Ice Trilogy (76 page)

Gorn
was waiting
.

I placed my fingers on his eyelids. His eyes opened. And looked at me. They were the eyes of a brother. The most
important
brother of all. And I am the one who has to
initiate
him into the Brotherhood. His heart had calmed down. It was ready to
heed
.

And so, I began to
speak
with him.

Gorn’s heart is
open
. It
desired
. Its strength amazed me. It is a new strength. The Strength we have all been waiting for. I could help him.

I
placed
my heart as a Light-bearing shield between Gorn and the world. My old body became a
shadow
of the
shining
shield. The shadow of my body shades him from the world: It isn’t yet time! The world of the Earth lies beyond my stooped back. The round, inconstant, self-devouring, and dangerous world of the Earth drones behind my back. My back is a wide shadow. Gorn’s pure heart should not
see
the world: It isn’t time yet! It
isn’t prepared
to touch the world of the Earth. The ruthless world. Which devours itself. Which coagulates with the rage of self-destruction. My trembling hands shade continents. My bony fingers spread out, hiding cities. The meat machines coagulate under my wrinkled palms. Villages and tiny settlements, roads and mechanisms crowd behind my flaccid thighs, which preserve the scars of torture. My shoulders hide the terrible order of earthly armies. My head shades the countries of the north where we found so many of
ours
. I cover the violent world of meat machines with the shadow of my torso, turning my
shining
heart toward the long-desired brother.

I
protect
Gorn.

I
protected
Gorn.

I
cherish
Gorn.

I
feed Gorn
.

Gorn’s heart is
opening
in leaps and bounds. It
flows
with the radiance of desire. It
demands
. Its
growth
is swift. No one in the Brotherhood is so
swift
of heart as Gorn. No one
burgeons
with Light so rapidly. We are joyful. We
shine
and exult. Our hearts
girdle
the Newly Acquired one, shining with the joy of the Light. And the exultation of the Light fills the Brotherhood with ecstasy: We
believe!
Gorn forced us to
place our faith
in the Fulfillment. What our hearts
dreamed
of,
spoke
of in Great and Lesser Circles, moaned over in our sleep, whispered about on our deathbeds — had come closer! And Gorn brought
it
closer.

We will protect his heart and body.

Each morning my hands wake up Gorn’s body. And my heart
wakens
his young, powerful heart. Sisters pick Gorn up and carry him into the room of Ablutions. The sisters wash his body with the purest water, infused with flowers and grasses. They dry him with silken fabrics. They anoint him with oils. They dress him in clothes woven of mountain plants. The sisters give Gorn tea to drink, made from grasses of the taiga, which give calm and strength. They offer him the fruits of tropical trees.

His body grows.

But his heart
grows
much faster.

His heart grows stronger. It
feeds
off the Light. He learns the first words of the heart language. He
sucks
in words from our hearts. In Gorn’s heart the immeasurable power of the Light grows stronger. Even my strong and experienced heart restrains this
onslaught
with great
difficulty
. Gorn wants to
embrace
everything right away. But he cannot
contain
it all. He
craves
with ferocity. It is my lot to
quench
the thirst of his heart. And I do this with
extreme
caution, so as not to harm him. Or the Brotherhood. For I understand
who
Gorn is for us. Brothers and sisters on all the continents understand this. Their hearts are
shining
. Hands are joining. Lesser, Middle, and Great Circles are forming. They flare in the dark gloom of earthly life, sending us heart Light. We
accept
it. It strengthens our hearts. We
share
the Light with Gorn.

I
guard
Gorn.

I
preserve
Gorn.

I
fill Gorn
.

I
hold
Gorn.

And the Light in his heart
grows
and
expands
.

Gorn’s heart gradually
fills
with Light. But knowledge of the world of Earth I
move aside
for Gorn: It is still early! It is not time! Only when his heart is strengthened may he
touch
the world. Which we created. In which we
went astray
. Only a
full
heart can
see
the world. And
understand
its essence.

I prepare Gorn’s heart for the most important.

A very
tall blond man wearing a lemon-yellow T-shirt and white shorts strode vigorously through the crowd, pulling a red suitcase rattling after him.

“There he is! What a beanpole!” Olga thought as she quickly finished her grapefruit juice and put six shekels down on the bar.

The blond man approached. He smiled cautiously. In the photograph he sent Olga by e-mail his chin seemed heavier and his neck less muscular. On the blond man’s upturned nose drops of sweat mingled with freckles.

“
Odin v pole voin
,” he painstakingly pronounced the passwords in a deep, chesty voice.

“
Kräftskivan
,” Olga replied, sliding off the tall metal barstool.

Her small heels touched the floor.

“Two and a half heads taller than me,” she noted to herself, stretching out her small hand. “Hi, Bjorn.”

“Hi, Olga!” He smiled even wider.

Olga firmly shook his huge, sweaty palm with her small hand.

“I didn’t expect you to be so tall,” she said in English. She noticed the word
KRÄFTSKIVAN
curving around a red crab on his yellow shirt.

“Six foot seven,” he answered honestly. “And where’s your red hair?”

“Sometimes you need to change something about yourself,” Olga said, donning her dark glasses, heaving the strap of her bag onto her shoulder. “Well, let’s go, shall we?”

The Swede spoke English with a typical Scandinavian accent; Olga with an acquired American one.

Not noticing her heavy bag, he turned his head. “And where i
s..
.”

“Follow me.” Olga moved decisively to the exit. “What is
Kräftskivan
?”

“The holiday of the crabs,” said Bjorn, catching up with her in two steps, his suitcase clattering behind him.

“You mean when they eat them?”

Bjorn nodded with a smile, and added, “I already translated your password from Russian. That is, someone helped me translate it: One soldier can win the war.”

“Wonderful!” said Olga, tossing her head back. “Now you know the principle of my life.”

They went out into the dry, hot July air. They got in a taxi. Olga slowly pronounced the address in Petah Tikva in Hebrew.

“Off we go,” the driver answered in Russian, smiling at Olga in the mirror.

Not the least bit surprised, she took out a cigarette. “May I smoke in the car?”

“We’re not in America, are we?” The driver grinned. “Smoke to your health, as much as you want, take deep breaths.”

“Thank you.” She lit up.

“He is from Russia?” Bjorn asked.

“Yes.” Olga opened the window despite the air conditioner and turned her face to the warm breeze.

“Here there are many people from Russia.” Bjorn shook the fair head on his long, sturdy neck.

“Yes.” Olga flipped the ash into the air. “There are a lot of people from Russia here.”

They rode in silence to Petah Tikva. Zipping past a hilly, sun-drenched landscape, the car entered dusty, scorching Tel Aviv. After winding through the streets, the driver stopped near an unusually long building.

Bjorn tried to pay, but Olga beat him to it, handing the driver a fifty-shekel bill.

“Are you a feminist?” Bjorn asked, extracting his large body from the car.

“Not anymore.” Olga looked at the rosy-white three-story building stretching half the block.

She went over to a small limestone stoop. Large brass numbers, 1-6-7, hung on the door. Olga rang the bell. After a moment, a pretty woman about fifty years old opened the door.

“Olga Drobot?” she asked in friendly voice, in Russian tinged with a Jewish accent.

“Yes, hello.” Olga took off her dark glasses.

“I’m Dina. Come in.”

“Hi, I’m Bjorn.” The Swede nodded his head.

They entered a small foyer.

“Are you hungry?” the woman asked. “Honestly, now!”

“Thank you, Dina, we’re full.” Olga put her bag down on the ground. “We’d like to do what we came here for as quickly as we can. If it’s possible, of course.”

Dina sighed. “Just now it is possible. Until he falls asleep.”

“Excellent.”

“Follow me,” Dina said as she climbed a staircase.

Olga and Bjorn followed her. It was cool in the house, and somewhere up above a dog shut in a room whined. On the second floor Dina led them to a door, opened it, and looked into the room. Her beautiful hand gestured to them to enter. Olga and Bjorn went in. It was a small bedroom, for one person. The venetian blinds on the window were slightly closed. On a narrow bed under a quilted blanket lay a thin old man in lilac-colored pajamas. His hands rested on top of the blanket; an empty cup stood on his chest. His breathing was heavy and loud, and the cup moved in time with his breath. On seeing the guests he picked up the cup and moved it from his chest to a bedside table.

“Papa, these are the people,” said Dina.

“I guessed,” said the old man. “And I would really like it if a half hour will be enough for you. Or else I’ll fall asleep again. This disease is so wonderful, it’s actually a delightful disease. Permanent sleep. Well, it’s not the worst illness, is it now, Dinochka?”

Dina nodded. “I already said it a million times: I’m jealous, Papa.”

“Go be jealous” — the old man grinned, baring his beautiful false teeth — “and bring them our carrot juice, the best in the world.”

“How would I manage without your suggestions, Papa!” said Dina, tossing her head and leaving.

“Sit down, we’ve already brought chairs for you.” The old man turned, leaning against two folded pillows. “And let’s get down to business.”

The guests sat; Olga got out a small Dictaphone.

“David Leibovich, we won’t trouble you too long, but believe me this is very — ” Olga began to speak but the old man interrupted her.

“No superfluous words are necessary, I beg you. For the last sixty years I’ve told this story about three hundred and eighty-six times. If today is the three hundred and eighty-seventh time, it won’t dislocate my tongue. Especially since close friends of Dina’s are asking about it. So are you ready?”

“Yes,” Olga replied.

Bjorn sat there, not understanding a word, his back straight and his tan fists on his white knees. Dina appeared with two tall glasses of fresh carrot juice wrapped in napkins and offered them to the guests.

“All right,
bikitser
,” the old man said, holding on to the edge of the quilt like a railing. “How I got to the camps doesn’t really matter. I was in two camps, in Belorussia and Poland, and then — over there. In short, I ended up there in the spring of ’44. I’d just turned seventeen. Well, you know what kind of place it was and what they did there, I don’t have to tell you. When our group arrived, we managed to crawl out of the cars; they lined us up straightaway, looked us over, and chose twenty-eight from the entire group. I was one of them. And we all looked alike only in that, first of all, we were all Jews, like everyone in the train cars, and second — all of us had light-colored or reddish hair and blue eyes. Now I’m all gray, my eyes have gone muddy, I’m lying here parallel to the horizon, but then I was a well-built, handsome fellow, blondish and blue-eyed. Of course, I didn’t understand where we were going and why we were chosen. None of the twenty-eight understood, and what was there to understand? There was nothing to understand. It stank of burned people all the time and ashes flew around everywhere, that’s all you needed to understand. In short, we were deloused and then taken off to the barracks. And in this barracks I saw only blue-eyed and light-haired Jews. There were two of those barracks: men’s and women’s. And everyone was blue-eyed and light-haired. There were a lot of redheads. It was kind of strange, you even felt like laughing. And there was lots of talk and guessing going on about this, a lot of people joked glumly that they were going to make us real Aryans and send us off to the eastern front to fight for the Führer. Some said that they were going to do experiments on us. But they didn’t do anything to us. The experiments were done on others. And it was others that went into the crematoriums, from other barracks. So then, six months passed. We weren’t made into ashes, as it turned out. And over this time both barracks were almost overflowing: with each train that arrived they kept on adding and adding blue-eyed Jews — five, ten, or more. And sometimes — not a single one. Then the front came nearer, the Germans started getting nervous, and the ovens worked full tilt. But still, no one touched us. And then in October, it was the eleventh, exactly, we got the command: ‘
Raus
!’ We left our barracks, and they looked us over. They picked out some who had hidden with us who had black eyes. Or brown eyes. Or green eyes. There were some of them too. We hid them. They were separated from us. Then we were loaded into a huge troop train and it left the camp, heading west. We didn’t know what to think, but still we were happy that we’d left that cursed place. It stank of death there. We were sure that we were being taken to Germany. But the train traveled only for about two hours and then stopped. We were ordered out of the train. So we got out. The train stood in a clear field. There was an enormous sandpit right nearby. It was this huge gully, a sandy ditch. The guards from the train took up their places along the edges of this pit. And we were ordered to go down into it. Well, we all realized that we weren’t going to any Germany, but that they’d just finish us off here. In the camp we’d heard that the Russians were attacking hard. So the Germans were in a hurry to get rid of us. And we walked down into that pit. What else could we do? There was nowhere to run — there was just a big field around. There were about two thousand of us. No less. We went down into the pit. We were ordered to sit. We sat. And prayed. Because we understood that they would start shooting off their machine guns any minute. But no one shot at us. We sat there and waited. Guards with automatic weapons stood around the edges of the pit. And suddenly, up above, from where we’d come down, two SS officers appeared with two suitcases. They opened the suitcases and took two old people out of them. They weren’t even exactly old people, but something totally strange, at first I thought that they were adolescents from our camp, emaciated, all skin and bones. But then I saw that it was an old man and an old woman. They were unbelievably thin, thinner than we were, and all sort of white, as if someone had been keeping them underground. Their hair was white as snow and very long. The SS officers carried them in their arms like children and brought them down to us. And this old couple, held in the arms of SS officers, stared at us. They had very strange faces, not evil and not good, but something bizarre, like they had already died long ago and didn’t give a fig about anything. I’ve never seen faces like that. Even in camp the goners had different faces. These faces were still very unusual. These two also had blue eyes. They watched. But it was the same kind of thing, it was like they looked straight through us. You know, there are times when a person starts thinking and fixes his eyes on something without seeing it. That’s the kind of eyes they had. They looked at us and muttered something we couldn’t hear. And the SS officers started picking out some of us: one here, another over there. This went on and on. And then they took a young guy who was sitting just by me. It was Moishe from Kraków. I met him in the camp and we even became friends a little. He was older than me. Before the war he worked as a salesman in a department store. Like me, his whole family had been killed. He was very religious and said that if God left him alive, he would become a rabbi. This Moishe from Kraków, he always carried a piece of paper with him, the waxed kind they used to wrap dried fish in before the war. He kept it with him all day long, crumpled up. And in the evening, when they called lights-out and locked the barracks, he lay down on his bunk and smoothed that paper out on his palm. It was given to him by a rabbi in the ghetto who said that this paper here, it is you yourself: during the day life crumples you up, turns you into a little ball, and in the evening you straighten yourself out, you forget about the world and again stand before God in all your truth. At night he always smoothed the paper out and placed it under his head. That piece of paper helped him. When they dragged him out of our crowd, this old man and woman got all worked up. They were actually writhing and shaking. And then I thought they had epilepsy. They only took about thirty of us. They took them to the train and put them in the car. And they took the epileptics away. The head guy gave an order to the guards and they went back to the train. All of us, we started praying because we were certain they were going to shoot us now. I put my head down, stared at an ant, because the ant was going to live, and they were going to shoot me any minute! And suddenly I heard the engine whistle and the train jerk. They up and left. The train wheels rolled and rolled and rolled. And that was it. The train was gone. No SS officers. We were sitting in the pit. And there was nothing but empty field all around. No one understood anything. So we stood up, climbed out of the pit, and walked off. No one had the strength to run. People wandered off in different directions. I made my way with three guys, they were all from Warsaw, and I was lucky because after all we were all blue-eyed and had light-colored hair, and the Poles, even though they’re anti-Semites, they took us in, umm, they, it wa
s...
azokhen ve
i
...
there still wer
e...
kind ones and scu
m...
that
pani
was named Veslava, and her father had lost an ar
m...
and the
y...
and the
y...
bu
t...
not onl
y...
as usua
l..
.”