Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

"What about Martin?" I asked her, when she signaled we were secure.

"We never worry about Martin," she said. "Because he is safe?"

"Because it could drive one to lunacy. Regarde." Across the field, Henri and Christian were ambling toward us, both so thoroughly relieved of their prior grimness that I failed to recognize them at first. They had ditched their rifles to appear more innocuous, and approached in their muddy boots and soaked overalls, smiling broadly. Henri, it turned out, lacked most of his upper teeth. They hugged Gita first, then both embraced Biddy and me. Henri virtually wrested me from my feet, and isolated within his powerful grasp and his warm husky scent, I felt the first stirrings of pride at the magnitude of our achievement and my own small role in it.

"We showed them," Henri said in French. The way back to the shepherd's but was safe, he said. There they had built a fire and filled a cistern with water from a nearby spring, and we all sat on the ground, drinking and warming ourselves, while we waited for Antonio and Martin. As we recounted the operation in a jumble of conversation, every spark of shared memory seemed to make each of us hilarious, but there was truly only one joke: we were alive.

When I was warmer, I hiked up my woolen pants leg to see what I had done to my knee. There was a gash, only an inch wide but deep, a smile amid a large purple welt. I had no clue how it had happened. Prodding the edges of the wound, I could feel nothing inside.

"For this a Purple Heart?" Gita asked Biddy in English, when she saw me toying with the injury. I had found my first-aid kit in my field-jacket pocket and Gita helped me wash the cut with a little of the gauze in there. Across the cut, she dumped a dusting of sulfa powder out of a packet, then skillfully fashioned a bandage from the remaining gauze. Wrapping my knee, she told me that it would be a week or so before I danced in the Follies again.

Your nursing skills are impressive, Mademoiselle Lodz. How were you trained?"

"In Marseilles, in the hospital, I watched and learned."

"Is that what drew you to the hospital, a vocation for nursing?"

"Far from it. I wanted to steal opium." She smiled. regally. More than anything, Gita Lodz enjoyed being shocking, and in me, she had easy prey.

"You were a drug fiend?"

"A bit. To dull the pain. Principally, I sold to opium dens. War is very hard on those people, Dubin. I survived on their desperation-until I met Robert. But I am a good nurse. I have what is required, a strong stomach and a soft heart. Even someone whom I would despise were he in good health moves me as an invalid."

"A bit of a paradox, is it not? To be a soldier and a nurse?

Her small shoulders turned indifferently.

"I told you, Dubin, I do not fight to kill. Or conquer.

"So why, then?"

She pulled my pants leg down to my boot and smoothed it there. Then she sat back on her haunches.

"I will tell you how it has been with me, Dubin. I have fought because the Nazis are wrong and we are right and the Nazis must lose. But I also fight death. I see it in the barrel of every gun, in the figure of every Boche, and when they are defeated, I think each time: Today I may live. Tu comprends?" She finished off by giving her full brows a comic wiggle, but her coffee eyes had been lethally intent. I knew she thought she had told me something remarkable, but I did not really grasp it. Right now I felt the thrill of surviving in all my limbs, as if I'd acquired the strength of ten.

"I fear I am too dense to fully understand, Mademoiselle."

"No, Dubin, it does not mean you are slow-witted." She stood with a sealed smile. "It means you are lucky."

The plan called for us to remain in the shepherd's but until we had all reassembled and the local reseau could assure safe passage. Christian wandered down to the farmhouse to see if there had been any warnings.

"All quiet," he said. Word was that Patton's Army was advancing. The Germans had more pressing business than to hunt a few stray commandos on friendly ground.

Antonio arrived about half an hour later and the same circle of embraces was repeated, despite the fact that his face and uniform were pasted with mud.

"Nom de nom," he said. "What an explosion! I was more than a kilometer away and it drove me into the riverbank so deep I thought I would suffocate. When I looked up there was not a tree standing for five hundred meters from the tunnel."

His account of the blast made me more concerned about Martin, but Gita refused to worry. Just as she said, an hour and a half along, Martin appeared. His pack and helmet were gone and the knee was torn out of his trousers. He was entirely soaked, but cheerful. Whistling, he came sauntering across the field.

When OSS had originally planned the operation in the fall, their engineers had calculated that Martin would survive the explosion by jumping from the trestle into the Seille and swimming away in a sprint. Knowing the timing, he would dive for the bottom just in advance of the blast, where the waters' depths would protect him from the plummeting debris.

But that scheme had been drawn up before the record rains of the autumn. The Seille, normally a slow-moving canal, was ten feet over its usual level and now a rushing river. That was why Martin had secured the ropes, so that he could use them to keep the current from carrying him back toward the tunnel. The theory was no match for reality when the shafts blew.

"Damn stupid," he said. "Lucky I didn't rip my arms off." With the explosion, the ropes tore through his hands, burning both palms despite his gloves, and lifting Martin from the water. He plunged back down farther on, but he was too dazed to get a footing or a handhold and was driven by the current at least a hundred yards until he was stopped by a dam of mud and rock that the explosion had dropped into the Seille almost directly opposite the point of attack. Swimming to the west bank, he crawled in a rush up the hill, expecting to be fired on any second, but from the top, he saw no soldiers moving amid the lingering smoke. The garrison appeared to have been wiped out to a man.

"What a beautiful locomotive," said Martin as we went over the events yet again. "Hochdruck by Henschel." In the midst of his recollection, his gaiety and wonder swiftly passed. "It was bad business about those boys," he said abruptly. No one added more about those deaths.

After walking through another field, we arrived at the road, where an old farmer rolled up on a horse-drawn flatbed loaded with newly harvested grapes. With their dusty skins, they looked like high clouds in a darkening sky. Martin instructed us to wade in and work our way down to the wagon bed to hide. Biddy and I went first. I could feel the grapes burst under my weight and their juice soaking my uniform. I positioned myself on my side to protect my knee, then heard Gita's rasp as she swam down through the bunches. Suddenly she was on top of me, her leg over mine, her face and torso some short distance away, the crushed fruit leaking out between us, but she made no effort to move, nor did I, and we remained that way all the time it took the wagon to clop back to the Comtesse de Lemolland's.

At the Comtesse de Lemolland's there was a celebration. The explosion had resounded even here and the giant flames, phosphorescent orange, shot a mile into the sky. In the house, the sole question was whether we had survived. The Comtesse would not consider the possibility that we had not, and once the lighting fixtures had stopped rocking, she ordered preparations for une grande fete. By the time we arrived, several dozen local residents, all with resistance affiliations, had gathered in the courtyard. It was the liberation scenes all over again-embraces, shouting, bottles of wine and cognac for each hand. A whole lamb was being roasted over an outdoor pit beside the stables. The seven of us-Biddy, Henri, Christian, Antonio, Gita, Martin, and I-stood shoulder to shoulder amid the grapes, waving our fists, praising France and America, to unending laughter and applause. It was 3:00 p. M. and Biddy and I might have reached HQ by nightfall, but I gave no thought to that. With my arm around Gita's slim waist, the other hand mounted on Biddy's wide shoulder, I felt an exhilaration and freedom that were new in my life.