No Heroes (16 page)

We walk in the morning to work in an ammunition factory making bullets. My job was to form a piece of flat metal like a spring and push it inside the bullet. I did this and gave it to another worker. There was a woman guard standing behind us. She didn't beat us. She was not a horrible monster like in other camps.

Some German women are working there, too. They were not prisoners, they were just regular workers, paid workers. When it came Christmas, I think what to do for those German girls. I took this flat piece of metal and I bend it out to make little people they can hang on a tree. I started to produce like there's no tomorrow. I liked to do that. It was nice. You could do many things with the wire. You could twist it in all kind of ways. One day a big SS man came and asks, who takes this metal? This is very dangerous and we need it. Who is stealing it?

I thought this is my last day in that camp. They are going to shoot me on the spot.

He said, somebody is a traitor, doing this. It is a very serious matter. You better tell me who it is or the others will be punished.

So I said that I was not alone but others work with me, too. I want to just make a tree so beautiful. Then the German girls got up and they say she didn't really do anything, we asked her to do it. He liked one of the German girls, so he said he would not do anything. But next time he kills the person who does it.

He didn't do anything to me, because they stood up for me. They had a guilty conscience. I wasn't the best girl in the world. I didn't do it for love. I made those things for food. The German girls gave me food. I wanted food.

Paying late fees on unwatched videos is a fierce gouging in the guts. Each time it happened I swore never again. The old Malibu clung to the tight curves and charged through the dips in the road as I poured the coal to it and arrived at the video store just before closing.

In the parking lot I saw Lena, one of the few girls with whom I was friends in high school. My female friends liked the cool guys who drove cool cars—athletes, outlaws, musicians. The girls dated them but talked to me. I was funny and short, a mascot to their beauty.

Lena had been married twenty-three years and had four kids. She worked as a dental hygienist. Five years ago she moved to Flemingsburg because Morehead got too big.

“It grew so fast,” she said, “spreading up the hollows like floodwater. I wanted to raise my children in a small-town atmosphere. Clearfield used to be separate from Morehead, but now you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. It's nothing to get a bicycle stolen anymore.”

“I didn't know that, Lena.”

“Morehead's got all the problems of a big town, but none of the advantages. The traffic is terrible, and prices are high as a cat's back. You go to Wal-Mart and don't know a soul.”

“But why Flemingsburg,” I said. “It's not a town, it's a hollow with houses.”

“Oh, Chris,” she said, “you still make me laugh. You're just as easy to talk to as ever. Maybe easier.”

“Well, I always liked you, Lena.”

“How come you never asked me out?”

“I didn't think you'd want me.”

“Why do you think I always talked to you so much?”

“I don't know. I didn't think about it.”

“You should have,” she said.

“I just wanted to get out of here, Lena. The only reason I stayed was failing the army physical.”

“The only reason I stayed was I got pregnant.”

“Maybe that's why I never asked you out.”

We looked at each other, our eyes seeking purchase. The world ceased to exist in time and space. We were fifteen, afraid to kiss. We were twenty-five, young parents working hard. We were thirty-five, both wondering how our lives would be with different choices, pondering an affair with a stranger. We were forty-five and proud grandparents. At fifty-five we quit working and drove a gigantic RV around the country, a gray-haired couple making up for a life spent in one place. At sixty-five, we took walks together, arm-in-arm along the creek. In our seventies one of us died. The other mourned with a gradual withering like a leaf curling into itself before detaching from the limb and becoming part of the loam.

Time swirled back like a tornado, encircling us with the present, holding us fast to the tar of an immense parking lot.

“Lena,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

I stepped forward and hugged her briefly before turning away. After fifteen steps, I looked back and watched her drive toward Flemingsburg. To me, Morehead's growth meant more things not to do. For Lena there were more people not doing those things.

I drove home to my family, kissed my wife, and wrestled with my kids. We watched a video together. I thought about Lena the whole time. I imagined that she and I were at the old Trail Theatre downtown. I pretended to yawn and stretch, leaving my arm on the back of her seat, and when she didn't mind, I kissed her. It was our first kiss, our only kiss, merely a peck, but it counted—an infinity of first kisses in the darkness expanding through the universe.

At the end of the movie, Rita and I put the kids to sleep and lay in our bed—the same bed where I'd wrestled with my boys, the same bed we'd all four slept in like cats through the cold Montana winters, the same bed Arthur and Irene had given us when Sam was born. I thought of how fortunate I was to have both left the hills and made it back home.

I didn't know that people were constantly inviting Rita to their church. I didn't know that she politely thanked them and explained that she was Jewish. I didn't know that each time this happened, the person's invariable response was, “Oh, I'm sorry.”

Mosbach is an old city, maybe eight hundred years old. A beautiful German city in the area they call the Black Forest. There is an underground factory and the Allies start bombing raids. I have a show every night. I'm sitting in the window and watching Mosbach being bombed. I'm extremely happy. It's a beautiful night and then you get the airplanes coming. Sirens are ringing air raid and everybody goes into the cellars. I don't mind. I love it. There are rows of bombs going down. The city got hit and everything is burning. We are engaged now in Götterdämmerung.

They missed the factory and hit the city, but there was nothing there. It was just civilian population. We had to clean up the mess, rubble and fires burning and the dead. The men were gone to fight and the old people were already dead. Only women and children were left. It turned my stomach. Women with no arms, babies without heads.

The first time we cleaned up I don't know what to feel, because when I saw the bombs coming I was happy about it. Then I saw the result and I didn't feel any pleasure at all. I could have gone anywhere, I could have escaped, but I wanted to help. I was very happy when somebody was taken out of the rubble. When I found someone dead, I didn't feel so good.

It took a few weeks to clean up, and the people were feeding us. They were grateful. I got butter and milk, things I never thought I would see again. They forgot that we were prisoners of war. They behaved like friends. We did a lot of laughing. We were always joking around. It seemed to me we lived a very normal, crazy life. We were laughing, we were singing. Then they realized that we were Jewish prisoners and they became hostile. They threw things at us. They told us to dig in certain places where there were time-delayed bombs. No more food they give us.

After we clean up, back to the camp. It's peculiar living when you know you're gonna die because you're so sick and there's no medication, and in addition, every so often, the Americans bomb it. We have casualties in the camp and who gives a damn, because we are all dying.

There are guys holding their pants up because all the pants were too big. We call them
Muselmann.
Walking dead. They're still walking, but they're dead already. Just a skeleton. The only thing you see is bones that still walk around somehow. They are holding on to anything to walk.

One night one of the bosses brought in a force of Polish slave labor women. They had bread and potatoes and sausage. You have to give them something for that food. You had to give them sex. The Serbs and Russians, they liked to screw but they had to save their strength for work. So they said to the women, I'll sleep with you on one condition. You give me a nice piece of sausage.

The women lived in France for so long, they thought that we know something about their family. They hadn't seen a man in months. They are doing it for food while getting some news of their husband. It was business, strictly business. Nothing personal. If they are caught, they're dead. And the
Muselmanner
are going back there, holding their pants up, willing to perform sex for food. The Serbs were tops. They could do it any time, anywhere. They brought back the biggest amount of food.

Me, I decided not to shit. I thought that if I kept it longer in me, my body would get more nutrition. I held it until there was no more to get. Then I let it go. There was never much.

People were chosen to go to a new place, and I went to Leipzig, a German town that was also an ammunition factory. It wasn't so terrible because they were not killing people on the spot.

Leipzig was very clean, no lice. Terrific camp. Almost not like a concentration, more like a slave-labor camp. A lot of showers for us. It was really more humane. Food was soup and water and bread once a week. But more bread at this camp.

I did a little bit something very sweet in Leipzig. I started to look at a Yugoslavian girl, very sweet. She always smiled when I was passing, so I borrowed from somebody a piece of pencil and paper and I wrote a note to her and I gave it in the hand when she was passing. I wrote, I don't have a family here, but I want you to be my family. And she was writing to me what she was thinking. The same paper and pencil we passed. A half a year we wrote. We never talked. Never. We just wrote the notes. She wrote to me and I wrote to her. I was waiting already, looking forward to when she would give me a note. I never saw her again.