by Amy Lane
“I figured that out.” They were his first words in three days that hadn’t been moans of pain or Walter’s name.
“I’m so sorry.” Ouida had aged in so short a time; her face thinner, the lines at the corner of her brown eyes deepening, her lips compressing, whether in bitterness or grief, he couldn’t say. “I shot him, but it was too late. I think . . .” Nate knew what she was going to say, would have stopped her if he’d felt anywhere close to being able to control even the words in his mouth. “I think he was surprised when you pulled Walter out of the brush. He kept claiming that you were alone, you see. Nobody but you and I knew Walter existed. Emile didn’t believe either of us.”
“He believes us now,” Nate said, surprised he even had room for irony.
“I suppose so,” Ouida responded, some of the animation dying from her eyes.
More tense silence, interrupted by Marion. “Your friend, Walter?”
“Yes?” Nate glanced up quickly.
“He was already MIA, presumed dead—we looked into it while you were under. He doesn’t have a next-of-kin listing. Is there any place you’d like him to be buried?”
Nate thought of their plans to live somewhere upstate, somewhere nobody knew them. And of his own aversion to cows and how Walter didn’t seem to mind them at all.
“Albany,” he said, thinking he could visit there as well as Long Island and that his parents were less likely to want to accompany him if he went. “The soldier’s lot in Albany.”
I can visit you there, Walter. It won’t be like we planned it, but life seldom is.
“That’ll be nice,” Marion said. “You can visit on the weekends.”
Nate felt laughter choke in his throat. It was so very what he had been thinking. He realized how long it had been since he’d been with his own people, someone who knew how far Albany was from Manhattan and would understand the Passover story, which he’d never had a chance to tell Walter. It comforted places in his heart that he didn’t realize were raw.
“I am so sor—”
“Don’t,” Nate said, probably more gruffly than he intended. “Both of you. You worked very hard to help—so brave. I’m grateful. I’m just . . .” He couldn’t even look at them. “Perhaps when I am healed, I will get a chance to fire a shot against the Nazis. Wouldn’t that be nice? Perhaps I can be assigned to a fighting squadron instead of recon. Perhaps I can shed the blood, do the killing. I would like that, I think. I think I would like very much to have a red day, full of blood.”
Father forgive him, he wanted somebody to pay.
He did not know it yet, because the doctors hadn’t come to talk to him and, well, because the doctors still had hope, but that day would never come. Three bullets—fired through Walter’s body—had shattered his femur and his pelvis. The bones had been wired back together, but one of Nate’s legs—even after three more surgeries—would always be shorter, and his hip would give him pain until it was replaced near the turn of the century, when those things became common. By then, he would joke, he was so old he needed the cane anyway, but for a few brief years before the stroke, he could walk without pain, and that was a miracle.
But the miracle was in the distant future. In the near future, he would be sent to the Philippines to work with the OSS and Naval Intelligence and help interpret the photos that the other recon teams took. It seemed that, once they realized what he’d spotted from an airplane in the dark had been important enough to die for, they wanted to see what he could do with lots of magnification and decent lighting at his disposal. But he did not know that now. Now, he only knew that when his body healed, he could take his revenge and wreak all of the brutal, bloody havoc that seemed to fester from his heart.
In his whole life, he’d only once struck another person in anger—and that had been Walter. Now that Walter was gone, he wanted to murder until the seas ran red.
“I will help you,” Ouida said fiercely, and he turned to her and felt his first moment of compassion since Walter had collapsed in his arms, so obviously dead that Nate hadn’t needed to see his glassy eyes or the blood gushing through his mouth to know.
That hadn’t stopped Nate from seeing those things in his anesthesia nightmares, from seeing Walter, sprawled next to him in the cargo hold of the plane while Ouida wept over Nate, trying to staunch the bleeding.
“I’d be honored,” Nate said now, thinking of her fierceness with the gun, her unwavering destruction of her own lover in the face of betrayal. Brave girl. Her and Marion—brave girls. He turned his attention to Marion, suddenly remembering what a miracle it was that a plane had landed in occupied France.
“Your copilot . . .?”
“Is on a mission,” Marion said, embarrassed. “I’m sort of grounded. You guys weren’t exactly on our itinerary, but some crazy Mexican guy practically shoved me on the damned plane. His buddy—Irish kid, bad skin—pulled some amazing strings. The contact on the ground dropped your name, and they went insane. Said they knew you—you’d be the only guy on the ground there who’d drop his name to an OSS operative in the middle of France.”
A terrible band of tension eased in Nate’s chest. Walter was gone, yes, and Nate had left a gobbet of faith with his blood in the woods of Moselle, but he was not alone.
His face ached, and for a moment, he didn’t recognize the feeling of a smile.
“Hector and Joey,” he said. He was tired, falling asleep in fact, but it was fine.
Walter, we have people. We have friends. They put themselves out for us, Walter. Isn’t that amazing?
“I can’t wait to see them,” he mumbled and then fell asleep.
They were there the next day, riotous, bitching, ribbing Nate about shirking his duty.
“All you had to do was take pictures!” Hector complained. “Pictures! What did you do?”
“Took the wrong pictures, I guess,” Nate said through a tired smile. “The film was taken?”
“Yeah, we got it to intel,” Joey said. “You probably don’t remember, but Hector and I were there to meet the plane when it flew in. Didn’t expect to find you shot up in the back. And really didn’t expect the guy there with you to be an escaped POW from a dog’s age ago.”
“A surprise to us all,” Nate said faintly, and the party atmosphere of the reunion sobered.
“And since we’re all depressed anyway,” Joey muttered, “they’re gonna debrief you soon, but they want to know what happened to Captain Albert.”
Nate grimaced. “Oy! Do you know that man died cursing me and kikes in general? He’s lucky I went back to bury him.”
Joey snickered. “That’s . . . that’s the meanest thing I’ve ever heard you say about anyone, Nate! That’s terrific!”
“Good gravy, it’s like he’s a real soldier!” Hector chortled, and Nate grinned at them, conscious of the gap between his teeth and the way it made his smile look wicked for the first time in a month. Since he’d awakened on a couch in an abandoned summer home, talking nonsense to a little man who had frightened him with his self-sufficiency, he hadn’t worried so much how others saw him. Walter had only known him for himself.
His grin faded though, and he remembered his words of blessing spoken over Thompson’s body. “I left his insignia lodged in a tree in Moselle, where we interred the body. There should have been one dog tag in my pocket with the film and another is in the grave. When the war is over, he should be easy to find.”
“You know, you’re lucky your plane didn’t break up during the crash. For all his faults, that man was a crack pilot.” Hector nodded with the sage assessment of the expert. It stirred nothing in Nate’s heart but respect for a friend, and he would remember that, because in later years, when he had cause to doubt, he did know what love was and how it was different than infatuation.
“Yes,” Nate said, acknowledging. “And for that, I am, without reservations, grateful.”
“Hey,” Joey burst out. “You never did say—I mean, you ain’t said nothin’ really, cause we just g
ot here and we been talking your ear off, but how did you meet that dead kid in the plane anyway?”
“He saved my life,” Nate said. You did, Walter. I don’t know how I’m going to repay that, because I didn’t return the favor. “He dragged me out of the plane wreck and nursed me back to health.”
Joey cackled, the shrill sound ringing across the tan tile and crisp white sheets of the hospital ward. “Well, too bad it wasn’t that sweet French piece, right, Nate? Then you could have had a real adventure in the woods!”
“Since her boyfriend shot him up and he didn’t get fresh with her, I think it’s probably a good thing it was that other guy,” Hector said practically. He smiled gently at Nate, patting his shoulder in a friendly way. “And I’m sorry about your friend, Nate. That’s gotta be rough.”
Nate tried to smile, but he couldn’t anymore. Recovery, it seemed, was not nearly as much fun without Walter as it had been with him.
They left after that, but it was by no means their last visit. In fact, as the years passed, Hector and Joey became fixtures in his life. They moved in together after the war, roommates, bachelors. It was such a shame they never married.
Nate’s children called them Uncle Joey and Uncle Hector, and if Carmen ever knew, ever suspected, she never batted an eyelash or so much as inflected a word. But then, Nate was never sure how much Carmen knew or guessed. He never wanted to know. They say women’s hearts are secret gardens, but that is because men so rarely have anything to hide. Nate hid Walter in a little room in his heart for nearly seventy years. The garden in his heart where he visited his lover was lush and verdant by the time his favorite grandson took him out to listen for the bells of New Year’s Eve, in a tradition that was the last reminder of a dead man and a month that no one alive remembered.
Nate’s parents hadn’t been informed that he was MIA or even wounded. Given that he was supposed to be taking pictures of officers, the brass had decided to keep his plane’s disappearance a secret until it was known whether or not he’d survived. One of the first things he did during his recovery was to destroy the letter he’d written his parents.
He planned to write a new one, he did. But he could never figure out what he’d say. He’d start with the healing things, the growing things:
Dear Father—I’m sorry I left so angry. I realize now that although I may disagree with you on many things, I should never doubt that you love me. Mama, you and Father kept me alive and in plenty, fed rich in tradition, for lean, hard years. I can only give you my gratitude and return your love.
A promising beginning. He had several that began just like that. But as he wrote that part, the first part, he would find himself yearning to finish the letter:
I met someone, someone you would not approve of. I loved him in all the ways there is to love another human being. He died in the war, and a part of me died with him. I know you cannot forgive me for this, but you know me, and nobody knows him. I wanted him to live, in your minds if in no other way.
That was when he ripped up the letter into several pieces, kept the pieces under his pillow, and waited until the other patients were sleeping before he threw them away in the trash can being collected by the maintenance private to be sent to the incinerator.
What a laugh it would be if he got a blue discharge for a letter he never intended to send.
And then he discovered that he was no longer on active duty, and he had no reason for a letter. It was a load off his mind.
By the time he’d been transferred to HQ in the Philippines, he had resigned himself to a certain amount of emptiness, a certain amount of going through the motions. Oh, Walter. Is this who I am without you? You would have been bored by me. I’m so sorry about that! But emptiness didn’t stop him from continuing with the war effort with his full heart. Terrible things—the farmer and his murdered cow small among them—were reported every day. Things so heinous that not even Nate believed them.
Marion’s delivery route ran by Nate’s location, and she looked in on him once or twice a month for that first year. Then came Normandy and the day when her copilot, Bess, actually flew the plane. Bess and Nate practically carried Marion into Nate’s quarters—he rated his own bunk as second lieutenant. She could not seem to stop crying.
Normandy took many, many young men, and her Ansel was one of them.
But the planes were stacking up, one after the other—so much intel, so many personnel, so many more places that needed information and weapons and men.
They gave her an hour—an hour to grieve a good man. It was a cheat, a cruelty, that’s all it was. Nate and Bess had needed to carry her back to her plane, and one of the bravest things he’d ever seen was Marion wiping her swollen eyes, squaring her shoulders, and climbing up into the cockpit, her heart dead to the world.
For the first time since Walter, he had strength in him to pray.
Something must have worked. She was back two weeks later, with six hours’ layover this time, which was enough for them to share dinner at the commissary and for him to pat her black armband awkwardly and give her proper condolences.
“Does it get better?” she asked, her voice broken. “Please tell me it gets better.”
Suddenly, the wound he’d covered with activity and purpose, the belief that his life, his work in the war, was worthwhile, was wide open and bleeding again. And he wasn’t sure he could even answer her honestly.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said tonelessly.
Her hand on his was the most human contact he could remember since Hector and Joey had embraced him before he’d been transferred to HQ.
“I’m going to take that as a no,” she whispered. “I saw, Nate. I saw how you looked at him, the way you called his name. I’m not saying a nice girl wouldn’t fix that, but for that moment, he meant something to you.”
Nate closed his eyes. He had nowhere to run from this and nowhere to go to fix it. “Forever,” he said. Then, in Yiddish, “Alz.”
Marion squeezed his hand, and they sat in silence for a little while longer. Eventually she left, but, contrarily, that painful conversation gave him some hope. Marion would be well—he had no doubts. Maybe so would he.
So, for a minute, in the midst of war, he prayed for hope.
Until one day in August when he analyzed a piece of film from over Poland. It had been through two other spotters, each of whom had passed it on until it had landed on his table, where he crouched with his newly acquired tobacco habit and witnessed horrors from afar. It seemed Nate had an uncanny ability to read the story in the landmarks that made him great at this job. He thought it probably came from a lifetime of peering through a lens and trying to capture a story. Wouldn’t my father be surprised? He assumed these were silly children’s tricks, and here they call me a magician.
But he was not gloating that day in August of 1943 when he read the story of skeletons walking into a building from which there was no return.
He ran—or hobbled, but quickly—through the maze of the hastily thrown-up building in a place where the natives very smartly lived in bungalows with ceiling fans to combat the heat and the mosquitoes.
“Captain Perry!” he called breathlessly, bypassing the corporal acting as his receptionist. “Captain Perry, did you know about this?”
The captain put down his phone and stared at the picture, listening to Nate’s explanation of it with grim intent.
“Another one,” he said flatly, closing his eyes. “Fuck.”
Nate recoiled. “Another one? This isn’t a concentration camp, Captain!” Because those had been bad enough. “Do you know what this is? The smoke here, the size of this room, the—”
It was too monstrous. Scarcely to be believed. How could this be on his desk, how could the world not know—
“Do you know what we can do about this?” the captain said bitterly, and Nate stopped ranting, desperate for hope.
“No.”
“Can we bomb this thing?”
“No. We would destroy the pe
ople we are trying to protect.”
“Can we stage a rescue operation?”
Nate knew how tight their personnel were, how many people would be used in an operation of only one camp. “For every concentration camp in occupied territory?” Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Chelmno, Bergen-Belsen—the list went on and on and on. Did they know which ones were doing this? Did they know if they were all doing it? This was a struggle of good and evil, and the terrifying thing was that they were so evenly matched. The Allies had just landed in Normandy, had just taken over France. Making their way through Germany and Poland to even get to these camps . . .
Nate’s indignation quailed.
“There must be something we can do,” he muttered in a small voice. “Oh, Holy Father, is there not something?”
Unlike Captain Thompson, this CO didn’t give a damn if Nate was Jewish, Episcopalian, or—his own words—from some weirdo tree-hugging religion. He did his job competently and didn’t piss off the people he worked with, and Perry had recommended Nate for the promotion to first lieutenant, which had meant Nate got a slightly bigger bunk and more filthy cigarettes to smoke. Nate was grateful the promotion didn’t come with a transfer; he was good at his job here. He was, day by day, learning to survive with the hole in his soul. He didn’t want to move if he could avoid it.
“There’s only one thing we can do here to stop this,” Perry said honestly. Nate knew what his answer would be before he said it. “Win this fucking war.”
But winning the war didn’t stop the horror of it, the betrayal via the inaction of what Nate had once thought of as a defending country and a loving God.
And the only thing that stopped the horror was more horror.
By the time Nate was discharged, sent back to his parents’ home in Manhattan with commendations and a purple heart and a sheaf of papers from the Pentagon with his signature promising to talk about perhaps only ten percent of what he had done in the war, his inner monologue with Walter was a constant thing. Inside his head and his heart, his garden was green, and there were flowers of memory—a poppy-colored kiss, lemon sunshine in a smile, the purple of a passionate night, the forbidden gold of a day in the sun.
