4
DURING THE LATER WAR years Martha spent a part of almost every day at the South Side USO Canteen. It was difficult for her at first, slow as she was to find rapport with strangers, but the shyness of so many of the boys quickened her sympathy and hence her tongue, and the boldness of some of her anger and hence, also, her tongue. She would have much preferred, after Jonathan left, to keep Tad with her all his waking hours and to spend her leisure painting again, solitary, but not altogether lonely: there was not an hour of the day she did not think of Marcus. For a while it did not alter her communion with him that he wrote so rarely. There was in the mystical aspect of her religious life the power of conjuring a presence.
But she suspected some time before receiving the letter he wrote her from the North of Ireland that Marcus had lost the intimate sense of her, and from that letter on her own conjuring began to fail her. And as well, she decided. They would not return to one another unchanged. “You may even have to come and get me,” he had written, meaning, she supposed, that they should have to fall in love all over again, and perhaps she be the wooer. Gladly, gladly. But imagination cannot conjure without the heart’s certainty. In the end she waited and accepted memory and tried not to seek the future in it, lest the memory itself diffuse and she be left with nothing of him.
She had not known until the letter from Ireland that Marcus had been in Italy, and while she conjectured from the new APO number that he was next in France or Holland, she did not know it for certain. When her mother wrote, following his visit, Martha resented her ardent praise of him. As though she needed to be told of Marcus’s virtues. Could she love him more for her mother’s praise of him? If he weren’t Marcus she might love him the less for it. She wondered sometimes if she were not jealous of her mother and that ten-day interlude: she was hard put to take unselfish pleasure in it.
After breakfast every morning Tad played in the library where he could watch for the mailman’s coming. He and the mailman always shook hands after a fashion: Tad would run to the front door when he saw him and stick his fingers out through the mail slot. The mailman would take hold of them and give them a shake of sorts. Then when Tad withdrew his hand the letters would cascade in upon the floor. At the age of three, he could recognize a letter from “Grandma n’Ireland” although he could not pronounce the R in Ireland. Any other overseas mail he came to attribute to his Grandpa Jon. He was going to need to be a wise child to recognize his father, Martha thought. And there was bitterness for the silence: she could not entirely suppress it.
Tad was keeping his regular vigil for the postman when, through the first snow of December, a Western Union messenger turned up the walk. The child cried out in his excitement, seeing the uniform, and both Annie and his mother came running. They flung open the door even as the man put his finger to the bell, and stopped all, in deadly apprehension of the message that must pass from his hand to theirs. Then Martha took the telegram and signed for it, and before the door closed them unto themselves, Annie began to pray aloud.
Martha could not pray. Stonily, remote from child and friend both, she tore open the envelope. Marcus had been taken prisoner of war by the Germans.
Throughout the day she grew more and more accustomed to the idea. It was not death; from such anticipation, she felt only relief at the other. Many people called, for the name was published with the latest local casualties: even strangers phoned among whose own close relatives were prisoners of war from whom they had heard through the Red Cross. To them she was very grateful. It was supposed from comparison of APO numbers that Marcus had been taken at the breakthrough in Belgium. It soon became uneasy consolation, however, that for him the war was over; there now existed too much documentation of Nazi cruelty, and if she allowed her imagination any play at all it suggested that a doctor would be to them a prize capture. And as so many people said, the pity of all this was its happening at The Bulge, when we had been led to feel that victory was all but won.
In the afternoon Nathan came. She had not seen him for a month although regularly a check came from the office to her. He looked vigorous and strong, and as always, on the verge of saying something rather too intimate. It was his manner only, but she never failed to be on the defensive with him.
“You look well, Nathan.”
“It is a handicap—would you believe me? Such an upsided world.”
Martha smiled.
“Oh, no. I see old ladies looking at me as much as to say … but you know what they would say. It is not so bad, Martha, what happened to Marcus. He is an officer, you must remember that. And he is Aryan. He will be treated well. You will see.”
“It is so terrible,” Martha said, “to know a little and know nothing, to sit and drink tea and know that someone whose right it is to be sitting with you—is sunk in God knows what desolation.” She looked within her cup. “And yet the tea is tea, not gall, not vinegar.”
Nathan leaned forward in his chair, his hands clasped between his knees. “You are so beautiful when you are tragic.”
“I am not tragic,” she said. “I am only helpless. Nathan, I swear to you, if I were near and saw anyone hurt Marcus, I should physically attack them. Like a beast with claws. It is not right that war is there and we are here. However shall we face them coming back to us?”
He threw up his hands. “Make heroes of them. That is all. What is it but a spin of the wheel—who shall be heroes and who cowards? Once I was ashamed. Twice. But no more. Nothing you will say, nothing anybody says. I do what I can do. What is shame? It is a perfume, no, a disinfectant. That’s what it is. We shake it over ourselves so people will think we are clean.”
“I did not reproach you, Nathan.”
“Your eyes did. But I am no longer going to hide from them.”
“There is no need,” she said, but without looking at him.
He left his chair and, standing in front of her, he touched his long, cool fingers to beneath her chin. “I would rather you looked at me no matter what I see in your eyes.” He caught her face and held it until she looked up at him. “Poor little unhappy one. How you suffer. May I tell you some news about myself?” He waited for her to answer. But she drew away from the touch of his hand. He returned to his chair. “I have been nominated to the Board of the County Medical Association.”
“How very nice, Nathan. I am sure you deserve it.”
“Thank you.”
“Marcus will be very pleased.”
There was an instant of dissonance in his aplomb—or she might have imagined it. “You are too kind,” he murmured. She suspected he meant quite the opposite, having taken her words for patronizing. “But you understand, nomination is not election. I wish your husband were here.”
“So do I.”
“Of course you do. That is why I am hoping you will do what he would do. I want you to write some letters for me, Martha. Only one or two. They are to very important men in the profession.”
“Do I know them?” she asked after a moment.
“Marcus knows them. They were friends, associates, of Doctor Bergner. You will say you are writing on behalf of your husband to recommend personally his colleague. If you are generous, you will say you met me when I was a distinguished Jewish surgeon on the Continent.” Observing the unguarded reservation in her eyes, he spread his hands. “I am at your mercy, you see. But sometime you were at mine, weren’t you?” The color flared up in her cheeks and he added quickly, “But, my dear, I did not mean our moment… of intimacy at all! What I meant, we are all sometimes at one another’s mercy, the most irreproachable of us. It is so. And if you were to tell of me what you observed in Vienna, it would not create a very distinguished impression, especially with these gentlemen. My friend, Mueller, by the way, is writing such a letter as I am asking of you. And if it is too difficult for you, but, of course, I will understand.”
Martha lifted her chin. “You were a distinguished surgeon. I have no reason to doubt it.”
“And a Jew.”
His eyes also challenged her to remember the worst of him, his denial of it.
“I think it would be out of place for me to say that, Nathan.”
“Perhaps you are right. But you will write the letters?”
Having got so far beyond the mere matter of a letter of recommendation, she could not hesitate.
“To whom am I to write the letters, Nathan?”
He wrote out the names and addresses of two prominent Traders City physicians. Martha knew them by reputation only, and she knew that they were Jewish.
“I must go this way now because I did not go directly among them at first—for reasons unheroic. One does not boast survival when someone for whom he feels responsible does not survive.”
“The Baroness is dead?”
“Surely I should have heard by now if she were not. After all, she was not an ordinary Jewess.”
“She was not an ordinary woman,” Martha said.
“You are right. An ordinary woman I could have saved. But because of what happened, I had to go—not to my own people. It is not my fault I live in such times.”
There was the question. But whose fault was it? Whose fault that Marcus stood now, perhaps, in some compound, half-starved among the starving, he who had never had a gun in his hands? Whose fault Hitler?
“You are remarkably well assimilated, Nathan.” If she had thought more deeply of the words, she might not have said them, for all that she believed them to be true. She could not help but suspect his sudden nostalgia for “his own people” to have a cause not yet revealed to her.
“I do not wish to be assimilated,” he said finally. “You cannot say I denied once in this country what I am.”
“I do not know what you are, Nathan, beyond what you say you are. I do not even know that I care, but I am sorry if I offended you.” She put her cup and saucer on the tray. She got up, a sign that it was time for him to go. “I shall write the letters in the morning.”
“I am too sensitive,” he said, and rising, held out both his hands as though hopeful that she might take them.
“Are you?” She went to the door and waited there, then going from the library before him. When he had put on his overcoat, she offered her hand. “I am sure you will be elected to the County Board, Nathan. Some day, I should think, you will be president of the American Medical Association.”
“And do you think Marcus will be pleased then too?”
Thus he succeeded in putting her on the defensive again. She should not think of him as a weak man, she knew, for he very well compelled her to his way. The cowardice of conscience? She could not say.
5
HOW MUCH CAN A doctor do without medications, without soap and with only a splash of water? What he could do, Marcus did. The war was almost over, everyone knew, but to be won, some in Marcus’s camp thought bitterly—they had almost all been taken at the Ardennes—by the Russians. The camp received over a thousand additional Allied prisoners in April of 1945 force-marched five hundred miles from where they had been interned in Poland: this upon the Russian break-through. Gangrene and dysentery came with them and even more diseases of malnutrition than Marcus had already learned of. And with them came the first eye-witness accounts of the extermination camps, the crematoria. Who could but say then Godspeed the Russians?
Night after night the skies were aglow over Hamburg and Berlin, and the all-night roar of the Allied bombers was the sweetest spoiler of sleep. Some men thought they heard artillery fire in the day; the German guards said it was machinery at the factory on the edge of town. And then one morning, when Marcus was out at dawn whittling splints out of a broom handle he had stolen during the night, a solitary figure came running across the compound from the barracks of the enlisted men.
“Doc,” he cried out, “doc, they’re gone! Look for yourself! There isn’t a God damned Nazi bastard in the whole stinking compound!” The soldier was half-laughing, half-crying, the spittle running out of his mouth. Marcus slowly looked from one watch post to another. He had long since trained himself to concentrate on what he was doing, not to look, the less to spend himself in loathing. He felt his head nodding and the rising in him of a sickening kind of joy. The youngster opened his mouth and let out a great, wild cry: “Halloooo-oo!” Soon everyone was running, men half-dressed, some barefoot, and above their shouts and jubilation, the distant thumping of guns could soon be heard to the north.
Marcus ran with the rest through the open gates, down the hill to the heart of the village where all the blinds and shutters were drawn. Prisoners from other camps were there and more yet coming; French, British, Canadians converged with the Americans, all abandoned by their guards. They broke into stores and warehouses, private homes, the villagers scuttling out in all directions, and no one bade them stay. The looters came out with milk and bread, with wine, with towels in which they rubbed their unwashed faces. Marcus watched the pillage with unmitigated joy.
Within the hour advance units of the American Ninth Army moved into the town. Marcus, in search of the medics, was on hand for an early exchange of information: the French P.O.W.s’ intelligence of a women’s concentration camp at the northeast end of town. He rode out in a jeep with the first platoons assigned its liberation. On the way he smoked his first cigaret in five months. It was the only pleasure he was to have for several hours.
Seeing the sight in the distance, Marcus was put first in mind of animal kennels, the creatures within leaping against the fences. But they were women, all, clinging, writhing at the wires, emaciated to where their faces were but frames for eyes, teeth and hair. They set up a din of screaming horror, those unable to reach the fence, tearing at the backs of those in front. The smell of them on the fresh spring air was as terrible as the sight and sound. Several German guards stood outside the compound gates, their hands in the air. The first American soldiers took command of them and marched them down the hill, eager themselves to forego the glory of the actual liberation. The remaining soldiers stood staring, obviously terrified of the women. Marcus went with the sergeant into the gatehouse where the latter turned off the electricity. As soon as they came out the women knew what they had done. With utter abandon they charged the gate and brought it down themselves while the petrified soldiers watched. Marcus cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted to the men, “Just let them go! Let them run out!”
They would not run far, he thought; God help them, they would not run far. Gaunt with starvation, crazed with joy, having freedom they were instantly bewildered by it. A few of them hugged those of the soldiers with the courage to accept their embraces, but most of them hobbled around, bleeding, oozing with sores, sobbing, remote, especially from one another, wretched with self-loathing and loathing of their other selves as all were, each to one another.
The medics came, and a canteen truck with soup. The unfortunates fought one another in the line the soldiers tried to keep them in, while a translator begged them in several languages not to destroy themselves, that they were saved.
Marcus went down the hill and waited. In comparison, the prisoners among whom he had been interned were blooming healthy. He reported himself to command headquarters.
Marcus stayed on in the town for several days after the other military internees had been evacuated. He lived in the burgomaster’s house and slept in a feather bed, and worked all his waking hours among the survivors of the labor camp. Most of the women were Eastern European Jews with a handful of Western political prisoners among them. That they had been young enough to work in twelve-hour shifts at the munitions factory was the reason they were alive. Many of the Jewish girls had come out of Auschwitz: their arms were indelibly numbered, their eyes soulless. They were got into clean quarters—the former barracks of the German officers—washed, given medication, and fed such foods as their starved bodies could accommodate.
Building by building, the foul barracks were burned to the ground. Some of the former inmates stood outside the fence watching, raising a howl of lamentation—or
of joy; who could say? They would wander off, many of them, vague and lost, and sometimes if a hand were put out to guide them, they would shy away from it or scream defiance. But the worst pose of all to see them in, Marcus thought, was that of wheedling beggary, which must nonetheless have been one way of survival. There were not many ways. Enough food to keep twenty-five of them alive had been daily apportioned to every hundred internees. Nor was there anything now one could give the survivors except to ease their bodies. What they needed was beyond man’s giving: they needed to be born again.
“Doctor, when comes the train from Paris, do you say?”
Both the woman and Marcus were watching the engineers repair the railroad tracks. Marcus had already observed her: in her prime she must have been a proud, fine-looking girl. Now she was a rack of sinew and bone. She had in hand a Red Cross satchel which he supposed contained a toothbrush, a towel, soap and a nightgown, possibly a change of underwear.
“Soon,” Marcus said. “Maybe today.” He was himself expecting supplies on the first train through.
“Maybe yesterday, maybe today. Tomorrow surely, eh?” The Frenchwoman spoke English well, or better by far than he could speak French. “I am glad it is not today,” she said resignedly.
Marcus nodded, knowing what she meant. “I wonder if those are cherry trees,” he said, indicating a clump of gnarled blossoming trees. “I suppose not. It’s late for them.”
“The chestnuts will be out in Paris. Have you been here long, doctor?”
“Since Christmas. I’ve been out of the States for two and a half years.”
“Ha! Since 1940 I have not been home. I am in the Underground, but I am betrayed.” She shrugged. “I am alive. You would not believe it was better to be a Communist than a Jew. Do you have a family, doctor?”
“I have a wife and son.”
“And a house?”
“Yes.”
“And a doctor can find work easily, no?”
Evening of the Good Samaritan Page 30