The Old Boys (20 page)

“Using you?”

“Asking me to collaborate.” Norman stopped talking, bit his lip, looked at the crucifix on the wall of my cell. “I had no idea that I was still so sad about all this,” he said. “Give me a moment.”

In a lifetime of listening to secrets, I had seldom before encountered one that shook me up as this one was doing. Human beings, women in particular, step out of character all the time and do unpredictable things. If Norman had been telling me about anyone else, short of my own mother, I would not have been shocked. But Lori Christopher—Paul’s mother, my uncle’s wife— had been the heroine in a romance that had transfixed me and the
rest of the Hubbards and Christophers for half a century. It was a surprise to discover that this maid of the mists had been flesh and blood after all, and that she had been trying to run away from the husband and son who had spent their lives believing that she was waiting for them to find her.

“Anyway,” Norman said. “I would have done anything for her. There was no other woman like her. I don’t mean her looks or her mind or the sex, even though all of it was wonderful. It was what it came wrapped up in—profound sorrow, never mentioned, not even in the form of a sad face or a tear. But always there. Accepted. Her fate.”

“You didn’t find this in any way theatrical?”

“Are you serious? She didn’t have a theatrical atom in her being. She was a person to whom the unbearable had happened, a person who had been in the power of maniacs. What had actually happened to her was already a nightmare. What was there to embroider?”

Lori told him the story of the Amphora Scroll, showed it to him sealed in its glass cylinder, described its contents.

“She must have trusted you.”

“She had good reason,” Norman said. “I have never told anyone that it existed from that day to this.”

“Not even your Uncle Yeho?”

Norman was not at all surprised by the question. “Not even him,” he said. “What Lori told him, I don’t know.”

I said, “Lori knew Yeho Stern?”

“He came to our house for dinner every sabbath so he could light matches and make phone calls without giving offense to the orthodox. He was a chain-smoker in those days and there was always somebody he had to talk to.”

“He met Lori in your parents’ home?”

“They met through my parents, but earlier, I think.”

“In Berlin?”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t know for certain?”

“With
Yeho nobody knew anything for certain,” Norman said.

“Did you ever ask Lori?”

“I never asked anybody any questions about anything having to do with Yeho,” Norman said.

In the winter of 1945–46, a bitter one all over the Old World, Norman awoke one morning in Jerusalem to find Lori gone. In true Christopherian fashion, there were no good-byes. She left a letter, addressed jointly to him and his parents.

“What the letter said, essentially, was thanks for the hospitality and good-bye forever,” Norman said. “No hint of where she was going or why. Of course I knew why. My mother and father didn’t. They were shocked by her bad manners. For a minute or two what she had done turned Lori back into a German for them. Then they remembered who she was and what she had done.”

Travel in those days, especially in the Middle East, was no simple matter. The British still controlled Palestine and its frontiers. They were already nervous about the work of Yeho Stern and other Zionist activists—the smuggling of European Jews into Palestine, terrorist incidents designed to frighten the British out of the country. As far as Norman knew, Lori still had no papers. In 1945 the chances of a German national, no matter how heroically anti-Nazi, moving freely across borders were close to zero. Unless she had help. Fortunately Norman was in a good position to ask the right person about this. As first light broke, he woke up his Uncle Yeho, pounding on the door of his room in the Old City. This was risky business.

“Yeho
was not happy to see me,” Norman said. “He came to the door with a big revolver in his hand. At the time, of course, he was considered the most dangerous terrorist in Palestine. But when I explained, he was sympathetic. He had the facts at his fingertips, of course.”

According to Yeho, Lori had acquired a Red Cross passport identifying her as a displaced Czech. She had left for Haifa to board a Lebanese freighter, the
Amin Gulgee,
that was bound for the Persian Gulf. Norman arrived that same morning, an hour before the ship sailed, and bought deck passage to the last port of call.

“Lori and I met on the deck as soon as the ship was beyond the twenty-kilometer limit,” Norman said. “She was not happy to see me, but short of throwing me overboard there wasn’t much she could do about my presence. She must have known that Yeho had a hand in the situation, just as I suspected that she owed her Red Cross papers and who knew what else to him.”

The
Amin Gulgee
was not built for speed or comfort, but the weather was cool by the standards of the region, and the long wallowing sun-scorched passage through the Red Sea and around the Arabian peninsula was pleasant enough. There was no possibility of lovemaking and very little opportunity for conversation. Lori shared a cabin with ten other women. The deck where Norman slept teemed with seamen and passengers day and night.

They disembarked at Bandar-e ‘Abbas, the first port of call in Iran. The journey had taken more than a month.

“The British were thin on the ground in that part of Persia and anyway I had a British passport,” Norman said. “So after paying bribes we went ashore without difficulty. However, this was Balochistan. A woman could not travel alone. Lori agreed that we would pose as man and wife. She had acquired a chador aboard ship and she put this on. I look enough like a generic Semite to pass for an Arab or even a Baloch.”

“You spoke the local languages?” I asked.

“Enough
Palestinian Arabic to be understood by other people who didn’t speak it very well,” he said. “Lori just kept mute inside the chador, as any Muslim woman would. Everyone assumed we were what we said we were.”

Then as now there were no railroads and virtually no roads in those parts. Air travel was far in the future. Norman and Lori took an ancient bus to Kerman, a journey of about two hundred miles as the crow flies.

“We traveled as the worm wiggles, assuming a worm could live in that dehydrated wilderness,” Norman said. “Half the time there was no road. Everyone would get out and push. The bus stopped at dark and we slept inside it until sunrise, when the starter would grind and wake us up. This was always a moment of suspense while the ancient diesel engine made up its mind to fire up. It took five days to get to Kerman, but when we got there we were welcomed, naturally, by a friend of Yeho’s.”

It was Lori who had the man’s name and address and the spoken phrase in Hebrew that told him that she was under Yeho’s protection.

“This fellow, Ibrahim by name, was in the caravansary business,” Norman said. “His inn was a hollow square made of tin sheets that buckled and boomed in the wind. Inside the square was a courtyard with a well. Dozens of camels were hobbled in this space. Swarms of huge black flies fed on their manure. It was stark, I tell you—not a pane of glass or a screen in the place. Sun beating down on a metal roof, the flies and the stench and dust drifting into the room on a delightful desert breeze that was the temperature of blood. Lori swathed in that chador.”

Until they saw the camels and the ruffians who owned them, Norman and Lori intended to join a caravan headed eastward toward Afghanistan. This was Lori’s plan, or as much of it as she cared to reveal.

“Ibrahim was horrified,” Norman said. “‘They already know you are not Muslims,’ he said in Hebrew, so that Lori would not understand. ‘These people are primitive. They will kill you on the
second night and take the woman. They will pass her around, make a slave of her and beat her, and when she wears out they will leave her naked in the desert to die.’”

Norman was convinced. He knew savages when he saw them, and so did Lori. But she still wanted to travel by caravan.

“She simply had no fear,” Norman said. “It wasn’t that she wanted to die, but danger just didn’t matter to her. This would have been strange in a man. In a woman it was uncanny. It was enough to make you wonder if a fortuneteller had described some other fate to her and, out of character as it seemed, she believed what the cards had told her.”

Norman feared that he would wake up one morning and find her gone again. Ibrahim forestalled this by providing alternative transportation before night fell on the day he delivered his warning.

“Who knows where he found it, but Ibrahim found us an old British truck,” Norman said. “Prewar vintage, but it ran.”

Ibrahim dealt in firearms as in many other things, and from him Norman and Lori bought two old but serviceable English sporting rifles, one equipped with a scope, and five hundred rounds of ammunition. Also water and spare gasoline in goatskins, a small tent with carpets in which, they soon discovered, a metropolis of fleas dwelt, and three sheep, a ewe to be milked and two wethers to be killed and eaten. All this did not come cheap— Ibrahim was a businessman, after all—but Lori paid for it with an open hand.

“Money seemed to be as irrelevant to her as caution, as though it was something that she wasn’t going to need much longer,” Norman said.

In the bazaar in Kerman, Norman bought men’s clothes for both of them. Lori wore her chador until they were well out of town, but then ordered Norman to stop the vehicle and went behind some rocks. She came back as a slender youth in pantaloons and baggy caftan, her bobbed hair concealed beneath a turban that she somehow knew how to wind. She no longer moved like a woman or even like a European, but like the fellaheen
she had evidently been studying aboard the
Amin Gulgee
and ashore in Balochistan. On the ship and the journey from the sea to Kermin she acquired a deep tan, and though she was more golden-skinned than most Balochi, in addition to being gray-eyed, she might—with a cloth across her face—pass for a boy whose mother had spent a night with an Englishman or a blue-eyed Afghan.

The only road north out of Kerman ran through a hilly salt desert. There were two or three oasis villages between Kerman and the point on the map, three hundred miles distant, where the road turned eastward across the Afghan border. And beyond that to the city of Herat.

Norman said, “I fully expected that I would die for love long before we got to Herat. Lori did not say that this was our final destination, but I couldn’t imagine a more hidden place on the face of the earth.”

On the second morning out of Kerman they were attacked by men on camels who rode out of a blinding white sunrise and riddled their tent with bullets.

“Because of the fleas in the rugs Ibrahim had sold us, Lori and I had taken to sleeping on the ground in the open,” Norman said. “On this particular morning we were on a little hill above the camp. We had our rifles with us. There were seven men in the attack. They were armed with jezails, old black powder muzzleloaders, and they riddled our empty tent with bullets. Without saying a word, Lori began firing. I had no idea how well she could shoot. But she knocked one man off his camel at a range of at least two hundred yards before I got in my first shot. My weapon was the one with the scope on it, which rendered it useless because we were shooting into the sun.”

By the time Norman got the scope detached, a matter of a few seconds, Lori had downed another man and wounded a camel, which threw its rider and was now running in agonized circles. The rest of the bandits were fleeing back into the blinding disk of the sun. Norman, who as you will remember was a trained sniper,
downed one of them and wounded another, who held onto his mount and kept going. The survivors were now out of range over open sights.

“Before I could stop her, Lori was running down the hill toward the camp,” Norman said. “She wasn’t wearing her turban and her hair was flying like a blond flag. I grabbed the scope and a box of ammunition and followed. No choice. I caught up with her just as she was leaping into the truck. She started it up with a roar and took off after the fleeing men.”

They were off the road, driving through open country. In such circumstances the old rattletrap could not go much faster than a running camel, but even a camel gets tired, and after a few minutes the men stopped on a hilltop, made the animals lie down, and began firing on the truck from behind a screen of rocks.

“Lori made a wide circle around the hill, then put the truck in low gear and drove it to the top of another little hill about a hundred yards away from the first,” Norman said. “The enemy’s jezails were pretty well at the limit of their range.”

This time the sun was behind Norman and Lori. She parked the truck behind a big rock, climbed to the top of it, fell on her stomach, and began methodically shooting the camels.

“Head shots every time,” Norman said. “The camels just jumped in their skins and died. I lay down beside her. She said, ‘The men are yours.’”

Norman had not been made a sniper by the British army because he was faint of heart, but this seemed extreme. The men were defeated, and where could they go without camels?