Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (9 page)

“I’m sure you’re correct,” I said.

“You all right, sir?”

“Never better,” I said, looking at a deuce-and-half driving down the road, the back loaded with prisoners who may have been SS in civilian clothes.

I
RECEIVED TREATMENT FOR
frostbite but nothing else. I rejoined the regiment and stayed with it all the way to the Elbe River, where we met the Russians on April 25, 1945. We got wonderfully drunk with them. We punched holes in canned beer with our bayonets, and the Russians drained the fuel from the rockets at a nearby V-2 base. In the morning we woke up with hangovers and the Russians woke up dead.

I thought my hangover would fade as the day warmed and the flowers opened along the banks of the Elbe and the hilarity of the previous night slipped into memory, left behind with all the other departures from sanity that wars allow us to justify. I had never been much of a drinker and thought the weakness in my joints and the spots that swam before my eyes were the result of exposing an inexperienced metabolism to too much alcohol. By evening I began to sweat, and my hair was sopping wet and cold as ice in the wind, and I entered the first stages of a hacking cough that I believed was either bronchitis or walking pneumonia.

There was no transition in the progression of my illness. By nightfall I was burning up and doubling over each time I coughed. I wrote in my notebook,
I feel like there’s a chunk of angle iron in my chest. Maybe I’ll be better in the morning. No word about Rosita. A captain in G-2 said many Jewish survivors were being placed in displaced persons camps, but he could find no record of her. I think of her constantly. I see her eyes in my sleep. The coloration and the inner light that shows through them are like none I have ever seen. I don’t think I will be able to rest until I find her.

I just coughed blood on my hand.

A medic came into my tent in the morning and took my temperature and placed a stethoscope on my chest. He was a tall, bony kid from Alabama and said he had worked in an X-ray unit in a Mobile hospital before he enlisted. He hung the earpieces to the stethoscope on his neck. “Is there a history of respiratory problems in your family, Lieutenant?” he asked.

“As a matter of fact, there is.”

“You smoke a lot?”

“Never took it up. What are we talking about, Doc?”

“You’re wheezing like a busted hose in there, sir.”

“We’re not talking about pneumonia, are we?”

“No, sir, we’re not.” He lifted his eyes into mine. “There’s a new drug available that’s supposed to work miracles.”

Chapter

6

T
HE TUBERCULAR UNIT
was in a converted eighteenth-century French mansion in vineyard country, one with a wide stone porch that allowed a wonderful view of the gardens and poplar trees and the low green hills in the distance and a meandering river and the white stucco farmhouses with red Spanish tile where the owners of the vineyards lived. The miracle drug I was given was called streptomycin. I took other forms of medication, too, but I do not remember their names. In the drowsy warmth of the breeze on an August afternoon, I would sleep the sleep of the dead, with no desire to wake up.

I had no dreams of the war, as though it had been airbrushed from my memory. I wrote in my notebook,
If I allow myself to feel, I will drop through a hole in the bottom of my stomach and begin to fall into a place from which I will not return.
If I dreamed at all, it was of my boyhood home, where I had lived with my mother and grandfather. Sometimes I dreamed of the pets we had owned, and the windmill creaking in the breeze at night, and the way the rains had returned in the form of gulley washers, our pastures blooming with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush after years of drought.

But I did not dream of the war or hear the sounds that always accompany dreams about war. Perhaps this was due to the narcotics humming in my bloodstream along with the streptomycin, although I never asked what was being put into my system. The wooden wheelchair in which I sat, with its woven bamboo backrest, had become my friend. The countryside was a re-creation of medieval Europe, snipped out of time, the valleys cultivated, the grass on the hilltops golden in the sun, more like southern Spain than France. On a mountain not far away were the softly molded biscuit-colored ruins of a castle. A nurse told me it had been built by Crusader knights, and according to legend, a great treasure was hidden in its stone walls.
The Song of Roland
had found me of its own accord.

On a singularly hot day, I took my medication and fell asleep on the porch. I could feel raindrops striking my skin like confetti, but I didn’t wake up. I felt a nurse wheel me to a dry place under the overhang, though I never raised my head. I was inside a chemical environment that was warm and cool at the same time; the air smelled of flowers and rain spotting on warm stone. When I woke, the sky had turned to orange sherbet, and I thought I could see Knights Templar wending their way on horseback up the hill to the castle, the sunlight melting on their armor. Perhaps I was becoming the prisoner of a pernicious drug. The truth was, I didn’t care.

Mail was delivered early each morning. Somehow I felt one of my many attempts to find Rosita Lowenstein would be rewarded. I received APO letters from friends and my mother and other relatives. I also heard from Hershel Pine, who was back in the States. But there was no word from anyone about Rosita.

After breakfast I read the newspapers in the hospital dayroom and played checkers with a man whose left lung had been removed, which caused him to sit sideways in his chair as though his spine were broken. In a side room I could see a man inside an iron lung, a nurse placing a teaspoon of ice in his mouth. I went back to my bed and put the pillow over my face, trying not to think about the type of surgery that might be awaiting me. I thought I could smell an odor like wild poppies on the wind. Soon I drifted off to sleep and dreamed of a boxlike automobile that contained four individuals who had just robbed a bank and were heavily armed and dangerous. I opened my eyes and looked at the silhouette of a tall American officer dressed in suntans.

He was wearing aviator glasses. His hair had a metallic tone and was cut short and wet-combed, his skin sun-browned. He removed his glasses and placed them in a case. He snapped the case shut and slipped it into his shirt pocket, before letting his eyes settle on me. Major Lloyd Fincher was an officer who thought in terms of first things first. “Getting a little extra shut-eye?” he said.

“How you doin’, sir?” I said.

“I’m back at Division now. Pretty nice deal, actually.” He nodded and looked around as though agreeing with himself or indicating approval of the surroundings. “The nurses treating you okay?”

“They’re fine.”

“I’m quartered right outside Paris. It’s quite the place in peacetime. Paris, I mean. French ladies love a liberator. You have to fly the flag, though.”

“I’m hoping I won’t be here much longer.”

“I just approved your nomination for the Silver Star. We were a little slow on the paperwork. That’ll give you three Hearts and the Bronze and Silver Star.”

“Silver Star for what?”

“Gallantry in action at the Ardennes. You might think about going into politics when you get home. Or insurance. You know I run an agency in San Antonio, don’t you?”

“I don’t remember a lot of what happened at the Ardennes.”

“Others do. That’s what counts. For a promising young fellow like yourself, it won’t hurt to have the right cachet.”

I couldn’t track what he was saying. Maybe that was because his gaze never really focused on me. While he talked, his eyes were constantly roaming around the room. He dragged up a chair and sat down. “Are you listening?”

“I was never keen on politics,” I said.

“That’s because you’re a warrior.” He was holding a manila folder on his thigh. His gaze followed a nurse. “We had some times, didn’t we? You should come to Paris and enjoy the fruits of victory.”

“It’s a long drive down here, Major. I appreciate your coming.”

“I thought we’d be in the Pacific now. Frankly, I was looking forward to it. You know Japs can’t pronounce the ‘l’ sound, right? One of them starts hollering out in the dark, ‘Hey, Joe, I’m hit! Help me!’ Then one of our guys hollers ‘lollapalooza’ or ‘Little Lulu.’ If the Jap doesn’t yell ‘Lily lollipop,’ he gets hosed with a flamethrower. The marines are still burning them out of caves on Iwo.” His eyes steadied and looked into mine. “You knew a camp survivor named Rosita Lowenstein?”

“I was in hiding with her.”

“Hold on a minute. You were not in ‘hiding’ with her. You saved her life.”

“Sergeant Hershel Pine and I saved her life. She helped us save ours, too, at least when she could. The people who hid us didn’t speak English. Rosita did all the talking for us.”

“Yeah, that’s all in the file. But you know her, right? We’re talking about the same person? Rosita Lowenstein? A Spanish Jewess?”

I didn’t answer him. He opened the manila folder and removed several sheets of paper and read the top one to himself. “You don’t need this kind of trouble, partner.”

“Where is she?”

“That’s not important. Some people think our next war is going to be with the Russkies. Some people think we’d have been better off allying with the Germans in 1940 and attacking Russia. Not everybody in the camps was there because they were Jews.”

“I’m not following you,” I said.

“Did she indicate to you that she might be a Communist?”

“She said she didn’t have any use for Communists.”

“According to both British and American intelligence, her father was a Communist representative in the Spanish parliament.”

“So what?”

“She’s related to Rosa Luxemburg.”

I looked at him, my face empty, my eyes flat.

“You don’t know who that is?”

“Not offhand,” I lied.

“She was a German Communist known as Red Rosa. A bunch of brownshirts beat her to death and threw her body in a river. Red Rosa’s mother was named Löwenstein. That girl you toted for miles probably gave you TB. Don’t let her mess you up twice, son.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“At a displaced persons camp not far from Nancy. She’s probably trying to get to Palestine. That’s how the Brits became interested in her.”

“How can I contact her?”

The major replaced the sheaf of papers in the manila folder and rolled the folder into a cone. He tapped me on the chest with it. “They’ll make mincemeat of you, boy. There’s justification for their actions, too. We didn’t fight a war in two theaters so Red spies could infest our system and use our constitutional guarantees to destroy us. These people are vermin.”

“Say that again?”

His eyes went away from mine, his cheeks pooling with color. He got up to go. “I’ve got to run,” he said. He picked up my hand from the bed and shook it. “I get hot-blooded sometimes. I suspect you had sexual congress with the Lowenstein woman and feel you owe her. Do the smart thing. Go back home and be a war hero. Smile a lot. Be humble. People will love you for it. Don’t get them mad at you.”

“You called her vermin? Or did I misunderstand?”

He put his aviator glasses back on. “I hope she’s worth it. Come see me in San Antone if you want to learn the insurance business.”

I
N OCTOBER, UPON
my discharge from the hospital, I went to the displaced persons camp east of Nancy, close to the German border. I had written perhaps ten requests for information about Rosita Lowenstein to the camp’s administration, but I had never received a reply. When I arrived, I understood why. Many of the people housed there looked like shells of people. Many had numbers tattooed on their left forearm. Some stared through the wire fence with the vacant expressions of schizophrenics. Their common denominator seemed to be a pathological form of detachment; they seemed to have no continuity as a group, as though they didn’t know one another and didn’t care to. I saw none who appeared to be mothers with children, or children with mothers, or husbands with wives. I suspected that many of them were ridden with guilt because they had survived and their loved ones had not; I suspected that many of them would never tell anyone of the deeds they had witnessed in the camps or the deeds they themselves had committed when they were forced to choose between survival and perishing.

I saw a man wearing a white shirt with blown sleeves. His arms were spread on the fence wire as he stared into my face. His eyes were as white and shiny as the skin of a peeled hard-boiled egg, the pupils like distorted ink drops, his hair black and curly and uncut, his skin leathery, his teeth showing in either defiance or fear. He reminded me of the Christlike figure in the Goya painting titled
The Third of May 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid.
As a matter of politeness, I said hello. He made no reply. His chin was tilted upward, a question mark in the middle of his face, as though he were daring me to explain what had happened to him. I tried to hold his gaze but couldn’t. I walked away, his recrimination hanging on me like sackcloth.

Rosita was nowhere to be seen. “Where is she?” I asked the clerk in the administration building.

“She left last week,” he said.

“Where to?”

The clerk was sitting behind a vintage typewriter, his desk piled with paper. He was an international relief worker and spoke English with a British accent. “Are you a family member?”

“No. I pulled her out of a stack of dead bodies and carried her through an artillery barrage. I hid in a cellar with her for eight days.”

“Ah, you’re the one. She told me about you,” he said. “She’s in Marseilles.”

“Do you have an address?”

“She’s in a pension. It’s run by a Jewish relocation group.” He wrote an address on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “They have no telephone there. Do you plan to go to Marseilles?”

“Yes.”

“If I remember correctly, she leaves today or tomorrow on a freighter. It’s headed for Haifa,” he said. “Good luck. I’m sorry we were not able to help you earlier.”