Child of the Journey (20 page)

Not that she showed any real interest in him, or anyone else except Werner Fink. Erich indulged her need to spend time with that troublemaker because it got her out of the house--

He stopped himself.

The truth was that she had asked for little since Christmas, except to be left alone. Unnerved by her long silences, he had gone on his knees to ask her forgiveness. His apologies, profound and constant, were met with disinterest: a cold stare, a cold shoulder.

"Why do you stay with me, Miriam?" he asked quietly.

She answered simply, giving him the same reason she had always given him. "You are your brother's keeper."

He stood up and looked down at her. She was anything but a fool, this niece of Walther Rathenau: a permanent reminder to him of Solomon and of his own weakness. She knew what was best for her own well-being and that of the child.

"Miri, it's Easter," he said, determining to try one more time. "All I have to do is pick up some papers at headquarters and then slip out for the day. It's too late to get to Oberammergau, but we could drive into the country, perhaps to the Harz."

"I told you---" She doubled up suddenly, as if in severe pain.

Erich struggled to find the lamp chain. By the time he had the light on, she was lying with her back arched, pressing her fists into her silk-gowned belly.

"What's the matter? What is it!"

"How should I know! I've never been pregnant before."

"What does it feel like?"

"Like pain."

His rudimentary medical training in the military had not included childbirth. He felt helpless. Grappling for the telephone to call for help, he knocked her photograph off his nightstand. "I'll have the car brought around."

Her features contorted. Struggling, she rolled onto her side and pulled up her legs. "It's only the fourth month!" She was gasping. "I must be losing the baby!"

Grabbing a handful of crumpled silk, Erich pulled himself toward her. He thrust his lips close to her ear. "You can't lose the baby--our son! You hear? Please, Miriam!"

In his anxiety, he thought he heard Goebbels' laughter. He stopped to listen. Fool! Probably a radio broadcast coming from downstairs or, at worst, the Gauleiter with another hopeful starlet.

"I think I'm okay now," Miriam said after a time, her face to the wall.

"You
think
you're okay?"

She took a deep breath. "Lately I'm sure of nothing."

He dropped the telephone in its cradle as if it were a megaphone threatening to announce his incompetence to the world. "Can you sleep?" he asked as gently as he could. Hoping to soften her attitude, he reached over her and placed his hand on her belly. "Let me feel him, Miriam."

"Stop it!" She batted his hand away. "You're like an old horse trader gloating over his prize mare." After a moment she relented and took his hand in hers. She placed it on the slightly mounded flesh of what had once been a dancer's slender belly, to the right of center.

He had learned how to listen through his fingers to the tiny intermittent flutters.

His son!

She moved away and turned to stare at the velvet flocked wallpaper. It's normal for her to emotionally distance herself in preparation for motherhood, he told himself. Animals do it, so why not humans? She would redirect her attention to him after the birth. For now, the boy was rightly her main concern--

What nonsense! he thought. The truth was, she hated him, and for good reason. Given time, and the birth of their child, she would forgive him. He could not expect her to forget, but surely forgiveness was possible.

Meanwhile, given her physical changes and the larger ones to come, her attitude was actually something of a relief; it excused his occasional desire for other women--like Leni Riefenstahl, the film director. Trim body. So sure of herself. She was said to prefer women, but that only made her all the more exciting. Not that he intended to do anything about his desire for her--those days were over--just that it was natural to contemplate...

While Miriam dozed, he dressed. By first light he was outside. The day smelled of spring and he felt good despite Miriam's surliness; on impulse, he chose to ride his motorcycle to headquarters. There would be no going to Mass this day or any other in the new Germany. More and more people--like the *woman at the Passion Play in Oberammergau during his bivouac in the Black Forest--confused Hitler with God. He felt no such confusion, but he had long since lost his taste for the overt trappings of Catholicism. Besides, Mass was not exactly part of the Party platform; all officers made it a point to show up for duty--and punctually!--on this day, or face possible reprimand.

Still, policy and his own angers could not keep him from celebrating the Earth--God's creation. The breaking dawn was beautiful, and he thoroughly enjoyed the ride to Oranienburg, home of Abwehr headquarters and once home of his glory on the athletic field.

After reporting in and collecting the papers he needed, he wandered into the officers' club. He downed three large rolls with cheese and liverwurst, and half a pot of coffee.

Tomorrow, he thought, he would make sure Miriam and the child were all right. He would take them to see Doctor Morell. He congratulated himself for being important enough to have Miriam taken care of by Hitler's personal physician. Perhaps he would have a check-up himself; he had been getting far too little exercise of late.

With that in mind, he decided to leave the cycle in front of headquarters, where it would be seen, and enjoy an Easter stroll before sitting down to the paperwork that, as usual, he had allowed to pile up. A Sunday morning hike--just like in the Wandervögel days. Whistling softly, he headed down the main road and toward the mortuary, which lay about two kilometers out of town. He would turn around there.

However, he soon abandoned his plan and cut through the woods. Pines, beeches, and hemlock rose into an orange Easter dawn; mushrooms had proliferated from the spring rains, and their smell permeated the air. He stopped to examine one of them, wondering if he could still tell the difference between mushrooms and toadstools. He was crouching near the ground when voices claimed his attention. Curious, he followed them out to the road and found the good people of Oranienburg, released from work by the holy day, gathered along the Waldstrasse.

"An Easter Parade?" he asked one of them pleasantly.

"Might call it that." The man grinned and pointed at a column of men just coming into view.

"Who are they?" Erich asked.

"As if you don't know!" The man stared at Erich's uniform.

"Haven't been around this area for a long time."

The man shrugged. "Whatever you say. It's the labor detail from Sachsenhausen on their three-kilometer stroll to the quarry. Mostly political prisoners--but enough Jews to make it worthwhile!"

Erich's stomach clenched as the sorry group headed toward him, herded by rifle butts and billy clubs. They looked beaten and starved. As the head of the column passed him by, he saw those who appeared to be the oldest of the men--though it was hard to tell--squeeze to the center of the human cage without breaking rank. Their comrades supported them as best they could.

"Blüt für Blüt!
--blood for blood!" shouted a townsman in a lederhosen and a green felt hat decorated with a red feather.

Next to him, a woman in a tight-bodiced dirndl took up the chant. She smiled companionably as she raised her Brownie to photograph the Easter entertainment

I didn't know,
he wanted to shout at the ragged column. The prisoners looked half alive--skeletons staring out of skulls whose eyes had seen too much death.

God! I didn't know.

The woman with the camera hurled a stone into the ranks.

Soon everyone was claiming the right to kill a Jew for Jesus before sunrise Services. Blows were rendered with clubs and broomsticks, with fireplace pokers hurriedly gathered from neat little houses, with stones plucked from gardens seeded with berries and beans. Young children hurled eggs and insults, their obscenities drowned by the shrieks of the prisoners as their rifle-bearing masters beat and shot them into submission.

The men along the outside of the column peeled off like old paint, skeletons performing a ghastly dance; they fell and were trampled by others fighting inward in their battle to survive.

"No," Erich whispered. The rumors about the detention centers, the abuses, the humiliations--true. All of it. Holy Mother of God, they were true.

Could Hell be any worse?

An elderly man next to Erich spat in a laborer's face and shook his fist. "It was because of
you
that our Lord was crucified!"

The inmate straightened his shoulders and wiped off the spittle on the striped sleeve of his prison uniform. A rock bounced off the temple of the man next to him. He swayed. His friend held him up and they staggered on.

Erich looked around. At least Sol was not here, facing the good people of Oranienburg--so blind to all but hatred. Their tile and shoe factories loomed unmanned, the machinery silent--and why? To commemorate Easter in a Germany that had officially declared the Christian god a manifestation of the Jewish disease. Yet the claptrap continued about Jews killing and bleeding Aryan infants for Passover rituals...and they went on blaming the Jews for the death of Christ. Were they stupid, bloodthirsty, or simply naïve?

He did not know; all he was sure of was, when the truth of this surfaced, not one of them--neither man, woman, nor child--would admit to having been here this day.

Nor, he thought sadly, feeling sick, would he.

A
t the rear of the column, Sol wiped the residue of an Easter egg off his face. The good people of Oranienburg must have run out of stones, he thought. How fortunate.

He bent and offered his fingers to Misha, who licked them clean. Sol smiled gently, but the boy did not smile back. He seemed to have forgotten how. And no small wonder. Yesterday it was Christmas, now it was Easter. From Chanukah to Passover, they had been living in a Panoptikum, a house of mirrors called Sachsenhausen.

Abruptly, the Oranienburg gauntlet was behind them...the morning "Running of the Bull," his new friend Hans Hannes called it.

Turning his head, he glanced back toward the camp. It was a nightmare, a zoetrope filled with slides of the black and white pain of Dadaism and filled with savage, sinister people turned inside-out by despair. Caricatures George Grosz may have rendered--only the camp artist was not Grosz or Van Gogh. He was SS Captain Hempel.

His whip was the brush, the flesh of men his canvas. His favorite subject lay inherent in his introductory speech to new arrivals: "This is not a penitentiary or prison. It is a place of instruction. Order and discipline are its highest law. If you hope to see freedom again, you must submit to severe training. You must convince us that our methods of training have borne fruit. You must deny your old way of life. Our methods are thorough...."

Translated, that meant, "...you will not go hungry. Not if you will eat ruthlessness for dessert after your entree of cruelty."

Each step toward the quarry sent pains shooting through Sol's stomach and spine. Beside him, around him, fellow inmates with torn flesh and broken bones stumbled on through fields black from spring plowing. He remembered other days in these grain fields. Athletic festivals. Erich-the-Teuton practicing his javelin; or he, Erich, and Miriam walking through the woods, talking, listening to birds.

It troubled him when birds sang here now. Their freedom and the beauty of their songs mocked him.

The column reached the quarry. By now, for some, standing took too much effort. They collapsed onto the marly ground.

"Boy!"

Hempel dismounted from his stallion. His silver hair shone in the early morning light, and his eyes brightened with pleasure as Misha came running to him. Using the tip of the barrel of his pistol, Hempel caressed the boy's cheek. He moved the pistol to the other cheek, and repeated the gesture.

Misha whimpered but did not cry. Far too small to carry out the work of the hard labor detail, he had to march with them. The order had come directly from Hempel, whose penchant for boys--the younger the better--was no secret.

"Eyes front!" Hans whispered to Sol. "You won't help the child by getting yourself killed."

"You were out of step back there, you little bastard!" Hempel said.

"Ja, Haupsturmführer!" Misha said. "Forgive me, Haupsturmführer! I am a wretched Jew, unworthy to lick your boots."

Sol glanced quickly at Hempel. The captain was smiling.
 

"Fifteen on the stock might make you worthy," Hempel said conversationally. "What do you think?"

"Ja. Thank you, Haupsturmführer."

Remounting, Hempel spurred his horse. His wolfhound, busy and bloodied from the roundup of straggling inmates, joined horse and rider.
 

"Be strong, Misha," Sol whispered to the boy when he returned to the ranks. The child was so terribly young! He did not deserve the ugly lessons he would learn from that master of the grotesque, Otto Hempel.