The Fury of Rachel Monette (28 page)

“We rarely saw them. They did not stay in the barracks with us; they hardly ever emerged from the laboratory. No supplies went in or out, not even water. The guard commander said there was a well dug within the walls. Occasionally a man in a white coat came out of the building for a few minutes and stood in the sun.

“Once or twice a month two Frenchmen came in a jeep from the direction of Mhamid. We were told they were our liaison with Vichy, but none of us believed that. Vichy could not possibly have known about the camp, at least not officially. It was in direct contravention of the armistice. These two Frenchmen wore civilian clothes, but they had képis on their heads. They were obviously demobilized French soldiers.”

“What were their names?”

Kopple made a little snickering sound. “Names? We didn't know anyone's name, except those of the other guards.”

“Can you describe them?”

Kopple thought. “I never had a close look,” he said. “Usually I would be riding around the perimeter of the camp in a jeep, or watching the desert from the top of the rock. All I can really say is that one was taller than the other.” He thought again. “The tall one always went into the laboratory and stayed for about an hour. The other one waited outside. Then they drove away.”

“What happened in the laboratory?”

Kopple looked over Rachel's shoulder. “We never really knew.” He inhaled very deeply. “Sometimes we thought we heard screams in the night. They were very faint. It could have been the wind in the desert.” His wife shifted her weight on the blanket, moving closer to him.

“But eventually you found out,” Rachel suggested. He nodded grimly. “What was it? The airplane?”

Kopple's eyes opened wider in surprise. “You know about the airplanes?”

“A little. Tell me more.”

“How do you know?”

“I haven't got time to explain right now. Get on with it.”

Kopple stroked his fleshy jaw. The suntan oil smeared across his palm. He regarded it with distaste and tried to wipe it off on the blanket. “The airplanes,” he said. “I saw two of them while I was there, but both times from a distance. As soon as the airplanes appeared the guards were ordered into the barracks. There was one small window which gave a partial view. The airplanes had French markings. They were small transports of a type I didn't know. When they landed, the S.S. men came out of the laboratory, armed with rifles. Each airplane brought about fifteen women. They were dressed in Arab robes, but they were European women. That became obvious when the man in the white coat … inspected them. After that they were led into the laboratory, and the airplane flew away to the north. The second time the two Frenchmen were at the camp, and they left on the airplane.”

“Did you see the women again?”

“Not alive.” Almost imperceptibly Kopple began to rock back and forth. His wife placed her hand on his knee.

“So we stayed in the desert. It was very boring. We were promised leave at Christmas. That was all we had to look forward to. But Christmas never came. Early in the morning of November eighth the British and Americans landed at Casablanca and Algiers and Oran. An S.S. major came into the barracks and woke us with the news. It meant we were cut off. Our only hope was to somehow get to the sea and find a boat to take us to the Canary Islands. We wanted to leave immediately, but the S.S. major forbade any such plan. We were confined to barracks for the whole day and the following night. By then it was clear from the radio reports that the whole of French North Africa was in enemy hands. We were desperate to leave.

“At noon on the ninth of November the S.S. major returned to the barracks and summoned us to the laboratory. He ordered us to leave our weapons behind. We had no choice. He was the highest-ranking officer. We went into the big building. Inside it resembled a hospital. There was a long corridor down the center with rooms off it on either side. The corridor was filled with armed S.S. men. There must have been thirty of them. We had no idea there were so many. The man in the white coat was there also. He stood on a chair at the far end. He told us that we had been called into the laboratory because there remained a lot of work to be done before we could leave, and time was running out. The buildings had to be demolished, he said. And there were also bodies to be buried. But before we got to that he told us that we had made a great contribution to science by guarding the laboratory. Germany had been engaged in a great experiment, an experiment designed to investigate the nature of the bond between mother and child. To investigate its nature and to test its limits. And now it was over, he said. It was a total success.”

Kopple laughed bitterly.

“They took us into the rooms, two S.S. to each guard. There were pallets on the floor, four to a room, and on the pallets lay women. Some of them were pregnant. The others had babies in their arms. They were all dead. They hadn't been shot or clubbed: it was probably poison or gas. But their deadness was not what you saw at first. It was the alterations that had been done to them. And to some of the children too.” His voice became very thick.

“What do you mean alterations?” Rachel asked quietly.

“They were mutilated, medically mutilated. Before they were killed. You could see the stitches in some of them.” Tears began to roll down Kopple's cheeks. “Some of the babies were mutilated. And many of them were blond, blond like the S.S.” Kopple began to sob. His wife put her arms around him. She was crying too. In a little while they grew quieter.

“When I saw that I went a little crazy, I suppose. I started yelling at the S.S. men; I don't know what. ‘What are you doing?' one of them asked me. ‘They are only Jews.' I took a step toward him. I doubt I would have had the nerve to do anything, but I never found out. Something struck me from behind.

“When I woke up it was night. There was a heavy weight on top of me. I felt hair on my face, and suddenly realized I was lying in a pile of bodies. I managed to claw my way out, but before I could leave I heard footsteps approaching. I lay very still on the floor. A door opened and I could see by the light in the corridor. Two S.S. men entered. They went to a corner and lifted a round cover off the floor. Then they began to drag the bodies from the pile and push them into the hole. They were the bodies of the women and the babies. And of the guards.

“I waited until one of the bodies got stuck in the hole. While the S.S. men struggled with it I crawled out of the room. There was no one in the corridor. I ran outside. The night was very dark, but I could see the S.S. They were working like madmen around the barracks, demolishing it with sledgehammers. I ran away into the desert.

“I knew they would be going west when they finished, so I went the other way. I walked through the night, and all of the following day and night. The next morning I stumbled on a caravan of desert traders moving east. I persuaded them to allow me to travel with them. I had a vague idea of rejoining my unit, which I managed to do in January of 1943. I was just in time to be captured by the British. I spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in England.”

Kopple stopped rocking. His face was slack, his body drained. He was an old, fat, sunburned man sitting on a faded blanket. The beaches of the Mediterranean were crowded with men just like him.

“And the others?” Rachel asked. “The man in white? The S.S.?”

Kopple shrugged.

“Why did you pick my husband?”

He sighed. “I didn't have the courage to speak up. And who would believe me if I had? But I knew from his book that he was a clever and resourceful man. I thought perhaps there might be some written records left somewhere that referred to the camp. And if so he was in a better position than anyone I knew of to track them down.” He shook his head. “I am very sorry. I hope you believe me.”

“That's not important,” Rachel said. “There are a few things I still don't understand. Why did you wait all these years before doing something? What was the point of opening this up now?”

“That's just it,” Kopple said. “I found out it was still open.”

“How?”

“I left one incident out of the story. There was an escape attempt that summer. It happened at the beginning of August, in the worst heat. The
cbergui
was blowing. It is a hot wind they have there, like the
khamseen.
We were awakened one morning before dawn. Outside our commanding officer was talking to the S.S. major and the tall French liaison officer. After a while the major and the Frenchman went into the laboratory. Our commander informed us that a woman had escaped during the night. He explained that the Frenchman was an expert on the desert and had drawn up a search pattern for us. Most of us were sent north, northeast or northwest. It was far less likely she would go south. To the south lay nothing but desert. Only one man was sent in that direction. He was Private Victor Reinhardt, who had been under my command in the 90th Light Infantry.

“We searched for a week, but we never found the woman. And we never saw Private Reinhardt again either. We found his jeep in the desert, filled with sand, but there was no sign of him. We assumed he had been lost in a sandstorm, and died.

“I forgot all about him until last October, when I saw his picture in the newspaper. At first I wasn't sure it was he, but in December I saw him on several newscasts. I had no more doubt. He has aged, but not very much. Even if he had I would probably have recognized him anyway. He was a very distinctive-looking man, even as a young soldier. He is now an Israeli politician. He calls himself Simon Calvi.”

Rachel thought she had seen the name in print, but she wasn't sure. “I don't know anything about him.”

“Neither did I,” Kopple said. “But I've been doing some research. I have a file at home you can look at if you like. Some people think he is a very dangerous man.”

“In what way?”

“He is the leader of a movement seeking equality for non-European Jews. He has passed himself off as a Jew of Moroccan origin. At first his movement confined itself to specific social goals—better housing, higher pay, that sort of thing. But in the past year or two he has grown much more radical. He talks of the special bond between Arabs and Oriental Jews.

“That's why I had to do something. He was a soldier in Hitler's army. I didn't want the whole thing to happen again.” His wife squeezed his hand.

“Have you told this to anyone else?”

“No. Only Marthe.”

Rachel got to her feet. “I'd better see your file.”

“Of course. Come to our apartment. We'll be there in an hour or a little more.”

He gave her directions. Then he and his wife folded the blanket and walked slowly across the beach, hand in hand.

24

In the late afternoon Rachel left the hotel and walked to the Kopples' apartment building. It was less than a mile away, on a street which ran parallel to the shore several blocks inland. For part of its length the street, rue de Lyautey, was closed to traffic. Restaurants spilled onto the cobblestones from dark cubbyholes in the walls. Rachel smelled garlic and onions and cheese on the warm kitchen breezes mingling in the air. Like the smells, the tables of one restaurant seemed to merge without demarcation into the next. Only the waiters, clad in brightly colored outfits like soldiers of a bygone century, knew the borders. They resembled each other closely, as if drawn from a race of waiters: short dark men who worked silently, spreading red tablecloths, folding napkins into cones which they stuck in the wine glasses, arming each place with steel cutlery. One poured wine for an early customer; in the sunlight of late afternoon it glowed in the glass like rubies.

Rachel felt the trail going cold in front of her. She walked faster as though the increased energy could warm it. How could she rely on an old man's guilt-ridden memories? She imagined him squinting at the flickering light of the television as he had squinted at her against the sun, or holding the newspaper close to his eyes while he shaped the tiny dots of a photograph into the face of someone from long ago.

The Kopples lived in a large townhouse which had been converted into apartments. A burgundy carpet covering the stone steps told the neighbors it was an elegant address. Two stone gargoyles cackled over the heavy wooden door. They had evil little eyes.

A waiter across the street noticed Rachel looking at them. “Monsters,” he called to her, and with his hand made a twisting gesture that she didn't understand. She opened the door and went inside.

The burgundy carpet led up a broad staircase bounded on one side by a delicate wrought-iron railing. Still lifes hung on the wall, three to a flight. Most showed fleshy flowers, a few overripe fruit. The Kopples' apartment was on the third floor. Number six. A brass mailbox was screwed to the doorjamb. In it was a rolled copy of
Die Welt.
Rachel took it out and knocked on the door. No one came. After thirty seconds she knocked again, harder. The door swung open.

She stepped across the threshold and saw herself in a gilt-framed mirror, with an alert look on her face and a newspaper in her hand. She was in a small foyer. The faded blue blanket lay folded on a small writing table beneath the mirror.

“Hello,” Rachel called. “Is anyone home?” She listened. A clock ticked, a refrigerator hummed. “Hello.” Thinking she would leave a note, Rachel went to the writing desk and bent to open the drawer. Inside she found writing paper and a pen. As she straightened something caught her eye through the doorway of an adjoining room. A sandal strapped to a bare foot, a few inches of a green polyester trouser leg. The foot hung in the air as if someone was sitting just out of sight with his legs crossed.

But he wasn't. Hans Kopple was lying on a brown leather couch with one leg extended over the end. His head rested on a small embroidered pillow. The pinkness had faded from his skin. It was all gray, except for the little red hole in the middle of his forehead.