Warburg in Rome (40 page)

“It is difficult to talk,” she said finally.

“But necessary,” he answered. “Talking is what keeps us alive.”

She firmly contradicted him, shaking her head. She busied herself with her bag, withdrawing a cigarette pack and gold lighter. She took a cigarette, awkwardly held the pack for him. French cigarettes. He took the pack, removed a cigarette. After she had lit her own, he bent to the gold lighter she held for him.

Exhaling, he said, “Nice lighter.”

She looked at it. “A friend,” she said. When she realized he was staring at it, she slipped it back into her bag, but not before he’d seen what was engraved on it.

“That’s the sign for Christ,” he said.

“I carry the lighter . . . to please my friend. He does not know I am a Jew.”

“Who does know that?”

“You know it. Jocko told me that you’d guessed about the
mikveh
, my immersion.”

“I couldn’t picture you in a
mikveh
. I found the idea of your conversion hard to fathom. But it moves me, what you did. You once told me you did not believe in God, but you also said, If there is a God, He is Jewish.”

“Even Jesus was Jewish. That he was Jewish is enough. As for God . . .” She shrugged. “For me, the people are enough.”

“I have some idea what you are involved in. Jocko trusted me.”

“I know. I told him he could.”

“He even told me he had a source in the Red Cross. I knew it was you.”

“Your Red Cross lady.” She smiled thinly.

“So who was he on to?”

“Pavelic.”

“The Croatian.”

“Yes. Jocko was following a group of Croatian priests.”

“Jocko did not drive.”

She let out the briefest of sounds, yet it connoted both a laugh at the thought of Lionni driving and anguish. “Of course he did not drive. He was not alone. He was with a unit, a team of five. They all died. The Croatian priests had guards, apparently. Protectors. It was my fault for not insisting on that danger firmly enough. Their mistake: to imagine that those with Vatican protection—priests—would not also have had Ustashe protection—killers. I had been watching the Croatian priests—”

“At the Convent of the Holy Spirit.”

“Yes. There were never signs of armed protection. I reported that, but the unit leader made too much of it, making him careless. I wanted to go with them. The leader would not permit it.” She fell silent.

“I am glad you were not permitted,” Warburg said. When, instead of replying, she drew on her cigarette, he said, “Croatia was where your story began.”

“Almost. My story began before that, on the road to Trento.”

“Where your parents died.”

“Yes.”

“And now Jocko died the way they died,” Warburg said. “A supposed accident, but it was murder.”

“With Mama and Papa, it was murder. With Jocko . . . it was combat.” She said this calmly—not coldly, but with a matter-of-fact assumption that the combat continued. That’s how it differed from murder. Without looking at Warburg she said, “Your shirt. It will need mending. Is that how you felt, to make such a tear in your shirt?”

“Jocko was what brought me here to Rome last year. Because of the Delegation, the WRB had a way to begin. When I arrived here, he was all I had.”

“By now he was all I had, too. I know who killed him.”

Her benumbed voice chilled him. He remembered that night, sitting in the jeep:
A man I thought a friend attacked me . . . and I killed him
.

“Who killed him?” Warburg asked.

“A man with a deformed upper lip. The car wreck did not kill Jocko, a bullet did. The back of Jocko’s head was exploded, but where the bullet entered was intact. An up-close shot. An execution, precisely through his upper lip. A signature. The priest’s name is Vukas.”

“A priest?”

“He was a ‘relocation official’ in Zagreb. ‘Relocating’ Jews and Serbs. Serbs could convert and be spared the ‘relocation.’ Jews could not.” She looked directly at Warburg. “I saw Vukas tormenting children with a snarling dog. The flesh on Jocko’s arm was half eaten away—the teeth of a Doberman pinscher. That is Vukas. The worst of them are priests.” She stopped. What else was there to say? Priests. But then she resumed, “When my parents died, I turned to the Church—”

“Padre Antonio.”

“Yes. Père Antoine to me. With him, I prayed, ‘Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary,’ but the Virgin forgot. In the Church now, across the Tiber, Père Antoine is anathema, Vukas is protected. Vukas! Jocko said, Leave Vukas be. But I will see to his being killed. His death is my purpose now. Does that surprise you?”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Blame? It would not occur to me—blame. You have an American innocence. You came from the New World to the Old World to save the innocent. It was beautiful, watching you. Watching you make them give me the milk for the starving children. Watching what you did for Budapest. Only in Budapest did an action for Jews succeed. Watching what you are still doing for Jews in camps. You think I have avoided you, but no. I have been watching you. All this time. Your beautiful work. Saving the innocent from the guilty. But David . . . may I call you David?”

He was as calm as she was. “Of course you may.”

“David, innocence has nothing to do with it. None of us here is innocent. My ‘friend’—the gold lighter from Christ? He also is a priest. He is one of them, a German. Also one of the worst. Himmler’s priest. I trick him. He trusts me. He tells me their secrets. I tell their secrets to the Haganah.”

“But Marguerite, I know all this. Jocko laid it out for me, what you are doing. He asked me to join you, and I did. The thought of Nazi criminals escaping is intolerable to me. Why do you think I came after you just now?”

“Not because of Nazis, David. You came because I lured you—to tell you I am not innocent.”

“I knew you lured me. I came anyway.”

“Yes. Because, imagining me innocent—your Red Cross blue angel—you think you want to be with me.”

How bold she was. How right. “I do think I want to be with you, that’s true,” he said. “As for innocence, put it this way: if you want Vukas killed, I will help you.”

She laughed, a burst of breath through her nose. “You are innocent, but naive as well. What could you do?”

“We’ll see,” he answered, taking no offense.

She tossed her cigarette. “No. That would be wrong for you. I am beyond what is wrong. The innocent and the guilty—for me, that difference no longer exists. You must still uphold it. You are American.”

“I am a Jew.”

“Not all Jews are alike. The Church says we Jews are damned. In my case, it is true.”

Warburg said nothing to that.

She added, “Besides, no help is needed with Vukas.” She stood.

“Haven’t you noticed something, Marguerite? I refuse to be left behind by you. How many times have you walked away from me? You can walk away now, but you are not rid of me.” He remained sitting, looking up at her.

“Because you are innocent, David, I must say the thing more clearly. I am the German priest’s woman. His mistress. His lover. What pleasures he wants from me I give. Also pleasures he does not know he wants until I give them. He, too, is damned, but too foolish to know it. And Jocko—Jocko was my
protettore
. My pimp.” There. She had sealed herself against him for good. She added, cruelly, “
Now
, you are surprised?”

And, in truth, he was. How could he have allowed himself not to see this? He had pictured this woman naked, in the throes of lovemaking, in the arms of a man. Blue angel? No. He had never imagined her as untouched. But the dream presumed, of course, that the man in whose arms she peaked was him.

For a long time she returned his sad gaze, waiting for him to drop his eyes. He did not drop them. She found it in herself to say, “If it were otherwise, David, I would return your feeling with feeling of my own—for you. Only you. But as it is, I feel nothing. I am damned.”

Warburg slowly stood up. “That is not true,” he said. “I don’t believe it. You are the farthest thing from damned.” And with that he gently closed his hands around her covered head, brought his mouth to hers, waited an instant, and kissed her. She who was beyond surprise was surprised by his move toward her, but more by his having seen before she did what made her instantly responsive. She opened her mouth to his tongue, pressed her breasts flat against his chest, circled his body with her arms, felt the press of his erection. Her response was total, emotional, carnal—and chosen.

They kissed. She pulled back. “Oh,” she said, but meant, I am still alive.
Alive!
And then, more fiercely, she kissed him again. A moment later, Warburg was the one to pull back. “I love you,” he said, words that had never passed his lips. “Marguerite, I love you!” They fell back toward the hedge, behind it, and once again—in grief and its opposite—set about the rending of garments.

They made their way to his place, where they spent the rest of the day, into the night. At one point she waited in the bed while, still naked, he went into the other room. When he returned, he was wearing a bathrobe and carrying two tumblers, each with a couple of inches of amber liquid.

Rising to lean against the headboard, she pulled the sheet to her shoulders.

“Bourbon,” he said.

Taking the glass, she asked, “Do you drink too much?”

“No,” he replied. “I don’t do anything too much.” He joined her on the bed again, although still robed, and on top of the sheets.

“Too bad,” she said.

“I’ve always thought so. What about you?”

“I walk alone too much.”

“Perhaps I can help with that.”

She sipped the bourbon.

He sensed her allergy to the future tense, and understood it. He, too, had allowed himself to think of his small room as confining time, the brackets on a present moment that would last forever. The silence that came over them now carried implications that were new, and unwelcome. Was the spell broken?

Perhaps he had been the one to crack the enchantment by leaving the room, if only to fetch the booze. In the bathroom, seeing his robe on the hook, he had donned it without thinking, just as, at the sight of him wrapped in the robe when he reappeared, she had automatically pulled the bedclothes up to cover herself.

“You can walk with me to the river,” she said at last. She placed the glass on the bedside table.

“You can stay here,” he said. “We can sleep.”

“I could never sleep, David.”

“I was wrong before. That’s what I do too much of . . . sleeping alone.”

“Going to bed with someone is one thing,” she said with forced levity. “But staying through the night, that is something else. As you know, I have been with a man, but I have never slept with one.”

“In that case, may I be your first?”

“You ask politely. It doesn’t bother you . . . ?”

“The other man?”

“Yes.”

“I trust you. I trust the choices you must make.”

Marguerite shook her head. “I don’t.”

“I understand that,” he said. “But you should.”

She stared at him, and a kind of wonder showed on her face as she registered afresh his simple goodness. Oddly, that worked against him. She shook her head slowly. “There is just a wide, deep . . . something between us. You say ‘void’?”

“Gulf? Chasm?”

“Yes. Far too much separating us. You are good. This was very good of you, receiving me.”

“But it’s impossible?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I told you.”

“Because you are damned.”

“Yes.”

“But didn’t you hear what I told you?”

“You told me that you love me, and I answered you with all that I have to give. But it is not enough.”

“I told you that you are the farthest thing from damned. We came together as lovers, caught up in each other, finally, without really choosing it. Perhaps the emotion of having said farewell to Jocko . . . It was chosen for us. Isn’t that how it felt?”

“Yes, which makes the point.”

“But now, Marguerite, in this aftermath . . . you French have a word for it . . .”

“Tristesse.”

“Yes. Exactly. Between a man and a woman, this is the most important time. Not passion, but calm. If you allowed yourself to know me, you would see a man incapable of giving himself to what is damned.”

“You have given yourself to the death camps.”

“The death camps, for all their horror, are what make you and me know that we are alive. That first day, your passionate demand for what life requires. You would not be refused. You wanted milk for children. You demanded it. Why?
L’chaim!
You know that word?”

She nodded and whispered, “Life.”

“Marguerite, it’s what I saw in you. And what I love in you. Your deep, unquenched life. Out of which you act so bravely.”

“I am a killer.”

“For life. If you killed, Marguerite, it was for life.”

“But I told you also . . . I am not finished with killing.
There
is the chasm.”

Warburg said quietly, “‘For wheresoever you go, I will go. Wheresoever you stay, I will stay.’”

When Marguerite turned her face to him, her eyes spilled over. She attempted a smile, but it would not come. “I thought that was what the woman said.”

“But she said it to a woman, so perhaps I am half permitted . . .”

Warburg reached across her to set his whiskey down on the table. Then, as he had in the cemetery, he put his two hands at her face and looked directly at her. Tears were coursing down her cheeks, but she found it possible to return his unrelenting gaze. “I meant everything I said to you before,” he said. “But when I say it this time, it is different. What I am expressing to you is not longing or the fulfillment of a dream. You are not the figment of my desire. I am not your haunting stranger. This is the harsh moment of our difficulty. You are the real woman beside me, and I hear what you are telling me. We know that we are different. We know that obstacles remain. Obstacles that perhaps for others would be impossible. A chasm, too far, too deep. But not for us. Do
you
hear? Not for us. I love you, Marguerite. And I say that understanding very well that you cannot say it in return to me.”