Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  Barbara nodded.

  “He’s Josh’s hero, and Josh talks a lot about going off to sea. Mom thinks he’ll grow out of it, but I don’t know—”

  By the time they reached Higate, Barbara had a fairly complete if confused history of the Levy family, and the feeling that the Levy children, if left to their own devices, could talk anyone deaf, dumb, and blind. Withal, Adam was charming, totally outgoing, and without self-consciousness—so much like his sister that Barbara could almost hear Sally in his words. There were moments during the drive when she stopped listening, absorbed by the gentle beauty of the place. She had not been to the Napa Valley since her childhood, and whatever memories she retained of that time only added to the bewitching charm of the place. The rolling, vine-striped hills undulated in the afternoon heat, the hot, midsummer sun beating down either mercilessly or benignly—as one saw it—and then giving way to the cool shade of the great oaks that lined the dirt road to Higate. Barbara understood immediately why the place had such a hold on Joe. The old stone buildings, covered with ivy from ground to roof, stood in happy agreement with the landscape. The vines draped the sloping fields, and on a high pasture, a cluster of cattle stood motionless, as if painted onto the yellow grass background. And everywhere a profusion of flowers, roses and marigolds and zinnias and banks of sweet alyssum.

  Jake and Clair greeted her with affection, begging her to stay with them for at least two or three days. She protested weakly, already under the spell of the place, that she had come only for the day, but agreed to remain at least overnight. Sally embraced her with undiluted excitement. “Oh, how keen, how absolutely keen to have you here with us!” She whispered that they must have a private talk just as soon as Barbara could get away. Joshua, as tall as his older brother, was quiet, reserved. His greeting was shy, diffident, and he stared at Barbara with unconscious and unconcealed admiration. He carried her bag up to her room, stood there staring at her until he remembered himself, and then said to his brother later, “She’s just so beautiful.”

  Clair came up to shoo Sally out of Barbara’s room. “Later,” she said. “Right now, I wish to talk to Barbara alone.” And when Sally had reluctantly departed, Clair said, “I have something for you, and it’s none of my business, but it puzzles Jake and me. We’re just so curious.” She took a letter out of the pocket of her apron. “It came three days ago, and I knew you’d be coming here, so I held it. I guess you were in San Francisco then. It’s from Sergeant Bernie Cohen, posted in Egypt six weeks ago, and addressed to you, care of us. The odd thing is that you asked us about a Bernie Cohen who had worked for us—in Paris, remember? Did you meet him?” Barbara was staring at the letter. “Is it the same person?” Clair asked.

  “Yes,” Barbara whispered. “The same person.”

  “How on earth do you know him?”

  “Can I tell you later?” Barbara asked her. “I’ll tell you the whole story. Right now, I think I have to be alone.”

  “Of course. Of course. Dinner in an hour and a half. But take your time, Barbara. We’ll wait for you.”

  After Clair had closed the door behind her, Barbara sat on the bed, staring at the letter. At last she opened it and began to read:

  “My very dear Barbara,” it began. “The fact that I have not written until now, two years since I saw you, does not mean that you have ever been out of my thoughts. Let’s say that it took most of that time for me to convince myself that there was any point in writing to you. But don’t misunderstand that. I simply mean that the odds against my ever seeing you again are so great that for a long time I felt that the best thing I could do was to disappear from your life completely. The few hours I spent with you were the best in my life, and I really don’t know of any other way to put it. In any case, the mails are so uncertain, just as life is, that for you to receive this letter will be a minor miracle. That gives me some leeway, and I can argue that I am mostly talking to myself. Although, believe me, miracles do happen. My meeting you was in the nature of a miracle. I don’t know of any other way to explain it.

  “Now let me say immediately that I am O.K., stupidly healthy, and still unwounded. I struck up a friendship with one of the Indian troops here. His name is Rama Kee, and he talks a lot about a thing called karma. He insists that my karma is something that is taking care of me for some purpose, which to me is a lot of nonsense, but since he’s five foot three and I’m twelve inches taller, it’s the only reasonable explanation for my not being hit.

  “I’m wandering too much, and the best thing for me to do is to begin when I walked out of your apartment that morning. I must admit that I took satisfaction in being dead broke. The only thing I could give you was not to take from you, if that makes any sense. Would you believe that I walked all the way to Villeneuve? Not that I couldn’t have gotten a lift, but I had a lot to talk over with myself, and the only way I can do that is to walk. Half a dozen times I started to turn back, because I began to see that I had cut out of myself the only damn thing that was any good whatsoever, but the Cohen strength of character carried me on. It was dark when I reached Villeneuve. I guess I had walked about twenty miles, mostly along the river, with a lot of time off when I sat down by the river and brooded and finally convinced myself that what happened between us was a matter of gratitude on your part and by no means any indication of your being able to actually care about a man like me.

  “A Spaniard by the name of Raol Garcia has a cafe in Villeneuve, and I lucked in there and got to talking about the war, and well, to make a long story shorter, he had a brother who was killed in the Spanish fighting, and when he found out that I was with the Internationals, he couldn’t do enough for me. I got a meal and a place to sleep, and the next day, his brother-in-law drove me down to Lyon in his truck. From there, I hitched my way to Marseille. I’ll try to be brief, otherwise this letter will have no end, so I’ll leave out the details. The thing is that when a Jewish kid finds himself a strange town, he can always get himself a bed and a handout at the local synagogue—which is what I did in Marseille. There I ran into another Spanish vet, a kid by the name of Brodsky, from the Bronx in New York. He had been there for a while and had teamed up with a couple of Marseille men who had bought an old fishing trawler and were running Jewish refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe into Palestine. They needed another hand on the boat, someone who could put together and use a twenty millimeter machine gun that they had bought from a Turkish arms peddler. So right there, I had the kind of a break I had dreamed about.

  “For the next three months we ran the boat between Marseille and the Palestine coast. Sleeping people on the deck, we could take anywhere from twelve to twenty, and I guess that during that time we took better than three hundred people into Palestine. It wasn’t all altruism on the part of the two French guys who owned the boat, not by any means. For them, it was a damn good business proposition. They took whatever the traffic would bear, and they paid me and Brodsky two hundred francs a month, because, as they put it, we were stupid idealists. They made a bundle, but at least when they were going to turn down someone who didn’t have enough for the passage, Brodsky and I could kick up enough fuss to get most of them on board.

  “It came to an end when an Italian destroyer put a shell through our hull off the coast of Palestine about ten miles south of Haifa. We had already landed our passengers, so there were just the four of us on the boat. That was the first time I ever tried to use the twenty millimeter, which was just dumb. Brodsky and I made the shore. We never found out what happened to the two Frenchmen. Maybe the Italians picked them up. Funny thing is, we didn’t even know that the war had started. And the Italians weren’t even in it. They probably figured we were running Jewish illegals and why not shoot us out of the water, or maybe they just wanted target practice.

  “We weren’t wearing shoes, and we had to hike inland about three miles before we found a kibbutz. I don’t want to remember what our feet were like. Anyw
ay, there we were, finally, in Palastine, so if this letter ever reaches you through the Levys, you can tell them that I made it at last, just as I said I would when I went to work for them seventeen, eighteen years ago.

  “I’m going to try to get this letter out without putting it through the censorship, but just in case I can’t, I won’t put down the name of the kibbutz. Things are pretty hellish in Palestine. Many of the kibbutzim are under constant Arab attack. The British confiscate their weapons and just make it hard all around. This kibbutz was in a bad way. They had a lot of attacks, and they just didn’t know much about defending themselves, and their whole armament was four old Mauser rifles and two Webley pistols. Barbara, I know how you feel about war and fighting and killing, and I think that by now I hate it more than you do, but there we were, me and Brodsky, and I guess we knew more about this kind of fighting than anyone in the British army of occupation. Either we got arms and ammunition or the kibbutz would be wiped out sooner or later. So Brodsky and myself, we trained six guys and we organized what is called a night squad. We would bribe an Arab to tell us where there was an arms depot, and then we’d go out at night and raid it. It was dirty, nasty work, but it served two purposes. It stopped the raids on the kibbutz, and it gave us the arms and ammunition we needed so desperately.

  “Now, looking over what I’ve written already, I have to say to myself that nothing here is going to make you think very highly of me, knowing how you feel, but that’s what happened, and I suppose we do what we have to do. Then what happened to me was this. We would have discussions in the kibbutz about what would happen after the war or maybe during it, when the Arabs decided that the Jews had to be eliminated, and hearing all the stories coming out of Germany and Poland, we decided that there was no other place in the world for the Jews to come but here in Palestine. So we had to find a new way to fight and defend ourselves. Most of the opinion was that somehow or other we had to have an air force, which is something to laugh at since there wasn’t one Jewish plane in Palestine and maybe not one Jewish pilot. But anyway, that’s the way everything goes in the Jewish settlements. They talk about tanks, and there are no tanks. They talk about artillery, and there’s no artillery. The same with the air force. They decide we have to have an air force, so we have to have pilots, and then everyone votes, and I’m elected to join up with the British and learn to fly a fighter plane. It sounds crazy, but that’s the way everything is done around here, and they say, ‘Just learn to fly and then we’ll find a plane for you.’

  “That’s how I came to enlist in the British army. The British recruiting officer tells me, ‘Cohen, you want to be a pilot, we’ll train you.’ And how I can be stupid enough to believe anything a British army recruiting officer tells me is simply the story of Bernie Cohen, and the main reason why he’ll never be rich or smart. The year that followed is something you must read about. It began with them finding out about my Spanish war record, so in their eyes I became a red and a Zionist, which is the worst combination in the world, and for two months I was in a labor battalion, digging ditches in Egypt and building pillboxes and gun emplacements. Then they decided that my talents were being wasted, and they forgave the past and made me a rifle instructor. Then I was promoted to corporal and machine guns, and then I made sergeant, which is what runs the British army, because when it comes to brains, their officers are nothing to write home about. I was put in command of a kind of tin truck called a Bren gun carrier, and we were going to try to hold Egypt in that wonderful British kind of dumb desperation against Graziani. We had about twenty men and Graziani had some three hundred thousand and a whole air force and maybe close to a thousand tanks. Well, not exactly. We had three divisions and a lot of these Bren trucks and a few tanks. We waited for the Italians until December, and then Wavell sent out a patrol of some Bren trucks and some tanks, and we found a hole in the Italian lines, and then we kept on going. I know this is no way to write about a battle, but I don’t want to write to you about any battle. You probably read all about it in the newspapers at home.

  “I guess the Italians had no heart for the war or for the fascists, because in the next three months we destroyed the Italian army and took over a hundred and fifty thousand prisoners. With the karma that my Indian friend talks about, I was not even scratched. The worst that happened to me was a bout of amoebic, and I’m over that now. I’m back in Egypt, training men again, and still trying to work my way into the air force, like the kibbutz elected me to do. But it doesn’t look much like it. Anyway, I have plenty of time to think now and to catch up on a lot of reading and to try to make some sense out of a life that doesn’t make very much sense up to now.

  “This letter has been written over three days, and when I began it I did not intend to do anything more than satisfy your curiosity. I am convinced you must have thought about me once or twice and wondered if I were alive or dead. So I felt that I had a sort of obligation to tell you that I was alive, and something about how I have been filling my time. Being so very far away from you gives me the courage to write that I think about you constantly, that I believe I love you more than I have ever loved any other woman, and that you are the best and most wonderful thing that ever happened to me in my whole life. These are my own rambling thoughts. For all I know, you may be married. You may have a kid. I won’t even ask you to write to me, so if this letter ever reaches you, you can tear it up and throw it away. As for me, I think this war will go on for a long, long time.”

  Barbara finished reading, and she sat there with the letter in her hands. It was much as if Cohen had transmitted his loneliness to her. How much had she thought about him, how many times? Certainly not constantly. There were times when weeks had gone by without any thought of him at all, but there were other times when his big, slow-moving figure lived in her mind’s eye, and she had wondered at those times how he could be a soldier, his movements so slow, almost lazy, and she would remember the rapt attention with which he had listened to all she had said that evening. Well, she was not in love with him; she had never been in love with him. Her heart went out to him, but her heart had gone out to other men, and that did not mean that she loved them. How could she feel anything toward a man who deliberately took up killing as his vocation? She told herself firmly that she would not budge from a conviction as deep as any she had ever held, that killing was the ultimate monstrosity, the ultimate evil, and that to justify it in war or in any other struggle was compounding the evil with the most hideous of sophistries.

  The door opened as she sat there, and Sally entered the room very tentatively. “Bobby?”

  Barbara looked up at her.

  “Oh, Bobby, darling, what happened?”

  Barbara shook her head.

  “You’re crying.”

  “No.” She touched her cheeks, and they were wet. “Am I? I didn’t know.”

  “It’s that letter, isn’t it?”

  “This?” She held it out to the girl. “Do you want to read it?”

  “I shouldn’t. Should I?”

  “Yes. I want someone to read it. I think you should.”

  Sally nodded very seriously, took the letter, and sat down next to Barbara, who put her arm around her as Sally read. When Sally finished reading it, she asked, “Bobby, why did you want me to read it?”

  “I had to talk to someone about it.”

  Sally threw her arms around Barbara and hugged her. “Oh, Bobby, I love you so much. I do. And I understand. I do understand. It’s a wonderful letter. And he sounds so sad and so lonely and so far away.”

  “I’m being absolutely silly.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not.”

  “I barely know him. The truth is, I hardly know him at all. I spent one evening with him. I don’t love him. I don’t love anyone at all, and that’s what’s so awful. I feel that I’m drying up and becoming something I don’t want to be.”

  “Bobby, you’re the most beautiful, wonder
ful woman in the world. Don’t you believe me?”

  Barbara stared at Sally, then suddenly burst into laughter. “You’re so good for me,” she said.

  “Am I, truly? Please stay here. At least for a few days. This is a wonderful place, and I’ll take you everywhere and show you everything. We all love you, Jake and Clair, and my brothers are just gaga about you, and Josh—well, Josh is absolutely swooning over you. Will you let me show you my poetry?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You won’t laugh at me? You’re such a good writer—you won’t laugh at me?”

  “Never. You’ll show them to me right after dinner, will you?”

  “Oh, Bobby, I do love you.”

  ***

  On the morning of the twenty-sixth of September 1941, May Ling pulled down the shades of the house in Westwood, checked the gas jets on the stove, and then turned the key in the lock. Dan had already stowed their bags in the cab. Grinning, excited, wearing white duck trousers and a sport shirt, he stood by the cab and waited for May Ling. With her back to him, dressed in a simple linen frock, she might well have been the girl he met a quarter of a century ago. “Come on, come on,” he called to her. “We go out with the tide at three o’clock.”

  In the cab, she said to him, “Danny, it’s only ten o’clock. We have five hours. I’ve never seen you this way before.”

  “Because I’ve never been this way. Do you realize that I’m fifty-two years old, and I’ve never had a real vacation before. Not even that trip to the Islands. That was business. May Ling, I hate this thing called business. I hate the whole rotten rat race. There was a real estate agent in my office the other day. I had to practically throw him out. He wanted to sell me one of those big barns of a house in Beverly Hills. He kept saying I could afford it. Word’s around that we’re rich. How in hell did that happen? Well, let me tell you this. We may just never come back. Do you remember that beach on the Big Island?”