel like talking, I can't turn him upside down and shake the words out.”

“Oh, he talks. He talks like birds sing all day long, tweet tweet.”

“So this is why you are standing guard duty tonight, because you want me to see what I can find out from your American major?”

“Well, it could be important.… No. It seems we can never sit down and talk. I cannot favor you too much, you being my daughter, but somehow it never happens that we communicate truly, except about munitions and plastique and couriers. By the way the men want to know if you think you have your cunning back with the plastique.”

“Not yet. My fingers are still stiff. I do the exercises Daniela prescribed, and I improve. But I wouldn't trust me to do a delicate job.” I do not want to try yet. I mistrust my own dexterity, first, and second, I do not want to go on night adventures as I used to do with Jeff, and everything will be the same except that he is gone. “I had better be a simple soldier for a while. The rifle and the machine gun I can handle nicely.”

“Bigon is not as good as you were. He doesn't get the timing just right for the maximum damage.”

“Eduardo is good, even with two fingers missing. Papa, I thought you wanted to speak to me about something besides plastique. So you said.”

He cupped his hands carefully and lit a cigarette. Then as we heard a distant sound in the road, immediately he pinched it out and stowed it in his beret. We slid into the ditch and waited to see who was coming. It was a horse-drawn wagon, so we shone our light and challenged them. It turned out to be a farmer taking his sick child to the doctor, ignoring the German curfew. We wished him luck and let him pass.

Papa pulled at his beard and shuffled around for at least half an hour, before he finally got himself wound up to begin the conversation I presume he had taken guard duty to have with me. “Yakova, I'm very sorry for what happened to your young man, the American commandant.”

“About that, I don't want to talk anymore, Papa. You and Daniela urged me to collect myself and press on. I have done that. Reopen the wounds, and I'll bleed again.”

“I'm proud of you for escaping.”

“If I had taken them with me, I'd be prouder.”

“Nonsense. I should have made contact with you earlier, Yakova.” Again he used my Hebrew name. The first time he did it, I thought it was unintentional. When he did it again, I knew it was not, and I waited to find out what was coming down the tracks, for something surely was. “It is a common way of thinking, that a daughter can't do what a son can, but my daughter has fought at least as well as anyone's son.”

I paced to and fro. Half of me was pleased by his praise and moved, and half of me was angry. Finally I said, “You saved one daughter and one of your daughters has so far saved herself. But you had also a wife and another daughter, Rivka. What of them? Maybe they too could have fought.”

He let himself down rather heavily on the rock I had sat on earlier. From the valley we heard an owl hunting, that hungry sad cry I had never heard before taking to the maquis and with which I am now so familiar I can tell that tawny owl from a barn owl. Much farther away two dogs were yapping back and forth at each other. He said, “You hold me responsible for what the Germans did. Is that fair? I saw my duty as fighting. I was trained as a fighting man, and I had the stomach to fight them.”

“Close to eighty Jewish children I led across the mountains, but not my own sister. It was too late for her.”

“Aren't they all your sisters? Or why risk your life to save them.”

“Touché. And yes, I am a Jew now.”

“Would you have married your American anyhow?”

“How do I know? I think so. My children would still be Jews. Would have been.”

“Lev is a good man. I don't believe his wife Vera can have survived.”

“Nor yours?”

“Vera was in the Resistance, and they had caught her before. With your mother, there is more hope.”

“Lev doesn't move me, nor I him. Daniela cares about him. But she waits for her fiancé Ari and Lev for his wife.”

“It's not a time for marrying,” he said. “Still, deep within me, I would like to see you settled.”

“You want me to set up housekeeping on the black mountain and sit on eggs like a mother raven? I mistrust dreaming.”

“I have a dream. I want to beat the Germans and then I want to take the good comrades I have fought with and live in our own land. Eretz Yisroel. We had a seder here, such a seder. Next year in Jerusalem. The time is coming. Europe stinks of our blood, it stinks in my nostrils.”

“Papa, you're French. You were born here, you're French through and through as I am. You think in French, you dream in French.”

“From the days the Vichy government passed the laws stripping Jews of our rights, voluntarily passed those laws, leaped to pass them, I haven't felt French. I've felt like a stranger, always a stranger, where I was foolish enough to think I belonged as a tree grows out of the earth.”

“You fight side by side with those who aren't Jews. We're all up on the same mountain trying to defeat the same enemy.”

“I didn't say I hate those who aren't Jews. In a just world, a man can be anything he pleases in his faith and his friends and his politics and others can do as they please leaving him in peace. But if I survive, I want to live out my life in a world where if somebody accosts me on the street or turns me down for a job, I don't have to wonder if he's an anti-Semite.”

“The British won't open Palestine to Jews.”

Papa put his face close to mine. His teeth shone against his beard. “Then we'll fight them. We've got used to fighting, haven't we? What I'd like is to bring back Naomi and try to find Rivka and Chava and for you to come too. I'd like us all to go together.”

“If Rivka and Maman come back from the dead, I won't break up the family. I'll go with you.”

“Good.” He took my hand in his. “That's enough for now.”

20 juillet 1944

Today as I promised, I looked for the big blond American major who calls himself the mongoose. He had been off raiding a convoy and reappeared with the men in high spirits, a group of maquis from near Vabre whom I know little about, mostly Protestant farmers. Eduardo had gone out with them for the attack on the column, for the same reason I expect that Papa set me to talk to the major: to figure him out, assets and liabilities, as they impact on us, whom he has presumably come to lead.

Eduardo did not seem surprised to see me waiting around. He gave me his crooked grin. “You want a report before Lapin? He's good. He knows his stuff. In war there are cowards who are no good, men who fight because they must and men who like to fight. Now me, I have been at war for eight years already, but it's a business for mad dogs. The good life is a life when you can fall asleep under a tree without somebody dropping a bomb on you.”

“And the mongoose?”

“He likes it. He gets very light, he shines in battle. I had a friend in Spain like him. We all die the same anyhow.” Eduardo went to report to Papa and I to find the major, who seemed not at all reluctant to talk.

“The boys tell me there was another American around here, Vendôme, and that you can tell me what happened to him. He wouldn't be with the maquis. He'd be running an intelligence network. Where is he?”

“Tie was doing both. It worked out that way. He died at the Milice barracks, in the jail there, on your D-Day. I am told they beat him, but he did not talk.”

He was watching me carefully. “They say he was your lover.”

“What does that matter?”

“Did he tell you his name? His real name?”

“Of course. Jeffrey Coates. He came from America, Massachusetts, Bentham Center.” I stopped because the major was cursing. He turned away, picked up a crude chair on which I had been sitting to pluck a chicken and smashed the chair to chunks of wood against a rock. Dalia, the sharpshooter, backed away with an exclamation and vanished into her tent, motioning for me to come after and leave the crazy American alone, but I understand anger in the face of death. I waited, asking, “You knew him?”

“I got him into this fucking business.”

“You were not his keeper, any more than I could be. He chose what he chose.”

He took my arm in a grip that hurt. “What didn't you tell me?”

“Much.”

“How did he die? Did they shoot him? How?”

“He took that poison capsule I presume you too have handy in your tooth.”

I thought he was going to break my arm in his reaction. Then he looked me in the eyes, his own grey as river ice. There is something in him I do not like, cold and hard, but just then we understood each other. “Goddamn him. He must have talked about me, about Zach.”

“He talked about his sister, whom he loved. He talked about his father, whom he did not love.” I saw I was going to have to lie to him. “And of course he talked with affection of you, of Zach.”

“He never felt real affection for anybody in the world. He was lovable, wasn't he, our Jeff? He permitted himself to be loved but that was it. Even that bored him fast enough, didn't it?”

I didn't answer because frankly that seemed nonsense. This man is cold, not Jeff. We were all better friends to him, and that was why he wanted to stay with us. Finally I thought of something I could say. “He loved this landscape, especially around Lacaune. He planned to settle here after the war.”

“If I'd been here, I could have covered his ass. He wasn't following procedures, obviously. He was taking suicidal chances.”

“They only caught us because they had tailed one of his agents and were waiting for us to appear at the drop site.”

His eyes were cold and still. “But they let you go.”

“I escaped.” I turned away. Suddenly I was sick of his suspicions and his ego. He seized my arm again. I said, “Let go of me. If you don't let go, I will defend myself.”

“Don't imagine you could,” he said, sneering at me, but as if doing me a great favor, he dropped my arm. I went into Dalia's tent immediately, where I did not think he would bother me.

When I was sure he had left, I went to the tent Daniela and I share. As I did so, a Messerschmitt came over, the second today. The men fired at it, but it simply rose a bit and circled back. I hoped Daniela would be here so I could talk to her about the arrogant American, but she was with our wounded. I'll go help, but I decided to make an entry in my journal to calm myself. I find myself furious and roiled up. I am sorry I lied to please him. Jeff did mention a rich friend of his who tried to control him, and I am sure this is that master manipulator in the cold flesh.

He speaks French correctly but his accent is hideous and—Some kind of explosion, finish later.

Thus ends the journal found by Lev Abel.

From
Le Journal de Marche
, Sergeant Lev Abel, leader, 1st platoon, 4th squadron, Montagne Noire Corps Franc:

On 20 juillet 1944, 10:30, we were attacked by a large German force. This force we later estimated to consist of five Panther tanks, four antitank guns, 1500 foot soldiers of four divisions, various artillery and armored vehicles, with air support. After the strafing runs by six Messerschmitts, a runner reported that a German column was advancing from the Arfons road.