Jamie got to his feet shakily. They helped him wriggle out of the chute harness. The plane circled lazily overhead.
“You did hokay,” Zavgorodny said, smiling broadly now.
“How’d you get down so fast?” Jamie asked.
“I did free-fall, went past you. You didn’t see me? I was like a rocket!”
“Yuri is free-fall champion,” said the other cosmonaut, his arms filled with Jamie’s parachute.
The plane was coming in to land, flaps down, engines coughing. Its wheels hit the ground and kicked up enormous plumes of dust.
“So now we go to Muzhestvo?” Jamie asked Zavgorodny.
The Russian shook his head. “We have found it already. Muzhestvo means in English language courage. You have courage, James Waterman. I am glad.”
Jamie took a deep breath. “Me too.”
“We four,” Zavgorodny said, “we will not go to Mars. But some of our friends will. We will not allow anyone who does not show courage to go to Mars.”
“How can you . . . ?”
“Others test you for knowledge, for health, for working with necessary equipment. We test for courage. No one without courage goes to Mars. It would make a danger for our fellow cosmonauts.”
“Muzhestvo,” Jamie said.
Zavgorodny laughed and slapped him on the back and they started walking across the bare, dusty ground toward the waiting plane.
Muzhestvo, Jamie repeated to himself. Their version of a sacred ritual. Like a Navajo purifying rite. I’m one of them now. I’ve proved it to them. I’ve proved it to myself.
Introduction to
“We’ll Always
Have Paris”
If all works of fiction can be categorized as a simple conflict of motivation, such as “love vs. duty” or “responsibility vs. freedom,” how would you summarize the classic film Casablanca?
To me, the underlying power of that film is the conflict in the soul of Richard Blaine, the American owner of Rick’s Café Americain, in Casablanca in 1941. Rick is deeply in love with Ilsa, a beautiful Swedish refugee from the Nazis who have conquered Europe from Poland to the English Channel.
But there are other things happening in Europe, a war and human conflicts that dwarf the love of an individual man for a wonderful woman.
Well, you undoubtedly know the movie. It’s at the top of every list of Hollywood classics. And you know the heart-wrenching final scene at the airport, where Rick sends Ilsa away, to return to her husband while he—and Capt. Reynaud—head for the war. Love vs. duty, portrayed as dramatically as you’ll ever see it.
But what happened to Rick and Ilsa and Reynaud after the war? Did they ever meet again? Did love triumph after all?
Read on.
We’ll Always
Have Paris
He had changed from the old days, but of course, going through the war had changed us all.
We French had just liberated Paris from the Nazis, with a bit of help (I must admit) from General Patton’s troops. The tumultuous outpouring of relief and gratitude that night was the wildest celebration any of us had ever witnessed.
I hadn’t seen Rick during that frantically joyful night, but I knew exactly where to find him. La Belle Aurore had hardly changed. I recognized it from his vivid, pained description: the low ceiling, the checkered tablecloths—frayed now after four years of German occupation. The model of the Eiffel Tower on the bar had been taken away, but the spinet piano still stood in the middle of the floor.
And there he was, sitting on the cushioned bench by the window, drinking champagne again. Somewhere he had found a blue pinstripe double-breasted suit. He looked good in it; trim and debonair. I was still in uniform and felt distinctly shabby.
In the old days, Rick had always seemed older, more knowing than he really was. Now the years of war had made an honest face for him: world-weary, totally aware of human folly, wise with the experience that comes from sorrow.
“Well, well,” he said, grinning at me. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
“I knew I’d find you here,” I said as I strode across the bare wooden floor toward him. Limped, actually; I still had a bit of shrapnel in my left leg.
As I pulled up a chair and sat in it, Rick called to the proprietor, behind the bar, for another bottle.
“You look like hell,” he said.
“It was an eventful night. Liberation. Grateful Parisians. Adoring women.”
With a nod, Rick muttered, “Any guy in uniform who didn’t get laid last night must be a real loser.”
I laughed, but then pointed out, “You’re not in uniform.”
“Very perceptive.”
“It’s my old police training.”
“I’m expecting someone,” he said.
“A lady?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You can’t imagine that she’ll be here to—”
“She’ll be here,” Rick snapped.
Henri put another bottle of champagne on the table, and a fresh glass for me. Rick opened it with a loud pop of the cork and poured for us both.
“I would have thought the Germans had looted all the good wine,” I said between sips.
“They left in a hurry,” Rick said, without taking his eyes from the doorway.
He is expecting a ghost, I thought. She’d been haunting him all these years, and now he expected her to come through that doorway and smile at him and take up life with him just where they’d left it the day the Germans marched into Paris.
Four years. We had both intended to join De Gaulle’s forces when we’d left Casablanca, but once the Americans got into the war, Rick disappeared like a puff of smoke. I ran into him again by sheer chance in London, shortly before D-Day. He was in the uniform of the US Army, a major in their intelligence service, no less.
“I’ll buy you a drink in La Belle Aurore,” he told me when we’d parted, after a long night of brandy and reminiscences at the Savoy bar. Two weeks later I was back on the soil of France at last, with the Free French army. Now, in August, we were both in Paris once again.
Through the open windows
