by I V Olokita
To those who smile, wherever they may be.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, locales, institutions, events, and incidents are the product of the writer’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to any persons, alive or dead, is purely coincidental
Reasons to Kill God
I. V. Olokita
Copyright © 2018 I. V. Olokita
All rights reserved; No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, of the author.
Translated from Hebrew by Zvi Chazanov
Editor Janet Ruth
Website: www.reasons-to-kill-god.com
Contact: [email protected]
Contents
The Trial
It Happened for a Reason
Jesus the redeemer
A true story
Reconnecting
Another true story
It happened under my very nose
A property for sale
My guardian angels
God Works in Mysterious Ways
Facing my Demons
About the author
Message from the author
“Everybody aspires that at least one’s death will turn him into a good memory. However, my father is gone now, yet he, like so many mortals, stands trial before me.”
Chapter 1
The Trial
“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”
“I do, your honor,” I replied, loud and clear.
“Are you Mateus Esperança?” the Prosecutor asked.
“Yes, I am,” I replied once again, with confidence.
Silence fell over the makeshift courthouse erected especially for me in that godforsaken town, usually visited by only ghosts and mortals gone astray.
“Was your previous name Klaus Holland? Are you the son of Maria and Albert Holland?” the Prosecutor kept asking, without waiting for my answer.
“Yes,” I confirmed, triggering an explosion of loud curses, cries, and wailings, which the Judge’s gavel tried in vain to suppress.
“Quiet, quiet! Order in the court!” a dark-skinned, great-legged court orderly cried on and on, almost cracking his voice.
“Please, tell me, sir, about your procedure over there, in Undespul Camp,” the Prosecutor enquired once the atmosphere in the courtroom calmed down a little.
“The format was very simple,” I replied.
“Format, sir?” he said.
“Yes, a format, as it is called by viewers of American reality shows,” I replied, slightly amused by my spontaneously clever answer. “Nobody may die until I permit him to.”
“Which means?” the Prosecutor asked with his eyes wide open, and the crowd, too, grew tense with anticipation of my answer.
“Mr. Prosecutor speaks as if he has no idea about concentration camps or a reality TV shows,” I laughed. “But I will gladly explain it to an ignoramus like you: all those who got lucky enough to get there as corpses, and stank accordingly, were thrown from the train straight to the burial pits, and fully covered with lime. Unlike them, those who survived the journey and got off the train alive were given a sleeping berth, clean clothes, a little hot soup and my permission to live another day with us in Undespul.”
“Have you ever granted any of the prisoners the permission to die?” the Prosecutor asked, with a touch of a cynical tone, adding a little wink, as if he was pleased with all my answers so far.
“Certainly, all of them. But not right away, since we had a format to follow,” I replied, with a wink of my own.
“Well, sir, what was that format?” the Prosecutor asked, giving up, at last.
“I was afraid you would never ask, Mr. Prosecutor,” I replied, breathing a sigh of relief. “Well, as I said, the procedure was very simple,” I rolled my eyes upwards in an attempt to recall everything, down to the smallest details. “Every day, I held a lottery, where I picked several lucky long-timers. On some occasions, they were ten, and on other occasions, one hundred. Each prisoner was given one hundred and eighty fresh sheets of paper, a quill pen, and an inkwell, and was told to write down their life story. Everyone who dropped his quill in the midst of writing, succumbing to either hunger or hand pains, was shot right away, while those who managed to complete their life stories, filling up all the sheets on both sides, I kindly granted my permission to summarize what they wrote, with a trembling voice, in front of the entire Camp.”
“And what happened then,” the Prosecutor asked with amazement. “Did you let the winners go?”
“Certainly not! What’s the point, if this was the end!?” I replied, giggling. “That was not part of the format. Then we buried them,” I concluded, taking a little sip of water from the glass which rested on the witness stand in front of me.
“You mean, those who died?” the Prosecutor insisted on using his layman’s terms.
“No, sir. Those were buried long before,” I replied instantly, proceeding without letting him pop more questions. “We buried them all, even the living - the winners. We called it a ‘quick release’.”
The Prosecutor took his glasses off, wiping his eyes as if to remove some irritating piece of sand or rheum, and right afterwards, refitting his glasses on his nose, he remarked with bewilderment absolutely beyond my understanding “But they won!”
“They did,” I replied, “and under the format rules, the winners had the right to read out their life stories to the crowd, and then were buried alive. They were the luckiest ones.”
“Sir!” the Judge interrupted me, “How many people died in this horrendous manner?”
“You mean, won, Your Honor,” I protested quietly. “Won,” I repeated aloud, yet he only kept staring straight into my eyes. I looked at him amazed and then gave the Prosecutor an inquisitive look. After all, it was an excess of judicial authority to manipulate the trial this way.
The courtroom fell silent, with only the rumbling of the fan preventing the microphone in front of me from receiving my pounding heartbeats. Looking around, I saw hundreds, or maybe even thousands of people occupying the wooden benches of the colossal roofed hall built especially for that trial.
I looked at the Judge once again. “As far as I know, when I left the camp there were five thousand people in it,” I finally replied.
Yet the tiny Judge’s face kept reddening, with sweat dripping down his forehead all the way to his cheeks. He combed with his hand the remnants of hair on his head, wiping the back of his hand with his robe, not attempting to conceal this seemingly inappropriate gesture at all. Then, once he calmed down a little and restored his normal breathing, he persistently asked, “And how many were there in the Camp before, since it was opened?”
I shook my head, lifting my eyes up to the ceiling, pretending to calculate, even though I knew the precise number. “From the moment the camp was opened, until I left it, sixty thousand people managed to win under the format rules, while another two hundred and fifty thousand didn’t make it.”
“In other words, under your order, about three hundred thousand people were killed in the Camp?”
“Your Honor, I strongly object!” I cried, rising, before two muscular guards grabbed my shoulders, forcing me back to my seat.
“Your Honor,” I begged his pardon again, this time, with a more appeased tone. “To begin with, as I mentioned before, slightly over three hundred fortunate ones underwent the forma
t. Secondly, Your Honor, I neither killed nor ordered to kill any of those people. They chose their own fate: back then, it was common knowledge that everybody entering the Camp should sign, willingly, an agreement to all the format rules, as they all did.”
“Mr. Holland, do you…?” the Prosecutor attempted to keep asking, yet the Judge interrupted him instantly, making that lanky man in the bluish cotton suit fall silent.
“Mr. Prosecutor, this will not be necessary,” the Judge said, adding right away, “Following the witness’s own words, I can convict and even sentence him right away!”
The Prosecutor turned around, raising his hands and displaying two rows of yellowing teeth to the crowd, as if trying to impress on them he won this case single-handedly.
“Stop it now!” the Judge cried, rising furiously.
“All rise!” the orderly exclaimed, confused, with his coarse voice, making the great crowd rise even though the trial was still on.
The trial was resumed after a several hours’ recess, during which the courtroom was washed and the TV cameras placed in all its corners. At about three o’clock that afternoon, I was escorted back into the court by two guards. A tumultuous crowd crammed the courtroom and all TV cameras were trained on me while I entered the room.
“All rise!” the court orderly cried again, routinely, and the courtroom fell silent. The crowd took their seats, and so did I.
“Well, Mr. Holland, following your confession,” the Judge went on, “and due to the horrible story you told the court, I see no point in any further deliberation of your case. Therefore, I found you guilty of genocide!”
Loud jubilant yells filled the courtroom, gradually giving way to weeping. Most of the crowd seemed to consist of my ex-prisoners in Undespul. “They weren’t even lucky enough to participate in the game,” I thought. “That’s a sufficient reason for delaying the sentence.” I found the thought so amusing I smirked, quickly catching myself hoping no one noticed.
“Does something amuse you, Mr. Holland?” the Judge asked furiously, his face reddening, which occurred frequently during the trial.
“Not at all,” I replied.
“Well, Mr. Holland, I sentence you to death,” the Judge went on, smiling as if paying me in kind, “As for the manner of execution, it will be exactly according to the very rules you designed yourself – to the letter!”
Chapter 2
It Happened for a Reason
Tiny icicles melted off and slid in cold droplets of water from the towering mountains surrounding the town of Udenspul and the vicinity of the Camp I was in charge of running. Little by little, the droplets combined into a stream, joining other streams rushing all over the place, forming the turbulent river which ran through the deserted part of the camp, and then onwards, to France and finally, to the ocean.
Now, where once the earth was coated with thick snow, green spots of grass appeared. I tried to hold my breath so the freezing steam from my mouth won’t come between my eyes and the late winter sights and smells, in that place I loved so dearly. I looked once more at the recently completed grand brick house and the bounds of the Camp. I am doomed to wander once again, I thought, dispirited.
I recalled that even as a child I was forced to leave my house hastily, and for a moment, was startled once again. Back then, just like now, I lifted a child’s eye to the peaks surrounding my parent’s house, yearning for a happy end that never came. Back then, Father and Mother used to fight nearly over everything, until one day, totally by surprise, Father hit Mother with an iron hammer, and she dropped right away. Then, in a matter-of-fact manner, he came out of the house and pulled me by the hand inside. His hand was stained with blood and grease, which mingled into dark brown spots stinking with rusted metal. “Wash your hands and pack some supplies for the road,” Father ordered, and I obeyed at once, while he hastily washed his body in the kitchen sink.
It happened in the year 1895, more than five decades earlier. Yet even now, while I was facing Udenspul peaks and giving them my farewell look before escaping, they seemed exactly as they were in the good old days. The snow of my beloved Germany, which I would never see again, restored the long-lost moisture to my eyes, and for a moment, I was once again the child I’ve always wished to be.
From beyond the bend, a few meters from the deserted castle where we took shelter on our way to Holtzen airfield, the rattling of Jan Olson’s motorbike reached our ears. It was definitely his since none but him dared to drive all the way to Holtzen without an armored escort, in those troubled days at the end of the war. Living was nearly unbearable, with chaos reigning over all that remained of the Germany I used to love so much. US and Allied armies were about to conquer Berlin, and those whom we have been idolizing until recently took their own lives. So now, no news the lad Jan would bring us could have been too surprising.
“The Americans are on their way here!” Jan burst with a loud cry of despair, throwing his bike on the curb and running the rest of the way towards us. I threw a stone at him, hitting exactly at the top of his biker’s helmet he was still wearing, silencing him at once.
“I’m sorry,” Jan hissed when he realized his cries could have doomed us. We already knew of the Americans’ presence near the airfield: as early as 1944, when our defenses in France were breached, every person in his right mind realized that the Third Reich is approaching its end with giant strides. I knew of it too, assuming its last day would come even earlier than it actually did. After all, once we decided to invade Russia, our doom was as evident as the freckles of Ivan, the red-headed radiant-faced Camp sentry.
Since it was against my nature to sit on my hands waiting for my doom, I rose early, packing my little belongings in just one suitcase and putting on a wide-brimmed white hat with a matching four-piece suit. I wrapped my shiny moccasins with a newspaper, tying them to the suitcase with a thread, putting on my feet high boots capable of standing the late-winter mud I expected to deal with on my journey to the airfield. In a smaller bag, I put, wrapped with small pieces of paper, ten ounces of gold, split into ten-gram bars. These were to bribe my way through, wherever I may go. Otto Von Dorff and I have been preparing our escape for a long time, assuming this day will come, eventually. Thus, we made careful plans, as good Germans should. From here, both of us would ride a car, with a driver and a guard all the way to the Swiss border, where a plane was to take us to the god-forsaken resort town of Skipolen. From there we planned to fly abroad, to some country far away, where we could take shelter and embark on a new life.
Otto was somewhat skeptical about the plan, or maybe of our motives for carrying it out. Occasionally, he asked me to give him incentives for it to clear his mind of any doubts. The night before we put our plan to action, he complained once again that all the money we took from the Jews would not suffice for the arduous journey ahead of us. When I objected, he put his bulky hand on my shoulder and sighed, finally realizing the time for arguments was over, and we must take to the road as soon as possible.
The beginning of the trip to the border went with no special difficulties. Albert, who had been my chauffeur for about two years, took the side roads he had memorized for months before the escape, and as usual, he was ahead of us in making his own feverish escape preparations, assuming that if worse came to worst, he would have to fend for himself.
“Could I have escaped all alone, forsaking him?!” I thought with indignation, my face twisting as if I just took a bite of an unripe berry. “How could have I ever done such a thing, and to my most faithful soldier!?” Yet all these contemplations stopped abruptly when Albert suddenly turned the wheel, making the car violently drop to the earthen shoulders and getting stopped by a thorny thicket, with only the windshield between the thorns and our flesh. The engine groaned for a moment and then fell silent. A cloud of dust rose from behind the car, covering us all over. Albert attempted to start the engine but in vain. It gave no signs of life. I looked at
him, and he grew red. Now I was mad at him not only for daring to suspect me of forsaking him but mostly because of his careless driving which got us into such a trouble.
Jan got out of the car, immediately followed by Otto and Albert. I kept sitting inside while my comrades removed the small suitcases from the trunk. Only when I had no choice, I placed my handbag on the vacant driver’s seat, joining my companions outside the car.
“We’ll have to go on foot from here,” Jan said. “I know the route. There is an abandoned castle on a hilltop. I stayed there about six months ago when it served as the Second Army’s HQ. There’s a chance of finding some abandoned car there,” the young officer kept inspiring us all with hopes.
“Well,” I decided, “let’s go.”
After a rather long walk, we reached the castle. We were inspired with a new hope when we learned that Jan’s prediction was absolutely correct: Second Army command and men did withdraw with haste highly uncharacteristic of the Reich’s troops, leaving behind a lot of papers, some food, and even some two-wheeled vehicles no longer useful for an army on the run. Jan quickly mounted a motorbike found in the warehouse, starting it with a swift move. “Shh...,” he hissed at it, like an adulterer does to a too noisy mistress, lest she betrays them to his wife. Then he took the bike to the warehouse door, asking for permission to reconnoiter our surroundings.
“Permission to patrol for no longer than one hour,” I commanded hesitantly, even though none of us were in uniforms anymore.
“Jan, go on one long distance patrol, and a closer one. If there’s any sign of Americans, abort the mission and report to us at once!” Otto added commandingly, to make sure the young man won’t forget his rank and duty.
Once he went on his patrol, Otto and I gathered all the food items and papers scattered all over the ground and first floor of the castle. I told Albert to make a fire in a large metal barrel behind the castle, where we burnt all the paper. Albert obeyed. A fire burst out of the barrel and split into multiple flames while we were feeding it with the thousands of papers and pictures we just picked up all over the castle.