Mila 18 - Leon Uris [25]
She took his cap off, unbuttoned his tunic, and wrestled his boots off. Andrei had reached that stage of drunkenness where words are thick but thoughts brilliantly clear. The coffee gave him a sudden resurgence. He looked up at his little Gabriela. She was so lovely.
“I don’t know why you put up with me,” he said.
She knelt before him and lay her head on his lap. Even in this state, his hands touched her hair with amazing tenderness.
“Are you all right, dear? Can we talk?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“When you’ve gone away in the past two years, a week to Krakow, or a week to Bialystok, or a week or two on maneuvers, it was never really too bad because I was always able to live for that moment I knew you would come storming up the stairs into my arms. But now you’ve been on regular duty—you’ve been gone nearly two months. Andrei, I almost died. At the Embassy we know how bad things really are. Andrei ... please marry me.”
He struggled to his feet, holding one of the four tall posters. “Maybe you’ll hate me the way you hate Paul Bronski for giving up his beliefs, but you mean more to me than being a Catholic does, and I’ll give it up and I’ll light the candles for you on your Sabbath and I’ll try to be all the things—”
“No, Gaby ... no. No ... I’d never ask you to do that.”
“I know how much you mean to other women. I can see the way they look at you. If you were angry with me and should go away for a night or two, I swear I’ll never question you or make a scene.”
“You make scenes now. You’d make scenes if we were married. Maybe I wouldn’t love you if you didn’t make scenes. Dear ... I ...”
“What, Andrei?”
“I have never said this to you, but it would be the proudest thing in my life if I were able to take you as my wife. It is only—I ... tell myself a hundred times a day that it is not true. It will not happen. But Chris is right. Poland is going to be conquered. God knows what the Germans will do to us. The one thing you don’t need now is a Jewish husband.”
Andrei’s words and their meaning were absolutely clear. “I see,” she said, deflated.
“God damn it all. God damn everything.” Andrei had that lost look about him that moved Gabriela to forget her own desires, for he was floundering and in trouble and needed her.
“What did Paul Bronski say to you tonight that brought all this on?” she asked.
“That bastard!”
“What did he say to hurt you so?”
Andrei sucked in a deep breath and reeled to the window, where he stared into the darkness. “He called me a phony Zionist—and he is right.”
“How can you say that?”
“No, he’s right, he’s right.”
He tried to clear his shrouded thoughts. He looked for Gabriela through bleary eyes. She seemed far away and out of focus. “You’ve never been on Stawki Street where the poor Jews live. I can see the garbage on the streets and smell it and hear the iron-rimmed wheels of the teamster wagons on the cobblestones. It was a kind of stink and humiliation that drove Paul Bronski out of there. Who can really blame him?”
Gabriela listened with terrible awe as the drunken outpour increased. Since she had known Andrei he had never spoken a word of his boyhood.
“Like all Jews, we lived through economic boycotts, and blood riots by the same students Paul Bronski leads. My father—you saw his picture?”
“Yes.”
“Just another one of those bearded old religious Jews nobody understands ... sold chickens. My father never got angry, even when they threw stones through his windows. He always said, ‘Evil will destroy itself.’ You don’t know the Krasinski Gardens—nice Polish girls don’t go there. It’s at the north end, where the poor people go on Saturday to look at trees and eat hard-boiled eggs and onions and pass gas while their kids fall into the fishponds. I had to deliver chickens for my father to the Bristol and Europa. I’d cut through the Krasinski Gardens. The gangs of goyim hung out there waiting for us little Jew boys. Every time they beat me up and stole my chickens we’d have to eat boiled potatoes for a