Ordinary Heroes (39 page)

Watching from a distance, I was surprised to hear my name from behind.

"David?" A doctor in a green surgical gown and cap had both arms raised toward me, a short dark man who looked a little like Algar. Once he removed the headgear I recognized Cal Echols, who had been my sister's boyfriend during his first two years in med school. Everyone in my family had loved Cal, who was smart and sociable, but he'd lost his mother as a four-year-old, and Dorothy said his clinging ultimately drove her insane. We'd never seen that sid
e o
f him, of course. Now Cal and I fell on each other like brothers.

"Jeepers creepers," he said, when he pushed me back to look me over, "talk about the tempest tossed. I thought you lawyers knew how to worm your way out of things."

"Bad timing," I said.

He figured I had come to the hospital to visit a soldier, and I was immediately embarrassed that my preoccupation with Gita had kept me from realizing that several of the wounded men from my company were probably here. Cal had finished his surgical shift and offered to help me find them. When I turned to the front desk to attempt some awkward goodbye with Gita, she was gone.

Once Biddy had found a place for the jeep, he and I went over the hospital roster with Cal. Four of our men were still on hand. A corporal named Jim Harzer had been wounded by a mortar round during a hill fight near Noville. He was another of the replacement troops, the father of two little girls, and when I'd last seen him he was on the ground, with the corpsmen attending him. They had a tourniquet above his knee; down where his boot had been it was primarily a bloody pulp. In spite of that, Harzer had beamed. 'I'm done, Cap,' he said. 'I'm going home. I'm gonna be kissing my girls.' I found him in a similarly buoyant mood today. He'd lost his right foot, but he said he'd met several fellas missing their left
s a
nd they planned to stay in touch so they could save money on shoes.

In the convent, all the class space had been converted to hospital wards. The long wooden desks at which students once sat facing the blackboards were being used as beds, with more cots placed in between. The valuable classroom equipment, bird exhibits for science, chem lab beakers, and microscopes, had been preserved in the closets.

Almost every patient had had surgery of some kind, the best-off only to remove shrapnel from nonmortal wounds. But on the wards were also the limbless, the faceless, the gut-shot, who too often were only days from death. The cellar that ran the length of the building now served as a morgue.

At the far end of the second floor, an MP stood outside a full ward of German POWs here as patients.

"We give them better than our boys get, that's for sure," said Cal. Indeed, several of the Germans waved when they recognized Cal in the doorway. "Nice kid, from Munich," said Cal about one of them. "Speaks good English, but both parents are Nazi Party members."

"Does he know you're Jewish?"

"That was the first thing I told him. Of course, all of his best friends at home were Jewish. All. He gave me a whole list." He smiled a little.

Cal had been here since the day after Christmas
,
and I began asking about the other men from my company who'd left the front in ambulances. He remembered a number. Too many had died, but there was some good news. Cal himself had operated on Mike O'Brien--the joker who'd enjoyed giving it to Stocker Collison--whom I'd dragged from the clearing on Christmas Day. He had lived. So had Massimo Fortunato, from whose thigh Cal had removed a shrapnel piece the size of a softball. He had been transferred to a general hospital in Luxembourg City, but Massimo had done so well that Cal thought he would be sent back to my former unit in a month or two.

Cal offered us billets in the convent, which we eagerly accepted, since it saved me from a problematic reconnaissance in the overcrowded town. The enlisted men, medical corpsmen for the most part, were housed in a large schoolroom converted to a dormitory. Their quarters were close, but the men weren't complaining, Cal said. The building had electricity from a field generator and central heat, coal-fired, although there was not yet running water in the tiled baths and shower rooms. Better still, the enlisted men were right next to the mess hall and on the same floor as the nuns and nurses, a few of whom were rumored to have dispensed healing treatments of a nonmedical variety. True or not, the mere idea had revived the men.

The docs were boarded on the second floor in th
e n
uns' former rooms, which the Sisters had insisted on surrendering. These were barren cubicles, six feet by ten, each containing a feather mattress, a small table, and a crucifix on the wall, but it would be the first privacy I'd had for a month. Cal's room was two doors down. He had received a package from home only a day ago and he offered me a chocolate, laughing out loud at my expression after the first bite.

"Careful," he said. "You look close to cardiac arrest.

Afterward, in officers' mess where we had dinner, I again recounted Christmas Day. Despite all the fighting I'd seen following that, my stories never seemed to get any farther.

"This war," said Cal. "I mean, being a doc--it's a paradox, I'll tell you, David. You try like hell to save them, and doing a really great job just means they get another chance to die. We had a young medic who came in here yesterday. It was the third time in a month. Minor wounds the first couple of times, but yesterday just about his whole right side was blown away. What a kid. Even in delirium, he would reply to all of my questions with a 'Yes, sir' or 'No, sir.' I stayed up all day with him, just trying to coax him to live, and he died not ten minutes after I finally went off." Cal peered at nothing, reabsorbing the loss. "A lot of these boys end up hating us when they realize they're going back. You know the saying. The only thing a doctor can give you is a pill and
a p
at on the back and an Army doc skips the pat on the back."

It was nearly 8
:00
p
. M
. now, and Cal's surgical shift was about to begin. He would operate until 4:00 a
. M
. The surgical theater was never empty. Before he went back to work, he brought a bottle of Pernod to my room. After two drinks, I passed out with my boots still on.

I woke in the middle of the night when my door cracked open. At first, I thought it was the wind, but then a silhouette appeared, backlit by the brightness from the hall.

"Ton Chien to cherche," Gita said. She slid through the door and closed it and flicked on the light. She had hold of Hercules by the woven belt that one of the men in my company had given him as a collar. Her hair had been pinned up under a white nurse's bonnet and she was dressed in a baggy gray uniform. The dog, which Biddy had left outside in the convent's one-car garage, had been found trotting through the wards. Harzer and a couple of others recognized him and swore that Hercules had come to pay his respects before moving on in his apparent search for Biddy or me. When she let him go, the dog bounded to my side. I scratched his ears, before I faced her.

Cal's stories about nurses scurrying through the halls at night had briefly sparked the thought that Gita might arrive here. It seemed unlikely given he
r m
ood when we parted, but before falling off I'd had a vision so clear I had actually deliberated for an instant about whether I would tell her to stay or to go. Yet in the moment there was no choice. As always, she presented herself as a challenge. But I doubted her boldness was only to prove her point about my longing. Her need was as plain as my craving for her, which just like my paralyzing fears in the air over Savy was not subject to the control of preparation or reason. I beckoned with my hand, the lights went off, and she was beside me.

As I embraced her, I apologized for my grime and the odor, but we met with all the gentleness our first time together had lacked, softened by what each of us had endured in the interval. Even as I savored the remarkable smoothness of her stomach and back, the thrill of touching a human so graceful and compact, something within me continued to wonder if this romance was a fraud, merely the overheated grappling of the battlefront. Perhaps it was just as Teedle had told me. When a human is reduced to the brute minimum, desire turns out to be at the core. But that did not matter now as we lay together in the tiny convent room. In the tumult of emotion Gita consistently provoked in me, there was a new element tonight. I had been fascinated from the start by her intelligence and her daring; and my physical yearning for her was greater than I'd felt for any woman. But tonight, my heart swelled also wit
h a
bounding gratitude. I pressed her so close that I seemed to hope to squeeze her inside my skin. I kissed her again and again, wishing my appreciation could pour out of me, as I, David Dubin, recovered, if only for a fragment of time, the fundamental joy of being David Dubin.

Chapter
24.

ALIVE

We remained in Bastogne two more days.

I had signaled Teedle that Gita wa
s h
ere if OSS wished to interview her, and awaited his order to formally abandon the effort to arrest Martin. Pending a response, I worked on a long report about the past month for Colonel Maples, who had moved to the new Third Army Headquarters in Luxembourg City. I also spent a couple of hours both days with the men from my former command who were hospitalized here. But every minute was only a long aching interval, waiting for dark and the end of Gita's shift, when she would slip into my room.

"You are an unusual woman," I had told her agai
n t
hat first night after she had come to me, as we lay whispering in the narrow bed.

"You notice only now?" She was laughing. "But I do not think you mean to praise me, Dubin. What do you find so uncommon?"

That you mourn Martin and are with me."

She thought a moment. "No soldier in Europe more eagerly sought death, Dubin. I knew that, no matter how often I tried to say otherwise. Besides, if my father died or my brother, would it be unusual, as you say, to find comfort in life?"

"Martin was not your father or your brother."

"No," she said and fell silent again. "He was both. And my salvation. He rescued me, Dubin. When I met him I was on the boil, furious at all moments except those when I simply wanted to die. He said, If you are angry, fight. And if you wish to die, then wait until tomorrow. Today you may do some good for someone else.' He knew the right things to say. Because he had said them to himself."

"But you do not mourn him as your lover?"

"Qu'est-ce qui to prend?" She raised her head from my chest. "Why does that matter so much to you--me with Martin? Do you fear that I liked Martin better this way than I like you?"

You think that is the issue?"

"It is the issue with every man at times. And it is stupid. With each person it is different, Dubin. No
t b
etter or worse. It is like a voice, yes? No voice is the same. But there is always conversation. Does one prefer a person for the voice, or the words? It is what is being said that matters far more. No?"

I agreed, but pondered in the dark.

"Doo-bean," she finally said, more emphatically than usual, "I have told you. With Martin and me that aspect was long over. It became impossible."

"Because?"

"Because this is no longer an activity for him."

I finally understood. "Was he wounded?"

"In the mind. He has not been good that way for some time. He punishes himself perhaps, because he likes the killing too much. He has clung to me, but only because he believes there will not be another woman after me. Comprends-tu?"

Surprisingly, something remained unsettled. I looked into the dark seeking the words, as if attempting to lay hold of a nerve running through my chest.

"When I think of Martin," I said then, "I wonder what interest I could have to you. I am so dull. My life is small and yours with him has been so large."

"Tu ne me comprends pas bien." You do not understand me well.

"Well'? You are the most mysterious person I have ever met."

"I am a simple girl, with little education. You ar
e l
earned, Dubin. Occasionally humorous. Brave enough. You are a solid type, Dubin. Would you drink and beat your wife?"

Not at the same time."

"Tu m'as fait craquer." I cracked, meaning, I couldn't resist. "Besides, you are a rich American." "My father is a cobbler."

"Evidemment! Les cordonniers sont toujours les plus mal chausses." The shoemaker's son always goes barefoot. "I have miscalculated." Once we had laughed for some time, she added, "You have a conscience, Dubin. It is an attractive quality in a fellow in a time of war."

"A conscience? Lying here with you when I have promised myself to someone else?"

"Eh," she answered again. "If you and she were destined for each other, you would have married before you departed. What woman loves a man and allows him to leave for war without having him to her bed?"

"It was not solely her choice."

"More the point, then. You are not so scrupulous here, when there are no expectations." She laid her fingertip directly on the end of my penis to make her point. "You chose to be free, Dubin. No? Qui se marie a la hate se repent a loisir." Marry in haste, repent at leisure.