The Holocaust Opera

by Mark Edward Hall

  Jeremiah stared at me with wet eyes. “What do you mean? Of course they did. They left the confession.”

  “Think about it, Jeremiah. Think about all the stuff you just told me. Your father was determined to destroy Mengele and he would have done anything. Maybe your parents were on the verge of warning the world of what might happen. We know for a fact that Friedman had figured it out. Maybe Friedman didn’t kill himself either.”

  Jeremiah stared at me, and I could tell that I was getting through to him. I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said: It is a virus, Roxanne. Once it gets inside you, you can’t get it out.

  Suddenly, I thought I understood what Mengele’s plan had been all along. His intention was for the entire world to become infected with whatever hidden evil lay buried inside the music. He’d tried unsuccessfully to work his evil magic with Aaron and Eva Gideon and when he knew he would fail, he worked some kind of Nazi magic and brought a child into the world, pre-programmed to do his terrible bidding for him. Jeremiah was good. Somehow, Mengele had failed. God, I wanted so much to believe that.

  The mathematics is skewed. The compositions are tainted with something.

  Dear God, Mengele—wherever he had come from, whatever he was—wanted mass suicide, mass hysteria. It would be his ultimate and parting gift to the world. I stood up quickly, adrenalin pumping through my bloodstream as the truth slammed home.

  It is a virus, Roxanne. Once it gets inside you, you can’t get it out.

  Jeremiah stood up and I lunged at him, pounding my fists against his chest, sobbing. “You bastard,” I said. “You knew, and yet you allowed me to come into your world. You allowed me to fall in love with you, you son of a bitch!” Jeremiah dropped his hands to his sides and made no attempt to fight back, or to stop me for that matter. He stared straight ahead as I beat on his chest, his eyes overflowing with tears as they slid down his cheeks. Finally, when I was physically and emotionally exhausted, I stopped and fell against him as convulsive sobs wracked my body.

  “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I should have resisted you. I should have sent you away. But I was weak, and alone. I thought that maybe things would get better if I let someone into my life. I was wrong. You can go now, if you want.”

  “Is that it?” I asked, pushing roughly away from Jeremiah. “You can go now? After everything I know? After all we’ve been through together? You can go now?”

  “It’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “No! It’s not what I want. I don’t care who you are, or where you came from. I love you, Jeremiah.” I searched his eyes, and I saw something in them that gave me hope. Perhaps it was an illusion, perhaps he was the greatest magician or the most cunning deceiver in the world, but I wanted to believe that he had the power to resist Mengele’s persuasions. God, I wanted so much to believe.

  I knew right then and there that if we were going to get out of this terrible mess alive, I would have to be strong. I could not afford any more tears or energy-burning outbursts.

  “Jeremiah, how did Professor Friedman get a copy of your compositions?”

  Jeremiah stared at me in bewilderment.

  “Come on,” I said. “We don’t have time to sit around here feeling sorry for ourselves. Tell me how he got them.”

  “I don’t know,” Jeremiah said. “We made some while I was still at school, but I took them all back when I left. Unless...”

  “Unless what, Jeremiah?”

  “Unless he gave it to him.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “They knew each other? Do you think Mengele saw to it that Friedman got a copy?” I was pacing the floor in front of Jeremiah now, running my hands through my hair trying to fit the pieces of the zaniest jigsaw puzzle in the world together. “We have got to stop them from playing that tape on the radio. Do you understand?”

  “The opera’s not finished,” Jeremiah said.

  “It doesn’t matter. Don’t you see? Even if you don’t finish it, even if Mengele’s sick vision never comes to its full potential, there’s enough evil in those songs to cause a catastrophe. In a city this size, millions could go berserk and commit suicide, or kill each other.”

  I went for the phone and grabbed it up, dialing 911. “I need to talk to someone at the police,” I told the man on the other end.

  “What does this concern?” the voice asked.

  “It concerns the death of a Doctor Friedman last night and a tape that was found near him. They don’t have to play it on the radio. I know who the composer is.”

  “Do you now, Miss Templeton,” the soothing voice answered and I froze in terror.

  “Who is this?” I asked through numb lips, but I thought I knew.

  “It is your friend from the zoo. The executioner. You remember me, don’t you, Miss Templeton? By the way, how is the dear little kitten, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I breathed. “How did you know—?”

  “Where my son is concerned I, know everything.”

  “He’s not yours, you sick fuck!”

  “Ah, but he is. Nothing you do or say will ever change that.”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “I’m upstairs playing with the dead. We’re preparing to have a little party in preparation for the completion of our fine opera, and the debut of some of its songs on the greater metropolitan airways. The opera cannot be finished without its esteemed composer, so, if you don’t mind, I would appreciate you bringing my son to me now.”

  I threw the phone away with revulsion and looked at Jeremiah. His eyes were round and wet and filled with terror. “He got through, didn’t he?”

  I nodded as tears of terror slid down my cheeks.

  “I never should have opened that door.”

  “Oh, Christ, Jeremiah,” I said. “Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll go to the police and tell them the story and beg them not to play the tape.”

  Jeremiah nodded earnestly, looking as though he was relieved that someone had thought of this simple solution.

  “What time is it?” I asked, noticing through the window that it was nearly dark outside.

  Jeremiah looked at his watch. “It’s almost quarter to five.”

  I lunged for the door, grabbed the doorknob, turned, and pushed, but the door would not move. I pushed all my weight against it and still it did not budge. I screamed in frustration.

  “Let me try,” Jeremiah said. I moved aside as he slammed his weight against it. It still did not open. He turned and grabbed up a chair, and in a rage smashed it against the basement window behind the sofa. The chair’s legs hit the glass and shattered into splinters. The glass remained intact.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “It’s him. He’s not going to let us leave.”

  “There’s only one thing we can do,” said Jeremiah.

  “What?”

  “We have to give him what he wants.”

  That’s when Jeremiah’s eyes began to change. It was just a subtle change, like a calm body of water that has suddenly been rippled by a passing squall. My body stiffened as I watched the change, knowing beyond a doubt now that something supernatural did lurk behind Jeremiah’s façade of complexities. I began backing away, moving my head slowly from side to side. “We can’t,” I said.

  “We must,” Jeremiah said, coming forward and taking hold of my wrist. “It’s the only way we’ll get out of here alive.”

  “At what cost, Jeremiah? Haven’t enough people died by that butcher’s hand?”

  Jeremiah put the index finger of his other hand vertically against his lips to shush me, and I knew that he was right, that the only chance we had of escaping this nightmare was to make Mengele believe that we would give him what he wanted. Jeremiah let go of my wrist and picked the phone up off the floor putting it to his ear. “Are
you still there?” he said. He nodded a couple of times and said no more. He laid the phone back in its cradle and went to the door, motioning for me to follow.

  * * * *

  It opened this time, only instead of turning left toward the outside, Jeremiah turned right toward the stairs. I followed him, the urge to bolt strong in me. I was just kidding myself. I knew the door wouldn’t open. We were in this for the long haul, like it or not. So I followed behind Jeremiah, the dread growing in me like a tumor. At the end of the corridor Jeremiah stopped as we both stared at the door to apartment #2. Without touching it, the door began to creak slowly open.

  From somewhere beyond, music played.

  Jeremiah stepped over the threshold and into the darkened kitchen, halting to accustom his eyes before he began again, a cautious step at a time. I followed, feeling numb, absolutely certain that each breath I took would be my last. At the archway to the living room, Jeremiah halted again. There was a murmur of voices from within, almost whispered, delicate and cadenced, like a television with the volume on low. Behind the cadenced voices the music played on, poignant, gorgeous, the sound of angels weeping. I began to cry, for I recognized the melody as one of Jeremiah’s compositions.

  Jeremiah stepped into the room and I followed, moving to his left and gripping his arm tightly. I was not sure that I wanted to witness whatever atrocities Mengele was offering up even as my wet eyes remained wide open in inquiry. At first, I saw nothing, but as my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, the room began to give up its secrets.

  Jeremiah gasped and took a step back. I dropped my grip on his arm and took another step forward, squinting to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. I was. There could be no mistake. Aaron and Eva Gideon were alive. Hours ago, they had been dead, both sitting at the piano with their blackened heads bowed, knitting needles protruding from their ears. I wasn’t really surprised. Since coming to New York and meeting up with Jeremiah, my life had been filled with illusions. Why should this moment be any different? The illusion could be that they were still dead, I supposed, not alive, as they now appeared, and this intimation of life might well be the deception. Or perhaps they had never been dead at all and what I’d seen then was the illusion. Ah well, there wasn’t much point in further speculation. I would know the truth, sooner than later. I was suddenly quite sure of that.

  The Gideons were sitting side by side on a sofa against the far wall, staring toward me and their son. A burning candle on the coffee table illuminated their features in ghostly relief while casting their shadows against the wall behind them like dark monsters. Back to at the piano, playing Jeremiah’s composition sat a man I recognized immediately, even from behind; the gray hair, the impeccable clothing, the white gloves. There could be no mistake. The executioner had come calling. He did not turn to greet us, just kept playing that maddeningly beautiful song.

  “Come,” Aaron Gideon said, motioning me forward, “and bring our son with you.” I turned and saw the frozen look on Jeremiah’s face. I took his hand and pulled. His feet reluctantly came unglued from the floor as he followed along, not for a moment taking his astonished eyes off his parents. The song played on. I made sure to skirt the piano widely, not wanting to come within reaching distance of the executioner and his intentions, whatever they might be.

  “It’s good to see you,” Aaron said as we approached. I noticed that they were dressed as they had been earlier: Aaron in his black tuxedo, Eva in her white evening gown. Both garments were immaculate now, clean and impossibly unruffled. Hours earlier, draped on corpses, they had been moldy and tattered.

  “What is this?” Jeremiah said, the incredulity harsh in his voice. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “We’ve come back,” Aaron said.

  “Back?” Jeremiah echoed. “How? Why?”

  “It was Josef,” Eva replied. “He found out about us and brought us back.” Eva smiled at her son, but there was nothing pretty or sincere in the gesture. It was a forced smile, that of a mannequin, as though there was a hand in her head shaping it. Jeremiah sensed the wrongness of it too, I could tell by his hesitation.

  “You’re not real,” he said. “You think you can fool me, but you can’t.”

  “Yes, darling, we’re real,” Eva said, the disconcerting smile frozen on her face. “I don’t know how or why, but we are. We’ve just had a long sleep, that’s all.”

  “Sleep?” Jeremiah said, his voice sharp with amazement. “Is that what you call it? Sleep? You were dead. You killed yourselves like cowards, and then you wouldn’t allow me to tell the world, or even bury you!”

  “We couldn’t.”

  “Is that monster my father?” Jeremiah asked, pointing toward Mengele, who was still sitting coolly behind the piano playing the gorgeously impassioned melody. “Is all of that shit you wrote and left me the truth?”

  “Yes, he is the father,” Eva said. “It is all true.”

  “The father?” Jeremiah asked. “Is he my father?”

  “He is the father of darkness,” Aaron said. “The Angel of Death.”

  “In him we all have a father,” Eva added.

  “No,” Jeremiah said, backing away. “This isn’t right. You’re not my parents. Let’s get out of here, Roxanne. This is bullshit.”

  We turned away from the Gideons with their Botox smiles and headed back toward the archway. The executioner rose slowly from the piano stool. The music had stopped, but in its wake other sounds were coming into play: weeping children, the roaring of immense furnaces, gruff orders barked in German, barking dogs, the distant sound of a high-pitched train whistle. Before we could take more than two steps, the light from the single candle behind us brightened, throwing our shadows forward onto the archway opening as if it were now a movie screen and we were to be the night’s entertainment. I soon realized, however, that there was no screen there. The archway had become a swirl of black ink and the kitchen beyond had completely disappeared. There were no walls. There was no floor with its colorful linoleum, no cupboards to rifle through or windows to look out of. There was only a swirling blackness that seemed to be shaping our shadows into images of death and despair. The archway had become a doorway into the past—blackened smokestacks delivered the ashes of the cremated into an eerie alien sky. There were rows of wooden barracks with lines of the colorfully-clad condemned, shivering with cold, the terror at the realization of their fates plainly visible on their faces. There was a train station with a rag-tag band playing a discordant melody as a man that could only be Josef Mengele perused a line of prisoners, separating them with his riding crop: death to the left, life to the right. Foamy-mouthed German Shepherd dogs with wild red yes pulled against their leads as handlers struggled to hold them back.

  The floor beneath my feet suddenly seemed insubstantial. I had stopped, as had Jeremiah, to witness the atrocities through the doorway beyond, but the floor seemed to be tipping us toward the archway, wanting to deliver us into that terrible place and time.

  “You must finish the opera,” Mengele said to Jeremiah. He was standing between us and the piano, gesturing for Jeremiah to sit down and play. “Come. It shouldn’t take long.”

  “No! Never!” Jeremiah said. “I will not do your dirty work for you.”

  “You must. You are the only one left with the talent. It is the reason you were brought upon this world.”

  “Then if I die, there will be no one left,” said Jeremiah, and I could hear the revelation in his voice. I wanted to scream, for I suspected what Jeremiah was about to do. I was helpless to aid him. I was sliding toward that improbable opening into Hell. Although Jeremiah stood on the tilting floor with me, he didn’t seem to be affected by its actions. I reached out and tried to grab hold of him, but it was too late, I was going down and he was moving in the opposite direction, toward the piano. I did scream then, loud and long.

&nb
sp; My feet went out from under me and I landed on my back, cutting off the scream and knocking the wind from my lungs. My fingers scratched for purchase, I dug my heels in, trying to hold myself back. Beyond the doorway, the scene had changed. Now, it was similar to the images in Jeremiah’s story; half-human creatures combusted and writhed; there were grinning Nazis with distorted features, ropes of steaming intestines looped around their bodies. The heads of children hung from the rafters of a vast wood-frame building, their milky eyes staring in shock.

  “Enough!” Jeremiah screamed and the shifting floor halted and tilted slightly back. “I will give you what you want. Just leave her alone.”

  “Very well,” the executioner said.

  I was scratching like mad at the elevated floor, trying desperately not to slip into the nightmare world beyond the archway.

  “No, Jeremiah,” I screamed. “Don’t give that bastard anything. He thinks he’s a god, but he’s nothing but a piece of shit.”

  Mengele’s head snapped around unnaturally and his eyes, now red and glowing, drilled through me. Horns began growing from his frontal lobes. “Look,” he said, pointing at the screen, smiling his dreadful yellow smile. “Tell me if you like what you see.”

  The image beyond the door had changed for a third time. I saw the woman who had been haunting my dreams of late, beaten, lacerated, and cowering in a corner, her arms outstretched in supplication. Then I saw a room with an iron bed. I saw the woman strapped spread-eagled to that bed, naked, so terribly vulnerable. She was beautiful, but familiar somehow. Beneath her beauty, something dreadful lurked, some morbid knowledge or resignation.

  Oh, my God, I’m dreaming this, I thought, as a small blossom of suspicion began to open in my mind.

  “I can make that real for you,” Mengele said to me, pointing at the woman beyond. “Go if you like! She’s been waiting for your return.” He turned back toward Jeremiah. “Do you want to save her?” he said. “You can, you know. Just sit down and play.”

  Jeremiah looked from me to the anguished woman beyond the doorway, then back at me, and I saw grim enlightenment come over his face. “Who is she?” he said, his voice full of suspicion.