Fields Where They Lay, page 19
“Off,” Keystone hissed, but in that brief moment the beam of light had bounced off the wide-open, glazed eyes of a fallen man, flaring into existence as suddenly and as brightly as the eyes of roadside wildlife at the edges of the long Canadian highways Morris had driven as a teenager. Morris had seen nothing but the eyes; they had commanded one hundred percent of his terrified attention, and he couldn’t have said whether the dead man was American, German, or French.
Or maybe even Canadian, like Morris.
Keystone and Morris dropped in unison to their hands and knees. Sabathia, who had scrambled back from the man he’d stumbled over, was sitting up, swearing and rubbing at his right ankle. For a long, frozen, breath-holding moment, they all absorbed the presence of death and waited to see whether the light would draw a shot from whichever group of armed troops was within range.
Nothing. Either the fog was too thick or they had wandered farther than Morris thought they had. But the fog, Morris saw, was changing: instead of a featureless, muffling, all-concealing presence it had turned ropy and fragmented, closing them in, lifting, and then surrounding them again.
Sabathia whispered, “Sprained it.”
“Well, then,” Keystone said, “that means you didn’t break it.” He smiled, his teeth white in his dark face.
Morris said, “That’s your Christmas present, Sabby.”
“Not going to be able to run with my usual grace,” Sabathia said. They were still whispering.
“Nope,” Keystone said. “No Sabathia waddle for a few days. Can you get up?”
“That’s really two questions,” Sabathia said, “the first being, do I want to? Since we have no idea where we’re going.”
“We’re going that way,” Keystone said, nodding in the direction they’d been walking.
“Fine, then. For a destination that precise, sure, I can get up. Might need to lean on one of you for walking, though.”
Down low and to their left, the sky flickered coldly, and they had all counted to four by the time they heard a hollow percussive sound, like someone hitting an empty barrel with a hammer. “Big Bertha,” Morris said as the fog swept in again “Four thousand feet, give or take. Little less than a mile.”
“See?” Keystone said. “The Krauts are to our left. So we’ll limp to our right.”
“It’s all that military history you read,” Morris said. “Having a complicated tactical decision like that right at your fingertips.”
“Let’s split it down the middle,” Sabathia said, pulling himself up onto his hands and knees. “Forty-five-degree angle to the right.”
“Why forty-five degrees?” Keystone said. He was, like the others, a private, but he was a year older and had almost three weeks’ more battle time than they, so they tended to defer to him. He was also the first black man either of them had ever known personally.
“Why the fuck not?” Sabathia said, and all three men laughed, Morris into the sleeve of his coat and the others with their hands over their mouths. Sabathia began to cough and brought the bottom of his coat up to muffle the sound.
When he was laughed out, Keystone said, “Come on, it’s Christmas Eve. What bad could happen?”
Ask the dead soldier back there, Morris thought, but what he said was, “Right ankle, Sabby?”
“Yeah.” He jerked the leg back. “Don’t you dare, don’t you touch it, you sadist—” He started laughing again, lowering his head as far as possible and covering his mouth with the crook of his elbow.
“I’m a doctor, Sabby,” Morris said. “Well, almost. Let me see whether it’s broken.”
“Fuck that,” Sabathia said. “Whaddya gonna do if it’s broken, amputate? One way or the other, I’ll be limping. At least this way I won’t be bleeding to death, too.” Keystone laughed quietly.
“Okay,” Morris said. “No miracle of modern medicine for you.” The three of them crouched there, breathing hard and listening for anything that sounded closer than Bertha, anything that might help them find the direction back to their own lines.
First there was nothing, but then a static electricity crackle of small-arms fire erupted from the same direction as the boom from Bertha. “That settles it,” Morris said. “Put your arm around my neck, Sabby.”
“You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for you to say that,” Sabathia whispered. “I’ve always been drawn to male Hebrews.”
“Well, this is probably as close as you’ll ever get,” Morris said. Sabathia draped his right arm around Morris’s shoulders and Morris grasped the dangling wrist and said, “One, two, three.” With a short, choked gasp from Sabathia, they were up.
“Here we go,” Keystone said. “Forty-five degrees exactly.” The fog swept past them, trailing more fog, enormous palaces of fog, so heavy and wet it drizzled icily on their faces. After the first few awkward steps, they moved in silence, Keystone and Morris passing Sabathia back and forth every ten minutes or so like the baton in a relay. They heard no more firing, and while it eased their nerves a bit, it also deprived them of their only dependable orientation. Up till now the firing had been to their left. Now that it was silent, whenever Keystone and Morris switched places, the free one followed their footprints back for a minute or two to make sure they were moving in a relatively straight line.
After thirty-five or forty endless minutes, at a time when Morris was once again supporting Sabathia, Keystone said, “Stop.”
“What?” Sabathia whispered. His ankle had swollen badly, and they’d unlaced his boot and pulled it off with much between-the-teeth groaning from Sabby, and then they’d laced it around his forearm so he couldn’t lose it.
“Somebody here,” Keystone said. He dropped to one knee and lit a match.
On his back in the black, rich dirt, one arm upraised over his head as though waving to someone far, far away, was a black American private. His mouth was open in seeming surprise and his chest was soaked with the autumn brown of dried blood. As Keystone brought the match closer and leaned forward, obviously looking for something, a gold filling gleamed in the dead man’s mouth.
“Nobody came back to get him,” Sabathia said. “They must have been running for their lives.”
“Or, you know, he’s black,” said Keystone. Morris could barely hear him.
“Oh, come on—” Sabathia said, but Keystone’s eyes stopped him mid-word.
“Sorry about this, brother,” Keystone said, and he blew out the match and threw it aside. Then he tugged the dead man’s collar open, wrapped something around his fist, and pulled.
“What are you—” Sabathia said, and then he said, “Oh.”
“Yeah, oh,” Keystone said. “He’s got other ID. It’s not like no one will know who he is.”
“Was,” Morris said. “I can’t wear those.”
“But you will,” Keystone said. “Because if you don’t, I’ll personally break your neck. You know, it’s not good for us, either, we get caught out here with a Jew.”
Neither Morris nor Sabathia said anything. They both knew that the Germans would probably kill a black soldier even faster than they’d kill a Jew.
“Willis,” Keystone read, holding the dog tags up to his eyes. “Henry. Lee. Willis.” He grabbed a lungful of air and blew it out. “Jesus Christ,” he said. Then he handed the tags to Morris and said, “Come on, Henry Lee.”
After another seven or eight minutes of following Keystone’s lead, they hit a plowed field and began to stumble, swearing, over the frozen furrows. Sabby let out a low cry as he turned his bad ankle, and the cry was cut off as Keystone’s hand covered Sabathia’s mouth. At that moment, Morris saw the dark outline of a house and barn. One dim light, probably a kerosene lantern, burned in a window.
Keystone deputized Sabathia to knock. Poor, injured Sabby would serve as the point of the wedge, to get the folks inside to open the door. Keystone stood behind a tree a few yards off with his rifle pointed at the door in case the knock was answered by Hermann Goering or some gung ho SS officer. Instead, the door was tugged inward by a small, balding man in his fifties, stoop-shouldered and worried-looking, wearing baggy pants and suspenders.
“Joyeux Noël,” Sabby said in Chicago French as the man looked up at him.
There was a moment when Keystone, sighting down the barrel of his gun, thought the little man was going to close the door in Sabathia’s face, but good manners won out, and he returned the holiday wishes. A moment later, Sabby was inside. Keystone counted to twenty and then went to the door and knocked.
Morris had chosen the barn because he needed to use his flashlight for what he had to do. He had it tucked beneath his left arm as he went through his things, finding everything that identified him as Morris Stempel and sorting it into a pile.
Every now and then, at the edge of his vision, the wide-open eyes of the first dead man, pulled from the darkness by the flashlight’s beam, flowered into existence against the dark. The first three or four times, he looked over to where he thought the gleam had come from, but after that he ignored it, consigning it to the lengthening list of things that had made an adrenaline-charged imprint on his mind since he got to the front. He’d seen several of these imprints multiple times, mostly horrifying visual echoes, usually as he was trying to sleep.
The general knowledge in the ranks, probably no more or less dependable than general knowledge anywhere else, said that the Germans treated Jews like any other prisoners if they were taken in groups large enough to make it likely that non-Jewish POWs would survive to report that their Jewish comrades had been murdered in the field. If Jews were captured alone, though, or in small groups, it was said that they were often killed on the spot.
And every black soldier knew that there had been incidents in the African campaigns, especially now that the war was widely thought to be winding down to a German defeat, in where the Nazis had simply shot black troops from the French colonies where they stood rather than taking them prisoner.
So, not a good idea to be Morris Stempel—or, for that matter, Jerome Keystone—until they could figure out where they were and how to get back to their own lines. But Morris had never been anyone except Morris Stempel, and it felt as though something inside him was turning away in shame to avoid seeing what the rest of him was doing. Especially since nothing could be done for Keystone.
Henry Lee Willis, he thought. Who had he been?
Morris was cold. He felt like he’d been cold for a decade. He was so cold that he had to keep blowing into his hands to bring feeling back to his fingers; he needed his sense of touch because he was sorting pieces of paper, trying to get rid of evidence. The day they’d moved out to the front—what? Two days ago? Three?—there had been a mail call, and the stuff he’d been handed was still bundled, unread, with a tight elastic band. As he rolled it down to unwrap the papers, the band snapped and one end hit him on the back of his freezing hand.
The pain was so intense and so unexpected that Morris’s vision was momentarily edged with red. He glared at the broken elastic band, a length of cheap, brown synthetic since all rubber was being rationed, and he picked it up in the stinging hand, rolled it into a ball, and threw it out of the small, yellowish circle created by his flashlight. “And fuck you, too,” he said.
Morris had never sworn before the war.
On top of the sheaf of papers, now curled from having been rolled up for two days, was a letter from his mother. Instead of opening it, he decided to short-cut the act of getting rid of it so he wouldn’t be tempted to change his mind after he read it. Using the semisharp edge of his entrenching tool, he hacked at the half-frozen earth beneath its wispy layer of straw, going up onto his knees to get a longer downstroke. A couple of minutes later, he had a sheen of sweat going ice cold on his forehead and a hole almost deep enough to bury one of his boots in.
It would have to do.
A scattering of small-arms fire, like hail on a tin roof. Closer than it had been.
So here come the Nazis, smelling blood, and here’s the Jew, sitting in a barn having what Mr. Sartre would call an existential crisis. Not taking action, not even reading his mother’s letter, just marinating in the oddness of having the entire weight, the cutting edge, of a global disaster, National Socialism, pointed directly at his narrow chest, threatening to obliterate his second-rate (as his older brother, the physicist, liked to describe it) mind.
He opened the flimsy envelope, the thin airmail paper almost falling to pieces as his numb fingers wrestled with it. And there she was on the page, his mother, a woman who never talked about herself. In her version of life, she was the invisible narrator of the family’s doings, the one holding the camera for all the snapshots. His father, she said, was feeling better, the indigestion that had plagued him all winter was on the wane. And here’s something about Sophie Resnick, the young woman who, at thirteen, gave Morris his first-ever taste of bubble gum in someone else’s mouth. The fruity smell of Sophie’s breath, the rubbery smoothness of her well-chewed gum, and the warm, soft roughness of her tongue, was as fresh and new at that moment, sitting in that freezing barn, as it had been the first night he took the experience to bed with him. Sophie was getting married, to a Gentile, no less, a man who had (he could hear the condemnation in his mother’s voice) dodged the draft. We’re all thinking of you, worrying about you. Be careful whatever you do, it would (scratched-out words that he recognized as kill me) break my heart if anything happened to you. Love from us all.
He put the letter into the hole. Thanks, Mom. Bye, Sophie.
Sophie Resnick. He hadn’t thought about her in years.
And here was something in a better-quality envelope, the envelope of someone spared the general privation of rationing, from, in fact, his insufferable physicist brother, sitting out the war in Washington with bad lungs and equations that were somehow vital to the national defense. Something from Jackie Morgenstern, a fraternity brother now adrift in the Pacific with the Navy, dated four months earlier.
Don’t even open them. Put them in the hole.
An envelope from . . .
He sat there, feeling something rise up in him, the last thing he ever expected under these circumstances: he was going to laugh. It bubbled in his chest but lost its force on the way up and finally pushed his lips open three or four times to make a voiceless phh, phh, phh.
From the moment he, like so many other North American Jews, began to hear the rumors from Europe, from the people who had made it out in time, who had taken refuge in places like Prague and Vienna—safe for a time, for a time—the first shocked reports of Kristallnacht, the second- and third-hand rumors of the trains packed with Jews heading who knew where, that began to circulate among Jews around the globe in a long and long-ignored cry of anguish and stifled rage—from that moment, Morris had only one desire: to go to war as an American. To be in the front lines, in the very teeth of the machine that would chew Hitler’s beasts like tender steak and spit them into the cities of Germany.
But he was born in Canada. He’d lived in the United States for fifteen years, he was finishing medical school at Columbia University in New York, he regarded himself as a New Yorker, but he wasn’t a citizen. When America finally entered the war, he tried to enlist in the Army. He was turned down. He tried again and was turned down again. It got to the point where the people at the recruiting office would shake their heads and laugh when he came in. At last he took a train to Canada and enlisted, was accepted immediately, and was assigned to a theater of war in France and Belgium where he’d be fighting beside and with the Americans.
And there he was, eighteen months later, exhausted, filthy, freezing, huddled in a barn, trying to destroy his identity before the Germans arrived, opening an official US Government envelope to read, Greetings from the President. Forwarded to him through a succession of stateside addresses, redirected to Canada, and floated across the Atlantic to no-man’s-land somewhere near the border between France and Belgium, here at last was his official notice to report for service in the American Army.
He wanted to laugh again, but the heaviness in his chest wouldn’t let him. He let the letter fall into the hole, looking down at it while the impulse of laughter turned into something heavier and colder. He retrieved his mother’s letter, folded it, and slipped it into his breast pocket. Then he reached up and took off Henry Lee Willis’s dog tags, put them into the hole on top of his papers, and covered it up, sprinkling some straw on the patch of bare, soft dirt. He slipped his own tags over his head, feeling their cold weight on the back of his neck, and with a grunt of weariness got to his feet. He was Morris Stempel again, and as Morris Stempel, he thought, he’d face whatever was coming.
The air around his ears seemed to crackle with the sound of rifle fire, now even closer than before. Morris went to the door of the barn and peered out into the fog. It had a new feature: a shell-like, silvery paling to the east. The moon, beginning to show her face.
More firing from the left (the east, he corrected himself), closer still. The darkness had thinned enough for him to see the house, and, looking at it, he thought, It’ll be either shelled or searched. We’d be better off in a hole.
But his friends were in there, so he picked his way over the frozen ground toward the light in the window.
22
The Coveted Serious Professional Size
I was thinking about the first part of Shlomo’s story, up through Morris’s decision to reclaim his identity, as I sat under the counter in the abandoned record store, waiting out the final security check before the two inside guards left for the night, abdicating security, such as it was, to the outdoor crew, who were supposed to cruise the parking lot and circle the building twice an hour. According to Wally, they were more likely to park at the far end of the lot and go to sleep in their car. Usually with a bottle of something.
