The Japanese Lover(37)
It was the time of year when the students held wild farewell parties at the university. Thanks to the music, alcohol, and dancing, Alma forgot about the sinister shadow she had imagined, until the Friday before her graduation. She had spent most of the night in a mad whirl, drinking too much and keeping herself on her feet thanks to cocaine—neither of which did her much good. At three in the morning, a rowdy group of students in a convertible dropped her off outside her dorm. Stumbling, disheveled, and carrying her shoes in one hand, Alma rummaged for the key in her handbag but, before she could find it, fell to her knees and brought up the entire contents of her stomach. The dry retching went on for several minutes, while tears coursed down her cheeks. Eventually she tried to get to her feet, covered in sweat and with her stomach heaving. She was shivering and groaning in despair. All of a sudden a pair of rough hands clamped on her arms, and she could feel herself being lifted and held upright.
“Alma Mendel, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
She did not recognize the voice from the telephone. She doubled up as another wave of nausea hit her, but the claws only dug deeper.
“Let me go, let me go!” she moaned, kicking and screaming.
A slap to the face sobered her up momentarily, and she glimpsed the outline of a man, a dark face slashed with lines that looked like scars, a shaven head. For some strange reason she felt an enormous sense of relief. She closed her eyes and succumbed to the ghastliness of her drunken state and the danger of being in the iron grip of a stranger who had just slapped her.
At seven that Saturday morning, Alma awoke to find herself wrapped in a rough, scratchy blanket on the backseat of a car. She smelled of vomit, urine, cigarettes, and alcohol. She had no idea where she was and couldn’t remember a thing about what had happened the night before. She sat up and tried to rearrange her clothes but discovered she had lost her dress and petticoat: she was in her bra, underpants, and garter belt. Her stockings were full of holes, and she had no shoes on. Merciless bells were ringing inside her head; she was cold, her mouth was parched, and she was very afraid. She lay down again and curled up in a ball, moaning and calling out to Nathaniel.
Moments later, she felt somebody shaking her. Opening her eyes with great difficulty, she tried to focus and eventually made out the silhouette of a man who had opened the car door and was leaning over her.
“Coffee and aspirin. That will help a bit,” he said, handing her a paper cup and two pills.
“Leave me, I have to go,” she said thickly, trying to sit up.
“You can’t go anywhere like that. Your family will be here in a few hours. Your graduation ceremony is tomorrow. Drink the coffee. And in case you’re wondering, I’m your brother, Samuel.”
This was the resurrection of Samuel Mendel, eleven years after he had died in the north of France.
* * *
After the war, Isaac Belasco had received convincing proof of the fate that had befallen Alma’s parents in a Nazi death camp near the town of Treblinka in northeastern Poland. Unlike the Americans elsewhere, the Russians did not document the camp’s liberation, and officially little was known of what had happened in that hell, but the Jewish Agency calculated that 840,000 people had perished there between July 1942 and October 1943, 800,000 of whom were Jews. As for Samuel Mendel, Isaac established that his plane was shot down in the occupied zone of France, and according to the British war records, there were no survivors. By then Alma had heard nothing about her family for several years and assumed they were dead long before her uncle confirmed it. When she was told, Alma did not weep for them, as might have been expected, because during that time she had learned to control her feelings to such an extent she had lost the ability to express them. Isaac and Lillian thought it necessary to bring closure to this tragedy and took Alma with them to Europe. In the French village where Samuel’s plane was shot down, they put up a memorial plaque with his name and the dates of his birth and death. They did not obtain permission to visit Poland, which was then under Soviet control; Alma was to make that pilgrimage many years later. The war had finished four years earlier, but Europe was still in ruins, and huge groups of people were still wandering around in search of a homeland. Alma concluded that her entire lifetime would not be enough to pay for the privilege of being her family’s only survivor.
Shaken by this stranger’s declaration that he was her brother, Samuel, Alma sat up in the car seat and gulped down the coffee and aspirins in three swallows. The man looked nothing like the brother she had seen off at the Danzig quayside, a youth with rosy cheeks and a playful expression. Her real brother was that blurred memory, not this person standing beside her, lean, dry, with hard eyes and a cruel mouth, sunburned skin, and a face lined with deep furrows and a couple of scars.
“How do I know you’re my brother?”
“You don’t. But I wouldn’t be wasting my time with you if I weren’t.”
“Where are my clothes?”
“At the laundry. They’ll be ready in an hour. That gives us time to talk.”
Samuel told her that the last thing he saw was the earth from above, as his plane went into a tailspin. He had no time to parachute out, he was sure of that, otherwise the Germans would have found him, and he couldn’t explain clearly how he managed not to be killed when his plane crashed and burst into flames. He guessed he must have been thrown out of his seat and ended up in the tops of some trees, dangling down. The enemy patrol found the body of his copilot and didn’t search any further. He was rescued by a couple of members of the resistance, who, when they saw he was circumcised, handed him on to a Jewish group. For months they hid him in caves, stables, basements, abandoned factories, and the houses of kind people willing to help, often changing his hiding place until his broken bones were mended and he was no longer a burden but could join the group as a fighter. The mist in his brain took far longer to clear than his bones did to knit. From the uniform he was wearing when they found him, they knew he came from England. He understood English and French, but answered in Polish; it would be months before he recovered the other languages he spoke fluently. Since they did not know his name, his companions decided to call him Scarface, but he eventually chose to name himself Jean Valjean like the protagonist of Victor Hugo’s novel, which he read during his convalescence. He fought with his colleagues in a guerrilla war that seemed to be doomed. The German forces were so efficient, their arrogance so immense, and their thirst for power and blood so insatiable that the acts of sabotage Samuel’s group carried out did not even scratch the monster’s armor plating. They lived in the shadows, moving about like desperate rats and with a constant sense of failure and pointlessness, and yet they carried on, because there was no choice. They greeted one another with a single word: victory. They said farewell with that same word: victory.