Child of the Light (41 page)

"Everything."

"It is the end." He stumbled back inside the shop. There was about him the look of a man hollowed by despair. His face was utterly without emotion and his shoulders sagged as though time itself had bent and then broken his back. "I've seen the beginning of the end. Now I shall see the end. We have all become children of darkness."

He walked in a daze toward the alcove and, after wiping his glasses with his Reichsbanner handkerchief and replacing them on his nose, stood staring at the safe. In a monotone, he said, "The basement. Into the cellar, children."

"They'll come there to ransack the inventory," Sol said.

Jacob dug in a drawer and held up a hammer. "Perhaps, but you will be in the sewer."

The hair on the back of Sol's neck bristled. Some inner sense told him that the chest pains he had experienced had as much to do with whatever lay in the cellar as it did with the terror outside. Numb, he followed his father and Miriam downstairs--toward what? he wondered. His boyhood nightmares?

"We'll never break the weld in time, Papa."

"What choice do we have but to try?" Jacob searched along a top shelf and located the boys' crowbar. Miriam held it against the weld while Solomon, using it like a chisel, bashed against its neck with the hammer. Jacob stood guard at the steps, listening between the ringing of metal against metal.

"I think they're at the apartments! Hurry, my son!"

Solomon did not waste time replying. Ceasing to worry about the possibility of missing the crowbar neck and hitting Miriam's hands, he smashed down again and again with all his strength. Sparks flew, some scattering across the limestone before dissipating. Like glowworms, he thought, sweat running in rivulets down his temples and face. Fireflies come to dance on the dead.

"They're outside the shop, Solomon! Faster!"

The weld peeled apart in metal curlicues. Miriam's eyes were filled with fear, but she kept the bar steady, her whitened knuckles as strained as leather about to be pierced by an awl.

From above came laughter, then the sound of splintering glass.

"Break it, Solomon!" Jacob said hoarsely. "Break it now!"

There was the thumping of boots. Shouted orders. More laughter. The thud of a display case crashing to the floor.

"It won't break, Papa! There's not enough time."

"Baruch ato adonai,"
Jacob prayed. He added a prayer of his own. "May you grant my son the strength of Samson and the wisdom of the king whose name he bears."

Sol jammed the crowbar into the weld and, with Miriam's help, pried down. His muscles screamed and he could feel his veins, enlarged and pulsing in his neck and forehead.

Jacob hurried over and together they pushed down.

The weld gave with a crack. The grate faltered and slid sideways in its rim, and Sol thrust the crowbar back under the lip.

"If Erich's among them, he'll know we're in the sewer," Miriam said.

"If Erich's among them," Sol grunted as he used the crowbar to raise the grate enough to grip it with his fingertips, "then life's not worth living anyway."

The grate creaked and fell back against the wall.

"Go!" Jacob said. "Go!"

Sol lowered himself into the hole, found the two by four and dropped the final meter, landing on the rotted, dismantled packing crates. Jumping to his feet, he took hold of Miriam's legs as she lowered herself. They fell back together, and he heard her stifle a startled laugh.

"Your turn next, Papa."

On hands and knees, Jacob Freund looked down into the sewer, surveying its bracken walls in what little light the drain hole allowed. "A man of my years should leap down into such a nether world?" His tone was oddly flippant. "And who would shut the grate? Are we acrobats who can stand on one another's shoulders?"

"There's a board here, Papa!" Sol started to climb up.

The grate clanged down.

"Papa? What're you doing!"

Fingers through the grating, Jacob Freund looked down with kindly, gray, bespectacled eyes that revealed an acceptance of the world's cruelty. "This we do my way, children." He was whispering, yet his voice seemed to fill the sewer. "First I'm going to cover the grate with empty boxes, then I intend to go upstairs and offer those...those...offer them cigars to commemorate their victory over the helpless."

"But Herr Freund--" Miriam peered up into the drain. "Please, Papa! All of us, or none!"

Sol struggled to open the grate again but could not lift it; his father held it down. Even through the small slats, he could see the slight, wry smile on his father's lips.

"I came through the Great War with but a broken nose and an outbreak of cynicism," Jacob said. "I wish to do battle again. Alone. That is my right as head of this family. Now hush, both of you. Let a not-so-young man have his way."

"Papa...I love you."

"And I love you, Solomon Isaac Freund. No man could have asked for a finer son." He moved away from the grate. Moments later, just as Solomon jumped down from the board and shook his head in bewilderment, Jacob's face was above them once again. Poking his glasses between the slats, he let them drop. Solomon, catching them, looked up in confusion. "If I should die, make sure I'm buried wearing my spectacles," his father said. "I wish to see the face of our enemy when I point him out to God."

He looked at Solomon and Miriam and muttered, in Hebrew, "May God provide." He placed the boxes over the grate.

Residuals of light danced before Solomon's eyes as he tried to accustom himself to the darkness. Clinging to Miriam, he listened to his father ascend the steps.

"Maybe the Nazis won't hurt him when they see that he's old and half blind," Miriam said.

She sounded unconvinced. Knowing words would only betray his own despair, Sol remained silent. Blackness reigned. It swirled around him, enveloping him in its shroud. The
plook...plook
of dripping water resounded through the sewer, and he thought he heard the scuttling of rats.

The place was colder than he remembered. He welcomed Miriam's embrace as much for its warmth as for its comfort. He tried to concentrate, to control his ragged breathing as the shortness of breath that had seized him on the streets returned to deflate his lungs. Pain settled on his chest like a great weight, but this was no heart attack...he knew that now. A sense of such foreboding filled him that he was sure Miriam must feel it too.

He let go of her and stared into the darkness. Waiting for the laughter, the voices, the images.

"I can hear them up there," Miriam whispered. "Why don't they leave!"

As if in answer to her words, the laughter came, rippling through the sewer.

"No! Go away!" Sol shouted.

"Be quiet, Solomon." Miriam placed a hand over Sol's mouth. "What is it? Are you in pain?" She removed her hand.

He shook her off, fighting the explosion of light in his head.

Miriam gripped his shoulder. "Don't let go of me again, Sol. I'm afraid."

"Me too." They embraced. Upstairs, there was faint scuffling. He could barely hear it above the pounding of his heart and the ghostly laughter that he knew did not come from the shop. Laughter that stopped when a cobalt-blue glow appeared at the end of the sewer and an image of a young black man began to take shape----

----the black man's skin shines with a blue fire.
He is naked except for a small piece of torn blanket that covers his genitals. He sits perfectly still, staring outward, face expressionless.
 
A white man, monocled and wearing a white, blood-stained laboratory smock, moves toward him, scalpel in hand----

"No!" Solomon reached toward the image. "They've come back!" he whispered, transfixed by a second image that materialized at the other end of the sewer.

----a paraffin lamp casts a blue-black shadow across a rude table in the center of one-roomed wooden shack.
Snow blows through gaps in the wall-boards. In one corner, a figure huddles close to a brazier's red coals, its smoke veiling the low ceiling--a man in a ragged army overcoat and woolen scarf; frostbite has scabbed and pockmarked his dark, sunken cheeks. His eyes are dull, his hands wrapped in blood-stained gauze. An emaciated woman wrapped in an old blanket, an ancient carbine slung across her back, leans over him. Carefully she unwraps the gauze from one of his hands. The fingers are gangrenous stumps----

I am losing my mind, Solomon thought. The riot, the emptied safe, the degradation--together they had caused him to snap.

A fit of shivering seized him, and with it came a voice.

----
Three days now the clouds have held,
an old man says. Standing knee-high in snow, he looks toward 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 has cast ribbons of russet and gold out of congealed blood and military uniforms----

"Try to see it," Sol told Miriam, though he knew he was asking the impossible.

"What are you talking about!"

"Look!" He turned her around forcefully. "There! There is another! Can you not hear the music?"

----gossamer veils of blue dust-moted light filter through a stained-glass window onto a man seated at a pipe organ.
He is blond and broad shouldered, and looks as athletic as he is musically talented. The Bach concerto he plays reverberates throughout the tall reaches of a rococo church that was obviously once a castle----

"Pull yourself together, Sol!" Miriam's voice was taut with terror. "There's nothing down here! Why don't you think about your papa! He's the one upstairs with...with...."

Papa! Sol blinked and drew a sharp breath as the vision vanished. Was that what the images were telling him--that if he stayed hidden down here, he was no better than the dybbuk?

Running his hands along the moss-slimed bricks, he made sure the board was properly emplaced and again boosted himself onto it. "I don't care what Papa said. I must go up and do what I can."

"Don't be a fool, Sol." Miriam tugged at his trousers. "You'll only make matters worse."

"Have you forgotten what those bastards did to Herr Weisser?"

Boots clumped down the stairs. Sol stood suspended between the board and the grating, unable to tell if what he was hearing were out there or inside his head.

"That can't be your father," Miriam whispered. "They are heavier boots..."

The footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs, and stopped.

Jars crashed, followed by what Sol supposed were boxes being pulled from shelves. He heard grunts and the tearing of cardboard. The boxes on top of the grate were sure to be next.

Then, from what seemed the top of the stairs came orders. "As much as you can carry...Havanas if you find any, and American cigarettes."

The boots went up the stairs, and down and up a second time. Then, silence.

"Sol, I smell smoke!"

Sol lifted his nose. His sense of smell had already begun to adapt to the sewer's noxious odors. "You sure?"

Miriam sniffed. "I think so."

"They must be burning whatever inventory they've chosen not to steal." The smoke had begun to penetrate his nostrils and sting his eyes. "We're going up." His matter-of-fact tone reflected his relief at having to deal with something tangible, no matter how dreadful. "We are not going to suffocate down here."

He climbed back down and dislodged the board. "If we go up this way we might be climbing right into a fire or...." Or into Nazi arms, he thought. "There's another drain beneath the furrier's. Maybe when the cabaret was sealed up the workmen didn't realize Erich and I had left the padlock open. It's worth a try."

They went along the sewer, fingers against the walls for guidance, and located the large board at the other end. After hoisting himself up, he helped Miriam.

The grating was unlocked.

"Push!" he told her.

As the grate opened, he remembered the time he and Erich had tried to pick the lock on the cabaret door. Sol had said he wanted to leave the place alone in honor of Rathenau's death; Erich had simply laughed and insisted. The lock had proved easy to jimmy, but they'd not been able to open the door. The workmen had apparently bolted it from the inside, for added security, and had exited through the furrier's upstairs, much to Erich's annoyance and Sol's relief.

He crawled out and helped Miriam through the drain.

Holding hands, they groped their way through the sub-basement and up the stairs to the deserted cabaret. Musty linen covered the tables. The chairs stacked up against them were netted with spider webs, and above them, from street level, the small stained-glass windows cast a green glow across the dance floor.

He felt an odd sense of wanting her to dance with him and pretend for a moment that dancing and music and love were as commonplace as hatred. Instead they hurried across the room, up the metal stairs, and unbolted and unlocked the entrance door.

It had begun to rain. Miriam started up the steps that led to the street. Sol held her back. He waited, listening for the tromp of boots, watching for them to appear at street level. When none appeared, they ascended to the street. It looked like a war zone. Sticks, bricks, and garbage lay everywhere. Glass from shattered windows gleamed in the waning light. From the direction of Unter den Linden came the sounds of ongoing riot.