Highlander - Donna Lettow [63]
Avram checked that his pistol was fully loaded and holstered it. “Guess this is it then.” He shouldered his rifle. “Keep my seat warm.” He headed down the stairs.
MacLeod returned to sit at his lookout position on the wooden crate near the edge of the roof overlooking the gate. The streets of the Ghetto were deserted, but beyond the gate, the city of Warsaw teemed with life. Despite the wartime blackout, he could see automobiles moving in the streets, young couples walking home from the picture show. So close, and yet it might as well be worlds away. Miriam stood anxiously near the door for several minutes before MacLeod noted, “It’s hard to stand watch from there. Sure you don’t want to come over here? Tzaddik left a little food.” She hesitated another moment, then pulled a bundle from the canvas pack she carried. She brought it to MacLeod and presented it to him wordlessly.
It was his bloodied, bullet-ridden shirt.
He took the shirt from her, and she searched his face for answers. She never said a word, yet MacLeod knew instinctively the questions she was asking. Who was he? What was he? So many times he’d heard those questions, faced the rejection and revulsion that accompanied them. He reached up and gently touched her bruised face, looking deeply into the dark, serious eyes that studied him so intently. He didn’t find the fear he expected to see there, only a burning curiosity and something akin to accusation.
“Don’t ask me, Miriam, please,” he finally said, with a touch of sadness. “I don’t want to have to lie to you.”
He continued looking at her, intense, unmoving, until she finally pulled away, not satisfied but knowing somehow she would never know. Moving to the ratty blanket where Avram had been, she sat down. She picked up the full cup of wine there with hands that trembled just a touch and took a drink, looking out at the gate and the darkened city beyond it, avoiding looking at him at all costs. MacLeod could sense she had much more on her mind than the mystery of the bullet holes in his shirt. Her second drink from the cup was a deep one. “I think that was Elijah’s,” he said softly.
Miriam turned back to him with a mournful smile. “Why would Elijah come all the way to Hell to get a drink?”
“I take it you’re not”—he indicated the remains of Avram’s impromptu seder—“practicing?”
Miriam shrugged. “I thought I believed. Once. Now?” She reached for the bottle and poured the last of the wine into the cup. “My parents believed. My neighbors believed. You see what good it did them.”
It was a spiritual journey MacLeod recognized all too well. How to justify a loving, caring God when all around the world lay bleeding and dying. Where was God’s love in agony, in atrocity, in carnage? He’d traveled that road many times, on countless bloodstained battlefields and by the caskets of those he loved, but still he had no answers. He only had his faith.
He swept aside the seder crumbs and sat on the blanket next to her. “Don’t blame God.” She turned her head and tried to shrug him off, but he grabbed her forearm, determined she would hear him. “God didn’t kill your parents, Miriam. The Nazis did.”
“He let it happen.”
MacLeod released her, stunned by the depth of her bitterness. After a moment, he leaned back on his elbows, looking up at the bright field of stars stretched above them. “Do you ever just sit and watch the stars, Miriam?” When she didn’t answer, he said quietly, “Some people might say God was there to comfort them at their passing.”
“And what do you say, Duncan?”
“I say … I don’t know. I say … I hope we find out someday.” It was the best he could do. It was the truth.
Miriam took another drink from Elijah’s cup, then offered it to MacLeod. He shook it off. “I’d better keep a clear head.” He pointed skyward. “That one’s Polaris. You can navigate a ship all the way to America by that one tiny star.”
She put down the cup and sat with her arms hugged around her knees, trying to see what it was MacLeod saw in the heavens. “I never