Second Generation (50 page)

"A Spaniard by the name of Raol Garcia has a cafe in Villeneuve, and I lucked in there and got to talking about the war, and well, to make a long story shorter, he had a brother who was killed in the Spanish fighting, and when he found out that I was with the Internationals, he couldn't do enough for me. I got a meal and a place to sleep, and the next day, his brother-in-law drove me down to Lyon in his truck. From there, I hitched my way to Marseille. I'll try to be brief, otherwise this letter will have
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end, so I'll leave out the details. The thing is that when a Jewish kid finds himself a strange town, he can always get himself a bed and a handout at the local synagogue— which is what I did in Marseille. There I ran into another Spanish vet, a kid by the name of Brodsky, from the Bronx in New York. He had been there for a while and had teamed up with a couple of Marseille men who had bought an old fishing trawler and were running Jewish refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe into Palestine. They needed another hand on the boat, someone who could put together and use a 20 millimeter machine gun that they had bought from a Turkish arms peddler. So right there, I had the kind of a break I had dreamed about.

"For the next three months we ran the boat between Marseille and the Palestine coast. Sleeping people on the deck, we could take anywhere from twelve to twenty, and I guess that during that time we took better than three hundred people into Palestine. It wasn't all altruism on the part of the two French guys who owned the boat, not by any means. For them, it was a damn good business proposition. They took whatever the traffic would bear, and they paid me and Brodsky two hundred francs a month, because, as they put it, we were stupid idealists. They made a bundle, but at least when they were going to turn down someone who didn't have enough for the passage, Brodsky and I could kick up enough fuss to get most of them on board.

"It came to an end when an Italian destroyer put a shell through our hull off the coast of Palestine about ten miles south of Haifa. We had already landed our passengers, so there were just the four of us on the boat. That was the first time I ever tried to use the 20 millimeter, which was just dumb. Brodsky and I made the shore. We never found out what happened to the two Frenchmen. Maybe the Italians picked them up. Funny thing is, we didn't even know that the war had started. And the Italians weren't even in it. They probably figured we were running Jewish illegals and why not shoot us out of the water, or maybe they just wanted target practice.

"We weren't wearing shoes, and we had to hike inland about three miles before we found a kibbutz. I don't want to remember what our feet were like. Anyway, there we were, finally, in Palastine, so if this letter ever reaches you through the Levys, you can tell them that I made it at last, just as I said I would when I went to work for them seventeen, eighteen years ago.

"I'm going to try to get this letter out without putting it through the censorship, but just in case I can't, I won't put down the name of the kibbutz. Things are pretty hellish in Palestine. Many of the kibbutzim are under constant Arab attack. The British confiscate their weapons and just make it hard all around. This kibbutz was in a bad way. They had a lot of attacks, and they just didn't know much about defending themselves, and their whole armament was four old Mauser rifles and two Webley pistols. Barbara, I know how you feel about war and fighting and killing, and I think that by now I hate it more than you do, but there we were, me and Brodsky, and I guess we knew more about this kind of fighting than anyone in the British army of occupation. Either we got arms and ammunition or the kibbutz would be wiped out sooner or later. So Brodsky and myself, we trained six guys and we organized what is called a night squad. We would bribe an Arab to tell us where there was an arms depot, and then we'd go out at night and raid it. It was dirty, nasty work, but it served two purposes. It stopped the raids on the kibbutz, and it gave us the arms and ammunition we needed so desperately.

"Now, looking over what I've written already, I have to say to myself that nothing here is going to make you think very highly of me, knowing how you feel, but that's what happened, and I suppose we do what we have to do. Then what happened to me was this. We would have discussions in the kibbutz about what would happen after the war or maybe during it, when the Arabs decided that the Jews had to be eliminated, and hearing all the stories coming out of Germany and Poland, we decided that there was no other place in the world for the Jews to come but here in Palestine. So we had to find a new way to fight and defend ourselves. Most of the opinion was that somehow or other we had to have an air force, which is something to laugh at since there wasn't one Jewish plane in Palestine and maybe not one Jewish pilot. But anyway, that's the way everything goes in the Jewish settlements. They talk about tanks, and there are no tanks. They talk about artil-Jery, and there's no artillery. The same with the air force. They decide we have to have an air force, so we have to have pilots, and then everyone votes and I'm elected to join up with the British and learn to fly a fighter plane. " sounds crazy, but that's the way everything is done around here, and they say, Just learn to fly and then we'll a plane for you.

'That's how I came to enlist in the British army. The ntish recruiting officer tells me, Cohen, you want to be
^a
Pilot, we'll train you. And how I can be stupid enough to

believe anything a British army recruiting officer tells me is simply the story of Bernie Cohen, and the main reason why he'll never be rich or smart. The year that followed is something you must read about. It began with them finding out about my Spanish war record, so in their eyes I became a red and a Zionist, which is the worst combination in the world, and for two months I was in a labor battalion, digging ditches in Eygpt and building pillboxes and gun emplacements. Then they decided that my talents were being wasted, and they forgave the past and made me a rifle instructor. Then I was promoted to corporal and machine guns, and then I made sergeant, which is what runs the British army, because when it comes to brains, their officers are nothing to write home about. I was put in command of a kind of tin truck called a Bren gun carrier, and we were going to try to hold Egypt in that wonderful British kind of dumb desperation against Graziani. We had about 20 men and Graziani had some three hundred thousand and a whole air force and maybe close to a thousand tanks. Well, not exactly. We had three divisions and a lot of these Bren trucks and a few tanks. We waited for the Italians until December, and then Wavell sent out a patrol of some Bren trucks and some tanks, and we found a hole in the Italian lines, and then we kept on going. I know this is no way to write about a battle, but I don't want to write to you about any battle. You probably read all about it in the newspapers at home.

"I guess the Italians had no heart for the war or for the fascists, because in the next three months we destroyed the Italian army and took over a hundred and fifty thousand prisoners. With the karma that my Indian friend talks about, I was not even scratched. The worst that happened to me was a bout of amoebic, and I'm over that now. I'm back in Egypt, training men again, and still trying to work my way into the air force, like the kibbutz elected me to do. But it doesn't look much like it. Anyway, I have plenty of time to think now and to catch up on a lot of reading and to try to make some sense out of a life that doesn't make very much sense up to now.

"This letter has been written over three days, and when I began it I did not intend to do anything more than satisfy your curiosity. I am convinced you must have thought about me once or twice and wondered if I were alive or dead. So I felt that I had a sort of obligation to tell you that I was alive, and something about how I have been filling my time. Being so very far away from you gives me the courage to write that I think about you constantly, that I believe I love you more than I have ever loved any other woman, and that you are the best and most wonderful thing that ever happened to me in my whole life. These are my own rambling thoughts. For all

I know, you may be married. You may have a kid. I won't even ask you to write to me, so if this letter ever reaches you, you can tear it up and throw it away. As for me, I think this war will go on for a long, long time."

Barbara finished reading, and she sat there with the letter in her hands. It was much as if Cohen had transmitted his loneliness to her. How much had she thought about him, how many times? Certainly not constantly. There were times when weeks had gone by without any thought of him at all, but there were other times when his big, slow-moving figure lived in her mind's eye, and she had wondered at those times how he could be a soldier, his movements so slow, almost lazy; and she would remember the rapt attention with which he had listened to all she had said that evening. Well, she was not in love with him; she had never been in love with him. Her heart went out to him, but her heart had gone out to other men, and that did not mean that she loved them. How could she feel anything toward a man who deliberately took up killing as his vocation? She told herself firmly that she would not budge from a conviction as deep as any she had ever held, that killing was the ultimate monstrosity, the ultimate evil, and that to justify it in war or in any other struggle was compounding the evil with the most hideous of sophistries.

The door opened as she sat there, and Sally entered the room very tentatively. "Bobby?"

Barbara looked up at her.

"Oh, Bobby, darling, what happened?"

Barbara shook her head.

"You're crying."
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No." She touched her cheeks and they were wet. "Am

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 I didn't know."

"It's that letter, isn't it?" ;
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"
^{She held}
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to the girl. "Do you want to read

shouldn't. Should I?"

Yes. I want someone to read it. I think you should."

Sally nodded very seriously, took the letter, and sat down next to Barbara, who put her arm around her as Sally read. When Sally finished reading it, she asked, "Bobby, why did you want me to read it?"

"I had to talk to someone about it."

Sally threw her arms around Barbara and hugged her. "Oh, Bobby, I love you so much. I do. And I understand. I do understand. It's a wonderful letter. And he sounds so sad and so lonely and so far away."

"I'm being absolutely silly."

"Oh, no, you're not."

"I barely know him. The truth is, I hardly know him at all. I spent one evening with him. I don't love him. I don't love anyone at all, and that's what's so awful. I feel that I'm drying up and becoming something I don't want to be."

"Bobby, you're the most beautiful, wonderful woman in the world. Don't you believe me?"

Barbara stared at Sally, then suddenly burst into laughter. "You're so good for me," she said.

"Am I, truly? Please stay here. At least for a few days. This is a wonderful place, and I'll take you everywhere and show you everything. We all love you, Jake and Clair, and my brothers are just gaga about you, and Josh—well, Josh is absolutely swooning over you. Will you let me show you my poetry?"

"Absolutely."

"You won't laugh at me? You're such a good writer— you won't laugh at me?"

"Never. You'll show them to me right after dinner, will you?"

"Oh, Bobby, I do love you."

On the morning of the twenty-sixth of September, 1941, May Ling pulled down the shades of the house in West-wood, checked the gas jets on the stove, and then turned the key in the lock. Dan had already stowed their bags in the cab. Grinning, excited, wearing white duck trousers and a sport shirt, he stood by the cab and waited for May Ling. With her back to him, dressed in a simple linen frock, she might well have been the girl he met a quarter of a century ago. "Come on, come on," he called to her. "We go out with the tide at three o'clock."

In the cab, she said to him, "Danny, it's only ten o'clock. We have five hours. I've never seen you this way before."

"Because I've never been this way. Do you realize that I'm fifty-two years old, and I've never had a real vacation before. Not even that trip to the Islands. That was business. May Ling, I hate this thing called business. I hate the whole rotten rat race. There was a real estate agent in my office the other day. I had to practically throw him out. He wanted to sell me one of those big barns of a house in Beverly Hills. He kept saying I could afford it. Word's around that we're rich. How in hell did that happen? Well, let me tell you this. We may just never come back. Do you remember that beach on the big island?"

"Dodo Beach?"

"Right. A mile of white beach, tucked into paradise."

"That's nice, Danny, 'tucked into paradise.'"

"Well, I may just stay there and never leave it. Live on seafood. Spear fish. Let my beard grow. Barefoot. Naked, God damn it."

"You don't like fish, Danny. And I'm not sure I'd like you with a beard."

"You'd get used to it."