War and Remembrance (77 page)

Natalie was starting to wonder how much she had to fear Pascal. She was at sea with three ruffians in international waters, with no legal record of their departure. What of Aaron’s well-stuffed money belt? What of the zipped-up compartment of dollars in her own suitcase? The boat was hissing along on the swells toward the sun sinking behind the Corsican mountaintops, the sail hummed and slapped, and all this was really happening, but how dreamlike it was, the sudden ride on the sea after the long stagnation in Marciana! This brigandlike stranger could easily rape her if he chose. Who could stop him? Poor Aaron? The genteel doctor? The two coarsely laughing horrors in the deckhouse, who were now passing a jug back and forth? They would only cheer him on and probably await their turns. Natalie’s vivid anxious imagination ran through the scenario: this fellow knocking her down on the nets, shoving up her skirt, forcing apart her bared thighs with those big hands —

Spray from the roughening swells flying over the deck stung Louis’s eyes and he wailed. She pounced on him and comforted him, and then Pascal let her alone.

The sun disappeared in a glow behind Corsica. The wind freshened. The boat canted steeply and ran fast. Swells broke over the gunwale. Anna became seasick, retching over the side while Castelnuovo patted her back and Miriam looked on in alarm. Aaron staggered to Natalie in the lee of the deckhouse, sat down beside her, and commenting on the pretty view of Elba astern, began to philosophize about Napoleon. Napoleon had left Corsica to rampage through Europe, he said, destroying the old regimes, spreading waste and death, turning the French Revolution into a reactionary comic opera of tinsel empire, only to come full circle and end up on Elba within sight of his native island. The same sort of thing would happen to Hitler; these upstart monsters inevitably generated the counterforces to crush them.

It was hard for Natalie to pay attention amid the noise of wind and water, but she had heard most of it before, in interludes of their Hebrew readings, and all she had to do was nod now and then. If only this scary passage would end! The coastline of Corsica was still below the horizon, and it was getting dark. Louis was whimpering in her arms. She was hugging him to keep off the cold, and feeling remorse at risking him in a tiny wallowing boat on the open sea; but these fishermen surely had been out here in worse weather a hundred times. Pascal came groping to them with a flask. She took a swig of raw brandy, and in the kindling warmth of it forgave him the presumably accidental grope at her breasts.

Made sleepy by the brandy, the rocking, and boredom, Natalie numbly
endured the slow passage of time, the wetting of her feet and legs, the pitching of the boat, for she could not tell how long. At last the boat moved into calmer water. On the dark coast ahead, she could discern moonlit trees and boulders. Another half hour or so, and the boat closed the shore. One fisherman dropped the sail; the other jumped with a manila line to a big flat rock. Pascal helped the passengers off with their meager luggage. At once the boat hoisted sail and slipped off into the night.

“Well, now you are in Corsica, and so you are in France,” he said to Natalie, taking her suitcases, “and we must walk about three kilometers.”

With Louis in her arms, she easily kept pace with him along a footpath through swampy-smelling fields, but they had to slow down for the others. The ground rocked under her feet after the long sail. So they walked for almost an hour. At a dark farmhouse Pascal led them to a hut in back. “Here you will sleep. There is some supper at the house.”

The food was soup and bread which Pascal served out. Nobody else appeared. In the candlelight at the plank table Natalie could see octopus tentacles in the tureen; loathsome, but she ate every scrap in her bowl. Pascal gave Louis bread dipped in goat’s milk, which he devoured like a dog; and they all bedded down in the hut fully clothed, on straw.

Next morning they had only a glimpse of Bastia’s narrow streets and old houses, very like a Tuscan town, as Pascal drove them through in an old truck. A train of three small cars carried them up a hair-raising mountain pass. The passengers, some dressed like Pascal and others in shabby city garb, were amused by Louis, who in his merry morning mood prattled nonsense on his mother’s lap and clapped his hands, looking wisely about him. Pascal joked with the conductor, handing him the tickets, and the man ignored the fugitives. Natalie felt in nervous high spirits. She had slept like a rock, and breakfasted on bread, cheese, and wine. Grand mountain views were unfolding outside the open window and an exquisite, pungently flowery odor was drifting in. Pascal told her that she was smelling the
maquis,
the famous aroma which Napoleon in St. Helena had sadly yearned to breathe again.

“I understand him,” she said. “It smells like Paradise.”

Pascal gave her a heated look through half-closed eyes. She could hardly contain her laughter, he so much resembled Rudolph Valentino emoting in a silent movie. For all that, he rather scared her.

Pascal’s father was the son, thirty years older; stouter, also dressed in corduroy, with white mustache and hair, with the same oval face and the same uncivilized brown eyes, set in aged leathery pouches. His manner was courtly, and his house on three levels of a steep street below the hilltop fortress of Corte had the look and the furnishings of prosperity. In a ceremonious lunch around a long polished oak table in a gloomy room, he welcomed
the fugitives. His wife, a shapeless figure in black, and two silent-walking daughters, also in black, brought the food and drink: identified by Pascal with some provincial pride as blackbird paté, goat stew, a cake of chestnut flour, and Corsican wine.

Over the first glass of wine Monsieur Gaffori made a little speech, sitting erect in his heavy carved armchair.
Le docteur Jastrow,
he understood, was a famous American author, in flight from the infamous Fascisti. America would one day rescue Corsica from its oppressors. The Corsican people would rise up and do their part by cutting many German and Italian throats; as in the past his ancestors in Corte had cut Genoese throats, Spanish throats, Turkish throats, Saracen throats, and Roman and Greek throats. The old gentleman’s soft fierce repetition of
gorges
—
“des GORGES espagnoles, des GORGES romaines, des GORGES grecques”
— gave Natalie the chills. Meanwhile, to help the famous author and his friends, said old Gaffori, was a privilege. The Gaffori house was theirs.

Pascal conducted them up a postern stair to a separate apartment. “Mine is the room exactly below,” he said to Natalie, repeating the Rudolph Valentino look, as he showed her into a room with a crib. But under his father’s roof, his menace had vanished; he was just a plump youngster suffering from endemic Mediterranean oversexiness, and he was, after all, her rescuer. She was on French soil, that was what mattered. She felt a pulse of gratitude toward Pascal.

“Vous êtes très aimable, monsieur.”
She shook his hand, holding Louis in one arm, and gave him a brief kiss on the cheek.
“Merci mille fois. ”

His eyes glowed like blown-on coals.
“Serviteur, madame. ”

Avram Rabinovitz rode the little three-car train up to Corte the other way, from the port of Ajaccio. The single-track road was reputed a scenic wonder, but he slumped with closed eyes at a window seat, chain-smoking vile Vichy French cigarettes as the splendid valleys and crags slid by. Shutting out the sunlight and the moving scenery somewhat relieved a migraine headache, which was clacking in his skull to the rhythm of the wheels. Some of the most beautiful views in the world had been wasted on Avram Rabinovitz: the Pyrenees, the Tyrol, the Dolomites, the Alps, the Danube valley, the Turkish coast, the Portuguese backcountry, and the Syrian mountains. In all these sublime settings his preoccupation had been finding enough food and water to keep fugitive Jews alive and on the move.

Not only was his taste for pretty scenery extinct; Rabinovitz’s outlook on geography and nationality was altogether peculiar. Countries, borders, passports, visas, languages, laws, currencies, were to him unreal elements in a tawdry risky game played on the European land mass. His attitude was in
that sense criminal. He recognized the law of rescue and no other. He had not always been such a freebooter; quite the contrary. His parents had come to Marseilles from Poland after the First World War. His father, a tailor, had taken to making naval and merchant marine uniforms. So Avram had grown up with French schooling and French friends, and had gone into the French merchant marine as a cabin boy, working his way up to a chief engineer’s certificate. Well into his twenties he had remained a conforming Frenchman, only dimly aware of his Jewish origins.

With the coming of Hitler, and with anti-Semitism rising in Marseilles like the seep of sewer gas, Rabinovitz had wakened to reluctant Jewish consciousness. A wealthy Swiss Zionist had recruited him to run Jews illegally to Palestine. He had taken three hundred people down the Danube and across the Black Sea to Turkey in a hulk like the
Izmir,
and thence through the Turkish and Syrian backcountry to the Holy Land. The exploit had changed his life. Thereafter he had done nothing else.

Settling in Palestine, he learned some Hebrew and married a Haifa girl. He changed his Frenchified name, André, back to Avram. He tried joining the Zionist movement, but the party quarrelling bored him and put him off. He was at heart a French Jew still, baffled by the fast-spreading hatred for Jews in Europe, and determined to do something about it. He looked no further than the saving of lives. In those days he was hearing the complacent Jewish byword about Hitler’s threats in many languages,
It’s always hotter cooked than eaten,
but to him the Nazis meant business. He stopped arguing with the Zionists about doctrine and politics, and used their money and connections for rescuing Jews, as he had done with Herbert Rose and the Sacerdotes.

After the fall of France he had returned there and joined the Resistance in Marseilles, as the best base for continuing rescue work. In effect he had been a Resistance man for years. He was already a competent forger, smuggler, spy, liar, confidence man, and thief. Once, to save more than forty people, he had killed an informer in Rumania who was blackmailing him for hush money; striking him harder with a piece of iron than he intended and leaving the man in an alley gasping, his eyes glazing. The episode recurred to him in low moments — the feel of bone cracking under metal, the gush of blood from the bushy hair of the fallen extortionist — but he felt no conscious regrets.

Rabinovitz’s migraines tended to come on him when he was overtired, or frustrated, or doing something he knew was stupid. He had no business reason to be riding this Corsican train. He merely wanted to see Mrs. Henry. Though he had talked with her on the
Izmir
only a couple of times, she remained a radiant memory. For Rabinovitz, as for many European men, American women were glamorous. Natalie Henry fascinated him: a
Jewess, an unmistakable darkly glowing Jewess, yet as American as Franklin D. Roosevelt, niece of a famous writer, married to a United States submarine officer! In Marseilles in peacetime, visiting American warships had brought with them an aura of distant power. The young officers in white and gold walking in twos and threes on the boulevard had seemed to Rabinovitz almost the kind of supermen the Germans fancied themselves to be. Byron Henry, an image on a snapshot, added much to Natalie’s magic in Rabinovitz’s eyes.

He had no designs on her; she seemed a very proper wife and mother. He was just greedy for the sight of her. He had done his best on the
Izmir
to suppress his pointless feelings, even though he thought she liked him. That Naples situation had been complicated enough, without the addling of his wits in a futile romance. Nevertheless her disembarking had been a blow.

The news from Siena in June — first, that Mrs. Henry and her uncle were still there, and then, that they were coming with the Castelnuovos — had deeply stirred him. For a week after learning that Mrs. Henry had reached Corsica, he had resisted the urge to go there. Then he had given in. The migraine had hit him on the overnight boat; and as the little train groaned up the hairpin turns and steep grades toward Corte, what with the turmoil in his heart and the throbbing agony in his head, he had to wonder at his folly. Yet he was happier than he had been since the death of his wife.

When he arrived at the Gaffori house, the object of his infatuation was in the small upstairs apartment in an old gray wool wrapper, bathing her baby in the kitchen sink. She had just washed her hair and put it up in pins. Splashed all over with soapy water by the frolicsome baby, she was not just then an erotic dream figure.

A knock. Aaron’s voice through the door. “Natalie, we have a visitor.”

“Who?”

“Avram Rabinovitz.”

“Christ!”

She heard Jastrow laugh. “He makes no such claim, dear, though he is a savior of sorts.”

“Well, I mean, how long will he be here? Louis is all soap from head to foot. So am I. I’m an absolute fright. What’s the news? Are we leaving?”

“I gather not. He’s staying for lunch.”

“Well — oh, blast, I’ll be down in a quarter of an hour.”

She dressed hurriedly in the white wool dress with the scarlet brass-buckled belt that she had bought in Lisbon for her meeting with Byron. For a long time after Louis’s birth she had been too plump to get into it. Packing up in Siena, she had on a last-minute impulse slammed it into a suitcase;
some
time in her wanderings she might want to look well! She put on Louis a
little corduroy suit Madame Gaffori had given her, and she strode into the garden, carrying him in her arms. Rabinovitz rose from a bench in the grape arbor where he sat with the others. He looked rather different from her recollection of him: younger, not so stout, not so desperately drawn.