Children of the Dusk Read online

  Hempel laughed sarcastically. "By yours and God's, or do you consider those to be one and the same?"

  "You disgrace the uniform of the Reich."

  "And you, Herr Oberst? I assume you have come to reclaim the Torah in order to loan it to the Jew vermin so they can practice their unholy rites--within a German military installation, no less!" Hempel was grinning, but his eyes narrowed as he spoke. "For your information, you gave permission for the killing of the zebu, and insisted that righteous payment be made to the owner." He pointed at the Zana-Malata and then at the Torah. "Owner, payment. It was what he wanted. I merely delivered it to him. Now if you have nothing more pleasant to say, I suggest you leave."

  "Not without the Torah," Erich said. "And you might as well know that I am taking the boy, Misha, with me, too. You have buggered him for the last time."

  His right hand settled on his pistol grip and unsnapped the holster, expecting and hoping that Hempel would try to hit him with whatever it was he was holding. He tensed his forearm for a block and used his peripheral vision to locate Hempel's forward knee. That was where the bullet should go. It would drop him nicely, but would not greatly delay the court martial. A good lesson for the troops.

  To his astonishment, Hempel merely shrugged.

  The devious bastard was doubtless playing with him, Erich thought, wanting him to believe that he had won so that he would be caught off-guard by his attack...when it came, and whatever it turned out to be. He had a feeling it would pay him well to watch his back.

  Without a further word, Erich picked up the Torah and the scroll caps, and left the hut.

  He found Bruqah gazing toward the shack. "Zana-Malata gather magic like bee gather honey." He straightened his lamba and slid back down into the turret, eyes flashing toward the colonel. "Mister Erich-Germantownman be wise to hold she temperament from now on."

  He clanked down the hatch and started the engine.

  Erich looked at Miriam, who was holding Misha. The boy was skinny enough that despite her bulk she could cradle him on her lap. Erich hoisted himself up and, sitting down on the slitted plates above the engine, stroked the boy's head.

  "Misha," he said softly.

  Looking over his shoulder, Erich told Bruqah, "Drive up the hill." It would be good for Miriam and the boy to be up there away from the compound. Besides, he wanted to be present when they opened the crypt, which should be any time now.

  The Panzer growled and snorted and turned on its treads without forward motion. The child’s eyes opened suddenly and fearfully, and his body stiffened. Thinking that boy might fall from Miriam's lap, Erich put out a hand to steady him. Miriam pushed it away with a strange motion. Though her eyes were open, he got the disquieting sense that she was asleep; smiling serenely, she placed forefinger and thumb under the boy's brows and lowered the eyelids as one might those of the dead.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  "Into the cage, Hundescheiss."

  Clutching at tufts of grass, Solomon crawled toward the tiny prison. He found the cage and jerked open the door with a clattering of chain.

  He pulled himself inside and sat as he had done so many times at Sachsenhausen, head scrunched down against drawn-up knees. Hempel kicked him to make him move further in, then slammed and chained the door.

  Do what you must to me, but stay away from Miriam, Sol prayed, wondering why he imagined that his words could have any meaning for the God who seemed to have deserted him all over again. At that moment, it seemed to be as unlikely a possibility as that of appealing to Hempel having any effect.

  Any positive effect, he amended his thoughts.

  "See how much good your precious Torah will do you sitting out here in the sun," Hempel said, adding, "and I remind you again that you can thank your friend, the good Herr Oberst, for this little holiday." The guards who had hastily built the cage laughed.

  Sol heard a familiar metallic grating as Hempel checked the magazine of his pistol. He fought the dread that threatened to overcome him. Again it's come to this, he thought. So much of my life dependent on Erich's actions.

  His heart beat wildly, pounding against his chest. Don't let the hate crowd out hope, he told himself. Surely Erich will save me, as a matter of pride, if nothing else.

  He heard Hempel and his men walk away, still laughing.

  Sol's tension abruptly uncoiled, and his body sagged with helplessness. Slipping from around his legs, his arms fell to his sides. He thought he heard himself mumbling a prayer, but he hadn't the energy to listen or stop. His mind seemed incapable even of subvocalizing the words, yet his lips kept moving. Insects buzzed and bit him and ran up his arms and legs, seeking his sweat.

  Deborah, the blazing sun beat out on his head. Deborah.

  The name came to him on the humid wind, rustling the grass and touching him so tenderly that he felt compelled to repeat it. "De-bor-ah." Tongue against frontal palette, a brief compression of lips, a tiny outrush of breath.

  The whispered syllables gave him such reassurance that he opened his eyes despite the pain and disorientation, but instead of the compound and the hut, he saw cobalt-blue light pinwheel before him----

  ----Amorphous figures move about him in a pulsing blue haze. Unfamiliar hands grip him. He squalls for the woman who lies nearby, wanting her love.

  Mama, he wants to say, but can only wail.

  White, ragged, fearful heads leer down from the edges of the fog. He sees zebu skulls. In the corner of a hut.

  A thousand needles stab his eyes, but Solomon squints harder, concentrating his focus, his face thrust as much as possible between the bars.

  In a glimpse immediately overwhelmed with blue pain, the haze lifts----

  Zebu skulls! In the corners of the hut!

  Was he seeing into the future again?

  The breeze wafted against his face, cooling him enough to allow the pain from the beating he had received at Pleshdimer's hands--and Hempel's instructions--to penetrate. Intruding into the pain came a renewed maelstrom of blue----

  ----Fingernails as long as talons tie a length of wire around a blanket of cypress palm.----

  ----Through the door of the Storch, he sees Hempel raise his Mann.----

  ----The Zana-Malata rushes toward a baby wrapped in cloth.---

  "Leave her alone!" Sol screamed, shaking the bamboo bars.

  For a moment the talking in the compound, the tinking of hammers against metal, the sawing in the jungle, all ceased. The only sound in the universe seemed to be the thunder of his anguish.

  "Deborah! My God! Miriam!"

  Tears of fury burst from him and he ground his knuckles against his eyes, hating all the agonies they'd witnessed. "Do something, Erich!" he ranted. "Prove to the world that you've got some courage."

  His body slackened against the bars and he cried, his breaths an angry rasping. When his anger was spent, his normal vision--poor though it was--had returned. He saw bamboo and grass and wire, and an orange sun, and he could hear the dogs yapping and yowling, pacing back and forth on their runs like expectant fathers.

  "Erich," he whispered. "Take care of Miriam and the child."

  You must dwell among your dreams, the wind whispered back.

  It was Bruqah's voice, but it reminded him of something deeper in his past. He smelled ginger cakes and apple-peel tea, and he thought he heard the crunch of autumn leaves underfoot. When he squinted upward, the sunlight seemed to have coalesced into a tunneled steep of stairs with a red-orange orb at their end, and he felt as if he could hike through the sky and unlock the sun, a vault containing the power of his meditations and memories, if only he were willing to confront the moon and his nightmares as well.

  "Miriam," he heard his lips tell him, as his muscles tightened and his body convulsed, a single spasm. His self stepped away and he fell into a state that was neither vision nor delirium, but something at the same time newer than the infant Miriam was carrying and more ancient than the universe itself...

  He labored up the
stairs and into the heavens, following a Gypsy's call, holding onto bamboo rails that were the scrolls of the Torah and Zorah so that he would not stumble or turn back. The compound and the island and the Earth fell away behind him, while around him the ten stars of the Kabbalah shone in a night sky. As he neared the moon, he heard voices, increasingly distinct, greeting and gently admonishing him for not having traveled skyward sooner. His father was there, and Hans Hannes, his friend from the camp. Rabbi Czisça was there, too, an older version of Misha. Their souls--all of them--danced joyously within a Bushman's moon.

  He hesitated, fearing that if he stayed here for even a minute he might never return to the world that he knew. Unready yet to leave it, he stretched out a trembling hand and touched reality--and a halo of cobalt blue----

  ----"I don't think Wilhelm worked for the SD for the money," a woman's voice says. "And I never accepted his explanation about his becoming a spy simply because he was German. I'm sure he lived in Tehran because the morphine content of Iranian opium was thirteen percent, five percent higher than that in Beijing, where he'd formerly been living."

  Solomon looks around. He is in a large cell with a small window which is higher than his head. Five other people are in the cell: a muscular black man in raggedy shorts, withdrawn into a corner and staring listlessly at his scarred left calf; a gray-haired woman leaning against a wall and smoking a cigarette; a man in a fez, standing behind a hurdy gurdy; a young woman in a Siit pilgrim robe, kneeling beside an old man who wears a tattered woolen coat and has an ancient carbine across his thighs.

  "Then the war broke out," the young woman continues telling the old man, "and Wilhelm found himself in what was probably the most isolated capital in the world. He so wanted to be part of the conflict!"

  The old man tilts up the carbine and starts cleaning it with a rag. "Sounds like he was addicted to being addicted."

  The elderly woman flips her cigarette onto the straw floor and grinds it out with the toe of her shoe. "Talk! All you two do is talk!"

  The younger woman grabs the carbine and shakes it. "What would you have me do? Talking stills the pain! I was raped--God only knows how many times.” Her voice abruptly lowers, and her face becomes a mask, eyes pale and distant. "But that pain is nothing compared to what I feel about having--"

  "I harbor more than a little guilt myself," the elderly woman says in a shaky voice.

  Holding his back as though he has bursitis, the old man rises. "Let's face it, we were fools."

  "Except him." The elderly woman nods toward the black man, who is silently crying. "He alone among us is truly innocent."

  The hurdy gurdy man, head lowered in a look of shame, sluggishly turns the handle of his machine. The metal fingers, hitting at a wrong speed, play "Glowworm" out of tune, flat and funereal.

  Solomon gropes through the blue light as though the air can be parted like a curtain. "Wanda," he hears himself say to the younger woman. He gazes at her thin, almost childish body and eyes made vapid with woe. "Wanda Pollock."

  He steps forward and puts a palm on the older woman's shoulder. "I'm dreaming," he says.

  "A wiser Solomon would know otherwise," she quietly replies.

  "For over twenty years I've heard a woman crying. 'My soul is dirty, let me die,' she'd say. That was you?"

  The elderly woman nods.

  "And you, begging for borscht and ginger tea?" he asks the man in the ragtag coat whom his dreams called Schutze Margabrook.

  The old man turns and gazes blankly toward the moonlight streaming between bars of the window as Solomon moves past the hurdy gurdy and stands, hands clasped, over the black man, as though he were beside a grave. "I dreamed that from you the evil ones took the sinew that had made you a human gazelle."

  Eyes brimming, the man does not lift his head. The hurdy gurdy man stops playing.

  "Dreaming," Solomon says again.

  "Dreams are mirrors, and mirrors, dreams," the old woman says softly. "Perhaps you're still asleep in your bed on Friedrich Ebert Strasse."

  "We've waited all these years for you to face your Self and touch the truth," Wanda interjects.

  "And what is that truth?" Solomon asks.

  She gives him a slight, condescending smile as her attention appears to drift. "German troops raped me after they took Warsaw. I escaped to Pinsk, where Russian troops raped me and shipped me to Siberia. Later I was sent to Iran. When the KGB discovered I was living with Wilhelm, they let forty soldiers gang-rape me, hoping to learn things about him that I didn't know. For four days, until he was able to rescue me.”

  "The truth," the elderly woman says in a voice filled with regret, "is that a child is about to be born whose soul is a dybbuk's. A dybbuk who is collaboration made manifest."

  "A dybbuk you must vow to kill."----

  ----"Oh my God, they've killed you."

  Solomon blinked and saw someone crawling rapidly toward him through the grass. As he neared, Sol could see that it was Max, a man in his early twenties. He looked over his shoulder to assure he was not seen.

  "I'm alive," Sol whispered hoarsely. He thrust a hand between the cage bars to wave Max away. "Get back to the others. The Nazis'll shoot you if they catch you roaming about."

  Max drew near and stopped, panting fiercely. "No one's paying attention to us. Even the sentries aren't watching." He stabbed an index finger toward the nearest tower. "The rest are all down at the east end, with their rifles ready. Look! See them?" He pointed toward the far edge of the perimeter, beyond which stood the Zana-Malata's hut. "And there, just outside the jungle. Do you see them?"

  "The Kalanaro?" Sol asked.

  Max nodded.

  At the east end, someone fired a shot in the air, and Sol watched in disgust as the Nazis hooted and jumped about in triumph when the Kalanaro disappeared into the bush.

  "It's this place." Max looked around timidly at the jungle. "This Africa. It isn't real."

  "I think there are probably some pretty strange things in Africa," Sol said. "Things no Whites will ever understand. But this...." He too looked around, though more in anger than fear. "This isn't Africa. This is Europe--transplanted."

  Yet his mind wasn't on his words. He was mulling over what Max had said. Where among the camp shadows, he wondered, did reality end and illusion begin? And was that the demarcation--if one existed--between his dreams and his wakefulness?

  "Why do the Nazis hate Jews?" Max asked abruptly. He turned onto his side and watched the spectacle at the far end of the camp as though he were lazing on a village green, listening to a summer ensemble. "I've been thinking about that a lot, lately. They can't all think we were responsible for the death of their Christ. They've officially renounced Christianity anyway. They know we fought alongside them in the Great War, and surely they all can't be so blind as really to believe that 'subhuman' business. Look at what we've done, Rabbi! The schools we've founded, the Nobel Prizes we've won, the courts...." The ease left him, and his face squinched with incomprehension.

  He stared at the sky, apparently too saddened to express himself in words any longer.

  "They don't hate the Jews," Sol said.

  "What?" Max eyed him with suspicion. "And to think I called you 'rabbi'!"

  "This time the persecution's no purge or pogrom. Those days died out with the Christian kings, who wanted to kill us only if they couldn't convert us. In their minds, our religion posed a threat to the world's salvation. What Beadle Treichzat termed a 'rational' hate. Like hating an enemy."

  Squinting, Sol could see the white-splotched faces of the Kalanaro slowly emerge from the foliage. "With the birth of modern dictators, we've become the focus of an irrational hatred. Like being afraid of the dark. The Nazis don't hate us--they fear us. They don't want to convert us to National Socialism, they want to exterminate us. We represent reason and scholarship and justice, the very things the Fascists and Communists must burn from the globe if their ideologies are to survive. We're the finger-pointers...those who remind
the world's conscience that 'Thou Shalt Not.'"

  "Moral law," Max said, eyes brightening with admiration as he picked up the thread of Sol's logic, "versus the law of the jungle." He squeezed Sol's hand and smiled. "I shall find the Oberst and request your release," he said. "If they want someone in there, let them take me. You are needed here."

  He smiled one more time and, turning, crawled away on his belly like a guerrilla.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Bruqah maneuvered the growling tank along the track that now pierced the rain forest and ran up to the gravesite. Erich looked out over the foliage into a sun that appeared to have been dipped in Miriam's rouge and hung in a sky colored by her blue eye shadow. Directly above him, cirrus clouds the color of beaten copper feathered the sky. Watching as the glow dulled and the deep, aquamarine bay took on a crinkled sheen, he asked himself why he had never noticed such things until Miriam came to live with him.

  Came to live with him?

  Hardly the right words--but he had put his bitterness behind him, he was sure of that. The days when he worried about her emotional outlook toward him--and did demeaning things to win her approval--were part of a world gone mad. Love took many forms, myriad faces; what she felt toward him would change when he showed her how high he was capable of rising above the Nazi miasma.

  The tank reached the bottom of the saddle between the two hills and angled up the second slope, the forest once again enclosing the machine as though in a tunnel. Sunlight filtered between fronds, dappling the machine and making the leaves spangle. Branches scraped along the sides or swooped low as if to decapitate him. The tank growled and jolted as its blade shoved aside felled trees and brush. He supposed he should exult in how rapidly and efficiently the Jews were opening up the forest, but he found himself surprisingly saddened by the neat roadways and new clearings the axes and blast cord created. The rain forest gave him the boyish delight of secret places, secret things, mysteries begging to remain unsolved. Perhaps his decision to have the Jews broaden the larger of the two paths that led from the hut to the valavato had been unwise, even if it had made military sense. He would have preferred to keep the hill more remote. His place except when it was needed to defend against attack.