Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [185]
Ration time. To hell with it, Gideon thought.
“Eat or you’ll get weak,” Shlomo said. “Eat, this sun sucks the starch out of you.”
“You sound like my stepmother, Lena. Did you ever know anybody who got their sex kicks out of stuffing people with food?”
“Yeah,” Shlomo answered, “half the women in Israel.”
Gideon ran his hand over his face. The stubble was getting prickly. He hated wearing a beard. It itched constantly. Penelope and Roxy had made him grow one once, a long one, because some of their girlfriends’ daddies were growing them.
“Suppose you were in a nice comfortable sheik’s tent,” Shlomo ventured between vocal bites of food, “and you had a choice between Val and Natasha?”
“Who am I? King Solomon?” Gideon answered. “They come from two different planets. On the one hand, peace, comfort, steadiness, softness, fidelity, trust. On the other hand, it’s wild fantasy, sensuality, the fine cutting line between love and rage.”
“They both sound pretty good to me,” Shlomo said.
“Sometimes you need one, sometimes you need the other. Too bad they don’t come in the same package.”
“What makes a woman like Natasha tick?”
“All women have a labyrinth inside their heads. Emotion is a woman’s first priority. When a woman gets devious, I’m screwed. I went through every crooked move as a kid, in Hollywood, in my marriage. But I couldn’t be as devious as the simplest woman. Anyhow, I’m pretty up front now. After Val went on her little binge and tore my office to pieces, I didn’t want to shelter lies anymore. Even the most honest of women have crooked minds, and being a concentration camp survivor, Natasha is even more complicated.”
“How many concentration camp survivors do you suppose we have interviewed?” Shlomo asked, rummaging through his pack. The fruit had gone soft and squishy. He tossed it, grudgingly, and out of nowhere little ants started appearing and feasted.
“I count between fifty and sixty,” Gideon said. “Besides that, I’ve read maybe three hundred case histories. I’d read more than a hundred in St. Barths before I got to Israel.”
“Every one different?”
“Every one different, but certain similarities in all of them. Every person who got through the camps left behind twenty, thirty members of their families dead. I found that everyone who survived had to use their wits. But every person who walked out of a concentration camp alive had run into a piece of golden luck at the right moment. Sometimes four or five pieces of luck. This kind of luck produces guilt.”
“My father died, my brothers died, but I got through because I had luck at the right moment and they didn’t. That what you mean?” Shlomo asked.
“That’s right,” Gideon said. “I’ve never met a survivor who didn’t carry the cross of guilt on his shoulder because his being alive represented twenty who were sent to the gas chamber. Why did I, who was no more worthy than the next guy, get through? Why am I alive? I’m guilty for being alive.”
“What’s the toll on Natasha’s family?”
“All of them. A big family ... all of them ... not only mother, father, brothers, but uncles, cousins, the works. Natasha’s guilt is compounded because she hated her father before the war. He was a professional, respected, important member of the community. Apparently he was a cold number, very strict. He didn’t abuse her physically, but she was frightened of him and he brought a great deal of pain, sexually, to his wife. She loved her mother dearly. And ... she’s got more than ordinary, garden-variety guilt about her father’s death. She felt responsible for his death because she hated him.”
“So she looks for her father through lovers?”
“I read it this way,” Gideon said. “She finds an attractive man and gets him to fall for her. No trick, she oozes sex from every pore. She loves him with a fury he didn’t know existed. And she drinks him dry. When he is completely exhausted, she has the symbol she is looking for. She’s killed her daddy again. So, she discards him like a dishrag, but she always has a sentimental feeling