Riders in the Chariot (29 page)

But all were soon ready to advance, and did, though the ones behind were the more willing. Beneath the streamers of music, through the wet, cajoling pines, the party moved. It could have been a tattered, a lamentable sight. So amorphous, in spite of official attempts, and the baritone voice of an iron tower, which urged order and cleanliness on the guests of Friedensdorf. But here came the sick, the aged, the untouchables--the Jews: old women pick-a-back on their sons, stiff legs stuck out in spiralled stockings; grandfathers trailing
tallithim
_ and the smell of years; desperate husbands protecting their wives' bellies from the crush; bourgeois with briefcases and identical hats. So they arrived, and the precautionary gates were closed upon them. The mesh of tingling, spangled wire subsided.

"
Ach
_, look now! I have torn my veil!"

The Lady from Czernowitz was inclined to whimper, but after a very brief contact between her black kid glove and her companion's arm, was able to continue.

"I am assured," she informed, "that we shall be treated with the greatest consideration during our short stay. And shall reach Constantsa unharmed. Or is it Istanbul? But to return, Professor, to our conversation, I must tell you the walks were magnificent in the forests of Bukhovina, where we would pick the little wild strawberries, and eat them with the finest sugar and faintly sour cream."

More than a little disarranged, her flesh turned mauve beneath the last vestiges of powder, the Lady from Czernowitz was still able to glitter from behind the kohl. It was also perhaps the music. She appeared to react more feverishly to music, and now a hand had released something by Lehar, the frills of which fluttered from the iron tower.

"
Achtung! Achtung
_!" interrupted the official voice, that rather warm baritone.

All new arrivals would proceed to the bath-houses. Men to the left, women to the right. All would take baths. Baths. Men to the left. To ensure absolute cleanliness, passengers would have to submit to a routine disinfection. Women to the right.

Through the palpitating air of the false thaw fell the cries of parting. It was most unreasonable, the official voice grumbled. But who had not been deceived by reason before? So the bodies of the unreasonable locked themselves together in a last, long attempt to merge. And, in many cases, were only prised apart by force, carrying with them into segregation convulsed handfuls of clothing and hair.

"Do you suppose, Professor," cried the Lady from Czernowitz, "do you suppose we shall be expected to undress in public?"

"Let us not be ashamed of our nakedness," Himmelfarb advised.

But the Lady from Czernowitz suddenly screamed.

"I cannot bear it!" she shrieked. "I cannot bear it! Oh, no! No! No! No!"

"I shall pray for us!" he called after her. "For all of us!"

His hands dangling uselessly in the vacant air.

Nor did she hear his man's voice attempting to grapple with a situation which might have tested the prophets themselves, for she was borne away, in a wind, and stuffed inside the bath-house, in case her hysteria should inspire those who were obedient, duller, or of colder blood. The last Himmelfarb saw of his companion, at that stage, was the black and disordered bundle of her tearing clothes.

For the men were also pressed back, by ropes of arms and, in certain cases, by naked steel. It seemed as though the sexes would never again meet, at the prospect of which, some of the women screamed, and one young man, remembering tender intimacies, rasped and ranted, until almost choked by his own tongue.

"
Achtung! Achtung
_!" the official voice prepared to inform, or admonish. "After disrobing, guests are requested to hang their clothing on the numbered hooks, and to pile any other belongings tidily on the benches beneath. Everything will be returned aft--"

But there the system failed.

"
Achtung! Acht
_... on numbered hooks... will be return. ..
Put.. . ftt
_..."

Now Himmelfarb, who had been pressed inside the door of the men's bath-house, gave himself into the hands of God. His own were on his necktie. Most of his companions, on whom the virtue of discipline had been impressed by the country of their birth or election, were instinctively doing as they had been asked. One big fat fellow had entered so far into the spirit of the dream that his shirt was halfway over his head. Himmelfarb himself was still only watching the dreadful dream-motions.

"Into Your hands, O Lord," his lips were committing him afresh.

When something happened.

A guard came pushing through the mass of bodies, one of the big, healthy, biddable blond children, choosing here and there with a kind of lazy, lingering discrimination.

"You will remain dressed," he ordered Himmelfarb, "and report with me outside for camp duties."

It seemed quite capricious that the guard should have picked on this elderly man, although there might have been an official reason for his doing so. Certainly Himmelfarb was still impressive. In height and breadth he was the guard's equal, but his eyes entered deeper than those of his superior, whose shallow blue did flicker for an instant. It could have been, then, that the physically luxuriant youth was deliberately wooing into his secret depths what he sensed to be a superior spirit. Or he could, simply, have been directed without knowing.

Several other Jews, of various ages and muscular build, were following the guard, stupefied.

Outside, the sanded yard appalled by its comparative emptiness, as well as by its chill, for mists were issuing out from the trees, to creep between the sweaty layers of clothes. The favoured stood around, fluctuating uneasily inside the cages of their ribs.

Then they began to notice that a number of other individuals, all obviously of slave status, dressed in miscellaneous garments, were assembled in a kind of informal formation.

One of them spoke to his neighbour, who happened to be Himmelfarb.

"The women will soon be going in," the stranger informed, in faltering, faulty German. "The women usually go in first."

It was doubtful to what race the man belonged. He could have been a darker Slav, a Pole perhaps, or of Mediterranean stock, but there was no mistaking the evidence of inferior blood.

"'Going in'?" asked Himmelfarb. "What do you mean by 'going in'?"

"To the gas," the fellow explained, in decent, friendly tones.

But ghostly. Himmelfarb remembered, fleetingly, a colleague who had been dying of cancer of the throat.

"Yes," whispered his new friend. "The gas will be pouring soon. When it is over, we shall drag the bodies to the pits."

It suggested a harvest ritual rather than the conventions of hell.

But just then, the door of the women's bath-house burst open, by terrible misadventure, and there, forever to haunt, staggered the Lady from Czernowitz.

How the hands of the old, helpless, and furthermore, intellectual Jew, her friend, went out to her.

"God show us!" shrieked the Lady from Czernowitz. "Just this once! At least!"

In that long, leathern voice.

She stood there for an instant in the doorway, and might have fallen if allowed to remain longer. Her scalp was grey stubble where the reddish hair had been. Her one dug hung down beside the ancient scar which represented the second. Her belly sloped away from the hillock of her navel. Her thighs were particularly poor. But it was her voice which lingered. Stripped. Calling to him from out of the dark of history, ageless, ageless, and interminable.

Then the man her counterpart, brought to his knees by sudden weakness, tearing them furiously, willingly, on the pebbles, calling to her across the same gulf, shouted through the stiff slot of his mouth, "The Name! Remember they cannot take the Name! When they have torn off our skins, that will clothe. Save. At last."

Before she was snatched back.

And he felt himself falling, falling, the human part of him. As his cheek encountered the stones, the funnels of a thousand mouths were directed upon him and poured out over his body a substance he failed to identify.

When Himmelfarb was able once more to raise his head, he realized that, for the second time in his life, he had fainted, or God had removed him, mercifully, from his body. Now it was evening, and a strange one. Those objects which had appeared most solid before: the recently built bath-houses, for instance, and the iron towers, were partially dissolved in mist. The well-planned establishment which he had known as Friedensdorf was enclosed in a blood-red blur, or aura, at the centre of which he lay, like a chrysalis swathed in some mysterious supernatural cocoon. Other forms, presumably, though not distinguishably human, moved on transcendental errands within the same shape, no longer that intense crimson, but expanding to a loose orange. Of blue edges. He was reminded suddenly and vividly of the long, blue-grey, tranquil ash of an expensive cigar he had smoked somewhere. Of stubbing out a cigar by the orange light from a little lantern of oriental design. Then, of course, he remembered his friend Konrad Stauffer.

When his tardier senses returned.

His surroundings exploded into the consciousness of the man who was lying on the ground. What had seemed soothingly immaterial became most searingly concrete. A wound opened in his left hand. The blue-black gusts of smoke rushed in at his eyes and up his nostrils. Men were shouting. He could feel the breath of orange fire. Explosives convulsed the earth beneath his body. Bullets pitted the air, but rarely. It was the fire that predominated. Friedensdorf was burning.

It was then that Himmelfarb realized he had lost his spectacles. The discovery was more terrible than fire. Engulfed in his affliction, he began to grope about him, touching stones, a strip of hot metal, a little lake of some liquid stickiness, a twig, a stone, a stone, in that fruitless journey across what must remain an empty desert.

As he crawled and searched.

Or looked up at the orange blur, which seemed by now to be invading the whole of existence. Somewhere on the left a machine-gun hawked fire. Even his own breath issued from his mouth in a tongue of fire. As he blubbered, and panted. Searching. To focus again the blessed shapes of things.

He had covered so much ground, it was unlikely now. Though his hands continued, for employment, to grope, and touch, long after he had strayed beyond reach of possibility. He touched wire. He tore his hands on the barbs of wire. He touched a cotton rag suspended from the same barbs. He was touching air. To the side of the rag, or flag of cotton, his hands suddenly encountered nothing but the soft air. There was, in fact, a small, jagged gap, if not a vast triumphal arch in the peripheral fence. Someone had simply cut the wire.

Then the Jew bowed his head, and went out, still upon his knees. He shuffled upon his knees, anywhere, or where it seemed indicated that he should. Over the stones he hobbled, like some deformity. Upon his torn knees. He must get up, he knew, but apart from the stiffness of his limbs, which made of this unnatural position a temporarily natural one, he had not yet crossed, he suspected, the line dividing hell from life. When the barbs entered his forehead, and he was not surprised to put out his hands and grasp a fresh agony of wire. It was, of course, the outer fence.

He might have hung there, content just to be ignored by the tormentor's mind, if a moment of lethargy had not forced him to reach out for a fresh hold, to prevent himself from toppling. And for the second time, he found himself touching the mild, unobstructed air. And was goaded into wildest action by that very gentleness. All of him was tearing--flesh, breath, the stuff of his clothes--as he wrenched himself out of the grip of the wire. But got himself free, and manoeuvred through the narrow, the so very narrow rent, made by those who had cut their way out through the second barrier of wire.

The air was staggeringly cold that flung against his sweaty, bleeding forehead. Shapes welcomed, whether of men or trees, he had not the strength to wonder, but did at last touch bark. And dragged himself up, onto his feet. He wandered through a forest, from trunk to kindly trunk. The wet needles mingled with his skin, their scent spreading through that second
maze
_, his skull, until he was almost drugged with freedom.

He walked on, and could have continued gratefully, if he had not come to what was by comparison a clearing, in which stood a band of virgin forms--young birches, they might have been--their skin so smooth and pure, he fell down against them, and lay crying, his mouth upon the wet earth.

Some time later, men arrived. Whatever their complexion or beliefs, he could not have moved. They stood around him. Talking. Poles, he reasoned with what was left of his mind. And listened to their silence and their breathing as they carried him through an infinity of trees.

On arrival at a stench of pigs and straw, they laid him on the stove of a house to which they had brought him. He had no desire to leave the warmth and darkness. He lay with his head on a kind of hard block, when not actually at rest in the bosom of his Lord. Women came to dress his wounds. They would appear with soup. Thin and watery. A steam of cabbage. Sometimes there were dumplings in the soup, which made it rather more difficult.

On the third day, or so he calculated, they brought him somebody, a man of youthful voice, who spoke to him in German, and told him as much as the peasants knew of recent events at Friedensdorf.

Those of the prisoners kept alive by the Germans, to empty the gas chambers of corpses, and provide labour for the camp, had decided to mutiny, the Pole related. Weeks had been spent collecting and hiding arms and ammunition, and it was only after the arrival of the last trainload of Jews that the conspirators felt themselves strong enough to act. Then the slaves rose, killed the commandant and a number of the guards, exploded a fuel dump, set fire to part of the establishment, cut the wire, and were at that moment on their way to join the Resistance.

"And all those other Jews?" Himmelfarb ventured to ask.

The Pole believed most of them had died, some already of the gas fumes, the remainder by the fire which destroyed Friedensdorf.