Love and Treasure

by Waldman, Ayelet

  Jack swallowed the last of his drink, climbed down from the roof, and ducked through the crowd until he caught up with the parade. He called to her. At the sound of her name she scanned the crowd.

  “Ilona!” he shouted again. He wormed his way through the crowd until he reached the edge of the parade. She disentangled her hand from that of one of the small children who clung to it and waved him over. He plunged in. He wanted to take her in his arms, but the parade in which they both now marched propelled him forward.

  “Ilona!”

  She smiled. “Happy holiday, Jack,” she said in Hebrew.

  “Happy holiday to you, too!”

  They had by now reached the end of the parade route. A bearded rabbi stood on a stage erected in the middle of what had been the mustering grounds of the barracks that once occupied this site. The rabbi lifted his hand for silence, and despite their varying levels of intoxication, the large crowd quieted. He took a small leather-bound volume out of the pocket of his suit jacket and began to chant the first chapter of the Book of Esther. Jack wondered how many of the assembled crowd actually spoke Hebrew and how many merely listened for the name of the diabolical enemy of Israel. Each time the rabbi chanted “Haman,” the crowd erupted in boos and hoots. Children banged cymbals fashioned of pot lids or beat sticks together. By the end of the rabbi’s reading, the crowd was delirious with a rage-fueled joy.

  The speakers came next, various camp dignitaries and officials, who decried the beast of Germany and recalled the Purims of previous years, when there had been little hope that the prophecy of Ezekiel would come to fruition, that the dry bones of Israel would live again. Some spoke in Yiddish, others in German, still others in a Hebrew sufficiently simplified that Jack had no trouble understanding it.

  The speeches showed no sign of winding down, and Jack was wondering how he would get Ilona alone when she grabbed his hand.

  “Come with me!” she said.

  She stopped to whisper in the ear of one of the other kindergarten teachers, turning over her charges, Jack figured. She moved quickly, snaking her way through the crowd. At times there were so many people Jack couldn’t see her ahead of him, but she held fast to his hand, and he trusted her to lead him along. They broke free and ran down a path between two barracks to a door by the barbed-wire fence that marked the boundary of the camp. They ducked inside.

  The barracks had been organized into rows of cubicles demarcated by piles of furniture and makeshift plywood walls. She led him to a tiny cubicle in the middle of the barracks. Though there were small windows cut into the walls, the light barely penetrated so far inside, and so it was in murky half-light that she stripped off her clothes. He watched her, trembling. When she was naked, she lay back on the small cot. With a groan, he fell on top of her, fumbling at the buttons of his pants, the grain alcohol swirling in his belly. Her body trembled as he traced his tongue along the scars, pocks, and pleats that ravaged her beautiful, pale skin.

  It was over almost as soon as it had begun, but for long moments afterward, he lay on top of her, his lips pressed into the side of her neck, murmuring her name.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck, planted a wet kiss on his mouth, and said, “Come, Jack. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  • 13 •

  THE MAN WHO OPENED the door to them was short, with bushy black eyebrows from which a few wiry white hairs stuck up like antennae. More tufts of hair poked from the open collar of his shirt. The effort of producing such plenty had exhausted his follicles, however, and his pate was hairless and polished to a high shine, mottled with misshapen freckles. He greeted Ilona with a nod but raised his caterpillar brows in Jack’s direction.

  “Jack Wiseman,” Ilona said. “My friend.”

  “A pleasure to meet you, Captain Wiseman,” the man said, extending his hand. He had a thick eastern European accent, but his English was good.

  Jack, dressed in civilian trousers and shirt, wondered how the man knew his rank.

  Ilona said, “Jack, this is Aba Yuval. He is a member of the Jewish Brigade.”

  When he’d first read about the Jewish Brigade in his grandfather’s Yiddish newspaper, Jack had not known whether to feel pride at their exploits or insulted by their segregation from the main body of British armed forces. Would he have wanted to be part of a specially designated, separate brigade of Jews in the U.S. Army? It was hard even to imagine such a thing coming to be, until he thought of the colored soldiers.

  He followed Ilona into the room and immediately snapped to attention. Rabbi Bohnen, in uniform, sat on a wooden chair at a small table in the center of the room.

  “Captain Wiseman,” the major said. “Happy Purim to you!”

  “Sir.”

  “ ‘Sir’ is for soldiers. You should call me rabbi.”

  “I’m a soldier, sir.”

  “Yes, of course you are, son. You are a soldier. But you are also a Jew. And also a righteous man, aren’t you?”

  It was no easier now to answer the question than it had been the first time the rabbi had posed it, months before, no easier, in fact, even to discern the truth behind the question. Jack felt as though the rabbi was trying to tug on a string in his heart, a string labeled “Jew.” But that string was tangled and frayed from disuse. Nothing happened when you pulled it.

  The rabbi got to his feet and patted Jack on the arm. “These are fine men, Captain Wiseman. I hope you’ll help them in any way you can.”

  On his way out the door, the rabbi shook hands first with Yuval and then with the third man in the room. This man sat on the edge of a cot, his legs crossed elegantly one over the other, smoking a cigarette. Unlike Yuval, who was dressed casually, in a well-worn shirt and a pair of army fatigues, this man wore an impeccably tailored suit, the cuff of his pants breaking cleanly over a pair of canary-yellow socks.

  He smiled blandly at Jack, who struggled to get a read on him.

  Jack looked from one man to the other and then back at Ilona, who was busy pulling at a loose thread on the apron of her Purim costume. Why had she brought him here?

  Yuval said, “In the Yishuv we are not so formal. We use first names. May I call you Jack?”

  Jack didn’t reply, instead he looked again at Ilona, who still refused to meet his eye.

  Yuval continued, “We have a situation, Jack. You know the conditions in the DP camps, yes?”

  Jack looked around the room. It appeared to be the residence of a single person, and though the cot was narrow and there was a paucity of personal belongings, it was a room, not a cubicle. Yuval’s “situation” seemed better than most.

  The man continued, “In Germany it is worse even than here. At least here, in Land Salzburg, your command is sympathetic to the plight of the Jews. Your general sends Rabbi Bohnen to help us. But in Germany the military government appoints SS to high positions and lets them abuse the few Jews who survive. Your General Patton, he refused to arrest the SS because he said it would be silly to get rid of the most intelligent people in Germany. Instead, he packed the Bavarian Provincial Administration full of Nazis. Even now, we haven’t managed to weed them out. They have a saying in Germany, ‘Too bad you weren’t a Nazi, then maybe you’d get somewhere.’ You’ve heard this?”

  “No.” But Jack wasn’t surprised. Ball had recently told him that a survey of U.S. troops reported that 59 percent of them believed that Hitler had done a lot for Germany. Given his experience with the replacements, Jack thought the figure was an understatement.

  “The Germans will never stop killing the Jews,” Yuval said. “Even when the Allied victory was inevitable, even as the Wehrmacht prepared to surrender, German civilians murdered the remnant of the camps, those who were led on forced marches through the countryside. I met a man once who told me that he was chased by a gang of boys—boys, Jack—who screamed at him, ‘We’re going hunting, to shoot down the zebras!’ You know why ‘zebras’?”

  “No.”

  “Because of the striped unif
orms.”

  At this Ilona moved closer to Jack, slipped her hand in his. He knew she was thinking of Etelka. He almost forgave her for ambushing him with these men.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked Yuval, though the question might as easily have been directed at her.

  Yuval said, “We understand that you have access to a truck. A U.S. military truck.”

  At the thought of the truck and what had happened in the back, Jack flushed.

  “There is a truck at the warehouse where I work,” he said.

  “A U.S. military truck.”

  “Technically it belongs to the Allied civilian authority.”

  “It is our hope,” Yuval said, “that you will make it possible for us to, let us say, borrow your truck.”

  “Nothing doing.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that. Like I said, it belongs to U.S. Forces, Austria.”

  “But it is under your command, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “So where you command it,” Yuval said, pleased by his own logic, “that’s where it goes.”

  Was this what it was about? Was this why Ilona had come to him? Was this why she had made love with him? As incentive? To get him to turn over his truck? He was furious and humiliated and wanted to leave, to run, to escape his anger and shame.

  “Sorry,” Jack said, turning to the door. “The truck’s not mine to lend.”

  The way Yuval blocked the door was elegant, without apparent force or effort, but as surely as a brick wall. “Okay, so you do not lend it to us. You just park the truck in an unguarded place, leave the key, walk away. And don’t come back for it for a day. That’s all.”

  “Oh, that’s all, is it?”

  “That’s all.”

  “And what, if you don’t mind my asking, do you need a truck for?”

  The man in the yellow socks shook another cigarette loose from his pack, affixed a small cardboard holder to it, and lit it with a shiny silver lighter. He blew two thin streams of smoke from his nostrils. He held the cigarette like a woman, between his index and middle fingers. He spoke in a refined and cultivated German accent. “Captain Wiseman,” he said, “you are a Jew.”

  It was not a question, so Jack did not bother to answer it.

  “I was at Auschwitz,” the man continued. “Not long after liberation. You know of Auschwitz?”

  “Yes.”

  “As difficult as it is for the Jewish survivors in Germany and here in Austria in the terribly overcrowded DP camps, it is worse in Poland. Those who have tried to reclaim their homes have been threatened. Some of them have been killed. They survive the camps, and find their way home at last, and there they die, on their own doorsteps, killed by their own neighbors. It is a terrible dilemma, don’t you think?”

  “What is?”

  “What to do with all these Jews. Hitler killed so many of them, but still some remain. Perhaps one hundred thousand, perhaps a million. No one is sure. Neither is anyone sure what to do with them. Will your government take them, do you suppose? Will Mr. Harry Truman say, Please, half-dead Polish Jews, come to New York. Come to Missouri.”

  Jack remembered sitting as a teenager at his maternal grandparents’ kitchen table, watching his normally stoic grandfather weep over the fate of the German Jewish refugee passengers onboard the St. Louis, turned away from Cuba, rejected by the United States, and sent back to their grim fates in Hitler’s Europe.

  “I doubt it,” he said.

  “You doubt it. I, also, doubt it. So then, what will become of them, Captain Wiseman? Their villages are gone. Even their cities. What remains of Jewish Vilna, Jewish Warsaw? Jewish Bucharest or Jewish Berlin? You know as well as I do. So, then. What will happen to all these Jews?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And, like you, your government has no answer.”

  “If they do, I’m not privy to whatever it is.”

  “Ah, that is where we differ, you and I. You see, I am privy to the answers of at least some in your government. Right now, it is costing your government millions to feed and house the Jews who are pouring into the American Zone. It’s costing, and nobody wants to pay for it. Your president, he wants to spend his money rebuilding Europe, turning Germany and Austria into allies against the Soviet Union. The British are your allies, and thus there can be no official policy that contradicts them, but some in your government agree with me that the Jewish remnant should go far away, as far as Palestine, to settle the land of Israel.”

  “I see,” Jack said. “And so you’re planning on driving them there, a hundred thousand Jews, in my truck.”

  The man smiled.

  “Only a few of them,” Yuval said. “And only to Italy. After that we use a boat.”

  Jack had never told a woman to fuck off, and he wasn’t about to begin, but as Ilona chased him through the camp, calling his name and begging for him to stop, to talk to her, he was sorely tempted. Instead he ignored her and would have made his escape had he not run into the crowd of revelers, only just now dispersing, the speeches having finally come to an end.

  “Goddamn it,” he muttered, trying to make it through the throng.

  “Please, Jack!” Ilona said, catching up to him. She grabbed his arm with both her hands. “Why are you running away from me?”

  He shook her off. “I’m not running away.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Tell me, Ilona, did you invite me here today because those men told you to?” He glanced quickly around to be sure that none of the passersby could hear him. He bent his head and hissed in her ear. “Did you sleep with me because they told you to?”

  She dropped her hands and glared at him, her face red. “You dare to say this to me? You go. Go now! I never want to see you again.”

  He thought of her hand stealing into his at the mention of the murderous German boys and their hunt for the “zebras,” and he hesitated, wondering if his anger was justified.

  “Ilona, tell me the truth. What happened today, in your room. In your bed. Did they tell you to do that?”

  “I am not a prostitute. And those men are not … I don’t know the word. They are not men who own prostitutes.”

  “Pimps.”

  She frowned. “That’s not the word.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “ ‘Pimp’?” she said. “That is a ridiculous word. It’s like a joke.”

  “Ilona!”

  “Jack, I came to you because I missed you. I took you to my room because I was happy.”

  “And why did you take me to meet those men?”

  “Because your rabbi asked me to. I told him you were coming today, and he told me to bring you to meet the men from Palestine.”

  Jack wanted so badly to believe her. And he did. He did believe her but for one worm of doubt that wriggled and gnawed and poisoned what he wanted so desperately to feel. And then another small hand slipped into his, and he jumped. It took him a moment to recognize Tomas Zweig. It had only been a matter of weeks since he had last seen the boy, but in that time Tomas had grown at least a few inches. It was as though his body had hibernated during the long years of the war and was now doing its best to catch up.

  “Tomas!” he said. The boy smiled and allowed his hair to be tousled. In German Jack asked, “How are you? How are your brother and your uncle?”

  “They are well. Are you well?”

  “I am.”

  The boy turned to Ilona. “Uncle sent me. He wants you to bring Jack to see him.”

  When Jack and Ilona arrived at Rudolph Zweig’s room, they found a convivial group sharing a holiday meal of small green apples and slices of hard yellow cheese.

  Rudolph leaped to his feet and said, “I am so glad Ilona has brought you to me! I wanted to tell you when we left the Europa, but it was so sudden.”

  “How are you?” Jack asked.

  “Very well.” Rudolph looked like a different person. Though his back was not entirely straight, h
e had discarded one of his canes. His cheeks had filled out. He looked impossibly young.

  Tomas’s older brother, Josef, had also shot up and filled out. The boy gave a stiff little bow, a remnant of the punctilious manner instilled by a governess long forgotten. He greeted Jack with a hearty “Shalom!”