Gone to Soldiers (119 page)

He realized he could probably kill anybody, except his buddies. The only emotions he seemed to feel any longer were loyalty to them, brute fear and sometimes anger, and then once in a while, relief. Relief that he was alive. Relief when they could eat something hot and sleep through a night. Relief when the shells finally, finally stopped for an hour. That shell on Iheya had left him with impaired hearing in the left ear. Would it ever come back? Relief that Hickock was gone. The Marines had taught him to kill well and efficiently and without thinking, and he had done so. If Jack thought the worse of him for it, he never said a word. Murray trusted Jack, he had trusted him with his life a thousand times and he would trust him a thousand more.

The incoming mail was heavy that night. They heard one coming, the swish and then a great thud that shook that tomb but no explosion. They looked at each other, waiting to die. Murray mumbled that maybe it was time delay, but nothing happened. Just at dawn they crawled out. There it was, a .90 millimeter, stuck in the mud halfway. The mud was so deep it hadn't exploded, or else it was a dud. Jack crossed himself. Murray could only stare at it. One of the clichés the movies liked was there were no atheists in foxholes, but he had completely lost his faith. Any world like this had no god, that much was clear. The only lord was death. Jack prayed for them, but Murray could not. His sky was empty except for kamikazes and fighters and lobbed shells.

They had flamethrowers, and each tank proceeded with a group of riflemen around it. The tank commander stuck his head out. “Okay, Mac, I'm set up for flamethrowing, but don't you go leaving me on my lonesome when the Japs pop out of their caves with satchel charges.”

“Hang loose,” Sergeant Zeeland said. “We're sticking to you like fleas to a fat puppy. We're your shadows.” He put Murray on the BAR.

They passed the night's KIAs stacked up wrapped in their ponchos, only their boondockers sticking out, anonymous as any other parcels. Jack looked at him from his almost black eyes and he looked back with the same recognition. As they were lying behind the wall of a tomb shooting at another tomb, a runner checking on positions told them that General Buckner had been killed by coral fragments from a shell. Slo Mo was impressed. “Some battle, when generals get killed.”

“You know, you're getting more talkative,” Murray said to him.

“Is that bad?” Slo Mo already had that hollow-eyed half-dead staring look of too much combat. They all looked like that.

“Watch it.” Shells coming in on them. The concussion struck them and Murray found blood on his face.

“I saw High Pockets rubbing dirt in his shrapnel wound to get it infected,” Jack said. “That's one way out.”

Murray thought of the stack of bodies, ponchos with boondockers stuck out. That was the other. He shrugged. “Hey, the tanker wants to move on up there.”

“What's his hurry?” Jack asked, but he got ready to move out.

“When we get up by that smashed tree, watch to your right,” Murray warned Slo Mo, and then he went out at a crouch. What he felt was scared, and what he felt was that Jack was to his right and Slo Mo was to his left and that was all there was to count on in the world.

JACQUELINE 13

Tunneling

It was the last day of April when Jacqueline came to and stayed conscious. She was in a clean high hospital bed in a ward with sunlight pouring in. When she asked about Rysia, the nurse did not know who she meant. All the patients in her ward were from one or another camp. Some had undergone amputations and many had contracted typhus. She had had a bad infection. “They almost took off your arm,” the nurse said in a funny kind of American English Jacqueline had trouble understanding. It came out like, “Theyee most took off ya ahm.”

She touched herself, counting, all there but weak, weak. The nurse told her she was in Bad Nauheim in Germany, which frightened her, but the hospital had been taken over by the Americans.

The nurse was rattling on: “But you responded real nice to the penicillin which I bet you never did hear of before, and that's what saved your arm and your life, so aren't you lucky? You weighed exactly seventy-one pounds when they brought you in here, honey, and you don't weigh a whole lot more now, but we're going to fatten you up.”

Jacqueline had no idea how seventy-one pounds translated into kilograms—it sounded heavy—but she was still skeletal. With great effort she sat up, while the nurse, who she saw was redheaded and freckled, plumped up the pillows behind her and brought her milk to drink. Jacqueline had not tasted milk in four years. It was thick and rich like liquid ice cream. Sitting up made her heart pound.

“Oh, you had typhus too, but not as bad as most of them.”

She began to look around the ward. Some women were raging with fever, some amputees and some just lying there, grey skeletons under sheets.

When the nurse had gone away, the woman in the next bed spoke to her in Yiddish. She said that she had been in Gross Rosen. She came from Austria and did not know how it would be to go back. The Austrian government would not give any help to Jews, because it said they had only been racially and not politically oppressed, and UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) would not help Austrian Jews because they were not citizens of any UN country. She felt afraid to go back, afraid of hatred, afraid that nothing was left of her home, her family. “I had a daughter three,” she said, a shriveled woman of indeterminate age with great gaps in her teeth, “and I sent her into hiding with a farm family in forty-one. I want to find her, but I can't get any help.”

A daughter of three. The woman might be in her twenties. Jacqueline wondered what she herself looked like. When the nurse came back, she asked for a mirror. “Honeybun, you been mighty sick. Is your hair brown?”

Jacqueline nodded.

“It's beginning to come back that way.”

In the mirror she saw a skull. “Is that me?” she cried. A gaunt old man looked back, with grey hair three centimeters long and light brown in the last half centimeter. The eyes were enormous. The flesh was hung on the bones, blotchy with an odd purplish cast.

Jacqueline began to live from meal to meal. She was always hungry, although eating was hard work. She had an appetite that her body seemed fitted around, a cavernous demand to be fed. The nurse began surreptitiously bringing her leftovers that others had not finished, for in the ward many were still dying. She ate everything. There was chicken, dried beef in sauce, fried fish. Sometimes they had ice cream. Often they had canned fruit. She had not tasted anything sweet in a year, except for the jam just after she was shot. She felt a little ashamed, but she could not refuse anything. She felt as if her stomach were in her throat, voracious, screaming, a baby just reborn.

Every morning when she woke, she was back in the camp. Then she lay with her eyes shut tight feeling the sheets, and that reassured her. Here it was clean and no blockalteste screamed, beating on the sluggards, no shots rang out, no clubs drummed on flesh. She ate and she slept and she had nightmares, from which she woke soaked and shivering. She was sullen, she was angry, she was terrified. When she heard German voices in the hall, she tried to get out of the bed to run, but crashed to her knees, too weak.

She did not mind the American doctor, but when the German doctor came, she turned her face to the wall. The orderlies were German and played mean tricks on the patients. They would take the little mirror the nurse had given her and place it beyond her reach. They laughed at the woman who always wept. They pretended not to understand the German of the woman in the next bed. Then the orderly found a cache of bread she was hiding in her mattress and threw it out. Jacqueline was furious. That was her little food bank, bread she had saved from every day, in case the next day there was none. In the camp if you could save a little bread, you might live. That day the nurse came into the ward and yelled at the top of her lungs to all the patients that the war in Europe was over. Most of them lay and stared at her. Their war would never be over.

When she closed her eyes she saw women lined up for the winter appel in their grey shifts and ill-fitting clogs standing under the sleet while the SS counted them once, twice, again, again, while the woman beside her dropped and was clubbed to death in the snow. She smelled the burning flesh in her nostrils. She saw the open glazed eyes of those dead in the morning, worked to death, used up. She saw the smear on the wall that was the brains of a child dashed to death by a grinning guard. She saw the blood pouring from the severed breast of a woman with a dog set on her, tearing now at her throat. That was real. This was an unplace, among unpeople. The nurse had told Jacqueline her name many times, but she could not remember, for the nurse was a trick, a smile in the air like the Cheshire cat in
Alice
.

She began to stand. She wanted the mirror the orderly had hidden. She wanted to go to the bathroom alone, when
she
wanted to. She could only walk holding on to the side of the bed and then the next bed. Sometimes she fell. Soon she could go all the way past five beds to the bathroom. Once there she could use a toilet and flush it and then run the water and run it some more, drink as much water as she wanted and wash her face and sponge herself clean. Soon she was allowed to take a bath. She cried in the bath, her tears running into the warm water. She had little breasts again, like a twelve-year-old, the breasts of Rivka. That was why she was crying. Maybe Maman and Rivka were still alive. She had to get well and leave.

When she awoke the next morning, her stomach hurt. The pain wakened her and she had soiled herself. She had wet the bed. No, blood. For a moment she was frightened and then she realized she was getting the first period she had had since October. She wept again. Now she seemed to cry every few hours. The redheaded nurse carried a glass bottle into the ward with lilacs in it. Their scent made more tears flow. She had turned to salt water: a small spring behind a rock, that was her.

One day the redheaded nurse brought her a lipstick and powder to use. “Now, fix yourself up. You're getting a visitor. The night nurse tells me he came too late last night, and he said he'd come back this afternoon.”

“A man?” For a moment she thought of Jeff, but he had died in Toulouse; then of her father, but he had been killed on the Montagne Noire. Who would be here trying to see her? Henri? That was another life; he had had quite enough of her before she had moved out and disappeared under a name he did not know. All the people she cared about were dead. Only she had incontinently survived.

Her face with the makeup was a woman's face, the face of an exotic terribly thin model under chopped hair, a little browner now, strange in its striation, tipped with silver like a fancy fur coat.

“Vous êtes Jacqueline Lévy-Monot?” the man boomed out, still several beds away. In French he went on: “You were with Daniela Rubin?”

Oh, she knew him now. How could she not? She had been looking at his picture for years. He had lost that sleepy schoolboy look he had worn in the picture, even though Daniela had told her that when it was taken, he had already fought in Spain. When he reached her bedside, the words jolted out of her, without forethought or volition. “She's dead! I couldn't save her, she's dead! All the way we came from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen to Magdeburg. Then she died on the road, in the death march. She would not get up. She had typhus. We carried her two days, Rysia and I, between us, but then she lay down and died before morning. It was so cold. Her feet were bleeding, infected. The clogs they gave us did that. We were used up, rags. We'd been starved too long.”

He sat down by the side of the bed. “I'm Ari Katz. I was engaged to Daniela.”

“I know, that's why I told you. I know from the photo of you she always had by her, until they took that too from her.”

“When did she die?”

“Just before we escaped, Rysia and me. After she was dead, then I decided to escape. They were going to kill us all. They shot me then.”

“I've been trying to find her. I couldn't stop hoping. Twice I saw someone who looked like her, once on the roadside, once in Bergen-Belsen.”

“How did you get here? Daniela only knew you had gone over the mountains to Spain.… I used to take children over the Pyrénées. I was called Gingembre.” It was hard to remember that she had had names and she had done things she chose to do, once.

“You were Gingembre?” He frowned with surprise. “You're sure?”

That seemed such a ridiculous thing to say that she laughed. It hurt. She did not know when she had last laughed. “Back when I was alive. Of course I'm sure.”

He held out his hand to shake. “Everybody back in Toulouse thinks you are dead. They found your diary, your rifle and a body.”

“I am,” she said. “We all are.”

“No,” he said. “We're not dead. We're not even defeated. It is all only beginning.”

She turned her face away from him and did not answer. How dare this man who was tanned and well fed and healthy and wearing clean clothes tell her she was not dead. She would not look at him or speak to him. After a while he said, “I'll see you tomorrow.”

Still when he came the next day, she was sitting on the edge of her bed. She refused the nurse's cosmetics but would have dressed if she had anything to put on. “Bonjour, Jacqueline,” he greeted her. “My name is Ari. Ari Katz.” As if she seemed simpleminded to him and he must start over.

“What uniform is that?” He was some sort of sergeant.

“I was in the Second Armored Division, in reconnaissance, under General Leclerc. Oh, you mean—the French army. We get the uniforms from the Americans, and just stick our own caps on. Basically now I'm working with the JDC—trying to help Jews in the camps get into Palestine.”

“Would you see what you can find out about my mother and sister? They were deported from Drancy in December of 1942. I'll write down their names for you.… I would like to get out of here, but I have no clothes.”