A Perfect Madness (20 page)

Erich saw the night lights of Triberg
as he crossed over a slight rise leading down to the small town.
History carpeted his mind as he paused for a second to look at the
distant lights dancing and flickering through the forest like a
thousand small candles. Cuckoo clock merchants of old, carrying
their priceless wares, must have crossed this same rise in the
trail centuries before, marveling with disbelief, as he was now, at
the same sights. But such moments are really for poets. We see them
for what they are for only a passing second in time, and then let
them go their way. A poet’s eyes see them for an eternity because
he sees them from his soul.

Erich took one last look at the lights
before him and then started down the trail, which widened
considerably as he drew close to the outer limits of the village
where his car was parked. A parting gift from his father, he
initially shied away from using the small Audi roadster when he
first arrived at Leipzig. Resentment among the staff over his
favored position with Dr. Catel was more than enough without
flaunting such a luxury in wartime in front of their eyes. But
having such reliable transportation available continued to anchor
the illusion harbored by him that somehow it was his only means of
escaping Germany.

He would go first to Dresden to visit
his mother for a day, then return to Leipzig before undertaking the
questionable move to Görden. It would be after midnight when he
arrived to awaken her with a scare.

As simple as his mother was, she was
clean from all that was going on around her, Erich believed. She
had not been dirtied by the outcry against the Jews and everybody
else in the world. Though she had often worried that silence about
a wrong was greater than the act itself, she believed God would
understand and forgive her. To her, no sin of man was beyond
forgiveness so long as you believed in being saved, which she did
every day of her life. For Erich, though, it was she to whom he
would go for forgiveness, not God. He had done this all his life,
as he would now. She would listen and never judge, and when she
spoke, it was always, “I understand.” The feeling of forgiveness,
of being clean, could not be greater if it had come from
God.

Erich talked for hours into the night
with his mother. Emptying the trash from his soul took that long.
He talked of Julia and the deep love that owned his heart, and of
exchanging their sacred vows witnessed only by Rabbi Loew, though
he lay buried in the ground next to them with his golem. All was
said with a tenderness his mother had never seen in him. Then he
spoke of the old Jewish man and woman and the murdered baby and his
desire to flee Germany. All the while he talked, his mother
listened and said nothing, studying his face from time to time, as
if trying to find the innocence her son once carried. At the end,
Erich spoke of his father, which she knew he would. He always
talked of his father last, and then with great reservation, as if
he were standing in the room hovering over them. There was no
warmth in Erich’s words, only timid inquiries about the man he
loved but couldn’t reach. The world is so different when we open
the door to it, his mother thought, looking at him. It is those we
lived with and loved and should know that elude us in the
end.

Leaving, Erich embraced his mother,
clinging to her as he had as a child, not wanting to let go.
Finally he said, “I will be moving to Görden next week, a new
assignment, a new psychiatric treatment program for
children.”

“
I know, your father has
told me of it and your position there. He believes you will rise
high in the eyes of the Reich Committee there.”

Before continuing, his mother brushed
a heavy strand of Erich’s long blond hair away from his face and
placed his hands in hers.

“
My sweet Erich, you have
been running away so long. Maybe when the war is over you can
become the painter of great pictures you dreamed of doing. But now
you must find your duty, whatever it’s to be.”

“
My duty?” Erich thought
it odd she would use such a word.

“
Yes, whatever you find it
to be. Otherwise, you’ll keep bouncing around like a puppet
dangling aimlessly on a string. Life imposes strange duties on all
of us, but those in war are even stranger.”

Erich left then, still puzzled by his
mother’s odd soliloquy. He had never heard such serious words from
her before, nor to such length. Perhaps she was only repeating his
father’s admonitions from a time they talked about him. Even though
it was doubtful, it pleased him to think that his father had done
so.

***

FOURTEEN

Julia, Tempsford, England, 1942

T
he RAF Lysander,
carrying Julia and Eva and two other Czech agents, ascended
smoothly from Tempsford’s grassy runway into the cold blackness of
the winter night. Freezing in the same blackness hundreds of miles
away, Prague awaited them. They were going home at last. Not as
they wished, though, to live, but to fight and perhaps to die.
Julia cared and worried about the dying because of Anna and Erich,
but Eva didn’t. To her, death was as essential to living as the air
she breathed. All the days ahead are hidden from us and always will
be, she would say to those who would listen. And whether it’s
living or dying that’s there waiting for us, what was to come would
come, as sure as the morning light first floods the skies each
waking day.

It was what both of them had wished
for so long and trained for so hard, to jump one moonless night
into the dark skies above their homeland and descend in silent fear
to its sacred soil. There they were to join with another resistance
group with plans to sabotage the gas works in Prague, and then,
hopefully, reestablish radio contact with British intelligence for
navigating bombers to the Skoda iron works in Pilsen. The final
part of their orders shattered any illusion that Julia held, that
somehow they might survive the barbwires of danger that lay before
them. If they should become separated during the jump, they were to
try to join up with a third group of agents already in Prague
preparing to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the blond beast,
Protectorate of Moravia and Bohemia and slayer of Jews. Julia knew
escaping the clutches of the Gestapo would be hopeless once the
assassination has been carried out. Operations Anthropoid, the plan
had been surreptitiously tagged, as a Halifax lifted off carrying
seven brave Czech soldiers to their ultimate fate. Their appointed
time to drop close to Prague was December 28, two months before
Julia and Eva would follow the same route, knowing that finding
them would be as daunting a task as killing Heydrich.

Once in the air, Julia leaned back
against the small pack she was carrying, in addition to the
parachute strapped in front. Looking across the aisle at Eva, she
began to laugh, imagining she looked the same way, like an overly
stuffed scarecrow. Underneath their jump suits, each wore two wool
sweaters, a shirt, bra, military shorts instead of panties, long
pants and two pairs of socks. Wrapped around their waist was a
money belt stuffed with thousands of Reich marks, which added a
voluminous stomach on both of them. Eva began laughing, too,
because she knew what Julia was thinking. But scarecrows can’t be
afraid and Julia was. The fear of bailing out into the unknown had
haunted her when she thought of it, hanging in her throat and teeth
like sour vomit. Only through laughter could she kill the
taste.

After a few minutes of nervous
laughter and chatter with Eva, each having to shout to the other
over the loud roar of the plane, Julia closed her eyes to rest for
the three-hour trip. There would be no more prayers to God, which
Eva thought Julia was doing. They had been said many times before
by her, until the casualty lists came out showing all the boys
dying everywhere there was some fighting. She figured then that God
wouldn’t listen to one person, and a woman at that, when so many
were dropping dead in foreign lands who had probably prayed to live
just like she had done. Staying alive in war, she had come to
believe, was no different from playing Russian roulette, except
there were a million guns pointed at your head instead of a
six-shot revolver.

Shutting out what lay ahead for her
and Eva, Julia’s mind became crowded with bundles of thoughts of
times that had passed. Much had changed since she arrived in
England, a lifetime ago, so it seemed. Hitler’s great boast of
bringing England to her knees had vanished in the summer winds
blowing across the English Channel. Even the terrible bombing of
London that began then in late summer appeared less. Still, Hitler
now ruled all of Europe, including the Balkan countries, and had
launched a massive invasion of Russia. But England no longer stood
alone, as America had entered the war. Soon, England would be
invaded by thousands of fresh, young faces from America, none too
eager to fight and die like their fathers had in the Great War, but
there only because they were told to be. From the beginning, it was
not their war to die in, but that would change as everything else
did.

It was mostly the thoughts of Anna
that hummed in her mind, keeping company with the monotonous
droning of the plane’s motors. Anna was two and a few months now,
healthy and strong as the new spring lambs dancing around in Angie
McFarland’s fresh green fields. Nothing put before her on the
dining table went untouched, even the morning breakfast bowls
filled with haggis. Carrots and greens and shepherd’s pie were her
favorites, though, and had made her a Scottish tot with fat, rosy
cheeks kept raw and chafed by the cold winds blowing and swirling
across the hills where she played. Anna loved Angie McFarland, whom
she saw as her mother, though Angie talked of Julia throughout each
day. She would read every letter to her from Julia, some two and
three times, when days passed without a new one. Even then, she
would change the wording to keep a fresh and exciting picture of
her mother in front of Anna’s young eyes.

At night, she would read and tell a
story to Anna from the Old Testament and teach her a Hebrew prayer
and song, as she promised Julia she would do. In time, the Hebrew
prayers became her own, though she would always add “In Christ’s
name” before the amen. One sunny November day, Angie took Anna with
her to the public library in Edinburgh, not too many miles away
from her own village, where she found a book explaining Jewish
holidays and their dates. Then, with Christmas coming, she would
celebrate Hanukkah with Anna, too. It was not something Angie
promised Julia she would do, or Julia even expected from her. “It
just seemed right,” she would tell those in the church that
questioned her about a Christian celebrating such a
holiday.

Later she would add, when Passover
came and the questions grew louder, “Would you want a Jewish mother
to raise your child as a Jew, tell me now, with you being
Presbyterian and all?”

The questions stopped then, though
some still thought Angie strange, that perhaps she had a troubled
soul.

The brief visits by Julia were the
hardest. And though happiness and laughter abounded, no one escaped
the sadness that hid its face beneath the smiles. When goodbyes
were said, each seemed to be a rehearsal for the day the final one
would come, as if it might lessen the pain. When the time did come,
Angie sensed it the moment she looked at Julia’s face and eyes, but
said nothing, hoping she was wrong. A distant face at another time,
in a different war, had looked the same when his leaving time
finally came. Her own Robert had looked no different when it came
his turn to go and fight and die in the Great War. It is the eyes,
always the eyes that betray us. Nothing in the soul can be hidden
from them, she remembered whispering to him as they lay together
for the last time. In two weeks she became widow
McFarland.

“
We will go to your church
tomorrow, the three of us,” Julia said, surprising Angie. “And then
I will leave. It’s better that I say the words now then pretend
until the moment arrives for me to go.”

“
I know, my child,” were
the only words Angie could say before embracing Julia, holding her
forever, it seemed.

Later, with Anna asleep for the night,
Julia and Angie sat huddled together in front of the fireplace,
grateful for what warmth the small fire was willing to give. Winter
was at its worst now, with the sun gone for another day and the
night winds beginning to blow. They had talked earlier about the
freezing days and the snow-covered hills and anything else but what
was on their minds.

“
It is a cold, cold night,
indeed. Perhaps we should turn in. Our beds will be much warmer,”
Angie said, shuddering and pulling the edges of her wool robe
tightly about her large body.

“
No, please, not yet.
There is another promise that I must ask of you. Waiting until
tomorrow will only make it more difficult,” Julia said.

Angie sat back down, taking Julia’s
hand in hers and waited, watching the tears form slowly and start
their run down her cheeks. Julia looked away for a moment to find
her voice, and inhaled deeply before trying to speak.

“
We have become a family,
you and me, not all Jewish or Presbyterian, but a good family,” she
said, laughing through the streams of tears now flowing unheeded
down every part of her face.