A Man Lies Dreaming

by Tidhar, Lavie

  Suddenly a small smile materialised on Bitker’s face. He laughed. The sound was unexpected, startling. ‘Do you know—!’ he said. ‘If you grew a moustache, you would almost be the spitting image of—’

  ‘Please, Herr Bitker! Do not joke of such things!’

  ‘No, of course not. My apologies.’ Still, some of the man’s good humour seemed to return, as if Wolf’s superficial similarity to that long-vanished leader had put him at ease. He put a hand on Wolf’s shoulder. ‘Listen to me, Wolfson. There is nothing here for you. Nothing remains. The election will not go our way. England will become a hell for the Jews. The Americans are closing their borders to our people. Europe remains hostile to us. There is only one place remaining, Wolfson.’ He stared into Wolf’s eyes with a deep and dark intensity. ‘There is only Palestine, now.’

  ‘We must kill Mosley,’ Wolf blurted.

  ‘Don’t worry about Mosley! That scum will be taken care of.’

  ‘How?’ Wolf said. His hands were shaking with excitement.

  ‘I have said too much. Listen to me, Wolfson. There will be a ship, leaving tomorrow morning before dawn. If things go wrong for us here. Greenwich docks. The SS Exodus. Now go! You’re putting us both in danger.’

  ‘But Herr Bitker! Wait!’ Wolf tried to halt the other man but Bitker shook his head.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said, softly. He shook Wolf’s hand and then, with quick, hurrying steps, disappeared into the grey daylight outside the hotel. Wolf stood staring after him. His brain was awhirl. What had Bitker meant about Mosley? He had successfully caught the Jew off-guard, had extracted valuable information from him. It was obvious there was a threat to Mosley’s life, planned sometime soon, planned, perhaps, for that very evening. He had to warn Mosley.

  Wolf left the hotel and saw Bitker enter an Austin Tourer. It was an ugly two-seater car with an open top. Bitker sat behind the wheel while, beside him, Wolf could make out a face he knew and loathed.

  It was the little sister, Judith Rubinstein.

  She was dressed inexplicably in a domestic servant’s uniform.

  ‘Wait!’ Wolf shouted, but neither heard him. The car’s engine came to life with a hacking cough and the Tourer slid away into the traffic. ‘Judith!’ Wolf cried. ‘Judith!’

  He ran after the car but the road was clear and the car disappeared. Wolf’s lungs burned and his leg throbbed with the old wound.

  He stood there with his hands on his knees, breathing hard.

  He should warn Mosley, he thought dully. A weak sun momentarily shone from a break in the grey clouds. Wolf felt himself filled by the light, once again seemingly detached of space and time: he felt as if he could just float away, into the clouds, for ever; but the feeling passed and he was himself again, and after a moment he straightened up.

  He found a red phone box and went in and shut the door. Reached for coins and gave the operator the number to call. The ringing seemed to fill the air, becoming a flock of dark birds against the cloudy sky.

  ‘Mosley residence.’

  ‘This is Wolf.’

  ‘Mr Wolf! It’s Alderman.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Thomas Alderman, sir. I came to visit you at the hospital.’ There was a note of reproach in the voice.

  Wolf conjured up with some difficulty the image of a serious, pale-faced young man, sitting beside the bed in a high-backed chair, asking him to sign a book. Had that really happened? He thought he had dreamed the episode up – they had given him rather a lot of drugs at the time.

  ‘I must speak with Mosley. It is of the utmost urgency!’

  ‘I am sure. Sir …’

  Wolf did not like the boy’s tone. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.

  ‘Sir, I’m most awfully sorry.’

  Was he too late? Was Mosley even now lying dead or dying by the side of the road or in some beer hall somewhere, or wounded from an assassin’s bullet or mutilated by an explosive device? ‘What is it?’ Wolf said. The dread rose in bubbles above his head, his speech encapsulated inside.

  ‘I’m afraid—’ he could hear the boy swallowing, over the phone. ‘Sir Oswald has found it necessary to terminate your employment.’

  ‘I … what? I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Your services are no longer necessary. I’m so sorry, I really am, Mr Wolf.’

  ‘My … my services? What are you – who do you think – how dare you! How dare you!’ Wolf was screaming at the receiver, his lips trembling in rage, his spit flying onto the mouthpiece of the telephone. ‘I have important news, urgent news for this … little … fucking no-good wannabe Fascist imitator!’

  ‘I truly am very sorry.’

  ‘Sorry? You will be sorry! You will all be sorry!’

  The boy, Alderman, said something, ‘Can I see you?’ perhaps, which would have been an odd thing to say, but anyway Wolf was no longer listening. He bashed the receiver against the phone box, over and over, splintering the casing, wantonly destroying the property of His Majesty’s General Post Office. Having done this, at last, and panting heavily, he exited the red phone box like an Übermensch awakened and transformed.

  * * *

  In a place beyond space and time Shomer stands, his back bent, working. Released from the infirmary he has wandered with a child’s gaze back into the camp. Everything about him has been replaced anew: his wooden clogs, his fetching striped pyjamas, his plate, his spoon. All those he knew are gone and he has been placed into a different block with different company, a new capo to command him, two new bunkmates on either side of him, one tall and skeletal and French, one short and skeletal and Polish. Also in the block is a rabbi, or in fact several rabbis, or perhaps only one rabbi and several yeshiva students (it is hard to tell), who in the rare moments of rest at the end of the day after the soup and before fitful sleep sit together and debate issues of the Torah and the Talmud, and did not Rabbi Akiva say—

  ‘Just as the house is proof of the builder,’ Rabbi Akiva said, ‘and the cloth is proof of the weaver, so is the world proof of its creator, so does the world proclaim the existence of God.’

  And it is certainly something to think about, is it not, Yenkl says, cheerfully. They have given Shomer a new job, too: no longer digging graves but working in a factory, a job as though from very Heaven, where it is warmer than outside, though the breath of the men frosts in the air before them as they work on the assembly line.

  They make doors.

  What the doors are for Shomer doesn’t know. There are hundreds of doors every day going round and round, with men to sand the wood and men to polish it and men to attach the hinges and men to carry the doors to the trucks. Large doors and small doors and toy doors and great big thick doors that would stop a bullet, and it is Shomer’s job to attach the handles, for without a handle, how can a door be opened, and therefore what good is a door? And for each door there is a lock but never not once does he see a key. And every day for hours at a time he stands there with his back bent and his feet throbbing with their new sores and his muscles straining and he attaches handles and every single nail must be accounted for. He sees men die on the assembly line, of accidents and carelessness or for trying to steal from the factory, men shot on the spot and the numbers on their arms carefully recorded. How many numbers, how many names, how many men have died to build this house, to weave this cloth?

  One day he sees a plane fly overhead and it is not a German plane. The guards in their guard towers shoot it but it flies past unscathed. And on the secret wireless, the rumour goes around the camp, it says an army is advancing across the winter land, that it is coming closer. And yet the trains still come, the black smoke rises, the gold teeth of dead men collect in ever-growing piles, extracted by those unfortunate few, the Sonderkommando. All those corpses, all that gold and the hair harvested and every few weeks a new squad to shave and harvest the corpses of their predecessors on the job – their first assignment.

  But Shomer works indoors; how this miracle happened he does no
t know. And Yenkl keeps him company.

  * * *

  In his office the watcher tidied his desk and the papers on his desk and aligned the telephone just so and the pens and the ledgers and he looked around the empty room and he was happy. And then he left and closed the door and locked it and went out in the night, into a darkness whispering promises of blood and murder.

  12

  Wolf’s Diary, 22nd November 1939 – contd.

  I was dressed in my beat-up old raincoat, a suit that’s seen better days, scuffed shoes and a fedora that didn’t quite fit me. I was shaved but awkwardly. I had a bruise the size of a hen’s egg on the back of my head, where I had been knocked out twice in the space of an hour several days back, and I was sober but for the drugs they had given me at the hospital. When I took a piss I held a Jew’s cock in my hands. I didn’t know how much Rubenstein’s house was worth but my guess was plenty. I was calling on Jewish money.

  The Rubinstein residence was a three-storey mansion off Sloane Square. It had a white stucco front and a driver in black leather and a black peaked cap washing a black Rolls-Royce parked in front of the house. I did not see Isabella Rubinstein’s white Crossley. It was a quiet street in a quiet neighbourhood and the air smelled fresh and clear, as though it had been laundered with money. I went up the steps and rang the bell and waited. A maid in a starched apron opened the door and stood there looking at me. ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘I’m here to see Miss Rubinstein,’ I said.

  ‘Miss Rubinstein is not in.’ She made to shut the door in my face. I stuck my foot between the door and the frame, prohibiting her from doing so. ‘I know she’s in there,’ I told her. ‘I can smell the whore’s wet snatch all the way from out here.’

  The maid blanched white as a hard-boiled egg. ‘I’m going to call the butler!’ she said in a rising voice.

  ‘I wish that you would,’ I said.

  ‘You repulsive man!’

  I watched her disappearing back, pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped inside. It was a cool antechamber with dark panelled oak and the kind of boiseries to give Syrie Maugham heart palpitations.

  I heard hurried footsteps and in a moment a large pink butler in a tight black suit appeared with the maid in his wake. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he said, in a New York accent. He looked like a goon gone to seed and stuffed like a goose into a suit two sizes too small for him.

  ‘Wolf,’ I said. He sneered. ‘The gumshoe? You have a lot of nerve coming in here.’

  ‘Where is Isabella?’

  ‘Miss Rubinstein is not accepting visitors,’ he said. ‘Now scram.’

  I tried to push past him but he was having none of it. I heard the maid hurry behind the butler’s back. For a long moment we stood facing each other, the butler and I. I had never liked butlers.

  ‘Get out,’ he said.

  I reached down and grabbed him by the testicles and squeezed, hard. His face turned red and a low slow moan emerged from his blubbery lips. I leaned in close and whispered endearments in his ear. He nodded, once, to signal that he understood. I put my other hand flat against his chest and pushed, and in this ungainly way we progressed into the house, my one hand on his precious jewels, the other navigating him: it was just like driving a car.

  We came into a large sitting room and I saw portmanteaus, black travelling bags and suitcases piled against one wall. They seemed hurriedly packed. One suitcase was still part open and I could see feminine toiletries and items of underclothing inside. ‘Going someplace?’ I said.

  ‘Let me … go …’

  I heard the same hurried footsteps again and the maid reappeared, looking agitated. ‘Let him go!’ she screamed. She came at me like a demented pheasant, flapping her hands. She was surprisingly strong and I had to release the butler to protect my face from her. He leaned against the wall, taking deep breaths. There was no fight left in him.

  ‘Enough!’

  For a moment I couldn’t tell where the voice had come from. Then I noticed an odd instrument, like an ear trumpet, placed high in one corner of the room, close to the ceiling. I knew the voice. The maid stopped abruptly and stood very still, breathing heavily.

  ‘Show him into the conservatory,’ the voice said.

  The maid glared at me. The butler slid to the floor and remained there clutching his testicles and moaning faintly to himself. He was as red as a cockerel’s hood.

  ‘Would sir please follow me,’ the maid said. I grinned at her and, when she turned, I pinched her rear and heard her squeal, then swear in a very unmatronly way. I followed her through a corridor and a turn and to a door that she opened. Warm humid air wafted from within and it was dark. The maid said nothing. The whole house was silent, pregnant with anticipation. I suddenly did not want to go in. It seemed to me, irrationally, to be like the entrance Dante had described into the circles of Hell. My palms were sweating. It was too warm in there, too quiet. The maid stared at me with hate-filled eyes, her lips curling into a cruel mocking grin, but still she said nothing. The air smelled of death. I clenched my fingers into fists. I imagined fires, the sweet cloying smell of burning bodies, the hiss of gas. The maid was as still as a statue. I stared into the dark hot room, paralysed with indecision.

  Dominique, too, was staring at the darkness. She had never got used to the dark. One of her strongest memories, the one she carried deep inside of her, wrapped and carefully hidden, was of a summer when her mother and her father were still together, and they had gone to visit her mother’s old home in Abidjan on the Ivory Coast. Dominique remembered her mother in her summer dress, purchased on the Champs Élysées, her father’s cool linen suit, made for the tropics. They had been so happy. In the memory, her father held her small hand in his, and they walked on the sands, on the banks of the lagoon n’doupé, and the air was so still, the water shimmered like a mirror, reflecting an immensity of sky.

  It had been a good time.

  Then came her mother’s illness, her father’s bursts of anger, the alcohol which took hold of him like a serpent and squeezed, squeezed until one day his heart had burst. She was a nothing after that, a girl of mixed blood abandoned at her father’s final posting, somewhere in the Lebanon. Her father’s relatives disowned her, her mother’s were in faraway Abidjan or scattered. She was alone.

  She had never got used to the darkness, not truly. Not on the ship taking her to Paris, not in the dark hold, with the grunting men, nor on the streets of the city nor later, following a handsome cavalry officer to London, more fool her.

  There were times when she didn’t have sex with clients. There was more money in specialising, and she had learned during her time in Paris: the art of the dominatrice. There were men who liked to be controlled, humiliated, abused, in a mockery of giving away power while still controlling her with their money. She had her kit, whips and chains and dildos, but there had been so many girls who came to London after the Fall, so many refugees, and competition was fierce and so she found herself once again on the streets, once again turning triques.

  Now she watched the darkness, with an anxiety she hid well. Gerta was still in hospital; her whoring days were over. The young German girl, Edith, was dead. There was a devil out there, out to kill and mutilate. She did not understand such hatred. That strange symbol carved into Edith’s chest – she had seen it before, the swastika. But why anyone would want to cut it into a woman’s flesh she couldn’t comprehend. She hugged herself against the cold. Would the killer come tonight? The night after that? She did not like this cold, this city. Footsteps in the dark, unhurried, almost awkward, shy. She put on her professional face. Would it be him this time? There were so many watchers in the dark, eyeing the girls with a terrible beastly hunger. Her fingers closed on the knife in her handbag. A face came into view as he crossed under the streetlight and she sighed with relief. He seemed so harmless, almost earnest, really. A clerk from a nearby office, perhaps, at last tempted by the girls he must have observed, covertly, so often.
She smiled, revealing even, sharp white teeth. She knew the effect her smile had on the men. The other girls catcalled to the boy – the man – but he had eyes only for Dominique.

  She knew his type. Her smile widened. She’d once been told there was a predatory quality to her smile, by an old French-Lebanese orange trader who had kept her for a time, when she was sixteen. She hadn’t known what he meant, exactly. There was something about her that men found both frightening and exciting. And this man – he was really not so much more than a boy. And so nervous!

  ‘Good evening,’ he said. His face was pale, his eyes wide. Dominique let him look her over. The boy’s gaze was drawn to her brassiere. He licked his lips, unconsciously.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’ Dominique said. The other whores crowed with laughter.

  ‘Can we talk somewhere more private?’ the boy said.

  ‘About what?’ Dominique said. She stepped closer to him. He seemed to radiate such heat. She leaned her cheek against his. ‘What do you want to talk about, boy?’

  Her hand went down to his front. He was so hard, his whole body shivered when she touched him. ‘I know what you like,’ Dominique said. ‘Don’t I.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the boy said.

  ‘The other girls, they don’t understand,’ she said.

  ‘No …’

  ‘You have money?’

  The boy reached into his pocket. Brought out a handful of notes. It was more money than Dominique had seen in a long time. The notes were crumpled, in disarray. She took them from him quickly, before the other girls could see. She put the money in her handbag, feeling inside for her instruments. Her hand closed on her favourite godemiché. She could bugger him with it, bugger him until he cried for mercy and came in the dirt. He would be quick, they always were, the eager ones.