Evening of the Good Samaritan (38 page)

“I must go this way now because I did not go directly among them at first—for reasons unheroic. One does not boast survival when someone for whom he feels responsible does not survive.”

“The Baroness is dead?”

“Surely I should have heard by now if she were not. After all, she was not an ordinary Jewess.”

“She was not an ordinary woman,” Martha said.

“You are right. An ordinary woman I could have saved. But because of what happened, I had to go—not to my own people. It is not my fault I live in such times.”

There was the question. But whose fault was it? Whose fault that Marcus stood now, perhaps, in some compound, half-starved among the starving, he who had never had a gun in his hands? Whose fault Hitler?

“You are remarkably well assimilated, Nathan.” If she had thought more deeply of the words, she might not have said them, for all that she believed them to be true. She could not help but suspect his sudden nostalgia for “his own people” to have a cause not yet revealed to her.

“I do not wish to be assimilated,” he said finally. “You cannot say I denied once in this country what I am.”

“I do not know what you are, Nathan, beyond what you say you are. I do not even know that I care, but I am sorry if I offended you.” She put her cup and saucer on the tray. She got up, a sign that it was time for him to go. “I shall write the letters in the morning.”

“I am too sensitive,” he said, and rising, held out both his hands as though hopeful that she might take them.

“Are you?” She went to the door and waited there, then going from the library before him. When he had put on his overcoat, she offered her hand. “I am sure you will be elected to the County Board, Nathan. Some day, I should think, you will be president of the American Medical Association.”

“And do you think Marcus will be pleased then too?”

Thus he succeeded in putting her on the defensive again. She should not think of him as a weak man, she knew, for he very well compelled her to his way. The cowardice of conscience? She could not say.

H
OW MUCH CAN A
doctor do without medications, without soap and with only a splash of water? What he could do, Marcus did. The war was almost over, everyone knew, but to be won, some in Marcus’s camp thought bitterly—they had almost all been taken at the Ardennes—by the Russians. The camp received over a thousand additional Allied prisoners in April of 1945 force-marched five hundred miles from where they had been interned in Poland: this upon the Russian break-through. Gangrene and dysentery came with them and even more diseases of malnutrition than Marcus had already learned of. And with them came the first eye-witness accounts of the extermination camps, the crematoria. Who could but say then Godspeed the Russians?

Night after night the skies were aglow over Hamburg and Berlin, and the all-night roar of the Allied bombers was the sweetest spoiler of sleep. Some men thought they heard artillery fire in the day; the German guards said it was machinery at the factory on the edge of town. And then one morning, when Marcus was out at dawn whittling splints out of a broom handle he had stolen during the night, a solitary figure came running across the compound from the barracks of the enlisted men.

“Doc,” he cried out, “doc, they’re gone! Look for yourself! There isn’t a God damned Nazi bastard in the whole stinking compound!” The soldier was half-laughing, half-crying, the spittle running out of his mouth. Marcus slowly looked from one watch post to another. He had long since trained himself to concentrate on what he was doing, not to look, the less to spend himself in loathing. He felt his head nodding and the rising in him of a sickening kind of joy. The youngster opened his mouth and let out a great, wild cry: “Halloooo-oo!” Soon everyone was running, men half-dressed, some barefoot, and above their shouts and jubilation, the distant thumping of guns could soon be heard to the north.

Marcus ran with the rest through the open gates, down the hill to the heart of the village where all the blinds and shutters were drawn. Prisoners from other camps were there and more yet coming; French, British, Canadians converged with the Americans, all abandoned by their guards. They broke into stores and warehouses, private homes, the villagers scuttling out in all directions, and no one bade them stay. The looters came out with milk and bread, with wine, with towels in which they rubbed their unwashed faces. Marcus watched the pillage with unmitigated joy.

Within the hour advance units of the American Ninth Army moved into the town. Marcus, in search of the medics, was on hand for an early exchange of information: the French
P.O.W
.s’ intelligence of a women’s concentration camp at the northeast end of town. He rode out in a jeep with the first platoons assigned its liberation. On the way he smoked his first cigaret in five months. It was the only pleasure he was to have for several hours.

Seeing the sight in the distance, Marcus was put first in mind of animal kennels, the creatures within leaping against the fences. But they were women, all, clinging, writhing at the wires, emaciated to where their faces were but frames for eyes, teeth and hair. They set up a din of screaming horror, those unable to reach the fence, tearing at the backs of those in front. The smell of them on the fresh spring air was as terrible as the sight and sound. Several German guards stood outside the compound gates, their hands in the air. The first American soldiers took command of them and marched them down the hill, eager themselves to forego the glory of the actual liberation. The remaining soldiers stood staring, obviously terrified of the women. Marcus went with the sergeant into the gatehouse where the latter turned off the electricity. As soon as they came out the women knew what they had done. With utter abandon they charged the gate and brought it down themselves while the petrified soldiers watched. Marcus cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted to the men, “Just let them go! Let them run out!”

They would not run far, he thought; God help them, they would not run far. Gaunt with starvation, crazed with joy, having freedom they were instantly bewildered by it. A few of them hugged those of the soldiers with the courage to accept their embraces, but most of them hobbled around, bleeding, oozing with sores, sobbing, remote, especially from one another, wretched with self-loathing and loathing of their other selves as all were, each to one another.

The medics came, and a canteen truck with soup. The unfortunates fought one another in the line the soldiers tried to keep them in, while a translator begged them in several languages not to destroy themselves, that they were saved.

Marcus went down the hill and waited. In comparison, the prisoners among whom he had been interned were blooming healthy. He reported himself to command headquarters.

Marcus stayed on in the town for several days after the other military internees had been evacuated. He lived in the burgomaster’s house and slept in a feather bed, and worked all his waking hours among the survivors of the labor camp. Most of the women were Eastern European Jews with a handful of Western political prisoners among them. That they had been young enough to work in twelve-hour shifts at the munitions factory was the reason they were alive. Many of the Jewish girls had come out of Auschwitz: their arms were indelibly numbered, their eyes soulless. They were got into clean quarters—the former barracks of the German officers—washed, given medication, and fed such foods as their starved bodies could accommodate.

Building by building, the foul barracks were burned to the ground. Some of the former inmates stood outside the fence watching, raising a howl of lamentation—or of joy; who could say? They would wander off, many of them, vague and lost, and sometimes if a hand were put out to guide them, they would shy away from it or scream defiance. But the worst pose of all to see them in, Marcus thought, was that of wheedling beggary, which must nonetheless have been one way of survival. There were not many ways. Enough food to keep twenty-five of them alive had been daily apportioned to every hundred internees. Nor was there anything now one could give the survivors except to ease their bodies. What they needed was beyond man’s giving: they needed to be born again.

“Doctor, when comes the train from Paris, do you say?”

Both the woman and Marcus were watching the engineers repair the railroad tracks. Marcus had already observed her: in her prime she must have been a proud, fine-looking girl. Now she was a rack of sinew and bone. She had in hand a Red Cross satchel which he supposed contained a toothbrush, a towel, soap and a nightgown, possibly a change of underwear.

“Soon,” Marcus said. “Maybe today.” He was himself expecting supplies on the first train through.

“Maybe yesterday, maybe today. Tomorrow surely, eh?” The Frenchwoman spoke English well, or better by far than he could speak French. “I am glad it is not today,” she said resignedly.

Marcus nodded, knowing what she meant. “I wonder if those are cherry trees,” he said, indicating a clump of gnarled blossoming trees. “I suppose not. It’s late for them.”

“The chestnuts will be out in Paris. Have you been here long, doctor?”

“Since Christmas. I’ve been out of the States for two and a half years.”

“Ha! Since 1940 I have not been home. I am in the Underground, but I am betrayed.” She shrugged. “I am alive. You would not believe it was better to be a Communist than a Jew. Do you have a family, doctor?”

“I have a wife and son.”

“And a house?”

“Yes.”

“And a doctor can find work easily, no?”

Marcus nodded, smiling.

She spread her hands. “Then why do you not go home?”

He laughed. “Soon. Very soon.”

“For me they say there is a plaque, a memorial—you know? On a street where there was shooting where I used to live. Now it is spring and people will put flowers there. I will go and look at it, and I will weep because I am not dead and everybody thinks so. What will I say if somebody asks me who I am?”

“You will have to tell them. We may all have to tell who we are when we get home. Or try.”

“But you they will not ask. You will only have to tell them if you want to,” she said with French exactness.

“You are quite right,” Marcus said. “It is not the same.”

“I have no money,” the woman said, “and they say Paris is expensive. I do not even know if my husband is alive or dead. And I tell you, I do not know which is better, he is alive or dead. I feel in my heart he was a collaborator. Is it better I know or I don’t know?” She looked up at him with sudden cunning. “Your wife is faithful, do you think, doctor?”

Marcus smiled. “What makes you ask that?”

She shrugged. “It is the same thing. Do you have any American dollars you could give me, doctor? On the black market in Paris I could get a great many francs for them.”

Marcus did have ten dollars. He had got it from an American medical officer on his personal
I.O.U.
He would have liked to keep it for an emergency until he could draw his own back pay. But he gave it now to the Frenchwoman. Before his eyes and the eyes of a platoon of army engineers, she lifted her skirt and tucked the money beneath a garment next to her skin and fastened it there with a safety pin. Some of the soldiers whistled. Her face became vivid with a smile.

“How did you get a safety pin?” Marcus asked, amused.

She gave a throaty laugh and for just an instant he could see her as she must have been before the war: pretty, earnest, but sometimes full of mischief. “But I asked for it, too, that is all.”

She left him and walked back through the town, swinging her satchel at her thigh. He had thought her over forty when first they spoke. Now he realized she was still in her early twenties. And whether or not there was a word of truth in her story, he would never know.

Marcus flew home aboard a hospital plane, the patients in his charge bound, almost to a man, to a lifetime of invalidism. They would not die of their wounds; that was about the only thing any of them was sure of. And at that, it was more than the men still fighting in the Pacific could be sure of.

“How does it feel to be going home, doc?” one of the boys asked. His maimed hands were hung up in improvised traction for the flight.

“Great,” Marcus said.

“Me, too,” the youngster said, and Marcus was ashamed because there was no irony in the boy’s words.

He called Martha as soon as possible on landing, and from the moment of hearing her voice, his need for her brooked neither barrier nor delay. Let the dead bury the dead; time and again the words ran through his mind on the last of his homeward flight. Truly, he felt he had done little, but he did not see how he could have done more. Looking at his watch as the plane circled the Traders City airport, the thought occurred to him that no matter where one was coming from or by what mode of transportation, he always seemed to arrive at Traders City in the morning. That the sky was blotched with dirty-looking clouds by the time he got on the ground only served to make him feel more sure that he had indeed come home.

Martha, watching from the garden where from dawn she had been walking up and down, saw the cab drawn up in front of the house. She thought she had felt its turn into Oak Street. She ran to the edge of the terrace and then called out his name, her voice seeming to shut off in her throat. But he heard it and came directly to the terrace. She waited at the far end. Marcus, too, stopped. Tad came out through French doors and looked from one of them to the other. They all ran at once then, but when the child put his arms around Marcus’s legs and hugged him, Marcus broke down completely and did not try to hide his tears.

“O
NCE I CAN GET
down inside things… Do you know what I mean?” Marcus sometimes tried to explain the peculiar peripheral sensation, not entirely unlike his wartime nightmare of watching himself at work.

“It’s going to have to wear off,” Martha said, “like a scab on a sore and it’s not going to help to keep picking at it.”

“That’s very good,” Marcus said, but it wasn’t really. One felt a sore, picking at it. He did not seem to be able to feel anything, only an aloof distaste for the city and the work once so dearly familiar.