Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“Yeah, that’s all in the file. But you know her, right? We’re talking about the same person? Rosita Lowenstein? A Spanish Jewess?”

I didn’t answer him. He opened the manila folder and removed several sheets of paper and read the top one to himself. “You don’t need this kind of trouble, partner.”

“Where is she?”

“That’s not important. Some people think our next war is going to be with the Russkies. Some people think we’d have been better off allying with the Germans in 1940 and attacking Russia. Not everybody in the camps was there because they were Jews.”

“I’m not following you,” I said.

“Did she indicate to you that she might be a Communist?”

“She said she didn’t have any use for Communists.”

“According to both British and American intelligence, her father was a Communist representative in the Spanish parliament.”

“So what?”

“She’s related to Rosa Luxemburg.”

I looked at him, my face empty, my eyes flat.

“You don’t know who that is?”

“Not offhand,” I lied.

“She was a German Communist known as Red Rosa. A bunch of brownshirts beat her to death and threw her body in a river. Red Rosa’s mother was named Löwenstein. That girl you toted for miles probably gave you TB. Don’t let her mess you up twice, son.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“At a displaced persons camp not far from Nancy. She’s probably trying to get to Palestine. That’s how the Brits became interested in her.”

“How can I contact her?”

The major replaced the sheaf of papers in the manila folder and rolled the folder into a cone. He tapped me on the chest with it. “They’ll make mincemeat of you, boy. There’s justification for their actions, too. We didn’t fight a war in two theaters so Red spies could infest our system and use our constitutional guarantees to destroy us. These people are vermin.”

“Say that again?”

His eyes went away from mine, his cheeks pooling with color. He got up to go. “I’ve got to run,” he said. He picked up my hand from the bed and shook it. “I get hot-blooded sometimes. I suspect you had sexual congress with the Lowenstein woman and feel you owe her. Do the smart thing. Go back home and be a war hero. Smile a lot. Be humble. People will love you for it. Don’t get them mad at you.”

“You called her vermin? Or did I misunderstand?”

He put his aviator glasses back on. “I hope she’s worth it. Come see me in San Antone if you want to learn the insurance business.”

IN OCTOBER, UPON my discharge from the hospital, I went to the displaced persons camp east of Nancy, close to the German border. I had written perhaps ten requests for information abou

t Rosita Lowenstein to the camp’s administration, but I had never received a reply. When I arrived, I understood why. Many of the people housed there looked like shells of people. Many had numbers tattooed on their left forearm. Some stared through the wire fence with the vacant expressions of schizophrenics. Their common denominator seemed to be a pathological form of detachment; they seemed to have no continuity as a group, as though they didn’t know one another and didn’t care to. I saw none who appeared to be mothers with children, or children with mothers, or husbands with wives. I suspected that many of them were ridden with guilt because they had survived and their loved ones had not; I suspected that many of them would never tell anyone of the deeds they had witnessed in the camps or the deeds they themselves had committed when they were forced to choose between survival and perishing.

I saw a man wearing a white shirt with blown sleeves. His arms were spread on the fence wire as he stared into my face. His eyes were as white and shiny as the skin of a peeled hard-boiled egg, the pupils like distorted ink drops, his hair black and curly and uncut, his skin leathery, his teeth showing in either defiance or fear. He reminded me of the Christlike figure in the Goya painting titled The Third of May 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid. As a matter of politeness, I said hello. He made no reply. His chin was tilted upward, a question mark in the middle of his face, as though he were daring me to explain what had happened to him. I tried to hold his gaze but couldn’t. I walked away, his recrimination hanging on me like sackcloth.

Rosita was nowhere to be seen. “Where is she?” I asked the clerk in the administration building.

“She left last week,” he said.

“Where to?”

The clerk was sitting behind a vintage typewriter, his desk piled with paper. He was an international relief worker and spoke English with a British accent. “Are you a family member?”

“No. I pulled her out of a stack of dead bodies and carried her through an artillery barrage. I hid in a cellar with her for eight days.”