Free Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel by James Lee Burke

and after the fall of Madrid, he and his wife and Rosita and her little brother walked across the Pyrenees into France with members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. In late 1943 the family was arrested by the Gestapo. The father’s name was on a list of suspected Communists, and he either died in a jail cell or was tortured to death; the mother and the boy were packed into a freight car bound for Buchenwald and never seen again. Rosita was selected for duty in a camp whorehouse.
    “Maybe your mother and the boy made it through,” Pine said. He was sitting against a wood post, his stomach full, his eyes sleepy. “It’s not going to be long before the Russians are in Berlin. You can pert’ near count on it.”
    “My brother was killed the second day after his arrival. My mother died three weeks later.”
    “How could you know that?” he asked.
    “An SS colonel checked. He wanted to impress me with his honesty and his access to information. He had me play piano at a dinner he gave. He wanted me to be his mistress. He poured me a glass of wine when he told me what he had learned of my family.”
    “What did you do?” Pine said.
    “I spat the wine in his face,” she replied.
    We heard heavy footsteps on the wood floor immediately above our heads. We sat frozen in the dark, breathing through our mouths, looking up the stairs. Then the door opened. A tall man stood on the landing, a lantern in his left hand, its oily yellow glow bouncing on our faces. A Schmeisser submachine gun hung on a strap from his right shoulder; his thick fingers, half-mooned with dirt, were clutched on the pistol grip. Rosita stood up, her hands in the air, and spoke to him in German. He walked halfway down the wood steps, lifting the lantern higher. He was wearing snow-caked boots and corduroy trousers and a leather coat seamed with cracks and lined with sheep’s wool. His beard and hair were as wild as a lion’s mane. He said something in reply, his eyes blazing.
    “How about a translation?” I said.
    “I told him who we were and that we were sorry for entering his house without permission,” Rosita said. “I told him that Americans in large numbers would be here soon and they would reward anyone who helped us.”
    “What did he say?” I asked.
    “That we shouldn’t have stolen from him,” she replied.

Chapter
    5
     
    O UR GLOWERING HOST turned out to be a Jehovah’s Witness named Armin Bauer. He had been jailed as a pacifist and his Mongoloid son had been gassed during Hitler’s racial purification program. Two days before our arrival, he and his wife, Charlotte, hid in a cave while the SS were in the area; they had returned home just after we took refuge in their cellar. For eight days they let us stay in their cellar and fed us and washed our clothes and heated water in pots on a woodstove so we could bathe. They gave us bottles of homemade beer and a plate of bread slices slathered with jam, treats I suspected they rarely allowed themselves. I tried to ask Armin where he had gotten the Schmeisser, but he refused to say.
    Charlotte was a jolly, bovine person with upper arms as big as hams and blond braids she tied on top of her head. In view of the hardship and loss that had been imposed on her family, I was amazed at her good nature; finally, I asked her, through Rosita, about its source. She held up seven fingers and pointed at the backyard. Then she drew a finger across her throat. She looked at me and said something in German and laughed.
    “She says she gave the Wehrmacht soldiers some bread and jam. With poison in it,” Rosita explained. “Seven of them are buried by the barn. She wanted to know if you’d like some more bread and jam.”
    At night we heard bombers flying overhead, and sometimes we saw flashes of light on the horizon and seconds later heard a soft rumbling sound, more like distant thunder than bombs exploding. I couldn’t tell if the planes were American or British. We’d heard that the Army Air