FIFTEEN
Czechoslovakia
As she hit the cold night air, Julia caught a glimpse of the big plane going away before her chute opened and she began floating down. To her left, a hundred or so yards, she saw the outline of Eva’s chute as it opened and billowed out into the endless darkness above her. The pilot had flown very low to drop them, leaving Julia only seconds to look down at the ground rushing up to meet her and to guide her landing away from a row of trees lining the open field. This time there would be no sheep dump to greet her. A heavy winter snow had fallen for two days, covering the ground with its white softness to cushion her landing, as if it knew she would be coming home soon.
It was Eva’s time, though, to provide the comedic relief needed for such a tense situation. Caught at the last moment of landing by a sudden gust of wind, she was pushed into the trees, crashing and breaking limbs and twigs and ending suspended upside down several feet from the ground. Had there been ears to hear that night, the steamy words flowing from her cursing lips would have shamed the saltiest of all swearers. Holding her tightly in their twisted arms, the limbs and twigs could not stop laughing, so it seemed to Eva, over her topsy-turvy predicament. But the laughter came from Julia, who had emerged from the surrounding darkness to find Eva’s embarrassing position. She had followed the faint sounds of her cursing voice, muted by the deep snow covering the fields and the heavy winter air. Sights such as this become engraved on the mind so that forgetting is impossible, and she would be reminded of it many times by Julia.
Still laughing, Julia made her way slowly to where Eva was hanging, pushing aside the limbs and twigs surrounding her like a captive army. Before she could say anything, Eva looked at her and said calmly, “This fucking night stays between you and me. Now cut me down before I pass out.”
Julia nodded, but her face still reddened from hearing such words, and did so this time as Eva spoke. Using her commando knife, she began cutting the parachute cords wrapped around Eva’s feet and the tree limbs, freeing her to fall the remaining few feet to the ground. As she did, the deep snow quickly wrapped around her like a white blanket, leaving only parts of her face showing.
“I should leave you here, but they would find you, I’m afraid,” Julia said, still laughing and reaching down to help Eva up.
Julia pushed Eva away, hurried to her feet and stood listening. Distant cries of an aroused dog could be faintly heard.
“There is a farm somewhere nearby. We need to locate the radio and supplies and hide them until we find out where we are,” she said, helping Eva to her feet.
“Near Pilsen, I would hope,” Eva said, brushing off the remaining snow from her arms and legs and starting back towards the place where Julia landed.
Julia stopped her for a second.
“We need to hide your parachute before we go. A German patrol may come by.”
“There’s no need to. We’ve made enough tracks to make any patrol think an army has landed. They can follow us to the ends of the earth until this snow melts,” Eva said, making a new path across the open field.
Julia was slow to follow, stopping every few feet to inhale the beautiful white world spread out around her. The snows in Prague were just as beautiful, she believed, perhaps even more so because they were alive, having a thousand happy children to play with the very first moment the flakes begin their long fall from the heavens. The snow around her was quiet, though she was sure it had much to tell since the war began. It had been their friend at first, muting the sounds and softening their landing. But when the morning light came it would become their enemy, following them wherever they went until it disappeared beneath the warming rays of the sun.
Ahead, Eva spotted the cylindrical metal box resting in the snow with its parachute spread out on the ground. By the time Julia arrived, Eva had pried open the box, laying out its contents on the parachute to run through a quick inventory in her mind—a wireless two-way radio, two British Stens with extra ammunition, two small lightweight Webley revolvers, three medium explosive devices, and K-rations. Nothing else was there that might help them survive.
“Until we know where we are, hiding out in the woods to wait for the morning light is our only choice. German patrols will come then,” Eva said.
Julia nodded and took out a small detailed map, which had been purposely folded to the sheet showing their drop-off spot. Focusing a small flashlight on the brown-colored map, she quickly traced across the markings to a large X.
“This is where we should be, no more than two miles east of Pilsen,” she said, making a quick calculation from the mileage scale put to her memory a hundred times in training. “And here is where we can expect to join the others,” she continued, pointing to a small residential area on the southern outskirts of Pilsen.
Julia and Eva, though, were nowhere near the large X on the map. They had mistakenly been dropped by the pilot many miles south of where they should be, a fact they would discover only after the cold, dark night grudgingly gave way to a frozen dawn. After moving the radio and supplies quickly into heavy brush at the edge of the woods, they huddled together through the long night, buried deep beneath a huge snow pile mercifully built by the strong winter winds blowing through the woods. Afraid to sleep, and almost to breathe, they endured the passing hours trying to interpret the strange forest sounds coming to their ears. Even then, Julia imagined, where they were would be a wondrous thing for poets to write about, a moment, it seemed, suspended in time from all things human.
Three years filled with a thousand days and nights had passed since she last felt the warmth of Erich’s arms. And she ached for him now. So many roads we could have taken, had we had time to choose. He would be a doctor now in Germany, healing the wounded minds of battle-weary soldiers, she knew. Or perhaps he would be still in Prague, a thought that excited her because of their nearness to each other in body. If he were there, he would keep her parents safe someway, a thought that warmed her heart even more, pushing away the coldness surrounding her. She would find him after the war, and they would be together again, that much she was sure of. Julia’s silent musings were suddenly shattered by the cracking noise of a large limb, laden with ice, breaking loose from a nearby tree and falling with a cushioned thud in the deep snow. Above their snow bed, two large limbs seemed equally as fragile, bending precariously low towards them with their thick coats of ice and snow. We should move, Julia thought, starting to nudge Eva until she heard the muffled chugging of motorcycles nearby, followed first by silence and then by a cursing voice.
“They must be our contacts,” Eva whispered, stirring from the snow bed. But Julia quickly held her back.
“No, listen. They are German soldiers, two, maybe three. One is complaining about the choke on his motorcycle not working,” she whispered.
“A night patrol?”
“Yes, I imagine. They must be on a main road leading to Pilsen.”
The cursing stopped and loud laughter came from the soldiers.
“One is trying to relieve himself, but can’t. Says his manhood has shriveled up like a dried prune from the cold and all he can do is dribble on himself,” Julia said with a giggle.
Julia and Eva both smiled at the irony of such a comical moment in such a terrible time. They, too, desperately needed to attend to their own needs, but refused to disturb the growing warmth of their hiding place. Instead, they would wait until the first glint of light found its way into the woods and they were sure to be alone.
Soon the cranking of the motorcycles could be heard, along with a slow chugging of the cold engines, hitting and missing until they finally started. No more words were heard from the soldiers, only loud idling, then a piercing roar as they raced away, leaving the freezing silence of the winter night to return. Julia and Eva sighed in relief, each listening to the frightened sounds of their own heart. What their ears had witnessed, both knew, was the opening act of an odyssey to come that would defy a thousand imaginations.
The awaited light of dawn
finally broke through the woods and across the snowy fields and hills, unchanging, as it had done for a thousand centuries. New snow had fallen throughout the night, but not enough to cover Julia and Eva’s zigzagging footprints through the field where they landed. Eva stood looking back across the field, tracing the tracks until they disappeared over a rise leading down to the woods where her chute had taken her.
“A two-year-old child could find us from those tracks,” she said.
“Yes, but we will be gone,” Julia said, trudging through the deep snow towards the place from where the voices came during the night.
After only sixty paces, a wide ice-covered road spread out before them running parallel to the woods where they had hid. The closeness surprised and frightened Julia for a moment. But something else quickly caught her attention. Kneeling down, she dug away with her hand loose snow by the edge of the road and felt the hard pavement.
“Concrete, for god’s sake, concrete,” she said.
“What do you mean concrete?” Eva asked, puzzled by Julia’s comment.
“Just that, rotting concrete—this is a main thoroughfare,” Julia responded, anxiously pulling the map from her pocket.
A quick glance told her what she feared. Somehow, they had been dropped by mistake over fifteen miles southeast from the rendezvous point instead of three. Julia was sure that the road she was standing on led from Prague to Nürnberg, completely bypassing Pilsen, their destination. She had been this way before with Erich and Hiram during a summer break, when the days were long and hot. Traveling on the worst of country buses, they had left Prague for the rising hills and deep forest along Germany’s border. There they would scour the forest floor for hours, hoping to find ancient relics from the wars between the Goths and Rome. Later, with Hiram napping, she and Erich would wander deeper into the woods to find another Eden, where nothing mattered except the love they would give to each other. If she and Eva traveled far enough along the road, they would find the deep woods, too.
“What are you saying?” Eva asked.
“That we are not where we should be. The pilot made a horrible mistake. This road goes straight south to Nürnberg and straight north to Prague. We are in the middle of—”
“Shit.”
“Yes, that’s a good word to use for where we are,” Julia said wryly, at her friend’s expression.
“That explains the patrol last night. This road is a major supply route for the German army. We’ll look funny as hell walking down the road carrying a radio and submachine guns strapped across our breasts,” Eva said.
“We won’t. A little town called Klatovy should be near to the east, a few miles maybe.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Try and radio headquarters for instructions first, if we can. If it’s a no go, find Klatovy and hide out until the weather breaks.”
“Pilsen’s out? Our contacts are there, you know,” Eva said, showing some frustration with the mess the pilot’s mistake had left them in.
“I know. We’ll get there, but I want to be alive when we do,” Julia said, trying to reassure Eva.
Even before Julia had finished her words, Eva had started walking back into the woods to where they endured the night’s freezing cold. Saying nothing, she carried the radio to the edge of the road and clicked the on switch, preparing to call in their code names. But the radio remained silent, attesting to the arctic coldness numbing everything around them—its sixteen-volt batteries were frozen solid, too. Eva looked at Julia for a second in disgust, then carried the radio back into the woods and hid it among the deep brush, adding as cover at the last moment two heavy limbs that had fallen nearby. At the same time, keeping only three rations and the two pistols, Julia covered the rest of the supplies and the Sten guns under nearby brush and snow, then marked a nearby tree with her knife. Nothing could be done with the tracks they had made in the heavy snow, so they decided to make hundreds more by walking in tens of circles in the fields nearby and cutting new paths through the woods to the road.
“At least it will give the Germans something to think about should they find them,” Eva said.
“Yes, but I would rather have a good God melt them as soon as we leave,” Julia said in a prayerful tone, as if such a thing might very well happen.
Without looking back, both moved to the edge of the road, standing without voice for a minute, each knowing what lay before them, how the odds of their surviving had changed. Though this was their homeland, with the war on they would come as strangers to the small villagers and peasants, draped in suspicion. Some would welcome and feed and clothe them, they knew, but many would avoid them. Others would betray them to the Germans for a small handful of extra rations, or gladly kill them should they be known to be Jews. Then they would proudly show the Germans what they had done, not for a small handful of extra rations, but from pure hate.
Julia stepped forward gingerly on the frozen highway, testing her footing, but could take only a few slow steps without risking a fall. Eva fared no better, having fallen to her knees twice trying to navigate on the slippery surface. Julia quickly pointed to the dense thicket of trees that seemed to be running for miles ahead along the side of the road.
“The road is too icy. We will make better time hiking through the woods,” she said, knowing they would probably freeze to death before the Germans found them.
***
A Perfect Madness Page 15
