Love and Treasure

by Waldman, Ayelet

  “Captain!” she said in a British accent so impeccable it was all Jack could do not to laugh. “Shut the curtain immediately! The patients will catch their deaths.”

  “It’ll just be a moment, ma’am,” Jack said.

  At that moment little Yossi began coughing. The sergeant shifted the flashlight, catching him in its beam. The young boy held a white handkerchief to his lips. His hacking was so realistic that Jack wondered for a moment if the boy might not, in fact, be ill. Then he pulled the cloth from his mouth, revealing an ugly smear of red blood.

  “Jesus!” the private said, backing away.

  “You see!” Ilona said, indignantly. “We must get them out of the cold!”

  Jack let the flap drop. “Shit,” he said, wiping his own mouth in a display of nervousness. “What the hell was I thinking, making this ride myself? It’s a fucking plague truck. I’m going to court-martial every last fucking one of those bunk lizards when I get back, if I don’t cough up both my fucking lungs before that.” He turned on the sergeant. “What’s your name, soldier?”

  “Walther, sir. Robert.”

  “Okay, Sergeant Walther. You about done here? I want to get this damn thing over with. Rumor has it there’s a bar in Bruneck where the girls are almost as pretty as the booze.”

  Walther gave the truck a final suspicious look and then shrugged. “Yes, sir.”

  “So move your goddamn vehicle, Walther,” Jack said.

  Walther hesitated, and Jack wondered if he’d gone too far, but Walther said, “Yes, sir.”

  Jack swung back up into the cab of the truck and gave an impatient tap on his horn. The two GIs got into their jeep and pulled it off the road. Jack drove away, sending up a spray of gravel as he passed.

  Yuval said, “You appear to have a gift for subterfuge.”

  They passed the last eight kilometers to the border in silence. Jack reprised his irritable captain persona for the Austrian and Italian border guards, who seemed only too happy to accept the forged paperwork he thrust at them. An hour’s drive past the border, on an unmarked cow path that Yuval was surprised Jack had so little difficulty finding, the second truck was waiting for them.

  A man and a woman were leaning against the bumper of the truck, both of them bundled into white parkas that looked, Jack thought, suspiciously like U.S. Army issue. They greeted Yuval in Hebrew. It only took a moment or two for Jack to adjust to their accents and to understand at least some of Yuval’s explanation for their delay.

  Jack opened the flaps of the truck. “Cute trick,” he said to Rudolph in German. Rudolph accepted Jack’s hand; the leap to the ground was still too much for him to manage on his own. “How did you do it?”

  Once he was firmly on the ground, Rudolph pushed up his sleeve, revealing a white handkerchief knotted around his wrist about three inches above his palm. He untied the handkerchief. Beneath it lay a gash about an inch long, still oozing blood.

  “You couldn’t have pricked your thumb?” Jack said.

  Rudolph laughed. “Ilona figured we needed more blood than that.”

  “Probably right. You’d better get that sewn up once you get where you’re going.”

  “I will,” Rudolph said. “Jack?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you. For everything.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Jack said. “Send me a letter when you get to Palestine.” If you get to Palestine, he thought.

  “I’ll send you a crate of oranges.”

  “Not milk and honey?”

  “That as well.”

  As Ilona helped the refugees settle themselves in the second truck, Jack leaned against the hood of his, staring up. The clouds had cleared, and there were so many stars it looked as though a shaker of salt had spilled across the velvet sky. He entertained himself by identifying as many constellations as he could.

  He listened as Yuval gave his colleagues a series of detailed instructions, including information about which of the refugees were likely to need extra help should walking become necessary and which could be relied upon to assist others. Yuval recommended that certain of the refugees, including Rudolph, be looked to as leaders.

  “That one?” the woman in the white parka said, looking at Rudolph. “He can be trusted?”

  “As much as any of them,” Yuval said.

  “Is this batch as bad as the others?” the woman said.

  Jack stiffened. He listened, growing ever more furious, ever more still.

  “They’re all the same,” Yuval said.

  The other man sucked his teeth loudly. “Ai, Yuval. We’re going to end up regretting this. Imagine the hell if every one of the DPs in the camps ends up coming to the Yishuv.”

  The woman said, “All this filth, just as it is.”

  That was more than Jack could bear. Had she not been a woman, he might have punched her. Instead, he leaped up, strode over to her, and, in stilted biblical Hebrew, told her that she disgusted him. He wanted her to cower; he wanted to see her bend her head in shame. Instead, she laughed.

  “Where did you study Hebrew? In cheder?”

  “What is wrong with them?” Jack said to Yuval, switching to English.

  Had Yuval rebuked his colleagues, Jack might have dismissed them as callow, ignorant youth, like the U.S. Army replacements who sucked up to the Austrian burghers and their daughters and treated the DPs like dirt. But Yuval said, “Captain Wiseman, your job is to drive. Understanding the complicated political situation is perhaps above your pay grade.”

  “Above my pay grade?” Jack said, his voice growing softer as his fury rose. He did not want to frighten Rudolph and the boys or the other people now climbing into the back of the second truck.

  “Tzipi and Micha are doing their job. It’s time for you to do yours. Let’s go.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Jack said.

  Yuval shrugged. “It’s your truck. I care little what time we return. I am not the one who risks court-martial.” He switched back to Hebrew and told his colleagues to help the rest of the DPs into the truck and get moving.

  “No one is getting moving until I say so.” In a smooth motion Jack pulled his sidearm from its holster. Tzipi began to raise her weapon, but Yuval put up a restraining hand.

  “What do you want, Jack?” he said.

  “How can you speak about them like that?”

  “As I said. The situation is complicated.”

  “Why don’t you explain it to me. Help me boost my pay grade.”

  “In Palestine our life is work and war, and our people must be strong and brave. These people”—Yuval jerked his head toward the truck where the refugees waited, unable, Jack hoped, to hear the conversation between the two men—“these ‘survivors’ …” He said the word as though it were a curse, not a miracle. “You think they are strong and brave?”

  “Who could possibly be stronger?”

  Yuval gave a derisive click of his tongue. “What happened in Poland could never have happened in Palestine. No one could have slaughtered us in our synagogues, in our fields. There would have been no Jewish councils fulfilling the Nazis’ demands for bodies. Every Jewish boy and girl in the Yishuv would have taken a gun and shot every German soldier they saw. Even if we had lost, we would have lost fighting. That, my friend, is strength. That is bravery.”

  “These people survived unholy misery, unimaginable torture. You know what proves their strength? They’re alive. That’s all the evidence we need.”

  “Yes. They are alive,” Yuval said. “Why do you think they are alive when so many others are dead?”

  “Because they managed by some miracle to hold on to the thread of life. If the war had lasted a few more months, they wouldn’t have made it.”

  “Millions died,” Yuval said. “Millions. These DPs who survived, I don’t ask what they did, what they stole, or who they killed so that they of all the millions would live.” He lifted his hand to silence Jack’s protest. “Whatever they did, maybe some of them have
the strength and courage to live in the land of Israel. I don’t know. I hope some do. But most of them are broken people. And in our new land, with all our enemies, we have no room for broken people.”

  For a miserable moment, Jack saw the DPs through Yuval’s eyes, the way they shuffled and scurried through the camps, the way many of them froze on the sidewalk when a black car approached, their eyes darting as though searching for a place—a hole, a burrow—in which to hide. The tears that came so easily to many, even the men. Their diffidence and exhaustion when asked to work, and the prickly rage with which they greeted any suggestion of anti-Semitism, real or imagined.

  He pushed these ugly thoughts from his mind and said, “So why are you bringing them? You say you don’t want them, but yet you go into the camps and convince them to immigrate. You train them, for Christ’s sake. You’ve got Ilona traipsing up and down mountains with all these broken children. Why bother, if they’re so damaged?”

  Yuval shrugged. “We are at war. Now with the British, soon with the Arabs. You’re a soldier. You know only some battles are fought on the field. Other battles are fought at sea, and others in the newspapers.”

  “The newspapers?”

  “We will have our land, Jack, because Hitler showed the world that we have no other choice. We are owed. And these people, they are evidence of that debt. Evidence for everyone to see.”

  “You make me sick,” Jack said. “They’re people. Not objects to be used to serve your ends.”

  “I make you sick, do I?”

  “Yes.”

  “You, my friend, have the luxury of a sensitive stomach. We in the Yishuv can afford no such delicacy. But there is an irony here, you know.”

  “What irony?”

  “You guard so conscientiously that treasure train. And for whom?”

  For the Jews of Hungary, Jack wished he could reply. But of course by now he feared that was no more than the vaguest and most unlikely of hopes.

  Yuval smiled. “You guard the train for us. Someday soon, your government will give it all to us, all the gold and the diamonds and precious artworks, and we will use them to pay for this very operation of which you so disapprove. We will sell it all to buy boats and supplies and weapons. The Yishuv will owe you a great debt, Captain Jack Wiseman, which we will repay by fighting and surviving the next time you and yours allow yourselves to be herded like lambs to slaughter.”

  For a moment Jack imagined lifting his weapon, considered how many shots he could get off before Tzipi or Micha sent a bullet crashing through his skull. Then he shrugged and turned away, allowing himself only one final indulgence. “I hope you won’t be disappointed,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away. “There’s not that much in the way of gold and diamonds.”

  Ilona’s shadow in the sliver of moonlight looked odd, hunchbacked, but it wasn’t until he was by her side that he realized she was wearing a haversack on her back. And even then it took a moment for him to understand what it meant.

  “You can’t,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Did you plan this all along?” She bit her lip, and he could see that she was trying to decide whether to lie to him. “Just tell me the truth,” he said.

  “Yes. I owe you that much. I knew I would go after I found out Etelka was dead, but it was only recently, when Reuven became determined to make the trip, that I decided to go now. He needs my help.”

  “Yeah? And who’s going to help you? Those guys over there?” He jutted his chin in Yuval’s direction. “Do you even know what they are? Those people who have trained you and pushed you and convinced you that Palestine is the only place for you? They’re not your friends, Ilona. They’re not your protectors or your heroes. They’re just using you. They think you’re the dregs of European Jewry. You can’t trust them.”

  “What is a dreg?” she asked.

  “You know. Dregs. Like what’s left over in your coffee cup.”

  She smiled her bitter smile. “Yes. The smear in the bottom of the cup. That is what we are. All that’s left.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s an insult. It’s the worthless part that’s left over. The dirt.”

  She sighed and adjusted the straps of her haversack. What did she have in it, he wondered. Had she packed any of the things he’d given her?

  “Do you know what I think about at night?” she said.

  I think about you, he wanted to say. “I have no idea what you think about, not at night, and not during the day, either.”

  “At night, as I try to sleep beneath a Wehrmacht woolen blanket dyed a horrible red, like dried blood, I wonder if I might not be the only Jewish survivor of Nagyvárad. I wonder, were they all killed? All the doctors and lawyers, wheat dealers and manufacturers, chiefs of police, members of the city council, teachers, beggars and housemaids. Are they all gone? Am I all that is left? One twenty-five-year-old woman from twenty thousand?”

  “I’m sure there are others.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. You say I cannot trust Aba Yuval. But he and the others from the Yishuv offer to the last Jew of Nagyvárad the possibility of a homeland.”

  Jack groaned in frustration. “They don’t care about you or any of the other DPs. They’re capitalizing on the world’s guilt to force the British to give them Palestine. You’re just a pawn in their battle with the British.”

  “ ‘They.’ Who is ‘they,’ Jack? Isn’t ‘they’ also you? Aren’t you also a Jew?”

  He refused to let her tug on the thread that had led him so astray. “They’re not me. And they aren’t you, either. It isn’t about Jews and not Jews. It’s about them using you, using immigration, as a weapon of war. Don’t you see? They know the British are going to enforce the blockade. They know none of the boats are going to get through. Rudolph and the boys and all the other DPs are basically hostages. Worse than that. The best thing that could happen in Yuval’s eyes is if the boats to Palestine are fired on! If the British sink a ship full of concentration camp survivors there will be a huge outcry, and they will have no choice but to cave in to international pressure.”

  “Reuven.”

  “What?”

  “His name is Reuven. You keep calling him Rudolph, but his name is Reuven.”

  “How can you not see this? He’s being used. You’re all being used.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we are being used. And maybe we will die. But at least this time we die standing. We die on our feet. Not crawling in the mud.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Of course you don’t understand. How could you? You are a lucky boy from America. You don’t know anything.”

  “I know what happened to you.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think you know. But you don’t really know how I lived for almost a year.”

  “Yeah, well, I spent a year getting shot at by Germans, and you know what? That was no goddamn picnic, either.”

  Even as he said it, Jack knew that if this was the game they were doomed to play, he had already lost. In the hierarchy of horrors, as dreadful as his were, they were far down the list. Jack imagined a chart. Color coded, with rows and columns, figures and values. Picking up his first sergeant’s helmet after a mortar blast and finding inside the rubbery gray remains of the man’s brain was worth a few points, he supposed, but fewer than inhaling the dust of your mother’s burned body. Being stripped of your clothes, forced to wear nothing more than a dead woman’s torn blouse, the shredded shirttails barely covering your ass as you stood at attention hour after hour, the sun raising blisters on the top of your shorn scalp: ten points. The blood of your final menstrual period dripping down your thighs as you waited to be selected for death or another day of starvation? Another five. Scrambling to dig a foxhole in the frozen dirt while mortar shells whistle down around your ears: two points, at most. Taking cover beneath the dead body of your best friend? Four more points. Or perhaps five. If there were actua
ries in the world who could accurately assess the worth of a man’s life, surely someone could determine the value of his misery.

  He said, “The people Yuval works for, in Palestine? The Jewish Agency people? These are the very same people who are telling the U.S. government not to send the property from the train back to Hungary. They’re the same people, do you understand? You were so angry at them. You said they were stealing your bicycle.”

  “No. I said you were stealing my bicycle.”

  “We aren’t stealing anything.” He paused. “Okay, yes. The U.S. brass are stealing stuff from the train. But they’ll give it all back.” Even as he said it, Jack knew this was at best a pathetic hope, at worst a bald-faced lie. When had the brass ever given anything back?

  He continued, “It’s not the U.S. Army’s fault that the property hasn’t been given back. If it weren’t for the Jewish Agency, we would have sent the train back to Hungary by now. Your friend Yuval’s bosses are telling the U.S. Army to sell the contents of the train and give them the money instead of sending it back to Hungary.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Why would they do that?”

  “For the money! You think this huge immigration project of theirs is free? Yuval and his buddies are buying trucks and boats and weapons. They’ve got to bribe every Italian bureaucrat between the Alps and the Mediterranean. Not to mention what it costs to feed and train all the refugees in the camps along the way. Yuval’s American cigarettes alone cost more than your bicycle.”

  “You know where I think my bicycle is, Jack?”

  He sighed.

  “I think a nice Romanian lady in Oradea is right now riding my Jewish bicycle home from work. Maybe she works in a bakery stolen also from Jews. Maybe she lives in a house stolen from Jews. Or maybe not. Maybe she has lived all her life in her house, and it is only her sister who stole a Jewish house. This kind Romanian lady, she took only a Jewish bicycle.”

  “Ilona!” Yuval called. “It’s time to go.”

  Urgently, Jack said, “The Romanians are horrible. And the Hungarians, they’re horrible, too. I don’t think you should go back there. But Yuval and the rest of them aren’t your answer. Palestine isn’t your answer. You don’t need to become a martyr. Come with me instead!”