Pursuit

by Robert L. Fish

  “As soon as it’s light,” Grossman said, and started to strip off his trousers. Max flipped off the light and started to undress in the dark. He slid into bed and glanced across the darkened room.

  “Good night, Ben.”

  “Good night.”

  But Wolf had the last word.

  “Good night, all,” he said, “and Grossman, I hope you know how to swim!”

  Dawn had just started to lighten the eastern sky when Grossman rolled over, considered the now visible windowpane, and then silently swung his feet to the floor. He winced slightly at the dampness of the bare wood and quickly pulled on his socks. His trousers followed, then the British fatigue blouse, then the heavy shoes “organized” at Belsen, and finally the little striped cap. He came to his feet, staring down at the sleeping men. They were Jews it was true, but actually not as bad as most Jews. He had spent a full year with them; Brodsky had been helpful during that time. In a way he would miss seeing him each day; in a way he would even miss Wolf’s sardonic humor, biting as it could be at times. But they were now as much of the past as Maidanek and Mittendorf, or Buchenwald and Schlossberg, or Bergen-Belsen and the dead Kapo, Soli Yaganzys. The future was ahead, when he was inside Switzerland. It was time to go.

  He walked as quietly as he could to the door, opening it silently, and tiptoed down the steps to the ground floor. There was a faint click as the outside door of the barracks closed behind him. Across the room Max Brodsky sat up and climbed silently from his bed. In the half-light Wolf pushed himself up on one elbow.

  “What are you getting up for?”

  Brodsky looked sheepish. “I can’t let him go alone …”

  Wolf stared in disbelief. “You’re going to Switzerland?”

  “No, no! I’ll be back. It’s just—well, he may need help in getting across the border …”

  Wolf snorted.

  “For this he’ll need more than the great Max Brodsky. He’ll need the American Seventh Army, plus a declaration of war against the Swiss. You think they really need people like Grossman? The man’s a nut. He’s a menace. Let him go. Let the Swiss worry about him.”

  “He’s my friend,” Brodsky said quietly. “He’s also neither as strong as he thinks he is, nor as self-sufficient. He didn’t think this out; he made up his mind at the spur of the moment. He’ll need help.” He shrugged. “What’s it cost to help a friend?”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t cost you getting to Palestine,” Wolf said somberly. “Or your life.” He didn’t sound like the usual sardonic Wolf; he was deadly serious. “Max, let him go. I mean it. Grossman’s a strange person. I don’t think I like him.”

  “You don’t understand him.”

  “I don’t understand alligators, either, but I don’t chase them. I think maybe I do understand Grossman and you don’t,” Wolf said. “He’s the German kind of German Jew.”

  Max was pulling on his trousers, buttoning them.

  “Now I don’t understand you. What kind of a German Jew are you?”

  “A different kind,” Wolf said quietly. “Grossman’s a German first, then—maybe—a Jew.”

  Brodsky smiled. “I thought Hitler removed that distinction.”

  Wolf shook his head; he was deadly serious.

  “Max, you don’t understand. Some of the German Jews, I’m ashamed to say, mostly from the north, from Hamburg, from Berlin, from Prussia—they always wanted to prove they were more German than the Kaiser. Yiddish was a language they deplored; Russian Jews were all Litvaks even if they came from Odessa; Zionism was a dirty word. It meant there was a country somewhere, a certain place on earth, that had a greater claim on the Jews than Germany did, and those flag-waving patriots couldn’t explain that. And since they couldn’t explain it, they obviously couldn’t accept it.” He shrugged. “I’ve known more than one German Jew who bragged about his saber cut from Heidelberg, can you imagine?”

  “In Poland,” Max said, putting on his blouse and buttoning it, “we thought all German Jews were like that.”

  “No,” Wolf said seriously, “not all. Oh, there were Jews in Germany who had no real objection to Hitler when he first came along. They even thought he was going to be good for Germany—until he started to kill them personally, of course. He had told them exactly what he planned to do in Mein Kampf, when it was first published back in 1925, but I guess they thought he was just using poetic license. Even after Kristallnacht in November of ’38, when the synagogues went up in flames, when all the Jewish shops were demolished and twenty thousand Jews were dragged from their beds and beaten in the streets and then put in prison—even then these Jews, these superpatriots, these extra-German Germans, claimed that it wasn’t Hitler’s fault. It was the fault of his subordinates. Or, even if Hitler knew about it and condoned it, it was a temporary aberration on his part that would pass. With castor oil, maybe, it would pass.” His voice was bitter. “After all, how could Germany exist without its Jews? Its liberated, educated Jews? Its scientific, cultured Jews? Its rich and comfortable—and German—Jews?”

  Max suddenly thought he understood.

  “You were a Communist …”

  “That was the charge when they beat me up and threw me into Dachau back in 1936,” Wolf said quietly. “I was one of the founding fathers of that camp, they owe me a medal. Was I a Communist? No. What I was, was the secretary of our union. What I wasn’t was a rich, influential Jew. I was a cook in a cheap restaurant in a working-class neighborhood in Munich. Not that it helped the rich, influential Jews very much; the ones who stuck around waiting for Hitler to change, ended up going up a chimney, someplace. Me, I’m still alive at least. And if I can’t get a job as a cook in Palestine, I can always get a job in a side show of a circus with my face.”

  “In Palestine you can cook, farm, do what you want.” Max was tying his shoe laces.

  “Max,” Wolf said in desperation, trying to continue the conversation in order to delay Brodsky’s departure, “before the camps, before Dachau and Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, I don’t suppose I was much of a Jew. I don’t know how much of a Jew I am today, certainly not a religious Jew, if believing in your kind of God is necessary. But I know that Germany is not for any Jew. I know that Germany is not for me. But Grossman—Germany is for him.” He looked at Brodsky in despair as the large man walked to the door. “Max, don’t go. Believe me, Grossman isn’t worth it.”

  Brodsky paused and looked back.

  “Every Jew is worth it,” he said quietly. “There aren’t all that many of us left.”

  Chapter 9

  There was no military bus waiting at the Maximilian Platz, nor any sign of Benjamin Grossman. There was, however, a wrecking crew piling rubbish onto a truck from what had been an office building, from the looks of the debris. The military bus? Of the Americans? Oh, that had pulled out a few minutes ago; it had made room for their truck, as a matter of fact. Another bus? The next day, they thought; or possibly not. They had no idea. Possibly he could get the information at the Hauptbahnhof; the American Military Police had a desk there to help their soldiers traveling by train. It was right where you went into the station from the Bayer Strasse.

  The MPs were unable to help him. Whatever military bus was in the habit of either starting or stopping in the Maximilian Platz had nothing to do with their department. To get to Konstanz? There were, of course, trains—but Max had left his prisoner garb at the camp, and without his striped shirt or cap, he would have to pay. And the money he was carrying was not meant for chasing foolish Jews halfway across Germany in order to help them get into Switzerland; it was meant for the far more important job of getting desperate people into Palestine to find safety.

  Max Brodsky stood and stared at the jagged holes in what had been the curved glass roof of the railroad station, thinking. He carefully reviewed all of Morris Wolf’s arguments, considered the monetary aspects of his chase in all their ramifications, carefully meditated on the chances of finding Grossman, and then discarded all his c
onclusions and walked into the information room and up to a clerk. There was a train in several hours that went to the Bodensee, yes; not to Konstanz, but to the Bodensee. It was the Alpine express, newly back in service, and it went through Friedrichshafen on its way to Lindau, Chur, and eventually Italy. By getting off at Friedrichshafen, he could catch a bus—whose schedule was admittedly arbitrary—and with luck get into Meersburg by early evening. It would be a long trip, the clerk admitted, but there was no doubt he would arrive. The ferry from Meersburg to Konstanz, the information clerk thought, had never ceased to function, but he was not sure. The ferry, after all, the clerk explained, did not run on rails and was therefore no responsibility of his.

  Brodsky thanked him, added up all the disadvantages of his pursuit once again—and then went out and bought a ticket. As he waited for the train to arrive, he promised himself that when at last he caught up with Benjamin Grossman, he would pound on his friend’s thick German skull until it rang like the glockenspiel at a Polish wedding.

  The clerk had not exaggerated; it was, indeed, a long journey. In compensation for having wasted Mossad money on the transportation, Max forwent both lunch and dinner, and as the ancient bus lumbered north along the clear waters of the Bodensee, with the Swiss Alps clearly visible in the transparent afternoon air, he wondered for the hundredth time exactly what he thought he was accomplishing by the trip. The chances that he could encounter Grossman had to be astronomical. After all, Konstanz was not exactly a crossroads village; and besides, he had never been there before. He would not only be searching for a needle in a haystack, but it would be a foreign haystack, at that. Besides, for all he knew Grossman could be planning on making his attempt in a hundred towns other than Konstanz; the man was not above being devious, and the fact that he had mentioned Konstanz might well mean it was the one place he would not try to cross the frontier. How could he hope to locate the man under those conditions? And even if he found him, how could he possibly help him? What did he know about crossing borders? He was an idiot; that was the answer. He was a fool; that was what he knew about crossing borders.

  The day wore on, seemingly endless. Max intermittently napped and tried to think of other things besides the meals he had missed. It had been many months now since Belsen had been liberated, and he had become accustomed in that time to regular meals. The bus lurched on and on.

  At seven o’clock the tired vehicle finally made it into Meersburg, dropping him off at a newsstand that served the small village as bus station. It was a short block to the ferry slip, and Max just managed to catch the ferry as the landing plate was being dragged aboard by the two-man crew. By now, of course, Max was merely completing an assignment simply because it had been started; it was obvious he was wasting his time, but he could scarcely turn about and go home at this point. That would have been even more foolish than his having started out in the first place, and God knew how stupid that had been!

  Under other circumstances, Max might have enjoyed the brief twenty-minute ferry ride across the blue waters of the Bodensee from Meersburg to Staad, the docking area for the Konstanz ferry. The sun was setting now over the huge mountains to the west; the snowcapped peaks rose majestically from the sloping plains that bordered the lake. The growing shadows made the narrow valleys that slotted their way between the ranges a deep blue, matching the dark waters of the lake. There was a freshness in the air, a promise that here in this part of the world which had been spared the devastation of war, one might find peace. Here one could forget the bombings; here one might even learn to forget the horrors of the concentration camps.

  How different, he thought, from the land I worked so hard on as a boy, working for the farmer Kolchak, while my parents slaved over their hot irons in the tailor shop in town that was permitted to make clothes just for Jews—who had no money to pay. How different this paradise from the barren soil of Palestine on the kibbutz, growing everything the hard way! Maybe Grossman was right. What was wrong with wanting to enjoy this peace, this beauty? What was wrong with preferring to live here among these great quiet peaks, in the wide green valleys, rather than struggling with the heat and the discomfort of the Palestinian deserts? What was wrong with wanting to live in peace with your neighbors rather than struggling against an inhospitable land in constant war with both British and Arab?

  Then his mind cleared and he smiled. Those struggles, he said to himself, made me strong enough to live through the camps—and to bring others through with me, Grossman included. And besides, Grossman was wrong. For any Jew one square meter of Palestinian soil, owned and brought to fruition by his own hand, his own sweat, had to be worth the whole of any country on earth.

  The ferry pulled into Staad and docked with a great rush of water into the slip, bouncing jarringly against the straining planks, and settling down only when lashed into growling obedience by the dockside davits. And as Max Brodsky swung along the short road leading to Konstanz itself, he tried to seriously analyze exactly why he was undertaking this obviously useless trip. He decided it had to be because he had too much time and effort invested in bringing Benjamin Grossman through Bergen-Belsen to lose him now. He also decided he had changed his mind as to what he would do when and if he found his friend. Rather than pound on that thick German skull, he would strangle the man with his bare hands, and then toss his dead body across the border into Switzerland, if that was where Benjamin Grossman wanted to go so badly.

  It was a comforting thought and kept his mind from food as he marched along.

  The seventy-odd miles from Munich’s Maximilian Platz to Leipheim on the Ulm road had been covered in a scant two and a half hours, a tribute to the bus driver’s utter lack of caution or good sense on the unrepaired road. As Grossman climbed down and watched the bus tear off again, he wished he had waited at least until after breakfast before taking off on his journey. Or had not been so stubborn about accepting a few cans of food before taking off; even a lunch of Spam would have tasted good at the moment. The little money Max had given him—which would have been more if Max had not been so Jew-stingy—he had to save for more desperate times. He crossed the road and started to wave down the trucks that were passing in a steady stream, churning up dust.

  As he stood there he felt a fine sense of freedom, simply for being alone. He had always been a loner, and that had been difficult if not impossible in either the camps or at Felsdorf. He was also pleased he had made the decision to leave, certain it had been the right one, even if arrived at on the spur of the moment.

  A truck pulled up, interrupting his thoughts, and the driver motioned him to join him in the cab. He climbed in, slammed the door behind him, shoved the striped cap into his pocket, and leaned back, completely at peace with the world. And Brodsky and Wolf had thought there would be some trouble in getting to Konstanz! Here he was, well on the way to his goal, and it was only eleven in the morning! Maybe he could get the driver to buy him some lunch at a roadside inn; or maybe the driver had rations with him. All these Americans seemed to be loaded with chocolate bars, as if they grew them in their back yards.

  His thoughts were interrupted and it was a moment before he realized he was being addressed in Yiddish. In surprise, he looked over at the driver, actually seeing him for the first time. It was an American soldier with two stripes on his arm, a corporal, a smallish man far older than one would expect for that lowly rank. He wore thick glasses and his uniform seemed too big for him. He kept wetting his lips as he spoke.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m trying to get to Konstanz, on the Bodensee,” he said, speaking pure German. There were enough rides to be had on this road without having to cater to the language tastes of some Jew corporal, probably from New York. Wasn’t that where all American Jews lived?

  “Konstanz. On the Bodensee,” said the corporal, frowning, and then understood. “Oh,” he said in English. “Constance. On Lake Constance.” He glanced over at Grossman and then brought his attention back to the road, chan
ging to halting German. “I thought—I guess we all have the idea that all camp inmates were Jews. And you look …” He let it fade away. Grossman made no attempt to enlighten the man. “What camps were you in?” the corporal asked, trying to pass over the brief silence.

  “Maidanek, Buchenwald, and Belsen.”

  The corporal’s eyebrows raised. “Good Lord! You’re lucky to be alive!”

  “I suppose.”

  “What was it like in the camps?”

  The nosy Jew bastard!

  “It was like something I don’t feel like talking about.”

  “Oh.” The corporal’s face turned fiery red. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I should have realized … I didn’t mean …” As if in compensation for the faux pas, he said slowly, “Constance … I’m on my way to Freiburg with medical supplies. I’m a medic, you see-well, a dental technician, actually, but they were short of drivers and I said I’d go. I think I go near there, though …”

  He pulled from the road, set the brake, and drew a map from the glove compartment, studying it, constantly pushing his glasses into position as they slid down his nose.

  “I go through a place called Tuttlingen. Constance is off the road quite a bit, but I guess I could take you at least partway to Constance from Tuttlingen …”

  “There’s a good road from Tuttlingen to Singen,” Grossman said.

  “Singen … yes …” said the corporal. He put the map away and got the truck back on the road, after which he concentrated on his driving, saying nothing.

  A typical Jew, Grossman thought with disgust. All nosy and pushing as long as you let them; all fawning and toadying once you put them in their place. Although it was true that Brodsky wasn’t that way, and to call Wolf fawning was ridiculous. Well, there were exceptions to every rule, and Brodsky and Wolf merely proved it. This little Jew was as standard as they came; he would not only take him where he wanted to go, but he would buy all the meals en route, as well. Grossman would have bet on it.