Chatnoga Cho Cho

Chatnoga Cho Cho

Avi Goldberg

August 2025

‘Decades have passed since then,’ he said, but still, as he began to recount what had happened, his voice trembled, he cleared his throat, lowered his eyes, and gestured for another glass of cognac.

The street was empty, with only a few cars passing by. The fear of a sudden missile alert from Lebanon or Gaza kept the city's residents as close to the shelters as possible. The café where we sat remained open, a refuge for those who had trouble sleeping even without an emergency. ‘Those were the days when wars were called wars before they became rounds, and before the army manoeuvred, flattened, and the residents got used to the fact that everything would end in a few days or weeks.’

He was widowed a year ago, and his children had emigrated to America many years ago, he said.

‘I'm a retired doctor. Years of hospital shifts robbed me of my sleep, and since the house emptied, I occasionally spend my evenings here.’

He said this in passing, perhaps to explain his tendency to chat with strangers who happened to be there.

The café owner was busy wiping down tables and emptying ashtrays. An old café on Lincoln Street, bustling with people during the day, empties after business hours. Old jazz music came from the old radio on the shelf. A young announcer named the artists who were playing, in a quiet baritone voice that suited the night birds.

Then, the announcer's voice almost whispered: "In memory of the greatest of them all, Glenn Miller, on the anniversary of his death, on that winter day in 1944 when the legendary conductor disappeared in the thick fog that enveloped the small military plane as it crossed the English Channel on its way to Paris. He was supposed to conduct his big band in front of the American soldiers who had crossed the Channel and fought like lions to liberate France and continue the liberation of Europe from the Nazis."

Then the big band conducted by Glenn Miller struck up ‘Chatanooga Choo Choo,’ one of his greatest hits, a tune that had captivated America, soldiers and civilians alike, decades earlier.

Hearing the stirring melody bursting from the radio, the elderly doctor's face paled as if he had suddenly seen a ghost. He cleared his throat, his voice trembling as he ordered a glass of cognac. After drinking it in one gulp, the colour returned to his face. ‘Listen,’ he said to me, "I never thought I would tell you what you are about to hear. I buried these events deep inside me and did not return to them until this evening.

It began with my hasty discharge from military service, hasty because immediately after leaving Sinai behind me, I decided without much thought that I would study medicine in Europe, in Bologna, Italy, or Leuven, Belgium, or any other city where young Israelis gathered. But first, Paris. As a jazz lover, I promised myself that if I left Sinai safe and sound, I would go to the Rue de Lombard and Saint-Germain-des-Prés to listen to jazz in the legendary clubs, in the smoke-filled basements where the great artists played at night. Already at Orly Airport, I felt the electric atmosphere that followed the student revolution of the summer of '68. I found a cheap hostel and by evening I was sitting at the Doche de Lombard listening to the guest artist that evening, Stéphane Grappelli, whose violin wowed the audience.

The smoke stung my eyes, and the girl in jeans next to me rubbed against me without noticing, but it was enough to strike up a conversation. We tried to talk and went out to get some air and smoke on the banks of the Seine. Towards dawn, we arrived at what Émile Zola called ‘the bowels of Paris,’ the Halles market. When Sylvie Anne heard that I was a discharged soldier from Israel, on my way to study medicine, she took me under her wing that very day. Sylvie Anne was a young Parisian Jew, a student at the Sorbonne. I packed my kitbag and moved in with her in what used to be a maid's room in the attic, overlooking the Eiffel Tower.

Like me, Sylvie Anne was crazy about jazz, and so we spent a summer month together until we parted ways. On her recommendation, I continued on to Nashville, the capital of country music. She also provided me with a letter of recommendation for her uncle, the renowned professor of medicine, Professor André Zimmerman, who taught at the University of Atlanta. ‘He will open doors for you, and you will be able to advance quickly.’

There was nothing better than that. I felt that the world was playing me a wonderful jazz tune.

The night before we parted, we talked before bed about the jazz giants who played in Paris before we were born, about Louis Armstrong and Django Reinhardt.

‘It's a shame that Glenn Miller was killed on his way to Paris and his fate remains unknown to this day, as did that of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,’ I said.

Sylvie Ann frowned, ‘I forgot that you're not from here and don't know what really happened to him.’

Then she told me the amazing story of Glenn Miller's fate, a story that has been circulating in the city's jazz cellars since he disappeared. "Farmers in eastern France, on the Belgian border, told of a small plane landing on a foggy morning in a field near their village, apparently having lost its way in the heavy fog. A group of German soldiers arrived and pulled the conductor, who was dressed in civilian clothes, out of the plane. blow up the plane, shoot the small crew that flew it, and transfer the famous conductor east of the Rhine. This was during the turbulent days when the Germans made a last-ditch effort to break through the Allied lines and return to Belgium. The Battle of the Bulge was undoubtedly the Americans' Iwo Jima in Europe.

Post-war testimonies recounted that Glenn Miller was transferred from the Gestapo in Berlin to Moscow when the city fell. He was imprisoned in the terrible Lubyanka prison, near the cell where Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who had been kidnapped from Budapest when it was captured by the Red Army, was being held.

The last testimony about the beloved conductor was in one of the letters sent to me by Oswald, who lived under the protection of the NKVD in Russia before returning to the United States and assassinating its president. He said that Miller lived in Moscow and helped translate secretly recorded conversations from the American embassy, but in his opinion, Miller was an American mole who was distorting the information being transmitted. In short, another victim of the Cold War. I didn't believe these rumours. I hugged Sylvie Ann and set off for the airport.

I made my way south from New York, usually hitchhiking in the cars of bored travelling agents who wanted to pass their long journeys with chatter, or in the company of truck drivers who were fighting sleep.

I covered the last stretch on foot from a rural crossroads near Sparta, Tennessee, where a truck driver dropped me off when I woke up from a nap in the early morning. I walked for about half an hour with my kitbag on my shoulder to the main street of the sleepy town. Dawn broke over Sparta and the neon sign of the diner went out.

Here the doctor paused in his story and asked, ‘Aren't you tired?’ I looked at my watch. It was already worth waiting for the omelette in a bun prepared by the young woman who had arrived for the morning shift.

The old doctor returned to his untold story:

I entered the place, which reeked of chewing tobacco and cooking oil. On the wall above the bar hung a Confederate flag, reinforced with tacks. Three old men in faded, patched jeans, who looked like Civil War veterans, were huddled together. I sat down to a Southern breakfast of eggs and pork chops, browned potato chips, and baked black beans. The coffee pot that had been sitting on the electric hotplate all night was bitter as wormwood. The hushed conversation of the elderly men ended with a handshake. They agreed on a payment of sixty-four dollars for a barrel of oak filled with homemade whiskey for the thirsty residents of Sparta.

The woman who entered the diner after me was tall in high heels, about forty years old. The car she parked outside the diner was red with a convertible top. An unusual sight by any standards. She sat down on the high stool next to me and introduced herself: ‘Good morning, Martha.’

I replied hesitantly, and she quickly realised that I was a stranger who had stumbled upon the place.

Martha was a college lecturer, an ethnographer who studied traditions in rural Tennessee.

‘I'm on my way to Chattanooga,’ she said, ‘you can come with me. You won't find anyone to take you out of this hole.’

I was delighted at the opportunity to visit the remote town immortalised in Glenn Miller's hit song about the train that arrived there from the east. We set off. She met with people she had arranged to meet in advance and photographed documents and household items that had lost their usefulness in their homes. We arrived at an old hostel in the evening, tanned and exhausted. It was a white, neoclassical building in the Southern style, called the Jefferson Davis Lodge.

‘We can share the room I rent when I come to town, and then I'll show you the historic railroad and the restored Chattanooga Choo Choo locomotive.’ I was torn. A beautiful, seductive woman desired a young man who had caught her eye. I hesitated. I looked at her profile and saw a dark moustache that somehow repelled me.

‘In the morning, you'll continue on to Nashville, if you still want to.’

The white Corinthian columns of the inn and the wide staircase leading to the floor where the room was located looked like something out of the film Gone with the Wind.

A ceiling fan circulated the warm air in the lobby. By the large window facing the street, an elderly black man with snow-white curly hair rocked slowly but steadily. He removed his straw hat from his head as we passed him and looked at us through the thick smoke from his pipe, which billowed like the funnel of a steamboat on the Mississippi. That's Uncle Tom from the cover of my childhood book, I thought. But he followed us with his gaze and winked at me, as if to warn me about something.

I carried her small suitcase upstairs. I put it down along with my kitbag.

‘I'll be right back, I'll bring some ice to the room.’

I went downstairs. The old man continued to rock back and forth and puff smoke. He stared at me and, in a language I found difficult to decipher, uttered from his toothless mouth, ‘beware kid sometimes a train runs over you’ , which sounded like a prophecy or a threat .

She took a shower and came out refreshed. ‘Take a shower,’ she said, ‘and we'll go out to eat.’

‘You won't find steaks as rare as the ones you'll eat here anywhere else on this damn continent.’

At eleven o'clock we left the restaurant. She suggested a tour. The time was undoubtedly strange, but she promised us a special event near the railway leading to the historic pre-Civil War train station.

‘Every year on 18 September at midnight, the old locomotive passes through here, driven by local descendants of the soldiers. In memory of the terrible Battle of Chickamauga, where Lincoln's soldiers were temporarily repelled.’

The road to the railway junction and tunnel was short. We waited in the darkness near the exit of the dark railway tunnel. The headlight of an approaching steam locomotive cast its dim light on the tracks. I heard the locomotive puffing in the distance, and then again the flickering light of the headlight approaching on the dark tracks. The locomotive slowly made its way through the tunnel and sounded a warning whistle. I was on edge. The words of the black oracle from the lobby echoed in my heart.

‘Let's get closer. We'll stand near the tracks so we can see better.’

Martha held my arm. Her face was very close to mine, and I could feel her rapid breathing on my cheek as the locomotive was about to emerge from the tunnel. The sound of wheels rubbing against the rusty tracks echoed in the dark tunnel, and the light of the headlights approached from the depths of the tunnel, and then suddenly her teeth sank into my neck with wild lust. I was alert and instinctively slammed my elbow into her heart with all my strength. Her breath caught and her teeth immediately loosened their grip. The train was about to pass us by, just centimetres away, when I threw myself backwards, my back hitting the sharp gravel. Martha's scream was swallowed up by the darkness and the roar of the wheels, and the blood spurting from her body disappeared into the darkness of the night.

When I got up, the train was moving away, puffing and spewing sparks and clouds of grey smoke into the darkness. What remained of Martha was scattered on the tracks.

My body was shaking. I returned to the car and drove back to the hotel. I parked it some distance away and entered the lobby. The black oracle continued to sway in the old chair and emit smoke like a steam train chimney. ‘Thanks, old man,’ I said and left again. Ten minutes later, a White Truck driver who was transporting logs to a sawmill in Nashville picked me up.

The next day, the front page of the Nashville Herald reported another horrific accident on the old railway tracks in Chattanooga, as had happened every year for the past ten years, on the night of 18 September. This time, unlike previous years when young tourists were killed, a well-known researcher of Tennessee folklore, Dr. Martha Campbell, was killed. The state of Tennessee bows its head in her memory.

The old doctor stood up, rummaged through his coat and took out a yellowed newspaper clipping.

"Here, look, if you don't believe me.

Paris

Glenn Miller

Jazz Tennessee