In his head and way down at the center of him he blotted her out, now, to see if he could bear it. She wasn’t away, he told himself. She wasn’t working, nor following her assignment until she could come home to him. She wasn’t traveling by convoy or talking to people trying to hear their stories. She wasn’t in her hotel, sleeping curled on her side like a child, but utterly gone and finished. She wasn’t his wife, because he had no wife.
At this last thought he’d stopped and just listened to himself breathing beneath the cat’s weight. His heart was still going. The floor was still there beneath him, and the blanket against his back. Boise opened his golden eyes and then opened them again, the second set of lids flashing like something metallic and strange, blessing him.
“If only you liked whiskey,” he said to the cat, “then everything really would be all right.”
The cat didn’t stir even a little. It sat on his chest, still as a sphinx and quiet as anything. This would be a very long night, he knew. He closed his eyes and felt the house all around him and him inside it. The weather made a halo around the house, and the sky made a halo around the weather, and the ocean pushed out all around everything and touched its way east until it found England, and that’s where she was, though she was also nowhere. He could feel her absence even in the place he’d tried to kill. He could feel it moving through him like his own blood. Yes, goddammit, it would be a long night.
68
In many ways being a woman meant I was relegated to the outskirts of the war in Europe, but there were interesting people at those outskirts, and I talked to as many as I could. In train stations and barracks, in storefronts and pubs and mess halls, I looked into their eyes as I asked questions, and wrote down what they said, and what I felt listening. At night I sat up late by the single bulb at my bedside, or sometimes walked through London’s blacked-out streets and thought about what I had seen and heard, turning everything over for myself until I felt that I was slowly and little by little coming to understand what this war was. I’d always been someone who needed to take things in on my feet and with my own eyes. I was doing that now and trying to stay focused on each day, each encounter, and not fall too low about my marriage.
The pieces came fast, tumbling out of me—most of them concerning ordinary people, which had always been what I most cared about and felt pulled toward. I stood beside them, watching until I thought I could glean what was particular about their story, what was true and worth knowing.
Maybe the most difficult of all the stories I heard came from a Polish refugee who’d only barely fled his village with his life. The Germans had taken most of the men for forced labor, and whichever of the wives and daughters they found desirable for brothels on the eastern front. The other women were made to work, or sometimes ordered to claw a shallow grave where they stood before they were shot without ceremony. Some Poles became servants or serfs on their own stolen farms. Most Jews were killed immediately, wherever they were found.
I watched the man carefully as he told me all this. He was rail thin and jaundiced, with wide yellow circles beneath his eyes. He couldn’t have been more than forty, I guessed, and had seen things no one should, not at that or any other age.
“They’re killing millions of Jews,” he said.
I heard him. His words rang in my skull like something hammered out on an anvil, but I also couldn’t fully take them in. The number was too vast, too hideous. The suffering almost unimaginable. “How many have found a way to escape, like you did?”
He shrugged. “Maybe one day we’ll know, but not enough. In my village, anyone who even gave a Jew a piece of bread was shot on sight.” His face changed as he told me that his parents had been sent to a labor camp. “I can’t believe they’re alive. I don’t know where my daughter was taken. She’s fourteen.”
I found I couldn’t say anything. I wanted to touch his hand, send up a prayer, weep for all that had been stolen from him, but nothing would have been right or enough. Finally I thanked him for his honesty and told him how important it felt to me that we’d met, that now readers in the States would know exactly how sickening and abominable things were in his country and elsewhere. Then I watched him walk away, feeling like I could barely stand up.
I met another Pole who told me about the Warsaw Ghetto, where there was a wall ten feet high and sealed all around with guards. Inside the walls, four or five hundred thousand people had been driven, and there they starved and fought off typhus and watched Nazis hunt through the streets randomly, murdering anyone they liked, just as it struck them. He’d escaped by jumping from a train that was taking him to a labor camp in Prussia. When he got back to Warsaw, he’d altered his appearance, changed his name, and paid to have new papers forged. The man he’d been before was dead. He didn’t know how to reach his living family members with the truth until the war was over.
I wanted to tell him the war had to be over soon, but I didn’t believe it, and anyway, even if it ended right then, at that precise moment, it would already have been far too late for the Jews. Learning the truth and taking it in felt like swallowing poison. The pieces I would write would take that poison and give it to each of my readers like a terrible dark kiss—that’s why I was here and not at home, and why Ernest truly needed to be here as well. But he couldn’t be, I realized with a very particular sadness. He’d lost something, something utterly essential to him, and had grown afraid. Maybe writing the book of his life had given him too much, after all, and he couldn’t take risks now. Maybe it was the middle of his life breathing down his neck, or Bum being sent over to France soon, which he still wouldn’t acknowledge. Whatever it was, I saw that now the war terrified him and so did his own death. And me, too, and himself. Everything.
I wrote him again, from the absolute bottom of my heart, saying how much I needed him to be here—for me—and for all the readers who needed to hear the truth as only he could write it.
His reply couldn’t have been clearer. He said I might be exactly where I wanted, as I usually was, but that he could not possibly come. His war work in Cuba was too essential to walk away from. He was going to stick it out there, because that’s what he was meant to do. Meanwhile, he was lonely—terribly, awfully, disgustingly lonely, like someone with my heart cut out. He ended not with the word love, but with so long, saying that maybe he would see me soon, and maybe he wouldn’t.
I’d been away for over four months, longer than I ever had. Too long, I realized. His loneliness had hardened and turned. He was only bitter now and he wouldn’t budge in my direction, or couldn’t. We seemed to be at a terrible impasse, and he was cutting my heart out, too, and I didn’t know what to think, or what to do. So I read it all again, holding the letter away from my body, like something that meant to do me harm, and already had.
69
By the end of January 1944, I’d finished and sent off six of the seven articles I’d promised to Collier’s. They were pleased with my work and told me so. They even printed a photo of me next to a short column saying that, “among gal correspondents,” I stood out, coming “pretty close to living up to Hollywood’s idea of what a big-league woman reporter should be.” I didn’t know about or care about Hollywood, but I loved knowing I had a real following now, readers who looked for my take on things, and recognized my voice when they came across it, what a far cry that was from how I’d started.
I decided to set out for Italy, where the Allies had been stalled by a brutal German defense for months and months, just below Cassino. Ginny Cowles had already headed there and written back to say she’d run into Herb Matthews and that they were waiting for me with a giant flask of whiskey.
My heart swelled to think of seeing Matthews and working beside him, as in the old days. As I readied myself to leave London and head after him, I received a packet of notices for Liana, which had just been released in the States. Only one of them was dismissive, referring to me merely as Hemingway
’s wife, and saying nothing substantial about the book. The others used my own name and applauded what I’d done. I’d come of age artistically, one said. Another mentioned that I seemed to be able to handle characters—particularly female ones—with more delicacy and restraint than my far-more-famous husband. The dizzying charge of that statement was followed by a letter from Max saying how pleased Scribner’s was by the early sales figures. The book had already sold out its first printing of twenty-seven thousand copies and had hit all the major bestseller lists.
I was ecstatic—I truly was—but the good news also seemed to belong to another Martha Gellhorn. This one was packing a satchel and hurrying to Algiers and then to Naples, where I threw in with a long convoy of trucks and Jeeps and tanks and ambulances stringing their way to the front through a deep constant paste of mud. It rained for weeks until everything was slick and wet and brown, the small villages we passed at a crawl, reduced to rubble from heavy shelling, the blown bridges and ransacked farms and displaced families that were working their way south while we headed steadily north, toward the Germans.
Ahead were the mountains the French were holding with their lives, and ones they were trying to take back, inch by inch. Ahead, I kept telling myself, were Matthews and Ginny Cowles keeping a place for me in some mud-spattered tent along the side of the road, warming whiskey with their hands and saving a laugh for me and all their best stories.
The convoy kept moving through the damp, past minefields and encampments, while the sounds of gunfire and shelling grew louder. My shoulders ached with knots. I was terrified, but also filled with admiration for the French soldiers who were dug in here and fighting with everything they had as a way to get home—right through the German army and back to France, by way of Italy.
When we came to Sant’Elia, seven kilometers from the front at Cassino, an ambulance had just been shelled where it stood, parked to one side of the Rapido, just below the village. The murdered driver had been brought to the hospital field tent on a cot, and there were flowers in her hands that one of her friends had placed there—her friends being the other French girl ambulance drivers who had come to see her where she lay, and now were headed back to their vehicles, to the treacherous road and the mud and the whistling shells with her face in their thoughts. She had the most beautiful features, and hair the color of summer corn, and she was absolutely gone and not asleep.
I watched the doctors and the stretcher-bearers doing their work in the unremitting cold, with improvised equipment, while a transistor radio in the corner played swing music on a station from over the Swiss border. When the number of wounded had ebbed to a trickle, the surgeon invited me to his living quarters down in the cellar of a nearby building. It had a dirt floor that had been covered over with peeling wooden doors taken from the rubble that was everywhere. The doors were damp and cold, but the floor was far worse, so we perched there on mattresses by a stingy coal-burning stove, and listened to the mice in the walls.
The surgeon offered me some Italian cognac he’d been saving, which smelled of singed peaches and lilacs and tasted like quivering fire on my tongue. I drank it gratefully, and sent up a silent toast to Matthews, wherever he was, and to Ernest, too—wishing with every last cell in my body that the three of us could be together right now, here with the damp doors and the endless mud and the mortar fire and Tommy Dorsey, and death. If we could lean on each other, we could bear anything, anything at all. Nothing had ever felt as right as that, and Ernest would remember it, and take it in, and maybe be saved a little by it. He would, if only I could get him here.
* * *
—
Before I left Italy, a letter from Bumby found me. He was stationed in Algeria, serving as a military police officer in charge of a special unit. He was fine, he promised, but had seen no action and was growing restless.
THANK GOD FOR THAT, I shot back by cable. YOU RESTLESS IS THE LUCKIEST THING I’VE HEARD IN AGES.
He told me he was going to be on leave soon, in Algiers, so I made arrangements to meet him there, en route back to London. Even for a single night, I thought it would be worth any amount of trouble. And it was.
As soon as I arrived in Algiers, I managed to get us both invited to a dinner being thrown by Victor Rothschild. He’d just won the George Medal for valor for his service in dismantling undetonated bombs in the London Blitz. In years to come, there would be a great deal of talk about whether or not he was a Soviet spy trading British secrets, but for the moment he was only our incredibly dashing host, recounting high-risk tales over pressed duck and plum pudding while Bumby gobbled up all of it, leaning on Victor’s every word.
“Don’t get any ideas,” I told him. “Papa and I need you in one piece.”
“I’m only listening,” he said with a wink. “You can’t arrest me for that.”
He seemed to have aged two years since I’d last seen him at Christmas. It was the trim cut of his uniform and his sharp haircut, but also a look in his eye. He was finished with being safe and sheltered, only he knew better than to tell me that.
After dinner, I followed him over to where Victor was perched with a Pimm’s Cup and a massive cigar, talking of parachute jumps with Randolph Churchill, son of the British prime minister. Randolph had just narrowly escaped capture, and probably death, after dropping into Yugoslavia. To hear him tell it, there were only thrilling, fearless moments. He was eager to go back immediately, right into the thick of things.
Randolph was at least as dashing to look at as Victor, if not more so. They both could have been film stars, even without the help of their very famous families. And now I knew there was no chance in persuading Bum that a sleepy post was lucky. As the evening flew by, he pressed both men with questions, nodding the way I’d seen him do when Ernest instructed him on some point of shooting on the wing or fly-fishing. He wasn’t dreaming; he was taking essential mental notes.
“I should steal you away to London and keep you as my special pet,” I told him when we had to part.
“What about the firing squad I’d get for desertion?” he asked, smiling and patient with me as ever.
“Oh, that. Well, the threat of a firing squad might be useful in drawing Papa over.”
“You’re worried about him.”
“Nearly always. Isn’t that stupid? I swear I’d worry less if he wanted to parachute into Yugoslavia with you. At least then he’d be behaving like himself.” I felt my emotions rising dangerously and shook my head quickly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be talking like this.”
“It’s all right. I know things haven’t been easy lately.”
“What would you do? Tell me.”
“Drag him here in a large wool sack?” He shrugged a little, trying to make light. “If only he were the dragging type.”
“I might try anyway,” I said, and then I pulled him close and hugged him hard and for a long time, not wanting to ever let him go.
70
Although Bumby was more than right about Ernest’s temperament, by March I’d decided that I was far too concerned about my husband not to head home, at least for a short while. I’d been away for five months—twice as long as we’d ever been apart—and I almost didn’t recognize the Finca when I arrived. Empty liquor bottles were strewn everywhere and the cats had taken over the Little House, spraying wherever they liked. Six or ten of them were new. So was the man that looked at me with Ernest’s face, but with a mood that was so very dark and sour I was almost afraid to go near him.
“Did you forget something?” he asked coldly, before I even settled my luggage properly.
“Please don’t punish me, Rabbit. I’ve missed you like no one’s business.”
He only shrugged and told me that Operation Friendless was no more. All counterintelligence activity in South America had recently been handed off to the FBI, which had examined his activities and pronounced them “amateurish.” He gr
imaced at the word, repeating it.
“I’m so sorry,” I told him.
“Like hell you are. Two years of steady patrolling and we don’t even rate a thank you very much. How’s that for duty?” Bitterness and pure rancor shone in his eyes and the turned-down corners of his mouth.
He seemed so much older to me suddenly. His eyes were lined and flat and without fire. His cheeks seemed to sag, and there was salt in his beard, I noticed in the light. When I tried to talk about Europe, the coming invasion of France, any portion of the future ahead of us, he flinched and twisted on himself, and then struck out at me.
He was intent on rubbing my nose in everything that was wrong with me, everything I’d ever done to cross him. He spat entire lists of things he’d had to suffer through because I’d needed to have my way, China and Arizona, Finland and the Caribbean, all the weeks and months he’d had to be on his own when he’d told me how rotten that was for him. The way I’d ruined the tomcats, and now was trying to sink him like every other woman. He snarled about my spoiledness, my terrible spending habits, my ambition. My ambition—that seemed the dirtiest word of all.
At first I refused to be baited, insisting that I loved him and wanted what was best for both of us. But finally I couldn’t take the bullying a moment longer.
“What’s my crime, exactly?” I lashed back. “To be working and at war when you weren’t? Why is it that a man can do his work and just get on with it, but a woman has to drop everything for her place at home or else she’s selfish?”
“You are that.” He ignored my question, simply batted it away. “Selfish beyond belief. You have to have excitement at every moment, or you’ll make it yourself, like a kind of sickness for adventure and for trouble. I should have seen it in you right away, but I guess I was looking at your legs. That was quite a trap you set, by the way.”