Wayfaring Stranger

  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.”

  IN 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 abou
t 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.”

  “Was she sick?”

  “No worse than anyone else here.”

  I CAUGHT A TRAIN that night to Marseilles. There was rain all the way to the coast. The chair car was crowded and overheated from a coal-burning stove and smelled of unwashed bodies and damp wool. The dawn was bleak when we pulled into the station, the sun little more than a pewterlike glow on the horizon, the railroad ties and rails in the yards shiny with waste that had been dumped from the passenger toilets onto the tracks. I brushed my teeth and shaved with cold water in the station and hired a cab to take me to the address of the pension given me by the clerk in the displaced persons camp.

  It was located four blocks from the harbor on a decrepit cobbled street where most of the buildings had been pocked by small-arms fire. I could see two large rusting freighters lying on their sides by the entrance to the harbor, their screws in the air. The pension was three stories high and made of stucco and had a dirt courtyard in back and two balconies strung with wash. I could hear children playing beyond the courtyard wall. A solitary palm tree extended above the wall, its fronds yellow and serrated by the wind.

  I gave the concierge Rosita’s name and waited, my heart thudding, as though I had labored up a hillside only to discover that the air was too thin to breathe. The concierge’s body was swollen with fat, her black dress almost ripping on her hips. Her eyes were as cautious and intense as a hawk’s. “Je suis un ami,” I said.

  “What do you want with her?” she replied in English.

  “To see her.”

  Her eyes dropped to my lieutenant’s bars. “The Americans machine-gunned my building. There were no Germans here. They robbed and destroyed the houses down the street.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Boche, les Américains, ils sont la même chose.”

  She gave me a dirty look before walking heavily up the stairs, her back bent, her hand clenching tightly on the banister. A moment later, Rosita came down the stairs. She was wearing a white skirt that went to her calves, with a frill on the hem, and a lavender peasant blouse. Her hair was thick and full of lights and cut short on her neck. She looked absolutely radiant. “Hey, kid,” I said.

  “Hello, Weldon,” she said. “How did you know where I was? I’ve tried since March to find you.”

  “A major in my outfit told me you were in Nancy. I went there yesterday and took the train here last night.”

  “Your commanding officer knew where I was?”

  “Don’t worry about the major. Let’s go to breakfast,” I said.

  “I leave for Palestine by boat tomorrow.”

  Outside, the sun had broken through a cloud and was shining on the cobblestones, slick with rain. “We can talk about that.”

  “Talk about it?” she said, looking up into my face.

  “There are lots of options in this world. You have to open up your parameters. Why limit yourself to one or two choices?”

  She started to speak, but I didn’t let her. I put my arm around her shoulders and walked her with me out the door and down to a café whose windows were steamed with heat.

  WE HAD YOGURT and smoked fish and freshly baked bread and marmalade and rolled butter, and coffee and sugar and hot milk, all the things you didn’t believe you’d ever be able to buy again in a European café. Rosita’s skin seemed to glow in the warmth of the café. Her hair had lightened during the summer months, and the streaks of brown in it had a gold cast that made me want to reach out and touch them. “Come to Paris with me,” I said.

  “I have to be on the freighter by nine A.M.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  She looked away from me and smiled. “Do you know how difficult it was to get passage on that ship?”

  “What’s in Haifa?”

  “A new life. Maybe a new nation in the making.”

  “I want you to meet someone. We’ll leave for Paris in two hours.”

  “Meet whom?”

  “You’ll find out when we get there.”

  “Do you realize how presumptuous you’re being?”

  “You’re going, Rosita.”

  “It’s been very good of you to come here. You’re a fine man. We’ll always be friends. But you should not be a romantic about these things. You shouldn’t dictate to others, either.”

  “There are other boats to Haifa. We’re going to Paris. We’ll go back to the pension and pack your things. Then we’ll go to the train station.” I didn’t know how long I could brass it out. My heart felt like a lump of lead. “Rosita?”

  “What?” she said irritably.

  I took her hand and held it on top of the table and did not let go of it. “You’re the one,” I said.

  “One what?”

  “You know what I mean. If things don’t work out, I’ll take you to Haifa myself. I give you my word of honor.”

  I GOT US A compartment for the trip to Paris. We pulled out of the station at 10:46 A.M. and were within sight of the Eiffel Tower at twilight.

  “Where is this person I’m supposed to meet?” she asked.

  “At the Jardin des Tuileries. Come on, he’s quite a fellow.”

  “Where are we supposed to stay?”

  “At a hotel on the Left Bank.”

  “How do you know Paris?”


  “I was here the day we liberated it. I met Ernest Hemingway here. He bought me a drink in the bar at the Ritz. I’ll take you there.”

  “I can’t believe I’ve done this.”

  “You’re going to love this friend of mine.”

  I hailed a cab in front of the train station. We got in the backseat, and she felt my forehead, then her own.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked.

  “I wondered if you might have a form of brain fever. Or if perhaps I do.”

  At the Tuileries I paid the driver and took our suitcases out of the cab and set them down on the walkway that led into the gardens. The air was damp and cold and smelled of the sewers by the Seine and the sodden leaves of the chestnut and maple trees that stained the fountains and stone benches. The light had gone out of the sky, and I could feel the temperature dropping. The autumnal odor on the wind seemed to presage more than a change in the season; it spoke of a winter that had no April on the other side of it; it spoke of the way the world had been since September 1, 1939.

  “Where is your friend?” she asked.

  “He’s coming.”

  She had tied a scarf on her head. She looked up and down the walkway. “I think we should go. I think perhaps both of us have acted foolishly.”

  “Look yonder,” I said, pointing. “He’s a little eccentric, but he’s a man of his word.”

  The figure approaching us wore a cowl and had a face that was a cross between a Canterbury pilgrim’s and a goat’s. He walked with a thin cane and wore oversize shoes and baggy pants and probably could have been called Chaplinesque. His teeth were purple with wine. He smiled broadly at Rosita and bowed.

  “This is Father Sasoon. He’s not formally a ‘father’ any longer, but he’s still called one out of respect,” I said.

  “Bonsoir, mademoiselle,” Father Sasoon said.

  “He’s a defrocked priest?” she said.

  “I think that’s the term normally used.”

  “Defrocked for what?” she said.

  “I’ve always been afraid to ask,” I said. “Father, let me have a word or two with Rosita, then we’ll take the next step.”