B004U2USMY EBOK (27 page)

“Maman! O
ù
est ma maman?”

Gabriela couldn’t help herself. “Who are
you?” she asked in French. “What is your name?”

But he only screamed incoherently.

Her French woke the other inmates. The
hallway filled with a clamor of shouting, moans, pleas. A woman
cried in Italian. Begging, pleading.

“What?” she said. “I can’t understand. Do you
speak French?”

Helmut pulled her along. “Gaby, listen to me.
You can’t, you’ll just cause trouble. Only your father, that’s all
we can see. These other people. . .there’s nothing you can do.”

“My god.” Gabriela resisted the urge to clamp
her hands over her ears. “How long has my papá been here?”

“I don’t know,” Helmut said. “At least two
years.”

Two years! Who could survive two years in
such a place? Another doctor passed, pushing a cart. There were
straps and electrical devices, forceps and long syringes.
Something dark and greasy stained his white apron.

“Are they really doctors?” she asked. “Please
tell me they’re not.”

“Real doctors, real nurses.”

“But doctors and nurses help people, they
don’t. . .do they?”

“Sometimes they do.” His voice was grim.

“But so many, all in one place?”

“These people always exist. They’re
everywhere in small numbers. What happens when cruelty is no
longer proscribed? When sadistic behavior is not just tolerated,
but sanctioned? Even enforced?” He shook his head. “It’s not hard
to staff insane asylums. Doctors, nurses, guards, there are always
volunteers.”

He started to say something else, but they
pushed through another door and an orderly demanded something.
Helmut pulled out his papers.

The orderly gestured for them to follow.
“Kommen
Sie mit mir.”

The man stopped in front of one of the doors
and took out a ring of keys, counted through them one after
another. This hall was quieter. In fact, Gabriela would have
thought the cells empty, except for a solitary cough toward the
end.

The orderly swung the door open and gave an
expansive, almost ironic gesture for them to enter. Gabriela
stepped through, heart pounding.

Dear god, let him be okay. Let him be
healthy.

A man sat in a chair, his back to the door,
facing the corner. He wore no restraints and rested his hands on
his lap. There was a cot attached to the wall with a single, thin
blanket. A metal chamber pot in the corner. One wall was scratched
and gouged, as if by the claws of some animal, trying desperately
to escape from its cell.

No books, no papers, nothing to occupy his
hands or his mind. A bare stone wall, bare concrete floor. A
single dim light bulb overhead. Two years in this place? Her
father had once claimed it was impossible to be bored, there were
too many things to read and learn. But he’d never imagined a room
three meters by three meters, with nothing but a single light bulb
to stare at day after hellish day.

“Go to him,” Helmut murmured.

His words jolted her from her stupor. “
Papá?
Soy yo, tu hijita. Ya vengo por ti.”

Her father didn’t answer, didn’t turn, even
as she crossed to his side. She bent and took his hands. For a
second she thought it was the wrong room; this couldn’t be her
father. He looked so old. His face drawn, his hair gone gray, face
unshaven for several days. There was no spark in his eyes, no
upturned mouth like she remembered. But the nose, the jaw, the
cheekbones; it was him.

His once strong hands and arms were weak and
trembling as she picked them up. She kissed his face. He smelled
old and sick. He didn’t look at her or respond to her touch or
words.

“Papá, I came, I told you I would. I’m so
sorry it took so long. Papá, it’s me, Gabriela. Papá?”

No response.

“Papá!” Gabriela let go of his hands, which
flopped to his side, and took his face in her hands. “What’s
wrong? Can’t you see me? It’s your daughter, me, Gabriela, Papá,
for god’s sake, can you hear me?” She turned to Helmut in a panic.
“What’s wrong with him? Why isn’t he answering?”

“Oh,” Helmut said. His face was pale. “I
didn’t know.”

He stepped forward and touched her father’s
forehead and she saw for the first time the scar traced in a curve
above the eyebrows. Raised and pink, where someone had carved into
him. A long, angry gash across the skull.

“What is it? What did they do?” She heard her
voice as if from a distance, a high-pitched sound, like a scream
from one of the asylum cells.

“He’s been cut.” Helmut spoke with an audible
shudder. “They cut through his skull across here and inserted
something into the brain. I’ve heard of this, it’s called a
lobotomy.”

“A what? For god’s sake, what is that?”

“They stick something in and they stir it
around to break up part of the brain.”

“No! No, they couldn’t. Why would they do
such a thing?”

“It’s to pacify the criminally insane. But
he’s so non-responsive, they must have given him an especially
violent surgery.”

“He wasn’t insane!” That distant screaming
again. “He wasn’t insane!”

She couldn’t tell if she were screaming or if
that sound came from her head. A tiny, distant part of her brain
observed that this must be what it felt like to be actually,
genuinely insane. Right before they cut open your skull and
stirred your brains as casually as if they were a pair of egg
yolks.

She felt violently ill. She turned, coughed
twice as her stomach heaved and she tried to force it down. And
then she threw up, not on the floor, but all down the front of her
dress. Helmut caught her as she fell. She fought to regain her
balance. He was wearing some of her vomit.

The door opened to their rear. The orderly
stood there with a frown. “F
raulein?”

His face was a mask of perfect sanctimony,
self-righteous priggery. She wanted to tear that look off his
face, to gouge out his eyes. To smash his head against the stone
wall again and again until
he
was the one with the
senseless look.

Gabriela lunged at him with a cry of rage. He
staggered back, seemingly caught unaware, and lifted his hands.
She was about to catch him, her only thought to go for his eyes,
when Helmut grabbed her arms.

“Gaby, no! Gaby, listen to me. Not like
this.”

She tried to pull free, to hit him until he
let her go. But he was too strong, he had her hands pinned and she
couldn’t move, could only wail. “My father, look what this bastard
did to him. Look!”

“No, Gaby. He didn’t, he’s not the one. He’s
a functionary, a nobody. You can’t do anything by hurting him.
You’ll just get yourself arrested.”

“I have to do something. They’ve destroyed my
father, don’t you see? Can’t you understand?”

“Who took your father, Gaby? Who sent him
here? Gaby, who is responsible? It’s not this man.”

The answer came to her and suddenly
everything about this horrible concrete building made sense. It
was a giant snake cage, with a man dropping mice down to be
destroyed inside.

“Colonel Hoekman,” she said. “He’s the one.
He did this.”

#

Gabriela spent a few more minutes with her
father before the orderly returned. Helmut argued with him and
managed to send him away. “We only have ten more minutes.”

She stroked her father’s hair, then rubbed
his neck. Scars ran like ribbons down his back; she could feel
them through his gown. A lump on one shoulder, like a broken bone
that had improperly healed. None of it seemed to cause him any
pain.

And yet he wasn’t completely unresponsive. He
turned at one point and stared at her with liquid eyes and she
swore she saw a glint of recognition.

“Oh, Papá, I’m so sorry. I love you so much.”

He gave a deep sigh, then turned back to the
corner.

It wasn’t ten minutes, more like five, before
the orderly returned. Helmut argued, but the man was insistent. A
soldier with a submachine gun appeared in the hallway and at last
Helmut said they had to go.

“No, I won’t.”

“You have to,” he said in a gentle voice. He
pried her fingers from the chair.

“Papá, I’ll be back for you.”

She was in a daze as Helmut led her back
through the building. The same man was screaming for his mother
and they wheeled a man past on a cart who stared at the ceiling
with eyes so glazed she thought he was dead. At last they were out
of the damnable place and outside. Even the smoggy air of
Strasbourg was a relief after the formaldehyde and ammonia and
blood that suffocated her lungs.

She glanced back at the building as they
reached the chain link gates, up to the roof where Roger had drawn
the rooster with his face. “I know what made him do it.”

“Hmm?” Helmut looked up from staring at his
hands.

“I know why Roger turned on his friends. They
took him here and showed him my father. Or someone like him.”

“Perhaps.”

“It was an ugly thing Roger did,” Gabriela
said. “His friends are going to suffer for it. But imagine they
strap you into a chair and draw a line across your skull. You see
a saw and a chisel on a tray and other horrible tools. The doctor
comes and there’s blood on his apron and he’s wearing rubber
gloves and a mask, so you can only see his eyes. You’re screaming,
but nobody seems to be paying attention.”

“Gaby, please, stop. Don’t do this to
yourself.”

“Then they wheel my father past. There’s a
scar on his forehead that matches what they’ve drawn on your own
skull. He’s alive, but there’s nothing behind his eyes but an
empty hole. Colonel Hoekman comes into the room then and you stop
screaming, but only because the terror has sucked it out of you.
He tells you what you have to do for the Gestapo and you beg him
to let you do more. You’ll betray anyone, denounce anyone. You’ll
prove how useful you can be, because there’s no torture or death
that’s worse than the empty hole.”

Helmut stared at her with a horrified
expression. “Where did that come from?”

She couldn’t say anything, just turned away
from Helmut to face the train station. She could feel the asylum
squatting behind her, gray and menacing. Her father remained
inside.

Chapter Twenty-two:

It was too late to return to Paris, but
Helmut didn’t want to stay in Strasbourg. “I’ve found that
constant air raid sirens and bombings tend to ruin a good night’s
sleep.”

Gabriela didn’t care. She walked in a choking
smog. It was all she could do to take her next breath.

The line was bombed out near Nancy, so they
took the train south instead and stopped in a village near
Mulhouse, at a hotel a few blocks from the train station. The
owner spoke German to Helmut, Alsatian to his wife, but then, when
she passed later on her way to the water closet, she overheard
them speaking French behind closed doors.

There was hot water and she took a bath. She
scrubbed herself until she couldn’t smell any formaldehyde, vomit,
or ammonia. Just the scent of lavender soap. When she came out,
wrapped in towels, she discovered Helmut had gone into the village
and found her a change of clothes.

The hotel room was small but clean, with a
hot, noisy radiator. Helmut retrieved a kettle from the kitchen
downstairs and made her tea, mixed with brandy. By the second cup
she felt herself relaxing. Or maybe it was impossible to sustain
the anger, horror, and despair she’d felt since seeing her father.

It wasn’t fair. After everything her father
had suffered and years of searching for him. They deserved a happy
ending, like in one of the books from the store.

Helmut stood by the window, parted the
curtains to look down to the street.

“The problem is,” she said, “I want two
things and I can’t have them both.”

“What two things?”

“First, I’ve got to get my father out of
there. Get him out and find a safe place where I can take care of
him.”

“It won’t be easy. It was hard enough getting
in to see him. And expensive. Not to mention dangerous. I took
some risks.”

“You have no idea how grateful I am.”

He sat on the edge of the bed. “It’s nothing.
I wish I could do more.”

“So you don’t think it can be done. Get my
father out, I mean.”

“I didn’t say that,” Helmut said. “I said it
won’t be easy. Let me think about it. What’s the other thing?”

“I want Hoekman to pay for what he did.”

“If there were any justice, he’d hang for his
crimes. The man is a monster. But what could you possibly do?”

“You’re right, it’s probably even more
hopeless than helping my father. Like you said, people like
Hoekman profit from their cruelty these days. But there’s got to
be a way.”

He was quiet for a long moment, then said in
a quiet voice, “There are other ways to get justice. Quicker, more
sure ways.”

“Tell me.”

“Did they search you the last time Colonel
Hoekman summoned you?”

“No. The first time, yes. I used to carry a
knife for protection, and he took it. Second time, he didn’t
bother. He must have known I wouldn’t dare.”

“So you could easily conceal something on
your person next time you saw him.”

“I suppose I could. Another knife, maybe, if
I could get one.”

“A knife isn’t good enough. He’d overpower
you and take it. You need a gun.”

“Could you get me one?”

“I could. In fact, I’ve already got one.
There’s a Mauser semi-automatic pistol hidden in my luggage.”

The idea was tempting. She imagined the look
on Hoekman’s face as she pulled the trigger. When he realized that
he was about to suffer for his crimes. When he looked into her
eyes and saw,
knew,
why she was killing him.

“I’d never survive. They’d hear the gun, come
in and arrest me, unless I could kill myself first.”