Mountainside

MOUNTAINSIDE Always, there would be darkness hovering through- out the bushes and trees, massive sky and earthen ground he tiptoed upon in shoeless stealth, machine gun slung over one shoulder and, strapped across the other, a leather pouch holding coded messages he delivered encampment to encampment, their locations razor-sharp in his 11 year old brain, in a body tall enough to be mistaken for older. Tall enough to be made a Partisan — a courier, and down the road, likely qualifying as a full-blown saboteur targeting Germans and the war machinery they were transporting through Yugoslavia’s Mosor mountain villages. (German soldiers, who, if they’d caught him, a Jew, & partisan, to boot, would surely have beaten him to death extracting every bit of information they could.) Upon each return to his farmhouse refuge, the communications he’d been charged with having been delivered hours before and miles away, the fear he’d braved began melting away. And, in the moments it took him to hang up his courier bag and machine gun, he felt ready for the evening meal of pit-roasted mutton and stone-ground bread washed down with goat’s milk. Then, a foot soak (weekly, a full-body scrub), followed by deep sleep, in a basement below a trap door — a peasant woman’s woven blankets softening the wooden floor boards and his heart. And when that heart rejoiced with freedom in ’45, at 13 years old, is truly when he understood why he detested the taste of lamb, no matter how gourmet the preparation offered the boy he once was — the boy who’d put meat back on his bones in Brooklyn, and the gastronome he’s become — a content 82 year old grateful for his hero Tito and the fact that he’s managed to keep his Hitler-torn past safely locked away in a tight-lipped box, he rarely chooses to open.