Love and Ruin
“Why not?” I heard her words as a challenge, and half wanted to say, Watch me. “At the very least, I mean to try.”
* * *
—
A week later, in the middle of October, almost as if the gods had overheard me and thought to call my bluff, Charles Colebaugh at Collier’s offered to send me to Finland. The Soviets were lately pressuring the Finns to cede land in exchange for some other territory elsewhere. The exchange was necessary for security reasons, they claimed, since Leningrad was only thirty-two kilometers from the Finnish border. But the Finns were refusing.
WE THINK YOU SHOULD BE THERE. THE SOONER THE BETTER, Colebaugh cabled, and I leaned in, realizing that although I still hadn’t recovered emotionally from Spain, it felt important to go anyway, to be where essential things were happening, and to find the stories that needed to be told, no matter how hard they were to see.
“I’m a little worried about my book, though,” I told Ernest. “And you, of course.”
It was midday, and we’d taken our lunch outside on a small patio off the main dining room. Around us, the Pioneer Mountains rose up sharp and clear, the edges of the peaks seeming hand etched against the high blue sky. Indian summer was upon us, and every moment outdoors seemed as precious as pure gold.
“You’re so close now. Nothing’s going to stall your novel, I’m sure of it. And this is a plum assignment. Most journalists would kill to have a shot at the circulation Collier’s has, and obviously the magazine knows you can deliver the material now. Think of the nest egg you can put aside, too.”
“Enough to keep me for four or five months, maybe. More if I economize. You’ll really be all right, then?”
“Sure, I will. Maybe I can meet you there if I can break away. If not, we’ll be back in Cuba together by the first of the year, happy as clams again.”
I phoned Colebaugh to tell him I was accepting the assignment, and then gave every drop of the time I had left to finishing A Stricken Field, and sending it to several editors in New York, hoping someone would love it as I did and see its value. Ernest kept insisting he understood both my total commitment to my novel, and this trip. That he supported me in every way. But when my travel orders arrived, he began to make pointed jokes at dinner with everyone in earshot.
“I’m being abandoned,” he said. “And just when winter’s coming on.”
“Poor you,” Tillie said, and turned to me. “Can’t you be a writer here? Why go halfway around the world? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“To report on a war, you have to be where the war is,” I explained, keeping my eyes on Ernest, trying to gauge whether he was kidding or just now letting me in on his true feelings.
“You can look after me,” Ernest said to Tillie, lightly. His expression was smooth as a sphinx’s, revealing nothing.
“Who’ll look after Marty?” Lloyd asked.
“Marty can look after herself,” Ernest shot back coolly. He was smiling, but I didn’t trust it.
“If you really don’t want me to go, I wish you’d tell me outright,” I said to him later when we’d gone up to bed.
He was in the bathroom, running water into a glass that would go on the nightstand. “Why? You’re going to go anyway.”
“Yes, but we’ve talked about this. All the arrangements have been made.”
“Don’t get so rattled, Rabbit.” He met my gaze in the bathroom mirror. “I’m only teasing.”
“I wonder if you are.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. We’re fine.”
“We are,” I told him. “Because we have to be.” I kissed the back of his neck, working to push my fears away. “I’ll be back before you know it. Quick as a winklet.”
Then I kissed him again to seal the promise.
40
On November 10, two days after my thirty-first birthday, I boarded the Westenland in New York Harbor and we eased our way out of the wide mouth of the Hudson, past Brighton Beach and Rockaway, past Sandy Hook, its spit of land arched back toward the bay, while the pale strobe of the lighthouse pulsed eternally out to sea.
It was a strange thing to be on the way to war again. The conflict in Spain had made so much sense to me. I knew exactly what its aims were, and its ideals. This war was only about greed, it seemed to me, and insanity. Adolf Hitler was a madman—everyone knew that—but he was also a child, a red-faced, angry baby bent on total dominion. There had been a time, perhaps, when the world could have joined forces to stop him, but that had come and gone. Now, there was only a chance to temper the size of the catastrophe, to staunch the loss of lives, thrashing back against evil with torches or pitchforks. Or words, in my case, when the time came to write them.
The Westenland was a Dutch ship, bound for Belgium with just forty-five passengers, though there was space enough for five hundred. It was eerie walking past all those empty cabins, the silent darkened ballroom with no band, no dancing, no merriment. From stern to bow, hundreds of empty deck chairs smacked of all that was wrong with this picture. Most of the other passengers were Europeans trying to get home to family in time to keep them safe. You felt that persistently, knots of dread hovering over each bowed head at meals. The meals themselves were almost intolerable, chicken cutlets like wet paste, and wine that should have been poured straight overboard. But I looked forward to them anyway. In between, there was no way to properly fill the time. We drifted through the passageways like lost souls, nodding to one another with nothing to say, or standing on the bridge and smoking, collars up against the cold stiff wind.
I tried to avoid my cabin whenever possible. It had obviously been built with halflings in mind—halflings eager for pain, too, since the mattress seemed full of knobbly sticks and stones. When I tried to read, my stomach pitched and burned. When I bent over sheets of paper, wanting to write Ernest, I ended up staring at my hands, or at my single tipping porthole in a half trance. I missed him, and worried I may have made the wrong decision, but it was too early to concede that, wasn’t it, when we weren’t even halfway across the Atlantic?
For eight days, the torpor was barely broken, as we pushed toward England and the Channel. Then, on the ninth day, at breakfast, a story came over the wire that another Dutch boat, just one day ahead of us and headed for the West Indies, had hit a string of three mines and sunk in smoldering pieces. Six hundred passengers had been on board, and no one could do more than estimate for the moment how many lives had been lost.
When the broadcast was over, everyone fell silent as the coffee went cold. I felt a thickness in my throat, as if I’d tried to swallow more than what was on my plate—my heart, maybe.
I pushed my meal away and went out to smoke on the deck. One of the other passengers was there already, his wool coat sooty gray against the stark-white railing, his face pale as custard. He was a Frenchman named Laurence Gardet, and I’d spoken to him once or twice before, about his family in Provence, his unwell father with an aging vineyard he felt ambivalent about inheriting.
“But now there are the Nazis,” he’d added, explaining his situation. “Maybe no one inherits anything anymore.”
I had agreed with him sadly, and we’d smoked a cigarette together. Now as I approached him on deck, he offered me another of his good Gauloises, and I took it, leaning into his flaring match, as if this were our routine and we were old friends.
War could do that to you. Helplessness could, too.
It was only a matter of stupid chance or accident, which vessels went down at sea. The Channel was strung through with mines, and even though our ship was posted fore and aft with signs that proclaimed our neutrality, what was the point of that? As if a floating mine could read, carefully consider politics and affiliation? It was ridiculous.
“The Germans have a new magnetic mine, I’ve heard,” Laurence said in his thickly accented English. “They sit at the bottom, and if anything passes
over…well. You understand.”
“How does it work exactly?”
“I’m no engineer. The ship disturbs something, I suppose. How does anything work?” He shrugged deeper into his collar and squinted against the wind. “I’m more interested in what they might look like. It’s a game I’ve played since I was a child. I used to draw things out from my imagination with pastels. Just bits of nonsense from my nightmares, or far-off things from the war in France I heard my parents talking about, sitting over the newspaper with coffee in the evenings. My mother kept all the drawings in a box, but secretly she probably thought I was mad.”
He was suddenly interesting to me and so human. I could picture his mother sifting through his drawings worriedly, smoking. “What have you come up with about the mines?”
“Something like the baleine, or the orque. Killer whale, as you say, with hard black curves. Made of iron, obviously.” He gave me a funny look, as if he were trying to plumb whether I thought he was crazy, too.
“The captain says we’ll anchor in the Channel overnight tonight, and try to shoot it by day tomorrow,” I said.
“They’re beneath the surface in either case, aren’t they?” He shrugged. “And then there are the torpedoes. They can travel up to six miles, you know.”
“I’ve read that, too.” I looked away from him and out at the morning sea, pale gray on darker gray, struck through with deep green and laced over with white foam. “Shouldn’t we be trying to talk of something else?” I asked, but he shrugged again, and closed his eyes, drawing in the smoke deeply.
I watched him, the skin of his closed eyelids pale blue and quivering almost imperceptibly, and remembered how it was in Spain when we’d heard an attack was coming, a bad one. At those times, it had helped to say the worst things out loud. Often we had talked all night, guessing, predicting the scale of the attack, how long it would last, how close the shells might fall. Somehow anything unknown was its own minefield. Waiting for shelling was worse than the shelling itself. Once the attack started, you knew exactly where you stood and could respond. But the waiting. Yes, the waiting was the worst part.
* * *
—
The next morning at first light we picked our way slowly forward toward the Strait of Dover. Many of us came up on deck to watch, because it was so much better than feeling trapped in the close tin boxes of our cabins, tethered to numbness. The wind whipped at us sideways, and that was real. Plymouth was real, off the port bow in the distance, and Weymouth farther on, and the looming spit of land that meant Cherbourg.
Every now and then, we’d spot a contact mine or a string of them, bobbing like basketballs with rounded black spines, innocuous looking as teapots, far below the deck where we stood. Gazing at them should have set my hair on end, but it didn’t. The real chill, the icy thing at the center of my fear, was reserved for something far below the rough green chop, something we would never see, not even if it sank us.
Late the next day, we’d reached the Downs, off Ramsgate, a safe zone protected by the English blockade. From there we heard more reports of vessels that had been sunk by mines, or by U-boats, and I found myself wishing the ship radio would stop working, at least for the night, so that I could get some sleep, though I knew that was foolish.
In the morning, we received clearance to move on toward Antwerp, but we were barely an hour past Ramsgate when the siren sounded ominously, and our captain’s voice came through the loudspeakers saying another Dutch ship, one just ahead of us in the Channel, had hit three mines simultaneously. At least a hundred were dead in the explosion. There were several hours, then, made entirely of dread, my nerves frayed, and then we began to see the wreckage floating in the sea around us. As we drew nearer, shapeless objects became men and women. They all bobbed facedown, stiff limbed and gray, wearing the same yellow life vests strung along the railings of the Westenland, and on her life rafts. I didn’t want to think of that, or to really look at the bodies, but found I couldn’t turn away. The long red hair on one woman streamed out like seaweed—though she wasn’t a woman any longer, was she? No, only a casualty, someone who would never reach home. The ship had been neutral and full of passengers just like us, people who hadn’t done anything more threatening or unforgivable than to be at sea.
Thankfully the fog came in an hour later, milky and dense, and we couldn’t see anything else until night. A few hours more, and I heard the sounding of the whistle that meant landfall. When I made my way to the deck, we were moving past Ostend. It stood glittering at the edge of the North Sea like a fairy city. The clouds parted above, and moonlight spilled onto our ship, lingering on the curves of the bowsprit, and onto the Scheldt River as we entered it, nearing Antwerp. The whole world was quiet, and suddenly made of light, as beautiful as the hours before had been terrible. How could a single day—or a single mind—hold two such vastly different realities? It didn’t even seem possible, but here was Belgium, cold and benign as a surgeon’s table rising from the mist.
The Channel hadn’t been a dream, and this wasn’t a dream either. They were both true, somehow, and I had to stretch or bend or break in order to see that, and move on to the next place, the next thing.
* * *
—
I was standing on the gangplank an hour later, as everyone disembarked. When Laurence, my French smoking companion, passed by, I barely recognized him. He looked ten years older, as if he’d spent days and days swallowing broken glass.
“Good luck to you,” I said.
“To you as well.” He stopped for just a moment—his face wind chapped and haggard looking. He reached to take my hand, I thought, but it was a gift he was offering—a square blue tin with a familiar winged helmet. His Gauloises. His fingers grazed mine, and then he was drifting away from me, swallowed up by flocks of hurrying porters, while I clutched the tin and stuffed it deep in my pocket, close to tears.
It seemed unlikely that I would ever see him or any of the others from the ship again. Something had happened to us all, something that might never be fully comprehensible to anyone who had not come through it. That was the thing about experience. It took distant strangers and made them a family. A family of one moment. There was no other way to see it, even as we scattered to the wind.
41
That night, as soon as I closed my eyes, I saw the bodies floating in their useless life vests, rocking while the sea churned around them. With a flaring knot of panic, I groped for the lamp and turned it on. A cone of strange yellow light fell on the night table and water glass and the neat blank pad of notebook paper, and the blue cigarette tin, giving the objects a cold and detached feel, like things in a museum all made of ice.
Don’t think about home or any of the other places you want to be right now, I told myself, training my eyes on the water glass, the still line of liquid like a simplified horizon in miniature. Be a good girl and go to sleep, and tomorrow you will feel less breakable. Then I pressed my eyelids tightly down against the yellow glare, doing my damnedest to shut everything out.
My hotel in Helsinki was sealed up with blackout paper on the windows. I didn’t even know it was morning when the sirens began to wail. There was pounding at the door and the sound of boots running in the hall, and over all of it, the high steady scream of the air-raid sirens. I felt frozen and stupid, and sat on the edge of the bed trying to remember where my shoes were. The lamp on the night table was still lit, and as I watched, the water in the glass began to vibrate. Planes were coming, and they were coming now.
I found my shoes somehow and stumbled down the flights of stairs and outside onto the cold street where everyone was staring up into the heavy gray sky. The humming was like the noise of a wasp growing louder and louder until I could feel it under my feet. They must be close, I knew, but I couldn’t see anything. The sky was still so dark with cloud cover, and it was a helpless feeling, waiting for something no one could see.
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The crowd around me began to move—toward the air-raid shelter, I guessed. That’s when the first huge silver trimotor roared in low, as if in slow motion, lumbering through the clouds, the sound it made now a roar. I began to run, still stiff and numb, half in a dream. And when the plane was directly overhead, its motor booming through me like thunder, it spilled its load.
I thought we’d all breathed our last; that everyone on the street would be dead the next instant, or horribly maimed. But as I turned to iron, waiting for the end, I understood that the flapping whiteness coming down all around wasn’t death and wasn’t snow, either. It was paper.
Propaganda leaflets fell in a crush, fluttering as they spun, depicting a mother grieving for her dead son, a Finnish soldier, with the eerie caption “You’re expected home.” And then it began to rain.
In the confusing silence that followed, people came out of the shelters and onto the street again, looking half asleep and disbelieving while the leaflets blew around and stuck fast to everything in the drizzle.
I went back to the hotel feeling angry and raw and humiliated. What kind of place was this, and why was I here? I ordered coffee and waited for true morning, but the sun simply didn’t come. The sky had gone a paler, pearly gray, but the clouds never parted. By afternoon, many had returned to work and to school. The fog had dropped, thick and damp, and people felt safe, even cheerful.
“They can’t come over in this,” the hotel manager said to a small group of journalists as we stood in the lobby. Two Italian reporters were there, too, and Geoffrey Cox, a New Zealander who wrote for the Daily Express. I’d met him once or twice in Madrid, and that was enough to make him a friend now.
“A Finn should know what his own weather can do, I guess,” Geoff said, but twenty minutes later, they did come.