“At the laundry. They’ll be ready in an hour. That gives us time to talk.”
Samuel told her that the last thing he saw was the earth from above, as his plane went into a tailspin. He had no time to parachute out, he was sure of that, otherwise the Germans would have found him, and he couldn’t explain clearly how he managed not to be killed when his plane crashed and burst into flames. He guessed he must have been thrown out of his seat and ended up in the tops of some trees, dangling down. The enemy patrol found the body of his copilot and didn’t search any further. He was rescued by a couple of members of the resistance, who, when they saw he was circumcised, handed him on to a Jewish group. For months they hid him in caves, stables, basements, abandoned factories, and the houses of kind people willing to help, often changing his hiding place until his broken bones were mended and he was no longer a burden but could join the group as a fighter. The mist in his brain took far longer to clear than his bones did to knit. From the uniform he was wearing when they found him, they knew he came from England. He understood English and French, but answered in Polish; it would be months before he recovered the other languages he spoke fluently. Since they did not know his name, his companions decided to call him Scarface, but he eventually chose to name himself Jean Valjean like the protagonist of Victor Hugo’s novel, which he read during his convalescence. He fought with his colleagues in a guerrilla war that seemed to be doomed. The German forces were so efficient, their arrogance so immense, and their thirst for power and blood so insatiable that the acts of sabotage Samuel’s group carried out did not even scratch the monster’s armor plating. They lived in the shadows, moving about like desperate rats and with a constant sense of failure and pointlessness, and yet they carried on, because there was no choice. They greeted one another with a single word: victory. They said farewell with that same word: victory.
At the end of the war, after surviving Auschwitz, Jean Valjean succeeded in landing clandestinely in Palestine, where waves of Jewish refugees were arriving despite the best efforts of the British, who controlled the region and tried to stop the influx to avoid conflict with the Arabs. The war had turned him into a lone wolf who never dropped his guard. He made do with casual affairs until a female colleague in Mossad, a painstaking and daring agent, announced that he was going to be a father. Her name was Anat Rakosi; she had emigrated with her father from Hungary, the only survivors of a big family. Her relationship with Samuel was above all a friendship, devoid of romance or any thought of the future, which suited them and which they would not have changed were it not for the unexpected pregnancy. Anat had been sure she was sterile because of the hunger, beatings, rapes, and the pseudomedical experiments she had suffered. When she found that the swelling in her belly was not a tumor but a baby, she thought it must be God’s joke. She said nothing to her lover until the sixth month.
“My goodness! I thought you were finally putting on a bit of weight,” was his only commentary, but he could not hide his enthusiasm.