Jim - Six.

Jim

            The week after the assembly was a whirlwind. I barely saw Hersch. It was like he disappeared into a cloud of planning and guns. They needed him everywhere at once, for strategy meetings and weapons inventory and intelligence updates. The whole thing was way more complicated than any of us could have imagined. Hersch and Peter were quick to assign us all to different positions within the Resistance.

            Rebecca already had her job; she was an important player the ground combat team, but her position of respect in the community meant she was also in charge of outreach and, most importantly, would lead the non-fighters through the escape route. Gabe, with virtually no experience in any kind of fighting, was assigned to the rooftop squad. Essentially a sniper, if he could just learn to fire the gun. I think Hersch put him there as a favor to Erich, to keep Gabe off the ground and out of the fighting, though I was still unwilling to consider that any one of us would actually die in this fight. And to Peter’s loud and often curse-filled objection, Hersch assigned me to strategy during the planning stage and medical aid for the day of the uprising. Peter questioned, and rightly so, how I could possibly assist in military strategy. Hersch defended his decision; he said I was smart, really smart. Smarter than I looked, at least. I was both proud and terrified of his confidence in me.

            Berezovsky made it astoundingly clear that he did not appreciate being saddled with me in the first days of the Resistance. I shadowed him in low-level strategy meetings: smuggling, evading the guards, that kind of thing. He wouldn’t let me go near the planning for the day of the actual uprising. I was afraid to ask, but apparently if I wanted any influence at all I would have to earn it.

            I couldn’t tell you a single thing I learned that week, and I certainly didn’t contribute anything. I tried to keep up at first, but this was not my world. I had a handful of Polish at my disposal, and if Peter wouldn’t translate I was screwed. He dragged me from dark back room to dark back room, where every day there was a new collection of Resistance members who could tell I was utterly useless. I couldn’t have been less helpful if they’d cut my arms and legs off.

            After a week of having Peter haul worthless carcass around the ghetto, I was selfishly relieved when he got sent out on the labor team. He left me alone in Hersch’s rooms to sort food rations and man the radio. The communication system in the underground was complicated as hell. There were six or seven radios that they had stolen from the soldiers over the last few years. Someone who understood the technology had patched the communicators together on a frequency the soldiers didn’t use. I wasn’t about to admit that I didn’t know how it worked. The system was dangerous and unreliable, though. There was always the risk that a soldier would pick up their signal, and messages didn’t always go through. Peter had left the central radio with me, and my job that day was to make sure the right people were getting through to each other. Someone with any knowledge of radio technology or the ability to speak Polish would have been vastly more qualified for the job.

            I had nothing to do. Gabe had come by earlier, before he had to go to shooting practice. Apparently he was actually doing well, though only time would tell, since they couldn’t waste ammunition and therefore couldn’t actually shoot the guns. If invisible Nazis attacked us, Gabe would be good to go. He asked if I had seen Erich, trying his best to sound casual. But I hadn’t. Peter and Hersch had reached an agreement that kept Erich out of the direct Resistance preparations, but allowed him to come in for a status report twice a week. Those meetings were with Hersch, though. I hadn’t seen him since the rally. I wished he would visit Gabe. What was the use of staying away from him, this late in the game? Surely he knew his pretending he never slept with Gabe ship had sailed.

            After a while, Gabe left me alone with my menial jobs. Sorting rations meant separating bread and onions into crates, a task that Peter apparently thought would take me all day. After I finished, I looked restlessly around for something to do. I wished I could read, but all Hersch’s books were in Polish. Hopefully the bag I had left in the safe house outside the wall would come through the underground soon. Gabe had gotten his things, and a damn violin to boot. I had to be next.

            I reached absentmindedly into the pocket of my coat, searching for the mouthful of bread I had leftover from breakfast. But instead my fingers brushed against the folded paper buried deep in the pocket. The only thing I had carried with me into the ghetto. Knowing I was making a mistake, I pulled the crumpled letter out.

            The letter was more than a year old, dirty and creased with the ink running together. It was the last letter my parents sent me, before I left. I was almost twenty-one now, and I hadn’t seem my parents since they put me on the plane to England when I was eighteen. For a year and a half, their letters had become sadder and more desperate. They knew I had been hurt in the bombing, but they couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t come home. I never told them about Rebecca and the boys. They didn’t know I was in Poland. I thought I probably would never see them again. The letter reminded me that they didn’t expect to see me again either.

            Dear James,

            I don’t know what to say to you, son. I understand why you won’t tell us why you won’t come home. I know what a bombing does to a man, James. Believe me, I know. War took me away before you were even born. You know that. But I went home. Scars and all, I went home. And now it’s time for you to come home. You’re missing your whole life, son. What could be worth missing your whole life?

            This is the last time I’ll ask you to come back. It hurts your mother too much when you let her letters go unanswered. Until you decide to come home, you won’t hear from us. But we’re ready for you. Your bed and your books and your catcher’s mitt are all still here, for when you decide to come home. I don’t know what else I can do.

Love,

Dad

            My father had never said that many words to me in person. He was great dad, but not a sentimental one. He’d been in the war, before I was born. He didn’t talk much about it. He wasn’t any kind of scary ex-military kind of guy, the way Erich talked about his dad. He was as tall and skinny as me and he sold insurance. But once he took me to the cemetery. I was probably about eleven, and we drove out to see my grandparents in La Crosse. He pulled off the road and took me out to this little country cemetery. We stood in front of two plain white veteran’s headstones, right next to each other, and told me about his two best buddies, who died when a grenade went off in their foxhole in France. Adam and Joe, boys he’d gone to high school with and enlisted with.

            He went home when the time came. Why couldn’t I? Even I didn’t understand. He’d been younger than me when he watched his friends get blown out of the foxhole. So why was it so hard for me, when no one had even died. What made me so goddamn important, so goddamn special that I couldn’t go home without my happy ending?

            The letter reminded me that this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. I was supposed to be home, playing ball with my pals, going to school in Madison or Minneapolis, not starving and freezing on the other side of the world. I remembered laughing at a letter from my parents, back at Wellington’s. I thought they were crazy for worrying.

            I should have written him back. Would knowing where I was make it better or worse? Before I left, I thought they wouldn’t want to know. Now I wasn’t sure. If none of us made it out of the ghetto, no one would ever know what happened to me. I had been too confident went I left. I didn’t know that going to Poland would essentially amount to a suicide mission.

            I heard someone coming up from the tunnels and rushed to wipe my eyes. Crying alone at the table didn’t exactly reflect well on my courage. I still didn’t always recognize Rebecca right away; somehow I always expected the put-together, made-up girl from Wellington’s. I felt bad every time I did.

            “Hey,” I said, trying to sound casual. I didn’t want her to know I was crying, either. “How are you?”

            She dusted off her hands, “I’m here for the onion rations, if you’re done. Do you want to help me get them down to the…” She gave me a long look. Nothing ever got past Rebecca. “What is it?”

            I wasn’t sure if I should tell her. I never really felt entitled to talk about my family around her or the boys. My parents were alive and pretty average, and talking about them around three orphans and Erich never felt right. But when I racked my brain for another reasonable excuse for crying, I came up blank. “It’s nothing,” I said as evenly as I could, “just an old letter from home.”

            Rebecca pursed her lips and looked at the paper in my hands. “Let me see.” I handed it over, keeping my eyes on my feet. She sat on the arm of my chair, resting her elbows on her knees as she skimmed the letter.

            She seemed prepared to disregard my problems, as it would have been completely reasonable to do. “Do they know you’re here?” I shook my head. When I looked up at Rebecca, I was shocked my how sad she looked. “Oh James, you never talk about them.”

             “They’re nothing special,” I said, fully aware of how constricted my voice sounded.  She was making it hard to pull myself together.  “Not, I mean, not like yours.”

            “Please,” Rebecca sighed, “Herschel and I are not the only people allowed to miss our parents.”

            Well that brought on the waterworks. I pressed a fist to my mouth and braced myself against the big, blubbery sobs that burst out of me. I heard Rebecca give a deep, pitying sigh, and then I felt her hand on the back of my neck. She just kind of rubbed, right where my hair started. It was about the nicest thing that had ever happened to me. When I didn’t stop crying, she let me put my head down in her lap.

            “I’m not supposed to be here,” was all I could sob out.

            “I know.” Rebecca ran her fingers through my hair. “No one is supposed to be here.” I was being ridiculous, of course. As if I somehow deserved to be in that place less than any of the people who were trapped there.

            Peter was right to hate me, whining like a little kid when he would have traded places with me in a heartbeat. I had freedom, the most valuable thing in the world, and I threw it away. I tried to articulate this to Rebecca, but all that came out was, “Berez.. Berezovsky… he hates…”

            “Hey,” with sudden force, Rebecca tipped my chin up, making me look at her, “you are as brave as Peter. And as good, and as strong. Look!” I had tried to look away from her, foolishly. What she was saying contradicted everything I knew to be true about myself. “Peter cannot love like you can. He can sacrifice for loyalty, or revenge, but never for love.”

            I looked sheepishly at her. “You know this?” I panicked internally for the long seconds before she replied, terrified of the answer that I knew was coming. The way she talked, comparing me to Peter, was evidence enough for my worst nightmare. Rivka. “You… you love him?”

            I honestly expected her to hit me; she’d worked so hard to hide what was obviously there between her and Peter. I had braced to be slapped when she stroked my cheek instead, looking suddenly very sad. “You forgot already, what I told you? James, you are the only boy I have ever loved.”

            “Then why don’t you love me now?” I felt like a pansy as soon as I said it. I was acting like a dumb lovesick girl in a movie. But it was the question I had been dying to ask for weeks. My outburst apparently knocked Rebecca off the chair, and she stood firmly in front of me.

            “Peter and I were together when we were young,” she said, not exactly angrily, but frankly and forcefully, no longer sugarcoating for me. “After Wellington’s, he was safe and familiar, and I slept with him for a few more months, too.”

            I felt like I’d been socked in the stomach. “After?”

            Rebecca set her lips in a hard line and nodded. “I won’t ask for your forgiveness, James. I don’t need it. I never thought I would see you again. I thought, God, I thought I would die in this place. Understand? I am not sorry for sleeping with Peter.” That was fair, I thought, as I adjusted to the daggers in my heart.

            I took a few shaky breaths, waiting to see if Rebecca would really answer my question. “But you don’t love me,” I said softly.

            She looked at me with a conflicted look on her face for a long minute, while I sat there feeling like the biggest, saddest wimp who ever lived. Then Rebecca leaned down to my eyelevel and took my face in my hands. “Of course,” she began, almost reconsidering, then starting again, “of course I love you.”

            She pressed her lips to my hair and I started to cry again, hugging her around the waist. What was the point of even trying to be a man anymore? If Rebecca loved me still, as the blubbering, insecure mess I was now, then nothing would turn her. “He will throw you out,” she said into my hair, “if he finds out. You will not be a part of the resistance, and we will not see each other again, if Peter finds out. Do you know what that means?”

            I did. I knew you could never hide anything in this ghetto, where people were stacked one on top of the other. Even at Wellington’s, Hersch had found us out. We would have to be even more careful here. I was lucky she was reckless enough to even hold me like that. We couldn’t do anything else. I couldn’t kiss her, or sleep with her, or hold her hand. Not until we made it out of the ghetto.

            “I do.”

            “And you can live with that?”

            I looked up at her, smiling for the first time in ages. “Of course.”

            Rebecca wiped my eyes with the back of her hand and smiled back. “Of course,” she echoed. “Now, how about those onion rations?”