Читать книгу ALCHEMIES OF THE HEART - David Dorian - Страница 19

The Yanks Are Coming

We all worry to death about the circumstances of our death. It is our birth that should preoccupy us. Today is my birthday.

Forty-nine years ago, a stray shell from a twelve-inch naval gun from an American Destroyer stationed five miles from the North African Coast hit the short-stay Hotel Sevigny at Rue Lasalle and tore it to shreds. The thunder created by the nearby explosion stunned my mother. I came out of her womb ejected into the sound and the fury of Operation Torch, the American landing in Casablanca, Morocco.

“Quel jour pour naitre,” Mother moaned.

“I va etre en colere toute sa vie parce qu’il est ne pendant un bombardement,” Solange, the neighbor, commented.

My mother sent Solange to fetch the priest so I’d be baptized, in case I’d die that day. By that rite, she would secure my entrance into the next world. Solange returned empty-handed. The church had been hit by an American shell and had caved in, and the priest had given up the ghost under a mountain of beams from the collapsed roof. I was never baptized.

Dense smoke from the burning hotel choked the neighboring streets. The singed walls smoldered for days. I inhaled these exhalations, which incinerated my throat and filled my eyes with tears. Is that what caused my asthma?

After the fall of France, my father took a bus to Tangiers, crossed the straits of Gibraltar on a fishing boat, hitchhiked through Spain, and crossed the Pyrenees to Provence, where he joined the partisans. He filled the ranks of the Resistance, which attracted students and French Army deserters who refused to collaborate with the invaders. He had become a combatant, placing explosives on railroad tracks, derailing troupe transports, slaughtering garrisons. He didn’t know he had a son. I never knew I had a father.

My mother, who made a living from tips as a waitress in the bistrot Café du Soleil, a dive for a garden variety of local alcoholics and American infantrymen, found herself without employment as the eating establishment was looted by starving Arabs. Desperate to feed me and trapped for cash, she opened her apartment to American soldiers garrisoned in the city, turning her two rooms into a bed-and-breakfast for the victors. The guests didn’t come empty-handed. Their ticket to my mother’s cuisine and her bed were canisters of evaporated milk and large boxes of salted butter. I owe my strong bones to the rivers of American milk and Wisconsin butter I devoured.

My mother was an alluring woman: alabaster skin, maroon eyes, cascading hazel-colored hair. A Captain Jim Martin, from New York, was a repeat visitor. He played the banjo and laughed for no reason. He would bring chocolate, a luxury item in a time of famine, from the military PX. Jim was a superb American: jovial and generous. He married my mother before he went to kill more Germans. His unit moved across North Africa, stalking the retreating Afrika Corp. He escorted General Patton across Sicily, Italy, and the Ardennes. He returned triumphant, many dollars in his pockets. To the victor belongs the spoils. He hauled Mother and me to the New World. We moved to Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, into a two-bedroom apartment with a balcony full of pots where my mother cultivated fines herbes.

I have to thank the States of Wisconsin and Michigan for my survival. Before the Americans landed, kids in North Africa were dying of starvation. The French had requisitioned the crops for the German army fighting the Russians, leaving nothing for the local population. The GIs entered the city and with truckloads of powdered milk in tow. Thousands of babies—French, Jews, and Arabs born in the war years—are alive today because of the Yankees.

I never met my biological father. I was told he was arrested by the Gestapo in Dijon with his Resistance friends and executed. This information arrived in a letter addressed to my mother by the Bureau of Disappeared Persons organized by the new French government. My mother told me I looked like him.