The One Man (10 page)

So how was he to choose?
Will it save lives or cost them?
What other calculus was there for deciding? It is what his father would have asked the colonel. He could almost hear his measured voice, pipe in hand, posing the question.

Or Rabbi Leitner, his instructor? There was something from the
Mishnah
he recalled, one of those countless tenets of Jewish law that had been drummed into him in dark-lit rooms as a boy, while his thoughts drifted out the window to things he found much more fun: playing football with friends in Krasinski Park, or the Sabbath goose his mother might have waiting for him later. With barley soup and
kreplach,
and a
kompot
of stewed apples and prunes.

Pidyon shvuyim
was how it was phrased in Hebrew.

To redeem a captive.

Taking a drag from his Lucky, Blum recalled the old rabbi once asking, his voice echoing in a corner of the empty synagogue, whether paying a ransom for the freedom of a man held hostage
in the end
would cost or save lives. Or just maybe, he explained, only bring additional hardship and suffering. “What is good cannot be fully known in the short term, do you understand that, Nathan?” The rabbi had come around the desk. Surely a life would be saved, he admitted. Yes. “But then would others then be taken and held in ransom the same way? Would funds that were meant for improvement of the temple be spent toward this ransom, and thus, let it fall into decline? Of course, if it was your son, or your brother,” the rabbi had shrugged, “the answer is not so clear.”

To Blum, if he did what Strauss and Donovan had asked of him, it was not so much that he would be “buying” back a life as putting
his
up in its place, in the same way a ransom would be offered. In effect, Blum would be the ransom. Sitting there, he smiled, as he could see the old rabbi pensively stroking his gray beard, muttering how else could you determine whether or not to pay for a captive's life unless you know this answer?
Will it save lives or cost them, in the end?
Taking out of the equation whose life in fact it was that was held—a brother or a complete stranger. That was the only answer or reply.

Blum thought back to how since he was seventeen and the Nazis had first marched into Krakow, no answer was ever easy.

He reminded himself that his parents and his sister had forfeited their lives so that he could be here now. There were many others who could easily have been picked to go instead of him. There was Perlman, Blum recalled, or Pincas Schreive. They were just as skilled as Blum was at avoiding the Germans.
Why did they not choose them?
Blum's mind brought back the glimmer of hope in his father's eyes amid the sadness of their final goodbye. Hope dimmed, because they both felt a sense of the different fates that awaited them, like diverging branches of the same tree.

And now to go back, Blum reflected, on a mission that was clearly more suicide than hope. For some man, only a name and a face, whose value might never be known to him. It made his decision to leave Krakow—
It was a great honor,
his father had insisted—stand for nothing if he ended up forfeiting his life in the same place they had given up their lives for him to leave.

So how else could he decide? He had looked into the colonel's somber eyes hoping to find the answer.
You can see how vital we think this is …
His look was just like his father's that last time. But then,
We don't know for sure that he's even still alive.

The odds against the mission's success were long. He saw that clearly in Strauss's and Donovan's sober faces. Beneath the need and the strategic importance of this man, the two of them clearly knew precisely what they were sending Blum on.

He reached into his wallet and removed the small photograph he had of him and Leisa, she, fourteen, sitting on the sill of the open window at their family's country house in Masuria. He, still barely able to shave.

She said,
I have a gift for you.

They had sat on the fire balcony of their cramped apartment on Jozefinska Street, their legs dangling over the edge.

“I don't want you to go,” she told him.

He swung his feet. “Neither do I.”

“Then why…?” she pleaded. “Tell Papa you changed your mind.”

When he was six and she was three, his father had made him promise to always watch out for his sister, in school, at the park. Once, when she was an infant, his father even playfully held her aloft above their fourth-floor window, saying “I'll throw her out. Unless you promise to look after her.”

“I promise. I promise,” Blum yelled, unaware there was a shelf beneath her and Leisa was never in any danger.

“I have to go,” he replied. “The temple is depending on it. You'll be all right. I told my friend Chaim to watch out for you if something happens.”

“Weissman? He's an ass.” Leisa turned up her nose.

True, Chaim was pompous and boastful. But he knew the paths and alleyways out of danger as well as anyone in the ghetto, and he always seemed to find a way to ask about Leisa.

“Nonetheless, if things get bad and he comes for you, you must go with him.” Blum looked squarely at her. “Even if Mother and Father don't. This is important, Leisa. You must promise me.”

She just looked at the street below, spotting a vendor pushing a lorry of vegetables four stories beneath them.

“I need you to promise me,” he said again.

“All right, I promise,” she finally agreed.

Blum looked closely at her.

“You have my word. I do.”

Blum smiled. “Good.”

A bit of time passed before she looked at him. “You think we'll ever see each other again?”

“Absolutely,” he replied. “I'll stake my life on it.”

“We'll see. I'm not so much worried about us, Nathan—Father always gets by—as I am about you. America is such a different place. And you don't speak a word of English.”

“That's not true. I can say ‘Put 'em up!'” he said in the kind of slow, Western drawl he'd heard in films and cocked his finger like a gun.

“Nathan, don't tease me. Anyway, I have something for you. Wait here.” She crawled inside and came back out a minute or two later with a piece of sheet music. It was Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Major. One of her favorites. What she played at the conservatory's recitals last year. She took the opening page and tore it from the binder.

“Leisa, don't!”

Then she folded it in half, lengthwise, and neatly split the page in two.

“See…” She folded up one side into a small square. “You'll keep this half and I'll keep mine. When we see each other again, we'll put them back together. Like this.” She unfolded hers and joined them again, the bars and passages once more fitting perfectly together. “That's our pact, okay? It's like a ticket. You won't lose it, will you?”

“They'll have to kill me to take it off me.” He grinned.

“Well, I prefer you don't let that happen.” His sister looked at him, her dark eyes wide and bruised with an unknown foreboding. “But the same for me.” She threw her arms around his neck. “I'm going to miss you, Nathan.”

“I'll miss you too, Doleczki.”

She wouldn't let him go.

“Whatever you do, Leisa, you continue to play. That's who you are. Never let them take that from you.”

“I won't,” she said, her body trembling with fear.

“And remember, when the shit hits the fan…”

“Yes, Chaim.” She nodded, her head buried against him. “If you say I must.”

Outside the barracks, Blum opened the folded sheet music he had kept with him these past three years.
“Wolfgang Ama—”
his side read at the top.
“Concerto ein—”

Then the opening bars.

He closed his eyes and imagined that Leisa was clutching hers when the bullets came. At least, he knew in her heart she was.

A couple of enlisted men hurried past and he stood up. The two saluted. “Sir.”

Blum saluted them back.

I'm sure that reassignment you put in to the Ritchie boys will be coming through at any time,
Donovan had said,
if that's how you'd like it to go.

He remembered at his bar mitzvah in Krakow, he had spoken of
aliyah.
Like all Jews, he had made a promise to go to the Holy Land one day. A promise most would never keep. So maybe in a way this would be his
aliyah
. To honor his parents and their deaths. His heritage. Not to Jerusalem, to the Holy Land, but to a camp in the woods of southern Poland where terrible things took place.

His promised land.

To find this one man.

With no return ticket.

He folded Leisa's music sheet back into a square and placed it inside his wallet, next to the small photo of her he kept there. Crushing his cigarette out, he picked up his cap and went to go in. He stopped a second. Thinking of her, which he tried not to do much these days, had brought a tear.

Months after he'd found out her fate, he'd also gotten word: Chaim Weissman had died in a fall off a rooftop onto Limanowa Street while fleeing the Germans the very morning Blum's family was murdered.

When that troop truck pulled up in front of their building, the Germans ordering everyone to get outside,
“Schnell!
” she probably waited, just like Blum had made her promise. Hid in the stairwell, hoping. Maybe until the moment they barged in and dragged her, screaming, down the stairs.

He'll be here, he'll be here,
she probably told herself.
Nathan promised.

Even as they were lined up against the wall and the bullets came.

 

FOURTEEN

Before his work shift the following morning, Blum went back to the Main Hall and asked for Captain Strauss's office, which turned out to be a small, poorly lit cubby on the third floor at the end of a long hallway. He stood in front of it for a few seconds, put his cap in his hand, and then knocked on the door.

The captain looked up from maps and reports and seemed pleased to see him. “Lieutenant.”

Strauss's office was a world away from his boss's. The only light was a bright lamp on the metal desk, other than what came through a shuttered window. One wall of shelves was stacked with heavy books and binders. A map of Poland and another of Europe were tacked to the other wall. On the desk, Blum saw two framed pictures. A pretty dark-haired woman, likely the captain's wife, and two young kids, and another of an older couple, the man dressed in a dark suit with a short beard, his wife in a white dress and hat.

Strauss pushed back from the desk, waiting.

All Blum said was, “So when do I have to leave?”

The captain edged into a smile. He stood up and put out his hand. “Day after tomorrow. At least, for Britain. The actual mission date is set for the end of May. That gives us two weeks there to prepare. Familiarization with the local terrain and the camp. What you can expect inside. You'll need to lose a few more pounds. Shouldn't be so hard, on what they feed us these days.”

Blum grinned.

“The Boss will be pleased. Damn pleased.” Strauss sat on the edge of his desk. “He'll want to congratulate you himself, of course. He's up on the Hill today. Do you mind, can you let me see your wrists.”

“My wrists…?” Blum held them out.

Strauss nodded, turning the left one over. “You don't happen to have a problem with needles, do you?”

“Needles…” Nathan shook his head. “No. Why?”

“Not to worry. We'll explain it all later. I know this is all coming at you pretty quickly. Anyone here who ought to know?”

“
Here…?
You mean in the States? Just a friend, perhaps. No one special. Maybe my cousin and his wife back in Chicago. They brought me over.”

“Let's just be sure we keep the real reason behind your trip to ourselves. How about we just simply tell them that you're being deployed? Everyone's being shipped over there these days. No need to mention anything more.”

“I understand.”

“Oh, and then there's this…” Strauss reached across his desk and opened a file. He took out a photograph. “I suppose, no reason not to show you this now.”

It was of a man, middle aged, in his fifties maybe. A heavy but pleasant face, sagging cheeks, wire glasses, graying hair, combed over from the side.

“Here's your man,” the captain said. “Though he may not look exactly the same now.”

Blum ran his eyes over the photograph.

“Don't worry, before we're done you'll have every wrinkle on his face committed to memory.”

“What's his name?” Blum asked. He looked kindly yet, at the same time, the eyes were serious, wise. There was a mole on the side of his nose. Who was he, Blum wondered, and what did he know, to make him, above all others, worth Blum risking his life to save?

“His name is Mendl. One ‘e.' Alfred. He's a professor. From Lvov. I'm afraid that's about all I can tell you now.”

“Mendl…” Blum muttered out loud. “What is his area of specialty?”

“Electromagnetic physics. Something very heady like that. Know much about it?”

“I know an apple falls to the earth if you drop it.”

Strauss grinned. “That's about my limit too. But a lot of very smart people here who do, say that what Mendl knows is indispensable. And that it's worth whatever we can do to bring him here. I think you should know, Nathan—I hope it's all right that I call you that, we're pretty much going to be tied at the hip for the next two weeks—that this mission, long as the odds might seem, goes all the way up to the top. And not just in this building, if you know what I mean. All I can say is, what you've agreed to do, you're doing your country a great service.”