by Scott Turow
"Bad off," he answered. "I don't take her for foolin."
In a few minutes, I skirted the rubble heap to find her.
"You should come with us," I told her. She had nowhere else to go. "Even the cows you herded are gone. And my superiors may have questions for you. Best to deal with them now." I suspected OSS would want to glean what they could from her about Martin.
She nodded. "I am another mouth to them," she said looking back to the Hurle family.
We headed for Bastogne. Biddy drove and Gita and I sat in the back of the jeep, smoking cigarettes and chatting while she stroked Hercules, who took to her quickly. We all agreed his prior master must have been a woman.
For the most part, we talked about what we had been through in the last few weeks. I described our airborne arrival in Savy, including the condition of my trousers. Every story with a happy ending is a comedy, one of my professors had said in college, and our tale of parachuting without training into a pitched battle had all three of us rolling by the time we'd finished.
"But why so desperate to reach Bastogne?" she asked. I had given away more than I wanted to, but had no way out except the truth. " Arrest Martin'!" she responded then. "These are foolish orders, Dubin. Martin played a trick. That is not a terrible crime. He has done nothing to harm the American Army."
I told her Teedle thought otherwise.
"Merde. Teedle est fou. Martin est un patriote." Teedle is nuts. Martin is a patriot.
"It does not matter now," I said somberly.
With that her eyes were glued closed a moment. I offered her another cigarette. I'd acquired a Zippo along the way and lit hers before mine. She pointed to me smoking.
"This is how I know for sure you are a soldier now.,, I showed her the callus I'd worn on the side of my thumb in the last month with the flint wheel of the lighter.
"You see, in the end, Martin was good for you, Dubin. You should be grateful to him. No? To fight is what you craved."
I was startled I had been so transparent. But that illusion was all in the past. I had not yet found a way to write to Grace or my parents about Christmas Day, but I told Gita the story now, quietly. Biddy stopped and got out of the jeep. He said he needed directions to Bastogne, but I suspected he wanted no part of the memories. I told her about lying in the snow in that clearing waiting to die, while the men nearby preceded me, and about feeling so shamed by my desperation to live.
"I thought all my last thoughts," I told her. "Including, I must say, about you."
Her full eyebrows shot up and I hurried to clarify. "Not with longing,". I said.
"Oh? What, then? Regret?" She was teasing, but remained attentive.
"I would say, with clarity," I said finally. "Our moment together had given me clarity. I longed for home and hearth. A normal life. To gather my family around a fire. To have children."
She had taken the Zippo and held its flame to the tip of a new cigarette for a long time. Through the blue scrim, she settled a drilling look on me, so intense my heart felt like it skipped.
"And I am what, Dubin? A vagabond? You think I care nothing for those things? The fire, the warm meal, the children underfoot?"
"Do you?" I answered stupidly.
"You think I do not wish to have a place in the world, as other persons have a place? To want what you or any other person wants? To have a life and not merely to survive? You think I have no right to be as weary of this as everyone else?"
"I hardly meant that."
"No," she said. "I heard. I am not fit for a decent life."
She suddenly could not stand to look at me. She released the car door and jumped outside, where I felt I had no choice but to pursue her. Her dark eyes were liquid when I caught up, but her look was savage. She swore at me in French, and then, as an astonishing exclamation point, hurled the pack of cigarettes at me.
I was flabbergasted. Men always are when they sacrifice a woman's feelings, I suppose. But I had known better. I had glimpsed the fundamental truth of Gita in the instant she had raised her skirt in that barn. She would always be the spurned offspring of the town pariah. Everything about her character was built over an abyss of hurt.
I followed her farther out into the snow. She was already attracting attention from some of the soldiers on their guard post nearby. Her face was crushed on her glove and I touched her shoulder.
"I mourn Martin," she said. "Do not think your chatter about yourself has upset me.
"I had no such thought." I knew better than to tell her she wept for herself. "But I am sorry. I should not have said that. About what I thought. That I felt no longing. I am sorry."
"No longing?" She pivoted. If possible, she was even more furious. "You think I care about that? You think that damaged my pride?" She smashed the last of her cigarette underfoot and stepped toward me, lowering her voice. "It is your poor opinion of me I revile, not your desires. You know nothing, Dubin. You are a fool. No longing," she huffed. "I do not even believe it, Dubin." Then she lifted her face to me, so that there was only a hairbreadth between us. "Nor do you," she whispered.
She was an iceberg, of course, on the remainder of the ride, tomb-silent except to the dog, to whom she spoke in whispers he could not hear. I sat in front with Biddy, but he could tell there had been a personal eruption and said little. As we approached Bastogne, Gita announced that she wanted to be taken to the military hospital, where she would find work as a nurse. Trained assistance was never spurned in a war zone. In so many words, she was saying she needed no help from me.
Arriving in Bastogne, I was startled by its size. It was hard to believe thousands of men had died for the sake of such a small place. The town had only one main street, rue Sablon, although the avenue sported several good-size buildings, whose fancy stone facades were now frequently broken or scarred by shrapnel and gunfire. Iron grates framed tiny balconies under windows which, for the most part, had been left as empty black holes. Here and there one of the steep peaked roofs characteristic of the region lay in complete collapse as a result of an artillery strike, but in general the poor weather had kept Bastogne from more severe destruction by air. The cathedral had been bombed as part of the Germans' Christmas Eve present, a crude gesture meant to deprive Bastogne's citizens of even the meager comfort of a holiday prayer, but the debris from the buildings that had been hit had already been shoveled into piles in the streets, and was being removed by locals in horse-drawn carts. Last night there had been yet another heavy snowfall, and soldiers on foot slogged along while the jeeps and convoys thick on rue Sablon slid slowly down the steep avenue.
I had no way to temporize with Gita. Instead we simply asked directions to the American field hospital, which occupied one of the largest structures of the town, a four-story convent, L'Etablissement des Soeurs de Notre Dame de Bastogne. Despite the fact that the roof was gone, the first two floors remained habitable, and the Sisters had given up their large redbrick school and the rear building of their compound to the care of the sick and wounded. The snow from the street had been pushed onto the walks and sat in frozen drifts, some the height of a man. Between them, several ambulances were parked, the same Ford trucks that served as paddy wagons at home, here emblazoned with huge red crosses. Gita snatched up the small parcel she had gathered from the remains of the Hurles' home and marched inside. I followed in case she needed someone to vouch for her.
At the front desk sat a nun whose face, amid a huge starched angel-wing habit, looked like a ripe peach in a white bowl. She made an oddly serene figure in the entryway, which had been strafed. There were bullet holes in the walls and in the somewhat grand wooden rococo balustrades leading to the upper stories, while some kind of ordnance had blown a small crater in the inlaid floor, leaving a hole all the way to the cellar. After only a few moments of conversation, Gita and the nun appeared to be reaching an agreement.
Watching from a distance, I was surprised to hear my name from behind.
"David?" A doctor in a green surgical gown
and cap had both arms raised toward me, a short dark man who looked a little like Algar. Once he removed the headgear I recognized Cal Echols, who had been my sister's boyfriend during his first two years in med school. Everyone in my family had loved Cal, who was smart and sociable, but he'd lost his mother as a four-year-old, and Dorothy said his clinging ultimately drove her insane. We'd never seen that side of him, of course. Now Cal and I fell on each other like brothers.
"Jeepers creepers," he said, when he pushed me back to look me over, "talk about the tempest tossed. I thought you lawyers knew how to worm your way out of things."
"Bad timing," I said.
He figured I had come to the hospital to visit a soldier, and I was immediately embarrassed that my preoccupation with Gita had kept me from realizing that several of the wounded men from my company were probably here. Cal had finished his surgical shift and offered to help me find them. When I turned to the front desk to attempt some awkward goodbye with Gita, she was gone.
Once Biddy had found a place for the jeep, he and I went over the hospital roster with Cal. Four of our men were still on hand. A corporal named Jim Harzer had been wounded by a mortar round during a hill fight near Noville. He was another of the replacement troops, the father of two little girls, and when I'd last seen him he was on the ground, with the corpsmen attending him. They had a tourniquet above his knee; down where his boot had been it was primarily a bloody pulp. In spite of that, Harzer had beamed. 'I'm done, Cap,' he said. 'I'm going home. I'm gonna be kissing my girls.' I found him in a similarly buoyant mood today. He'd lost his right foot, but he said he'd met several fellas missing their lefts and they planned to stay in touch so they could save money on shoes.
In the convent, all the class space had been converted to hospital wards. The long wooden desks at which students once sat facing the blackboards were being used as beds, with more cots placed in between. The valuable classroom equipment, bird exhibits for science, chem lab beakers, and microscopes, had been preserved in the closets.
Almost every patient had had surgery of some kind, the best-off only to remove shrapnel from nonmortal wounds. But on the wards were also the limbless, the faceless, the gut-shot, who too often were only days from death. The cellar that ran the length of the building now served as a morgue.
At the far end of the second floor, an MP stood outside a full ward of German POWs here as patients.
"We give them better than our boys get, that's for sure," said Cal. Indeed, several of the Germans waved when they recognized Cal in the doorway. "Nice kid, from Munich," said Cal about one of them. "Speaks good English, but both parents are Nazi Party members."
"Does he know you're Jewish?"
"That was the first thing I told him. Of course, all of his best friends at home were Jewish. All. He gave me a whole list." He smiled a little.
Cal had been here since the day after Christmas, and I began asking about the other men from my company who'd left the front in ambulances. He remembered a number. Too many had died, but there was some good news. Cal himself had operated on Mike O'Brien--the joker who'd enjoyed giving it to Stocker Collison--whom I'd dragged from the clearing on Christmas Day. He had lived. So had Massimo Fortunato, from whose thigh Cal had removed a shrapnel piece the size of a softball. He had been transferred to a general hospital in Luxembourg City, but Massimo had done so well that Cal thought he would be sent back to my former unit in a month or two.
Cal offered us billets in the convent, which we eagerly accepted, since it saved me from a problematic reconnaissance in the overcrowded town. The enlisted men, medical corpsmen for the most part, were housed in a large schoolroom converted to a dormitory. Their quarters were close, but the men weren't complaining, Cal said. The building had electricity from a field generator and central heat, coal-fired, although there was not yet running water in the tiled baths and shower rooms. Better still, the enlisted men were right next to the mess hall and on the same floor as the nuns and nurses, a few of whom were rumored to have dispensed healing treatments of a nonmedical variety. True or not, the mere idea had revived the men.
The docs were boarded on the second floor in the nuns' former rooms, which the Sisters had insisted on surrendering. These were barren cubicles, six feet by ten, each containing a feather mattress, a small table, and a crucifix on the wall, but it would be the first privacy I'd had for a month. Cal's room was two doors down. He had received a package from home only a day ago and he offered me a chocolate, laughing out loud at my expression after the first bite.
"Careful," he said. "You look close to cardiac arrest.
Afterward, in officers' mess where we had dinner, I again recounted Christmas Day. Despite all the fighting I'd seen following that, my stories never seemed to get any farther.
"This war," said Cal. "I mean, being a doc--it's a paradox, I'll tell you, David. You try like hell to save them, and doing a really great job just means they get another chance to die. We had a young medic who came in here yesterday. It was the third time in a month. Minor wounds the first couple of times, but yesterday just about his whole right side was blown away. What a kid. Even in delirium, he would reply to all of my questions with a 'Yes, sir' or 'No, sir.' I stayed up all day with him, just trying to coax him to live, and he died not ten minutes after I finally went off." Cal peered at nothing, reabsorbing the loss. "A lot of these boys end up hating us when they realize they're going back. You know the saying. The only thing a doctor can give you is a pill and a pat on the back and an Army doc skips the pat on the back."
It was nearly 8:00 p. M. now, and Cal's surgical shift was about to begin. He would operate until 4:00 a. M. The surgical theater was never empty. Before he went back to work, he brought a bottle of Pernod to my room. After two drinks, I passed out with my boots still on.
I woke in the middle of the night when my door cracked open. At first, I thought it was the wind, but then a silhouette appeared, backlit by the brightness from the hall.
"Ton Chien to cherche," Gita said. She slid through the door and closed it and flicked on the light. She had hold of Hercules by the woven belt that one of the men in my company had given him as a collar. Her hair had been pinned up under a white nurse's bonnet and she was dressed in a baggy gray uniform. The dog, which Biddy had left outside in the convent's one-car garage, had been found trotting through the wards. Harzer and a couple of others recognized him and swore that Hercules had come to pay his respects before moving on in his apparent search for Biddy or me. When she let him go, the dog bounded to my side. I scratched his ears, before I faced her.
Cal's stories about nurses scurrying through the halls at night had briefly sparked the thought that Gita might arrive here. It seemed unlikely given her mood when we parted, but before falling off I'd had a vision so clear I had actually deliberated for an instant about whether I would tell her to stay or to go. Yet in the moment there was no choice. As always, she presented herself as a challenge. But I doubted her boldness was only to prove her point about my longing. Her need was as plain as my craving for her, which just like my paralyzing fears in the air over Savy was not subject to the control of preparation or reason. I beckoned with my hand, the lights went off, and she was beside me.
As I embraced her, I apologized for my grime and the odor, but we met with all the gentleness our first time together had lacked, softened by what each of us had endured in the interval. Even as I savored the remarkable smoothness of her stomach and back, the thrill of touching a human so graceful and compact, something within me continued to wonder if this romance was a fraud, merely the overheated grappling of the battlefront. Perhaps it was just as Teedle had told me. When a human is reduced to the brute minimum, desire turns out to be at the core. But that did not matter now as we lay together in the tiny convent room. In the tumult of emotion Gita consistently provoked in me, there was a new element tonight. I had been fascinated from the start by her intelligence and her daring; and my physical yearning for her was greater than I'd felt for
any woman. But tonight, my heart swelled also with abounding gratitude. I pressed her so close that I seemed to hope to squeeze her inside my skin. I kissed her again and again, wishing my appreciation could pour out of me, as I, David Dubin, recovered, if only for a fragment of time, the fundamental joy of being David Dubin.
Chapter 24.
ALIVE
We remained in Bastogne two more days.
I had signaled Teedle that Gita was here if OSS wished to interview her, and awaited his order to formally abandon the effort to arrest Martin. Pending a response, I worked on a long report about the past month for Colonel Maples, who had moved to the new Third Army Headquarters in Luxembourg City. I also spent a couple of hours both days with the men from my former command who were hospitalized here. But every minute was only a long aching interval, waiting for dark and the end of Gita's shift, when she would slip into my room.
"You are an unusual woman," I had told her again that first night after she had come to me, as we lay whispering in the narrow bed.
"You notice only now?" She was laughing. "But I do not think you mean to praise me, Dubin. What do you find so uncommon?"
That you mourn Martin and are with me."
She thought a moment. "No soldier in Europe more eagerly sought death, Dubin. I knew that, no matter how often I tried to say otherwise. Besides, if my father died or my brother, would it be unusual, as you say, to find comfort in life?"
"Martin was not your father or your brother."
"No," she said and fell silent again. "He was both. And my salvation. He rescued me, Dubin. When I met him I was on the boil, furious at all moments except those when I simply wanted to die. He said, If you are angry, fight. And if you wish to die, then wait until tomorrow. Today you may do some good for someone else.' He knew the right things to say. Because he had said them to himself."
"But you do not mourn him as your lover?"
"Qu'est-ce qui to prend?" She raised her head from my chest. "Why does that matter so much to you--me with Martin? Do you fear that I liked Martin better this way than I like you?"