Gibraltar Passage

by T. Davis Bunn

  Jake nodded his understanding. “So tell me more about your brother.”

  Pierre was silent a long moment, then began. “Marseille is a funny place. For the first three years of the war, it was occupied by the Italians. Between the mentality of the Italians and that of the Marseille people, life there was what we callsoft.’ People got on with the business of living. There was laughter. There was smuggling. That is what my brother did. He smuggled bodies.”

  “Warm ones, I hope.”

  Pierre smiled. “My brother operated the Marseille end of an underground system that smuggled out people wanted by the Nazis. About half were Jews. The others were mostly German intelligentsia, people who publicly opposed Hitler’s madness—professionals, priests, teachers, writers. He was very successful, my brother. At least, as long as the Italians were there.”

  “After that?”

  “After that, well, after that came the Nazis. And life became very hard.”

  “And your brother?”

  “Patrique stayed for as long as he could. Then one night the Nazis came for him, and we all thought he had been taken. But somehow he had managed to escape at the very last moment. He went to Morocco and operated there for a while.”

  Jake inspected his friend’s somber face. “He was killed there?”

  “So we were told,” Pierre sighed. “Where exactly I have not been able to determine. Everything after his departure from Marseille remains a mystery.”

  Jake said quietly, “You miss him.”

  “There is a bond between twins that only another twin can understand,” Pierre said. “It is for me like an invisible connection from the womb. More than sympathy. We share in the emotions and the experiences of one another. Across distances, across time. We are different, yet the same.”

  Jake listened and heard the way his friend spoke. We are these things, Pierre was saying. Not were. Not in the past. Still today. Jake heard, and understood, and dared hope for his friend as he had not been able to hope for his own family.

  “I am the cautious one. Reserved. Deliberate. I am the one who made the good army officer,” Pierre continued. “Patrique is bold. More than that. He is reckless. I was the reins that held Patrique in place. I think he understood this better than I. Through Patrique I felt the emotions I never allowed myself, and through me Patrique knew a balance between caution and abandon.”

  The emotions that etched themselves on Pierre’s features were too naked for Jake to feel comfortable watching. He turned his attention to the window, listening carefully, but granting his friend the only privacy he could offer.

  “Patrique was younger than me,” Pierre continued, pitching his voice softly. With the noise of the locomotive and the train’s rattles and squeaks, only Jake could hear him. “He was younger only by two minutes in time, but always I was the older brother. I went through life feeling that I watched over him. I was responsible for him. I was the rock. Patrique was the wind.”

  The train did not go fast. Nothing seemed to move fast in this land. The entire country appeared to be gradually recovering from shock, stumbling a bit as it found its footing.

  Their journey was one of stark contrasts. Some towns and villages were left virtually untouched by the war, at least as far as Jake could see. Others were pitifully scarred. All wore the same run-down look as the people.

  “When Patrique was fifteen,” Pierre told Jake, “he got a job working at the local hippodrome, the racetrack. He became an excellent rider. In his free time, he began hunting the wild white stallions of the Camargue. I can still remember him flying across the great salt flats, both hands busy with his lasso, guiding his horse with his knees. The weekends he went hunting, my mother used to spend at the local église, praying that her son would come home in one piece.

  “Patrique sought out the Resistance within days of the German invasion,” Pierre went on. “He proposed that they use the hippodrome as a gathering point for the fleeing refugees. In his first letter to me, he bragged that already they had ten times as many Jews as horses in the stables. It gave him great pride to help these people.”

  Pierre was silent for a time, then said to himself, “I think I have always seen my brother as the hero I never was.”

  “That’s crazy and you know it,” Jake protested. “Where did you get those medals on your chest, a bazaar?”

  * * *

  The journey from Karlsruhe to Strasbourg to Lyons to Marseille took twenty-eight hours. For the majority of the trip, Pierre remained immersed in his thoughts and his memories. Jake did not complain. His own ruminations were more than enough company. At times he would emerge, look about, return the smiles of the people whose eye he caught. But soon enough the blanket of sorrowful thoughts tucked itself up tight around his chest and he retreated into missing Sally.

  Six months. The time stretched out before him in endless emptiness. It did not matter how much he argued with himself. It did not matter that she had been ordered to go. It did not matter that her work was important. Jake found it impossible to see beyond the painful fact that she was not there beside him.

  Near Avignon the train chuffed around a high rock ledge just as the sun cleared the horizon. Gray-faced rocks drank in the morning light and were transformed into shades of soft coral. The train’s brakes squealed on a sharp decline, the whistle blew a greeting to the new day, and they were swallowed by the ancient town.

  From Avignon the train followed the Rhone River’s winding path, never leaving its side for more than a few minutes. The air was scented with olive trees and pines and awakening spring. The sensation of entering a new world grew ever stronger. Behind them northern Europe still struggled to cast off winter’s cloak. Here in the Provence, spring had long since been welcomed home with open arms.

  The faces surrounding Jake seemed to lose some of their deeper lines. Eyes shadowed by years of strain and worry and war took on a glint of newfound humor as breakfast provisions were brought out. The woman next to Jake unfolded a checkered bundle to reveal a round loaf of bread, home-whipped butter, and a honeycomb in waxed paper. Shyly she offered him a portion. The entire compartment watched as he bit and chewed, then shared a smile as he moaned his pleasure.

  Jake offered his handful to Pierre. “You want some?”

  “What?” Startled by the words, he turned from his endless perusal of the window. “Oh, no thank you.”

  “It’s great.”

  The woman next to Jake spoke up, urging Pierre to take a portion. He dredged up a smile and shook his head. Pierre remained the only one of their compartment untouched by the new day.

  He felt Jake’s eyes on him and turned a sorrowful gaze toward his friend. “I was thinking of Jasmyn.”

  Once more Jake recalled late-night talks. “She’s the woman who betrayed you by taking up with a Nazi officer, right?”

  His friend nodded and confessed, “The closer we come to Marseille, the harder it is to keep the memory of her behind me. You remember how I said that there could never be another woman for me?”

  “I remember,” Jake said quietly.

  Pierre sighed his way back to the window. “All she did, all that was, and still I yearn for her.”

  “Would it help to talk?”

  “Thank you, my friend,” Pierre replied to the unseen day outside the train. “But more words about Jasmyn would be lances to my spirit.”

  Outside Arles, a new conductor made his way down the crowded train. He was an ancient survivor of the First War, the chest of his heavy blue conductor’s uniform sporting three rows of ribbons. When they handed over their official passes, the old man drew himself to attention and threw them a rusty salute.

  For the first time that morning, Pierre showed a spark of life. He asked the old man a question and received an overloud reply. Pierre smiled, only his eyes holding the stain of unspoken memories. He motioned toward Jake and spoke at length. All eyes in the compartment turned his way. Pierre pointed to the ribbons on Jake’s own chest and gave a name
to several of them. His words were greeted with appreciative oohs and aahs.

  Jake objected with, “You mind telling me—”

  But Pierre cut him off with further words in French. He grew fervent, his voice rising to reach more of the passengers who now crowded into the compartment’s open door. The woman seated next to him had eyes as wide as saucers. Jake felt his face grow hot.

  The ancient conductor handed back Jake’s papers and snapped off a second salute. Jake accepted the papers and brushed one hand across the front of his close-cropped hair. The conductor spun around, shut the compartment door behind him, and talked excitedly with the people jamming the corridor who immediately crowded around him. From the looks cast through the smudged glass partition, Jake assumed the old man was recounting Pierre’s story.

  Jake leaned forward and muttered, “What was that all about?”

  “I was simply telling them a little of who you are,” Pierre replied.

  Jake shot a glance toward the growing number of faces pressed against the glass. “You don’t say.”

  “Believe me, I was defusing trouble before it could take hold,” Pierre replied. “Not everyone you meet in Marseille greets Americans as friends.”

  “Why is that?”

  “There was a terrible bombing here in 1944,” Pierre answered. “The city’s worst destruction from the entire war.”

  “By the Americans?”

  Pierre nodded. “The Allies decided the city was important enough to be bombed, since Marseille was a German submarine harbor. They wanted to destroy three points—the central train station, a storage center, and the submarine base. The Americans came with their great bombers called Superfortresses. But not one bomb found its target. Not one. Bombs fell all over the city. The worst destruction was in the Quartier Saint Charles, not far from the station. Over three thousand people were killed that night, all within two hours. It was tragic. The city’s highest death toll in all the years of war.”

  Jake sat back in his seat. “I’m really sorry, Pierre.”

  His friend replied with another smile that did not reach his eyes. “In some ways, the city of Marseille is but a very large village. By tomorrow it will be known all through the markets that a great American hero has come to visit their beloved town. And that he will stay in the home of their own Resistance hero, the famous Patrique Servais.”

  Marseille was a bustling, thriving city. It was also a city wed firmly to the sea. The Bay of Marseille bit out a mighty chunk, as vast as a great inland lake. Hills rose on the north and east, giving the impression from seaside that the entire town looked out upon water. The deep blue Mediterranean waters caught the sun’s rays and brushed the tired land with hope of a new tomorrow.

  As the train wound its way toward the station, Pierre pointed out a great medieval castle, rising from the city’s southern tip. It was the Fortress of Saint John, he said, from which Crusade ships journeyed into the unknown dangers of the Ottoman Empire.

  The train platform was jammed solid. When Pierre stepped into view, a great cry of joy arose from the throng. He was immediately swept into a huge crowd of laughing, crying, singing, shouting people. Jake stood on the train’s top step and watched as a diminutive woman in black stepped forward. The crowd quieted and drew back a step as she reached up one age-scarred hand to stroke the side of Pierre’s face. When Pierre reached down and enveloped the woman, a second great cheer arose. He reached out behind the woman and made room in the embrace for a bespectacled man who held his sparse frame rigidly erect. Tears streamed from every face in view.

  A champagne cork popped, then another, and suddenly every hand was holding a mug, a cup, a glass. Pierre turned to find Jake still standing at the crowd’s periphery and shouted for silence. He waved Jake over and said in English, “Come join me, my friend.”

  A space was made through which Jake walked. Pierre raised his voice and spoke briefly in French, ending with the words, “Colonel Jake Burnes.” A murmur of greeting rose in reply.

  “These are friends and family,” Pierre explained. “Many have traveled from Montpelier to welcome me home.”

  Pierre’s mother reached over and gripped Jake’s arm with surprising strength. She spoke rapidly, her voice trembling slightly, her eyes shining despite the tears.

  “My mother tells me to apologize for her lack of English,” Pierre translated. For this moment at least, the shadows were gone from his eyes. “I am to tell you that she has read from my letters about your parents’ accident and the loss of your brother in the war, and that she grieves for you. She says that she would consider it an honor if you would consider our family to be your own.”

  A pewter mug full of champagne was thrust into Jake’s hand. A great salute rose as Pierre raised his own cup and toasted the crowd and his parents. Then he turned to Jake and said, “Welcome home, my friend.”

  Chapter Three

  Jake awoke to the sound of church bells clanging directly beside his head.

  He groped his way upright, rubbed his eyes, and realized that the bells were ringing through his open window. He stumbled across the room, but just as his hand gripped the ledge the clanging stopped. The air ached with the sudden stillness.

  Thoroughly awake, Jake took in his surroundings. The Servais family did not live in the city of Marseille itself, but in Le Rouet, a small farming village near both the city and the sea. The village church stood to Jake’s right, bordering the cobblestone plaza. To his left rose houses so old they appeared to have grown naturally from the earth. Beyond the village stretched vast fields of verdant green.

  Jake leaned on the windowsill and watched the gentle colors strengthen into full-fledged day. Great wild birch and umbrella pines acted as natural windbreaks for the ancient houses. Hoopoes and robins and nightingales and song thrushes sang the glory of Pierre’s homecoming.

  Through his window Jake saw a fox shepherd her three cubs across the field. Herons stood in white calmness about the edge of a distant lake. Flamingos fed with the foolish intricacy of ballet dancers. Ducks mocked all Jake’s worries. Beyond the fields and lake stretched the wetlands, silver-white with salt.

  His attention was drawn downward at the sound of a closing door. He watched as Pierre’s father and mother, dressed in suit and dress of basic black, exited the house and walked arm in arm toward the chapel.

  Pierre swung the bedroom door open. “Ah, you’re awake. Good.”

  “It’d be easier to sleep through D-day than that racket.”

  “Yes, my father says he has never found it so easy to be on time for morning Mass.” Although the joy of yesterday’s homecoming had dimmed, Pierre’s sardonic smile appeared to be firmly in place. “I spent much of last night going over places we need to check. Shall we get started?”

  “Give me two minutes to throw on some clothes,” Jake replied, “and I’m with you.”

  * * *

  First stop was the port of Marseille. The harbor seemed to be flourishing. Fishing vessels of every size and make bustled in smoky confusion between the great gray hulks of the American battleships. With the Sixth Fleet using Marseille as a major center for offloading supplies, the streets were full of American uniforms.

  Tankers and cargo vessels lay at anchor or vied for space at the crowded docks. The surrounding streets were jammed with every imaginable form of transport, from donkey carts to military trucks to human-powered pushcarts. People shouted and cursed and fought their way through the crawling traffic. The air stank from rotting fish and seaweed, from the refuse of a thousand broken food crates, from the fumes of the overheated trucks.

  Pierre did a slow circle, took a deep breath, and smiled with vast pleasure. “Ah, my friend, it is so good to be home!”

  Alleys opening off the main thoroughfares widened into markets selling everything from fish to fashionable clothes, from seaweed fertilizer to silverware. Time after time Pierre and Jake’s progress was stopped by stall holders who dropped their wares, shoved aside impatient custome
rs, and rushed to greet Pierre with cries of welcome. Large women swathed in layers of frayed sweaters and stained with fish scales enveloped Pierre in their fleshy arms, tears of joy streaming down their broad faces. Old fishermen overturned packing crates and scattered ice and nets in their haste to rush over and pound his back.

  Each time Pierre extricated himself from their blows, he pointed toward Jake and spoke an introduction. They turned and doffed battered berets, their hands curled into stone-hard rigidity by decades of fighting nets and fish. Leathery seams creased until dark eyes almost disappeared, and smiles revealed a few remaining smoke-stained teeth. Then Jake was pulled into the back-slapping circle, where his total lack of French in no way slowed down the questions thrown his way. Jake replied with shrugs and smiles, while Pierre tried to keep up with a dozen people demanding answers at once.

  Whenever the name of Patrique was brought up, the crowd quieted. A moment of reflecting upon the ground, the sky, the harbor’s scummy waters, and then quietly Pierre would ask his question. Eyes widened, the group tightened, voices tensed. Jake watched faces, since he could not understand the talk, and repeatedly saw a struggle pass over their weather-beaten features. They drank in Pierre’s news with breathless unease. They wanted to believe, tried to believe. But in the end they turned away with sorrowful shakes of their heads. Patrique, to their minds, was no more.

  “They don’t know anything,” Jake said with certainty when they stopped for a breather at a harbor cafe. The air was redolent with the pungent odor of French cigarettes and cheap wine. Jake followed Pierre’s example and hunched down over his coffee. That appeared to be the universal signal for privacy, and no one approached them unless one or the other straightened up.

  “I think you are right,” Pierre said. “No one has heard anything to suggest Patrique is alive.”