Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

"Major Martin is quite correct in his assessment," I told the Comtesse. I bowed again, but felt pained to realize that this frail old woman had done far more to win the war than I ever would.

"I am no one," she said simply, "but if you insist that I am as important as all that, Lieutenant, I must take advantage and insist that you and your companion honor me by joining us at supper." Without awaiting a reply, she instructed Sophie, the servant who was at the stove, to set two more plates.

I went looking for Bidwell, whom I found outside, leaning on the jeep and shooting pictures. In the bright daylight, looking back at the Comtesse's little castle, I felt as if I'd just left an amusement park.

"Quite a bunch, aren't they?" I asked. They were all captivating, the gallant Comtesse, and fierce little Mademoiselle Lodz, and of course Martin. "I think the Major is the first actual war hero I've met," I said.

From Biddy I received one of his sour looks, a step from insubordination.

"No disrespect, Lieutenant, but ain't no way rightly to tell where all the malarkey ends in there, sir. Only it's plenty of it, this country boy knows that." He closed the snaps on the leather camera case. "Food smells just fine, though," he said and headed inside.

Supper at the Comtesse de Lemolland's was an idyll. In an alcove beside the kitchen, we ate at a long table of heavily varnished wood, enjoying a savory stew. It might have been veal, although there was not much meat among the root vegetables that were the main ingredients. Nevertheless, the usual French hand with food prevailed and the victuals were far tastier, if less plentiful, than even the very good rations we had at HQ. Some of my appreciation for the meal might have been due to the Comtesse's wine, newly pressed, which was poured freely. But in time I realized that the principal charm was that at the Comtesse de Lemolland's I had left the military. A civil-and civilian-atmosphere prevailed. I sat next to the old woman while she shared reflections in English on the history of the region. When we started, Biddy lingered, uncertain if he was invading the officers' mess, but Martin waved him to a chair. Sophie, who had cooked, joined us, too. The Gypsy I had seen, called Antonio, was at the far end of the table speaking in French with Peter Bettjer, a ruddy blond Belgian, who was the Operational Group's communications expert.

Last to sit was Mademoiselle Lodz, who took the empty chair on my right. Midway through the meal, I felt the weight of her gaze. She was studying me unapologetically.

"I am reflecting about you, Doo-bean," she told me in French. It was clear already that she was never going to pronounce my name any other way.

"I am delighted to know I concern you at all. What exactly is it you are thinking, Mademoiselle?"

"If you are indeed Dubinsky from Pinsk"-she puckered her lips, then stared straight at me-"vous etes juif."

So that was it. In the little fantasia of the Comtesse's home, I felt especially scalded, which my face apparently betrayed.

"This is nothing to be ashamed of," she said in French. "In my town there were many Jews. I knew them well."

"I am hardly ashamed," I said quickly.

"There are many Jewish soldiers in the American Army?"

"Some.), "And they stay among the other troops?"

"Of course. We are one nation."

"But the dark ones I see-they drive and move the equipment. The Jews do not have separate battalions like the Negroes?"

"No. It is entirely different. The blacks were slaves to some of the Americans' grandfathers, who, regrettably, have not allowed the past to die."

"And these Jew soldiers. They look like you? You have no sidelocks. Are there tsitsis beneath your garments?"

"I am not a Jew in that way."

"In my town they had only one way, Dubin. Red Yiddish?" she asked. That made the third language in which she had addressed me, and her smile revealed a dark space between her front teeth.

"Ayn bisel. Yich red besser am franzosich." My grandparents who had followed my father to the United States spoke Yiddish, but my mother and father used only English in the presence of their children, unwilling to risk hindering our development as Americans. My Yiddish was not even close to my French, as I had just told her.

"Ach mir," she answered, "ayn bisel." With me, too, a little bit.

Martin, across the table, asked her in French, "What language is that?"

"We are speaking Jewish, Robert."

"Jewish? I thought you disliked the Jews.,, She looked at him sharply. "Wrong. Stupidly wrong. This is because you will never listen to anything I say about my home. My only friends as a child were Jewish. They alone would allow me in their houses. Why would I dislike them?"

"But they spurned you."

"For a bride, Robert. It is their way."

He turned away to ask Sophie for the bread, while Mademoiselle Lodz was left to explain.

"C'est une histoire compliquee," she told me. It's a long story. "My mother, Dubin, wanted me to find a Jew to be my husband. She said, 'They are seldom drunks and rarely beat their wives.' '' Mademoiselle Lodz's mother had clearly never met Julius Klein, who lived on the third floor above us when I was a child and whose wife and children often ran for their lives while his drunken rages shook the entire building. But no Jew, of course, would marry me.

"You are a Catholic?"

"Only to a Jew. I have never set foot inside a church."

"So you felt, as the Major put it, spurned?"

She wagged her head from side to side, as if weighing the idea for the first time only now.

"The Poles were far worse. Those who regarded themselves as respectable would not even speak to my mother-including her own family. So we lived happily among the Jews. And if I'd had a Jewish husband, I would have been on the trucks beside him.

For me, in the end, it was a piece of good fortune.), "The trucks?"

"Vous m'etonnez! You do not know of this? In my town, every Jew is gone. The Nazis took them away. They are in the ghetto in Lublin, held like livestock inside fences. This has happened everywhere. France, too. In Vichy, Petain rounded up the Jews even before the Germans asked. As a Jewish soldier, you, especially, should be here fighting Hitler."

When I enlisted, my first choice was to battle Tojo and the sinister Japanese who had launched their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. As for Hitler, I knew about his ruthless war against the Jews in Germany, smashing Jewish businesses and confiscating Jewish homes, and felt a stake in bringing him down, but it was not the same as the sense of direct attack I'd experienced from the Japanese bombs on American soil.

I was disinclined to try to explain any of this to Mademoiselle Lodz. Instead, I gave my attention to Martin, who was across the table regaling Bidwell with tales of the Operational Group during the years before the invasion. To introduce Antonio and Bettjer, Martin was detailing their most entertaining success against the Nazis, which had come in a small town to the west. There vintners sold yin ordinaire by hauling it through the streets in a hogshead mounted on two wheels, from which the villagers would fill their carafes through a bunghole in the bottom. Together Antonio and Bettjer had inserted a wooden partition in one of these casks, leaving wine in the lower portion. In the upper half, Bettjer had crawled between the staves. Looking out a tiny spy hole, he radioed information to Martin on the whereabouts of a German Panzer division moving through the town, while Antonio rolled the barrel down the street so their wireless was immune to the German direction-finding trucks that crawled around the area in search of resistance transmitters.

"It was all brilliant," said Martin, "except that poor Peter literally got drunk on the fumes. When we opened the cask, he had passed out cold."