I am Wolf (The Wolfboy Chronicles) (4 page)

The fever didn’t decrease in the coming days to my mother’s great
worry. She would look at me with those eyes and a slightly tilted head while
moving her fingers through my hair. She tried to get a doctor to come and look
at me but had no luck.

“They don’t want to be seen in a Jew’s home,” she
mumbled while feeding me soup with a spoon. “Cowards!”

I didn’t listen much to what she said. All that was on
my mind was Catalina. Her black hair, her beautiful green eyes and fair skin.
Skin like Snow White I kept repeating to myself. I dreamt about her when
asleep, I thought about her when I was awake. I couldn’t get her out of my
thoughts. Even her scent kept lingering in my mind. If I wasn’t thinking about
her I was wondering about the beast that had bitten me. What was that creature?
It had been as tall as me. It had been furry and when I touched it, it had
growled like a dog or a big wolf. But no wolf was this big. Could it have been
a bear like people said?

I tried to picture it but it was all a blur to me. It
was just a lot of sounds and emotions mixed up in a dreamlike vision. Even
Catalina seemed dreamlike to me after some time. Yet she was all I thought
about, all I longed for. I wanted desperately to find her again. I wanted to
help her, save her from the hands of those bastards. But for all I knew she was
already dead. It was more likely than her being alive. After that conclusion I
fell into some sort of depression and hardly noticed my surroundings anymore.
Not even when my mother finally succeeded in finding a Jewish doctor to look at
me. He seemed nervous when he examined me, like he really didn’t want to be
there. They both whispered when he spoke to my mother in the corner of the
room, but I could still hear their every word. I could even smell them too.

“He is very sick,” the doctor said.

My mother shook her head in worry and disbelief.
“What’s wrong with him? He has had that fever for a week now.”

“It must be some infection. The fever is a clear sign
that something is really wrong in the body. I think it might be in his blood.
Some infection in his blood.”

“Oh dear god. What can we do?” My mother asked.

The doctor shook his head slowly while putting his
instruments back in his bag. “There is nothing to do. There is no medicine
these days with the war and all. Especially not for a Jewish boy.”

My mother nodded seriously. “But is there nothing we
can do?”

“I am afraid not. The infection will kill him
eventually. He won’t make it through a whole winter in this state. He won’t
survive. I’m sorry Mrs. Margulies. I truly am. There is nothing I can do for
him.”

I didn’t feel very sick listening to them talk about
me, but his statement frightened me. I started shaking and suddenly felt very
sick, like the blood had left my body and there was nothing left but an empty
shell.

I looked at my reflection in the silverware on my
plate. My skin was pale but my hair seemed longer and thicker than ever. I
stared at my arms while my mother paid the doctor for his visit and they both
left my room like I had never been in there. My muscles seemed to have grown as
I was looking at my body in the bed. This couldn’t be the body of a sick
person. I listened to their voices as they went down the stairs and to my
surprise I could hear them talk when they went outside and my mother said
goodbye to the doctor. Not just a mumbling but every word. I heard their voices
loud and clear and I soon realized that I even heard their thoughts! This
couldn’t be, I thought to myself. But I had no doubt. I soon learned there is a
very distinct difference between voices and thoughts. Thoughts have no
continuity. They are merely a lot of images and words mixed up and most of the
time they only make sense to the person having them. Now I was suddenly listening
in on my mother’s thoughts and found myself picking her most inner emotions and
secrets. I wasn’t proud of it but never found anything in there I couldn’t love
or forgive. She was as pure as anything I had ever met. I don’t think I have
ever picked on a mind this pure since.

What I learned was that she was very concerned about
my health but somehow inside she felt at peace. She knew that I was going to
make it even if the doctor told her otherwise. Her motherly instinct told her
so and no doctor could ever convince her otherwise. There was nothing wrong
with her son, she would know if there were, she told herself. A high fever that
to most people would be life-threatening, yes those were the facts, she knew
that in her mind. But her heart told her something else. It told her that her
son was strong and with her love he would make it through.

I agreed.

 
I
DID FEEL WORSE
in the coming days and began to worry
the
 
doctor had been right. I slept
most of the days away. Now and then I woke with screams from a deep nightmare
and my mother nursed me back to sleep like she had done when I was a child. It
seemed she hardly ever left my side. Every time I opened my eyes she was there,
looking at me with her concerned eyes and forced smile. She was praying over
me, reading scriptures for God’s healing and sometimes she was crying. She
tried to hide it, but I could tell.

My father came to see me once a day. I wasn’t always
awake to see him, but the few times I was, I greatly enjoyed him being there.
It was hard on him as well, I could tell. But he was better at hiding it.

“You’ll be well soon, son. Up and running before we
know it,” he kept saying. “You still look good. Pale but strong. You’ll make
it. Just fight for it. You are strong. Don’t give up.”

In a brief awake moment I promised him I wouldn’t give
up.

Meanwhile the inside of me was a mess. I heard
people’s thoughts and had them mixed up so I couldn’t decipher which belonged
to who when there was more than one person in the room. I saw images coming from
their minds that I had no idea what to do about. I had it all mixed up with my
feverish dreams and everything soon became like a blur to me. Catalina haunted
my dreams and so did the ferocious beast until it became a true monster in my
dreams. It was like it grew for every time I dreamt about it. It became bigger
and more vicious in every dream. When I was asleep the beast haunted me as did
Catalina, when I was awake I felt a heavy burden of guilt. Guilt for having
survived the encounter while all the soldiers had been killed. Why me? I kept
asking myself. Why had the beast chosen to spare my life of all?

I didn’t understand. It was like it chose deliberately
to save me from the certain death of being shot, but then it attacked me
anyway. It bit me. I was sure of that much even if I couldn’t see the bite any
longer; I still remembered it like it had just happened. It was so vivid in my
mind, the feeling of the teeth penetrating my skin and veins. Why would it do
that if it didn’t intend to eat me, if it didn’t want to devour my flesh? The
bite on my throat had felt so gentle, like the beast was deliberately sparing
me any pain.

It was like it didn’t want me to feel anything. But
then why bite me?

I never told anyone about my thoughts and concerns. There was so much I
didn’t comprehend, so much I wondered about, but I never wanted to burden my
family with it especially since I knew they had no answers and would never
understand. In their eyes I only had to thank God and my guardian angel for
having watched over me that day. I should be grateful and move on. But how
could I when I didn’t understand even the simplest thing like why I was still
alive? Why did I feel so different if I was still the same?

Every day I woke up and looked at my body and felt
like I didn’t know it any longer. It wasn’t even my body anymore. I used to be
tall and skinny, lanky even. But now my muscles seemed to have grown and when I
looked at my reflection I saw a grown man looking back at me. Was it merely the
experience that had changed me? Was it because I had faced death? Because I had
seen the cruelty of this cold, damned world? Had that changed everything, even
the look in my eyes that for every day resembled more and more that of an
animal?

I wasn’t so sure. My eyes had always been a greyish
kind of blue but it seemed they had changed into a deeper blue. The same blue
as the ocean or the sky on a nice summer day. My vision was improving as well.
Every day I spotted new details in the room and even out of my small window. I
could see farther and farther away and spotted small movements between the
bushes or in the trees far away.

I became ultra sensitive to sounds. Small noises
irritated me and made me jumpy. My resting was disturbed by my family talking
in a room downstairs or the sound of my dog wagging its tail across the floor
in the kitchen. I heard people fighting in houses in a valley far away on the
other side of our estate. Someone sneezing or a horse’s hooves in the gravel
somewhere could keep me awake for a long time. Even the sound of leaves falling
would disturb me.

Then there were the smells. I had a hard time coping
with all those horrible smells. I could smell the stables from my room. I could
smell the forest even if it was winter. I could smell the animals in there; point
out their exact whereabouts just by their scent. I could determine what kind of
animal it was just by the scent. I never doubted if it was a deer, a rabbit or
a bird. I could smell them from far away and they all awoke something in me,
something that felt like an old instinct.

The food my mother brought couldn’t catch my interest.
Not the porridge, nor the freshly baked bread or soup. I couldn’t eat it. It
wasn’t because I had lost my appetite. On the contrary. Fever or not I was
constantly hungry. It was because I was craving something completely different.
My body longed, almost demanded to have meat. Not the cooked kind, but the raw
kind, the bloody and fleshy kind. I craved it like a madman. I even dreamt
about it and sometimes caught myself daydreaming about it.

It became almost an obsession.

Something was definitely happening to me and it
frightened me from time to time. It was as if I had lost control over my own
body, which I didn’t like. I was afraid yet strangely curious.

Slowly the fever decreased and soon it was gone. I
began to feel stronger and left the bed for a few hours a day. When it didn’t
worry or frighten me, the change slowly began to fascinate me. To my surprise
my legs felt stronger than ever despite my having been in bed for this long.
They were bigger, too. I couldn’t fit in any of my old pants. Nor did any of my
old shirts fit me. I had somehow grown, my muscles had grown. Not just a little
bit like a teenage boy usually does, this was a lot.

“That’s odd,” my mother said when she tried to help me
get dressed one day. “I thought you would have lost weight while lying in bed
with a fever, but you have grown. A lot even.” She looked at me with concerned
eyes.

I smiled gently while looking at myself in the mirror.
Even my hair looked stronger and healthier. It had grown beyond my shoulders.
Even if my mother had cut it, it grew back and touched my shoulders in just a
few days.

“Well I guess one of your brothers could give you some
of their clothes,” she sighed. Then she ran a hand through my hair. “And we
need to trim this as well again. You look like an animal.”

I nodded still while looking at myself. I liked what I
saw. It had a wildness, a rawness to it. I had always combed it back in a slick
way to try and look like my dad, but I wasn’t going to do that anymore. I
looked at my hands. They were hairier and bigger than before. I loved big
hands. I had always had small hands that were way too feminine for a man. Now I
had real manly hands like my father and brothers. They seemed to be even bigger
than theirs. I seemed to be even stronger and bigger than they were now. I
liked that. There would be no more bullying me, no more throwing me in the pile
of horse’s dung just because I was the youngest and weakest.

My mother left and came back with one of my older
brother’s shirts. It didn’t fit either.

“We’ll have to try Leon’s then,” she said. Then she
left.

I chuckled while staring at myself. Leon was the
oldest and biggest of my brothers. Could it be that I was as big as him now? I
had always wanted to be. I turned and looked at my body, studied its many new
details.

I realized I had begun to grow hair on my chest. But
not only there. I turned slightly and discovered that I had started to grow
hair almost everywhere now. Even on my shoulders. My eyebrows had become
bushier and so wide they almost touched in the middle. It gave me a vicious
expression far from the pretty-boy face I was so known for. My mother said she
didn’t care much for it, she liked the boyish charm I had always possessed and
it saddened me that she felt that way, because I quickly grew quite fond of it.
The ferocious beast, the wild man that had always lived inside of me had
finally broken out. It was new, it was different and it gave me the confidence
that I had always wanted. My mother scolded me and called me wild and out of
control, but I liked this new me.