Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel by James Lee Burke

vermin.”
    “Say that again?”
    His eyes went away from mine, his cheeks pooling with color. He got up to go. “I’ve got to run,” he said. He picked up my hand from the bed and shook it. “I get hot-blooded sometimes. I suspect you had sexual congress with the Lowenstein woman and feel you owe her. Do the smart thing. Go back home and be a war hero. Smile a lot. Be humble. People will love you for it. Don’t get them mad at you.”
    “You called her vermin? Or did I misunderstand?”
    He put his aviator glasses back on. “I hope she’s worth it. Come see me in San Antone if you want to learn the insurance business.”
     
    I N OCTOBER, UPON my discharge from the hospital, I went to the displaced persons camp east of Nancy, close to the German border. I had written perhaps ten requests for information about Rosita Lowenstein to the camp’s administration, but I had never received a reply. When I arrived, I understood why. Many of the people housed there looked like shells of people. Many had numbers tattooed on their left forearm. Some stared through the wire fence with the vacant expressions of schizophrenics. Their common denominator seemed to be a pathological form of detachment; they seemed to have no continuity as a group, as though they didn’t know one another and didn’t care to. I saw none who appeared to be mothers with children, or children with mothers, or husbands with wives. I suspected that many of them were ridden with guilt because they had survived and their loved ones had not; I suspected that many of them would never tell anyone of the deeds they had witnessed in the camps or the deeds they themselves had committed when they were forced to choose between survival and perishing.
    I saw a man wearing a white shirt with blown sleeves. His arms were spread on the fence wire as he stared into my face. His eyes were as white and shiny as the skin of a peeled hard-boiled egg, the pupils like distorted ink drops, his hair black and curly and uncut, his skin leathery, his teeth showing in either defiance or fear. He reminded me of the Christlike figure in the Goya painting titled The Third of May 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid. As a matter of politeness, I said hello. He made no reply. His chin was tilted upward, a question mark in the middle of his face, as though he were daring me to explain what had happened to him. I tried to hold his gaze but couldn’t. I walked away, his recrimination hanging on me like sackcloth.
    Rosita was nowhere to be seen. “Where is she?” I asked the clerk in the administration building.
    “She left last week,” he said.
    “Where to?”
    The clerk was sitting behind a vintage typewriter, his desk piled with paper. He was an international relief worker and spoke English with a British accent. “Are you a family member?”
    “No. I pulled her out of a stack of dead bodies and carried her through an artillery barrage. I hid in a cellar with her for eight days.”
    “Ah, you’re the one. She told me about you,” he said. “She’s in Marseilles.”
    “Do you have an address?”
    “She’s in a pension. It’s run by a Jewish relocation group.” He wrote an address on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “They have no telephone there. Do you plan to go to Marseilles?”
    “Yes.”
    “If I remember correctly, she leaves today or tomorrow on a freighter. It’s headed for Haifa,” he said. “Good luck. I’m sorry we were not able to help you earlier.”
    “Was she sick?”
    “No worse than anyone else here.”
     
    I CAUGHT A TRAIN that night to Marseilles. There was rain all the way to the coast. The chair car was crowded and overheated from a coal-burning stove and smelled of unwashed bodies and damp wool. The dawn was bleak when we pulled into the station, the sun little more than a pewterlike glow on the horizon, the railroad ties and rails in the yards shiny with waste that had been dumped from the passenger toilets onto the tracks.