Alesandro knew she was
as secretive as her mother. If anyone knows how to live a double life, and
addict does. “Just as long as she lives, you don’t have to go that far. Johanna
moved in some elite circles while in London. All who knew her thought she was
one of several aristocratic women hired to fill government jobs... low ones, like typing pools.”
“I never knew she could
type.”
“She could type...
maybe not the standard eighty words a minute, but she passed the appearance.”
Alesandro’s posture on
horseback became taller and gallant like a knight without the armor… proud, and
as though boasting of a child's accomplishments, he said, “her forte was the
financing of resistance groups in Holland and eventually France with your father.”
“And an Aristocrat too?
Was she well off?”
“No, certainly not. She
barely managed to dress the part before the S.O.E. provided her with a stipend
and generous clothing allotment. But she made connections, as more than a
typist, that led her to meet with a young French journalist exiled in London,
your father.”
“What do you mean,
dress the part and more than a typist? I have a feeling you mean that my father
owes it all to her? Wasn’t this his family’s estate before the war?”
“Oui,” he laughed,
saying, “They were farmers… maybe they were frugal, but not financial
powerhouses. After the war, it was she who mentored him. It was her maneuvers
that brought his fortune here.”
“They could have at
least told me a bit of it. You write your memoirs… Were they ashamed of what
they did? They should have been proud.”
“Sure, I write, but my
pages are more of an exorcism than memoirs. Maybe they had to quiet their
demons: not at all out of shame or fear… but of being found out. I can’t speak
for them, but some don’t like to talk about the war, and others, can’t. Those
of us who made it through… maybe we withhold our own stories out of respect for
those who didn’t survive,” Alesandro held the reins tighter on his horse,
pulling back at the bit as it backed up. He would have been more honest to
speak of the guilt, the nightmares and sweats, it gets muddled with time, but
horse-sense told his steed that the subject was getting touchy.
After the horse calmed he continued, “Your
mother had fled from Holland to Britain after she escaped being taken to Poland
with her mother and father.”
“Poland? Taken? That is
where the camps...”
“Yes, they were taken
to Auschwitz.”
“What, Ma-Mère is
Jewish?” Adrienne hadn’t heard any of this before but felt an unaccustomed
pride swell in her breast. She had always felt herself to be on the outside, looking in, to French society, as though her family was a pariah... les nouveau
riche. There was an underbelly of anti-Semitism in France too that gave reason
for Adrienne to belong somewhere, “Maybe I’m half Jewish.”
“Yes, but anyone with a
pair of glasses and a bookshelf was suspect. Her father was a professor at the
Municipal Amsterdam University… a dangerous intellectual.”
“She fled… how did she
get to Britain?”
“The Jewish underground
knew how to get her out of Holland… she saw the gloom that was rising over all
of Europe with no one else helping.”
"What was she
then, a spy, some kind of accountant?"
"Johanna got out
of the typing pool and worked as a secretary at the S.I.S. She wanted to be of
more use to the resistance in Holland and managed to get her boss, the Judge,
to recommend her to another Dutch woman... an operative for Churchill’s baby,
the Secret Operations Executive. This woman recommended her to be trained and
equipped as an operative by the S.O.E.”
“Who was she?”
“This woman was a
courier for the Dutch banker I mentioned. His name was Walraven of the De
Nederlandsche Bank that financed the Resistance during the War.”
“I’m sorry, I know so
little of this…” embarrassed at her ignorance, Adrienne asked, “I should know,
what they are. These initials? The S.I.S. and S.O.E.?”
Alesandro was patient.
He was accustomed to history fading from one generation to another. This
generation had no new folk songs to pass on their heritage… after all, the
memory of their ancestors had been usurped by the mythology of pseudo-rebellion
in the self-absorbed nihilism of popular culture; sex, drugs, and fashion. He
explained, “The S.I.S. is like our Deuxième Bureau and there has never been
anything like the S.O.E.”
“Like the American
C.I.A.?”
“Yes, but more so than
that, the S.O.E. was about subversion, sabotage… assassination. It was most
suitable for Johanna after she fled from Holland,” he spoke as though recalling
a dream, admiring the sunset glowing crimson on gossamer clouds across the
landscape, as they sat side by side on horseback at the top of a knoll.
“My god, I’m left out
of my own heritage… uninformed.” she said, knowing that, by the time she was of
age to hear of such things, drugs had alienated her from her family.
Alesandro spoke
respectfully solemn, “There is so much that you didn’t need to know.”
“I’ve done so little
with the life I’ve been given… but, why wouldn’t anyone tell me about…?”
“War is a dirty
business and some of what we’ve had to do lives with us in our sleep. Secretly,
and not so secretly, there are a few who can’t admit to themselves that they
enjoyed it... took great pleasure in it and profited greatly. Some of us tried to bury the past, but the
past never lets us rest. Hannah and Marcel chose that path while, so many
others march as heroes in all the parades and claim a glorious fiction of their
parts in the Résistance. The truth, if they told it, was that what your mother
and father did after the war would be considered criminal in some circles.”
Feelings of pride in
what that generation stood for, and shame for what her own generation had done
with this heritage, Adrienne was overcome with admiration for the white-haired
man at ease on the horse next to her.
“Some of us do have our
share of shame too,” he glanced over to catch her wipe away a tear. "Shame
and pride were buried for me in Carabanchel. Not all, but for some of us, our
crime was that we allowed ourselves to be drawn into an ideal of perfection that
was nowhere near as perfect as this vista.”
Alesandro would
eventually tell her, on these rides, "Most of the estate, beyond the
original farm, had been gotten through Johanna’s resentment. By the time Berlin
fell, the bureaucrats sneered at them with disdain."
"Them? Who is
them. Spies?"
"Yes, for the
lower classes. If you think London is bad now, it lightened up during the war
but snapped right back... especially biased against foreign women. They never
suffered more than a paper cut while she, and several other women like her,
were the S.O.E.'s most productive spies. Post-war bureaucrats would offer them
little more than a job back in the typing pool where she'd begun."
"How did she even
the score?"
"Throughout the war, she used her
acquired skills to uncover and obtain the Reich’s hidden assets. Unemployed and
lacking support from the agency, she fell back into the reserves she’d acquired
and spirited away in Swiss banking accounts. She had to fund herself and her
handler, The Judge, knew it and looked the other way. These activities were
unknown to anyone else in the S.O.E. It was her private joke that she and
Marcel would exploit the knowledge she’d gained during the war in retaliation
for her talents shunned by the stuffed shirts of the British bureaucracy."
Adrienne's was eager to
hear moret of her mother's cunning, and asked questions as fast as Alesandro
could answer, "Was she afraid she'd get caught?"
"You know,"
he said, "Johanna’s had a more compelling reason to keep her war record
secret. Stalin’s agents were everywhere in the underground. Even after the war.
Communists, rather Stalinists, were anxious to have opposition that wouldn't
kiss their red asses. She protected your father... his cover was that of a
journalist and she had gone deep after the Judge had been taken out... died,
and her former identity slipped away as she became a ghost. This protected
Marcel from some in the Kremlin and in London... she might as well become more
of a ghost because they would surely have her erased as though she never
existed."
During another ride,
Adrienne asked, “Is shame the source of your writing?” Curiosity compelled her
to probe deeper into the enigma of Alesandro’s mysticism.
Alesandro insisted,
“Rid yourself of that notion, dear one. I am no more a writer than I am a
hero.”
She had no
understanding of his steadfast denial, so she asked, “Isn’t that what writers
do, write?”
His answer was simple,
“Yes, writers write, but more importantly, writers publish.” he quipped,
remembering her precociousness so many years before when she first met Iniga,
and trying unsuccessfully to make light of the subject.
Unwilling to accept
such a flippant answer, she insisted, “Then, why do you write, dammit?”
He admitted, “I suppose
I’m driven to clear my mind of it… the past.”
She challenged his
humility, “And why are you not a hero if what I know of your life has been an
epic saga of heroics?”
Sadness washed over his
face. His eyes glazed over as though they were full and ready to overflow with
tears, “Heroes die at the end of their saga.”
“Perhaps, but wasn’t
Carabanchel a death of sorts?” She could never dismiss both notions; that he
was a writer of the first rank, and his heroics were legendary. She could see
that, though violent and tumultuous in youth, the natural poetry of Alesandro’s
humility, and the nuances of a gentle mind moved as steadily as the Nive
towards the estuary of L’Adour as he aged.
Though he wrote of what
would be despicable crimes, if war hadn’t engulfed the continents of Europe and
Asia, he didn’t excuse himself or dodge the morality of his past actions. In
this sense what he wrote of was a true confession. Since his imprisonment in
Carabanchel, Alesandro had shunned his academic compatriots in the cafés of
Paris and the communist Anarchists of Barcelona. He had committed an
unpardonable sin to some of them by seeking refuge in this hermitage of luxury
contrary to the socialist faith of his fellow maquis and professing a
conversion to a filtered Zen of his own Western Catholicism instead of dying a
martyr in the field. But more than that, he’d settled with a truce against his
own demons of despair and became enthusiastic about living within the grace of
a forgiving cosmic reality.
“Yes, I surrendered.
The war was over for me... body and soul.” His face lit up like a paper lantern
as he continued, “At that moment I knew a presence in my heart far more
powerful than anything of my own making.”
His sudden enthusiasm
was mildly disturbing to her so she changed the subject, asking, “What did this
Iniga do after the war? Was she still in Spain?”
The panorama of the
landscape spread out beyond the two on horseback nearly all the way to the Bay
of Biscay. The beauty of it made more sense to Alesandro in that moment than
all the politics, platitudes, dogma, and morality of revolutionary zeal, he’d
survived. His memory was consumed by the tragedy that always began with the
massacre of innocents and ended with a cavalcade of slaughter and oppression
worse than the horrors before.
He said softly, “She
carried on in Spain,” wistfully adding, “She came to her own terms with peace.
She passed away a long time ago, but, in a way, her destiny has become your
legacy.”
“What legacy?”
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