Child of the Journey (32 page)

"Well?" Erich asked. "What are you waiting for?"

"Are you--are you going to open it, sir?"

"Is it any of your business?"

The messenger suddenly looked flushed. "I'm sorry, sir. It's just that everyone at headquarters is talking about," he glanced around and lowered his voice, "the
project,
sir. It's damn exciting!"

"And you thought you could carry back another piece of gossip to fuel the fire," Erich said, looking at him sternly. "I'm afraid you will have to return empty-handed."

"Yes sir. Forgive me, sir."

The young man turned and hurried toward his bike. Erich waited until Krayller had let him out the gate before he examined the box. He did not open it immediately but rather held back, checking its heft, as though it were a birthday or Christmas gift.

The butcher paper had no return name or address. He ripped if off and tossed it aside. The box proved to be likewise unmarked. As he opened it and pulled out a jar with a metallic-gold lid, a premonition of fear mixed with an urge to kill someone gripped him with such force that he almost dropped the jar. Then, gingerly, he held it up to the light.

Bile filled his throat. He placed a hand on his chest and sucked a short breath to keep from retching. There was no mistaking the contents--a set of purplish genitalia. Shaking, cursing his weak stomach, he set the jar down on the stoop.
 

An envelope the size of an invitation and embossed with fleur-de-lis lay in the bottom of the box.
 
He tore it open.

Inside, neatly folded, he found a death certificate.

Solomon Isaac Freund, prisoner 37704.
Adverse reaction to anesthesia during voluntary surgery. Cause of death: heart failure. 10 June 1939. Detained 1 January 1938, Stuttgart. Entry into camp system 3 January 1938, Marienbad. Relocated Sachsenhausen, 14 August 1938.

He refolded the paper slowly, stupefied by the enormity of the irony. For over a year the lies he had been telling Miriam had been the truth. Solomon, in Sachsenhausen...Hempel's camp! But how! When had he returned to Germany? And why Stuttgart!... Something to do with Miriam's past? Had he contacted her? Did she know the truth?

He sat down and ransacked his mind, trying to recall if Miriam had acted strangely about the time Solomon returned, but it was too long ago, and her moods were so volatile anyway! Perhaps, he thought hopefully, Solomon had been on his way
to
Berlin and was arrested before he ever contacted...

My God, what was he thinking! Solomon dead, that bastard Hempel surely somehow responsible, and he was hoping that...! To his horror, he found that he had unconsciously put a hand on the jar. He lurched away, then swiveled so his back was to the thing, and shuddered. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!
 

His mind sprang back to the paper. He shook as he fought to unfold it. There! He jabbed at the information as thought to point it out to someone.

Designation: pink.

Pink! Solomon, arrested not as a Jew but as a queer! Surely there was some mistake!

His mind raced through memories as if through the narrow, chaotic streets of some medieval city, reason and feverish logic opening doors long battened down as though against a plague. For the first time in his life the past made sense to him.

That
was why Solomon would wince whenever anyone made derogatory remarks about queers! Why he had to be goaded into buying that hot little whore with the banana-shaped tits, only to emerge afterward so repulsed with himself that he looked sick.
That
was why Miriam...

So that was her obsession with Solomon! Not because he was having her every night after they closed up shop,
but because he wouldn't.
Or--he had to cool down hysterical laughter bubbling up at the back of his brain--
or because Solomon couldn't.

He thought about Miriam, that Christmas in the apartment. Wanting him, not wanting him, seducing and denying, until he had no other choice but to take her by force. She probably had not spread her legs for someone since returning to Berlin, since touring out of...Stuttgart.

Stuttgart!

Could it be possible that Solomon had returned to Germany not for Miriam, but for something buried in her past that he thought might resurrect the manhood he had never had?

Solomon Freund, a fucking queer! Erich looked at the jar with angry disgust. All that time Solomon had squired Miriam, claimed to be in love with her, when in reality he had desired...The thought made him ill.

Desired me.
 

That was why Solomon had not abandoned their friendship when Erich joined the Party...why Miriam seemed happy about Madagascar. It was not Erich Alois she hated, he decided, for though he had raped her--well, sort of raped--that union had given her what she wanted most. A child. And now...a chance to raise that child outside Nazi Germany. It all made sense.

He stood up. He would give her more than that chance, he vowed to himself. Once he had the colony established and in running order, then if she wanted to raise the boy as a Jew, he would consider it.

Ready to head back to the shepherds, he strode around to the kitchen, opened the lid of one of the garbage cans, and let the jar slip from between his fingers. Good-bye,
friend,
he thought, and slammed the lid down.

The dogs yelped and strained at their chains upon his approach.
Those
were real friends. You know who feeds you, he thought affectionately.

Taurus fought to lick his face when he squatted beside her. He hugged her neck so tightly that she had to lower her back and pull her head down to keep from choking. Her body rippled with power beneath the gold and black coat. She was more vicious since she had tasted blood, but that did not make him love her less. Nor did her dysplasia, especially since her performances requiring intelligence and not just physical prowess equaled or exceeded those of the other dogs--as if she had been created to remind him that a disability cannot defeat a true champion.

He stroked her head gently. Did he really have the right to subject her, or any of the dogs, to the long voyage and the tropics? Was he placing personal gain before the health of his troops? Madagascar's dampness was bound to affect Taurus' hip joint. Filled with fluid, it was edging from its socket. And what about brain fever? Dogs unaccustomed to tropical sun and humidity were highly susceptible.

Lantern glow interrupted his solitude. He squared his shoulders and stood up.

"Redwing," Krayller said. His affenpinscher bared its teeth, as if grinning in recognition of Erich who was its feeder, as he was of all the dogs.

"Comfort," Erich replied, completing the password exchange.

Krayller stooped to pat his terrier. "Sir?"

"Yes?"

"Will you be taking Grog with you?" The huge man's voice was heavy with emotion. "Rumor has it that I will not be going to Madagascar. Is Grog slated for a new trainer?"

"Rumors don't run an army. Brains and oil do." Erich looked down at the black monkey terrier. "I'm not positive who is going."

The trainer drew a distraught breath. Hitler himself had presented the little dog to the corps, a gesture Eva Braun had apparently inspired. At first Krayller had been insulted when Erich put the animal in his charge, but the dog proved quick and intelligent, with a sense of comedy that provided relief from the seriousness of the work with the shepherds.

"I will leave you now, sir." Krayller swept the light along the line of tethered dogs and began to walk off.

"Just a moment." Letting go of Taurus, Erich walked toward the far wall.

"Sir?"

"When I reach the back fence, let the dogs loose. Pull the pin and let them run with their chains attached."

"What?"

"You heard me."

"But, sir, the other trainers are asleep or in the city--sir!"

"Do as I say!"

Nearing the iron gate, Erich looked up at the sky, studded with stars. Along the horizon of chestnut trees, long feathery clouds shone silver and bright, and he thought of the dogsled that had taken Benyowsky across Siberia.
Master of this castle. But who is really master of these grand, graceful animals?

"I can't do this, sir." Krayller sounded plaintive as a child. "Unless the dogs are muzzled, without their trainers here they will tear each other apart, even if they don't wrap their chains around something and choke to death."

"You will do as I tell you."

"If you insist on doing this, sir, I must wash my hands of all responsibility for the consequences."

"That goes without saying. You are not my keeper."

On impulse Erich closed his eyes and lifted his arms, as if seeking affirmation from the clouds. Did his destiny, he wondered, like the Count's, lie in Madagascar? He could hear Krayller tinkering with the main pin designed to disconnect all the animals from their runs in case of fire or other emergency.

That's it, he thought. He would let his real friends decide his destiny. His only friends. Should they obey orders and attack him, he would refuse to take them to the tropics--assuming he lived through the attack--but if they disobeyed an immoral command and bound to their feeder like children to a loving parent, he would set aside his fears for them. For then they would not be Nazi puppets but true German soldiers, capable of thinking for themselves.

Yes. He willed forth his resolve. Let the dogs decide.

They came bounding, barking and snarling, tongues and tail wagging with excitement. When they were near enough so that he could see their dark-velvet eyes in the moonlight, he issued an unspoken command:

Kill me!

For a moment the dogs kept charging. Then those in front slowed and parted, whining, their ears uplifted, some now looking backward as though listening to a secret signal.

Kill me!
he commanded again as Taurus stormed past the others, no longer fast but her determination undiminished, eyes gleaming with fury. With a primeval rasping deep in her throat, she leaped.

And, even as he fell beneath her weight, she began to lick him.

H
e rolled with the dogs, feeling their panting and excitement as his own. When he and they were spent, he lay in the grass and looked at the clouds, physically and emotionally exhausted but happy. He thought about inventing lies for the clouds, images that he could not see but felt a more imaginative man might, then settled for reveling in their ordinariness. Clouds were clouds were clouds. He let his mind roam among them, inventing realities that fit the lies of his life and talking to himself as he so increasingly did. He played out the dialogue in his head, divorcing himself from his own responses as if he were an eavesdropper listening to two people speaking about him.

He remembered a conversation he had not had with Solomon, but should have. In his head, his friend asked about his relationship with the Party. Solomon had always seemed frightened to mention it, except as vituperative aside, as though sarcasm could safely shield him from his friend Erich Alois' potential enmity. From his quaint little lies, like the Amsterdam fairytale? Quaint little lies in extenuating circumstances, such as Hitler's increasingly obvious intention to rule the world if not the universe, that might make an officer in the Reich abandon a friend who was also a rival?

So Solomon was careful about asking Erich about the Nazis.

"My feelings toward Hitler?" Erich imagined himself answering. "They parallel my feelings about my father, who rants when there's an audience, but when it's just the two of us is afraid to lift his voice or his hand. Like the time at Pfaueninsel. There was a crowd around us when Achilles attacked the Reich's precious peacock, but when Hitler whispered to me to shoot her I heard fear in his voice behind that assurance and command. He was afraid of how he would look if I refused. So now I fight him my way, with every step and with every breath. I do it not only because of what he made me do, but also because he is a fool and a coward. A
hamster
who sells lies instead of other men's half-rotted produce. He has no honor. That's the one thing I cannot abide."

And so I fight him, but without his knowing. It's dishonorable, I know that, Solomon, but what other avenue...
alley
, I should say, is open to me, given that kind of opponent?"

"You're not exactly the rebel type, Erich. Perhaps as a child, but you are fooling no one now, except maybe yourself."

"I'm a rebel against rebelliousness."

"And that's how you define Adolf Hitler--as a rebel?"

"As far as I am concerned, he has rebelled against all that is sacred."

"So now you claim to fight him. By wearing the uniform. That's hardly what one would call sabotage, or even espionage."

"When I was taking my Abwehr training at Tegel," Erich said, "there was a retarded boy--a man--whose only job was to clean the blackboards. Every day after classes he arrived with his bucket and rag. Always grinning.

"One day our instructor was using a projector, and because the classroom was small, he shone the projector against the board instead of a screen. The retarded man arrived early, who knows why. Oblivious to the lesson, he began erasing and washing the board. The instructor was livid, but just stood and watched.