Child of the Journey (22 page)

In the pit, the blood became a torrent. Engulfing him. Red-black and gelatinous, and as stinking as the pheasant he'd shot during his family's one vacation in the Black Forest and had left too long in the sun....

Streaming into the pit, the blood turned blue. Blue as the veins beneath the skin of living skeletons. He felt a vision coming, and could not keep it from engulfing him. He was too tired. The light was big, and blue as cobalt----

----a lamp pours light onto two women on cots set in an alcove of a crumbling brick wall, under an unframed picture of the Führer.

The older woman, wearing a pink slip, is sitting up, smoking, reading a letter, a dirty sheet draped over her legs. "Doktor Hahn must have written this in the lab. See how cramped the handwriting is?" She shows the letter to the younger woman. "He writes that way when he's excited, otherwise he has the most beautiful penmanship. And see this smear?" She taps the paper with a fingernail. "Graphite...and not from a pencil, that's for certain." She nods conclusively. "Definitely written in the lab."

Nightgowned in ragged flannel, the other woman looks dolefully into a shard of mirror she holds, and checks her hair. "I don't know how you can constantly read and reread those love letters. You even make notes in the margins, as though they were some kind of grammar exercise. How can you be so stoic? Your Otto wrote those two years ago! Don't you wonder where he is...
if
he is?"

Her eyes fill with remorse and she puts down the mirror. "I'm sorry, Lise...
Doktor
Meitner. You must think me morbid."

"Nonsense, Judith!" Lise mashes her cigarette in an ashtray on the cot. "You've husband and child. Your concern for their safety suffuses your every thought and breath, as well it should. But just because they incarcerated Otto Hahn doesn't mean he's come to harm. He isn't Jewish, after all. Besides, even Hitler would think twice about exterminating a Nobel Laureate, no matter how outspoken. How ironic! They detain him for practicing the Jewish science of Bohr and Einstein, then as punishment demand that he go on practicing."

She carefully folds the yellowed pages of the letter and places it among others in a tin, removes a brick from the wall, inserts the tin, and replaces the brick. "Otto Hahn is with me every moment. His love guides me in every experiment we perform."

"And if we achieve critical mass?"

"He'll be there too. Especially then."

"Even if it means giving the Nazis--"

"The power of the atom? In exchange for guaranteed freedom for our people? Yes, Doktor Hahn will be there should that happen, even if only in spirit."

The younger woman stretches out on her cot, her head upon her extended arm, and looks at Lise with loving admiration. "You never expect to see him again, and yet you go on...."

Lise chuckles sadly. "When the Nazis split us, they split our atom. If you and I and Professor Heisenberg split the real atom, Doktor Hahn and I will remain forever split. They'll see to that. A female, Jewish Nobel candidate working alongside a Gentile Nobel Laureate who preaches the Jewish science he practices? That smacks of miscegenation, even though I was raised Protestant. The Nazis wouldn't hear of our being together again. But while we're apart...well, there is always hope. So we continue working."

The younger woman sighs. Despite lines of worry and overwork that crease her forehead, she now seems at ease. "Will I ever be as wise as you? My Franz may only be a laborer, but he's more knowledgeable about life than I'll ever be. And you with your--"

"My hopes--dead hopes--for a Nobel?"

"Yes. Being your lab assistant is an honor, Doktor Meitner. Sometimes, though, I wish you'd been my mother."

Lise frowns petulantly. "So you could have begun studying radium as a toddler? I would have made a terrible parent. I can see you now, a two-year-old worrying about nuclear properties and chain reactions." She reaches for another cigarette.

"And about your chain smoking." Judith takes the cigarette and wags a finger of admonition at Lise, who snatches at the cigarette and laughs when she misses.
 

Her laughter dissipates as the resonant chords of a Bach fugue played on a pipe organ fills the room.

"He's at it again," Judith says, suddenly sullen. "They only give us four or five hours' rest, yet every night Heisenberg plays--"

"He's a very good musician. Sometimes I think he'd rather devote his life to Bach's theories than to Bohr's."

"I hate him," Judith says bitterly. "He sold out to the Nazis. He's worse than Göring. Werner Heisenberg has the capacity to take a moral stand. The world respects him. Instead he simply gave in. At least he could have emigrated! Einstein did, and Fermi, and Slizard...who knows how many others? Now, with Bohr gone as well--"

"Heisenberg has no love for Hitler."

"He lectured in Switzerland and visited America." Judith says. "He didn't have to return."

"Should he have left his family behind?"

"Others did."

"Others did not have the weight of the scientific community on their shoulders."

"They bore the weight of the
Jewish
community," Judith says. "That's why they're helping the Allies."

Lise looks pained. "And who is helping European Jews while the United States chases the atom's Holy Grail? Has so much as a single conventional bomb been dropped on a death camp? The Allies surely know of the camps by now, yet nothing is done."

"Our people would die if the camps were bombed!"

"They'll die anyway, except those you and I manage to save." Lise's hand trembles as she lights a cigarette. "Why not destroy the slaughterhouses and slow down the killing?"

"Everyone
will die, if we give Hitler what he wants," Judith says morosely. "I don't know why you agreed to this insanity! And me a part of it! A scientific breakthrough here...ten thousand saved." She moves her hand around on the cot as if picking up and setting down chessmen. "Another breakthrough there...ten thousand more. What happens when we run out of breakthroughs and must deliver the real thing? What good will have become of all this! Are you so naïve as to think Hitler will keep his promise to send all Jews to that homeland he's creating in Madagascar?"

Bending closely, Lise says in a low voice, "We pray to Jehovah that the war will end before the bomb is born."

"And in the meantime?"

"In the meantime...as long as the Nazis remain divided about Jewish science, they will continue to dole out to a dozen research facilities what little heavy water there is available, instead of concentrating efforts and supplies. The bomb could be delayed for a decade."

Lise's voice has risen earnestly. Judith puts a finger to her lips.

"The music drowns out our whispers," she says. "Why else do you think Heisenberg plays the pipes for half an hour every night, rather than immediately returning to his family in Hechingen? Even he isn't that much of a music enthusiast. He gives us time to talk--to assess--to plan."

"Doktor Heisenberg knows of our deal with Hitler?"

"Of course he knows," the older woman says impatiently. "Is he a part of it? I'm not sure. He's very complex, especially morally. He feels that if Germany doesn't have the bomb, we won't be able to stop the Allies from using theirs, should they create one. And yet...give the Luftwaffe the bomb? Who can say what Heisenberg thinks! You think he wasn't upset when the papers called him a White Jew?"

"The usual Nazi logic. Destroy the best."

"That's why there's hope! You bash in the brains of a wolf and it may go on snapping, but not for long."

Judith curls into a ball, to sleep; the cot has no blanket. Lise reaches to turn off the light, but the door opens and an obese man with a pink and white complexion enters. Judith jerks upright, crossing her arms protectively across her bosom.

"I have two lion cubs at my home in Berlin," the man says. "They remind me of you ladies. Cuddly but dangerous."

Lise stands and, with an air of arrogance, leans against the wall and drags on the cigarette. "Is this your idea of a surprise inspection, Feldmarschall Göring?" She blows smoke in his direction. "Play games with
this
physicist and you can bet your jackboots that her mind goes blank in the lab tomorrow!"

"Someday, Doktor," he says genially, "that mouth of yours is going to get your tongue torn out."

"Someday I will be eliminated like the troublesome burr that I am. Until then, you need me. I know it. You know it."

"That day might come sooner than you think." Göring licks a palm and smoothes back his hair. "In the meantime, let us not forget that uncooperative laboratory assistants arrive in Auschwitz by the boxcar load...as do their families."

 
Her face anguished, Judith puts her head against her fists.

"You promised--we work without provocation," Lise says.

He looks at her with disdain. "And you promised delivery. Until then, promises are just...promises."----

Sol awoke panting from the stuffiness of the room. He was not in the quarry, as he expected, but back in the barracks. Had he ever left?
 
The sky was dark and the moon, framed in the window, filled the barracks with liquid silver. Hans was standing with one hand gripping the barracks's noose. He gazed toward the sentry tower.

Taking hold of the next bunk edge, Sol once again slid from the cramped space and crept among the sleepers to stand beside his friend. The camp's gate was open, and people were being herded inside. "Another pogrom," Sol said. "If only they knew how much easier it would be for them if they died now." He took the noose from Hans and tugged at it.

Hans laughed bitterly. "I've heard the dead are taken to the crematoria in Gotha and Eisenback. Also Weimar. That's where my father has his farm. The soil there is being spread with a new fertilizer. Gray-white. They sell human ashes to the farmers, Solomon. They are mad, all of them."

"Shush. You'll bring the Kapo down on us."

Hans turned back to the window. "Know why I was imprisoned? For watching a couple copulate in a city park outside of Stuttgart.
For watching!
The man was a Party official. I thought they would let me go...you know, like the man who goes to the Kaiserhof with his secretary and meets his brother-in-law having a night on the town. They are silenced by mutual guilt."

Solomon put an arm across Hans' shoulder and gave his friend's upper arm an affectionate squeeze. The boy moaned in his sleep.

"I love that boy, Solomon." Hans' eyes welled with tears. "He has dignity far beyond his years, but they're taking it from him."

"He is young and strong."

"Young enough to believe in God and good men of government?"

"He will survive. You and I will see to that."

"You will have to do it alone, Solomon." Hans gripped a bunk post, his face wracked with anguish. "Sooner or later, they will get me. Ten years ago some sociologist decided there were over a million homosexual men in Germany. Himmler rounded the number up to
two
million and swore to rid the Reich of them all. In the so-called Dark Ages, homosexuals were drowned in bogs or rolled in blankets for use as faggots during witch burnings."
 

"I heard talk that you pink-triangles are to be marched to the camp brothel. If you perform with a woman, you'll be released into the civilian labor force."

"Perform!" Hans grabbed his groin with such hatred, it seemed he wanted to tear off his genitals.

"If you refuse, they'll kill you," Sol said.

"They'll kill us anyway." Forehead against the post, Hans said quietly, "When I was making movies one after another, working literally night and day, UFA put me on anti-depressants. For my mental health, they said. They had me working seven days a week. I was so tired, and always afraid for my brother. Their damned anti-depressants gave me priapism. Know what that is, my friend?"

Solomon shook his head.

"An eternal erection." He looked at Sol through eyes filled with agony. "The pain--you cannot believe the pain, Solomon. The beatings we endure is nothing compared to it."
 
He released a slow breath. "Priapism results in a form of gangrene," he said.

"Your name will become a part of medical history,"
the voice in the Ethiopian vision echoed. "The hospital's a death trap for both of us," Sol said.

A movement outside caught his eye. He watched Pleshdimer cross the yard, a thick-necked murderer who, as Hempel's human watchdog, had found his calling in Sachsenhausen. To him, passion and cruelty were synonymous, but the fear he inspired in all of the prisoners was multiplied tenfold for Misha, who had several times seen the man outside the camp.

"HEIL HITLER!" the loudspeakers boomed. "PRISONERS ARISE!"

Less than ten minutes till roll call. Sol had to hurry in order to have precious seconds in which to relieve himself in the holes in the floor of the room that adjoined the barracks.

"I'd sell my soul to see Hempel dead," Hans said. He lumbered over to the sleeping boy and shook him gently to arouse him.

"You'd sell your soul for a bowl of semolina soup,"
a voice from Sol's childhood whispered in his head.