Snow Wolf (21 page)

"Pal)ieren, bitte."

Lebel promptly handed over his papers.
The Gestapo man was tall, thin-faced, with piercing blue eyes. It was a face
that was to live vividly in Lebel's head day and night. The eyes flicked slowly
from the photograph in the papers to Lebel's face, as if the Gestapo man were
trying to make up his mind about something.

The eyes narrowed. Lebel's hands were
shaking and he guessed the man noticed.

The Gestapo man smiled coldly and said,
"Where were these papers issued?"

Lebel could hear the silence in the cafe
as the man spoke. He saw his wife glance at him nervously.

"Marseilles, sir," Lebel
answered respectfully, trying to keep his composure. The place of issue was
already stamped on the papers. Lebel had got rid of his own papers and had been
given forged ones by the Resistance. His new family name was Claudel. It had
worked for six months. But now Lebel thought the Gestapo man sensed something
wasn't right.

He continued to scrutinize the papers,
then looked up. "Your occupation, Herr Claudel?"

Lebel swallowed. His occupation was typed
on the document. "I am a salesman." He paused, decided to be bold and
risk everything. "Is there a problem with our papers? There really
shouldn't be, you know."

"That's for me to decide," the
Gestapo man snapped back, then looked down at Lebel's wife. There were tiny
beads of perspiration on Klara's upper lip, her hands trembling in her lap as
she clutched her napkin.

The Gestapo man had sensed her fear. He
looked back at Lebel and said, "Your wife, Herr Claudet, she seems afraid
of something. I wonder what?"

The question hung in the air like an
accusation. Lebel felt his heart sink. He answered as calmly as he could.

"She hasn't been well, I'm
afraid."

The man looked at Klara. "Really?
And what has been the matter, Frau Claudel?"

Lebel decided to brazen it out.

"Really, officer," he
interrupted. "My wife's health is no concern of yours. We are both upright
French citizens. And if you must know, my wife suffers with her nerves. And
really, this intrusion of yours is not helping matters. So please be so kind as
to return our papers if you have finished examining them." He held out his
hand boldly as he tried to keep it from shaking.

The Gestapo man sneered before he slowly
handed back the papers.

"My apologies, Herr Claudel,"
he said politely. "I hope your wife's condition improves. Enjoy your
coffee and cake."

The Gestapo men left. Lebel could not
help the feeling of relief and triumph that surged through his body.

It did not last long.

They came later that night.

Lebel heard the screech of tires in the
street below their safe apartment, heard the pounding fists on the door. As he
flicked on the light and went to grab the pistol he kept hidden under the
pillow, the door burst in on its hinges.

Half a dozen men in plain clothes crowded
into the room, the thin-faced man from the cafe leading them, a sneer on his
face.

He smashed Lebel in the mouth with a
leather-gloved fist. Then Lebel was on the floor and the man was kicking him
senseless. "Get up, Jew! Get up!"

When they dragged him to his feet two of
his ribs were broken and his shoulder dislocated. The other men were already
moving through the apartment, ransacking the rooms. His wife was dragged
screaming from her bed and bundled downstairs.

Everything after that was a troubling,
painful memory. Lebel could never forget the nightmare that followed. The
separation from Klara. The brutal interrogation in the Gestapo cellars on the
avenue Foch. And when they told him his wife had been sent to Poland for
resettlement, Henri Lebel knew it was a lie and feared the worst.

For a week the Gestapo tortured him,
trying to pry information from him about his resistance connections. Despite
the beatings, the torture, the sleepless nights, he held out and told them
nothing. Two days later he was put on a cattle train to Auschwitz extermination
camp. There he endured almost two long years of painful humiliation, surviving
only because of his will to survive.

And there he first met frena Dezov.

A young Red Army driver in her late
twenties, she had been captured and sent to Auschwitz along with a ragged
convoy of Russian prisoners. She was eventually put to work in the warehouse
where Lebel had to sift through the clothes from the cattle-train transports of
prisoners sent to the camp. lrena Dezov was a handsome woman, and despite the
appalling camp conditions she was full of humor and vitality, and with a
fondness for the illegal vodka the prisoners distilled. But although Lebel
spoke fluent Russian he had hardly exchanged a word with her in the two months
they had worked together, until, that was, the day he found out with certainty
the fate of his wife.

Since arriving at Auschwitz he had been
driven half mad wondering what had happened to Klara, hoping that somehow she
might still be alive. When he learned that a trainload of French Jews had
reached the camp two days before his own arrival, he gave Klara's name and a
description to a kapo in the women's section he had become friendly with and
asked her to help.

The woman came to him a week later and
confirmed his fears. "Your wife was gassed the day she arrived. Then
burned in the crematorium. I'm sorry, Henri."

Lebel had looked at the woman in horror,
expecting the worst, but not wanting to believe it. He went to his filthy bunk
and lay there, curled up in a ball, weeping.

Images and memories raged like a fire
through his mind. The day he had first met Klara, and how innocent she looked,
and how much he had wanted to protect her. The first time he told her he loved
her, and the first time they made love. The grief and anguish that flooded his
body was unbearable. When he finally dragged himself from his bed he removed
his camp tunic and tied it to the top bunk. He put his neck in the noose. Then
he let his body go with the fall.

As he slowly strangled, he heard the
scream.

"Henri!"

lrena burst into the hut and struggled to
free him, Lebel protesting, wanting to die. But Irena would have none of it,
the two of them struggling on the floor, Lebel gasping and punching the young
Russian woman.

"Get away! Leave me to die!"

"No, Henri, no ..."

It took lrena all her might to calm
Lebel, to help him to the bed. And then he was curled up in a ball again on the
bunk, crying his eyes out. lrena put a hand tenderly on his shoulder. "The
kapo told me. I came here to see if I could help comfort YOU."

Tears streamed down Lebel's cheeks,
"You should have let me kill myself. Why did you stop me'? Why'? You have
no right ..."

"I do have a right, Henri Lebel. We
Jews must stick together. You and I, we're going to survive. Do you hear?"

Lebel looked into lrena's face. "You
... a Jew?"

"Yes. Me, a Jew."

"But the Germans don't know?"

"And why should I tell them? They
have enough Jews to kill."

Lebel stared back at her, his pain
deflected. "Why didn't you tell me?"

frena smiled and shrugged. "What
does it matter what a man or woman is'?

Does it change your opinion of me?"

"No."

"Good. Take some of this."

She handed him a small bottle of illegal
spirit. He refused, but she made him drink.

She looked into his face, this cheerful
Russian woman, and he saw compassion in her eyes.

"And now, Henri Lebel, I want us to
say kaddish together. And then you're going to go back to work and you're going
to try to forget your troubles. But for that to happen some of us must survive.
Do you understand me, Henri?"

Lebel nodded. He wiped his eyes.

Irena took his hand and smiled.
"Come, let us kneel and say kaddish for your family."

It was so unreal. In the midst of all the
pain and death around him, Lebel had knelt with the young Russian woman and
said the ancient prayer for the dead. Afterwards he had cried again, and frena
had put a hand on his shoulder and hugged him. And then she had made the
supreme gesture any woman could make to comfort a man. She offered him her
body.

Not for sex, but for solace. Despite the
filthy barrack surroundings , there was a beauty and a touching kindness to the
lovemaking which somehow reaffirmed Henri Lebel's belief in justice."

After that day, Henri Lebel and arena
Dezov had become friends as well as lovers. They endured the endless
humiliations of camp life, laughed together when they could, shared what scraps
of food they managed to scavenge to supplement their meager rations of watery
turnip soup and stale black bread, and got drunk on illegal spirits whenever
possible, anything to relieve the agony and pain around them.

The last time Lebel saw Irena was three
days after the Russians finally liberated the camp. She was being helped to
climb onto the back of a truck to take her behind Russian lines, her long frail
legs barely able to stand. They kissed and embraced and promised they would
write, and as the truck drove out through the gates Irena managed a smile and a
wave. Lebel cried that day as much as he had when he had learned the fate of
his wife.

In the five years after the war, Lebel
tried to forget his past. A succession of nubile young models eager to parade
in his furs on the Paris catwalks and also to give him solace had temporarily
dulled the pain, but somehow Irena Dezov never left his mind.

A year later he had to visit Moscow on
business, an opportunity he was to be allowed with greater frequency because of
his expanding business.

On one such trip, as he came out of the
Moscow Hotel, he saw a woman across the street and he froze, rooted to the spot
with shock. She looked like lrena, only somehow different, and then Lebel
realized she was no longer the emaciated skeleton in his memory but a
full-figured, handsome woman, much like the one he had seen the first day she
had arrived in Auschwitz. But it was definitely Irena, She climbed on board a
tram and in panic Lebel did something he had never done before.

He evaded the KGB man delegated to
chaperone him and hopped on board the tram at the last moment. His heart
pounding, he sat behind the woman. When she got off he followed her to an
apartment off Lenin Prospect, took note of the KGB chaperone , then reluctantly
returned to his hotel.

A contact in the Ministry of Foreign
Trade, who demanded an explanation for the evasion.

Lebel pretended angry indignation: as a
trusted friend of RLISSIA he ought to be allowed to travel in Moscow more
freely. He considered it a matter of mutual trust and he gave his word as a
gentleman that he would not break that trust. Besides, he had strong business
interests in Moscow and he would hardly destroy those interests by doing
something he shouldn't, now would he'?

The man from the Ministry merely smiled
and said to him. "Impossible, Henri. You know the way it works here.
Foreigners are suspect. Even if you do nothing we have to watch you.

Lebel said indignantly, "Then von
realize this. I can buy excellent fur from the Canadians and the Americans and
without the irritation of being followed everywhere I go in New York or
Quebec."

The man's face paled just a little, but
then he smiled. "is that a threat, Henri?"

"No, simply a fact. And another
thing. I fought for the Communist Resistance in France. I lost my wife and was
sent to Auschwitz for my ideals. You people know I'm not a spy."

The man laughed. "Of course we know
you're not a spy, Henri, but you're a businessman, not a communist."

"That doesn't stop me from having
certain ... sympathies."

Lebel's sympathies had long since
vanished but business was business. "Besides, some of the wealthiest
businessmen in France supported the Communist Resistance during the war."

"True. But I still can't grant you
your request."

Lebel tossed aside the refusal and said
very angrily, "Then I suggest you seriously consider this. I'm tired of
these petty games you people play. Tired of being followed like some mistrusted
schoolboy. Tired of being scrutinized like some unwelcome guest and feeling
half a dozen pairs of eyes on me every time I go to the bathroom. I'm
considering no longer representing your interests in Europe. Quite frankly,
it's not worth the bother. I can buy my furs elsewhere."

The man permitted himself a knowing grin.
"But not sable, Henri. You have to come to us for that, Besides, we could
simply have someone else represent us."

It was true-and Russian sable fur was the
finest and the most sought-after-but Lebel had an ace up his sleeve, "Not
registered sable. But a firm in Canada have bred a marten species not unlike
yours and believe me the sable pelts are the finest I've come across. So either
we stop this petty pantomime and you trust me, or I go to them."