by Willow Rose
My mother shook her head in worry and disbelief. “What’s wrong with him? He has had that fever for a week now.”
“It must be some infection. The fever is a clear sign that something is really wrong in the body. I think it might be in his blood. Some infection in his blood.”
“Oh dear god. What can we do?” My mother asked.
The doctor shook his head slowly while putting his instruments back in his bag. “There is nothing to do. There is no medicine these days with the war and all. Especially not for a Jewish boy.”
My mother nodded seriously. “But is there nothing we can do?”
“I am afraid not. The infection will kill him eventually. He won’t make it through a whole winter in this state. He won’t survive. I’m sorry Mrs. Margulies. I truly am. There is nothing I can do for him.”
I didn’t feel very sick listening to them talk about me, but his statement frightened me. I started shaking and suddenly felt very sick, like the blood had left my body and there was nothing left but an empty shell.
I looked at my reflection in the silverware on my plate. My skin was pale but my hair seemed longer and thicker than ever. I stared at my arms while my mother paid the doctor for his visit and they both left my room like I had never been in there. My muscles seemed to have grown as I was looking at my body in the bed. This couldn’t be the body of a sick person. I listened to their voices as they went down the stairs and to my surprise I could hear them talk when they went outside and my mother said goodbye to the doctor. Not just a mumbling but every word. I heard their voices loud and clear and I soon realized that I even heard their thoughts! This couldn’t be, I thought to myself. But I had no doubt. I soon learned there is a very distinct difference between voices and thoughts. Thoughts have no continuity. They are merely a lot of images and words mixed up and most of the time they only make sense to the person having them. Now I was suddenly listening in on my mother’s thoughts and found myself picking her most inner emotions and secrets. I wasn’t proud of it but never found anything in there I couldn’t love or forgive. She was as pure as anything I had ever met. I don’t think I have ever picked on a mind this pure since.
What I learned was that she was very concerned about my health but somehow inside she felt at peace. She knew that I was going to make it even if the doctor told her otherwise. Her motherly instinct told her so and no doctor could ever convince her otherwise. There was nothing wrong with her son, she would know if there were, she told herself. A high fever that to most people would be life-threatening, yes those were the facts, she knew that in her mind. But her heart told her something else. It told her that her son was strong and with her love he would make it through.
I agreed.
Chapter 6
I DID FEEL WORSE in the coming days and began to worry the doctor had been right. I slept most of the days away. Now and then I woke with screams from a deep nightmare and my mother nursed me back to sleep like she had done when I was a child. It seemed she hardly ever left my side. Every time I opened my eyes she was there, looking at me with her concerned eyes and forced smile. She was praying over me, reading scriptures for God’s healing and sometimes she was crying. She tried to hide it, but I could tell.
My father came to see me once a day. I wasn’t always awake to see him, but the few times I was, I greatly enjoyed him being there. It was hard on him as well, I could tell. But he was better at hiding it.
“You’ll be well soon, son. Up and running before we know it,” he kept saying. “You still look good. Pale but strong. You’ll make it. Just fight for it. You are strong. Don’t give up.”
In a brief awake moment I promised him I wouldn’t give up.
Meanwhile the inside of me was a mess. I heard people’s thoughts and had them mixed up so I couldn’t decipher which belonged to who when there was more than one person in the room. I saw images coming from their minds that I had no idea what to do about. I had it all mixed up with my feverish dreams and everything soon became like a blur to me. Catalina haunted my dreams and so did the ferocious beast until it became a true monster in my dreams. It was like it grew for every time I dreamt about it. It became bigger and more vicious in every dream. When I was asleep the beast haunted me as did Catalina, when I was awake I felt a heavy burden of guilt. Guilt for having survived the encounter while all the soldiers had been killed. Why me? I kept asking myself. Why had the beast chosen to spare my life of all?
I didn’t understand. It was like it chose deliberately to save me from the certain death of being shot, but then it attacked me anyway. It bit me. I was sure of that much even if I couldn’t see the bite any longer; I still remembered it like it had just happened. It was so vivid in my mind, the feeling of the teeth penetrating my skin and veins. Why would it do that if it didn’t intend to eat me, if it didn’t want to devour my flesh? The bite on my throat had felt so gentle, like the beast was deliberately sparing me any pain.
It was like it didn’t want me to feel anything. But then why bite me?
I never told anyone about my thoughts and concerns. There was so much I didn’t comprehend, so much I wondered about, but I never wanted to burden my family with it especially since I knew they had no answers and would never understand. In their eyes I only had to thank God and my guardian angel for having watched over me that day. I should be grateful and move on. But how could I when I didn’t understand even the simplest thing like why I was still alive? Why did I feel so different if I was still the same?
Every day I woke up and looked at my body and felt like I didn’t know it any longer. It wasn’t even my body anymore. I used to be tall and skinny, lanky even. But now my muscles seemed to have grown and when I looked at my reflection I saw a grown man looking back at me. Was it merely the experience that had changed me? Was it because I had faced death? Because I had seen the cruelty of this cold, damned world? Had that changed everything, even the look in my eyes that for every day resembled more and more that of an animal?
I wasn’t so sure. My eyes had always been a greyish kind of blue but it seemed they had changed into a deeper blue. The same blue as the ocean or the sky on a nice summer day. My vision was improving as well. Every day I spotted new details in the room and even out of my small window. I could see farther and farther away and spotted small movements between the bushes or in the trees far away.
I became ultra sensitive to sounds. Small noises irritated me and made me jumpy. My resting was disturbed by my family talking in a room downstairs or the sound of my dog wagging its tail across the floor in the kitchen. I heard people fighting in houses in a valley far away on the other side of our estate. Someone sneezing or a horse’s hooves in the gravel somewhere could keep me awake for a long time. Even the sound of leaves falling would disturb me.
Then there were the smells. I had a hard time coping with all those horrible smells. I could smell the stables from my room. I could smell the forest even if it was winter. I could smell the animals in there; point out their exact whereabouts just by their scent. I could determine what kind of animal it was just by the scent. I never doubted if it was a deer, a rabbit or a bird. I could smell them from far away and they all awoke something in me, something that felt like an old instinct.
The food my mother brought couldn’t catch my interest. Not the porridge, nor the freshly baked bread or soup. I couldn’t eat it. It wasn’t because I had lost my appetite. On the contrary. Fever or not I was constantly hungry. It was because I was craving something completely different. My body longed, almost demanded to have meat. Not the cooked kind, but the raw kind, the bloody and fleshy kind. I craved it like a madman. I even dreamt about it and sometimes caught myself daydreaming about it.
It became almost an obsession.
Something was definitely happening to me and it frightened me from time to time. It was as if I had lost control over my own body, which I didn’t like. I was afraid yet strangely curious.
Slowly the fever decreased and soon it was gone. I began to feel stro
nger and left the bed for a few hours a day. When it didn’t worry or frighten me, the change slowly began to fascinate me. To my surprise my legs felt stronger than ever despite my having been in bed for this long. They were bigger, too. I couldn’t fit in any of my old pants. Nor did any of my old shirts fit me. I had somehow grown, my muscles had grown. Not just a little bit like a teenage boy usually does, this was a lot.
“That’s odd,” my mother said when she tried to help me get dressed one day. “I thought you would have lost weight while lying in bed with a fever, but you have grown. A lot even.” She looked at me with concerned eyes.
I smiled gently while looking at myself in the mirror. Even my hair looked stronger and healthier. It had grown beyond my shoulders. Even if my mother had cut it, it grew back and touched my shoulders in just a few days.
“Well I guess one of your brothers could give you some of their clothes,” she sighed. Then she ran a hand through my hair. “And we need to trim this as well again. You look like an animal.”
I nodded still while looking at myself. I liked what I saw. It had a wildness, a rawness to it. I had always combed it back in a slick way to try and look like my dad, but I wasn’t going to do that anymore. I looked at my hands. They were hairier and bigger than before. I loved big hands. I had always had small hands that were way too feminine for a man. Now I had real manly hands like my father and brothers. They seemed to be even bigger than theirs. I seemed to be even stronger and bigger than they were now. I liked that. There would be no more bullying me, no more throwing me in the pile of horse’s dung just because I was the youngest and weakest.
My mother left and came back with one of my older brother’s shirts. It didn’t fit either.
“We’ll have to try Leon’s then,” she said. Then she left.
I chuckled while staring at myself. Leon was the oldest and biggest of my brothers. Could it be that I was as big as him now? I had always wanted to be. I turned and looked at my body, studied its many new details.
I realized I had begun to grow hair on my chest. But not only there. I turned slightly and discovered that I had started to grow hair almost everywhere now. Even on my shoulders. My eyebrows had become bushier and so wide they almost touched in the middle. It gave me a vicious expression far from the pretty-boy face I was so known for. My mother said she didn’t care much for it, she liked the boyish charm I had always possessed and it saddened me that she felt that way, because I quickly grew quite fond of it. The ferocious beast, the wild man that had always lived inside of me had finally broken out. It was new, it was different and it gave me the confidence that I had always wanted. My mother scolded me and called me wild and out of control, but I liked this new me.
I began longing for the big outdoors. Spring was still far away and we were absolutely forbidden to go outside, except my father and oldest brother who would hunt in the forest and bring back meat for the entire family. Oh, how I envied them watching from my window as they rode away on the back of their horses. I wanted so badly to go hunting with them. Not for the same reasons as they. They went to provide for their family, to bring home food, for survival. I wanted the kill. I craved the raw, fleshy, bloody meat of my prey. I wanted to sink my teeth into the salty raw meat, to drink its blood. Every day I was deprived from it I grew more and more irritated, restless, agonized. I was growling and hissing at everybody, even my dear mother who told me she hardly recognized me; she hardly knew who I was.
I felt horrible for hurting her.
Then finally in mid-January 1941 when the snow fell hard on the countryside and blocked all of the roads, it happened.
It began with thick grey hairs growing out everywhere on my skin. It was after sunset, and I had already gone to my bedroom for the night so luckily no one saw what was happening to me. I stared at my own reflection in the mirror on the wall. What were those stiff hairs on the top of my hands? I lifted them in the light to better see. They didn’t look anything like my normal hair or the soft light hairs on my body. I lifted my shirt and realized they were growing out everywhere. On my chest, my arms and legs. I remember touching them, feeling their stiffness and wondering what was happening to me? Could it be some sort of disease? Was something terribly wrong?
Right there, in my room, in front of the mirror I was suddenly struck by a horrifying, overwhelming fear that caused me to kneel on the floor. It was followed by a horrendous pain in my hands and fingers as I felt something grow out, almost burst out of me from my insides. It was like an explosion inside of my body. I held my hands to my face as a tremendous headache struck me, feeling like my face was about to shatter.
Seconds later, everything went completely black.
Chapter 7
I WOKE UP NOT knowing where I was. I thought I had been dreaming, a terrible nightmare. It was cold, I was freezing, and my entire body was trembling. I soon realized I was lying outside in the snow, somewhere in the forest, surrounded by trees in a clearing of some sort. It was no longer dark. A heavy sky of grey clouds was hanging over my head.
My head, I thought and touched it. The pain, I remembered having pain and then ... then nothing. I sat up and looked at myself. I realized to my surprise that I was completely naked. My hair was wet, my arms and legs sore and I felt exhausted, like I had been running all night.
It was dawn now. As I slowly woke up I realized there was something next to me. I jumped upright with a gasp. Next to where I had been sleeping lay a small dead rabbit, half-eaten. Next to it another one. The blood had colored the snow red around them. I jumped at the sight of it then turned and looked into the eyes of a deer, a dead deer also half-eaten, blood smeared all over the snow surrounding it. With much difficulty I got up on my two feet and looked at the place where I had been sleeping. The entire clearing looked like a massacre. Deer, rabbits, even sheep. Killed, slaughtered and then eaten.
I was startled. What had happened?
It was getting brighter now and I suddenly feared getting exposed. I was shaking with cold and fear. Then I started running, running through the forest and towards my father’s estate. As I ran I slowly recognized parts of the forest and I knew I was far away from home, but still on my father’s property. I kept wondering how on earth I had come all the way out there, and on foot? The worst part was I remembered absolutely nothing from the night before. I kept going over what I could recall. I remembered being in my room, I remembered not feeling well, I remembered the hairs and then the pain. After that was blank, like a dream. Small moments started coming back to me, darkness that surrounded me, absorbed me, paws in the snow, running, the sound of heavy breathing, animals fleeing, teeth gnarling, a snarling sound, flesh being torn, ripped, blood spurting. I gasped for breath as I ran through the icy wind on my naked body. I shivered with cold, my teeth clanking, my fingers were turning purple. Could I have killed those animals?
Finally I reached my home and found the front door open. Had I left it open? I sneaked in and up the stairs hoping and praying to not be seen or heard by anyone. I reached my room and threw myself on the bed, exhausted, completely drained.
Then I fell into a deep and heavy sleep.
My oldest brother Leon woke me up. I was confused and startled. He wasn’t alone. He had one of my other brothers with him.
“Wake up, little brother,” Leon said poking me. “You have slept all day.”
I sat up with a grunt. The light from outside hurt my eyes. I felt horrible. Completely worn out. I had muscle pain in both legs and arms.
“It’s almost evening,” my second brother Isaac said. “Mom wants you to at least come down for dinner.”
I sighed and rubbed my head. It felt like I had needles inside of me, my insides made of glass that had shattered overnight. “I can’t,” I moaned. “I feel terrible. I’m not hungry at all.”
I knew it had to sound strange in those times when everybody was starving and there wasn’t enough of anything. But I felt no hunger whatsoever. Not even a little bit. Leon picked up my shi
rt and trousers from the floor and threw it at me.
“Get dressed. You’re coming down for dinner. Father and Mother want you to be there, so you better obey.”
My mind drifted while thinking about Catalina during dinner. I recalled the look in her eyes as she was taken away in the black car and felt a sadness grow inside. Even though I had only known her for a few hours I felt so connected to her. I wondered with fear what had happened to her afterwards. I had heard the stories that my brothers told me about camps that no one ever returned from.
The war was the subject of this dinner conversation as well, as usual. Ever since King Carol II had abdicated in September and gone into exile in Mexico he had left this country in the hands of the pro-German administration of Marshal Ion Antonescu and his brutal Iron Guard. That meant very hard times for all minority groups in Romania, among them the Jews and the Romani-people, often referred to as the gypsies. My brothers were discussing this development during dinner with my father.
“We need to stand up for our rights,” my brother Isaac said. “They are killing people all over the country in brutal massacres and no one is doing a damn thing about it.”
“What do you want to do?” my father said. “It’s happening all over Europe. The important thing is to stay safe.”
“And hide like cowards?” Isaac said. “When we should be fighting? We should be helping these people, our people.”
My father sighed deeply while eating his soup slowly. He had lost a lot of weight the past few months. His cheekbones were showing and when he lifted his spoon I noticed his collarbone was a lot more apparent than it used to be.
“We’re up against powerful forces here. I don’t think there is much we can do,” he said. “You’ll only risk your life and the whole family’s as well. If we stay here on our property and not bother anyone then they’ll leave us alone. Then we will be safe.”