Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“Who is Bonnie Parker?” she said.

“A beautiful outlaw woman,” I said. “She was my first love. I ended up shooting a bullet through the back of her automobile while she was in it.”

For the first time I saw Rosita smile.

I suspect it was foolish to be musing upon the allure of a young woman when there was a possibility that we might be blown into bits in a snowy, tree-lined gulch in the heart of a medieval forest. But the prospect of death sometimes creates an interlude when time stops and you see a portrait of what existence should be like rather than what it is. The artillery crews began firing for effect, the 105 rounds arcing into the fields, blowing craters in the earth that boiled and hissed on the rims and rained dirt clods on the snow. Pine and I each grabbed Rosita by an arm and labored up the gulch, the 105s marching through the forest, smacking down like Neptune’s net on all of us, Jew and Gentile, German and American. Inside the roar of the explosions, I think I shouted out my mother’s name.

WHEN IT STOPPED, the entire countryside was totally silent, as though we had been struck deaf. We were on the northern tip of the woods and could not see any German troops or hear any vehicles. The sky was pink and blue, the clouds puffy and white. The farmhouse Pine had seen the previous night was built of fieldstones and squared timbers that were notched and pegged and stained almost black by age and smoke from stubble fires. There were no animals in sight; sunlight was shining through the barn walls. The windows of the house were dark, the chimney powdered with frost, a snowdrift piled against the front door.

“What do you want to do, Lieutenant?” Pine asked.

The wind was blowing hard, enough to cover our footprints. I went first, my .45 drawn. I pulled open the cellar door and went down the steps into the darkness. When I lit a match, I saw a wooden icebox against one wall, the kind many people owned when I was growing up in Depression-era Texas. Inside the box were salted fish wrapped in newspaper, a big round of cheese, and two smoked sausages that must have weighed five pounds apiece. Pine and Rosita came down the stone steps and pulled the door shut behind them. “Welcome to the Lone Star Café,” I said.

We ate until we thought we’d pass out.

ROSITA TOLD US her father had been a linguist and professor of classical studies at the University of Madrid. He had also been a member of the Popular Front, and after the fall of Madrid, he and his wife and Rosita and her little brother walked across the Pyrenees into France with members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. In late 1943 the family was arrested by the Gestapo. The father’s name was on a list of suspected Communists, and he either died in a jail cell or was tortured to death; the mother and the boy were packed into a freight car bound for Buchenwald and never seen again. Rosita was selected for duty in a camp whorehouse.

“Maybe your mother and the boy made it through,” Pine said. He was sitting against a wood post, his stomach full, his eyes sleepy. “It’s not going to be long before the Russians are in Berlin. You can pert’ near count on it.”

“My brother was killed the second day after his arrival. My mother died three weeks later.”

“How could you know that?” he asked.

“An SS colonel checked. He wanted to impress me with his honesty and his access to information. He had me play piano at a dinner he gave. He wanted me to be his mistress. He poured me a glass of wine when he told me what he had learned of my family.”

“What did you do?” Pine said.

“I spat the wine in his face,” she replied.

We heard heavy footsteps on the wood floor immediately above our heads. We sat frozen in the dark, breathing through our mouths, looking up the stairs. Then the door opened. A tall man stood on the landing, a lantern in his left hand, its oily yellow glow bouncing on our faces. A Schmeisser submachine gun hung on a strap from his right shoulder; his thick fingers, half-mooned with dirt, were clutched on the pistol grip. Rosita stood up, her hands in the air, and spoke to him in German. He walked halfway down the wood steps, lifting the lantern higher. He was wearing snow-caked boots and corduroy trousers and a leather coat seamed with cracks and lined with sheep’s wool. His beard and hair were as wild as a lion’s mane. He said something in reply, his eyes blazing.

“How about a translation?” I said.

“I told him who we were and that we were sorry for entering his house without permission,” Rosita said. “I told him that Americans in large numbers would be here soon and they would reward anyone who helped us.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“That we shouldn’t have stolen from him,” she replied.

Chapter

5

OUR GLOWERING HOST turned out to be a Jehovah’s Witness named Armin Bauer. He had been jailed as a pacifist and his Mongoloid son had been gassed during Hitler’s racial purification program. Two days before our arrival, he and his wife, Charlotte, hid in a cave while the SS were in the area; they had returned home just after we took refuge in their cellar. For eight days they let us stay in their cellar and fed us and washed our clothes and heated water in pots on a woodstove so we could bathe. They gave us bottles of homemade beer and a plate of bread slices slathered with jam, treats I suspected they rarely allowed themselves. I tried to ask Armin where he had gotten the Schmeisser, but he refused to say.

Charlotte was a jolly, bovine person with upper arms as big as hams and blond braids she tied on top of her head. In view of the hardship and loss that had been imposed on her family, I was amazed at her good nature; finally, I asked her, through Rosita, about its source. She held up seven fingers and pointed at the backyard. Then she drew a finger across her throat. She looked at me and said something in German and laughed.

“She says she gave the Wehrmacht soldiers some bread and jam. With poison in it,” Rosita explained. “Seven of them are buried by the barn. She wanted to know if you’d like some more bread and jam.”

At night we heard bombers flying overhead, and sometimes we saw flashes of light on the horizon and seconds later heard a soft rumbling sound, more like distant thunder than bombs exploding. I couldn’t tell if the planes were American or British. We’d heard that the Army Air Corps had stopped conducting only daylight raids, which cost them terrible losses; like the RAF, they had commenced flying at night, lighting the target area with incendiaries.

It felt unnatural to be a spectator in the war and not a participant. We were being sheltered and cared for by people who would be summarily executed if we were discovered in their cellar. We were eating their food, burning their fuel, sleeping on the blankets and quilts they gave us, and in Rosita’s case, wearing their clothes (the wife had given her a pair of trousers, a warm jacket, kneesocks, and a cute fur hat). The cellar was warm and dry, and we could sleep as much as we wanted, or stay up late at night and talk, the way people talk around campfires when their newfound companionship allows them to put aside pretense about their lives. It was a respite that I didn’t feel I deserved. West of us, my countrymen were still dying. Sometimes when I fell asleep on my pallet with a quilt pulled over my head, the preserve jars on the cellar shelves would begin rattling, and I knew that someone who had taken my place was huddling at the bottom of a foxhole, knees pulled up in the embryonic position, trying to control his sphincter while German 88s were demonstrating what a firestorm was all about.

On the eighth night, the reverberations of the artillery shells were stronger, the clouds on the eastern horizon flickering with light from the ground. Pine was sound asleep at the back of the cellar, behind the stairs. Rosita was sitting on her pallet, her back to the wall, glancing up each time the house trembled.

“You never hear the one that gets you,” I said. “At least that’s what survivors say.”

“Is it true?”