Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [198]
Gideon suddenly stopped speaking. He stood up and screamed in anguish. “I didn’t get to him! I let my buddy down!”
He fell on the bed, rolled onto his stomach, and babbled. They sent the division to Hawaii to recuperate. I didn’t want to go on anymore. I wanted to quit and go home. I had a bad case of dengue fever on Tarawa ... it’s a kind of shit disease where all your joints, elbows, knees, knuckles, all swell up and you’ve got this crazy fever ... I wasn’t any good to anyone, anymore. Then my asthma came back from the volcanic dust in our camp. So they sent me home. My outfit went on to the invasion of Saipan, and all my buddies got slaughtered on the beach. The guy carrying my radio got his guts blown out. And there I was, safe in the hospital in Oakland, putting on another fucking play!”
He felt her loving hand.
“Don’t touch me! I’m no good! I’m a fucking fake! I’ve faked my way through everything!”
“Don’t you know that all soldiers want to go home?” Natasha said. “From the beginning of time, all soldiers want to go home.”
“But I ...”
“What?”
“I was a coward! I was a Jew coward!”
“Shut up, Gideon! Sit up and look at me! I said look at me, God damn you, look at me!”
He rolled over slowly and stared up at her. Natasha’s face was wild, and the light and shadows whirling around her were wild.
“What happened to Pedro! He was killed, right!”
“He was killed!”
“How many bullet holes?”
“Just one.”
“So he was already dead when Captain Farney and Corporal Burns reached him, wasn’t he?”
“He’d been shot through the head.”
“And if you had gone out to get him, you would have been killed, just like Farney and Burns, isn’t that right? Well, tell me, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t know ... maybe I could’ve ... maybe if I had acted faster ... maybe ...”
“But you stayed on the generator until the message got through. You didn’t run. They were shooting at you too.”
“We had to save the ammo boat.”
“So you stuck in until your job was done. Pedro was dead and the men who went after him got killed. And you’ve let yourself be filled with guilt because you survived. Darling, remember when you said to me ... Natasha ... you can’t be guilty because you lost everyone in the gas chambers. You told me that. All survivors have a guilt syndrome. I have it from Auschwitz, you have it from Tarawa. It has nothing to do with you being a Jew. All your life, that’s been pounded into you. I’m a Jew, so I’m a coward. So, to absolve yourself of your guilt, you had to write a book, a great book, to redeem yourself in your own eyes and win the respect of your fellow Marines. And then you had to come to Israel and go to Mitla Pass to redeem yourself as a Jew and win the respect of the Jewish people. Why can’t you see that, man!”
“Oh, Natasha,” he cried, “hold me, hold me, hold me.”
Natasha rocked him in her arms, and after a long time Gideon fell into a dead sleep. A knock on the door and she opened it a crack.
“Waiter, ma’am. You asked for the dinner menu.”
“Just a moment, please,” Natasha said and looked about for a bill to tip him. She went to the armoir, reached inside Gideon’s jacket pocket, and took out his wallet. His airline ticket fell to the floor.
She tipped the waiter. “I’ll call down when we are ready to order.”
“Thank you,” he said and closed the door behind him. Natasha returned to the armoir and picked up his ticket, then became curiously entranced by it. As she read it, she paled.
Gideon reached for her on the bed and, feeling nothing, opened his eyes, got his bearings, sat up, and yawned. Natasha advanced toward him ever so slowly.
“Hi, honey,” he said. “Must have conked out.”
“Bastard!” she said and flung the ticket in his face. Gideon avoided her eyes.
“You were going to take me back to Israel, then head for Rome alone, if I read your ticket right.”
“You read it right.”
“I was under the illusion that we were on our way to St. Barths to write a book.”
“Somewhere along the line during this binge, I had a few moments of clarity,