Child of the Journey (23 page)

As quickly as he could, he straightened his bunk, collected his bag with its dry piece of bread--remnant of the previous day's rations--and relieved himself. Still, he and Hans and Misha only just made it outside in time for roll call. Holding a roster on a clipboard, Pleshdimer made his morning announcements, his huge forehead furrowed in concentration.

"Three, sev-en, sev-en, ze-ro four. Hos-spit-tal." He used a forefinger as a pointer. Gap-toothed, he looked up and grinned. "Today you work in the quarry. When you get back they will examinate you, Jew."

Sol felt a sick, sinking feeling in his gut.
"Your name will become a part of medical history."

"Nine, se-ven...." Pleshdimer stopped and pointed at Misha. "The Haupsturmführer wants you in his quarters when you get back."

Sol saw raw fear in the boy's eyes.

"Is this your season of sadness, Solomon Freund?"
a voice in Sol's head asked.

"The
world's
season of sadness," he answered, joining the column headed for the gate and the quarry.

T
errified of what the day would bring, Misha dawdled alongside Hans. He knew that eventually he would have to join the line of shuffling humans leaving for the quarry, but every minute he stayed behind seemed like a gift of time, delaying what lay at the day's end.

"I was watching. Listening," a man said, emerging from the closest building to address Misha. "Do whatever you must to survive. Someone has to tell them about this when it's over. You are young and strong. You can make it."

As quickly as the man had appeared, he was gone.

Hans held onto Misha's shoulder. "Bite off the bastard's cock if he tries anything," he whispered into the boy's ear.

"How can I do it, Uncle Hans?" Misha asked.

"You bite down, like this--"

"No. Don't make jokes." The boy shook his head impatiently. "I meant, how can I survive?"

"You can because you must," Hans said. He prodded Misha into the line before he continued talking, very softly, so as not to be overheard by the Kapo. "You must think of yourself as a soldier, defending yourself against the enemy."

"But I have no weapons."

"Yes, you do." Hans paused. "Listen carefully. You have weapons, but they are hidden. It is simply a question of finding them."

Pleshdimer was heading toward them down the line. Automatically, they stopped whispering.

"Let me give you some suggestions," Hans went on when the Kapo had passed. "The first thing you must learn to do is cry."

Misha shook his head, remembering his promise to himself.

"It washes out the eyes and is good for the soul. If you think you have forgotten how, I can teach you. I am a great actor. I can cry on command."

"What else?"

"You must think about something you were going to do, something you were struggling for before all of this--"

"Like my bar mitzvah?"

"Precisely. Remember your lessons and repeat them to yourself as if you know with absolute certainty that your bar mitzvah will come to pass. I have been to a bar mitzvah. I know that it requires much work, much planning. You must plan every detail, down to the shine on your shoes. Debate the menu with yourself, day after day. Month after month if need be. Wake up with it in your mind. Go to sleep thinking about it."

None of that made sense to Misha, but he stored it away in his head so that he could think about it later.

"One more thing," Hans said. "I met a man once, from Poland. He told me something I will never forget. He said that life is nothing more or less than a huge ledger. On one side, there is a list of all of the good things that have happened to you, and all of the good things that you have done. On the other, a list of all of the bad things that have happened to you, and," he smiled gently down at Misha, "the bad things you have done--even if they were not done on purpose. If you have any luck at all, the good side will always be longer than the bad side. Only when that is not true is life no longer worth living."

"I don't understand."

"You must keep such a ledger, Misha. It will become one of your best weapons."

"But I have no paper, Uncle Hans. No pencil. Even if I did, they would take it away from me."

Hans chuckled. "And you told me not to joke," he said. "I had forgotten that children were so literal. You must keep the ledger in your mind, Misha. That way you will never run out of pages or lead."

He stopped talking and left Misha to his thoughts. What nonsense, Misha thought. Ledgers and bar mitzvahs and tears. Those were not weapons. Guns were weapons. Hateful things, like guns and whips and--

Pleshdimer returned down the line. "Good thing you stopped your chit-chat," he said, jabbing Misha in the thigh with his stick. "I was about to stop it myself by stuffing this in your mouth." He waved the stick in front of Misha's face.

Misha shrunk from it.
I hate you
, he thought.
Hate you, hate you, hate you
.

That was it, he knew suddenly. There was an event he could plan down to the last detail, and he did have a weapon after all. In fact if hatred was, as he suspected, the most powerful weapon he owned, he had just discovered within himself an entire arsenal.

Misha picked up his feet and squared his shoulders. As soon as he could, he would tell Sol about this, he thought, watching the line snake around a bend in the road. Uncle Hans, too. Then the three of them could become warriors together against the enemy.

With that in mind, he opened a page in his thought-ledger and began to make his first list: enemies on one side, friends on the other.

Without knowing why, he included amongst his friends the man in the corpsman's uniform, the one who had stepped out of the shadows to tell him that he had to survive.

H
ow long was it since he and Misha and Hans had been reassigned from the quarry? Sol wondered. He was beginning to lose track of time again, the way he had done in the sewer. Here, it felt worse. In the sewer there had been hope...and darkness to keep him from seeing his own physical degeneration.

Here, he not only saw his own, he saw others'.

Misha worked in the morgue next door to the
Pathologie,
where prisoners were experimented upon--vivisection and dissection on a stainless steel table with sloped troughs for collecting blood. The boy's job was to pry out gold teeth and search for gemstones in the rectums of corpses awaiting transport in Oranienburg garbage trucks to the city's crematorium. He said he did not mind it too much because of his new friend, Franz, a corpsman who had apparently dared question the huge casualty list at the camp and earned himself an assignment as
Pathologie
guard. He was the same man who, Misha said, had spoken to the boy kindly on the last morning of his quarry duty; a German of apparent compassion who, upon occasion, sneaked Misha a chocolate bar, which Misha shared with Sol and Hans.

The choice, he insisted, was his.

Hans had been reassigned to the brickworks, then to the Klinker factory's ships in the Oranienburg Kanal, to the holds and the heat and the dust. His job was to shovel coal and rubble up onto sloped platforms. More often than not, he said, it fell back on him.

His multiple injuries had been compounded by a hacking cough. Judging by the color and particles in his sputum, he was already a victim of the early stages of black lung disease. His skin was becoming permanently discolored; any attempt at a smile caused his lips to crack into ridges of blood and dust. He was also forced to perform in the brothel twice a day and often several times on Sundays, when the Klinker factory closed to give management a rest.

Instead of effecting his release, his priapism had brought him under Schmidt's scrutiny. He was made to move from woman to woman while Kapos whipped him, used electro-shock, or shoved numbing suppositories up his rectum...all in the name of science.

"Sooner or later they'll neuter me," he told Solomon. "Then I will kill Schmidt and myself."

The choice, he insisted, was his.

They were given a choice, all right, Sol thought bitterly. Cooperate and survive; fight and die...if you're lucky.

He thought back to the first day of his own reassignment, the day he became Doctor Schmidt's prime guinea pig in her eye experiments...an attempt to reduce the problem of night blindness in pilots. She had injected dye at the outer edge of each of his eyes. When it took effect, there was an hour of photographing and peering and examination through various lenses. He had to lie still and keep his blinking to a minimum, or suffer Schmidt's syringe in his stomach.
 

The choice, she insisted, was his.

The process was repeated once or twice a week. Each time she repeated the same questions. Was your father sensitive to light? As a child, did you prefer dark places?

After the sessions in the laboratory, he was free until roll call--not out of compassion, but because Schmidt wanted him nearby in case she wished to repeat some part of her experiment. He was to have no food or water until dinner--why, he did not know. His was not to question, but to accept and survive.

That was his mandate.
  

Meanwhile, he could not ignore the fact that Schmidt's dyes were accelerating the deterioration of his eyesight; he was beginning to perceive colors differently, like the gray pebbles beneath his feet, which were beginning to look purple. But as his peripheral vision deteriorated, the clarity of his central vision improved. He wanted to see less, not more. Blindness would spare him the sight of all the horrors; with luck, it might even induce the SS to bless him with a bullet in the neck.

Until then, life would continue to be made up of eye days and, when Schmidt did not send for him, foot days.

Today was a foot day.

He looked down at his shoes. Inside, his feet were slimed with blood and dirt, and crammed so tightly into the too-small shoes that he made macabre jokes to himself about being a Chinese princess.

At the request of local shoe manufacturers looking for "a true test of durability," a walkway was built along the edge of the roll call area. The walkway's
raison d'être
was the provision of superior footwear for Germans to more comfortably carry the banners of truth and racial purity to the ends of the earth.

Sol picked up a sandbag and began to walk. As he did at the beginning of each foot day, he read the signs along the edge of the walkway, hand-lettered, blooming like large white flowers: Give Sacrifice and Glory to the Fatherland! Obedience. Industry. Honesty. Cleanliness.

For the rest of the day, the track would define his universe. Each path-length averaged six thousand steps. He was required to walk it--back and forth--seven times. Even wearing good, firm shoes, negotiating forty kilometers of stretches of cement, cinders, crushed stones, and broken glass embedded in tar, gravel, and sand would have been difficult and painful; in shoes a full size too small, carrying increasingly heavy sandbags, the foot days added a new color to the fresco that was Sol's life: the color of blood.

He smelled it everywhere, tasted it. Saw it in the wake left by the line of feet walking the shoe track. Up and down--

Familiar with every hazard on the track, his only defense against the deadly combination of pain and boredom was to resort to the same tactic he had used in the sewer: counting his steps.

Seven hundred twenty-six...seven hundred twenty-seven....

He continued walking and counting until he reached the far end of the walkway, the one nearest
Pathologie.
A scream interrupted his counting.

In the brief silence between screams, Sol turned and started back toward the beginning of the crescent-shaped walkway.

...six thousand and one...

Like a flagellant, he had learned to relish the pain. Dragging his feet, feeling the blood ooze, he gritted his teeth in a kind of pleasure as a matching pain pulsed behind his eyes. There was a flash of light, and then another. A blue glow grew out of the walkway and enveloped him.

Grateful that the universe defined by the track was about to be expanded, he did not try to shut out the vision----

----Lise Meitner and her assistant sit on the edges of their cots, staring hopelessly at the floor.
Göring stands over them.

"Our lab...shut down!" Lise utters in disbelief. Now she peers up, her face strained. "But we were making such progress."

Göring chuckles haughtily. "We have no need of parasites like you, now that we'll soon have," he pauses for effect, "the bomb."

"Impossible!"

"The Copenhagen plant made certain breakthroughs--"

"So Bohr did give you heavy water before he escaped."

"Before he was kidnapped!" Göring snaps.
 

"But the partisans--they blew up the Norsk-Hydro power plant!"

"Those inept traitors?" The Feldmarschall tilts his face toward the ceiling and laughs so hard that he takes out a handkerchief and wipes tears from his eyes. "We let the British jellyfish
think
they had succeeded. We hadn't counted on the Americans having Bohr as well as Einstein, so we circulated the sabotage story so people would think we were still using heavy water as a neutron moderator instead of...graphite."