A Perfect Madness (28 page)

Julia exchanged glances with Eva, then
nodded to the man.

The chugging of the motorcycles grew
louder as they came into view, increasing to a frightening roar as
it resonated through the crisp air. Julia counted six, each with a
helmeted rider wearing heavy goggles and a submachine gun strapped
across the back. As they neared the narrow road leading to the
farmhouse, the last two slowed, then stopped at the entrance while
the others continued on. Parking their machines by the roadside,
they stood for a moment talking and smoking a cigarette before
starting to the house through the heavy snow. Neither one seemed to
notice, or pay any attention, to the double rows of tracks left by
Julia and Eva leading to the house. When they drew near, Julia
could hear their words, the closer of the two happily relating that
he would go home soon to see his wife in Mainz, where he hoped she
would become pregnant. Having a child would make him a better
soldier, he believed.

“
You must stay here and
hide in the rooms while I go and talk with them. They won’t come
in. They never do,” the man said, opening the door and going to the
two soldiers.

“
The bastard will betray
us—he knows we are Jews,” Eva said, moving quickly to the edge of
the window, where she could see the man talking with the two
soldiers.

“
Probably, but it’s the
reward he will get from the Germans that has him out there
talking,” Julia said, glancing to the kitchen where the man had
left his rifle. A fool’s gift, she mumbled.

Within seconds of meeting the two
soldiers, the man pointed to the house. Without waiting, both
soldiers started for the staircase holding the submachine guns by
their side. Julia and Eva were armed and waiting, kneeling quietly
in the left front corner by the kitchen holding the small handguns
they had carried holstered in a special inner waistband. Hidden by
the front door when opened, they could be seen only at the last
minute after the soldiers stepped from the doorway into the big
room.

“
We have the edge,” Eva
whispered to Julia as the door swung open.

Martin Drossen came in first and never
saw who killed him. Julia shot him dead center between the eyes the
second he turned his head towards the kitchen. The second soldier
fared no better, falling within a second from two rapid shots fired
by Eva. Before Julia could move, Eva jumped up and walked straight
to the man who had meekly followed the soldiers into the house and
shot him in the head twice.

“
You betrayed us, you son
of a bitch,” she yelled at his crumpled body beneath her feet, then
spat on him.

Julia hadn’t moved from where she
knelt, firing the first shot of her war with the Germans. She
looked closely at the bloody face of Martin Drossen, who had fallen
only a few feet from her, eyes open, frozen in death, staring at
her. His moment on the stage had come to this. Erich was right. It
is only when you can see the face of those who have died, those
whom you have killed and never knew, that war has any meaning at
all. Without the face, there is nothing to remember, only a
statistic. Julia leaned over Martin and gently closed his eyes,
then looked at Eva.

“
We have killed three men
this morning Eva. I wish God would tell us which side He is on now,
then we would know what to do,” she said in a remorseful
tone.

“
My sweet, gentle friend.
Do you think God is hanging around to see which side is going to
win this war?”

“
This man seemed to be a
kind German, that’s all,” Julia continued, pointing to
Martin.

“
He was. That’s why he is
dead. He wasn’t ready to kill us, or anyone else. Only animals
fight wars.”

“
Are we animals
now?”

“
Yes, fully grown ones.
Like you said, we’ve just killed three people,” Eva said, walking
to the door and looking toward the road where the two motorcycles
were parked.

“
Right now we need to try
and stay alive ourselves. These bodies and the motorcycles have to
be hidden before they are missed by other patrols.”

Julia rolled the soldier Eva had shot
onto his stomach, trying hard not to look at the man’s lifeless
face. With some effort, she pulled a small leather wallet from his
pants pocket, took the few Reich marks it held, and replaced the
wallet. The peasant man she would leave alone. In Eva’s eyes he had
betrayed them, but to Julia he was just an ignorant man trying to
survive for one more day.

Martin Drossen carried a beautiful
brown embroidered leather case for a wallet that held five Reich
marks and one photograph of a young woman in a nurse’s uniform.
Written across the bottom of the picture were the words, “Together
in love always, Maria.” Julia looked at the photograph for several
seconds, then for reasons hidden from her by the drama of the
moment, she placed the photograph in the inside pocket of her
jacket. Later, whenever she would look at it, doing so kept before
her Martin Drossen’s gentle face, reminding her always of the day
she became an animal trying to survive like everyone else in a
world full of hate. Perhaps, she would think, when the killing was
all done, she could go and find the young nurse and tell her of
Martin.

Eva burst through the front door and
walked to where Julia was sitting by Martin’s body, streams of
sweat dripping from her face.

“
We can’t use the man’s
spring pond to hide the bodies in—frozen over solid. But I found a
better place. Let’s take the old man first,” she said, signaling
Julia to lift his legs.

“
Where are we taking
him?”

“
Just follow me and try
and step in my tracks,” Eva said, backing through the door and down
the staircase.

Julia saw ahead the fresh tracks made
by Eva leading to the old man’s outhouse, and shuddered at what
they were about to do.

“
You won’t like it, but
it’s all we have. Somehow it seems we are always around shit when
it’s there,” Eva said.

When they got to the outhouse, Julia
saw that Eva had kicked the toilet loose from the wood floor it was
resting on, exposing the pit full of human feces and lime
below.

Eva stopped at the door and looked at
Julia’s questioning expression for a moment.

“
We can’t hide them under
the snow—they’ll find them when it melts,” she said.

“
I know. We should do it
quickly and be done.”

The old man was the first of the three
to rest his soul in the outhouse, with Martin Drossen last. Each
was pushed with some difficulty through the hole face down so their
arms wouldn’t catch on the floor. When it came Martin’s turn, Julia
tried to avert seeing his face, but couldn’t, and cried a little
inside. When they were through, though, thinking back on where
Martin and the others were made her glad she had kept the picture
of Maria—it shouldn’t be rotting in such a filthy mess.

As quickly as they had disposed of the
three bodies, Eva moved the toilet back over the hole, leaving it
unattached because of the heavy damage she had done kicking it
loose from the metal ties securing it to the floor.

She then followed Julia back to the
house, leaving their tracks as they were in the snow. They looked
no different than if the old man had gone to the outhouse several
times. Before going into the house, both picked up large handfuls
of snow to cover the gathering pools of blood left by the three
men. Julia continued to bring in more snow while Eva scrubbed the
floor with a short wooden floor mop she found in the kitchen. When
the mop turned red with blood, Julia cleaned it the best she could
in piles of snow away from the house. After fifteen minutes, only
three small spots remained where the blood had stained the floor.
Both then carried more snow to the fireplace, dousing the flames
and then the embers. Julia quickly kicked some of the dead embers
across the floor onto the remaining stains, mashing and scuffing
the floor with them. The stains could still be seen, but only if
you came in looking for them. When she was through, she went to the
larger of the two bedrooms where Eva was trying to reduce the only
bed quilt the man owned into a tighter roll.

“
The damn thing is too
dirty and smelly to take,” she said, tossing the quilt back onto
the bed, though it could help keep them warm in the nights
ahead.

“
Leave it. We need to get
as far as we can from this horrible place before other patrols come
looking for the two soldiers.”

On their way out, Julia looked back at
the kitchen and spotted a pint bottle of vodka sitting back in the
far corner of the countertop.

“
We can take that—it might
be warmer than the quilt and certainly won’t have any lice,” she
said, nodding to Eva.

Walking down to the road, they decided
to deliberately make two new rows of tracks in the snow alongside
those the soldiers had left coming to the house.

“
The returning footprints
might fool them for awhile. What we do now is just a guess,” Julia
said, as they both stood by the parked motorcycles, looking at the
frozen landscape all about them.

“
God surely is not going
to let us freeze to death standing here next to these fucking
German motorcycles,” Eva yelled, frustrated with the indecisiveness
about which direction they should go.

“
We have to go south,”
Julia finally said, “and push the motorcycles on the road until we
find a heavy stand of trees and brush that will hide them from
passing eyes.”

“
But our radio and weapons
are back the other way, toward Prague,” Eva said, pointing north
where the snow-covered road seemingly disappeared from the earth as
it blended into the vast whiteness surrounding it.

“
I know, but our best
chance is to reach the great forests further south of here. The
Germans will not come into the forests without a reason. There
should be more farms along the way, too,” Julia said, kicking up
the parking arm on one motorcycle and walking it onto the
road.

Twenty minutes passed before they came
upon an unusually heavy grouping of trees and brush ahead on the
right. Moving as fast as they could on the icy road, Julia saw a
small opening through the roadside brush leading into the woods,
and moved into them with her motorcycle. Eva quickly followed in
Julia’s tracks with the second motorcycle. Then she tore the
distributor loose from each machine, walked further into the woods,
and threw them into an isolated cluster of brush and
leaves.

“
Too bad they didn’t teach
us how to ride these crazy things back in England,” Julia
said.

“
Unladylike. We would
surely be ‘straddling’ such a big machine with our legs, you know,”
Eva laughed in a mocking English accent, flavored with her Slavic
tongue.

Julia laughed, too, but more from
relief, in gaining distance from the three men they had killed. The
Gestapo were too good not to find the dead soldiers and the
motorcycles, and even them, unless they were too far away to care
about. By her calculations they were ten to twelve miles from
Klatovy, a small town to the southeast of little importance to the
Germans, except for the railroad nearby. From there it might be
another eight miles to the deep forest along the German border.
They would be safe there, and maybe so in Klatovy, if they could
find one God-fearing person still willing to help them. She had
always loved this part of Bohemia, mostly because of its raw
beauty. Somehow it always stayed fixed before you, unchanging in
the summer heat and winter snows. Looking up at the broad skies,
Julia’s spirits gladdened when she realized that what she most
wanted was happening. Patches of deep blue had begun peeking
through small holes in the heavy blanket of gray clouds that had
kept all warmth from the earth. With each passing minute the
patches of blue grew bolder until the long fingered rays of the
afternoon sun broke through the shattering grayness, bringing their
healing grace to earth’s life again. The warming air, though, was
taking its toll on the snow and ice, making the roads much more
treacherous to walk on, and slowing Julia and Eva to a snail-like
pace. Yet, they both knew, the slushy roads would slow the Germans,
too, as they moved supplies. Other than the patrols, the roads
should stay empty until late in the day, or perhaps even tomorrow,
giving them a slight advantage in avoiding more
confrontations.

After two hours they reached a narrow
road turning southeast to Klatovy. The village, Julia knew, was no
different from many of the other small towns scattered around
Pilsen except that the railroad was there, which meant the Germans
would be, too. Ahead a hundred yards, a rail line could be seen
crossing the road, which she believed ran between Klatovy and
Pilsen. Upon reaching the crossing, she paused for a moment,
looking west towards Pilsen. Their contacts with Czech and British
intelligence were there, unless the Gestapo had found them. There
were no contacts in Klatovy. Even so, the small village would bring
them nearer to the great forest where they could hide safely for
weeks if necessary, until the warming spring winds arrived and the
Germans tired in their hunt for them. Either way would be like
testing the waters of hell once the hidden motorcycles were
discovered. Looking down a long span in the rails leading towards
Klatovy, Julia quickly saw that passing trains had cleared most of
the snow from the tracks and shoulders. Moving quickly onto the
gravel shoulder, she began walking at a much brisker pace with Eva
close behind. They would be in Klatovy in less than two hours, she
yelled back at Eva, as they moved deeper into the snow-covered
hills rising around them like giant puffs of white clouds that had
come down to rest on the earth for a while.