Death by Publication

by J. J. Fiechter

  Yasmina dead! No, it couldn’t be. . . . Yet there it was. And it was all my fault! I burst into tears and could not stop sobbing. I left the house to seek refuge in the streets and walked aimlessly, still sobbing, from one end of town to the other, bearing all the woes of the world in my broken heart. In losing Yasmina, I had lost everything. I could think of nothing but joining her in death. I wanted to throw myself out of a window. No, drowning would be better. I was a murderer, and deserved to die.

  For more than thirty years I firmly believed that Mansour had somehow got wind of our romance and had killed Yasmina to avenge his honor.

  Chapter 5

  The war in Europe, now over a year old, had been for us but a distant event, of no real consequence. It was moreover a dull war, with both sides lined up across from each other only a few miles apart, blustering more than doing battle. The Maginot line was, we had it on good authority, impregnable, and the French army, buttressed by our own stalwart young men, the largest in the world. So why didn’t the Germans, and their funny little führer, give up their grandiose plans of expansion and go home?

  And then everything changed, virtually overnight. The Germans, knowing they could never pierce the French fortresses by a frontal assault, made an end run around the Maginot line and in a matter of days overran the Netherlands, Belgium, and then, to our utter dismay, France itself. We saw images in our newspapers of thousands upon thousands of Parisians heading south—in overloaded automobiles, pushing bicycles, on foot—holding children by the hand, bearing in their arms whatever precious possessions they had managed to grab. And there were images too of our soldiers at Dunkerque, being loaded helter-skelter onto ships and boats of every make and vintage, escaping just in time the final thrust of the Germans. Even today the memory of those defeats melds in my mind with my own personal tragedy, with the searing memory of my lost love.

  And then the French surrender, the shameful handshake at Montoire that put an end to the conflict and installed a lackey government in Vichy—the same city that would play such an important part in my later life. In Egypt the heavily pro-French population—the Syrians, the Jews, the Lebanese—refused to accept that their glorious image of France had been tarnished. They refused to believe the cold hard fact of the defeat. They preferred to believe that France had been betrayed. Surely a miracle would occur to reverse the past few weeks and restore its glory.

  We listened to the radio appeal from London by General de Gaulle, but most of the foreign colony, especially the embassy personnel, took it with a grain of salt, as did the ranking officers of the French Mediterranean fleet. Was it opportunism on their part? Military discipline on the part of the French navy? After all, they argued, the newly appointed leader was Marshal Petain, and for most of the French in Egypt, Petain was France.

  Most of my information about events on the Continent came from Nicolas, who, like me, was finishing his last year of secondary school. We discussed the now-not-so-distant war each time we got together, and assessed our chances of becoming involved. We argued that we were too young, but in our hearts we knew that in all likelihood the war would catch up with us sooner or later.

  Despite the cynicism of so many of his compatriots, Nicolas’s father made the decision to respond to General de Gaulle’s appeal and join his Free French forces in London. Since he was one of the first to respond, and because of his relatively high station in the French diplomatic corps, he became almost immediately one of de Gaulle’s top aides. Nicolas stayed on in Alexandria until the school year was out, then rejoined his father in London. Our farewells were cordial, but subconsciously at least, I still harbored a deep resentment at what he had done to our magazine. I had a feeling, too, that our paths would cross again, for not long after Nicolas’s father left Egypt, my father was called back to London to join his old army unit.

  Thus I was left completely alone, in the weeks and months following Yasmina’s death. Once or twice I ran into Elias and Irene, but they cut me dead. I had no one in the world I could talk to, no one with whom I could share my grief. I didn’t even know where my beloved was buried. Or, I wondered, had they even accorded her a decent burial? I would have wanted her to lie in that little chapel where we had loved each other so desperately for all those months. I would have liked to see her, to warm her in my arms, to talk to her. But I didn’t even have that consolation. I had no memento of her, no shred or rag to clutch in loving memory to my broken heart.

  War was moving closer, raging now in the nearby Libyan desert, but all the bombs in the world could fall around me, all the victories and defeats of the Allies come and go, I could not have cared less. Air raid alarms were increasingly common, and my mother would urge me to go down into the shelters at the first signal, but I refused. Nothing mattered to me any longer. I barely listened to the staccato of the now-familiar antiaircraft batteries chattering in the night right outside our window, as I barely reacted to the explosions of bombs landing, whether they were distant or near. The only thing that mattered to me now, and even more to my mother, was to rejoin my father in England. But he had made us promise to stay until I had received my diploma from Victoria College. As soon as I had, we booked passage on the next ship, which turned out to be a battered old troop ship. From the docks it looked barely seaworthy. It was unloading troops and ammunition, and for the return trip priority was being given to the elderly and invalids. Any remaining berths were allotted to the likes of us who were being reunited with our families. Rumors were rampant that the waters between here and home were crawling with both German and Italian submarines; in fact, news had just reached us that the proudest ship in the British navy, the Royal Ark, had just been sunk. The only redeeming footnote was the report that the Royal Ark’s captain, who had somehow miraculously survived, was picked up swimming with one hand, the other hand proudly holding above the waves his braided cap. Surely such spirit and bravery would end up carrying the day!

  Till now I had viewed the war through the tear-stained eyes of my own inconsolable grief. But at our first port of call I suddenly came face-to-face with real suffering.

  We took on board wounded whose faces were nothing more than a mass of twisted and swollen flesh; others whose faces you could not even see, since they were swathed in bandages; still others whose entire bodies were wrapped in bandages, looking for all the world like the mummies of my former home. But these mummies were still alive. They were soldiers, most of them still in their uniforms, or rather what remained of their uniforms. One or more of their limbs was missing, and they lay on their stretchers, moaning and calling for help. But the nurses on board were few and far between, and horribly overworked. I wanted to help but felt completely inadequate. All I could do was to talk to them and, more often, listen to their stories, and what they had to tell was the apocalypse. Through them I learned the horrors of war, discovered the terrible tempest of History from which my Alexandrian cocoon had till now protected me. But even worse than the stories they told were their silences, the terror I could see in their eyes as they stared into the darkness of their souls. Suddenly I was ashamed of my tanned face, my intact legs and arms, my grief born of love.

  London was a nightmare.

  Hitler’s Luftwaffe was intent on subduing England by destroying her cities, and the emphasis was clearly on the crown jewel, the capital. I made my way through a city of burned-out walls and endless piles of rubble, out of which, by some unexplained miracle, the intact towers of Saint Paul and Westminster rose in all their majesty.

  I had lived a completely self-centered life. I now swore to live a life of heroism, to put my romantic sorrow behind me, to bury my grief once and for all, and to dedicate myself to the greater good, to the fight against evil. I wanted to join the armed forces, become a soldier—and I realized that I had always wanted that since I was a child. One of my ancestors had fought at Waterloo, and now my father had been posted abroad to lead his regiment into battle, and that was where I too should be, right up on the front lines
. A wave of patriotism lifted me up and carried me high above myself.

  But reality has a way of bringing you back to earth with a resounding thud. My proud and glorious dreams resulted in my being accepted into the army all right, but not on the front lines. My battlefront was an underground office in London, where I was tied to a chair, so to speak, under the pretense that the armed forces needed my brains and my knowledge of languages. It was with great reluctance therefore that I was assigned to a unit known under the general heading of “Documentation,” an innocent term that included a multitude of activities for the secret services: decoding, preparation of false documents, counterfeiting, outfitting chosen personnel with all the equipment and identification they would need to perform their various tasks. All that in the third-level basement of the Dorchester Hotel.

  I was assigned to the unit specializing in North Africa and the Middle East. To the gargantuan task of dealing with the Axis was added the complex problem of unraveling, and then combatting, the various clandestine Jewish underground movements—the Irgun first and foremost, which from its base in Egypt was operating a network of sabotage aimed at Palestine. An incredible imbroglio of spies and conspirators. To try and figure out exactly what was going on, you had to adopt a quasi-Middle Eastern frame of mind yourself. It was like a tapestry being woven by several often-contradictory hands, each with its own pattern and agenda, and we had to make sense of this seemingly inextricable mess to our emissaries so they could act accordingly. Our job was to furnish our agents with indispensable covers by making sure the documents we provided would pass as authentic.

  Within a surprisingly short time I not only adapted myself to but took pride in these clandestine games of the shadow war, and within a few months I had become so adept that I was commended by my superiors. Inks, papers, official stamps, typewriters, encoding and decoding machines—none of this hush-hush paraphernalia held any secrets for me. My knowledge, plus the virtue of patience and that indescribable element known as flair, enabled me almost instinctively to tell the difference between a valid and a phony document. The team of counterfeiters—mostly recruited from prisons specifically to work with us—considered me a past master of the art. They assured me that after the war I had a bright future among them if I was so inclined.

  I worked fifteen, sometimes twenty, hours a day, with all the dedication and devotion that my country’s beleaguered position deserved. My fatigue helped me bury deep within me the sad memory of Yasmina. I tried to repress any amorous impulse and put my grief behind me. I had lived a useless life till now and felt a certain exhilaration at knowing I was doing something useful. Day after day I hardened myself against the memory of lost love.

  And then one day the war came even closer. The dreaded messenger from the War Department arrived to deliver the awful news: my father had fallen at Monte Cassino. We were told that his was a glorious death, but it was death nonetheless. My mother had lived in the daily fear that Father would not return, but when the expectation became reality, she crumbled. I could see her declining day by day. She had had only two loves in her life, Father and me, and now that he was gone she lavished on me all her love and devotion. Yet at the same time a kind of indifference settled over her. She took refuge in some inner world and seemed not to care about the war or the suffering of others. She rarely if ever left our apartment, became totally self-involved; she spent her days listening for my footsteps in the hallway, announcing my return from work, and she sat with her hand by the phone in the hope of hearing my voice, if only announcing I would be home late. She lived on the edge of the void, her door ajar, and in this endless waiting she had lost her winning smile. Tears had furrowed her face with deep wrinkles that made her look twice her age. If I had been transferred to the front, to the front lines of battle, I think she would either have gone mad or given up the ghost. As it was, if I were gone as much as two days she was in a state of indescribable panic.

  Please don’t misunderstand. She was neither abusive nor possessive: quite simply, she loved me. But her love was a prison. She asked nothing from me except that I be there, but that requirement weighed on me heavily, despite all my love for her.

  Looking back, I see as if in a fog the blurred image of the young man I was then, so focused on my work I could barely think of anything else, coming and going from the underground office where I was perfecting my talents as a counterfeiter and the apartment where my mother’s love held me in a viselike grip. I often brought her little gifts—a bouquet of flowers, a box of sweets—as a surprise. And I made up stories, amusing anecdotes I had heard firsthand, or sometimes second, to make her smile, rouse her from her torpor.

  Months went by, and the war continued above our heads. All I knew of the war was the thunderous sound of bombs falling and the strident whistle of the air raid sirens. Until one day the war descended into the street.

  I had had a long, hard day in the office and was on my way home on the bus rather late at night, my head still filled with false papers and impressive, but equally false, stamps and photographs. I was totally unaware of the outside world until I felt my neighbor—a quite pretty girl, in fact—staring at me.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “but I’m afraid you’re sitting on my skirt.”

  Taken aback, I jumped to my feet.

  “So sorry,” I managed to say. “Will you ever forgive me?”

  “Of course.” She smiled. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  “Thank you. . . . I’m afraid I’m terribly absent-minded.”

  “You look more as if you’re totally exhausted,” she said.

  After this banal exchange we struck up a conversation that was perfectly natural and—for anyone who knows how shy I am—quite remarkable. And then all of a sudden the sirens went off, and there was a deafening roar. Instinctively I dived for the floor, dragging the girl with me in a protective gesture. And then I lost consciousness.

  When I came to there was the dreadful stench of burning flesh in my nostrils. My clothes were drenched with blood. The blood of the young girl who was lying beside me, her head exploded, horribly unrecognizable.

  Filled with terror and despair, I began to sob uncontrollably, sobbing for the girl, for myself, for life itself.

  In a strange way that shock was therapeutic; it gave me the courage to see the reality of war for the first time, and the strength to react against the apathy that had begun to turn me into a zombie. I took my courage in my hands and, citing the dangers of her remaining in London, sent my mother away to Scotland to stay with a cousin of hers, a paragon of energy and good cheer. She agreed only on the condition that I write her every day.

  I then made an effort to go out after work, to live or at least make the effort. Night after night I would force myself to go to a pub, drinking along with the best of them, in the vain hope I might find a willing girl. When that failed, I repaired to bars that catered to soldiers, where there were sure to be girls. But these encounters were disastrous, a complete humiliation—miserable, ridiculous efforts to forget Yasmina. . . .

  The first time I took a girl home I blamed the sorry results on abstinence. After all, only once you start eating do you realize how hungry you are, and I hadn’t made love since my summer with Yasmina. I blamed the second fiasco on the fact that my partner’s oversize buttocks had turned me off. Then I began to wonder seriously: was it possible that at age twenty I was impotent? That Yasmina’s death had stripped me forever of my virility? Was it possible that I could never manage to desire, to possess, another woman? Was I bewitched?

  At that point I panicked and decided that I had to find some means, however low or sordid, to prove that I could overcome my temporary impotence.

  So it was that one night I went to the Wellington, a club that catered to aviators, in search of the Dulcinea who would be the answer to my dreams, when I saw Nicolas again. He appeared to me as if enveloped in a cloud of light, a sort of halo that doubtless existed only in my mind, still deformed as it was with admiratio
n. He was a cross between Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway. Film hero, war hero as well. He was born to wear a uniform. His jacket, tightly buttoned, accentuated his broad, athletic shoulders. And all of a sudden I felt like a nobody in my lieutenant’s uniform, which till then I had thought made me look quite handsome.

  To make things worse, Nicolas was wearing a white silk scarf, draped nonchalantly over his shoulder. No question, life had dealt him a great hand, and the woman he was with, a Ginger Rogers lookalike sculpted in amber, was more than great. Nicolas was staring at her as if she were the only creature on earth.

  Why did I feel like running away? Out of shyness? Because I suddenly felt myself very small and insignificant? But it was too late. Nicolas had seen me.

  “Edward! Edward!” he called across the crowded room as I was halfway out the door.

  “This calls for a bottle of champagne!” he said, after embracing me warmly and introducing me to his companion. And he raised his hand imperiously and ordered a bottle of the best vintage. Then he launched into a harangue, expostulating about “his” war. For him it was the great adventure, a game of Russian roulette. An adventure that could only be played out “up above.” What about dying? He could face dying, but not in the mud up to his hips, and not in some back office, some subbasement like the one in which I labored. To die “up there,” in the heavens about, a hero’s death in the wild blue yonder, now that was the only glorious way to go!

  The Ginger Rogers lookalike, who must have heard the same speech a hundred times, wandered away to swivel her hips in front of someone else, leaving Nicolas free to fill me in at length on his endless amorous exploits. . . . My God, I probably couldn’t even picture the way the adorable creatures came rushing out to greet his plane as soon as he landed and climbed down out of his cockpit upon returning from some dangerous mission. They couldn’t wait to fall into his arms. This living dangerously, these daily brushes with death, seemed to go straight to his balls, he added. He needed to make love in order to calm his nerves, and also because making love was, after all, a hymn to life, now wasn’t it, Edward? A hymn you’d better sing as often as you could because, God knows, the next mission might be your last. So he took every available opportunity that came his way: nurses, women from the auxiliary corps, women whose husbands were away at the front, widows . . . you name it. “Quite a collection if I do say so myself. Like the glutton who can’t get enough no matter how much he has eaten. I amaze even myself.”