Mila 18 - Leon Uris [1]
Chris rolled over on his side and looked at Deborah through an opening in the drapes. Her half-naked body was bathed in late afternoon shadows. Chris loved to watch her dress. She balanced a foot on the end of a chair and stretched her leg and rolled up her stockings and slipped into her blouse and skirt with effortless grace. Then she stood before the mirror, her fingers darting pins into long raven hair and twisting it nervously into a firm knot. He remembered that first time when he had taken the pins from her hair one by one and watched it fall like black silk. She took her trench coat from the coat tree and buttoned it, never acknowledging that she knew Chris’s eyes were on her back, and with determined abruptness walked for the door.
“Deborah.”
She stopped and pressed her forehead against the door.
“Deborah.”
She came into the alcove and sat on the edge of the bed. Chris snuffed out the cigarette, rolled next to her, and lay his head in her lap. Her black eyes filled with melancholy. Her fingers traced his cheek and mouth and neck and shoulders, and Chris looked up at her. How beautiful you are, he thought. She was biblical. Black and olive. A Deborah of the Bible. When she stood, Chris grabbed her wrist and she could feel his hand tremble.
“We can’t keep this up. Let me speak to him.”
“It would kill him, Chris.”
“How about me? It’s killing me.”
“Please.”
“I’m talking to him tonight.”
“Oh Lord, why does it always have to end like this?”
“It will until you’re my wife.”
“You’re not to see him, Chris. I mean that.”
He released his grip. “You’d better go,” he whispered. He turned away, his back toward her.
“Chris ... Chris ...”
Pride kept him silent.
“I’ll call you,” she said. “Will you see me?”
“You know I will.”
He threw on a robe and listened to the click-click-click of her footsteps on the marble hall outside. He pulled back the window drapes. The rain had slowed to a miserable drizzle. In a moment Deborah appeared on Jerusalem Boulevard below. She looked up to his window and waved her hand feebly, then ran across the street to where a line of droshkas waited. The horse clip-clopped away from the curb and turned out of sight.
Chris let the drapes fall closed, snuffing out most of the light. He wandered into the kitchen and poured himself cup of the steaming coffee Deborah had made, then slumped into a chair and hid his face in his hands, shaken by the impact of another parting.
On the radio, a newscaster speaking in nervous Polish recited the latest diplomatic setback in the growing mountain of them.
Chapter Two
Journal Entry
ON THE NEWS WE hear that Russia and Germany are about to announce a non-aggression treaty. It seems impossible that the two sworn enemies on the planet, pledged to destroy each other, have come to this. Hitler’s tactics seem logical. He obviously wants to neutralize Russia for the time being to avoid the possibility of a two-front war (that is, if England and France honor their obligations to Poland). I’m willing to wager that the wages being paid to Stalin is half of Poland and I think we are being divided up at some long polished table in Moscow this minute.
ALEXANDER BRANDEL
In embassies, state departments, chancelleries, foreign offices, consulates, ministries, war offices, code rooms, newsrooms, frantic men scurried to all-night conferences, played war games, barked into telephones of flooded switchboards, cursed, prayed, pleaded.
A trail of broken treaties lay strewn about like corpses after a Mongol invasion.
Men of good will were stunned at the warped logic behind which eighty million civilized people rallied and shrieked and strutted like hysterical robots. Hammered into a hypnotic trance by the well-timed tantrums that were the mad genius of Adolf Hitler, the men of good will sank deeper into muck and mire, unable to divest themselves of the all-consuming monster in their midst.
The geopoliticians had drawn and quartered the world into areas of labor and raw material and presented the