Child of the Journey (35 page)

"It's not fair," he said seriously. His eyes, set like globules of white fat amid the oily corpulence of his cheeks, appeared to shine with genuine sorrow. "The Sturmbannführer won't let me touch you the way I wish to. The way you would like. The way I did with my own children, my daughters." He opened his arms, eyes closed in serenity.

Misha had heard the stories. Everyone had. He pictured the Kapo's daughters, strung up in the barn like sausages.

Pleshdimer untied the nylons from Misha's ankles. "You dropped the knife. You know what that means." Tucking an arm around Misha's calves, he drew up the boy's legs to his forehead, bending him nearly in half.

Misha closed his eyes again as the belt came down, buckle first. "How can you, a Jew, do this?" he cried out.

The belt slashed down harder. "I'm no more Jewish than God!"

Blood ran down Misha's buttocks and he could feel the stranglehold of the collar around his neck. The small cabin closed in on him, and he wondered if this was what it felt like to be a dog in a kennel.

"You hear me, you little son-of-a-bitch?" Hempel shouted. "Just because I had some ancestor who humped some Jew cow once or twice--don't mean a thing!"

When he finished, Misha knew, the Kapo would hurry to find Hempel and report that the boy had needed disciplining. And when the Kapo was angry, he often forgot things.

Things like nylons. Like stilettos.

Maybe he will forget to retie my legs, he thought. Maybe he will forget about the knife.

Maybe when the knife is mine I will learn how to be a dolphin.

F
og hung like used cheesecloth around Kiel's Hochwaldt Wharf, and smelled as bad. Erich frowned with disgust as he stuck his head out of the window of his touring car and peered up at the grey ship.
Altmark,
she proclaimed in meter-high letters.

Her construction, the proud captain, Heinrich Dau, had told him, was a masterpiece of deceit. To the unwary, she seemed just another old steamer. In reality she was well built and less than a year old. Every centimeter of her 178-meter length and 22-meter beam was designed to maximize space while minimizing bulk. Her 11,000 ton gross had a loading capacity of 14,000 tons, and her four nine-cylinder M.A.N. diesel engines were capable of 21 knots.

Most impressive, or so Dau would have him believe. With his lack of naval experience, what Erich heard meant little to him. She looked about as interesting to him as a used-up whore.

Stevedores, their knitted caps pulled low against the dampness, moved silently around the wharf, their carts piled with boxes to be loaded onto the ship. Light from the large triangular docklamps reflected off puddles and off the harbor's rainbowed oil slicks, but none of it looked inviting.

A panel truck drew up. Cameramen piled out, complaining of the chill and the odor of rotting fish, and clowning as if preparing to film a comedy and not the loading of camp Jews onto a military transport. They quickly turned the dreary dock into a complex of lights and tripods.

Fools! Erich thought. Or were they?

They worshipped Movietone News, others bowed before Hitler. Both were dictators invading the privacy of their idolaters. Soon he would be rid of all propagandists. He would feel whole again. He and Miriam and the baby--especially the baby--deserved more than the Führer's empty assurances that manhood and statehood went hand in hand with the Fatherland.

"Stay!" he commanded Taurus, and stepped from the car.
 

A cameraman, pulling equipment along on a cart, followed him to the ship. As they started up the gangway, the ship's stack blasted as if in greeting. Erich pulled back his shoulders, not for the cameras or the petty officer piping him aboard, but for himself.
 

Captain Dau, small and wiry, and apparently nonplussed by the camera, rambled forward to meet him. A graying beard poorly hid a weak chin, but his face, wrinkled and weathered, was not a stupid face, and his eyes were cold and shrewd.

Erich returned the greeting respectfully. He would spend a long time confined with the old man; it would not do to antagonize him, a Nazi hard-liner. Dau's military exploits had been legendary for a quarter of a century. It was said he would flee a fight only if the Seekriegsführung--the Naval High Command in Berlin--would allow him to re-engage the enemy as soon as possible.
 

"You two ready for us up there?" Leni Riefenstahl called out from below. "I want you shaking hands."

"Ready for our 'historic first meeting?'" Erich asked Dau.

The old man reluctantly put out his hand. "In my day such foolishness would have been rewarded with a trip to the Front."

"Miriam will be here shortly," Leni yelled.

Erich waved in acknowledgement.

"A few more takes, with the boy in the picture," Leni shouted.

"Boy? What boy?"

Leni pointed to Erich's left, to a pale young boy in a black, turtle-neck pullover.

"Come on over here," Erich said, wondering whose idea it had been to include a child on the journey. Judging by the look on Dau's face, the boy was certainly no relative of his. "What is your name, son?" he asked, lifting the boy onto the rail, and balancing him with one arm.

"I am Misha," the boy said.

"And to whom do you belong?"

"Haupt...the Jews...myself--"

"Never mind. We'll figure it out later. For now, put your arm around my neck and hold on tight."

Leni smiled and gave him the high sign.

After two takes of what was actually their fourth meeting, they were spared further attention by the arrival of twelve army trucks. Erich released the boy, leaned his forearms on a rail and watched a squad of soldiers emerge from the first. Placing themselves well out of camera range, they raised their rifles to their shoulders, and waited.

One at a time, bucking like unbroken steeds, the trucks' engines were killed. Now their lights winked out. Escort guards, weaponless in deference to the audiences who would view the film, climbed from passenger seats and strode around the trucks to pull the pins on the tailgates, which came clanging down.

The cameras whirred.

A dog and trainer jumped from each of the remaining trucks. Only Krayller was missing, reassigned--along with the affenpinscher--to a military pool.

"Escorts," Leni explained into her microphone. "We must make sure the one hundred and forty-four boarding Jews are safe from Jewish traitors who might seek to sabotage our Führer's grand experiment."

Erich looked over at Hempel, who stood near two trucks that had arrived earlier, carrying the forty guards he had selected for the mission. If anyone is likely to sabotage this experiment, it's that son of a bitch, Erich thought. And that damned orderly of his, Wasj Pleshdimer. What a beauty! The man was rancid as a month-old fish.

Pleshdimer. Hempel. He repeated their names angrily under his breath. Sometimes he agreed with the worst of Hitler's methods. The
Altmark
was scheduled to reach Madagascar in forty-two days. If either of them so much as spoke harshly to his dogs or his men, he would plant their severed heads on the landing beach.

"Let the Jews out before we run out of film!" Leni shouted at Hempel. "Idiots!" she said to her chief cameraman, without worrying about being overheard. "The whole trip better not be so disorganized."

Pleshdimer started toward her, but Hempel put a restraining hand on his arm. "Let them out," Hempel ordered.

The inmates, wearing clogs, spotless trousers, light jackets and caps, climbed from the trucks. In accordance with Goebbels' instructions, nothing about the boarding was to appear involuntary; it was to look like an orderly emigration, not a chaotic exile. Each man carried a satchel, one side inscribed with a swastika, the other with the Star of David. They looked like determined workers undertaking an important mission for the good of all European Jewry.
 

"Thanks to the generosity of our great leader, these Jewish volunteers are being resettled on the African island of Madagascar," Leni said, playing the dual role of overvoice and director. "It is our Führer's desire that they live there in peace and that others of their kind follow to make their homes along the island's balmy shores--a paradise of curious lemurs and colorful orchids. These men will work the very soil which scholars believe may have been the original site of ancient Lemuria, the remnant of a sunken continent known as Gondwanaland."

Pushing away the memory of Sachsenhausen's walking cadavers, Erich surveyed the living cargo. They looked passably healthy after a month's sequestering and proper meals, but even at this distance he sensed their anxiety.

"Keep in mind," Captain Dau said, "that if one Jew causes trouble at sea, the lot of them go overboard." He thumped his Meerschaum pipe against the rail. "Into the water, all of them."

"You are in command--at sea."

A wistful smile played around Dau's mouth, softening its hard edges. "The sea has her own criteria concerning necessity. I remember when..."

Erich blocked out Dau's words. For all the captain's military mien, he was like most old men; he sought an audience for his stories.

As Dau rambled on, Erich watched the line of Jews thread on board. Most, he had been told, possessed specialized skills that would be useful in Madagascar. One, for example, was supposed to be a scholar who spoke fluent French and had been schooled for the past two weeks on Madagascar's customs and culture. He might prove invaluable if Bruqah, who was black, after all, and thus prone to laziness, took off when they reached the island.

Invaluable...or would the scholar remind him of Solomon? Erich gritted his teeth. He had no business feeling guilty about Solomon's death. He had, after all, helped him get to Amsterdam. If the stupid queer was so brainless as to come back, why should
he
give a damn?

"...is that not so?"

"Is what not so!" Erich said abruptly, momentarily forgetting his resolution to treat the old man with respect.

"I suggest that in the future you listen when I speak, Herr Oberst. You might learn something."

"I might, indeed." Erich had not intended the words to sound sarcastic.

"Do not underestimate me, Herr Oberst." Dau sucked at his empty pipe, shook it once, and placed it in his vest pocket. "I saw more action in the Great War than you could dream of. Now I have brought this ship back from helping Franco against the Republicans. I know my purpose in life, and how to wield the power the Seekriegsführung places in my hands." Erich could see a burning, icy patriotism in the man's eyes. "Your little vacation southeast of Africa is not my primary mission. Interfere
     
with the real reason the
Altmark
sails, and I will shoot you for treason as easily as I'd squash a Jew or a June bug."

Clearing his throat, Dau excused himself and stalked toward his cabin, leaving Erich to swear under his breath as he lit a cheroot.

"Notice the man about to board the
Altmark,"
the overvoice said. "He is bearing a jeweled scroll, known to the Jews as the Torah, a word which, strangely enough, also means 'an African antelope.' This Torah is alive in a different way, for it contains the entire body of Jewish religious literature. It is a gift from our Führer to the new Jews of Madagascar."

Curious, Erich leaned over the rail. He had seen a Torah only once, at Sol's bar mitzvah--covered in white satin and encrusted with jewels and gold braiding.

Head bent, the man carrying the scroll made his way slowly up the gangway. The skin on the hands that held the scroll was dried and wrinkled. Short hair emerged from his scalp like bristles on an old porcupine, and blackened, misshapen toes stuck out of the end of his clogs.

Suddenly, as if sensing Erich's gaze upon him, the man stopped walking and looked up. The other Jews, on their way to the open steel hatch that led to the holds, flowed around him like a stream around a rock, but still the man did not move.

"Hello, old friend," the prisoner said quietly.

Erich stared into a face so shrunken the eyes looked like big shooter's marbles.

"Do you truly not know me? ...or do you not wish to?"

"Solomon?" The word emerged as a whispered plea. As the man continued walking toward him, Erich gaped in disbelief. A rush of anger and anxiety make his skin tingle. "But I thought you were..."

"In Amsterdam?" Now abreast of Erich, Solomon stopped and looked at Erich's uniform. "You know what the English say about the best laid plans, Herr Oberst. I'm one of the chosen, I'm told, despite my appearance." There was a hint of the old Solomon, with his wry acknowledgment of the inappropriateness of things. "They even offered me the option of sharing quarters with Bruqah."

"Take the offer."

Alive! Erich thought. Alive! Hempel had faked the death certificate! He reached out a shaking hand as if to take Solomon's, then pulled back. What if he were diseased! What if Hempel had not faked
all
the information? Erich glanced at Solomon's clothing, searching for a pink triangle. The clothing was without special identification.

"Angst and hatred are contagious," Solomon said quietly. "Suffering is not. I prefer to be in the hold with the others."
 
He adjusted the weight of the Torah and placed a hand on Erich's shoulder. "We have lived in sewers before, you and I."