Cross-posted on Ao3. Unbeta'ed, glorified Liebgott ramble in which I continue to blur the line between fanfiction and my own original fiction ideas. Warnings for strong anti-Semitic slurs, brief descriptions of violence, and not explicitly graphic but heavy Holocaust mentions/descriptions. Honestly, this is just me trying to get across in 2000 words what the song War by Young Yeller did in like, way less than that. As an aside, the next chapter of WTWC is coming along well, but everything's gotten wicked busy with finals and summer job hunting and study abroad applications & etc. Thank you guys for continuing to have such patience with me, and it will be the first thing on my list to get done once the semester ends next week.
He's heard it all, and still it hurts.
It shouldn't, he knows it shouldn't, he expects it for fuck's sake, but, every time he hears a hiss or a whisper or a throwaway comment, Yid, dirty Jew, kike, how that last one can ever be a throwaway he can't fathom, he can't stop himself from thinking of his sister. Standing over the table on Shabbos with her hands over her eyes, reciting the blessings over the flickering candles, her dark hair spilling out from underneath her head covering and over her shoulders. People often mistook them for twins, all angles and freckles and darting brown eyes, and all he wants to do is protect her. All this ugliness in front of him, a wall of it, it seems at times, and all he can think of is how he'd feel if those damn bullies were saying the same to her. He's heard it all by the time his feet hit the dusty, rainless ground in Georgia, and still it feels like a knife.
He'd left her back in San Francisco on a day overcast with clouds, in a gingham dress he can still remember being blue. She'd been trying not to cry, but something about his smile, his trying to reassure her, had opened the floodgates. He'd only seen her cry once before, at their grandmother's funeral. She holds him as close as she can, trying not to wet his uniform. Ruth is four years older than him, and she'd been the one to hold his hand on the way to school, walking past the empty lots and past the kids saying things she told him not to repeat and not to even think about. The one who had helped him through the Four Questions without making it seem like she was, who'd snuck him spoonfuls of sweet charoset before their mother placed it on the seder plate. Seized by childhood nightmares in a creaky wooden bed, he'd never padded down to his parents' room but only over to Ruth next door.
As soon as he's old enough to realize what the words spat at them mean, and it doesn't take long, it's enough to set him swinging, never to go back to those days of walking silently by her side. He knows she doesn't need protecting; she's strong enough on her own, but it won't stop him from trying.
He comes to hate Sobel just as much as the rest of them, but he can't stop the lump in his throat when the comments veer from the night marches and training to the man himself. He stays quiet as his eyes grow darker, lips pressed together, focusing on polishing his boots or scraping his tin fork across his tin plate, not saying anything but feeling it all welling in his chest.
When they're cramped like sardines into the troop ship over to England his stomach feels worse than the day of his bar mitzvah for fuck's sake, and this time he doesn't have anything to ground him. No looking at his parents, no quiet reassurance from Rabbi Landau, no feeling of the silver yad, shaped by the years and the hands who'd held it before him, heavy and warm in his own clammy palm. The pitch of the sea will roil the anger into spilling over, the heaviness in his chest returning- he's what?- and when his fist springs from his arm like lightning it feels like a release.
The smart ones've thrown their airsickness pills away, and maybe if he'd known they'd put him to sleep he would've done the same. But there's something about this drowsiness that pulls him back.
If he closes his eyes tight enough, he can almost pretend he's somewhere different.
If he ignores the greasepaint and the roar of the engine and the hollow in his stomach he's back in shul on a Saturday morning and Abe Rabinowitz is davening, the low tones of his voice carrying like waves to Joe's ears. Sometimes it seems like his lips are barely moving. He follows along in the siddur until his eyes start to flutter shut, and until Ruth elbows him in the ribs.
This time though, it's not her pointed whisper jerking him out of sleep or her elbow, but the shake of the plane too close above the Normandy countryside. His dogtags feel hot against his chest, the thin metal stamped H. That H could get him into trouble. It has. Just how much trouble though now, he isn't sure. He doesn't want to think about it. He pushes the newsreels out of his mind- the goose-stepping and the helmets and the thump-thump in his stomach, the pictures of the same terrifying unity at Madison Square Garden and the paleness of his father's face- and jumps.
Training meant becoming a kind of family, and combat means thinking less about his own. He's able to bury, to bluster and joke. He tries to remember the taste of his mother's cooking as he shovels in the Army slop. Everything comes easily to his lips but prayers. They look at him like he's a loose cannon.
He writes Ruth as often as he can, tells her about the food and how he misses home and how boring everything is, tries not to worry her, tries to hold on to the good times. But war- war is dirt and blood and everything he never imagined as a child. He had wanted to be a warrior. Ruth called him her vilde chaya, her wild beast- but now that he has a gun in his hands and a wound at his neck he doesn't know what to make of any of it. She said vilde chaya but meant fighter. He doesn't know what she'd say now.
When they comes up against SS in Holland and Winters makes him empty his rifle the curses bubble up between his thoughts, English words and Yiddish oaths, the blood thrumming in his fingertips. The sound of gunfire still echoes in his ears, get up, move, stop talking, ver gerharget, drop dead, c'mon Kraut boys, keep it moving, drop dead. If his hatred of the Germans is something they want him to apologize for they've got another thing coming.
When the cold in Belgium cuts deep to the bone, when they're huddled up next to each other in their foxholes, it sometimes seems like they don't know what they're fighting for besides the heartbeat next to them, not like that's not reason enough, and sometimes he starts to think he doesn't either. But all it takes is one memory of Ruth, baruch asah Adonai eloheinu melech ha-olam, or the sight of his mother at the dining room table poring over the last letters from Warsaw and Pinsk, and there's no mystery in any of it. He imagines his torn nails and his fingers, cracked and bleeding from the cold, tracing the letters and vowels of the prayer book in his thirteen year-old hands.
Rosaries and scapulars are personal belongings and moments of comfort for other men, but he carries no Magen David. The prayers never came easy in Georgia or North Carolina or even France, the words caught in his throat like they no longer belonged to him. After the shelling comes that deals the biggest blow, no one speaks. He lights a cigarette with numb fingers, holding one hand over the small flame, the remembered words of the Kaddish swirling in the smoke.
As they sit fractured and still frozen in a church's chapel, the voices of the nun's choir sound like angels from another world. He imagines that to guys like Lip and Luz and Perco this must feel something like home. He lets the brass candelabras blur before his eyes into the flames of the candles on the white linen tablecloth, asher kidshanu b'mitzvosav vitzivanu, and manages to hold onto Ruth's voice as the exhaustion finally overtakes him.
He tells himself he should have known. He should have known from the newsreels and headlines, he should have known from his parents' hushed tones when they thought he was asleep. He should have known from the way his sister's face paled when he asked her if they'd ever meet their relatives from the Old Country. He should have put the pieces together back in in 1940, when the letter came from Cousin Esther in Warsaw. He should have known.
The German words catch in his throat like stones, like he's choking, and when the tears come in the back of the open truck- dear God- he bows his head like he did at thirteen and cries like it is the first time the nightmares came to him in Michigan. But this time, Ruthie isn't here to hold him laying in her lap, her body curled over his, singing, the lullabies that he knows are the same sung by the mothers who lie dead and near-dead in the camp up the road.
He doesn't sleep for days. At night he lays in bed burning, bones humming out of his skin. The smell of the cigarette between his fingers makes his stomach churn.
Everyone tiptoes around him, like they're walking on eggshells, and even though everything has changed he wonders what about their behavior hasn't. When Nix tells them that what they've seen isn't even the tip of the iceberg, that the Soviets have liberated somewhere much worse, he doesn't believe that a place much worse could exist. How you could even measure "worse." What it meant to see your own people as skeletons before your eyes. People. They were people. He wonders if anyone still knows they are.
Weeks later, when his rifle jams somewhere in the mountains around Zell Am See, it will not come as a relief.
By September the memories have already begun to lodge themselves like shrapnel. The winter chill will always leave their fingertips frozen, but the sun still manages to warm their skin. They are maps, of childhood scars and freckles and the wounds sustained in defense of their country, entire universes drawn out on bodies still so young. Their war is his war, yet what he fights to protect, what he thought he was protecting, the guilt will bolt his feet in place, is something they will never know. It'd been proven as much, he thinks, ever since Webster had asked him, guns at their sides, if interrogating the commandant was 'personal.' As if the whole living nightmare hadn't been the same as his own family in front of him.
He can't bring himself to write Ruthie any more than the simplest sentences, as if those weren't horrific enough. He leaves out more than he wants to. He's made it up mountains with full gear, pounds upon pounds upon pounds, he's pushed farther than he'd ever thought before, and now he cannot find the words to say that this is too much to hold between two arms.
He packs away his duffel and wears his uniform with war seeping at its seams, the taste of everything still in his mouth. The day he comes back to San Francisco will be the same as when he left. She's not wearing the same dress, but when she takes his hand, leads him back home, another tiny piece of whatever has broken in him falls into place.
He makes it back to his mother's table just as the sun is setting. He wears his uniform to pour the wine and cover the bread, and when Ruthie's voice still sounds the same he asks himself why he ever thought it wouldn't. The candles flicker- baruch asah Adonai eloheinu melech ha-olam- the flames dance- asher kidshanu b'mitzvosav vitzivanu- Ruthie smiles- l'hadlikner shel Shabbat. The words start to come easier now. He can breathe.