Ordinary Heroes

  "I am no one," she said simply, "but if you insist that I am as important as all that, Lieutenant, I must take advantage and insist that you and your companion honor me by joining us at supper." Without awaiting a reply, she instructed Sophie, the servant who was at the stove, to set two more plates.

  I went looking for Bidwell, whom I found outside, leaning on the jeep and shooting pictures. In the bright daylight, looking back at the Comtesse's little castle, I felt as if I'd just left an amusement park.

  "Quite a bunch, aren't they?" I asked. They were all captivating, the gallant Comtesse, and fierce little Mademoiselle Lodz, and of course Martin. "I think the Major is the first actual war hero I've met," I said.

  From Biddy I received one of his sour looks, a step from insubordination.

  "No disrespect, Lieutenant, but ain't no way rightly to tell where all the malarkey ends in there, sir. Only it's plenty of it, this country boy knows that." He closed the snaps on the leather camera case. "Food smells just fine, though," he said and headed inside.

  Chapter 6.

  PRINCIPLES

  Supper at the Comtesse de Lemolland's was an idyll. In an alcove beside the kitchen, we ate at a long table of heavily varnished wood, enjoying a savory stew. It might have been veal, although there was not much meat among the root vegetables that were the main ingredients. Nevertheless, the usual French hand with food prevailed and the victuals were far tastier, if less plentiful, than even the very good rations we had at HQ. Some of my appreciation for the meal might have been due to the Comtesse's wine, newly pressed, which was poured freely. But in time I realized that the principal charm was that at the Comtesse de Lemolland's I had left the military. A civil--and civilian--atmosphere prevailed. I sat next to the old woman while she shared reflections in English on the history of the region. When we started, Biddy lingered, uncertain if he was invading the officers' mess, but Martin waved him to a chair. Sophie, who had cooked, joined us, too. The Gypsy I had seen, called Antonio, was at the far end of the table speaking in French with Peter Bettjer, a ruddy blond Belgian, who was the Operational Group's communications expert.

  Last to sit was Mademoiselle Lodz, who took the empty chair on my right. Midway through the meal, I felt the weight of her gaze. She was studying me unapologetically.

  "I am reflecting about you, Doo-bean," she told me in French. It was clear already that she was never going to pronounce my name any other way.

  "I am delighted to know I concern you at all. What exactly is it you are thinking, Mademoiselle?"

  "If you are indeed Dubinsky from Pinsk"--she puckered her lips, then stared straight at me--"vous etes juif."

  So that was it. In the little fantasia of the Comtesse's home, I felt especially scalded, which my face apparently betrayed.

  "This is nothing to be ashamed of," she said in French. "In my town there were many Jews. I knew them well."

  "I am hardly ashamed," I said quickly.

  "There are many Jewish soldiers in the American Army?"

  "Some.), "And they stay among the other troops?"

  "Of course. We are one nation."

  "But the dark ones I see--they drive and move the equipment. The Jews do not have separate battalions like the Negroes?"

  "No. It is entirely different. The blacks were slaves to some of the Americans' grandfathers, who, regrettably, have not allowed the past to die."

  "And these Jew soldiers. They look like you? You have no sidelocks. Are there tsitsis beneath your garments?"

  "I am not a Jew in that way."

  "In my town they had only one way, Dubin. Red Yiddish?" she asked. That made the third language in which she had addressed me, and her smile revealed a dark space between her front teeth.

  "Ayn bisel. Yich red besser am franzosich." My grandparents who had followed my father to the United States spoke Yiddish, but my mother and father used only English in the presence of their children, unwilling to risk hindering our development as Americans. My Yiddish was not even close to my French, as I had just told her.

  "Ach mir," she answered, "ayn bisel." With me, too, a little bit.

  Martin, across the table, asked her in French, "What language is that?"

  "We are speaking Jewish, Robert."

  "Jewish? I thought you disliked the Jews.,, She looked at him sharply. "Wrong. Stupidly wrong. This is because you will never listen to anything I say about my home. My only friends as a child were Jewish. They alone would allow me in their houses. Why would I dislike them?"

  "But they spurned you."

  "For a bride, Robert. It is their way."

  He turned away to ask Sophie for the bread, while Mademoiselle Lodz was left to explain.

  "C'est une histoire compliquee," she told me. It's a long story. "My mother, Dubin, wanted me to find a Jew to be my husband. She said, 'They are seldom drunks and rarely beat their wives.' '' Mademoiselle Lodz's mother had clearly never met Julius Klein, who lived on the third floor above us when I was a child and whose wife and children often ran for their lives while his drunken rages shook the entire building. But no Jew, of course, would marry me.

  "You are a Catholic?"

  "Only to a Jew. I have never set foot inside a church."

  "So you felt, as the Major put it, spurned?"

  She wagged her head from side to side, as if weighing the idea for the first time only now.

  "The Poles were far worse. Those who regarded themselves as respectable would not even speak to my mother--including her own family. So we lived happily among the Jews. And if I'd had a Jewish husband, I would have been on the trucks beside him.

  For me, in the end, it was a piece of good fortune.), "The trucks?"

  "Vous m'etonnez! You do not know of this? In my town, every Jew is gone. The Nazis took them away. They are in the ghetto in Lublin, held like livestock inside fences. This has happened everywhere. France, too. In Vichy, Petain rounded up the Jews even before the Germans asked. As a Jewish soldier, you, especially, should be here fighting Hitler."

  When I enlisted, my first choice was to battle Tojo and the sinister Japanese who had launched their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. As for Hitler, I knew about his ruthless war against the Jews in Germany, smashing Jewish businesses and confiscating Jewish homes, and felt a stake in bringing him down, but it was not the same as the sense of direct attack I'd experienced from the Japanese bombs on American soil.

  I was disinclined to try to explain any of this to Mademoiselle Lodz. Instead, I gave my attention to Martin, who was across the table regaling Bidwell with tales of the Operational Group during the years before the invasion. To introduce Antonio and Bettjer, Martin was detailing their most entertaining success against the Nazis, which had come in a small town to the west. There vintners sold yin ordinaire by hauling it through the streets in a hogshead mounted on two wheels, from which the villagers would fill their carafes through a bunghole in the bottom. Together Antonio and Bettjer had inserted a wooden partition in one of these casks, leaving wine in the lower portion. In the upper half, Bettjer had crawled between the staves. Looking out a tiny spy hole, he radioed information to Martin on the whereabouts of a German Panzer division moving through the town, while Antonio rolled the barrel down the street so their wireless was immune to the German direction-finding trucks that crawled around the area in search of resistance transmitters.

  "It was all brilliant," said Martin, "except that poor Peter literally got drunk on the fumes. When we opened the cask, he had passed out cold."

  Around the table, there was a hail of laughter and several jokes about Bettjer and alcohol, to which he'd clearly become more accustomed. Right now he was bright red with drink. I had been more careful with the wine, but the same could not be said of most of the others and the level of hilarity had increased as Martin went on recounting their adventures.

  "You appear, Major, to have been destined for this life," I said to him eventually.

  "Oh, hardly," he answered. "I was organizing for the Intern
ational Transport Workers around Paris, when the Nazis decided to go marching. I had no desire to return to war, Dubin. I'd had more than enough of it in Spain. I'd led other Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, then became a commando when the foreign troops were sent home. It was all quite dismal, to be frank. I had no desire to see more friends and comrades tortured and killed by Fascists. After Paris fell, I moved back to Madrid, where I was a transportation official with an oil company. Spain was a neutral country, and with a Spanish passport I could go anywhere, even Germany, which is why the OSS approached me. Originally, I thought I was to be a mere conduit for information. But one thing led to another. I had no interest in joining the Army, yet I could not refuse when they asked me to lead the OG."

  Yesterday, at the i8th, I had reviewed a clip from Stars and Stripes in Martin's file, detailing how the Operational Groups had been formed. Colonel Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, had corralled swashbucklers from everywhere, Russian emigres, Spanish Civil War veterans like Martin, and a number of Italian speakers from New York, Boston, and Chicago. All of them had been trained at the Congressional Country Club outside D. C., where they had done conditioning runs on the famous golf course and received instruction in the black arts of silent assassination, demolition, secret radio broadcast, judo, cryptography, lock picking, safecracking, and installing listening devices. Martin's efficiency reports from that period were often marked out, but made clear he had been a star, except with Morse code, where he never succeeded in getting above twelve words a minute.

  Following his training, according to Lieutenant Colonel Brunson, Teedle's G-1 who'd briefed me, Martin and two comrades, as well as eight supply chutes carrying radios, weapons, and necessities like currency, were dropped over France by a low-flying bomber in October 1942. Each man had a fake ID, a work card, and a cyanide capsule. Somehow, the Nazis had seen the drop. The Englishman with them was shot, while Martin and a French sergeant, who I believed was the Gypsy Antonio now at the end of the table, spent two days in the woods barely avoiding the Germans.

  Over time, however, the OG was established. Because of his union activities before the war, Martin was able to build an active network among the rail workers, many of whom he had known for years. Together they sabotaged 37o trains in the succeeding months, destroying railheads and tracks, setting locomotives afire, igniting fuel dumps, and attacking German convoys on the run. After D-Day, as the Third Army advanced north, Stemwinder monitored German troop movements and brought down bridges along the Loire. In the file, there were several laudatory communications from grateful commanders. Leaving aside Teedle.

  "And before Spain?" I said to him. "May I ask what you asked me, Major? Where is the home war has taken you from?"

  He laughed, but the wine gave him a wistful look.

  "Good for you, Dubin. That's the sixty-four-dollar question. But I left all that behind long ago." His smile had faded, when he added, "The answer is as lost to history as the ruins of ancient Greece."

  After coffee--Nescafe, about which the Comtesse permitted herself one rueful remark over the lost pleasures of former days--I asked Martin to help me find evidence that would show that OSS had directed him to remain here. Very drunk now, he took a second to marshal himself, and in his confused expression I could see he was peeved by my determination. But in the end he laughed and patted my back.

  "What a serious fellow you are, Dubin. Yes, of course.''

  The first thought was to show me the shortwave radio through which they received London's orders, but I needed something better than that. Martin frowned again at my doggedness but put the question in French to his Stemwinder colleagues who remained at the table.

  "Londres?" asked Bettjer. "Les documents des cons, non?"

  Martin laughed. "How wonderful. Yes." 'The papers of the idiots' referred to the Finance Officers in OSS, who were the same relentless penny-pinchers in that outfit they were everywhere else, demanding that Martin keep exact accounts of the funds advanced for the Operational Group. If I had not been in the Army, I might not have believed that Martin's orders to mount commando attacks were never reduced to writing, but that nickels and dimes required precise records. Mademoiselle Lodz said she kept the papers with the radio, and I followed her outside to find them. At 3:00 p. M. the daylight was still bright, and leaving the dim house, especially after the wine, I needed to shield my eyes.

  "Cela vous derange si je fume?" she asked. Does it bother you if I smoke? It was a meaningless courtesy since she already had the flame of her lighter, an American Zippo, to the tip. She had not lit up at the table in deference to the Comtesse, who did not approve of women with cigarettes. Otherwise, Mademoiselle Lodz had barely been without a Lucky Strike between her fingers. I took smoking as the source of her appealing cough-drop voice, like June Allyson's. I declined when she offered me one, telling her I'd never picked up the habit.

  "The C rations are terrible," she said. "But the cigarettes? This is the best thing the American Army brought with them." She actually hugged her green pack of Luckys to her breast. "In Vichy, the women were banned from buying cigarettes altogether. Martin says that is why I had no choice but to join the resistance." She laughed at herself.

  At supper, Martin had recounted several of Gita's adventures. On D-Day, for example, she had calmly turned the road signs at an intersection ninety degrees and stood there long enough to direct an entire Nazi tank battalion south rather than west. Later that afternoon, according to Martin, they had destroyed a large part of the same unit, when Gita and he herded dozens of sheep onto a bridgehead the Nazis were hoping to cross. While the German soldiers were shooing the livestock, Antonio slipped beneath the bridge and set detonators and dynamite, which they blew when the tanks moved forward.

  "Martin's stories of your exploits are remarkable."

  She smiled. "And even better if they were true."

  I lost a step, which evoked another spirited laugh from her.

  "Those of us with Martin," she told me, "have watched our lives grow larger when he describes our activities. But he is so good at it, we all believe him. That is Martin's way. At times, there's not a person here who knows whether he's speaking the truth. I am not even certain that his name is Martin. With the OSS, they all take noms de guerre. But it does not matter. Who are we, Dubin, but the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly if we accept them? My mother said that always."

  I had never heard anyone declare such a notion aloud, that we somehow had the power to make ourselves up on the go. Yet it was an idea that attracted me, and I reflected a moment, trying to determine whether life allowed that kind of latitude and how far it might extend.

  "Without disrespect to your mother, Mademoiselle, it is better, is it not, if those stories are also true?"

  "But who is to tell the truth, Doo-bean? In my town, they said my mother was a tramp. She was a seamstress, but she had lovers among the well-to-do, and took their money. In her view, she was a nonconformist, an artiste at heart. She chose to believe that, and I did as well."

  "I am sure that is so," I said, deferring to the reflective softness that had come over Mademoiselle Lodz as she spoke about her mother. "Her loss must have been terrible for you," I said quietly.

  "Quite terrible. She remains with me every moment. If not for those assassins, she would have lived to be one hundred. In my family, all the women do. My mother said that was our problem, she and I.

  There is too much life in us. It makes us wild in youth. And for her that made enduring burdens." She smiled sadly as she touched her own blouse.

  "And when she died and you ran from Poland, where did you go first?"

  "I landed in Marseilles. I was seventeen. I envisioned myself as the new Bernhardt. Bold, eh? I could barely speak a word of French. I did what needed doing. My mother had taught me to sew, and I found a job mending sheets in a hospital laundry. Soon I was promoted and allowed to empty bedpans." Again, she permitted a husky laugh about herself. "I fo
und my way. Come," she said, "I will show you the items you wish to see."

  Walking briskly, she reached the cowshed at the far end of the courtyard, which, like all the connected buildings, had been built of thick stones clad in a coating of cement and sand. On the second floor were quarters for a staff. Judging from the line of curtained windows that surrounded us, the Comtesse once must have employed dozens more workers than now.

  Inside the old barn, the air was dense with the ripe smells of animals and moldy hay. Entering a cow stall, Mademoiselle Lodz took hold of a weathered milking stool. With a screwdriver, she removed a metal plate from the bottom of the seat, revealing the radio and its battery.

  "Peter says only a few years ago the radios were enormous. Ten, twelve kilos. But now." She withdrew the sleek transmitter and placed it in my hand. It was about six inches long and did not weigh even a pound. Before D-Day, she said, their orders came over the BBC in code with the 9:00 p. M. news. These days, messages were relayed back and forth once a week, when an OSS plane carrying a radio relay to London passed overhead. I nodded, but it was the papers that interested me and I mentioned them again.

  "Voila." Mademoiselle Lodz drew a wad from inside the stool. Included was the yellow duplicate of Standard Form limn, Martin's travel voucher, signed and stamped by the paymaster at Central Base Station in London, and containing the details of Martin's trip there and back between September 26 and 30. There were also receipts for two meals Martin had consumed on the way, and French war scrip. Martin's itinerary was exactly as he claimed: OSS had redispatched him here a little more than three weeks ago. When I asked to take the papers, Mademoiselle Lodz was reluctant, but I promised to have them back within a week. In return, she wanted to know what this was all about. I gave her the bare details of Teedle's complaint.

  "London just sent Martin back," she said. "You can see yourself." The records didn't seem to leave much doubt of that. All in all, it had the look of a typical Army SNAFU. "Teedle would be eager to believe the worst," she said. "Bon sang. Teedle, Martin--that is a bad match. They have been unpleasant with each other from the start."