“Ah, you’re the one. She told me about you,” he said. “She’s in Marseilles.”
“Do you have an address?”
“She’s in a pension. It’s run by a Jewish relocation group.” He wrote an address on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “They have no telephone there. Do you plan to go to Marseilles?”
“Yes.”
“If I remember correctly, she leaves today or tomorrow on a freighter. It’s headed for Haifa,” he said. “Good luck. I’m sorry we were not able to help you earlier.”
“Was she sick?”
“No worse than anyone else here.”
I CAUGHT A TRAIN that night to Marseilles. There was rain all the way to the coast. The chair car was crowded and overheated from a coal-burning stove and smelled of unwashed bodies and damp wool. The dawn was bleak when we pulled into the station, the sun little more than a pewterlike glow on the horizon, the railroad ties and rails in the yards shiny with waste that had been dumped from the passenger toilets onto the tracks. I brushed my teeth and shaved with cold water in the station and hired a cab to take me to the address of the pension given me by the clerk in the displaced persons camp.
It was located four blocks from the harbor on a decrepit cobbled street where most of the buildings had been pocked by small-arms fire. I could see two large rusting freighters lying on their sides by the entrance to the harbor, their screws in the air. The pension was three stories high and made of stucco and had a dirt courtyard in back and two balconies strung with wash. I could hear children playing beyond the courtyard wall. A solitary palm tree extended above the wall, its fronds yellow and serrated by the wind.
I gave the concierge Rosita’s name and waited, my heart thudding, as though I had labored up a hillside only to discover that the air was too thin to breathe. The concierge’s body was swollen with fat, her black dress almost ripping on her hips. Her eyes were as cautious and intense as a hawk’s. “Je suis un ami,” I said.
“What do you want with her?” she replied in English.
“To see her.”
Her eyes dropped to my lieutenant’s bars. “The Americans machine-gunned my building. There were no Germans here. They robbed and destroyed the houses down the street.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Boche, les Américains, ils sont la même chose.”
She gave me a dirty look before walking heavily up the stairs, her back bent, her hand clenching tightly on the banister. A moment later, Rosita came down the stairs. She was wearing a white skirt that went to her calves, with a frill on the hem, and a lavender peasant blouse. Her hair was thick and full of lights and cut short on her neck. She looked absolutely radiant. “Hey, kid,” I said.
“Hello, Weldon,” she said. “How did you know where I was? I’ve tried since March to find you.”
“A major in my outfit told me you were in Nancy. I went there yesterday and took the train here last night.”
“Your commanding officer knew where I was?”
“Don’t worry about the major. Let’s go to breakfast,” I said.
“I leave for Palestine by boat tomorrow.”
Outside, the sun had broken through a cloud and was shining on the cobblestones, slick with rain. “We can talk about that.”
“Talk about it?” she said, looking up into my face.
“There are lots of options in this world. You have to open up your parameters. Why limit yourself to one or two choices?”
She started to speak, but I didn’t let her. I put my arm around her shoulders and walked her with me out the door and down to a café whose windows were steamed with heat.
WE HAD YOGURT and smoked fish and freshly baked bread and marmalade and rolled butter, and coffee and sugar and hot milk, all the things you didn’t believe you’d ever be able to buy again in a European café. Rosita’s skin seemed to glow in the warmth of the café. Her hair had lightened during the summer months, and the streaks of brown in it had a gold cast that made me want to reach out and touch them. “Come to Paris with me,” I said.
“I have to be on the freighter by nine A.M.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
She looked away from me and smiled. “Do you know how difficult it was to get passage on that ship?”
“What’s in Haifa?”