War and Remembrance (134 page)

“I don’t change much.”

“I don’t love Duncan. That’s what I wrote you in the letter to the
Northampton.
He knows I don’t. He knows about you. In that letter I asked you to speak, or forever hold your peace. But you never got it.”

“Why are you marrying a man you don’t love?”

“I wrote you that, too. I was sick of floating, I wanted to land. That’s doubly true now. I had Talky then, now I have nobody.”

It was a while before he spoke. “Pamela, when I got home, Rhoda acted like a Turkish harem girl. She was my slave. She’s guilty, and sorry, and sad, and bereft. I’m sure she has nothing to do with that other fellow any more. I’m not God. I’m her husband. I can’t chuck her out.”

Guilty and sorry! Sad and bereft!
How little that resembled the woman Pamela had seen in Washington! Pug was the sad and bereft one, it was written in every line of his face.
And if she’s unfaithful to you again?
The question was on the tip of Pamela’s tongue. Looking into Pug Henry’s seamed decent face and somber eyes, she couldn’t utter it. “Well, here I am. You got me here. What do you want of me?”

“Look, Slote wrote that you were having trouble with your visa.” She was facing him, staring into his eyes. “All right, do I have to say it? I wanted you here because to see you is happiness.”

“Even when I’m dancing with Phil Rule?”

“Well, that just happened.”

“Phil means nothing to me.”

“I know.”

“Pug, we have the rottenest luck, don’t we?” Her eyes filled with tears that did not fall. “I can’t hang around Moscow just to be near you. You don’t want lovemaking, do you?”

With an ardent and bitter look he said, “I’m not free for lovemaking. Neither are you.”

“Then I’ll go on to New Delhi. Ill marry Duncan.”

“You’re so young. Why do that? There’ll be a man you’ll love.”

“God almighty, there’s no
room.
Don’t you understand me? How explicit do I have to be? Duncan’s sexual taste runs to pretty young popsies, and they swarm and swoon around him, so that more or less solves a difficulty for me. He wants a lady in his life, and he’s very affectionate and
romantic about me. He thinks I’m a dashing creature, decorative as hell.” She put both hands on Pug’s shoulders. “You are my love. I’d help it if I could. I can’t.”

He took her in his arms. The sun came through low clouds and made a yellow patch on the wall.

“Ye gods, sunup,” he said.

“Victor, just keep your arms around me.”

After a long, long silence he said, “This may not come out right in words. You said we’ve had rotten luck. Well, I’m grateful as things are, Pam. It’s a miraculous gift from God, what I feel for you. Stay here awhile.”

“A week,” Pamela said, choking. “I’ll try to stay a week.”

“You will? A week? That’s a lifetime. Now I’ve got to go and pour General Fitzgerald on an airplane.”

She caressed his hair and eyebrows and kissed him. He strode out without looking back. At her window she watched until the erect small figure in white came in view, and vigorously walked out of sight on the quiet sunlit boulevard. The melody of “Lili Marlene” was running over and over in her head, and she was wondering when he would find out what was happening to his wife.

I
N
a wild ravine high in the Carpathian Mountains, wan light diffused through yellowing leaves shows a meandering forest path which might be a hunters’ trail or an animal track, or no path at all but a trick of the light falling among the trees. As the sun sets and clouds redden overhead a bulkily clad figure comes, striding down this trail carrying a heavy pack, with a rifle slung on a shoulder. It is a woman of slight build, her face close-wrapped by a thick gray shawl, her breath smoking. Passing a lightning-blasted oak trunk, she vanishes like a forest spirit sinking into the earth.

She is no forest spirit, but a so-called forest wife, a partisan commander’s woman; and she has jumped down into a dugout, through a hole so masked by brush that if not for the ruined oak she herself might have missed it in the gloom. Partisan discipline forbids such creature comforts to lesser men, but a woman sharing his bed is a prestige symbol of the leader, like a new Nagant pistol, a separate dugout, and a leather windbreaker. Major Sidor Nikonov has grown quite fond of Bronka Ginsberg, whom at first he more or less raped; besides using her body he talks a lot to her, and listens to her opinions. He has been waiting for her, in fact, to help him decide whether or not to shoot the suspected infiltrator lying tied up in the cook dugout.

This fellow swears he is no infiltrator, but a Red Army soldier who escaped from a prison camp outside Ternopol, and joined a partisan band which the Germans wiped out. He got away, so he says, and has been wandering westward in the mountains, living on roots and berries or handouts from peasants. His story is plausible, and he is certainly emaciated and ragged enough; but his Russian accent is odd, he looks over sixty, and he has no identification at all.

Bronka Ginsberg goes to size up the man. Hunched in the dirt in a corner of the cook dugout, more tortured by the food smells than by the ropes cutting his ankles and wrists, Berel Jastrow takes one look at her face and decides to gamble.

“Yir
zeit a yiddishe tochter, nane?”
(“You’re a Jewish daughter, no?”)

“Richtig. Und ver zeit ir?”
(“Right. And who are you?”)

The Galician Yiddish, toughly rapped out, falls on his ears like song. He gives straight answers to Bronka’s probing questions.

The two bearded cooks stirring the soup vats exchange winks at the Yiddish
gabble. Bronka Ginsberg is an old story to them. Long ago the major dragged this thin-lipped, hard-faced creature out of the family camp of Jews up in the mountains, to nurse men wounded in a raid. Now the damned Jew-bitch bosses the whole show. But she is a skilled nurse, and nobody makes trouble about her. For one thing Sidor Nikonov would shoot any man who looked cross-eyed at the woman.

As she jaws away in Yiddish with the infiltrator, the cooks lose interest. Since the fellow is a Yid, he can’t really be an infiltrator; so they won’t get to take him out in the woods and shoot him. She’ll see to that. Too bad. It can be fun when they beg for mercy. These two are Ukrainian peasants drafted into the band; in the cook dugout they stay warm, fill their bellies, and avoid the food raids and railroad dynamitings. They loathe Bronka Ginsberg but aren’t about to cross her.

Why, she is asking Jastrow, didn’t he tell his captors the truth? The partisans know about the mass graves; why did he make up that yarn about Ternopol? Glancing at the cooks, he says she ought to know how treacherous the Ukrainian backwoods are, worse even than in Lithuania. The Benderovce gangs are just as apt to kill a Jew as to feed him or to let him go on his way. In Auschwitz some of the worst guards were Ukrainians. So he invented that story. Other partisan bands have believed him and given him food. Why is he tied up here like a dog?

Bronka Ginsberg explains that a unit of turncoat Russian soldiers led by Germans infiltrated the ravine a week ago to destroy Nikonov’s band. One fellow doublecrossed the Fritzes, and alerted the partisans. They ambushed the outfit, killed most of them, and have been hunting the stragglers ever since. Jastrow is lucky, she says, that he wasn’t shot at sight.

Berel is untied and fed. Later in the command dugout he repeats his story in Russian to Major Nikonov and the political officer, Comrade Polchenko, a wizened man with black teeth. Bronka Ginsberg sits by, sewing. The officers make Berel cut the slender aluminum cylinders containing the film rolls out of his coat lining. They are peering at the cylinders by the oil lamp when the evening Central Partisan Staff broadcast from Moscow starts up. They put aside the film containers to listen. Through a square wooden box that whistles and squeals, dispatch orders come gargling out in plain language to various code-named detachments; also cheery bulletins about a victory west of recaptured Kharkov, big bombing raids on Germany, and the surrender of Italy.

Their discussion about Berel resumes. The political officer is for sending the films to Moscow in the next ammunition delivery plane, and turning the Jew loose. Major Nikonov is against that; the films will get lost or nobody will know what they mean. If the films go to Moscow, the Jew should be sent along.

The major is curt with Polchenko. Political officers in partisan detachments are an irritation. Most of these bands consist of Red Army soldiers trapped behind German lines who have taken to the woods to survive. They attack enemy units or the local gendarmerie to seize food, arms, and ammunition, or to take revenge for peasants who are punished for helping them. But the heroic partisan stories are propaganda romance, by and large; these men have mostly turned forest animals, thinking first of their safety. This does not suit Moscow, naturally; hence men like Polchenko have been airlifted to the partisan forests, to stir up activity and see that Central Staff orders are obeyed.

As it happens, Nikonov’s band is a brave and venturesome one, with a good record of sabotaging German communications. Nikonov himself is a regular Red Army officer, thinking of his own future once the tide of war has turned. But the Carpathians are far from Moscow, and the Red Army is far from the Carpathians. The Soviet bureaucracy, represented by the black-toothed man, doesn’t swing much weight; Nikonov is boss here. So Berel Jastrow observes, listening anxiously to the talk. Polchenko is civil, almost ingratiating, as he argues with the leader.

Bronka Ginsberg looks up from her sewing. “You’re both talking nonsense. Why bother with this fellow? What’s he to us? Did Moscow ask for him or his films? Send him up to Levine’s camp. They’ll feed him, and then he can go on to Prague, or to the devil. If his Prague contact can really reach the Americans, then maybe the
New York Times
will have a story about the heroic Sidor Nikonov band. Eh?” She turns on Berel. “Wouldn’t you give Major Nikonov credit? And his partisan detachment, that’s blowing up Fritz’s trains and bridges all over the western Ukraine?”

“I will get to Prague,” says Berel, “and the Americans will hear about the Nikonov partisan brigade.”

Major Nikonov’s band is far from a brigade — a mere four hundred men, loosely held together by Nikonov. The word pleases him.

“All right, take him to Levine tomorrow,” he says to Bronka. “You can use mules. The fellow’s half-dead.”

“Oh, he’ll drag his own carcass up the mountain, don’t worry.”

The political officer makes a disgusted face, shakes his head, and spits in the dirt.

Dr. Levine’s Jews, refugees from the last massacre in Zhitomir, are squatting in a tumbledown hunters’ camp by a small lake, not far from the Slovakian border. The carpenters have long since repaired the leaky roofs of the abandoned cabins and main lodge, sealed the walls, put in shutters, knocked together rough furniture, and made a habitable retreat for the survivors of some eighty families, much reduced by frost, malnutrition, and
disease in their long westward trek. Sidor Nikonov raided these Jews when they first came here, took most of their food and weapons, and dragged off Bronka. Bronka pointed out to him, after her rape, that Levine’s men are craftsmen spared by the Germans in Zhitomir; electricians, carpenters, blacksmiths, mechanics, a gunsmith, a baker, a watchmaker, and the like. Ever since, the partisans have supplied food, clothing, bullets, and weapons to the Jews — very little, but sufficient to keep them alive and able to fight off intruders — and in return the Jews have serviced their machines, fashioned new weapons, made crude bombs, and repaired their generators and signal equipment. They are like a maintenance battalion, very useful.

The partnership has paid off both ways. Once when an SS patrol, tipped off by an anti-Semite down in the flats, climbed the mountain to scoop in the Jews, Nikonov warned them. They melted into the woods with their children, their aged, and their sick. The Germans found an empty camp. While they were still engaged in stealing everything they could lift, Nikonov’s men fell on them and murdered them all. Germans have not come again looking for Jews. On the other hand, while Nikonov was off attacking a troop train, a gang of renegade Ukrainians happened upon his dugouts, and in a brief fierce fight with the guards set fire to the weapons cache. It burned for hours, leaving a smoking pile of twisted red-hot gun barrels. The Jews straightened the barrels, repaired the firing mechanisms, made new stocks, and restored the weapons to Nikonov’s arsenal, usable again in a fashion until he could steal more guns.

Such are the stories that Bronka Ginsberg tells Jastrow while toiling up the mountain trail. “Sidor Nikonov is really not a bad man, for a
goy,”
she sums up, sighing. “Not a wild beast like some. But my grandfather was a rabbi in Bryansk. My father was the president of the Zhitomir Zionists. And look at me, will you? A forest wife. Ivan Ivanovitch’s whore.”

Jastrow says, “You are an
aishess khayil.”

Bronka, ahead of him on the trail, looks back at him, her weatherbeaten face coloring, her eyes moist.
Aishess khayil,
from the Book of Proverbs, means “woman of valor,” the ultimate religious praise for a Jewess.

Late that night, the only woman in the council circle at the lodge is Bronka Ginsberg. The other firelit faces, except for the clean-shaven doctor’s, are bearded, rough, and grim. “Tell them about the chains,” she says. Her face is as hard as any man’s there. “And about the dogs. Give them the picture.”