The Partisan
by Rebecca Ann Hodgkins
"You weren't there, you don't understand!" My wife screams at me from the bed. Her forehead is a war torn map of trenches when her brow furrows. "You don't know what it was like to run, to hide. The German checkpoints. Vous ne savez pas! Ils etaient des monstres! You don't know!"
I don't. All I know is, my wife is thirty-seven years old. She took Spanish in high school. She's never to my knowledge spoken a word of French until the past few days. She's never lived or traveled outside the U.S.
All I know is, there's a caravan of people headed for the U.S./Mexican border from Central America, and anyone could be hiding in it. Gang members ready to slice open children. Militant Muslims who will blow themselves up after hitting a strip club.
All I know is, she only sees the women and children, hungry, dirty, desperate. Fleeing a war, she says.
I can't talk to her about the caravan without her breaking into a language she's never learned, describing events she can't possibly have lived through.
"We can't be expected to take them all in," I try. "We have to turn them away."
"Like the Americans turned away the boat full of Jews?" She swipes at her face. "There is no difference. Aucun."
Another torrent of French, and I can only make out a few words. American pilots. Partisans. Checkpoint. Woods. Running. Guns. Dead.
I call my mother-in-law. "Has she ever done anything like this before?"
"Oh, yes. When she was a little girl. She always... she could see things. Before they happened, sometimes while they were happening elsewhere. I'll be damned if she wasn't right about a warehouse fire burning across town. That unnerved me.
"One morning when she was maybe four, she asked me what a point de controle was. I had to look it up. When I asked her how she knew those words, she told me they'd had to avoid checkpoints, to get the pilots to Switzerland. But they got caught anyway. She described how they died. How she died, shot in the back of the head and left in the woods. It was horrible. I can't explain why she said that. From then on, though, I'd catch her making little maps with barbed wire fences and talking to her stuffed rabbit about how they needed to escape. She grew out of it."
"Until now. What am I supposed to do?"
