Ordinary Heroes

  I, on the other hand, who had proudly reclaimed Dubinsky, who sent my daughters to Hebrew school and insisted we have shabbas dinner every Friday night, I now reposed in the nouveau-Federal sitting room of a Connecticut nursing home realizing that by the strict traditions of a religion that has always determined a child's faith by that of his mother, I am not really Jewish.

  These are the last pages of my father's account:

  I emerged again from the dungeon darkness into the brilliant day and terrible reek of Balingen. I suppose that humans recoil on instinct from the rankness of decaying flesh and I had to spend a moment fighting down my sickness again.

  Grove was waiting for me. I thought he wanted to know how it had gone with Martin, but he had other news.

  "Roosevelt is dead," he said. "Truman is President."

  "Don't be a card."

  "It's just on Armed Services Radio. They say FDR had a stroke. I kid you not." I had been raised to worship Roosevelt. My mother, who regarded the President as if he were a close relation, would be devastated. And then I looked to the nearest mound of broken corpses. At every one of these instants of paradox, I reflexively expected my understanding of life to become deeper, only to find myself more confused.

  I asked the MP who'd accompanied me if we had an estimated arrival time on the half-track that would carry Martin back, but the news about Roosevelt's death seemed to have brought everything to a halt for a while. Nonetheless, I wouldn't countenance the idea of spending the night within Balingen. Whatever hour the convoy arrived, I said, I wanted Martin transferred. We could bivouac with the 406th Armored Cavalry a mile or two away, nearer Hechingen.

  An hour or so later, vehicles reached the camp, but not the ones I awaited. They carried the first Red Cross workers. I watched with a certain veteran distance as these men and women, accustomed to working tirelessly to save lives, began to absorb the enormity of what they were confronting. A young French doctor passed out when he saw the first hill of bodies. Inexplicably, one of the wraiths moving vacantly through the camp, an elderly man who had somehow lived to liberation, fell dead only a few feet from the unconscious doctor. As with everything else, we all seemed bereft of the power to react. If the sky fell, as Henny Penny feared, we might have had more to say.

  Many of the American infantrymen were standing in little groups, speculating about what the President's death might mean with regard to the Nazis' final surrender and the war in the Pacific. I could see that the shock of the news was welcome in its way, a chance to put where they were out of their minds for a while.

  The half-track I awaited, a captured German 251 that had been repainted, finally appeared at 2:3o in the afternoon. Only a minute or so after that, Grove came to find me. We were preparing to load Martin. He would be in leg irons with at least two guns trained on him at all times.

  "There's an inmate looking for you," Grove said. "She asked for you by name."

  I knew who it was. A shamed and exhausted fantasy that Gita might appear had circulated through my mind, in just the way it had for months, even as I'd tried to banish it.

  "Polish?" I asked.

  "Yes, from the Polish camp. She looks quite well," he added, "but there are several young women here who look all right." He made no further comment on how these girls might have managed.

  She was in the regimental office that had been established in the largest of the yellow buildings the SS had abandoned earlier in the week. The room was empty, paneled to half height in shellacked tongueand-groove, with a broken schoolhouse fixture hanging overhead from a frayed wire. Beneath it, Gita Lodz sat on a single wooden chair, the only furnishing in the room. She sprang to her feet as soon as she saw me. She was still in the gray uniform the nuns had given her in Bastogne, although it was frayed at both sleeves and soiled, and bore a yellow star pinned above the breast.

  "Doo-bean," she said, and with the name, more than the sight of her, my poor heart felt as if it might explode. I had no need to ask how she knew I was here. She would have maintained her own surveillance on the building where Martin was jailed.

  I dragged another wooden chair in from the hall, taking a seat at least a dozen feet from her. We faced each other like that, with no barrier between us but distance, both of us with our feet flat on the worn floor. I was too proud to lose my composure, and waited with my face trembling, until I could drag out a few words.

  "So we meet again in hell," I said to her in French. I felt my heart and mind pirouetting again with the unaccountable extremes in life. Here I was with this gallant, deceitful woman, full of wrath and anguish, while I was still reeling from the reek of atrocity, sitting where some of history's greatest monsters had been in charge only a week ago. Roosevelt was dead. I was alive.

  Although I did not ask, she told me about the last several days. Martin and she had snuck in through the same breach in the rear fence the SS guards were using to slip away. After only a matter of hours, she recognized four people she had known in Pilzkoba and last seen on the trucks the Nazis had loaded for deportation to Lublin. One of them was a girl a year younger than Gita, a playmate, who was the last of a family of six. Two younger siblings, a brother and a sister, had been snatched from her parents' arms and promptly gassed when they arrived at a camp called Buchenwald. There the next year her father had been beaten to death by a kapo right in front of her, only a few weeks after her mother had succumbed to pneumonia. But still this girl from Pilzkoba had survived. She had marched here hundreds of miles with no food, her feet wrapped in rags, a journey on which another of her brothers had perished. Yet she had arrived at Balingen in relative health. And then yesterday she had died of one of the plagues raging through the camp.

  "In Normandy, Dubin, when we helped to direct the Allied troops through the hedgerows, I saw battlefields so thick with corpses that one could not cross without walking on the bodies. I told myself I would never see anything worse, and now I see this. And there are souls here, Dubin, who say the Germans have created places worse yet. Is that possible? N'y at-il jamais un fond, meme dans les oceans les plus profonds?" Is there no bottom even to the darkest ocean?

  With that, she cried, and her tears, of course, unleashed my own. Seated a dozen feet apart, we both wept, I with my face in my hands.

  "There is so much I do not understand," I finally said, and will never understand. Here looking at you, I ask myself how it can seem possible, amid this suffering, that the worst pain of all is heartbreak?"

  "Do you criticize me, Dubin?"

  "Need I?" I answered with one of those French sayings she loved to quote. "Conscience coupable n'a pas besoin d'accusateur." A guilty conscience needs no accuser. "But I am sure you feel no shame."

  She tossed her bronze curls. She was thin and sallow. Yet unimaginably, she remained beautiful. How was that possible either?

  "You are bitter with me," she said.

  You decimated me with your lies."

  "I never lied to you, Dubin."

  "Call it what you like. I told you secrets and you used them against me, against my country. All for Martin."

  "Entre l'arbre et l'ecorce it faut ne pas mettre le doigt." One shouldn't put a finger between the bark and the tree. In our parlance, she was caught between a rock and a hard place. "This is not justice. What you were about to do--what you will do now Martin placed in chains by his nation? He has risked his life for America, for the Allies, for freedom, a thousand times. He is the bravest man in Europe."

  "The Americans believe he is a spy for the Soviets."

  She wrenched her eyes shut in anguish.

  "The things they have asked you to accept," she murmured. "C'est impossible. Martin despises Stalin. He was never a Stalinist, and after Stalin's pact with Hitler, Martin regarded him as the worse of the two. He calls Stalin and Hitler the spawn of the same devil."

  "And what then is it he has been doing all these months, defying his orders, running from OSS, from Teedle, and from me? Has he told you his goal?"

&nbs
p; "Now? Lately, he has, yes. Up to the time of the Ardennes, I believed what he told you--that he was on assignment for OSS, as he has always been. He would not say where he was to go, but that was not unusual."

  "And do you believe him now?"

  "I think what he says is what he believes."

  When I asked her to say what that was, she looked down to her small hands folded in her lap, clearly reluctant even now to disclose Martin's secrets. And still, I cautioned myself that the reaction I saw might be another pose.

  "Since I took him from the hospital at SaintVith," she finally said, "he has maintained the same thing. Martin says that the Nazis are making a machine that can destroy the world. He wants to kill all who understand its workings and bury their secret with them forever. It is madness, but it is madness in Martin's style. It is glorious. He claims this is his destiny. For the most part, I have felt like, what is his name, the little one who walks beside Don Quixote?"

  "Sancho Panza."

  "Yes, I am Sancho Panza. There is no telling Martin this is lunacy. And I have stopped trying, Dubin. The scientists are at Hechinger. Martin has established that much. But a single device that could reduce London to cinders? It is fantasy, like so much that Martin tells himself. But it will surely be the last.

  "Because?"

  "Because he will die trying to do this. A man with one hand? His left leg is still barely of any use. The pain is so severe at night from the nerves that were burned that he sheds tears in his sleep. And he has no one to help him."

  "Except you."

  "Not I. I will have no part of this, Dubin. He does not ask it. And I would not go. I have been a member of the resistance, not a vigilante. He has no allies in this, no organization. But it is paramount to him nonetheless."

  "But not because of the Soviets?"

  "Dubin, it is how he wishes to die. Whether or not he admits as much to himself, death is clearly his goal. He is maimed and in unending pain. But now when he dies, as he surely will, he will believe he was doing no less than assuring the safety of the world. It is a glory as great as the one he has always wished for. That is what you would deny him. He says that the Americans will hang him instead, if he is caught. True?"

  I had told Martin as much a few hours earlier, and with time to calculate, I had decided it was no exaggeration. The story Martin had told me would be enough to send him to the gallows. Whether he was working for the Soviets, as most of his superiors would believe, or as the new Flash Gordon, he had admitted that he was an American soldier trying to undermine American forces and deny them a weapon regarded as essential to the security of the United States. That would, at a minimum, make him a traitor and a mutineer. The law would need to sift no finer.

  "And is that just, Dubin?" she asked, once I'd nodded.

  "Just? Compared to anything that has happened in this place, it is just. Martin disobeyed orders. He brought this on himself."

  "But is that what you wish to see, Dubin? Martin trembling at the end of a rope?"

  "That is not my choice, Gita. I must do my duty." "So the guards are claiming here. They did as ordered."

  "Please."

  "I ask again if that is what you would choose for him."

  "I dare not choose a destiny for Martin, Gita. The law does not allow it. It would say I am hopelessly biased by jealousy. And in that, the law is surely wise.''

  "Jealousy?" She looked at me blankly until my meaning reached her. "Dubin, I have told you many times, you have no need to be jealous of Martin."

  "And that proved to be another lie. You slept with me to learn what I would find out about Martin and then deserted me to rescue him. Jealousy is the least of it."

  She had drawn herself straight. The black eyes were a doll's now, hard as glass.

  "You think that is why I slept with you?" "I do."

  She looked askance and made as if to spit on the floor. "I misjudged you, Dubin."

  "Because you thought I was more gullible?"

  She actually lifted a hand toward her heart, not far from where the star was pinned.

  "What do you believe, Dubin? That I am a statue and cannot be hurt? I value your esteem, Dubin. More, apparently, than you can understand. I cannot tolerate your scorn."

  "I admire your strength, Gita. I still admire that." She closed her eyes for a time.

  "Be angry, Dubin. Be hurt. Think I was too casual with your feelings. But please do not believe I would make love to you with such ugly intentions. Do you see me as a harlot? Because I am a harlot's daughter?"

  "I see you as you are, Gita. As someone who knows how to do what she has to." I repeated Winters' story about the German officer in Marseilles to whom she'd succumbed in order to win details of the London bombing. And even as I recounted the OSS's sniggering about her sleeping with the enemy, I realized I had awaited this moment for months so that she would tell me it was untrue. She did not.

  "Qui n'entend qu'une cloche n'entend qu'un son." He who hears one bell hears only one sound. There were, she meant, two sides of the story. "Something like that, Dubin, is so easy to judge from a distance."

  I mocked her with another proverb. "Qui veut la fin veut les moyens?" He who wants the ends wants the means.

  "Is that not true? In this place, Dubin, there are thousands who have done far worse to save just their own lives, let alone hundreds of others. Thousands probably were spared because of what I did. There are many mistakes I have made, Dubin, for which I forgive myself less freely. I was young. It was a poor idea only because I did not understand that even when the soul wears armor, it remains fragile. I thought, a cock is just another thing, Dubin. And Martin, by the way, knew nothing of this in advance and begged me never to consider such an act again, for my own sake as much as for his. But let me tell you, Dubin, what was the most confounding part. This man, this Nazi, this officer, he was kind to me. He was a man with some goodness in him. And to learn that about him on false pretenses--that was the most difficult part."

  "As I am sure you have said the same of me."

  "It is not the same, Dubin! I will not leave this place with you believing that." She continued to sit tall, her face folded in fury. "I care for you, Dubin. Greatly. You know that. Look at me here. You cannot tell me that even four meters away from me, you cannot feel that? I know you can."

  "And that is why you crushed my heart. Because you cared for me?"

  "My only excuse is one you must acknowledge as true. I left you before you left me."

  "As you say. That is an excuse. I believed I loved you.

  "You never spoke to me of love."

  "You were gone before I could. But please do not pretend that would have made any difference. What I felt and what I showed could not have been clearer with a name applied. You rewarded my love with lies. Until I came here, I thought that was the cruelest thing in life."

  "Yes," she said. "Such a thing is unkind. But understand, Dubin, please understand. Could I have stayed and loved you and watched as you took Martin off in chains to be hanged? He gave me back my life, Dubin. Should I have quietly condemned him for the sake of my own happiness?"

  "I do not believe that is how you thought of it."

  "How I thought of it, Dubin, is that a man like you, a proper bourgeois gentleman, would never make your life with a Polish peasant with no schooling. That is how I thought of it. You would return to your America, to your law books, to your intended. That is how I thought of it. I dream of children, as you dream. I dream of being as far from war as a happy home is. For me that is a dream that will probably never come true."

  "These are excuses."

  "This is the truth, Dubin!" She shook her small hands at me in rage, again in tears. "You say I would not forsake Martin for you. But you surely have your own idols. If I had stayed and begged you not to do your duty with Martin, would you have refused?"

  "I would like to believe that my answer is 'Yes.' But I doubt it. I am afraid, Gita, I would have done anything for you."

  "An
d who would you be after that, Dubin, without your precious principles?"

  "I do not know. But it would be who I had chosen to become. I could tell myself that. I could tell myself I had chosen love and that in a life as harsh as ours, it must come first."

  She was motionless, staring at me in that way she had, a look so intense I thought it might turn me to flame. Then she asked if I had a cloth, meaning a handkerchief. She took it from me and returned to her chair to clear her nose. Finally, she sat forward and clasped her hands.

  "Do you mean this? What you have just said? Do you speak from the heart, Dubin, or is this merely a lawyer's argument?"

  "It is the truth, Gita. Or was. It is in the past."

  "Must it be? We have our moment, Dubin. Here. Now. It can all be as you would like. As I would like. We will have love. We will have each other. But let him go, Dubin. Let Martin go and I will stay with you. I will tend your hearth and cook your meals and bear your brats, Dubin. I will. I want to. But let him go.

  "'Let him go' ?"

  "Let him go."

  "I cannot even imagine how I could do that."

  "Oh, Dubin, you are far too clever to say that. You would not need an hour's reflection to concoct a scheme that would work. Dubin, please. Please." She walked to my chair and then put one knee on the floor. "Please, Dubin. Dubin, choose this. Choose love. Choose me. If you send Robert to the hangman, it will stand between us forever. Here in hell, Dubin, you can choose this one good thing. Let Quixote fight his windmill. Do not make him die in disgrace. He has lived to be a hero. It would be worse than torture for him to die known as a traitor."