Ordinary Heroes (49 page)

"I should say so," answered Bear. "I'm the one who arranged it."

"Arranged the wedding?"

"Not their meeting," said Bear. "But getting the military authorities to allow them to wed, yes, that was my doing. Your father was concerned, quite rightly, that when he was convicted, as was inevitable, he would be transferred immediately to a military prison in the U
. S
. He was therefore desperate to marry before the proceedings, so that your mother, as a war bride, would have the right to immigrate to the States. She had remained an inmate in a displaced persons camp that had been erected after burning down the Balingen huts. The conditions were far better, of course, but she was anything but free. It required countless petitions to the Army and the Occupation Authorities, but eventually your mother and a rabbi, also held at Balingen, were allowed to visit your father for half an hour at Regensburg Castle for their wedding. I was the best man. In spite of the circumstances, it was quite touching. They appeared very much in love."

Bear said only that and glanced down to the pages I'd handed him, allowing me to work my way through this information in relative privacy. Despite the horrors of the camp, or Mom's unfamiliarity with the military, or even her limited English at the time, someone as innately canny as she was couldn't possibly have failed to grasp the essentials of Dad's situation. She knew he was under arrest, and as such, had to be gravely concerned for her new husband. Clearly, then, Mom recalled a great deal more about Dad's court-martial than she'd been willing to acknowledge to me. Yet even at that moment, my firs
t i
mpulse was to accept her reluctance as a way of honoring Dad's desire for silence.

But somehow my mind wandered back to the question that had perplexed me for half a year now. Why did Dad say he desperately hoped his children would never hear his story? Out the paned windows of Northumberland Manor's sitting room, there was perfect light on the red maple buds just showing the first sign of ripening, and beholding them with the intense museum attention Dad wrote of, a moment of concentrated sight, I found the truth hanging out there, too. It was simple. My father's remark about keeping this from his children was not philosophical. It was practical. Dad had not wanted the truth to emerge at his trial, or to survive it, because it would have imperiled his wife and the lie she was to be obliged to live. That is why it would have been a disaster to call Gita Lodz as a witness. That is why he hoped we never heard the story--because that silence would have meant they had made a life as husband and wife.

Bear's head was wilted in his wheelchair while he read, and I reached out to softly clutch his spotted hand and the fingers crooked with disease.

"She's my mother. Right? Gita Lodz?"

Bear started, as if I'd woken him. His cloudy eyes that still reflected the depth of the ages settled on me, and his lower jaw slid sideways in his odd lopsided smile. Then he deliberated, an instant of lawyerly cool.

"As I have said, Stewart, I was not there when you were born.

"But the woman you saw my father marry--that was Gita Lodz?"

"Your father never said that to me," he answered. "Anything but. It would have compromised me severely to know that, inasmuch as I had spent months begging the military authorities for permission to allow David to marry a concentration camp survivor of another name. I would have been obliged to correct the fraud being perpetrated. I believe that was why he never contacted me once we were back in the U
. S. A
.--so that I didn't have to deal with any second thoughts about that."

Despite failing on the uptake for months, I now bounced rapidly along the path of obvious conclusions. I instantly comprehended why Gita Lodz, hero of the French underground, came here pretending to be the former Gella Rosner (whose name was Americanized as Gilda), David Dubin's war bride, allegedly saved from the Nazi hell called Balingen. In the spring of 1945, my parents had every reason to believe that OSS would never have permitted the sidekick of Robert Martin, suspected Soviet spy, to enter the United States. Indeed, as someone who had repeatedly abetted Martin's escapes, Gita stood
a g
ood chance of being prosecuted if OSS and Teedle had gotten their hands on her. A new identity was the only safe course. One that could never be disproved amid that ocean of corpses. One more role to add to the many the would-be Bernhardt had already played flawlessly. And one that guaranteed that Gilda would be welcome in David's family. A Jewish bride. As his parents wished. And as Gita herself, when she was younger, had once wanted to be.

And, probably not insignificantly, it was also a weighty declaration for my father. When I had changed my last name in 1970, Dad had never really responded to my implication that I was reversing an act of renunciation from decades before. There was only one thing he cared to be clear about.

"Do not doubt, Stewart," he said to me once, "that Balingen made me a Jew." Since I knew he would never describe what he'd witnessed there, I did not pursue the remark. On reflection, I took it as one more way of telling me how devoted he was to my mother. And even now I'm not completely certain of the precise nature of the transformation he was alluding to. I don't know if he meant that he had realized, as had been true for so many in Germany, that there was no escape from that identity, or, rather, as I tend to suspect, that he owed the thousands annihilated there the reverence of not shirking the heritage that had condemned them. Certainly, there was a touchin
g h
omage in Gita's new persona, which allowed one of the millions who perished to be not only remembered, but revived. But I see that Dad was also making an emphatic statement about himself, about what an individual could stand for, or hope for, against the forces of history.

I, on the other hand, who had proudly reclaimed Dubinsky, who sent my daughters to Hebrew school and insisted we have shabbas dinner every Friday night, I now reposed in the nouveau-Federal sitting room of a Connecticut nursing home realizing that by the strict traditions of a religion that has always determined a child's faith by that of his mother, I am not really Jewish.

These are the last pages of my father's account:

I emerged again from the dungeon darkness into the brilliant day and terrible reek of Balingen. I suppose that humans recoil on instinct from the rankness of decaying flesh and I had to spend a moment fighting down my sickness again.

Grove was waiting for me. I thought he wanted to know how it had gone with Martin, but he had other news.

"Roosevelt is dead," he said. "Truman is President."

"Don't be a card."

"It's just on Armed Services Radio. They say FDR had a stroke. I kid you not." I had been raised to worship Roosevelt. My mother, who regarded the President as if he were a close relation, would be devastated. And then I looked to the nearest mound of broken corpses. At every one of these instants of paradox, I reflexively expected my understanding of life to become deeper, only to find myself more confused.

I asked the MP who'd accompanied me if we had an estimated arrival time on the half-track that would carry Martin back, but the news about Roosevelt's death seemed to have brought everything to a halt for a while. Nonetheless, I wouldn't countenance the idea of spending the night within Balingen. Whatever hour the convoy arrived, I said, I wanted Martin transferred. We could bivouac with the 406th Armored Cavalry a mile or two away, nearer Hechingen.

An hour or so later, vehicles reached the camp, but not the ones I awaited. They carried the first Red Cross workers. I watched with a certain veteran distance as these men and women, accustomed to working tirelessly to save lives, began to absorb the enormity of what they were confronting. A young French doctor passed out when he saw the first hill of bodies. Inexplicably, one of the wraiths moving vacantly through the camp, an elderly man who ha
d s
omehow lived to liberation, fell dead only a few feet from the unconscious doctor. As with everything else, we all seemed bereft of the power to react. If the sky fell, as Henny Penny feared, we might have had more to say.

Many of the American infantrymen were standing in little groups, speculating about what the President's death might mean with regard to the Nazis' final surrender and the war in the Pacific. I could see that the shock of the news was welcome in its way, a chance to put where they were out of their minds for a while.

The half-track I awaited, a captured German 251 that had been repainted, finally appeared at 2:3o in the afternoon. Only a minute or so after that, Grove came to find me. We were preparing to load Martin. He would be in leg irons with at least two guns trained on him at all times.

"There's an inmate looking for you," Grove said. "She asked for you by name."

I knew who it was. A shamed and exhausted fantasy that Gita might appear had circulated through my mind, in just the way it had for months, even as I'd tried to banish it.

"Polish?" I asked.

"Yes, from the Polish camp. She looks quite well," he added, "but there are several young women here who look all right." He made no further comment on how these girls might have managed.

She was in the regimental office that had been established in the largest of the yellow buildings the SS had abandoned earlier in the week. The room was empty, paneled to half height in shellacked tongueand-groove, with a broken schoolhouse fixture hanging overhead from a frayed wire. Beneath it, Gita Lodz sat on a single wooden chair, the only furnishing in the room. She sprang to her feet as soon as she saw me. She was still in the gray uniform the nuns had given her in Bastogne, although it was frayed at both sleeves and soiled, and bore a yellow star pinned above the breast.

"Doo-bean," she said, and with the name, more than the sight of her, my poor heart felt as if it might explode. I had no need to ask how she knew I was here. She would have maintained her own surveillance on the building where Martin was jailed.

I dragged another wooden chair in from the hall, taking a seat at least a dozen feet from her. We faced each other like that, with no barrier between us but distance, both of us with our feet flat on the worn floor. I was too proud to lose my composure, and waited with my face trembling, until I could drag out a few words.

"So we meet again in hell," I said to her in French. I felt my heart and mind pirouetting again with the unaccountable extremes in life. Here I was with this gallant, deceitful woman, full of wrath and anguish
,
while I was still reeling from the reek of atrocity, sitting where some of history's greatest monsters had been in charge only a week ago. Roosevelt was dead. I was alive.

Although I did not ask, she told me about the last several days. Martin and she had snuck in through the same breach in the rear fence the SS guards were using to slip away. After only a matter of hours, she recognized four people she had known in Pilzkoba and last seen on the trucks the Nazis had loaded for deportation to Lublin. One of them was a girl a year younger than Gita, a playmate, who was the last of a family of six. Two younger siblings, a brother and a sister, had been snatched from her parents' arms and promptly gassed when they arrived at a camp called Buchenwald. There the next year her father had been beaten to death by a kapo right in front of her, only a few weeks after her mother had succumbed to pneumonia. But still this girl from Pilzkoba had survived. She had marched here hundreds of miles with no food, her feet wrapped in rags, a journey on which another of her brothers had perished. Yet she had arrived at Balingen in relative health. And then yesterday she had died of one of the plagues raging through the camp.

"In Normandy, Dubin, when we helped to direct the Allied troops through the hedgerows, I saw battlefields so thick with corpses that one could not cros
s w
ithout walking on the bodies. I told myself I would never see anything worse, and now I see this. And there are souls here, Dubin, who say the Germans have created places worse yet. Is that possible? N'y at-il jamais un fond, meme dans les oceans les plus profonds?" Is there no bottom even to the darkest ocean?

With that, she cried, and her tears, of course, unleashed my own. Seated a dozen feet apart, we both wept, I with my face in my hands.

"There is so much I do not understand," I finally said, and will never understand. Here looking at you, I ask myself how it can seem possible, amid this suffering, that the worst pain of all is heartbreak?"

"Do you criticize me, Dubin?"

"Need I?" I answered with one of those French sayings she loved to quote. "Conscience coupable n'a pas besoin d'accusateur." A guilty conscience needs no accuser. "But I am sure you feel no shame."

She tossed her bronze curls. She was thin and sallow. Yet unimaginably, she remained beautiful. How was that possible either?

"You are bitter with me," she said.

You decimated me with your lies."

"I never lied to you, Dubin."

"Call it what you like. I told you secrets and you used them against me, against my country. All for Martin."

"Entre l'arbre et l'ecorce it faut ne pas mettre le doigt." One shouldn't put a finger between the bark and the tree. In our parlance, she was caught between a rock and a hard place. "This is not justice. What you were about to do--what you will do now Martin placed in chains by his nation? He has risked his life for America, for the Allies, for freedom, a thousand times. He is the bravest man in Europe."