Mila 18 - Leon Uris [139]
“Paul has only done this for us!”
“You don’t believe that yourself. He has done it for Paul. Now, listen. You’re leaving. I’ll have you picked up and forced out beyond your choice before I’d let you die.”
“You’ll never touch me again.”
Chris nodded and stood. “I know that,” he said weakly. “I have already resigned myself to the fact that I will never see you. I know that there can never be a life for us if Paul is left here. That doesn’t matter to me—all I want is for you to live.”
“I can’t leave him,” Deborah said.
“Ask him! I think he will let you and your son and daughter die before he faces this alone here.”
“That’s not true.”
“Ask him!”
Deborah tried to push her way to the door, but Chris grabbed her arms with a vise-like grip. She started a useless resistance. Then she stiffened.
“I’ll haunt you, Deborah. Every day and every night I’m waiting beyond the wall.”
“Let me go!”
“Haven’t we been punished enough? Do you want the death of your children as part of the penance too?”
“Please, Chris,” she begged.
“Tell me you don’t love me and you’re free of me.”
Deborah leaned against him and put her head on his chest and sobbed softly, and his strong arms folded about her gently. “That is my greatest sin,” she cried, “still loving you.”
Chris’s arms were empty. He watched her disappear among the cots in the ward.
Paul dozed in the overstuffed chair. She was sick with worry about him since the Germans closed the Civil Authority and moved their headquarters to the big ghetto at Zamenhof and Gensia, in the former ghetto post office. They would have to move soon, too, she was certain. House by house, the Germans were emptying the little ghetto on the south.
Deborah watched him over the top of her book. Sometimes his mind would go blank in the middle of a sentence and he would stare aimlessly, then try to mumble his way back to reality. He wanted to sleep, only to sleep. He was taking greater doses of pills to block from his mind the torment of the German directives.
The children never said it, but she knew. She knew they were ashamed of him.
God, why did I have to see Chris? No rational human being could avoid being swayed by the thought of leaving this chamber of horrors. There was less and less she could do about the wails of the pitiful ragamuffins. Babi-Yar ... Would it happen in Warsaw? Did she have the right to deny a try for life for Stephan and Rachael?
She doubted that Rachael would leave. She had sent her own daughter to a woman’s bed at the age of seventeen. She felt it would be the greater sin to yield to society’s dogmas of morality and find some morning the boy was gone forever and her child bear a lonely and unfulfilled cross. They had so little and so little time. But Rachael would not leave the boy. Deborah knew that as surely as she knew she would not leave Paul.
Perhaps she should send Stephan away by himself. He was a tenacious little boy, so much like his Uncle Andrei. So eager to fight. He would rebel.
Suppose she asked Paul. Would he let them go, or would he let them die first? Was Paul’s weakness for survival at any price so consuming that he would bring his family to doom out of sheer fear?
Paul blinked his eyes open and saw Deborah’s black eyes searching him questioningly.
“I must have dozed,” he said groggily. “Dear, what is it? Why do you look at me that way?”
She started at the realization that she had not heard him.
“Is something wrong, Deborah? Is there something you want to ask?”
“No,” she said. “I have the answer.”
Chapter Thirty
Journal Entry
IF YOU WANT TO be in movies,
You don’t have to travel far,
The ghetto is like Hollywood,
All here, have a STAR.
COMPLIMENTS OF CRAZY NATHAN
Ervin Rosenblum has done a magnificent job as cultural secretary of Orphans and Self-Help. We now have a full Ghetto Symphony Orchestra, fifteen theatrical productions in Yiddish and Polish, a secret school for both primary education and religious training in each orphanage; art exhibitions, debates, poetry readings, etc., etc. Several individual artists