Ordinary Heroes (2005)

by Scott Turow

  "You're in the Army, Major. This has never been freedom's Valhalla."

  "Yes, that's the argument. But look at what's happened on the home front. I get letters, I read the papers. War has consumed every liberty. There's propaganda in the magazines and on the movie screens. Ration books and save your tin cans. Sing the songs and spout the line. There's no freedom left anywhere. With one more war, Dubin, civil society will never recover. The war profiteers, the militarists, the fearmongers--they'll be running things permanently. Mark my words. Mankind is falling into a long dark tunnel. It's the new Middle Ages, Dubin. That's the bit that breaks my heart. I thought fascism was the plague. But war is. War is." He looked into his glass again.

  As he spoke, Teedle came to mind. I wondered if Martin and he had had this argument face-to-face. Or simply suspected as much of one another. They both saw the world headed to hell in a handbasket. I gave them credit for worrying, each of them. For most of the men out here, me included, the only real concern was going home.

  "May I assume I am quit of your charges?" Martin asked then.

  I told him I'd certainly recommend that, but that the safest course, given the orders he'd received, would be for him to return to Nancy with me in the morning to sort it out. He thought it through, but finally nodded.

  "I'll spend a few hours," he said, "but I have to get on now to the next assignment." That would be the operation in Germany he'd mentioned when I first arrived here, the one for which he'd been called back to London. "I think it will be the most important work I've done, Dubin. There's no counting the lives we may save." He lifted his eyes toward the bright light of that prospect, then asked when I wanted to start in the morning. Dawn, I said, would be best, given how long we'd been away.

  That reminded me that I needed to retrieve my uniform. I stood hesitantly, my knee quite stiff, to seek Gita. She had been outside saying adieu to the locals. I met her in the parlor, where Bidwell had crawled up on one of the Comtesse's elegant red velvet divans and was fast asleep beneath a lace shawl from the back of the couch.

  "Leave him," she said.

  "I shall, but I can't take him back to headquarters in culottes."

  Gita consulted Sophie, the maid who had washed our uniforms and left them to dry over the same fire, now banked, where the lamb was roasted. As we headed out, Gita threw her arm through mine companionably as I limped along between the puddles etched in the candlelight from the house. The rain had been heavy for a while but had ceased, although the eaves and trees still dripped. The Comtesse's other guests had gone down the road in a pack and their drunken uproar carried back to us in the dank night.

  I told her about my conversation with Martin. "Is he normally so dour?"

  "Afterward? Afterward, always. Have you known gamblers, Dubin? I have often thought that if there were not war, Martin would probably be standing at a gaming table. Many gamblers have moods like this. They exult in the game, in betting everything, but their spirit flags once they win. Voila la raison. Martin speaks the truth when he says he is miserable without war. That was the case when I met him."

  "In Marseilles?"

  "Yes. I sold him opium, when he visited from Spain." I managed not to miss a step. I seemed to have prepared myself for anything from her. "He smoked too much of it, but he recovered a few months later once he agreed to go to the States to train as a commando."

  "His new wager?" I thought of the way Martin had raised his eyes at the thought of his next assignment in Germany.

  "Precisely," Gita answered.

  The uniforms were by the barn entrance, now imbued with an intense smoky aroma, but dry. She helped me fold them and I placed them under the arm she had been holding.

  "Martin says his remorse is over no longer being who he was," I told her.

  "Does he?" She was struck by that. She squinted into the darkness. "Well, who is? Am I who I was when I ran to Marseilles at the age of seventeen? Still," she said, "it is true he suffers."

  From what she'd told me, I said, it seemed as if Martin had suffered always.

  "D'accord. But there are degrees, no? Now at night, he sleeps in torment. He sees the dead. But that is probably not the worst of it. There is no principle in war, Dubin. And Martin has been at war so long, there is no principle in him. I was not sure he recognized this."

  "Ah, that word again," I said. We were standing in the open doorway of the barn, where the dust and animal smells breathed onto us in the wind. Her heavy brows narrowed as she sought my meaning.

  "Principles," I said.

  She grinned, delighted to have been caught again. And here we debated," she added.

  "You most effectively," I answered.

  "Yes, I showed you my principles." She laughed, we both did, but a silence fell between us, and with it came a lingering turning moment, while Gita's quick eyes, small and dark and sometimes greedy, searched me out. She spoke far more quietly. "Shall I show you my principles again, Doo-bean?"

  The hunger I felt for this woman had been no secret from me. Amid the peak emotions of the day, the increasing physical contact between us had seemed natural, even needed, and the direction we were headed seemed plain. But I had been equally certain that reason would intervene and find a stopping point. Now, I realized there would be none. I felt a blink of terror, but I had learned today how to overcome that, and I also had the tide of alcohol to carry me. Yet drink was not the key. Gita was simply part of this, this place, these adventures. I answered her question with a single word.

  "Please," I said. And with that she took her thin skirt in her fingertips and eased it upward bit by bit, until she stood as she had stood two weeks ago, delicately revealed. Then she was in my arms. With her presence came three fleeting impressions: of how small and light she was, of the stale odor of tobacco that penetrated her fingertips and hair, and of the almost infinite nature of my longing.

  For a second, I thought it would happen there in the barn, among the animals, a literal roll in the hay, but she drew me to the narrow stairs and we crept up together to the tiny room where Biddy and I had changed. Her blouse was open, one shallow breast exposed. She stepped quickly out of her bloomers, and with no hesitation placed one hand on my belt and lowered my fly, taking hold of me with a nurse's proficiency. We staggered toward the bunk and then we were together, a sudden, jolting, desperate coupling, but that seemed to be the need for both of us, to arrive at once at that instant of possession and declaration. My knee throbbed throughout, which seemed appropriate somehow.

  Afterward, she rested on my chest. I lay on the striped ticking of the unmade bunk, my pants still around my ankles, breathing in the odor of the mildewed mattress and the barnyard smells of manure and poultry feathers rising up from below while I assessed who I really was.

  So, I thought. So. There had been something brutal in this act, not between Gita and me, but in the fact it had happened. The thought of Grace had arrived by now to grip me with despair. It was not merely that I had given no consideration to her. It was as if she had never existed. Was Gita right? No principle in war and thus no principle in those who fight it? It was the day, I thought, the day. I conveniently imagined that Grace would understand if she knew the entire tale, although I harbored no illusion I would ever tell her.

  Gita brought her small face to mine and whispered. We could hear the snores of the farmhands sleeping on the other side of the thin wooden partitions that passed for walls.

  "A quoi penses-tu, Doo-bean?" What are you thinking?

  "Many things. Mostly of myself."

  "Tell me some."

  "You can imagine. There is a woman at home." "You are here, Dubin."

  For the moment that would have to be answer enough.

  "And I wonder, too, about you," I said.

  "Vas-y. What do you wonder?"

  "I wonder if I have met another woman like you." "Does that mean you have met such men?"

  I laughed aloud and she clapped her small hand over my mouth.

  "That
is your only question?" she asked.

  "Hardly."

  "Continue."

  "The truth?"

  "Bien silts."

  "I wonder if you sleep with all the men you fight with."

  "Does this matter to you, Dubin?"

  "I suppose it must, since I ask."

  "I am not in love with you. Do not worry, Dubin. You have no responsibilities. Nor do I."

  "And Martin? What truly goes on between Martin and you? You are like an old married couple."

  "I have told you, Dubin. I owe much to Robert. But we are not a couple."

  "Would he say the same thing?"

  "Say? Who can ever tell what Martin might say? But he knows the truth. We each do as we please."

  I did not quite understand, but made a face at what I took to be the meaning.

  "You do not approve?" she asked.

  "I have told you before. I am bourgeois." "Forgive me, but that cannot be my concern." "But Martin is mine. And you intend to stay with Martin."

  "I am not with him now, Dubin. I am with you."

  "But I will go and you will stay with Martin. Yes?"

  "For now. For now, I stay with Martin. He says he dreads the day I go. But I stay with Martin to fight, Dubin. Will the Americans allow me to join their Army?"

  "I doubt it."

  She sat up and looked down at me. Even in the dark, I could see she was narrow and lovely. I ran my hand from her shoulder to her waist, which did nothing to diminish the intensity with which she watched me.

  "How many women, Dubin. For you? Many?"

  I was shy of this subject, not the doing, but the talking. At twenty-nine, my sexual history remained abbreviated. Some love for sale, some drunken grappling. It was best summarized by the phrase a college friend had applied to himself that fit me equally: I had never gotten laid with my shoes off. Tonight was another example.

  "Not so many," I said.

  "No? You forgive me, but I think not. Not from the act, Dubin, but from how you are now And how is it with this woman of yours at home?"

  I recoiled at that, then realized the question was not all that different from the ones I'd been asking her.

  "It has not occurred, as yet."

  "Truly?"

  "She is my fiancee, not my wife."

  This was her choice?"

  It was mutual, I supposed. Not that there had ever been much discussion. Grace and I had the same assumptions, that there was special meaning in the union of man and woman.

  "I worship Grace," I said to Gita. That was the perfect word. 'Worship.' It had not dawned on me until this moment that I could not say in the same way that I craved her.

  "She should have insisted, Dubin. She had no idea what she was sending you to."

  I could see that much myself.

  Gita went down to the barn to attend to herself.

  A pump handle squealed. Most single men I knew talked a tough game about the women they slept with. But my experience had always been the opposite. In the wake of sex, I inevitably felt a bounty of tenderness, even when I paid a local lunatic called Mary Quick Legs $4 for my first encounter. Now that Gita had left my side, I longed to have her back there. I lay there wondering if I had ever known people like Martin and Gita who had so quickly altered my understanding of myself.

  Her small tread squeaked up the stairs and she crept in, standing near the bunk. Seeing her dressed, I reached down and drew up my trousers.

  "I must go, Dubin," she whispered. "They will be looking for me shortly. Au revoir." She peered at me, albeit with some softness. "Doo-bean, I believe we shall have other moments together."

  "Do you?" I had no idea if I wanted that, but I told her that I would probably return one more time to give Martin the final papers on my investigation.

  "Well, then," she answered. She hesitated but bent and pressed her lips to mine lightly. It was more of a concession than an embrace. She said au revoir again.

  I had been so raddled by emotion all day that I would have thought my nerves would be too unsettled for sleep, but as with every other expectation of late, I was wrong. I had purposely not drawn the wooden shutters outside and woke at 7:30, as I intended, with the livid sunrise firing through the clouds. Coming to, I recognized my knee as the discomfort, which, like a leash, had seemed to drag me up from sleep periodically throughout the night. The leg was swollen and stiff and I eased myself up slowly, then put on my uniform, refastening the insignia. As I went back toward the house to rouse Bidwell and to see about Martin, I could hear mortars pounding. The 26th Infantry Division, as it turned out, was about to seize Bezange-la-Petite. I was standing there, trying to make out the direction of the booming guns, when Bettjer, still with a cognac bottle in his hand, stumbled into the courtyard.

  I asked if he knew where Bidwell was. Peter answered in perfect English.

  "Inside. Just now awake. The rest are gone for several hours."

  who?"

  "Martin. Antonio. The girl. Packed and gone for good. They have left me behind. After all of that, they have left me behind."

  "Gone?"

  "They went in darkness. Hours ago. They tried to creep away, but the Comtesse wept terribly. You must have slept soundly not to hear her."

  "Gone?" I said again.

  Bettjer, the very image of a sot, whiskered and disheveled in his brown Belgian uniform with half a shirttail out, lifted his bottle to me. He had fallen during the night and bloodied his nose and now when he smiled, I could see he had lost half a tooth as well, from that stumble or from one before. Still, he was having a fine time at my expense.

  "I see," he said. "I see."

  "What do you see, Peter?"

  "Why, they have left you behind, too."

  PART IV

  Chapter 13.

  SWIMMING

  My father had learned to swim as a child in Lake Ellyn, a man-made lake that was actually a large retaining pond in the South End, dug to keep the Kindle River from overflowing its banks in wet seasons. His parents apparently liked the water, too, because there are many photos of the whole family in the ridiculously full bathing costumes of that era, cavorting at the lake, or in the Garfield Baths, a giant teeming indoor swimming pool which was a favorite diversion for Kindle County's working families until the baths' role as a polio breeding ground led them to be closed in the 1950s.

  Watching my father swim was always mesmerizing to me. His grace in the water, and the carefree way he splashed around, was inconsistent with the guy who existed on dry land. And so was the physique revealed in his bathing suit. He was a fair-sized person, five foot eleven, and while not exactly Charles Atlas, pretty muscular. Whenever I saw the solid body concealed beneath the shirt and tie he wore until he went to bed each night, I was amazed. So this was who was here. I felt simultaneously reassured and baffled.

  Eventually, when I was around fourteen, my father, never much for boasting, admitted in response to my questions that he had been the Tri-Cities high-school champion in the hundred-yard backstroke. Even then, I was hungry for any morsel about who he was, and so one day when my duties on The Argonaut, the high-school paper, required me to visit the U High Athletic Association, I decided to look in the archives to see if I could find my father's name.

  I did. Sort of. The backstroke champion of 1933 had been called not 'David Dubin,' but 'David Dubinsky.' I knew, of course, that immigrants of all kinds had Americanized their names. Cohens had become Coles. Wawzenskis had become Walters. But it did not sit well with me that he had made this alteration just before starting on his scholarship at Easton College, that gentile bastion. It was a bitter hypocrisy to disown your past and, worse, a capitulation to the happy American melting pot that had marginalized many citizens, especially those with darker skin, whom it could not fit into the blender. When I discovered that Dad had talked his parents into following this example, so he wouldn't be undermined in his new identity, I couldn't keep myself from confronting him.

  He defended himself in his
usual fashion, with few words. "It seemed simpler then," he said.

  "I am not hiding my heritage," I told my father. "However you felt, I'm not ashamed." This was a fairly cheap shot. In our home, my mother had insisted on Jewish ritual and Jewish education. There was a Sabbath meal on Friday night, Hebrew school, and even a quaint form of kosher in her kitchen, in which traife of all kinds; including the ham sandwiches she loved, could be consumed, but only if they were served on paper plates and stored on a single, designated shelf in the Frigidaire. Dad had never seemed adept with any of that, probably because he had absolutely no religious training in his own home, but on the other hand, I never doubted that my mother had his full support. Nonetheless, in my final year of college, in 1970, I did my father one better and legally changed my name back. I have been known as Stewart Dubinsky ever since.

  Nature, of course, has this way of getting even. Daughter Number 1, since the age of six, has told me she hates Dubinsky (which first-grade meanies turned into Toop-insky') and has vowed to take the last name of whomever she marries, even if it's Bozo A. Clown. And I didn't do my father much worse than he'd done his own dad. My grandfather, the cobbler, was in his last years when I made the change, and actually seemed pleased. But as I labored throughout 2003 to recover what my father had never seen fit to share, there was always a little sore spot in my heart whenever I recalled how I had shunned the one thing of my father's I'd had.

  This, then, was the story I told Bear Leach immediately after first meeting him in the front sitting room of Northumberland Manor. Bear extracted the complete tale with adroit questioning and accepted my rueful second thoughts about the change with a sage smile.

  "Well, Stewart," he said, "I sometimes think that's everything that goes wrong between parents and children. What's rejected. And what's withheld."

  In the latter column I could count my father's manuscript, which I eventually thought to ask Leach about. At that point, I assumed Dad had carried through on his threat to burn it. When I said as much, Leach struggled to his left and right, muttering until he located a Redweld he'd rested against the chrome spokes of his wheelchair. Inside the expandable folder he handed over was at least an inch and a half of jumbled papers, but thumbing through them I instantly recognized my father's lovely cursive hand on several interlineations. Big goof that I am, I sat there on the little love seat where I was perched and cried.