Wayfaring Stranger

by James Lee Burke

  WHEN IT STOPPED, the entire countryside was totally silent, as though we had been struck deaf. We were on the northern tip of the woods and could not see any German troops or hear any vehicles. The sky was pink and blue, the clouds puffy and white. The farmhouse Pine had seen the previous night was built of fieldstones and squared timbers that were notched and pegged and stained almost black by age and smoke from stubble fires. There were no animals in sight; sunlight was shining through the barn walls. The windows of the house were dark, the chimney powdered with frost, a snowdrift piled against the front door.

  “What do you want to do, Lieutenant?” Pine asked.

  The wind was blowing hard, enough to cover our footprints. I went first, my .45 drawn. I pulled open the cellar door and went down the steps into the darkness. When I lit a match, I saw a wooden icebox against one wall, the kind many people owned when I was growing up in Depression-era Texas. Inside the box were salted fish wrapped in newspaper, a big round of cheese, and two smoked sausages that must have weighed five pounds apiece. Pine and Rosita came down the stone steps and pulled the door shut behind them. “Welcome to the Lone Star Café,” I said.

  We ate until we thought we’d pass out.

  ROSITA TOLD US her father had been a linguist and professor of classical studies at the University of Madrid. He had also been a member of the Popular Front, and after the fall of Madrid, he and his wife and Rosita and her little brother walked across the Pyrenees into France with members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. In late 1943 the family was arrested by the Gestapo. The father’s name was on a list of suspected Communists, and he either died in a jail cell or was tortured to death; the mother and the boy were packed into a freight car bound for Buchenwald and never seen again. Rosita was selected for duty in a camp whorehouse.

  “Maybe your mother and the boy made it through,” Pine said. He was sitting against a wood post, his stomach full, his eyes sleepy. “It’s not going to be long before the Russians are in Berlin. You can pert’ near count on it.”

  “My brother was killed the second day after his arrival. My mother died three weeks later.”

  “How could you know that?” he asked.

  “An SS colonel checked. He wanted to impress me with his honesty and his access to information. He had me play piano at a dinner he gave. He wanted me to be his mistress. He poured me a glass of wine when he told me what he had learned of my family.”

  “What did you do?” Pine said.

  “I spat the wine in his face,” she replied.

  We heard heavy footsteps on the wood floor immediately above our heads. We sat frozen in the dark, breathing through our mouths, looking up the stairs. Then the door opened. A tall man stood on the landing, a lantern in his left hand, its oily yellow glow bouncing on our faces. A Schmeisser submachine gun hung on a strap from his right shoulder; his thick fingers, half-mooned with dirt, were clutched on the pistol grip. Rosita stood up, her hands in the air, and spoke to him in German. He walked halfway down the wood steps, lifting the lantern higher. He was wearing snow-caked boots and corduroy trousers and a leather coat seamed with cracks and lined with sheep’s wool. His beard and hair were as wild as a lion’s mane. He said something in reply, his eyes blazing.

  “How about a translation?” I said.

  “I told him who we were and that we were sorry for entering his house without permission,” Rosita said. “I told him that Americans in large numbers would be here soon and they would reward anyone who helped us.”

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “That we shouldn’t have stolen from him,” she replied.

  Chapter

  5

  OUR GLOWERING HOST turned out to be a Jehovah’s Witness named Armin Bauer. He had been jailed as a pacifist and his Mongoloid son had been gassed during Hitler’s racial purification program. Two days before our arrival, he and his wife, Charlotte, hid in a cave while the SS were in the area; they had returned home just after we took refuge in their cellar. For eight days they let us stay in their cellar and fed us and washed our clothes and heated water in pots on a woodstove so we could bathe. They gave us bottles of homemade beer and a plate of bread slices slathered with jam, treats I suspected they rarely allowed themselves. I tried to ask Armin where he had gotten the Schmeisser, but he refused to say.

  Charlotte was a jolly, bovine person with upper arms as big as hams and blond braids she tied on top of her head. In view of the hardship and loss that had been imposed on her family, I was amazed at her good nature; finally, I asked her, through Rosita, about its source. She held up seven fingers and pointed at the backyard. Then she drew a finger across her throat. She looked at me and said something in German and laughed.

  “She says she gave the Wehrmacht soldiers some bread and jam. With poison in it,” Rosita explained. “Seven of them are buried by the barn. She wanted to know if you’d like some more bread and jam.”

  At night we heard bombers flying overhead, and sometimes we saw flashes of light on the horizon and seconds later heard a soft rumbling sound, more like distant thunder than bombs exploding. I couldn’t tell if the planes were American or British. We’d heard that the Army Air Corps had stopped conducting only daylight raids, which cost them terrible losses; like the RAF, they had commenced flying at night, lighting the target area with incendiaries.

  It felt unnatural to be a spectator in the war and not a participant. We were being sheltered and cared for by people who would be summarily executed if we were discovered in their cellar. We were eating their food, burning their fuel, sleeping on the blankets and quilts they gave us, and in Rosita’s case, wearing their clothes (the wife had given her a pair of trousers, a warm jacket, kneesocks, and a cute fur hat). The cellar was warm and dry, and we could sleep as much as we wanted, or stay up late at night and talk, the way people talk around campfires when their newfound companionship allows them to put aside pretense about their lives. It was a respite that I didn’t feel I deserved. West of us, my countrymen were still dying. Sometimes when I fell asleep on my pallet with a quilt pulled over my head, the preserve jars on the cellar shelves would begin rattling, and I knew that someone who had taken my place was huddling at the bottom of a foxhole, knees pulled up in the embryonic position, trying to control his sphincter while German 88s were demonstrating what a firestorm was all about.

  On the eighth night, the reverberations of the artillery shells were stronger, the clouds on the eastern horizon flickering with light from the ground. Pine was sound asleep at the back of the cellar, behind the stairs. Rosita was sitting on her pallet, her back to the wall, glancing up each time the house trembled.

  “You never hear the one that gets you,” I said. “At least that’s what survivors say.”

  “Is it true?”

  “I don’t think it is. An eighty-eight-millimeter comes in like a train. You can hear it powering out of the sky. One of ours, a 105, sounds like automobile tires coming toward you at high speed on a wet highway. The sound can come right into your foxhole with the shell attached.”

  “Are you going back to the war?”

  “I don’t have a lot of say about that. I’d like to finish it, though.”

  “Why do you always address me as Miss Rosita?”

  “Because in the American South, you don’t call a lady by her first name without expressing a form of deference. You’re obviously a lady. Actually, you’re a little more than that. You don’t belong in a category.”

  “You should go back home if you have the opportunity. You would be a very good university teacher.” Then she seemed to revisit my last remark. “I am not categorical? That is an unbelievable thing to say to a woman.”

  She had gained weight, and the shadows had gone out of her cheeks. The cast in her eyes was unchanged, however. It was different from what survivors of the Great War called the thousand-yard stare. I had seen that. The eyes were unseeing,
as though someone had clicked off a switch inside the person’s head, shutting down his faculties. The expression was glazed, the facial muscles dead. None of these applied to Rosita. The look in her eyes was acceptance; she had seen the evil her fellow humans were capable of, and she did not try to find explanations for it. She also knew that few would want to believe the events she had witnessed, and her attempts to describe them would only make her a pariah. The truth would not make her free; it would become her prison.

  “Lieutenant, you make me uncomfortable when you look at me like that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Do I still remind you of a woman outlaw?”

  “We grow them tough in Texas.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  I got up from my pallet and sat next to her. My proximity seemed to make her flinch inside, though I had carried her in my arms for days. Her face was inches from mine. “The woman outlaw represented something greater than herself. When people’s homes in Kansas and West Texas and Oklahoma were being tractored out, a few outlaws fought back. In reality, Bonnie Parker was a murderer and treated my grandfather with disrespect, and that’s why I shot at her.”

  “I’m a symbol of other people? How degrading.”

  “No, not a symbol. You have a huge soul. It dwarfs the souls of others. It certainly dwarfs mine. I’ve never seen eyes like yours. They’re the color of sherry with light shining through it. You’re the kind of woman who’s beautiful inside a camera’s lens no matter what pose she takes.”

  I hadn’t meant to say the things I did. My cheeks were hot, my throat dry.

  “You’re a romantic,” she said. “I think you see things in others that don’t exist. You might be a famous writer one day.”

  “You winked at me, didn’t you?”

  “I did what?”

  “When you said Viva la República and No pasarán.”

  “Like this?” she said.

  I felt chills all over.

  EARLY THE NEXT day Charlotte ran down the cellar steps, waving her arms. Before Rosita could translate, Charlotte threw open the cellar door and pointed joyously at the bluest, most beautiful sky I had ever seen.

  “Better come look at this,” I said to the sergeant, who was shaving with Armin’s straight razor in a pan of water.

  He walked up behind me into the sunlight shining through the door. “Great God in the morning!” he said.

  The sky was filled with khaki-colored C-47s, more than I had ever seen, hundreds if not thousands of parachutes blooming one after another from one horizon to another. Three American paratroopers came down right behind the barn, rolling with the impact, then collapsing and gathering up their chutes. Pine and Rosita and I and our hosts went into the yard, the grass green and soggy, snow melting and sliding down the barn roof. A paratrooper came down forty feet from us and began pulling his chute from a mud puddle.

  “Where the hell have you guys been?” Pine said.

  “You know how it is, Mack. The traffic can be a bitch,” he said.

  FOR SOME REASON the German army was always praised for its efficiency and its practicality and even, by some, its ruthlessness. Their occupation of an area left no one in doubt about who was in charge. Their methodology was as subtle as a hobnailed boot stepping on an anthill. Unfortunately, unlike Roman imperialists, they didn’t have a culture that transferred readily to the subjects of the countries they conquered.

  The cultural and social changes caused by the United States Army’s occupation of an area, for good or bad, were immediate, overwhelming, and almost cartoonish. The cultural assimilation that usually took place was mind-numbing. Fully equipped field hospitals were in business in hours, showers and sit-down latrines were built, water tankers and ambulances and long convoys of deuce-and-a-half trucks showed up out of nowhere. GIs played touch football in a pasture pockmarked by shell fire; they jitterbugged in a café with local girls who, days earlier, were thought to be the enemy, a Benny Goodman record playing on a hand-crank Victrola.

  I should have been overjoyed to be back among my own. At first I was. Then I felt my initial happiness begin to fade, as though I were about to step aboard a passenger train that would take me away from home. The following day I couldn’t find Rosita. I asked Pine where she was.

  “Some guys from G-2 were talking to her,” he said.

  “What does G-2 want with Rosita?”

  “Search me, sir,” he said. “They caught some SS in Wehrmacht uniforms. Some of the women guards in those camps have posed as inmates.”

  “G-2 thinks she’s an imposter?”

  “She’s probably okay, Loot.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “An hour ago. They put her on a truck with some other women.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Sir, the doc says I’m going to lose a couple of toes. I probably won’t be seeing you for a while.”

  We were standing in the sunshine outside a mess tent, the wind ballooning the canvas top. I looked at the lean cut of his jaw and the moral clarity in his eyes and regretted my anger. I couldn’t quite accept the fact that we were parting.

  “You’ll be headed back to Louisiana.”

  “Yes, sir, I will. I owe you, Lieutenant.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. We do our job and go home, and then we eventually forget about all this.”

  He was shaking his head before I finished speaking. “We’re going to be rich men, sir. I know everything there is to know about pipelining. I was hustling skids on the pipeline when I was thirteen years old. It’ll take some capital, but we’ll pull it off.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not connecting here.”

  “Know the secret to the Tiger tank’s structural success? It’s the rolled-steel and electro-welding process. When the war is done, the big peacetime score will be in oil and natural gas. That means pipelines, thousands and thousands of miles of them, all over the country. Oil might as well stay in the ground if you cain’t get it to the refinery.”

  “I’m sure you’re correct,” I said.

  “You all right, sir?”

  “Never better,” I said, looking at a deuce-and-half driving down the road, the back loaded with prisoners who may have been SS in civilian clothes.

  I RECEIVED TREATMENT FOR frostbite but nothing else. I rejoined the regiment and stayed with it all the way to the Elbe River, where we met the Russians on April 25, 1945. We got wonderfully drunk with them. We punched holes in canned beer with our bayonets, and the Russians drained the fuel from the rockets at a nearby V-2 base. In the morning we woke up with hangovers and the Russians woke up dead.

  I thought my hangover would fade as the day warmed and the flowers opened along the banks of the Elbe and the hilarity of the previous night slipped into memory, left behind with all the other departures from sanity that wars allow us to justify. I had never been much of a drinker and thought the weakness in my joints and the spots that swam before my eyes were the result of exposing an inexperienced metabolism to too much alcohol. By evening I began to sweat, and my hair was sopping wet and cold as ice in the wind, and I entered the first stages of a hacking cough that I believed was either bronchitis or walking pneumonia.

  There was no transition in the progression of my illness. By nightfall I was burning up and doubling over each time I coughed. I wrote in my notebook, I feel like there’s a chunk of angle iron in my chest. Maybe I’ll be better in the morning. No word about Rosita. A captain in G-2 said many Jewish survivors were being placed in displaced persons camps, but he could find no record of her. I think of her constantly. I see her eyes in my sleep. The coloration and the inner light that shows through them are like none I have ever seen. I don’t think I will be able to rest until I find her.

  I just coughed blood on my hand.

  A medic came into my tent in
the morning and took my temperature and placed a stethoscope on my chest. He was a tall, bony kid from Alabama and said he had worked in an X-ray unit in a Mobile hospital before he enlisted. He hung the earpieces to the stethoscope on his neck. “Is there a history of respiratory problems in your family, Lieutenant?” he asked.

  “As a matter of fact, there is.”

  “You smoke a lot?”

  “Never took it up. What are we talking about, Doc?”

  “You’re wheezing like a busted hose in there, sir.”

  “We’re not talking about pneumonia, are we?”

  “No, sir, we’re not.” He lifted his eyes into mine. “There’s a new drug available that’s supposed to work miracles.”

  Chapter

  6

  THE TUBERCULAR UNIT was in a converted eighteenth-century French mansion in vineyard country, one with a wide stone porch that allowed a wonderful view of the gardens and poplar trees and the low green hills in the distance and a meandering river and the white stucco farmhouses with red Spanish tile where the owners of the vineyards lived. The miracle drug I was given was called streptomycin. I took other forms of medication, too, but I do not remember their names. In the drowsy warmth of the breeze on an August afternoon, I would sleep the sleep of the dead, with no desire to wake up.

  I had no dreams of the war, as though it had been airbrushed from my memory. I wrote in my notebook, If I allow myself to feel, I will drop through a hole in the bottom of my stomach and begin to fall into a place from which I will not return. If I dreamed at all, it was of my boyhood home, where I had lived with my mother and grandfather. Sometimes I dreamed of the pets we had owned, and the windmill creaking in the breeze at night, and the way the rains had returned in the form of gulley washers, our pastures blooming with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush after years of drought.