Child of the Light (17 page)

But, as with so many other things in his life, the death of Walther Rathenau had altered all that. Reality had conspired to draw aside the lace curtains in his life. These days, after his parents made sure he was in bed and closed the door, his inclination was to reach for his glasses; as he watched the clouds chase each other across the moon, his head was filled with thoughts of the Adlon luncheon and of assassins who lusted after blood and power, instead of Hessian princes who fought moon men with swords bejeweled with stars. More often than not, he fell asleep with his glasses on, even on nights like this when he could see the full moon with clarity. Ringed with dark clouds, it was set in a night filled with questions. Why did God allow assassins? Why am I a Jew first and a German second?
 
Falling asleep was no longer an easy drifting, but a time for doubts and fear--and headaches--

He felt a sharp stab of pain in his left temple. Groaning he pressed his knuckles into the pain. There was another stab of pain and a flash of light which dissolved into pinpoints floating in the night like fireflies. A cobalt-blue glow superimposed itself over the darkness and he huddled, terrified, under his eiderdown.

Don't think about it, Margabrook. Just drink the tea, he heard a woman say, her voice familiar.

Best you get rid of it now, Peta, a man said. Sol knew the voice well. If you don't acknowledge the soldiers' twisted idea of a joke, who knows what they will put in the teapot the next time.

Then the lights...and the headache...were gone. All that was left was the blue glow and, emerging out of it----

----a paraffin lamp casts a lavender shadow across a rude table in the center of a one-room wooden shack.
Snow blows through gaps in the wall-boards. Beyond a single small window, curled edges of snowdrifts mass like breaking waves. Smoke veils the ceiling. A man in a ragged army overcoat and woolen scarf huddles close to a brazier's red coals. Frostbite has scabbed and pockmarked his dark sunken cheeks. His eyes are dull, his hands wrapped in bloodstained gauze. An emaciated woman wearing an old blanket, an ancient carbine slung across her back, steps from the shadows in the corner and leans over him. Carefully she unwinds the gauze from one of his hands. The fingers are gangrenous stumps.

Eyeing the old man angrily, the woman uses the edge of her blanket as a pot holder and removes the cast-iron teapot from the brazier's grate. She raises the lid of the teapot and looks inside.

Her face hardens.

"You've seen worse," the old man mutters. Lifting the edge of his coat, he unsheathes and hands her the bayonet that was strapped to his leg. "Pick out the thing and save the tea."

She has started to pour the contents of the teapot into the snow through a large crack between two of the unplaned floorboards. Apparently deciding the old man is right, she takes the knife and clanks it around inside the pot.

"What a waste." She pulls out a steaming thumb, stuck through with the knife. "Looks like sweetbreads, eh Margabrook?" She swipes the knife against the brazier. The thumb slides off the blade and onto the floor; she pokes at it like a child worrying a snail.

"Doesn't matter what it looks like," the old man says. "Don't even think about putting it in your mouth. Between us, we get enough food to stay alive."

"So what."

"You'll hate yourself."

"The only thing worth hating is hunger." The woman reinserts the bayonet and turns the thumb over to scrutinize it. "You Nazis!
Your
mandate is hatred.
Mine
is survival."

"Nazi? No! But I
am
German, and proud of it." He lowers his voice. "I joined the Nazis because, like you, I thought survival was everything. I have learned. It is what survives in
here
that counts." He thumps his chest with a gauze-wrapped fist. "Retain what little dignity the world still accords you, Peta. Forget what the others out there have become and leave that thing alone."

"You don't know what hunger is," she says. "When you had nothing to eat, you fed on idealism. I've had none of that with which to fill my belly or heart."

Unbuttoning his coat, the old man takes out a tin cup and holds it up. The woman fills it and her own cup from the teapot, gulps down her tea, and pours herself a second cup.

"What I'd give for fresh goat's milk," he says, touching palsied fingers to his lips as if complimenting the chef. "You city dwellers know nothing of such delicacies. My mother milked the goats every morning--"

An explosion rattles the shack and snow billows through the cracks. The old man shakes his head sadly and returns to his tea, ignoring the yellow and red starbursts that bruise what sky can be seen through the window. "Again the steppes test us," he says, putting down his cup.

The woman unslings the carbine and checks the bolt, dry-firing the weapon three times. "Here, put on your
Kopfschützer,
old man." She hands him a balaclava. Having pulled one over her own head, she helps him up. "Make sure there's enough paper stuffed inside or your ears will fall off from the cold, like Hansie's did."

On crippled feet he hobbles to the door and waits for her to open it. A gust of wind pulls it from her hand and slams it against the outer wall of the hut.

Facing them is a long gentle slope ending in what appears to be a frozen lake shining like a silver platter beneath thick low clouds. Except for clumps of rushes, feathery with ice and sticking up here and there at windblown angles, the area seems without vegetation--a white treeless waste. Along the edge of the lake, white-clad infantry move like phantoms before a line of tanks. Bursts of smoke from the armored vehicles are followed seconds later by the sharp crack of firing and sprays of snow farther up the hill.

At the crest of the hill, behind a breastwork of what looks like ice-covered logs, a group of men crank howitzer barrels into position. Others pull white canvas tarpaulins off mortars and machine guns. From that distance, the men and machinery look like a collection of animated pewter miniatures.

"I've had goat's milk." As she surveys the battle scene, the woman speaks as if their conversation has never been interrupted. "I have eaten and drunk almost anything you can name."

"Your family was wealthy?"

Through knee-deep snow they crunch uphill toward the gunnery. From all over the hill, people like them emerge from huts and, like disconnected threads, move toward the battlement.

"Non-practicing Jews and Party members like us managed some luxuries," she says. "Unfortunately, Papa had reservations about the Party and talked too much. Someone informed on him. They convened a Kolhosp court and accused us of being exploiters of the poor--
Kurkuls.
My parents were sent to help dig the Baltic Sea-White Sea Canal, or so we children were told."

Her expression softens as she speaks of her parents. Now it hardens again. "They disappeared. The Komsomol sent my brothers and me to a collective and assigned us to the worst of the subunits--the crocodiles."

The man nods, saying nothing.

"They said we who gobbled the bread of the Soviets had to meet harvest quotas. We were villagers and townspeople competing against farmers and even they could not meet the quota, because whenever they did, it was raised."

She halts in front of a pair of boots sticking out of a snowdrift. "These will keep the chilblains away from my toes." She tugs at them. "Come on. Help me."

The old man bends to help. They both pull, but nothing budges.

"If we failed to meet the quota, we were put on the
chorna doshka,
the blacklist." Gasping, she lets loose of the boots. "Our rations were halved. Not until the Soviet is satisfied! they'd tell us. Nurse the fields. Nurture them. Fill up on the conscience of the collective!"

"Bastards," the old man says. "I was much luckier than you. I grew up in the Oberharz, in Hahenklee, right next door to Paul Lincke's house. Once he even walked to Goslar with us, to watch the figures dance around the old town Glockenspiel. He said they should be dancing to
his
music. Often my friends and I watched the cable car carry tourists around Bad Lauterberg and or watched them eat cake in the cafés. Before going home, we dug in the garbage for leftovers. When the tourists stopped coming, we roasted crickets and field mice and picked gooseberries and wild mushrooms. We thought ourselves kings--except for those who died because they could not tell toadstools from
Steinpilze."

"They say seven-hundred thousand have died in the Ukraine," the woman says. "God only knows how many of those starved to death! We thought it a blessing when you Nazis came to liberate our village. We thought you'd put us in ghettos and leave us alone."

She looks up; the howitzers are returning fire. "Lend me your ax," she says.

The old man ignores her demand. "When this war started, I was too old to enlist. Like an idiot, I pulled strings and became a soldier for the Reich! I was assigned to an extermination center in eastern Poland. Would you believe I thought I'd be killing lice?
Lice!"

"You're an old fool, Margabrook."

"Daily there came new truckloads of Jews. They were asked for volunteers who could operate heavy equipment. The endloaders were assigned to dig graves. Each hour we shot so many people we had to soak our rifle barrels in cold water to cool them." He snorted sarcastically. "The Jews dying by the hundreds, and we worried about rust! At twilight, when the graves were filled and covered, our Untersturmführer made the endloader operators lie on the mounds, heads together and feet outward like daisy petals. Then he shot them in the stomach and watched them bleed to death. A flower of death to commemorate man's capacity for evil."

"I suppose that is why you won't carry a carbine, even here at the Front?"

"There are no real Fronts. This is a world without Fronts. Only backstabbing and lies...lies," he repeats softly.

"You're right, old man. Now give me your ax or I will take it from you."

He touches her arm and points at the breastworks. "Let the dead dream their dreams in peace. Look at them. A wall of dead soldiers masquerading as logs to protect their living comrades in a treeless land."

He steps closer to the battlement. The woman follows.

"Don't give in...as I did." He stares at the frozen bodies. Icy limbs protrude in impossibly contorted positions. Faces are molded into snow-covered masks.

The woman shrugs. "Stalin starves people, Hitler shoots them, we use them as logs. What's the difference?" When he doesn't answer, she turns back toward the boots. "The hatchet, please, old man. I am younger and stronger than you are, and I intend to survive. I want those boots. When the rest of you run out of paper to wrap your feet in, mine will be warm."

He hands her the hatchet. "Three days now the clouds have held." Knee-deep in snow, the old man looks up at the sky. A worker next to him grabs hold of a corpse and flops it down as if it is a sandbag. The old man glances at it, then at a row of fresh bodies. The setting sun--its palette congealed blood and military uniforms--decorates the dead with ribbons of russet and gold.

With the woman's first determined swing, one of the soldier's legs cracks like a large dry stick----

Sol sat upright. His heart was pounding madly, but his headache was gone. So were the blue glow and the voices. All that remained was the stillness of midnight.

He recalled that the beadle had spoken of visions. Could this...he shook his head and lay down again. A nightmare, he decided. He had fallen asleep while trying to analyze the voices, and his night-mind, encroaching upon his wakeful efforts, had created faces, bodies, a story to match some of the voices: the woman's, talking of sweetbreads; the old man, Margabrook, speaking of lice and saying, "Let the dead dream their dreams in peace."

He shuddered, remembering the boiled thumb.

Think about something else.

Miriam.

He looked over at the framed photograph Erich had given him as his bar mitzvah gift, wrapped in a square of mauve silk. He still had not figured out how Erich acquired the photograph of Miriam, but he was glad he had it. He smiled, remembering how she had winked at him during the most serious moment of his bar mitzvah speech. Later, just before he intoned the blessing over the long
Challah,
the slightly sweet, plaited bread that looked like a woman's shining braid, she had pushed her way through to him and kissed his cheek. He had felt so benign about everybody that day, as if writing his speech and thanking them all for their love had been a tonic. Take one spoonful morning and night for three days and the world will look better.

He snuggled into his pillow. If he could just figure out how to feel that way every day, he thought.

Camouflaged with the green and brown facial pastes the Youth leaders had given them, Erich and some of the other boys from the group hid behind a hedge and spied on the last of the day's Wannsee picnickers. Night had long since fallen. Moonlight lay upon the lake, and still the people lingered, gathering their foodstuffs, folding blankets, and slipping into their clothes.

It was the boys' assignment to watch and report, though for what reason Erich could not figure out. There was all too much about the Youth group that he could not understand these days, though nothing as much as the experience near Lutherstrasse, which had spoiled things for him more than anyone would ever understand. Anyone, that is, except Solomon, who was the one person he could never tell about it. No more than he could ever again convince himself that Rittmeister Otto Hempel was his ideal.