Second Generation (26 page)

"All right. We'll talk. Do you know what they want to do? They want to take my leg off at the thigh. Is that what you want—a monster with half a body?"

"Yes, that's what I want."

He was alive now, aware of her. "Then think about it! Reach down for my penis to fondle me and think about what you'll find there. Think of what it will look like. You'll look at it every day of your life. You'll watch me crawl around, like some rotten beetle."

"Is that it?" she snapped. "Is that your whole case?"

"Don't you understand that I love you?"

"No. Such love is worthless, because you're putting yourself in my place, and you can't stand the thought of looking at me with one of my legs gone."

"No, no," he whimpered. "No."

"Yes. Don't deny it. It's not my love that frightens you. It's yours. And because your love can't stand the test, you're ready to die. What a rotten, lousy thing that is!"

"Oh, God, no. You don't understand."

"I understand only too well."

"It's because I love you. Barbara, believe me. How can I come to you with half of me gone? How can I ask you to give your life to a worthless, helpless cripple?"

"You don't have to ask me. Nothing you can do would stop me. I intend to marry you, and I intend to marry a man who is alive, not a corpse."

"No."

"Stop saying no like a broken record. What do you expect me to do, to agree with you, to kneel down and weep with you and say that you're better off dead? We're not living some stupid, romantic story. We're two people of flesh and blood who love each other and who are tied together with that love. What have I ever asked of you? Now I'm asking for your life. How can you refuse me?"

"Because I love you," he said weakly.

"Damnit, I will not accept that. We are beyond words. Words are for those who have nothing to give and nothing to lose. You have a life to give me, and I have a life to lose—and I will not accept no for an answer!"

His face slowly breaking into a smile, he raised himself on one elbow, stared at her for a long moment, and then said, "You are splendid. I am so proud, so proud."

"Then you'll do it?"

"No."

Her control collapsed. She stood up, moved back from the bed, sat down in a chair, and began to cry.

"Barbara."

"Leave me alone, damn you!" She leaped to her feet suddenly and shouted at him, "You're killing the only thing I love, you bastard!"

"Barbara, please, please—"

"No!" she shouted. "No, damn you. If you say you love me again—"

He began to laugh, shaking with laughter and wincing with the pain of it.

"What are you laughing at?"

"You. My God, I adore you. You are quite magnificent. I love you so, I'm not afraid of anything, even of death."

"Bullshit!" she snapped, using the English word. "You're not afraid of death. Only of life."

He stopped laughing and stared at her. Then he sighed, closed his eyes, and fell back onto his pillow. Used up, Barbara sat and waited. Two, three minutes passed. Then Marcel said softly, "Over there, dear love, on the chest of drawers, is the form they want me to sign. There is a pen there too. Give it to me and help me sit up, and I'll sign it, and then you can give it to Dr. Lazaire, who, I'm sure, is waiting outside the door. You win, God help us both."

It was an hour and a half since the operation had begun. Barbara sat in the little waiting room with Monsieur and Madame Duboise. As with so many French parents of that generation, their single child was born in their later years. Duboise was well past sixty, his wife in her mid-fifties. Duboise, a pharmacist, was very much like his son, slender and tall, but stooped and bald, with a fringe of gray hair around his head. His wife was a tiny, pretty woman with prematurely white hair, very neatly and correctly dressed, very prissy, even in her grief, out of a lifetime habit. Evidently Marcel had written to them in detail over the past year, for they knew a good deal about Barbara. Under other circumstances, they might have been distant and difficult, regarding her with the peculiar suspicion the French reserve for all foreigners and for Americans in particular. But in this case, she came to them as a sort of savior. What chance their son had for life was due to Barbara's intercession. They embraced her and poured out their hearts to her. That their son should return to them this way, after so long; that he should have to endure this mutilation—that was almost too much. Yet at least they would have him for a while, and with him this lovely young American.

Thus they sat for an hour and a half, while the day outside turned bleak and dark, the rain beginning, sometimes in silence, again with Barbara as the object of their attention and solicitude, Madame Duboise recalling some incident of Marcel's childhood, clinging to his childhood now, or with Monsieur Duboise gravely questioning Barbara about life and family in that half-mythical place called San Francisco. It came out that Marcel had written to them of the possibility of himself and Barbara making their life in the United States, testing himself as well as his parents; and they questioned Barbara about America. Was there any place on earth as beautiful, as civilized, as France? Of course they could not expect Marcel to live in Toulouse; it was much too provincial a place. But was there anything that could not be found in Paris?

It was all a dream, all of it—all the fears, all the hopes: Barbara knew this the moment Dr. Lazaire entered the waiting room. His face spelled it out.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "But it was too late. The infection had taken over his body. Gangrene is a monster. Even yesterday it would have been too late."

"What is he saying?" Madame Duboise whispered.

Her husband put his arm around her. "He is telling us that Marcel is dead."

"Is that what he's telling us? That can't be what he's telling us."

Barbara rose and walked out, past the doctor, down the long white corridor, down the stairs, and out into the rain.

Part Three

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INTO EGYPT

In April of 1939, late in the afternoon, the doorbell rang in Barbara's apartment in Paris. She had been expecting no one, and she opened the door to find the hall filled with an enormous hulk of a man, at least six feet two inches in height, broad, sloping shoulders, thick hair, a round, moonlike face, large nose, and pale blue eyes. He wore a leather jacket over a turtleneck sweater and shapeless corduroy trousers. He smiled at her tentatively and wanted to know whether she was Miss Barbara Lavette.

"Yes?"

"Good. I'm glad to meet you finally, miss. My name is Bernie Cohen."

"You?" She was astonished, speechless, dislocated in time and space. A year that had begun in misery and hopelessness backed up and jarred her mind, and then she grasped one of his oversized hands and pulled him into the apartment. "Forgive me, please, but my mind wouldn't work. It's yesterday and it's also an eternity ago. But you're blessed in my memory, believe me. Come in, please."

"Yes, ma'am, I can understand the way you feel. It's been one hell of a year, hasn't it? It's all over in Spain, all done and finished. I'm just passing through, and I thought I owed it to Marcel to just stop by and at least have a word with you."

"More than a word. Oh, I'm so glad to see you. Sit down, please. I'll get some wine."

He eased his bulk into a chair while Barbara brought wine and glasses.

"You know about Marcel?" she asked him.

"I stopped in at
Le Monde.
They told me. They gave me your address. I'm sorry, believe me. I liked him."

"You saved his life."

"I wish I could have saved his life. It was a lousy, rotten bloodbath. So many good boys died there, and for what?

To be sold down the river by those bastards in England

and here."

"Still, you saved his life. You sent him back to me—at least for the little time I had with him. I'm so grateful. How many times I said to myself, I'll meet you one day and tell you how truly grateful I am."

Obviously embarrassed, he raised his glass. "What shall we drink to, Miss Lavette?"

"We'll drink to peace, and a little human decency. And call me Barbara. We're old friends."

"O.K., Barbara. A little human decency. Only, I don't look for it in my time."

"When did you leave Spain?"

"Two weeks ago, after Madrid fell to the fascists. It was all over then. Most of the Internationals had left already. I walked over the Pyrenees, same way I came in. Funny thing, I'm pretty big, but I was never hit, never even scratched. Ah, it was a nightmare, first to last. But I don't know why I'm talking to you about Spain—"

"Please, do, yes."

"Well, what's to say? Now the Nazis have it their own way. France will be next. I hope to God you get out of here."

"The magazine wants me to stay, but I don't think I can. I'm homesick and lonely, and without Marcel, Paris is empty. Suddenly, I look at it and it's a city without a soul. And my mother and father give me no peace. They're very upset at what is happening in Europe."

"They should be."

"Then you think there'll be war?"

"There'll be war, no doubt about it. Spain, Czechoslovakia, Poland next—and then England and France, maybe America."

"I hope not. I hope you're wrong," Barbara said earnestly. "It's such madness, such insanity, a whole world gone insane and thinking of nothing else but to kill."

"Or be killed."

"That's such an ancient excuse, isn't it? Thank God I'm a woman."

"I can say amen to that."

They sat and drank and talked and finished a bottle of wine between them. Cohen was an easy man to talk to. He was from San Francisco; they had common ground. Barbara was overcome with nostalgia. How good it was to talk in her own tongue! Cohen told her how he had worked at Higate when the Levys were filling their first order for sacramental wine. The federal agents had staged a raid, and he, Cohen, had faced them with an old, rusty shotgun.

"Real stupid," he said. "They could have shot me. Life was so damn simple then. No Hitler, no Nazis, no war, just the feds to cuss out and hate. I was just a kid then. First time I ever held a gun in my hands. And now—"

"What now, Bernie?" Barbara was a little drunk, warm, almost content, her eyes wet with the memory of a lost love, not with tears, only moist with the remembering.

"Marcel said you were beautiful—but damnit, I think you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen."

"You're a little tight, Bernie. So am I. Let's go out and eat."

"Well, I don't know."

"If you have a dinner date?"

"Date?" He began to laugh. "Funny thing is, I was going to tell you that. Hell, look at me. I haven't had a bath in two weeks. I just can't imagine what I smell like. I came out of Spain without a dime. When I got to Ceret in France, I sold my rifle and a German Liiger to a Rumanian who had an arrangement with the border guards, a small-time munitions dealer. He gave me two hundred francs. I have four francs left. That won't buy us dinner."

"Then let me buy you dinner."

"No!"

"Oh, great! I just love men who are proud. The whole world is bleeding and ready to die from the pride and stupidity of men, and now you're too proud to let me buy us dinner."

"Hey, don't get angry at me!"

"Why not?" Barbara demanded. "You won't accept repayment. You're too proud for that. You saved the life of a man I loved more than anything on earth, but I can't buy you dinner."

"All right. O.K. I'm half-starved. If you're not ashamed to be seen with me, buy me dinner. But I warn you—I eat a lot."

"I'm not ashamed," she said.

They went to Allard's; it was the first time she had been there since Marcel died, her first evening out with a man. It seemed incredible to her that she could have been alone so long. Her mourning had been like a death of her own. Her American friends had left Paris. There had been days and weeks when she had sat in her apartment, did nothing and saw no one. Then one day she left her apartment and walked for hours in the rain, "As if the rain had never stopped after that day in Toulouse," she told Bernie Cohen. "And then the rain stopped and .the sun came out. Suddenly, it was all right for me to be alive. As if I had paid a debt. Do you understand?"

"I know the feeling, after they die," he agreed. "I felt that way. Like I'm the murderer, not the fascists."

"I'm all right now. I'll never let go of Marcel, but I'm all right now."

"I know."

"Good. Dessert?"

"Sure. Why not. I've eaten like a pig. I might as well finish like a pig."