Ordinary Heroes (38 page)

But I sensed this was the place I was looking for, due not so much to Madame Trausch's information as to what I'd heard from Private Barnes. He'd described the lady of the house as "a round old doll," and there would never be better words for the woman wobbling along near the top of the pile.

I had started toward her, when I heard my name. On the far side of the heap, Gita held a hand to her eye. She was dressed in a makeshift outfit--a headscarf, a cloth overcoat with fur trim on the sleeves, and torn work pants.

"Doo-bean?" She seemed only mildly surprised to see me, as if she presumed I'd been searching for her for weeks. She climbed up grinning and struck me on the shoulder, speaking English. It was only my physical appearance that seemed to inspire her wonder.

"You soldier!" she cried.

Despite all the vows I had made on the battlefield, I found myself enjoying her admiration. I offered her a cigarette. She shrieked when she saw the pack and dragged on the smoke so hungrily that I thought she would consume the butt in one breath. I told her to keep the package, which she literally crushed to her heart in gratitude.

We reverted to French. I said I was looking for Martin.

"Pourquoi? Still all this with Teedle?"

"There are questions. Have you seen him?"

"Moir She laughed in surprise. The round old doll teetered over to see about me. Soon, the whole family was describing the last month. In Marnach, like everywhere else, collaborators with the Germans had been severely punished when the Allies took control, and thus, once the Germans returned, those known to have aided the Americans were endangered, less by the SS than by their vengeful neighbors. Gita and the Hurles had endured many close calls. For several days, they had scurried like wood mice through the forest, eventually stealing back here and remaining in the woodshed of family friends. No one had food, and there was little way to know which side would bomb or shoot them first. The Hurles still had no idea who had destroyed their house, nor did it matter. All was lost, except two of their twelve cows. But the father, the mother, and their two married daughters were safe, and they al
l c
ontinued to hold out hope for their sons, who like most of the young men in Luxembourg had been forced into the German Army and sent to the eastern front. Madame Hurle remained on the Americans' side, but wished they would hurry up and win the war.

"Qu'est-ce gulls nous ont mis!" The Germans, she said, had beaten the hell out of them.

"But no sign of Martin?" I asked Gita. She had not really answered the question.

"Quelle mouche ea pique?" she answered. What's eating you? You are angry with Martin, no? Because he played a trick. And me, too, I suppose."

"I received your postcard," I answered.

"Robert was very put out when I told him I wrote. But I owed you a word. I was afraid you would be hurt when you woke."

"And so I was."

"It was a moment, Dubin. An impulse. War is not a time when impulse is contained."

"I have had the very same thoughts in the days since.''

"Ah," she said. "So between us, peace is declared."

"Of course," I said. We were both smiling, if still somewhat shyly. "But I must know about Martin. Tell me when you last saw him."

"A month, I would say. More. Since I am with the Hurles. When the battle is done, he will find me here. He always does." She was blithe, even childis
h i
n her conviction. Assaying her reactions, the question I had been sent here to pose seemed answered. Martin had made no miraculous escape, had sent no secret emissaries.

"Then I am afraid Martin is dead," I said. "Qu'est-ce que to dis?"

I repeated it. A tremor passed through her small face, briefly erasing the indomitable look that was always there. Then she gave a resolute shake to her short curls and addressed me in English to make her meaning clear.

"Is said before. Many times. Is not dead."

"The men in his company saw him fall, Gita. Tank shells struck the building where he was. He died bravely.)
,
"Non!" she said, in the French way, through the nose.

I had watched myself, as it were, throughout this exchange. Even now, I could not completely fight off the fragment in me that was dashed that she took Martin so much to heart. But I felt for her as well. When I wondered where she would go next, I recognized much of the motive for her attachment to him. She was again a Polish orphan in a broken country. Even her time as warrior was over without Martin.

"I had very faint hopes, Gita. Hope against hope, we say. That is why I came. If he survived, I knew he would have contacted you."

She agreed with that in a murmur. I had toyed with the truth in my role of interrogator, and she might well have shaded her answers to me. After all, she wanted to be Bernhardt. But her grief looked genuine. She wandered down the mound by herself. She was not crying, though. Then again, I wondered if Gita ever wept. She stood alone, looking out at a field where a dead cow was frozen in the snow.

I asked Biddy how she appeared to him.

"Bad off," he answered. "I don't take her for foolin."

In a few minutes, I skirted the rubble heap to find her.

"You should come with us," I told her. She had nowhere else to go. "Even the cows you herded are gone. And my superiors may have questions for you. Best to deal with them now." I suspected OSS would want to glean what they could from her about Martin.

She nodded. "I am another mouth to them," she said looking back to the Hurle family.

We headed for Bastogne. Biddy drove and Gita and I sat in the back of the jeep, smoking cigarettes and chatting while she stroked Hercules, who took to her quickly. We all agreed his prior master must have been a woman.

For the most part, we talked about what we ha
d b
een through in the last few weeks. I described our airborne arrival in Savy, including the condition of my trousers. Every story with a happy ending is a comedy, one of my professors had said in college, and our tale of parachuting without training into a pitched battle had all three of us rolling by the time we'd finished.

"But why so desperate to reach Bastogne?" she asked. I had given away more than I wanted to, but had no way out except the truth. " Arrest Martin'!" she responded then. "These are foolish orders, Dubin. Martin played a trick. That is not a terrible crime. He has done nothing to harm the American Army."

I told her Teedle thought otherwise.

"Merde. Teedle est fou. Martin est un patriote." Teedle is nuts. Martin is a patriot.

"It does not matter now," I said somberly.

With that her eyes were glued closed a moment. I offered her another cigarette. I'd acquired a Zippo along the way and lit hers before mine. She pointed to me smoking.

"This is how I know for sure you are a soldie
r n
ow.,
,
I showed her the callus I'd worn on the side of my thumb in the last month with the flint wheel of the lighter.

"You see, in the end, Martin was good for you, Dubin. You should be grateful to him. No? To fight is what you craved."

I was startled I had been so transparent. But that illusion was all in the past. I had not yet found a way to write to Grace or my parents about Christmas Day, but I told Gita the story now, quietly. Biddy stopped and got out of the jeep. He said he needed directions to Bastogne, but I suspected he wanted no part of the memories. I told her about lying in the snow in that clearing waiting to die, while the men nearby preceded me, and about feeling so shamed by my desperation to live.

"I thought all my last thoughts," I told her. "Including, I must say, about you."

Her full eyebrows shot up and I hurried to clarify. "Not with longing,". I said.

"Oh? What, then? Regret?" She was teasing, but remained attentive.

"I would say, with clarity," I said finally. "Our moment together had given me clarity. I longed for home and hearth. A normal life. To gather my family around a fire. To have children."

She had taken the Zippo and held its flame to the tip of a new cigarette for a long time. Through the blue scrim, she settled a drilling look on me, so intense my heart felt like it skipped.

"And I am what, Dubin? A vagabond? You think I care nothing for those things? The fire, the warm meal, the children underfoot?"

"Do you?" I answered stupidly.

"You think I do not wish to have a place in th
e w
orld, as other persons have a place? To want what you or any other person wants? To have a life and not merely to survive? You think I have no right to be as weary of this as everyone else?"

"I hardly meant that."

"No," she said. "I heard. I am not fit for a decent life."

She suddenly could not stand to look at me. She released the car door and jumped outside, where I felt I had no choice but to pursue her. Her dark eyes were liquid when I caught up, but her look was savage. She swore at me in French, and then, as an astonishing exclamation point, hurled the pack of cigarettes at me.

I was flabbergasted. Men always are when they sacrifice a woman's feelings, I suppose. But I had known better. I had glimpsed the fundamental truth of Gita in the instant she had raised her skirt in that barn. She would always be the spurned offspring of the town pariah. Everything about her character was built over an abyss of hurt.

I followed her farther out into the snow. She was already attracting attention from some of the soldiers on their guard post nearby. Her face was crushed on her glove and I touched her shoulder.

"I mourn Martin," she said. "Do not think your chatter about yourself has upset me.

"I had no such thought." I knew better than to tell her she wept for herself. "But I am sorry. I
should not have said that. About what I thought. That I felt no longing. I am sorry."

"No longing?" She pivoted. If possible, she was even more furious. "You think I care about that? You think that damaged my pride?" She smashed the last of her cigarette underfoot and stepped toward me, lowering her voice. "It is your poor opinion of me I revile, not your desires. You know nothing, Dubin. You are a fool. No longing," she huffed. "I do not even believe it, Dubin." Then she lifted her face to me, so that there was only a hairbreadth between us. "Nor do you," she whispered.

She was an iceberg, of course, on the remainder of the ride, tomb-silent except to the dog, to whom she spoke in whispers he could not hear. I sat in front with Biddy, but he could tell there had been a personal eruption and said little. As we approached Bastogne, Gita announced that she wanted to be taken to the military hospital, where she would find work as a nurse. Trained assistance was never spurned in a war zone. In so many words, she was saying she needed no help from me.

Arriving in Bastogne, I was startled by its size. It was hard to believe thousands of men had died for the sake of such a small place. The town had only one main street, rue Sablon, although the avenue sported several good-size buildings, whose fanc
y s
tone facades were now frequently broken or scarred by shrapnel and gunfire. Iron grates framed tiny balconies under windows which, for the most part, had been left as empty black holes. Here and there one of the steep peaked roofs characteristic of the region lay in complete collapse as a result of an artillery strike, but in general the poor weather had kept Bastogne from more severe destruction by air. The cathedral had been bombed as part of the Germans' Christmas Eve present, a crude gesture meant to deprive Bastogne's citizens of even the meager comfort of a holiday prayer, but the debris from the buildings that had been hit had already been shoveled into piles in the streets, and was being removed by locals in horse-drawn carts. Last night there had been yet another heavy snowfall, and soldiers on foot slogged along while the jeeps and convoys thick on rue Sablon slid slowly down the steep avenue.

I had no way to temporize with Gita. Instead we simply asked directions to the American field hospital, which occupied one of the largest structures of the town, a four-story convent, L'Etablissement des Soeurs de Notre Dame de Bastogne. Despite the fact that the roof was gone, the first two floors remained habitable, and the Sisters had given up their large redbrick school and the rear building of their compound to the care of the sick and wounded. The snow from the street had been pushed onto the walks and sat in frozen drifts, some the height of a man. Betwee
n t
hem, several ambulances were parked, the same Ford trucks that served as paddy wagons at home, here emblazoned with huge red crosses. Gita snatched up the small parcel she had gathered from the remains of the Hurles' home and marched inside. I followed in case she needed someone to vouch for her.

At the front desk sat a nun whose face, amid a huge starched angel-wing habit, looked like a ripe peach in a white bowl. She made an oddly serene figure in the entryway, which had been strafed. There were bullet holes in the walls and in the somewhat grand wooden rococo balustrades leading to the upper stories, while some kind of ordnance had blown a small crater in the inlaid floor, leaving a hole all the way to the cellar. After only a few moments of conversation, Gita and the nun appeared to be reaching an agreement.