Ordinary Heroes (9 page)

"If you must," he answered. He picked at a plate of grapes.

"General Teedle alleges that you've been ordere
d t
o disband your Operational Group and return to London. He says you've refused."

"Refused'? What rubbish. I'm here under the command of OSS London, and London has directed me to continue as before. Gita and I and the others are going to finish our business in France, then continue on to Germany. I have built networks there, too, Dubin. We will see this to an end. Teedle can be damned with his nonsense about refusing orders."

This is a misunderstanding, then?"

If you wish to call it that."

I was somewhat relieved to find the matter could be settled quickly. I asked Martin to see his orders from OSS, which brought an indulgent smile.

"You don't know much about OSS, do you, Dubin?" In fact, I had tried to learn as much as I could, but except for an old propaganda piece in Stars and Stripes and what I gleaned at the i8th Division from Martin's sanitized zoI file, I was largely in the dark. "An OSS officer carries no written orders," he told me. "The Nazis have said forthrightly that they'll shoot any OSS member they capture. Teedle knows this. But mine are orders nonetheless."

"Well, if I may, sir, who gave those orders?"

"My operational officer in London. I was ordered back to see him the last week in September, as a matter of fact."

"And his name, if you please?"

Again, Martin smiled as he would with a boy.

"Dubin, OSS has strict rules of secrecy. It is not a normal military organization. Only London can reveal the information you're asking for. But feel free to check with them. They will confirm everything."

I frowned.

"Oh, pshaw, Dubin. You doubt me? Look around here. We live in the open in the French countryside, fed and housed by a noted French resister. If London didn't want this, don't you think they could inform the local networks, the Free French, with whom they've worked hand in glove for years now? Do you think the Comtesse would defy them? I am here only with the leave of OSS."

He was making some sense, but I knew I could not conclude this investigation merely by inference. However, I had lost Martin's attention. On the threshold was an older woman, very erect, very slim, very drawn. Her graying hair was swept back smoothly and she wore a simple dress, sashed at the waist, and no jewelry besides a cameo that hung between her collarbones. Biddy and I were introduced to the Comtesse de Lemolland. I bowed briefly, accepting her hand.

She addressed us in English.

"I owe to all Americans my deepest gratitude for your courage in behalf of my country."

"I am only a lawyer, Comtesse. Your thanks go to the likes of Major Martin, not to me."

Martin interjected, "The Comtesse herself is a great heroine."

Not at all true," she answered.

"May I tell the story then, Comtesse, and allow Lieutenant Dubin to judge for himself?"

Leaning against a large cutting block in the center of the kitchen, Martin played raconteur, a role that clearly pleased him. He explained that when the Nazis arrived in 194o, they had commandeered the Comte de Lemolland's ancestral house in the Cotesdu-Nord, where the Comtesse, a widow of three years, had been residing. The Germans turned the chateau into a communications node. The Comtesse was forced to live as a guest in her own home, confined to an apartment of several rooms. Because the Germans adored rank, they accorded her some dignity, but they partied with prostitutes and nailed maps to the wainscoting in the parlor and abused her servants. Twice maids were raped.

One of the Comtesse's house staff was a member of the underground, and it was she who secretly introduced Agnes de Lemolland to Martin. The Comtesse agreed to the installation in her salon of a listening device, an induction microphone no larger than a button, which was attached by a filament to a tiny earphone that ran to her sitting room. Ther
e t
he Comtesse listened to the daily flow of information through the communications center downstairs, reporting what she'd overheard. When the plans were laid for D-Day, the Comtesse understood that it was from this very center that German reinforcements would be routed to Normandy. With no request from Martin, she designated her own house for bombing once the invasion began, fleeing with her servants only minutes before the first strike.

"Major Martin is quite correct in his assessment," I told the Comtesse. I bowed again, but felt pained to realize that this frail old woman had done far more to win the war than I ever would.

"I am no one," she said simply, "but if you insist that I am as important as all that, Lieutenant, I must take advantage and insist that you and your companion honor me by joining us at supper." Without awaiting a reply, she instructed Sophie, the servant who was at the stove, to set two more plates.

I went looking for Bidwell, whom I found outside, leaning on the jeep and shooting pictures. In the bright daylight, looking back at the Comtesse's little castle, I felt as if I'd just left an amusement park.

"Quite a bunch, aren't they?" I asked. They were all captivating, the gallant Comtesse, and fierce little Mademoiselle Lodz, and of course Martin. "I think the Major is the first actual war hero I've met," I said.

From Biddy I received one of his sour looks, a step from insubordination.

"No disrespect, Lieutenant, but ain't no way rightly to tell where all the malarkey ends in there, sir. Only it's plenty of it, this country boy knows that." He closed the snaps on the leather camera case. "Food smells just fine, though," he said and headed inside.

Chapter
6.

PRINCIPLES

Supper at the Comtesse de Lemolland's was an idyll. In an alcove beside the kitchen, we ate at a long table of heavily varnished wood, enjoying a savory stew. It might have been veal, although there was not much meat among the root vegetables that were the main ingredients. Nevertheless, the usual French hand with food prevailed and the victuals were far tastier, if less plentiful, than even the very good rations we had at HQ. Some of my appreciation for the meal might have been due to the Comtesse's wine, newly pressed, which was poured freely. But in time I realized that the principal charm was that at the Comtesse de Lemolland's I had left the military. A civil--and civilian--atmosphere prevailed. I sat next to the old woman while she share
d r
eflections in English on the history of the region. When we started, Biddy lingered, uncertain if he was invading the officers' mess, but Martin waved him to a chair. Sophie, who had cooked, joined us, too. The Gypsy I had seen, called Antonio, was at the far end of the table speaking in French with Peter Bettjer, a ruddy blond Belgian, who was the Operational Group's communications expert.

Last to sit was Mademoiselle Lodz, who took the empty chair on my right. Midway through the meal, I felt the weight of her gaze. She was studying me unapologetically.

"I am reflecting about you, Doo-bean," she told me in French. It was clear already that she was never going to pronounce my name any other way.

"I am delighted to know I concern you at all. What exactly is it you are thinking, Mademoiselle?"

"If you are indeed Dubinsky from Pinsk"--she puckered her lips, then stared straight at me--"vous etes juif."

So that was it. In the little fantasia of the Comtesse's home, I felt especially scalded, which my face apparently betrayed.

"This is nothing to be ashamed of," she said in French. "In my town there were many Jews. I knew them well."

"I am hardly ashamed," I said quickly.

"There are many Jewish soldiers in the American Army?"

"Some.)
,
"And they stay among the other troops?"

"Of course. We are one nation."

"But the dark ones I see--they drive and move the equipment. The Jews do not have separate battalions like the Negroes?"

"No. It is entirely different. The blacks were slaves to some of the Americans' grandfathers, who, regrettably, have not allowed the past to die."

"And these Jew soldiers. They look like you? You have no sidelocks. Are there tsitsis beneath your garments?"

"I am not a Jew in that way."

"In my town they had only one way, Dubin. Red Yiddish?" she asked. That made the third language in which she had addressed me, and her smile revealed a dark space between her front teeth.

"Ayn bisel. Yich red besser am franzosich." My grandparents who had followed my father to the United States spoke Yiddish, but my mother and father used only English in the presence of their children, unwilling to risk hindering our development as Americans. My Yiddish was not even close to my French, as I had just told her.

"Ach mir," she answered, "ayn bisel." With me, too, a little bit.

Martin, across the table, asked her in French, "What language is that?"

"We are speaking Jewish, Robert."

"Jewish? I thought you disliked the Jews.,
,
She looked at him sharply. "Wrong. Stupidly wrong. This is because you will never listen to anything I say about my home. My only friends as a child were Jewish. They alone would allow me in their houses. Why would I dislike them?"

"But they spurned you."

"For a bride, Robert. It is their way."

He turned away to ask Sophie for the bread, while Mademoiselle Lodz was left to explain.

"C'est une histoire compliquee," she told me. It's a long story. "My mother, Dubin, wanted me to find a Jew to be my husband. She said, 'They are seldom drunks and rarely beat their wives.' '' Mademoiselle Lodz's mother had clearly never met Julius Klein, who lived on the third floor above us when I was a child and whose wife and children often ran for their lives while his drunken rages shook the entire building. But no Jew, of course, would marry me.

"You are a Catholic?"

"Only to a Jew. I have never set foot inside a church."

"So you felt, as the Major put it, spurned?"

She wagged her head from side to side, as if weighing the idea for the first time only now
.

"The Poles were far worse. Those who regarded themselves as respectable would not even speak to my mother--including her own family. So we live
d h
appily among the Jews. And if I'd had a Jewish husband, I would have been on the trucks beside him.

For me, in the end, it was a piece of good fortune.)
,
"The trucks?"

"Vous m'etonnez! You do not know of this? In my town, every Jew is gone. The Nazis took them away. They are in the ghetto in Lublin, held like livestock inside fences. This has happened everywhere. France, too. In Vichy, Petain rounded up the Jews even before the Germans asked. As a Jewish soldier, you, especially, should be here fighting Hitler."

When I enlisted, my first choice was to battle Tojo and the sinister Japanese who had launched their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. As for Hitler, I knew about his ruthless war against the Jews in Germany, smashing Jewish businesses and confiscating Jewish homes, and felt a stake in bringing him down, but it was not the same as the sense of direct attack I'd experienced from the Japanese bombs on American soil.

I was disinclined to try to explain any of this to Mademoiselle Lodz. Instead, I gave my attention to Martin, who was across the table regaling Bidwell with tales of the Operational Group during the years before the invasion. To introduce Antonio and Bettjer, Martin was detailing their most entertaining success against the Nazis, which had come in a small town to the west. There vintners sold yin ordinair
e b
y hauling it through the streets in a hogshead mounted on two wheels, from which the villagers would fill their carafes through a bunghole in the bottom. Together Antonio and Bettjer had inserted a wooden partition in one of these casks, leaving wine in the lower portion. In the upper half, Bettjer had crawled between the staves. Looking out a tiny spy hole, he radioed information to Martin on the whereabouts of a German Panzer division moving through the town, while Antonio rolled the barrel down the street so their wireless was immune to the German direction-finding trucks that crawled around the area in search of resistance transmitters.

"It was all brilliant," said Martin, "except that poor Peter literally got drunk on the fumes. When we opened the cask, he had passed out cold."

Around the table, there was a hail of laughter and several jokes about Bettjer and alcohol, to which he'd clearly become more accustomed. Right now he was bright red with drink. I had been more careful with the wine, but the same could not be said of most of the others and the level of hilarity had increased as Martin went on recounting their adventures.

"You appear, Major, to have been destined for this life," I said to him eventually.

"Oh, hardly," he answered. "I was organizing for the International Transport Workers around Paris, when the Nazis decided to go marching. I had n
o d
esire to return to war, Dubin. I'd had more than enough of it in Spain. I'd led other Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, then became a commando when the foreign troops were sent home. It was all quite dismal, to be frank. I had no desire to see more friends and comrades tortured and killed by Fascists. After Paris fell, I moved back to Madrid, where I was a transportation official with an oil company. Spain was a neutral country, and with a Spanish passport I could go anywhere, even Germany, which is why the OSS approached me. Originally, I thought I was to be a mere conduit for information. But one thing led to another. I had no interest in joining the Army, yet I could not refuse when they asked me to lead the OG."