A Perfect Madness

by Frank H. Marsh

FOURTEEN

  Julia, Tempsford, England, 1942

  The RAF Lysander, carrying Julia and Eva and two other Czech agents, ascended smoothly from Tempsford’s grassy runway into the cold blackness of the winter night. Freezing in the same blackness hundreds of miles away, Prague awaited them. They were going home at last. Not as they wished, though, to live, but to fight and perhaps to die. Julia cared and worried about the dying because of Anna and Erich, but Eva didn’t. To her, death was as essential to living as the air she breathed. All the days ahead are hidden from us and always will be, she would say to those who would listen. And whether it’s living or dying that’s there waiting for us, what was to come would come, as sure as the morning light first floods the skies each waking day.

  It was what both of them had wished for so long and trained for so hard, to jump one moonless night into the dark skies above their homeland and descend in silent fear to its sacred soil. There they were to join with another resistance group with plans to sabotage the gas works in Prague, and then, hopefully, reestablish radio contact with British intelligence for navigating bombers to the Skoda iron works in Pilsen. The final part of their orders shattered any illusion that Julia held, that somehow they might survive the barbwires of danger that lay before them. If they should become separated during the jump, they were to try to join up with a third group of agents already in Prague preparing to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the blond beast, Protectorate of Moravia and Bohemia and slayer of Jews. Julia knew escaping the clutches of the Gestapo would be hopeless once the assassination has been carried out. Operations Anthropoid, the plan had been surreptitiously tagged, as a Halifax lifted off carrying seven brave Czech soldiers to their ultimate fate. Their appointed time to drop close to Prague was December 28, two months before Julia and Eva would follow the same route, knowing that finding them would be as daunting a task as killing Heydrich.

  Once in the air, Julia leaned back against the small pack she was carrying, in addition to the parachute strapped in front. Looking across the aisle at Eva, she began to laugh, imagining she looked the same way, like an overly stuffed scarecrow. Underneath their jump suits, each wore two wool sweaters, a shirt, bra, military shorts instead of panties, long pants and two pairs of socks. Wrapped around their waist was a money belt stuffed with thousands of Reich marks, which added a voluminous stomach on both of them. Eva began laughing, too, because she knew what Julia was thinking. But scarecrows can’t be afraid and Julia was. The fear of bailing out into the unknown had haunted her when she thought of it, hanging in her throat and teeth like sour vomit. Only through laughter could she kill the taste.

  After a few minutes of nervous laughter and chatter with Eva, each having to shout to the other over the loud roar of the plane, Julia closed her eyes to rest for the three-hour trip. There would be no more prayers to God, which Eva thought Julia was doing. They had been said many times before by her, until the casualty lists came out showing all the boys dying everywhere there was some fighting. She figured then that God wouldn’t listen to one person, and a woman at that, when so many were dropping dead in foreign lands who had probably prayed to live just like she had done. Staying alive in war, she had come to believe, was no different from playing Russian roulette, except there were a million guns pointed at your head instead of a six-shot revolver.

  Shutting out what lay ahead for her and Eva, Julia’s mind became crowded with bundles of thoughts of times that had passed. Much had changed since she arrived in England, a lifetime ago, so it seemed. Hitler’s great boast of bringing England to her knees had vanished in the summer winds blowing across the English Channel. Even the terrible bombing of London that began then in late summer appeared less. Still, Hitler now ruled all of Europe, including the Balkan countries, and had launched a massive invasion of Russia. But England no longer stood alone, as America had entered the war. Soon, England would be invaded by thousands of fresh, young faces from America, none too eager to fight and die like their fathers had in the Great War, but there only because they were told to be. From the beginning, it was not their war to die in, but that would change as everything else did.

  It was mostly the thoughts of Anna that hummed in her mind, keeping company with the monotonous droning of the plane’s motors. Anna was two and a few months now, healthy and strong as the new spring lambs dancing around in Angie McFarland’s fresh green fields. Nothing put before her on the dining table went untouched, even the morning breakfast bowls filled with haggis. Carrots and greens and shepherd’s pie were her favorites, though, and had made her a Scottish tot with fat, rosy cheeks kept raw and chafed by the cold winds blowing and swirling across the hills where she played. Anna loved Angie McFarland, whom she saw as her mother, though Angie talked of Julia throughout each day. She would read every letter to her from Julia, some two and three times, when days passed without a new one. Even then, she would change the wording to keep a fresh and exciting picture of her mother in front of Anna’s young eyes.

  At night, she would read and tell a story to Anna from the Old Testament and teach her a Hebrew prayer and song, as she promised Julia she would do. In time, the Hebrew prayers became her own, though she would always add “In Christ’s name” before the amen. One sunny November day, Angie took Anna with her to the public library in Edinburgh, not too many miles away from her own village, where she found a book explaining Jewish holidays and their dates. Then, with Christmas coming, she would celebrate Hanukkah with Anna, too. It was not something Angie promised Julia she would do, or Julia even expected from her. “It just seemed right,” she would tell those in the church that questioned her about a Christian celebrating such a holiday.

  Later she would add, when Passover came and the questions grew louder, “Would you want a Jewish mother to raise your child as a Jew, tell me now, with you being Presbyterian and all?”

  The questions stopped then, though some still thought Angie strange, that perhaps she had a troubled soul.

  The brief visits by Julia were the hardest. And though happiness and laughter abounded, no one escaped the sadness that hid its face beneath the smiles. When goodbyes were said, each seemed to be a rehearsal for the day the final one would come, as if it might lessen the pain. When the time did come, Angie sensed it the moment she looked at Julia’s face and eyes, but said nothing, hoping she was wrong. A distant face at another time, in a different war, had looked the same when his leaving time finally came. Her own Robert had looked no different when it came his turn to go and fight and die in the Great War. It is the eyes, always the eyes that betray us. Nothing in the soul can be hidden from them, she remembered whispering to him as they lay together for the last time. In two weeks she became widow McFarland.

  “We will go to your church tomorrow, the three of us,” Julia said, surprising Angie. “And then I will leave. It’s better that I say the words now then pretend until the moment arrives for me to go.”

  “I know, my child,” were the only words Angie could say before embracing Julia, holding her forever, it seemed.

  Later, with Anna asleep for the night, Julia and Angie sat huddled together in front of the fireplace, grateful for what warmth the small fire was willing to give. Winter was at its worst now, with the sun gone for another day and the night winds beginning to blow. They had talked earlier about the freezing days and the snow-covered hills and anything else but what was on their minds.

  “It is a cold, cold night, indeed. Perhaps we should turn in. Our beds will be much warmer,” Angie said, shuddering and pulling the edges of her wool robe tightly about her large body.

  “No, please, not yet. There is another promise that I must ask of you. Waiting until tomorrow will only make it more difficult,” Julia said.

  Angie sat back down, taking Julia’s hand in hers and waited, watching the tears form slowly and start their run down her cheeks. Julia looked away for a moment to find her voice, and inhaled deeply before trying to speak.

  “We have become a family, you and me, not
all Jewish or Presbyterian, but a good family,” she said, laughing through the streams of tears now flowing unheeded down every part of her face.

  “Yes, yes, very much so, I would say,” Angie said, very close to crying herself.

  “I want your promise that should I, or my brother Hiram, not return from the war, you will let no one take Anna from you—no one. You are as much her mother as I am, if not more so.”

  Angie had wondered how it would be when this moment came, as she knew it surely must, knowing Julia’s great love for Anna. She had tried, but couldn’t feel the terrible anguish of a mother parting from her child, perhaps for the last time. Only those standing at the edge of such a loss could speak of it, she realized. And now the precious gift was before her.

  “Aye, and raise her I will. How could it not be—she’s got my heart and is a part of me, just as you are.” Angie said, smiling through her own tears. “But shame be on you. You will be standing here banging on the door the day the war is over.”

  Angie never knew if what she said was right by Julia, but they sat holding each other for hours more in a pleasing silence, the kind where one’s mind becomes that of the soul. Tomorrow would bring more tears but that was of little matter now.

  Only the hymns were different for her final Sunday service. The preaching and the looks from the congregation, though, were the two things Julia knew would always be the same. Luther’s great “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” did send cold shivers down her spine, and she and Angie sang it with such gusto that those standing close quit their own singing to listen. By the third stanza, most of the congregation had stopped as the two voices, harmonizing when they could, filled the cold church to the rafters with a melodious warmth seldom heard there. Looking back days later, and times after, the same joy would sweep Julia’s heart as if it had its own existence and would stay with her forever. Her father would have been pleased, too, even though it was a Christian hymn, because he knew her singing was always to God, and that’s all that mattered.

  After the service, when the time came for Julia to make the long walk back down to the village to go home, she lifted Anna in her arms one last time and kissed her lightly. Then she simply smiled at Angie.

  “I will go now,” she said, and walked away, not turning back to look.

  Julia opened her eyes as the plane began a slow descent over what was supposed to be their drop zone. Everything she had learned the past two years was now to be tested. Julia looked at Eva, and for the first time saw a tiny shade of fear in her eyes. It is good, though, the fear, Eva had said many times when they had discussed the strongest of human emotions. All animals live by fear, and they will either kill or run to live another day. And in war, we become the worst of animals, seldom running, but always killing. The idea to Julia that she might have to kill someone was the impetus for many sleepless nights in Arisaig, Scotland during her difficult training in commando tactics. There she learned a hundred ways to kill a person, so it seemed at the time. But at the end, she was still unsure what she might do when such a moment came, though she told no one. The name, make and purpose of every military weapon and mechanized vehicle, British and German, was pounded into her head much like words had been in the English class, without mercy. And soon, she became so skilled at breaking down weapons and identifying them when blindfolded that many in her class sought her company, if only to learn from her.

  One evening, while walking alone around the training grounds, Julia thought about Erich and where he might be and whether he, perhaps, had killed someone in the war. It would be a terrible thing for him to do so, she knew. Maybe it was because the winter sky was so full of stars that the time came to her when they were lying together on the soft grass in the Old Jewish Cemetery looking at the same dark sky with the same bright stars above them. With thousands of tombstones as their audience, they discussed and argued in whispered voices how it might be to kill someone who was as innocent as you, even in war. It was then that Erich had expressed a concern quite like hers over his own ability to kill a stranger he didn’t know, and probably never would, should he be cast into Germany’s wars. It was distance that made war so palatable and easy to accept, they finally decided, both for the old men that send the young to die and, in the end, for those who do the killing. Distance hides the humanity of who we kill, lessening one’s concern over their death, he had argued. If we don’t see them fall and die or blown into a thousand pieces, we stay disconnected from the killing. It is only when we see the eyes of those we are killing that we cry out inside. Even then, some never see them, the eyes, though they are there before them. What would Erich do now, if he were here to jump with her? Would they run away and hide together, as they talked of doing, and let the world handle its own problems? Julia wondered.

  When the red light began flashing, indicating jump time was two minutes, Julia and Eva looked at each other for one brief second, then stood quickly, tightened each other’s backpacks, and connected the parachute’s cord line to the static line. The jump time only seconds away, Julia braced herself in the open door, waiting for the final signal. The snow-covered earth was a scant eight hundred feet below and she was glad. The heavy blanket of snow would soften the impact, though she would be more visible to those that might be watching.

  “Stay with me, God, the night will be cold and long,” she whispered, leaping into the waiting darkness.

  ***