A Perfect Madness Read online

ELEVEN

  Eva and Hiram came into Julia’s view the moment the train rolled to a stop alongside the passenger platform in King’s Cross station. Stepping down hurriedly from the car, she rushed to embrace both of them. Why Eva and Hiram were together was a story Julia wanted to hear, but it would come later when she and Eva were alone. Right now, her brother’s face was all she wanted to see. Months had passed since they had been together and talked. Julia looked at her brother, older by two years than she, now proudly dressed in a Royal Air Force uniform. After months of studying English, as Julia did, he enlisted in the RAF, along with a group of other Czech men. Hiram’s intellect and advanced schooling moved him quickly into the pilot training program for the new four-engine Avro Lancaster bombers arriving weekly at Mildenhall.

  “I will be flying out of the Mildenhall air base, forty or so miles from here,” he said, beaming with that wide grin that set him apart from most other men.

  “You are so easy to look at, and my brother, too,” Julia laughed, throwing her arms around Hiram’s neck and kissing him. Hiram was handsome, in a distinguished way. “A fine Jewish-looking man,” their father used to say teasingly, as if there were such a thing.

  Like his father, Hiram was overly proud of his Jewish blood, perhaps more so than Julia. Together, they had initially frowned on Julia’s close relationship with Erich, but each gave way as the goodness in Erich became apparent. Hiram had hoped his sister would come to see the rapidly increasing walls of hate rising everywhere throughout Europe against the Jews, and the terrible ending that was sure to come from her relationship with Erich. But the day Julia told him she loved Erich—“every inch of his German skin,” she had said, bursting with rapturous joy, he embraced Erich as he would a brother. They became even closer the day the Sudetenland was annexed by Germany and the trashing and beating and killing of Jews began. Fearful for Julia’s safety and his mother’s, he rushed home to find Erich standing on the front porch, a steel bar in hand, ready to face alone what might come. Through the passing of the night they sat together on the steps, talking endlessly at first, then resting, but all the while listening to distant angry sounds in the night, of marauding youths looking for someone to hurt. When the given grace of dawn came, he eagerly embraced Erich before he left, as he would his father, or anyone else he loved. From that day on, no one would speak ill of Erich in front of Hiram.

  After greeting Hiram, Julia glanced at Eva, who was waiting patiently to be hugged, too. Three days of separation in alien lands can seem like a year, where the feeling of belonging still eludes you. Julia and Eva were embraced by their small group of Czech comrades, but still looked on with great suspicion by many others as intruders in their kingdom. Ever mindful of this fact, Julia and Eva never left each other’s side, always appearing humble and grateful wherever they went in public. Even Hiram felt the silent glances at first, too, but as casualties among the airmen rose, the glances were replaced with smiles. Little would change for Julia and Eva, though, until the Nazi blitzkrieg that crushed France and England stood alone—a time which was soon to come.

  “Did Hiram keep you company while I was in Scotland with Anna?” Julia asked, fishing for a reason Eva and Hiram were together.

  “Yes, quite nicely, I might say,” Eva replied teasingly, causing Julia to step back with a puzzled look at her friend and then at Hiram.

  “We went to a small synagogue together Saturday, hardly a place to get in trouble. It was Passover week, you know, or had you forgotten?” Hiram said.

  Julia had never thought of Eva and Hiram being together. “A sophisticated intellect” was the best way to describe Hiram, though he always kept his feet firmly planted on the ground with his head just beneath the clouds. Eva kept her head nowhere near the clouds, and her feet deep in the rich soil of her farm home along the winding Danube River, edging Bratislava. Coarse in language and manners and poorly educated, she was everything Hiram wasn’t or likely to become. A peasant of the land, Eva inhaled the staleness of life others avoided as easily as the fresh air around her, never complaining, never afraid of what the next storm might bring to her life. Unreligious all her life, she believed that all God requires of anyone is that they live and die the best they can. Eva was as beautiful as Julia, yet in a different way. Long sought as a prize by the young and old men working the endless vineyards and fields around her, no one could reach her heart. Strangely though, it was Julia who filled her soul with love.

  Walking between the two as they left the train station, Julia took hold of Hiram’s and Eva’s hands, eagerly entwining her fingers with theirs to capture for a few moments longer the warm happiness of being together. After but a few steps, Hiram stopped and turned to Julia, discarding the mask of gladness he was wearing when she arrived.

  “Denmark and Norway have surrendered to Germany. The Netherlands and Belgium will be next. When that happens, they will crush the French army and take Paris,” Hiram said.

  “France—how can that be?” she asked, stunned by the unexpected news.

  “Stupidity mostly, ignoring a festering sore until it became cancerous. That’s what Europe did, thinking it would get well by itself. The German cancer will spread here, too, when it is ready.”

  “It will be more difficult for them to move their army across the channel. The British will not quit so easily,” Julia said defiantly.

  “Perhaps. But Hitler will come after England as sure as he marched into Prague,” Hiram said, walking away from Eva and Julia back towards the station.

  Hiram’s reference to Prague brought tears to Julia’s eyes. Germany was there and would be for years to come, if not forever, it seemed to her. And they will be here, too, maybe. Then nothing would be left of hope and all of the tomorrows she wished for Anna.

  “There is no promise, not even from God, that children will have a world to live in, that things will always be the same,” her father had whispered to her the evening before she left Prague with Hiram. “Even God was not that foolish to think this might be. But we must smile and hope, as if it were so.”

  Then they walked onto the front porch and sat down on the steps together for the last time, looking at the stars and the passing moon and all else they had seen a million times before. After long moments of silence, he took Julia’s hand and held it tightly, whispering again to her, “You must remember that a time of happiness has no separate existence of its own, no separate breath apart from the moment we experience it. When that moment passes, what we lived withers in the darkness and is gone. It takes courage to love life, Julia, and for that it takes a gift for life. You have that gift, my precious daughter, more than anyone in the family.” Then, standing, he started to return indoors but stopped and looked back at Julia for a long minute, knowing without thought that the future would take her from him.

  “You remember Goethe’s words, don’t you, Julia?” he asked, with tears now covering his face.

  “What words, Papa? I don’t remember.”

  “His words from the game we used to play when you were ten, reading the great philosophers and trying to figure out what they were trying to tell us. Goethe was one of your favorites.”

  “I still don’t remember, Papa, there were so many,” Julia said, trying desperately to find the words her father sought from a distant time.

  “ ‘There is nothing more valuable than this day.’ I’m surprised you have forgotten such beautiful words. You shouldn’t, they will carry you in the days ahead.”

  “I won’t, Papa,” Julia said, but her father had already gone inside, leaving her to cry alone.

  Later, she knew the words spoken by her father were true. The great joy she had experienced with Anna and Angie McFarland the last two days was gone, as if it had never been.

  Hiram stopped at the main exit door and took Julia in his arms, holding her close for several seconds.

  “I must stay here at the station and wait. The train to Mildenhall should leave in less than an hour.”

  “We will
wait with you,” Julia said quickly, refusing to let go of Hiram’s hand and starting back into the station with him.

  “No, go. You have your own schedule to worry about, and it’s late. We will be together again soon, I promise you.”

  With that, Julia embraced Hiram, sobbing at first, then unleashing a sea of tears unabashedly, causing a few in the station to look her way.

  “We’ll all be together soon, won’t we, Hiram? Papa and Mama and you and me—our family.”

  “Yes, in time. Who knows, England may sue for peace, if France falls,” Hiram half jested, signaling to Eva with his eyes to leave quickly with Julia, which she did.

  As they turned a corner away from the station to begin the long trek to their billets, Eva released her hard grip on Julia’s hand, then gently took hold of it again as they walked along in silence.

  “It seems we are always saying goodbye in this world,” Julia said after a few minutes, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I wonder if we’ll ever stop doing so.”

  “I don’t know. Goodbye is too harsh a word, so I never say it,” Eva replied.

  “That doesn’t seem right.”

  “Well it is. You never leave a person as long as they can remember who you are and were. If they can’t, it doesn’t make any difference what you say, or if you’re gone, or standing there with them.”

  “Well, it still doesn’t seem right not to say good-bye, to wish them well.”

  “When I left home to come to Prague, my grandmother didn’t say one word of goodbye, ’cause she didn’t know who I might be. In fact, she thought I was one of those Hungarian whores who slip now and then into Bratislava when business is slow in Budapest, and she said she certainly wasn’t going to say goodbye to some whore she didn’t know,” Eva said, trying hard to keep a straight face, even though what she had said was true.

  Julia stretched her eyes wide at Eva’s words for a second, then burst out laughing. The depth of Eva’s homegrown intelligence and wit continually amazed her. With little formal schooling, what she could come up with at a moment’s notice to untangle a sticky conversation could challenge the gods. To Julia, Eva could give light to the darkest of nights when the moon and stars stayed hidden and to the days when there was no sunrise. Her learning came from a wisdom deep in the soil around her, a thousand years of listening to all who came before her, and who had worked the land as she did. But in her training with Czech intelligence, Eva would always defer to Julia because she could reach inside the nuts and bolts being put before them haphazardly and find the solution they wanted to hear.

  Thirty minutes after leaving the station, they neared the dense row of trees near the billets where she had been attacked. Julia stopped and looked and listened, not for any human shadows that might be waiting along the dark pathway before them, but for the sounds of the night. Even now, wherever she went, they always seemed to be around her.

  “God’s guardian angels,” her mother had told her one night, as they listened to the rustling sounds together. “They are moving about, here and there as fast as they can, watching over all of us when we sleep.”

  When she told Hiram about the angels, he laughed and teased her for days about such foolishness, making her cry each time. Then late one night when she was listening to the sounds in her bed, he tiptoed in and said, “The sounds you are hearing are the souls of bad people rushing around, trying to find a place to sleep, maybe even with you,” causing her to cry even louder, much to his delight. Julia didn’t believe in angels anymore, but she still loved the sounds moving through the trees at night, as she did the voices of the river, because they told her she was alive.

  “Are you alright?” Eva asked, puzzled by Julia’s sudden behavior.

  “Oh yes, I’m fine. Wait—you can hear them, can’t you?”

  “Hear what, for god’s sake?”

  “Those sounds—the wind and the leaves and the—”

  “You are tired, Julia. Your head is too fuzzy-full of joy and sadness, when there is room for only one or the other, not both at the same time.”

  “I know. But they’ll still be there tomorrow night and all the nights afterwards, and I’ll keep on hearing and loving them. They are part of my existence. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know why,” Eva answered, clearly frustrated with everything being said. Sounds were not what they should be talking about. It was the letter in her pocket from her own brother in Bratislava telling her what was beginning to happen to all of the Jews in Czechoslovakia. But Eva knew it was his way of letting her go, just as Hiram had Julia, but for a tragically different reason. She would wait until tomorrow, or maybe never, to tell Julia about the letter.

  Later, when they arrived at their quarters, Eva reminded Julia of their expected move tomorrow to Chichley Hall in Buckinghamshire. There they were to begin a long and vigorous training as Czech agents through the British intelligence program labeled M16. If all went well, it was then they would return to Prague. Julia only nodded to Eva, offering a faint smile as she closed the door behind her. Tomorrow meant nothing now, only sleep with a few dreams thrown in, perhaps, of Anna and Erich.

  ***