from Brooklyn, shunted around from one family member to another until he struck out on his own and never looked back.
“Well,” Daniel began, clearing his throat, “so she’s gonna teach you to drive, hey? I bet that’s not all she’s going to teach you.” He grinned beneath his bandages.
This time, Reuben noticed, Daniel didn’t blush at all.
“Hey, boy! Rest. I’ll see you tomorrow.” With a wave of his hand, he left his friend and found himself smiling as he threaded his way through the aisles of cots and wounded men to the great heavy doors that led to the street.
Daniel lay quietly for a long time after Reuben left. If Reuben said he would be able to see again, then he would see. If Reuben said his shoulder would knit, it would knit. He was alive, and Reuben had both their lives under control. All this misery would become a memory. His thoughts came to life as the moans and groans of the other men in the makeshift ward faded. Thank God for Reuben.
They’d been in boot camp together since day one, from the first he had recognized a kindred spirit in Reuben. Then they’d arrived in France and tasted the first bitter dregs of day-to-day combat. At night, groups of men had huddled together, speaking of their homes, their families, their sweethearts. They would ramble on and show pictures, and eyes would embarrassingly tear and voices break. Daniel would see Reuben’s expression change, become vacant. Hardened. The tall, handsome man would walk from the group determinedly, and Daniel would join him. They would talk about their own childhoods, about their lack of any kind of home that could compare with what the other men had.
Daniel was an orphan, a fact he’d learned early on, scrambling in the orphanage for scraps of bread or fleeting attention. Reuben’s mother had died giving birth to him, and then his father had died when he was six. After that he was passed from one relative to another, winding up with an aunt, a destitute woman who had made it clear that with six children of her own to care for, she had no time for Reuben. Wherever they lived, Reuben and Daniel had felt extraneous. They were outsiders. Neither of them could remember a cozy Thanksgiving dinner in the bosom of their family—parents, grandparents, sisters, or brothers.
The war had brought them together. In the trenches they became brothers to each other while the bitter realities of war embraced them in a cloak of death and destruction. Although there were times when it seemed life offered little more than a thousand ways to die, they’d survived by sharing rations and fears, past emotional traumas, and then almost identical physical pain—gassed and blinded in the same overwhelming moment.
Daniel shifted on his cot, where he lay bandaged and broken. The one question he tried to push far away, to the very back of his brain, whirled in his mind. Will I be blind? Forever? A recent night in the trenches flashed through his mind. He could smell it and feel it, and his skin began to crawl. Speechless and trembling as the world crashed around them, they sat ankle deep in the muck, waiting out an unusually fearful blitz. Then he remembered the body of that boy landing on him, bleeding, open and steaming at the same time, and the smell of gunpowder and burning flesh. When Reuben had pulled him out they had stared at each other and voiced the same overpowering fear: that they would die on strange soil with no one but each other to care about them. They’d shared their youth, their dreams, and their innocence over the next few hours, looking deep into each other’s souls. When the sun came up, they shook hands in open acknowledgment of their brotherhood. Reuben had said, “We’re in this together, and, by God, we’ll get out of it together.” He would never forget those words and the unbreakable bond they’d formed that night.
Daniel pushed his head deeper into the pillow on the hard cot. He had to believe in Reuben. Believe in Reuben…He dreamed of fluffy white clouds, soft warm breezes, and the slow, joyful unfolding of Reuben’s promises.
Reuben stood beneath the portico of Soissons Hospital, an abandoned ruin of a chalet before French forces had marched into the valley and commandeered the building for medical facilities. Before coming here he and Daniel had been treated behind the battle lines. Dealing with the sick and wounded was more difficult for the Americans than for the French because there were no American hospitals, and only those men who were permanently unfit for further service could be sent home. Reuben didn’t know if Daniel realized they would surely see action again. It was this knowledge that made Madame Mickey’s invitation so attractive. On their own, Reuben and Daniel were doomed to return to the front. If someone could pull a few strings for them, for whatever purpose, why not?
The cold made Reuben’s leg ache and the biting wind burned his eyes. The past weeks he’d forced himself to ignore such pain. He was alive, that was all that mattered. Time would heal his wounds. He leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette, trying to shrug deeper into his khaki tunic. He was colder than a well digger’s ass, but he wouldn’t move toward the barracks that were his temporary home until Madam Mickey had all the paperwork in order.
Private Reuben Aaron Tarz, Co. D, 16th Infantry Regiment, a doughboy. On June 5, 1917, he’d been one of five million men registering for the draft, but he wasn’t one of the ones who shouted “Kill the Kaiser!” He’d enlisted for two simple reasons: three square meals a day and a roof over his head. For his efforts he’d received his pay, killed the enemy, lain in his own body filth, been sprayed for cooties, been blinded and wounded. More than that, he’d stood at attention when the bugles blew at four A.M., the time when a lot of Americans stateside were just going to bed. He’d slogged through sleet and slush, seen every horror there was. Eventually he’d hardened himself to the sight of maggots feeding on dead flesh, of rats that infested the trenches in search of food, any kind of food, even human corpses and gangrenous flesh. If he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget walking up the line, his eyes alert for the Krauts and for Daniel. The hateful cacophony of bayonets clanking against steel helmets, the mountains of dead bodies, the madness, the absolute terror of it all. The nightly muck sweats, the fear of dying, the fear of surviving. They called it a world war, but to Reuben it was his war, very personal and very much his own. It was his fight to stay alive.
Reuben flicked his cigarette into a mound of slush. His feet were cold, his legs ached, and he had a terrible pounding in his head. Back at the barracks he would apply the drops to his eyes and gradually the headache would lessen. It was a hell of a price to pay for three meals that were more slop than food and for a cold roof of stars. But what choice had he? he reflected bitterly. All the ills of the world, all the wars, pestilence, and famine, were brought about by small men, small of stature and small of mind.
With a muttered oath, he pulled his cap over his curly dark hair and yanked it down over his ears. By the time he’d made it halfway down the road to the barracks, the hard, sluicing sleet had soaked him to the skin. His head was pounding as he limped through the half-frozen sludge. Looking up, he squinted through the rain in the direction of the barracks. Another few minutes and he’d be inside, where it was warm. Things were looking up—the way his luck was going, his dreams might even come true. He could almost touch them, and it scared him; he kept wanting to look over his shoulder. But he had guts, he had chutzpah, and that chutzpah would make all the difference. He was going to succeed in this world. In the trenches, he’d climbed over dead bodies literally—now he’d do it figuratively if need be.
Yes, he was Jewish, but only when it was convenient to be Jewish. During his year in the trenches he had passed for every nationality under the sun. Jews, he’d found out early, were not the most highly regarded of people. But when it came right down to it, he probably wasn’t anything except Reuben Aaron Tarz from Brooklyn, New York.
A young man, angry still at his mother for dying during the first minutes of his life and then making him live through his first six years with his father, who had grieved over his wife’s death in granite silence until he, too, had succumbed. Those first six years, he believed, had taught him not to cry. He didn’t remember too much after that except arriving and leaving, then his aunt’s house in
