Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  Pascal conducted them up a pastern stair to a separate apartment.

  "Mine is the room exactly below," he said to Natalie, repeating the Rudolph Valentino look, as he showed her into a room with a crib.

  But under his father's roof, his menace had vanished; he was just a plump youngster suffering from endemic Mediterranean oversexiness, and he was, after all, her rescuer. She was on French soil, that was what mattered. She felt a pulse of gratitude toward Pascal.

  "Vous 46tes tres aimable, monsieur." She shook his hand, holding Louis in one arm, and gave him a brief kiss on the cheek. "Merci mille lois.

  His eyes glowed like blown-on coals. "Serviieur, madame.

  Avram Rabinovitz rode the little three-car train up to Corte the other way, from the port of Ajaccio. The singletrack road was reputed a scenic wonder, but he slumped with closed eyes at a window sent, chain-smoking vile Vichy French cigarettes as the splendid valleys and crags slid by.

  Shutting out the sunlight and the moving scenery somewhat relieved a migraine headache, which was clacking in his skull to the rhythm of the wheels. Some of the most beautiful views in the world had been wasted on Avram Rabinovitz: the Pyrenees, the Tyrot, the Dolomites, the Alps, the Danube valley, the Turkish coast, the Portuguese back country, and the Syrian mountains. In all these sublime settings his preoccupation had been finding enough food and water to keep fugitive Jews alive and on the move.

  Not only was his taste for pretty scenery extinct; Rabinovitz's outlook on geography and nationality was altogether peculiar.

  Countries, borders, passports, visas, languages, laws, currencies, were to him unreal elements in a tawdry risky game played on the European land mass. His attitude was in that sense criminal. He recognized the law of rescue and no other. He had not always been such a freebooter; quite the contrary. His parents had come to Marseilles from Poland after the First World War. His father, a tailor, had taken to making naval and merchant marine uniforms. So Avram had grown up with French schooling and French friends, and had gone into the French merchant marine as a cabin boy, working his way up to a chief engineer's certificate. Well into his twenties he had remained a conforming Frenchman, only dimly aware of his Jewish origins.

  With the coming of Hitler, and with anti-Semitism rising in Marseilles like the seep of sewer gas, kabinovitz had wakened to reluctant Jewish consciousness. A wealthy Swiss Zionist had recruited him to run Jews illegally to Palestine.

  He had taken three hundred people down the Danube and across the Black Sea to Turkey in a hulk like the Izmir, and thence through the Turkish and Syrian back country to the Holy Land. The exploit had changed his life. Thereafter he had done nothing else.

  Settling in Palestine, he learned some Hebrew and married a Haifa girl. He changed his Frenchified name, Andre back to Avram. He tried joining the Zionist movement, but the party quarrelling bored him and put him off. He was at heart a French Jew still, baffled by the fast-spreading hatred for Jews in Europe, and determined to do something about it. He looked no further than the saving of lives.

  In those days he was hearing the complacent Jewish byword about Hitler's threats in many languages, It's always hotter cooked than eaten, but to him the Nazis meant business. He stopped arguing with the Zionists about doctrine and politics, and used their money and connections for rescuing Jews, as he had done with Herbert Rose and the Sacerdotes.

  After the fall of France he had returned there and joined the Resistance in Marseilles, as the best base for continuing rescue work.

  In effect he had been a Resistance man for years. He was already a competent forger, smuggler, spy, liar, confidence man, and thief.

  Once, to save more than forty people, he had killed an informer in Rumania who was blackmailing him for hush money; striking him harder with a piece of iron than he intended and leaving the man in an alley gasping, his eyes glazing. The episode recurred to him in low moments-the feel of bone cracking under metal, the gush of, blood from the bushy hair of the fallen extortionist-but he felt no conscious regrets.

  Rabinovitz's migraines tended to come on him when he was overtired, or frustrated, or doing something he knew was stupid. He had no business reason to be riding this Corsican train. He merely wanted to see Mrs. Henry. Though he had talked with her on the Izmir only a couple of times, she remained a radiant memory. For Rabinovitz, as for many European men, American women were glamorous. Natalie Henry fascinated him: a Jewess, an unmistakable darkly glowing Jewess, yet as American as Franklin D. Roosevelt, niece of a famous writer, married to a United States submarine officer! In Marseilles in peacetime, visiting American warships had brought with them an aura of distant power.

  The young officers in white and gold walking in twos and threes on the boulevard had seemed to Rabinovitz almost the kind of supermen the Germans fancied themselves to be.

  Byron Henry, an image on a snapshot, added much to Natalie's magic in Rabinovitz's eyes.

  He had no designs on her; she seemed a very proper wife and mother. He was just greedy for the sight of her. He had done his best on the Izmir to suppress his pointless feelings, even though he thought she liked him. That Natalie's situation had been complicated enough, without the addling of his wits in a -futile romance. Nevertheless her disembarking had been a blow.

  The news from Siena in June-first, that Mrs. Henry and her uncle were still there, and then, that they were coming with the Castelnuovos -had deeply stirred him. For a week after learning that Mrs. Henry had reached Corsica, he had resisted the urge to go there. Then he had given in. The migraine had hit him on the overnight boat; and as the little train groaned up the hairpin turns and steep grades toward Corte, what with the turmoil in his heart and the throbbing agony in his head, he had to wonder at his folly Yet he was happier than he had been since the death of his wife.

  When he arrived at the Gaffori house, the object of his infatuation was in the small upstairs apartment in an old gray wool wrapper, bathing her baby in the kitchen sink. She had just washed her hair and put it up in pins. Splashed all over with soapy water by the frolicsome baby, she was not just then an erotic dream figure.

  A knock. Aaron's voice through the door. "Natalie, we have a visitor."

  "Who?"

  "Avram Rabinovitz."

  "Christ!"

  She heard Jastrow laugh. "He makes no such claim, dear, though he is a savior of sorts."

  "Well, I mean, how long will he be here? Louis is all soap from head to foot. So am I. I'm an absolute fright. What's the news? Are we leaving?"

  "I gather not. He's staying for lunch."

  "Well-oh, blast, I'll be down in a quarter of an hour."

  She dressed hurriedly in the white wool dress with the scarlet brass-buckled belt that she had bought in Lisbon for her meeting with Byron. For a long time after Louis's birth she had been too plump to get into it. Packing up in Siena, she had on a last-minute iznpulse slammed it into a suitcase; some time in her wanderings she might want to look well! She put on Louis a little corduroy suit Madame Gaffori had given her, and she strode into the garden, carrying him in her arms.

  Rabinovitz rose from a bench in the grape arbor where he sat with the others. He looked rather different from her recollection of him: younger, not so stout, not so desperately drawn.

  "Hello, Mrs. Henry."

  Her dark hair, still damp despite furious towelling, was swept up over her head. He remembered this heavy beautiful hair, and the slant of the huge eyes, now twinkling at him in the friendliest way, and the shape of the generous mouth when she smiled, and the way her cheeks curved. The feel of her brief cool handshake was enchanting.

  "I've got a surprise for you," she said, setting Louis down on the brown grass. "Stretch out your arms to him."

  Rabinovitz obeyed. She let go, and Louis, with a keen excited look on his chubby face, took a few uncertain steps and fell into the Palestinian's arms, laughing and crowing.

  Rabinovitz swept him up.

  "He's starting to talk, too," Natal
ie exclaimed. "Imagine, it's all happened in one week! Maybe it's the Corsican air. I feared I was raising an idiot."

  "You never did." Jastrow sounded indignant.

  "Say something," Rabinovitz told Louis, who was inspecting him with sharp eyes.

  Louis pointed a finger at Rabinovitz's broad nose.

  "Daddy."

  Natalie turned scarlet. Even the Castelnuovos, sitting in glum silence, burst out laughing. Natalie gasped, "Oh, God!

  I've been showing him a snapshot of his father."

  Delighted with the sensation he had produced, Louis shouted, "Da-dee!

  Da-dee!" pointing at Castelnuovo and at Jastrow.

  "Horrors, that'll do, you little beast!"

  The old man and Pascal ate in farming clothes. Pascal, grimy and tousle-haired in his old goatskin jacket, was giving Natalie his Valentino looks again. In his father's presence he had until now been more careful. The dress, she thought uneasily, was setting him off, and she kept glancing at Rabinovitz, who took no visible notice. The conversation around the table was about the war news. The latest rumor in Corsica, said old Gaffori, was that all the North Africa hints were a deception. The Allies would hit Norway, drive across Scandinavia and Finland, and link up with the Russians. This would relieve Leningrad, open up a good Lend-Lease supply route to the Red Army, and put Allied bombers close to Berlin. What did Monsieur Rabinovitz think?

  "I don't believe the NorwAy story. Too late in the year.

  Your son and I once served in a freighter that made port in Trondheirn in November' We got icebound for Weeks."

  "Orianduccio fold us about that," said Gaffori, reaching foia stone jug and'fihing Rabinovitz's glass and his own. "He told us about some other things, monsieur, such as the little affair in Istanbul."

  He raised his glass to Rabihovitz. "You are always welcome in this house, as long as you live. Thank you for sending us the great American author and his friends." Jastrow said, "We feel we're a burden."

  "No. You may stay, monsieur, until we are all freed together.

  And now Pascal and I must go back to work."

  Natalie said quietly to Rabinovitz as they stood up from the table, "I must talk to you. Have you time?"

  He walked with her up the steep cobbled steps of the street outside, which led to the open gateway of the ruined fortress.

  "Shall we climb up?" she said. "The view is marvelous from the top."

  "Okay.

  "What was the business is Istanbul?" she asked as they began to mount a narrow stone staircase along an inner wall.

  "Nothing much."

  "I'd like to know."

  "Oh, well, this guy Orlanduccio used to drink a lot and raise hell when we made port. This was before he married and settled down. I was on deck working on a broken winch, and I saw him come staggering along the wharf about midnight.

  Some hoodlums jumped him. Those waterfront rats are all cowards, they pick on drunks, so I just ran down there with a crowbar and broke it up."

  "Why, then, you saved his life."

  "His money, maybe."

  "And the Gafforis are being kind to us on your account."

  "No, no. They're in the Resistance, the whole family."

  On a level terrace choked with brown grass and weeds, goats were wandering in and out of the broken walls of a roofless stucco structure with bars in the windows.

  "Guardhouse," said Rabinovitz. "Not much good now."

  "Tell me about the Izmir," she said, leading him across the terrace to another staircase that went higher.

  "The Izmir? That's long ago." He shook his head, looking sad and troubled. "It wasn't so bad when we started out, but the weather got pretty wild by the time we reached,Haifa. We had to unload the people into boats at night in a storm. That damned Turkish captain was making trouble, threatening to leave. There were some drownings, a few, I don't know just how many. Once the people reached the shore they scanered.

  We never got an accurate count."

  Natalie asked soberly, "Then I was right to get off, after all?"

  "Who can say? Here you are in Corsica now."

  "Yes, and what happens next?"

  The higher staircase, its steps ground deep by climbers, was very steep. He spoke slowly, breathing hard, "The American consul general in Marseilles knows you're here. He's a good fellow, James Gaither.

  I've had dealings with him. He's all right. Some of the other people in that consulate are no damn good. He's handling your problem himself, on a strict confidential basis. When all your papers are in order you'll come to Marseilles and proceed by train the same day to Lisbon. That's Gaither's idea."

  "When will that be?"

  "Well, the tough thing is the exit visa. Up to a month or so ago you could have gone by train to Lisbon like any tourist.

  But now the Franch have stopped issuing exit visas. German pressure.

  Your embassy can get things done in Vichy, so you'll receive visas, but it'll take awhile."

  "You've already managed all that!"

  "Don't give me credit." It was a sharp sour reply. "Gaither had a cable from the U.S. legation in Berne to be on the lookout for you.

  When I told Gaither you were in Corsica, he said, "Hooray!" Just like that." They were at the top now.

  Over windswept battlements, they looked down on a valley floor of farms and vineyards, surrounded by wild forested mountains. "Well, I see what you mean. Fine view."

  "What about the Castelnuovos?"

  He cupped a cigarette in his palms to light it. "Much tougher proposition. The German armistice commission made a raid on Bastia in September, because refugees were escaping to Algeria through there.

  That broke up MY arrangements, so you got stuck in Marciana.

  Still, it's good they left Siena. The O.V.R.A started pulling in Italian Zionists in July. They'd be in a concentration camp by now.

  I'm working something out for them, so please try to keep the doctor from getting impatient. If the worst comes to the worst, the Gafforis will always look after them." He puffed the cigarette and glanced at his watch. "We'd better start back. You wanted to talk to me? The train leaves for Ajaccio in about an hour."

  "Well, yes. That young fellow, Pascal-" she hesitated, gnawing a knuckle.

  "Yes, what about him?"

  "Oh, hell, I must confide in you. And I couldn't talk in the house. Night before last, I woke up and he was in my room, sitting on my bed. With a hand on the covers. On my leg."

  She began rushing out the words as they went down the windy steps.

  "Just sitting there! My baby's crib wasn't two feet from us. I didn't know whether I was dreaming or what! I whispered, "What is it?

  What are you doing here?" And he whispered, "Jet'aime. Tu veux?"

  " Rabinovitz stopped short on the steps. To her astonishment he was blushing. "Oh, don't worry, he didn't rape me or anything, in fact I got rid of him." She tugged at his elbow. Frowning, he resumed the descent. "It may have been my fault. Even in Elba he was making eyes at me, and on the boat he got sort of fresh. I did one damn fool thing when we got to the house. The trip was over, I'd made it safely, and I was grateful to him. I kissed him. Well, he looked at me as though I'd taken off my skirt.

  And since then, it's as though I've never put it back on. And now this thing the other night-"

  "How did you get rid of him?"

  "Well, it wasn't so easy. First thing I whispered was, "It's impossible, you'll wake my baby " Natalie took a quick side glance at Rabinovitz. "Now, maybe I should have gotten on my high horse and just thrown him out, yelled for I his father, whatnot. But I was sleepy I and surprised, and I didn't ant to wake Louis, and I felt more or less at these pee mercy. opl 's So then he whispered, "Oh, no, we'll be as quiet as two liitie pigeons."

  " Natalie nervously giggled. "I was scared as hell, but it was just too ludicrous, "deux petites colombes'-" Rabinovitz was smiling, but not pleasantly. "So what broke it up?"

  "Oh, we whispered like that, yes,
no, back and forth. He wouldn't leave. I thought of appealing to his Co rsican honor not to harm a fugitive under his roof. Or threatening to tell his father. All that seemed long and complicated. So I just said, "Look, it mustn't be, I'm unwell." He snatched his hand off my leg and jumped from the bed as though I'd pleaded leprosy."

  For a seafaring man, she thought, Rabinovitz was oddly prudish.

  He looked very in at ease at this.

  "Then he stood over me and whispered, "You're telling the truth?"

  "Of course." 'Madame, if you are simply refusing me, you are making a grave mistake. I can promise you ecstasyShe assumed a baritone voice.