Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [145]
“Maybe,” she answered.
Gideon sighed heavily, then took his drink down to the bottom of the glass. “There’s even the possibility I might ask the family to come to Israel if this research runs too long. If my wife comes here, I want to be able to look her straight in the eyes.”
Natasha laughed a bit bitterly. “Well, you’re not a Hungarian, that’s for certain.” She took his hands and demanded his eyes. “You’re a damned fool if you don’t grab at whatever promises compassion and what we have in the making.”
“Natasha, don’t lean on me. I’m not the strongest guy in the world when it comes to this.”
“What we have brewing is beautiful, wild, madness. We’ve been looking for each other for a long time, cowboy.”
“I know that and I’m scared to death of you.”
“You only want a woman you can walk away from. I know that because I’m cut out of the same dirty cloth.”
“Sorry, Natasha.”
“Funny, I’ve never been rejected before,” she said. “I don’t know how to behave.” She took a pad and pen from her purse and scribbled out a street and telephone number. “Here’s where I’ll be tonight if you have a change of heart.”
Lord, Gideon thought, lead me not into temptation. He tore the paper to bits and put it in the ashtray.
Natasha spouted something in Hungarian.
“I don’t speak the language, but I get the drift,” he said.
“Up your mother’s you know what,” she said.
“See, it’s wrong already,” Gideon said. “People should be happy in love. We’re grim and we haven’t even made it to the bedroom.” She got up abruptly. Gideon grabbed her arm tightly. “You don’t want love, Natasha, you want combat.”
NATASHA
COMBAT! HOW DARE HE! Gideon the cowboy writer, big shot. Interviews us as though we are cattle ... Which concentration camp? ... What was your relationship with your parents? ... What dreams do you have?
Dreams! I have only one dream ... only one. Where is it? Venice? Auschwitz? The Cornwall Coast? It is the same, always covered in billowing fog. I see him emerging from the white mist. “Father!” I call. His eyes are so cruel and filled with lust and anger. He smiles, thin-lipped. His Van Dyke beard coming to a sharp point.
I shiver. It is so cold.
“So you have won again,” Father says.
“It wasn’t my fault they found the note. I didn’t want to send you to the ovens. Father! Don’t go away this time! Father!”
Just as I am about to touch him, the fog envelops him and he is gone. I run after him ... nowhere ... nowhere ... “Father!”
We were once the Solomons of Budapest, a great affluent family. Thirty, forty, fifty at a gathering. Doctors, teachers, merchants. So highly respected. Monarchs of Jewish society.
I loathed him ... Professor Doctor Hubert Solomon. He was so cold, so unloving. The pain he caused my brothers as he sliced them down, never letting them rise to his level, and the pain he caused my mother when he went to bed with her.
It was me, Natasha, you wanted, wasn’t it, Father? He touches me, pats my head ... I cringe. His eyes follow me all the time. Yes, I want to love you, Father, so I can plunge a knife into your back.
The Nazis came and took us all ... uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers. Father and I escaped. I lived over half the war in a blond wig and sharing false “Aryan” documents with three other Jewish girls.
They found us and took us to Auschwitz. Luck had to run out. Or were we betrayed? Who will ever know? When we got to Auschwitz, we found out who carried messages and we learned the entire family had been killed ... everyone ... everyone ...
Just Father and I were left. We found a secret way to get messages to one another from the clothing factory where I worked to the school where he taught the children of the SS officers. It was one of my messages that got him killed. The guards intercepted it and thought it was a coded message to the underground. It was only a birthday greeting. They never discovered me as the sender, but they sent