Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

"Well, let me say only that I intend to pay very careful attention to your answer."

"You sound like a lawyer."

We laughed.

"Martin once said you will never be content with just one man.''

"Eh, he was consoling himself. Believe me, Dubin, I know what I need to know about men. And myself with them. But one person forever? For many years that sounded to me like a prison sentence."

"May I ask? Was that perhaps your mother's influence?"

"I think not. My mother, if she had any influence, would have told me to find a fellow like you, decent and stable, and to stand by him. 'One craves peace,' she said always." She sat up into the borrowed light. Gita was more physically shy than I might have expected and I enjoyed the sight of her, her small breasts rising perfectly to their dark peaks.

"But she did not succeed herself."

"She had tried, Dubin. When she was seventeen, her looks attracted the son of a merchant, a wool seller from the city. She thought he was rich and handsome and a sophisticate and married him on impulse."

"This was Lodzka?" I tried to pronounce it correctly.

"Lodzki, yes. He was a cad, of course. He drank, he had other women, he was stingy with her. They fought like minks, even battled with their fists, and naturally she took the worst of it. One day she left him. She returned to Pilzkoba and announced that her husband was dead of influenza. Soon she had suitors. She had been married again for a month, when it was discovered that Lodzki was still alive. It was a terrible scandal. She was lucky they did not hang her. She always said she would have left, but it would have given everyone in Pilzkoba too much satisfaction." Gita stopped with a wistful smile. "So," she said.

"So," I answered, and drew her close again. One craves peace.

The next day, late in the afternoon while I was on the wards visiting, a private from the signal office found me with a telegram. Teedle had finally replied.

Seventh Armored Division captured Oflag XII-D outside Saint-Vith yesterday a. M. STOP Confirms Major Martin alive in prison hospital STOP Proceed at once STOP Arrest

I had been with Corporal Harzer, the soldier who had lost his foot, when the messenger put the yellow envelope in my hand.

"Captain, you don't look good," he said.

"No, Harzer. I've seen the proverbial ghost."

I located Bidwell. We'd head out first thing tomorrow. Then I walked around Bastogne, up and down the snowy streets and passageways. I knew I would tell Gita. How could I not? But I wanted to contend with myself beforehand. I had no doubt about her loyalties. She would desert me. If she did, she did, I told myself again and again, but I was already reeling at the prospect. I concentrated for some time on how to put this to her, but in the event, I found I had worked myself into one of those anxious states in which my only goal was to get it over with. I waited for her to emerge from the ward on which she was working and simply showed her the telegram.

I watched her study it. She had left the ward smoking, and as the hand that held the cigarette threshed again and again through her curls, I wondered briefly if she would set fire to the nurse's bonnet on her head. Her lips moved as she struggled with the English. But she understood enough. Those coffee-dark eyes of hers, when they found me, held a hint of alarm.

"II est vivant?"

I nodded.

"These are your orders?"

I nodded again.

"We talk tonight," she whispered.

And I nodded once more.

It was well past midnight before I realized she was not coming, and then I lay there with the light on overhead, trying to cope. My hurt was immeasurable. With Martin alive, she could not bring herself to be with me. That was transparent. Their bond, whatever the truth of their relationship, was more powerful than ours.

In the morning, as Bidwell packed the jeep, I sought her out to say goodbye. I had no idea whether I could contain my bitterness, or if I would break down and beg her to take me instead.

"Gita?" asked Soeur Marie, the nun in charge, when I inquired of her whereabouts. "Elle est partie."

How long had she been gone, I asked. Since dark yesterday, the Sister told me.

It took nine hours to reach Saint-Vith and I realized well in advance what we would find. The MP at Oflag XII-D said that a Red Cross nurse, accompanied by two French attendants, had come hours ago to transport Major Martin to a local hospital. We followed his directions there, where, as I had anticipated, no one knew a thing about the nurse, the attendants, or Robert Martin.

When I was a senior in high school, I was desperately in love with Nona Katz, the woman I finally married six years later.

The mere thought of parting from her for college left me desolate. I had been admitted to the Honors Program at the U., here in Kindle County. Nona, on the other hand, was never much of a student. She had been lucky to get into State, originally called. State Agricultural College, which was not an institution in the same circle of heaven as the more famous university to the north. Not to be overlooked either was the fact that my admission to the U. Honors Program included a tuition waiver and a $1,500 stipend for room and board. My parents used endless ploys to get me to go there. From Kindle County, it was no more than a five-hour drive to State, they said, even in winter weather. They promised to help me buy a used car and pay my phone bills.

"You don't understand," I told them. "You don't understand what this feels like."

"Of course not," said my mother. "How could we understand? Ours must have been an arranged marriage.

"Ma, don't be sarcastic."

"It is you, Stewart, who does not understand. I met your father at perhaps the darkest time humanity has ever known. We fully comprehend the wonder of these feelings. That is not, however, all there is to consider."

"Ma, what else matters? What's more important than love?"

My father cleared his throat and took a rare part in our debates.

"Love in the form you are talking about, Stewart, does not remain unchanged forever. You cannot lead your life as if you will never have other concerns."

I was thunderstruck by this remark. First, because my mother looked on approvingly. And second, by the sheer notion that Dad was asserting so coolly. Nona-the discovery that there was some complementary principle in the world-had lifted the stinking fog from my morbid adolescence. My father's blase assertion that love would somehow evaporate was like telling me I was going to be thrown back into a dungeon.

"You're wrong," I said to him.

"Well, consider that I may be right. Please, Stewart. Love in time takes a form more solid but less consuming. And thank the Lord! No one would ever leave the bedroom. There is work to do, families to raise. It changes, Stewart, and you have to be prepared for what happens next in life."

I did not hear much after that. It was the "thank the Lord" that always stuck with me, evidencing my father's frank relief that he had been able to escape from something as messy and demanding as passion.

And yet it was that selfsame guy I had to contemplate in the arms of Gita Lodz, so nuts with lust that he was rutting in a barn with the farm animals, and then, even more sensationally, getting it on in the bed of a nun. Yet I didn't feel as much discomfort with these scenes as I might have expected. For one thing, when you're big enough to think, on bad days, of replacing your bathroom scale with the ones they use at highway weigh stations, you accept one of life's most cheerful truths. Everybody fucks. Or at least they want to. Notwithstanding American advertisers, it's a universal franchise. The bald truth was that after several months of separation, Gita Lodz struck me as a pretty hot dish. Like my father, I've always been attracted to small women-Nona is barely five feet.