A Perfect Madness

by Frank H. Marsh

TWENTY-EIGHT

  Julia, Carpathian Mountains, Slovakia, 1944

  Finding Django’s Romani road leading to the Carpathians took longer than expected. Hidden beneath tall grass and brush, little of the old road could be seen. Only where the ground was weathered bare by the seasons, or where families of rocks lay piled together as markers, could the tracks of gypsy carts be seen. The old road seemed to begin in the middle of nowhere, and end in the same way, too, deep in the cuts between the last of the rising hills before they curled up against the great mountains.

  Julia had never seen the Carpathians, having never traveled much distance east of the Vltava River, and when they loomed before her she was taken by their odd shapes. Unlike the great Alps with their jagged peaks reaching to where heaven begins, they were more forested and rounded, with thousands of hidden folds looking in places much like a human brain. But she loved all mountains, big and small. There was something holy about them and the sounds the wind would make blowing up and down and around them. No sound was ever the same, like when it blew across open fields or through the narrow streets of Prague. It was easy to see why God first chose a mountain to look down from to tell us what was right and wrong.

  But to the north, the tall mountains held more than God. Hidden among the tens of villages sprinkled throughout the deep valleys of the mountains were small numbers of Slovak partisans who maintained contact with the Czech resistance and British intelligence. So it was there Julia and Eva and Django would go to live and fight for two years, only to run once more to stay alive.

  One day, when spring came early in 1944, two men came to Julia’s band of partisans camped high in the mountains around the small village of Banska Bystrica and told them of Auschwitz and its horrors. Never before had the Czechs and Slovaks there heard such tales of evil as these two Jewish men offered. Both had managed a miraculous escape from the death camp, and would spend their days ahead like prophets of old, spreading the terrible stories to all who would listen. When Julia first heard them she cried unashamedly, knowing they spoke of her father and mother’s fate as well. When she asked about her family, neither men knew of them, only that a small handful of those that came from Prague had escaped the ovens thus far. The words of the two men, though, added a new dimension to Eva’s own silent hate of the Nazis, and in the coming months she became someone unknown to Julia, even to Django, fighting with the ferocity of a wounded beast, daring things no one else would do. The Slovaks grew to love her even though she was a Jew.

  One August morning, after the summer winds had warmed the mountains, the partisans descended on Banska Bystrica, bringing with them Julia and Eva and Django. A long-planned national uprising against the Germans and Slovak puppet government had begun its ill-fated journey to disaster. Though Julia and Eva knew of the plan, little had come to them from intelligence of what their role should be. By the time the cards were turned face up for everyone to see, a quickening demise of the ill-planned uprising was taking place before them. With their fighting group quickly encircled by six German divisions, Eva and Django talked together away from Julia of the end to come and of their hope of killing ten soldiers before their own eyes became fixed in the stare of the dead, too.

  Thinking of her own death was not Julia’s way. It was only the silence that came with the loss of something precious that she had tried to understand. It was the only reason she had for believing a human soul existed. We go before God as a shadow, her father had told her when she was a child, and it is there we are given the light promised Moses and Abraham. But his words made little sense to her, because it is the light of living that dims and grows dark when death is around. She had seen it flicker for a while, and then go out like a candle in the wind when her grandpapa died. How to keep this candle burning a little longer was all that Julia could think of doing in the moments before her, not of dying and killing. Thousands of partisans and rebel Slovak forces were preparing to retreat to the high mountains ahead of the advancing German troops; and Julia and Eva and Django would go with them, but then turn south, retracing the trail that first brought them here two years back.

  Walking over to where Eva and Django were sitting eating bits of hard bread and cheese, Julia knelt down to tell them of what tomorrow would bring. Her words were interrupted when the first salvo of heavy German mortars crashed down upon the encampment without warning, shattering and tossing bodies in the air with every explosion. She realized the time was now, in the night’s darkness, to go back into the mountains once more, not tomorrow. Screaming loudly at Eva and Django to grab what they could carry of food and water and follow her, Julia started for the narrow winding road leading deep into the first of the long valleys stretched out beneath the tallest of the mountains. The road was filling rapidly with others who knew that night was their only hope to escape the relentless shelling. Safety would not come in numbers, Julia knew, and would draw the guns once they were seen. Before she could move away from the road towards a row of low-lying hills silhouetted like moving phantoms across the night sky by the rising moon, the mortars came again, covering the road with flying shrapnel from every direction. So many fell that the earth itself trembled in fear.

  When the guns turned silent, Julia looked at the carnage around her. Bodies with arms and legs missing were flopping up and down like fish pulled from the sea and left to die on land. Eva was curled up next to her, trying to stem the blood flowing from a large hole in her right thigh. Shrapnel from a nearby explosion had ripped through her clothing and skin, missing by inches the femoral artery and thighbone before lodging against her thigh muscle. Julia moved quickly to help her. Using her belt to fashion a tourniquet around Eva’s blood-soaked thigh, she reduced the flow to a trickle, then doused the gaping wound with a packet of sulfur. They would try to cleanse it again later when safely in the mountains. Helping Eva to her feet, Julia turned to where Django lay unmoving several feet away, his arms twisted and bent horribly around his head and neck as if he were trying to rip it from his body. Only the left eye remained of what had been a beautiful man. All else was gone from his face. She had loved him as a friend, though he wanted more from her. And now she would leave him to rot in the fields for days until the Germans plowed him into a mass grave with people who were not his own. Julia knew no Christian words to say over his dead body, so kneeling beside him, she took his bloodied hand and hurriedly recited the Twenty-Third Psalm.

  Later, when she and Eva had distanced themselves from the field of the dead, Eva said to her, “You should have screamed, ‘Oh Lord, Oh Lord, why has thou forsaken me,’ because He certainly was nowhere around Django and the rest of the dead lying there.”

  Julia looked sharply at Eva.

  “Why do you say such words, you are alive. He hasn’t forsaken you.”

  “I know. But only for awhile perhaps.”

  “You mustn’t talk that way. Your wound will heal fine,” Julia said, taking Eva’s arm to steady her as they walked the narrow trail south away from Banska Bystrica.

  By the third day, though, Eva’s leg had grown hot and stiff with infection. When night came and they stopped to sleep, Julia rinsed clean the wound the best she could, picking off the pus-laden scabs and sprinkling on the last dust of sulfur. Two days of hard travel still lay ahead and all they would be able to do was to rinse the festering hole with cold spring water. At night she would hold Eva for hours as the fever chills shook her body, singing to her every childhood song she could remember until they both fell asleep from exhaustion. By the fifth day, when they were standing looking down through the long, shadowed valleys where Eva’s home lay hidden amongst a grove of walnut trees, she had cried out during the night for her mother. She was looking down on her from somewhere, Eva later told Julia, but then her face had faded as quickly as it had come, back into the darkness.

  Exhausted and unable to stand any longer, Eva sat down with Julia’s help, leaning her back against a rotting tree stump for support. The gaping wound in her thigh had turned a nasty colo
r, oozing bloody pus and bits of black rotting flesh and blood and shrapnel, soaking her pant leg a dark reddish-yellow. The smell was worse, though. And when the mountain winds stilled for a moment, the stench became unbearable. Eva knew, as Julia did, that her leg was dying and her whole body would follow soon without medical care; but the sweet scent of the rich dirt in the fields spread out before Bratislava, which they could now see in the distance, filled her nostrils and lungs, bringing music once more to her soul. From where they were in the foothills of the Carpathians, her farm home was less than four miles.

  “We’ll be there soon,” Eva said, her hollow eyes coming alive momentarily with anticipation.

  “Yes, and you’ll get better. We still have much to do together,” Julia said, helping Eva to stand.

  Julia struggled to keep from crying as she looked at her old friend trying to steady herself so they could begin the final descent to the valley. Unable to do so, Eva quickly sat down again and looked over at Julia.

  “I don’t want it to end here. Let me rest a while longer, and then we can go,” she said, leaning once more against the tree stump and closing her eyes.

  Julia nodded and sat down next to Eva and closed her eyes to rest, too. Soon she would have to carry Eva, if they were to get to the farmhouse before dark. They had traveled a long way together, and the thought that it might end soon paralyzed her. The things they had done in the two years since leaving the gypsy camp, fighting alongside the partisans as they did, few people would dare to try. Such an odyssey would have pleased the ancient Homer well, had he been traveling with them.

  Resting against the rotten stump, Eva suddenly turned to Julia and told of her mother’s visit again and begged to be left here should she return.

  “We will be in the valley soon, and then I will carry you home. Your mother will be waiting for you,” Julia said, looking at the setting sun drifting lower by the minute. They needed to move now before darkness engulfed the mountain.

  The final descent to reach the valley floor took longer than expected, but Julia was glad. It was nightfall now and they would less likely be seen by German patrols as they crossed through the vast open fields and vineyards leading to Eva’s home. With Eva saddled on her back, Julia began the arduous three-mile journey, all the while watching ahead as the lights of hundreds of military vehicles raced back and forth in the distance along the road to Bratislava. Julia knew that the Slovak uprising had brought thousands of Germans to occupy Bratislava, making it impossible for her to find a doctor who would come to Eva, or even find what medicine she could to try and save her life. When they neared the small stone home, Eva suddenly loosened her grip from Julia and slipped to the ground. Leaning on Julia, she struggled to remove her heavy boots and socks, crying all the time from the piercing pain mixed with her joy in being home.

  “You must help me, please. It’s the soil I want to feel,” she begged Julia.

  Standing barefooted away from Julia, Eva moved her toes back and forth in the rich, black soil, which to her was the most wonderful feeling in the whole world. Time was ending now for her, at a point when history seemed to be going backwards, where wars were an everyday fashion, but she cared more that time was ending before the warm spring rains came that she loved so much, bringing new life to the land that was around her. The dirt beneath her feet was all she really knew and was ready to die for. Finally, she grew weary and collapsed in Julia’s arms.

  “You mustn’t light a lamp, they will see it,” she whispered to Julia. “Let me sleep here on the ground tonight, so that I can see all that is above me. Right there,” she said pointing skyward, “is where the morning stars first began to sing. That’s true because my grandpapa told me so when I was five.”

  Julia nodded and began crying softly as she stretched Eva out on the soft ground near the front door, and then lay next to her. Looking upward, it did seem that every star the heavens owned was looking down on them this night. She had never seen so many, not even as a child.

  “It is beautiful,” she said. “God has given us much to look at.”

  Eva said nothing for a few minutes, before turning her head to face Julia. “I have loved you much more than as a friend. I think you knew, yet you didn’t turn away from me or make me ashamed.”

  Sobbing in great heaves, Julia put her arms around Eva’s shoulders and held her close.

  “I know. You will always be my precious friend.”

  Julia had never experienced a night so long, holding Eva until she stopped breathing. Death came to her gently then, without a whimper or a sigh, but as it should be, in the arms of love. Julia would wait until first light to carry Eva into the house, laying her on the floor before the fireplace. She had talked of the cold winter nights when she would lie there watching, until she fell asleep, the dancing fingers of the burning logs climb and disappear like magic up the chimney.

  “It would be a wonderful way to go, drifting upward like a puff of smoke into the clouds, rather than turning to bones and dust in the cold earth,” she had said to Julia one night when they talked of death.

  So Julia set about readying the house for Eva’s pyre, piling anything that could burn into a large heap around her that reached almost to the ceiling of the room. Then she waited until dusk to light the fire before returning to the mountains again. Free of Eva’s weight, she would reach them in less than an hour. Looking back a mile away, she could see the flames leaping to the sky, carrying Eva with them as she would have wanted. The fire had spread, as Julia had hoped, to the small outbuilding, causing it to burn brighter and longer. By now the Germans were there. Such a fire was unusual and they would want to know why. It would be the morning, though, before they could uncover what had brought about the fire, and she would be hours into the mountains by then, heading north once more to where the partisans were.

  Eva’s face seemed everywhere Julia looked, as she hurried along the narrow mountain trail. At times the grief pushed down on her chest so hard that it was impossible to breathe, until she would stop and cry for several minutes. How could Eva have died this way, when it was she who had promised to bring her home to Anna? And she had believed her. Alone now, where she would go and what she would do to stay alive were as unknown as all the tomorrows gathered together. When Django was blown to pieces, she had refused to accept Eva’s cry that God had forsaken him; but now, with Eva dead, too, perhaps she was right that God was nowhere to be found on the battlefields of war. What she had learned from the two Jewish men who escaped from Auschwitz made it seem even more so to her. All her family might have died there, too, along with the thousands that did, making it easy to believe that God was no longer interested in the mess that first began in Eden’s garden.

  At night, as she traveled north, Julia came down into the valleys to gather what food she could find from isolated farms backed up against the base of the mountains, always leaving behind a few Reich marks in payment. Little could be found though, this late into autumn—mostly wormy apples and rotting potatoes and a few beets kept stored in barns to feed the pigs. They were eaten though, worms and all, and the protein from them kept her moving one more day closer north to Banska Bystrica, where she hoped the partisans would still be camped. If the Germans were there, she had decided, she would try to reach the dense forest along the Polish border where many partisans had come from to join the uprising.

  On the day Julia neared the hills above Banska Bystrica, she looked down on the small airfield stretched out two miles south of the village to see the Slovak flag still flying from the radio tower. It was what she saw next that brought disbelief to her eyes, causing her to cry out in the cold silence around her. Two B-17 Flying Fortress bombers had landed, bringing supplies to reinforce the partisans and rebel Slovak army still fighting the Germans. Two hours later she walked into the command office where the American pilots were sitting drinking coffee with several OSS agents that had flown in with the supplies. She told them who she was and asked if she could fly back with them to En
gland. That was the only question she would ask the surprised men. Forty-five minutes later, credentialed only by the stories she told of Czech intelligence gone awry and the two years of fighting with the resistance, Julia sat on one of the B-17s, glowing and smiling as a new mother might do in the company of a group of strangers. But her happiness was mostly for the sixteen Allied pilots who had been shot down over Slovakia, who would be going home to England with her. Yet they were as fascinated with her as she was with them, trying to guess who the dirty and seedy young woman was that smelled so bad, and why she was sitting on the plane with them.

  Julia, though, found it almost impossible to contain the joy she felt and thought only of the happiness that awaited her. Tonight she would take warm showers and wear fresh clothes and dine with a knife and fork at a table, becoming a young woman again.

  ***