Slow Dancing Through Time

by Gardner R. Dozois

  It feels like magic.

  It certainly isn’t work, even though it can be exhausting and unnerving.

  Usually, when I collaborate with my friend Barry N. Malzberg, he does first cut and I do the final polish. To have the words already there before you, to be able to rework them—no matter how much you expand the material—feels more like editing than writing. You don’t have that cold-sweat panic of staring at a blank page and wondering how in God’s name you are going to fill it up with words, much less produce prose that is elegant, comprehensible, and brilliant. And since you’re wearing an editor’s hat, it’s natural to write pages and pages of “interstitial” prose. After all, you are merely doing the editorial job of connecting one scene to another, never mind that you have created thirty pages of your own scenes in between.

  You’ve been duped into believing that the hard work has already been done.

  I always feel that Barry did all the hard work of putting pen to paper, even when my draft weighs in at twice the length.

  Although I can’t speak for Gardner, I imagine he might feel something like that, for he usually takes last cut when we work together. That has been comfortable for us. It worked out naturally. And I like getting to do the easy part: the first draft. I should mention that once a story is in motion, everyone involved will do first-draft material, for we take turns writing various sections and polishing others. (Remember, I wrote the first nine pages of “Down Among the Dead Men,” and then Gardner carried the ball, with me only drafting material here and there and reworking for background continuity.)

  Usually a story gets passed back and forth so many times, I sometimes find it difficult to discern who wrote what. When we work with Michael and Susan, they usually do first cut—after all, they’ve got so much more energy than we old farts. And then I really beat the game by mucking about in the middle, writing scenes here and there, knowing that the initial hard work has already been done, and the final polish will be done, and I’ll still get my share of the profits!

  Gardner called today to see how I was coming along with this memoir. (You know what pests editors can be. They actually expect projects to be completed by deadlines.) But there are so many deadlines now. Perhaps we shouldn’t complain; but it is a sad marker, (only because we still think of ourselves as the Young Turks!) for we are definitely in middle life, right in the hurly-burly of it all; and time, which we’ve so successfully filled with work and family, becomes compressed. We reminisce on the phone, discuss a story we worked on, only to discover that it’s been five years since we wrote it.

  But this book seems to have juiced us up once again.

  This time Gardner and I discussed plots and counterplots for a new story called “The Wall.” Then Susan picked up the phone and we discussed expanding our Playboy story “The Clowns” into a novel. We discussed other projects that had been lying dormant these last few, busy years. We started planning other novels. We made a pact to get together and once again talk the talk. To make the stuff we so fondly remember, the kind of memories that Michael recounted in his memoir, which had me chuckling for hours.

  Hey, Michael, be warned, the good times are coming back.

  Although I won’t have a Special Corona cigar clamped in my teeth (Sigh, how I miss cigars!), you may consider this fair warning: soon I’ll be leaning close to you while we’re in the creative throes of working up another story, and you’ll wince from the odor of garlic on my breath and recoil in horror from my unshaven, gleeful, wild-eyed visage as I tell you once again that “This, my friend, is as good as it gets!”

  Hallelujah.

  DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN

  GARDNER DOZOIS & JACK DANN

  Bruckman first discovered that Wernecke was a vampire when they went to the quarry that morning.

  He was bending down to pick up a large rock when he thought he heard something in the gully nearby. He looked around and saw Wernecke huddled over a Musselmänn, one of the walking dead, a new man who had not been able to wake up to the terrible reality of the camp.

  “Do you need any help?” Bruckman asked Wernecke in a low voice.

  Wernecke looked up, startled, and covered his mouth with his hand, as if he were signing to Bruckman to be quiet.

  But Bruckman was certain that he had glimpsed blood smeared on Wernecke’s mouth. “The Musselmänn, is he alive?” Wernecke had often risked his own life to save one or another of the men in his barrack. But to risk one’s life for a Musselmänn? “What’s wrong?”

  “Get away.”

  All right, Bruckman thought. Best to leave him alone. He looked pale, perhaps it was typhus. The guards were working him hard enough, and Wernecke was older than the rest of the men in the work-gang. Let him sit for a moment and rest. But what about that blood . . . ?

  “Hey, you, what are you doing?” one of the young SS guards shouted to Bruckman.

  Bruckman picked up the rock and, as if he had not heard the guard, began to walk away from the gully, toward the rusty brown cart on the tracks that led back to the barbed-wire fence of the camp. He would try to draw the guard’s attention away from Wernecke.

  But the guard shouted at him to halt. “Were you taking a little rest, is that it?” he asked, and Bruckman tensed, ready for a beating. This guard was new, neatly and cleanly dressed—and an unknown quantity. He walked over to the gully and, seeing Wernecke and the Musselmänn, said, “Aha, so your friend is taking care of the sick.” He motioned Bruckman to follow him into the gully.

  Bruckman had done the unpardonable—he had brought it on Wernecke. He swore at himself. He had been in this camp long enough to know to keep his mouth shut.

  The guard kicked Wernecke sharply in the ribs. “I want you to put the Musselmänn in the cart. Now!” He kicked Wernecke again, as if as an afterthought. Wernecke groaned, but got to his feet. “Help him put the Musselmänn in the cart,” the guard said to Bruckman; then he smiled and drew a circle in the air—the sign of smoke, the smoke which rose from the tall gray chimneys behind them. This Musselmänn would be in the oven within an hour, his ashes soon to be floating in the hot, stale air, as if they were the very particles of his soul.

  Wernecke kicked the Musselmänn, and the guard chuckled, waved to another guard who had been watching, and stepped back a few feet. He stood with his hands on his hips. “Come on, dead man, get up or you’re going to die in the oven,” Wernecke whispered as he tried to pull the man to his feet. Bruckman supported the unsteady Musselmänn, who began to wail softly. Wernecke slapped him hard. “Do you want to live, Musselmänn? Do you want to see your family again, feel the touch of a woman, smell grass after it’s been mowed? Then move.” The Musselmänn shambled forward between Wernecke and Bruckman. “You’re dead, aren’t you Musselmänn,” goaded Wernecke. “As dead as your father and mother, as dead as your sweet wife, if you ever had one, aren’t you? Dead!”

  The Musselmänn groaned, shook his head, and whispered, “Not dead, my wife . . .”

  “Ah, it talks,” Wernecke said, loud enough so the guard walking a step behind them could hear. “Do you have a name, corpse?”

  “Josef, and I’m not a Musselmänn.”

  “The corpse says he’s alive,” Wernecke said, again loud enough for the SS guard to hear. Then in a whisper, he said, “Josef, if you’re not a Musselmänn, then you must work now, do you understand?” Josef tripped, and Bruckman caught him. “Let him be,” said Wernecke. “Let him walk to the cart himself.”

  “Not the cart,” Josef mumbled. “Not to die, not—”

  “Then get down and pick up stones, show the fart-eating guard you can work.”

  “Can’t. I’m sick, I’m . . .”

  “Musselmänn!”

  Josef bent down, fell to his knees, but took hold of a stone and stood up with it.

  “You see,” Wernecke said to the guard, “it’s not dead yet. It can still work.”

  “I told you to carry him to the cart, didn’t I,” the guard said petulantly.

&n
bsp; “Show him you can work,” Wernecke said to Josef, “or you’ll surely be smoke.”

  And Josef stumbled away from Wernecke and Bruckman, leaning forward, as if following the rock he was carrying.

  “Bring him back!” shouted the guard, but his attention was distracted from Josef by some other prisoners, who, sensing the trouble, began to mill about. One of the other guards began to shout and kick at the men on the periphery, and the new guard joined him. For the moment, he had forgotten about Josef.

  “Let’s get to work, lest they notice us again,” Wernecke said.

  “I’m sorry that I—”

  Wernecke laughed and made a fluttering gesture with his hand—smoke rising. “It’s all hazard, my friend. All luck.” Again the laugh. “It was a venial sin,” and his face seemed to darken. “Never do it again, though, lest I think of you as bad luck.”

  “Eduard, are you all right?” Bruckman asked. “I noticed some blood when—”

  “Do the sores on your feet bleed in the morning?” Wernecke countered angrily. Bruckman nodded, feeling foolish and embarrassed. “And so it is with my gums, now go away, unlucky one, and let me live.”

  They separated, and Bruckman tried to make himself invisible, tried to think himself into the rocks and sand and grit, into the choking air. He used to play this game as a child; he would close his eyes, and since he couldn’t see anybody, he would pretend that nobody could see him. And so it was again. Pretending the guards couldn’t see him was as good a way of staying alive as any.

  He owed Wernecke another apology, which could not be made. He shouldn’t have asked about Wernecke’s sickness. It was bad luck to talk about such things. Wernecke had told him that when he, Bruckman, had first come to the barracks. If it weren’t for Wernecke, who had shared his rations with Bruckman, he might well have become a Musselmänn himself. Or dead, which was the same thing.

  The day turned blisteringly hot, and prisoners as well as guards were coughing. The air was foul, the sun a smear in the heavy yellow sky. The colors were all wrong: the ash from the ovens changed the light, and they were all slowly choking on the ashes of dead friends, wives, and parents. The guards stood together quietly, talking in low voices, watching the prisoners, and there was the sense of a perverse freedom—as if both guards and prisoners had fallen out of time, as if they were all parts of the same fleshy machine.

  At dusk, the guards broke the hypnosis of lifting and grunting and sweating and formed the prisoners into ranks. They marched back to the camp through the fields, beside the railroad tracks, the electrified wire, conical towers, and into the main gate of the camp.

  Bruckman tried to block out a dangerous stray thought of his wife. He remembered her as if he were hallucinating: she was in his arms. The boxcar stank of sweat and feces and urine, but he had been inside it for so long that he was used to the smells. Miriam had been sleeping. Suddenly he discovered that she was dead. As he screamed, the smells of the car overpowered him, the smells of death.

  Wernecke touched his arm, as if he knew, as if he could see through Bruckman’s eyes. And Bruckman knew what Wernecke’s eyes were saying: “Another day. We’re alive. Against all the odds. We conquered death.” Josef walked beside them, but he kept stumbling, as he was once again slipping back into death, becoming a Musselmänn. Wernecke helped him walk, pushed him along. “We should let this man become dead,” Wernecke said to Bruckman.

  Bruckman only nodded, but he felt a chill sweep over his sweating back. He was seeing Wernecke’s face again as it was for that instant in the morning. Smeared with blood.

  Yes, Bruckman thought, we should let the Musselmänn become dead. We should all be dead . . .

  ###

  Wernecke served up the lukewarm water with bits of spoiled turnip floating on the top, what passed as soup for the prisoners. Everyone sat or kneeled on the rough-planked floor, as there were no chairs.

  Bruckman ate his portion, counting the sips and the bites, forcing himself to take his time. Later, he would take a very small bite of the bread he had in his pocket. He always saved a small morsel of food for later—in the endless world of the camp, he had learned to give himself things to look forward to. Better to dream of bread than to get lost in the present. That was the fate of the Musselmänner.

  But he always dreamed of food. Hunger was with him every moment of the day and night. Those times when he actually ate were in a way the most difficult, for there was never enough to satisfy him. There was the taste of softness in his mouth, and then in an instant it was gone. The emptiness took the form of pain—it hurt to eat. For bread, he thought, he would have killed his father, or his wife. God forgive me, and he watched Wernecke—Wernecke, who had shared his bread with him, who had died a little so he could live. He’s a better man than me, Bruckman thought.

  It was dim inside the barracks. A bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling and cast sharp shadows across the cavernous room. Two tiers of five-foot-deep shelves ran around the room on three sides, bare wooden shelves where the men slept without blankets or mattresses. Set high in the northern wall was a slatted window, which let in the stark white light of the kliegs. Outside, the lights turned the ground into a deathly imitation of day; only inside the barracks was it night.

  “Do you know what tonight is, my friends?” Wernecke asked. He sat in the far corner of the room with Josef, who, hour by hour, was reverting back into a Musselmänn. Wernecke’s face looked hollow and drawn in the light from the window and the lightbulb; his eyes were deep-set and his face was long with deep creases running from his nose to the corners of his thin mouth. His hair was black, and even since Bruckman had known him, quite a bit of it had fallen out. He was a very tall man, almost six foot four, and that made him stand out in a crowd, which was dangerous in a death camp. But Wernecke had his own secret ways of blending with the crowd, of making himself invisible.

  “No, tell us what tonight is,” crazy old Bohme said. That men such as Bohme could survive was a miracle—or, as Bruckman thought—a testament to men such as Wernecke who somehow found the strength to help the others live.

  “It’s Passover,” Wernecke said.

  “How does he know that?” someone mumbled, but it didn’t matter how Wernecke knew because he knew—even if it really wasn’t Passover by the calendar. In this dimly lit barrack, it was Passover, the feast of freedom, the time of thanksgiving.

  “But how can we have Passover without a seder?” asked Bohme. “We don’t even have any matzoh,” he whined.

  “Nor do we have candles, or a silver cup for Elijah, or the shankbone, or haroset—nor would I make a seder over the traif the Nazis are so generous in giving us,” replied Wernecke with a smile. “But we can pray, can’t we? And when we all get out of here, when we’re in our own homes in the coming year with God’s help, then well have twice as much food—two afikomens, a bottle of wine for Elijah, and the haggadahs that our fathers and our fathers’ fathers used.”

  It was Passover.

  “Isadore, do you remember the four questions?” Wernecke asked Bruckman.

  And Bruckman heard himself speaking. He was twelve years old again at the long table beside his father, who sat in the seat of honor. To sit next to him was itself an honor. “How does this night differ from all other nights? On all other nights we eat bread and matzoh; why on this night do we eat only matzoh?”

  “M’a nisht’ana halylah hazeah . . .”

  ###

  Sleep would not come to Bruckman that night, although he was so tired that he felt as if the marrow of his bones had been sucked away and replaced with lead.

  He lay there in the semi-darkness, feeling his muscles ache, feeling the acid biting of his hunger. Usually he was numb enough with exhaustion that he could empty his mind, close himself down, and fall rapidly into oblivion, but not tonight. Tonight he was noticing things again, his surroundings were getting through to him again, in a way that they had not since he had been new in the camp. It was smotheringly hot, and the ai
r was filled with the stinks of death and sweat and fever, of stale urine and drying blood. The sleepers thrashed and turned, as though they fought with sleep, and as they slept, many of them talked or muttered or screamed aloud; they lived other lives in their dreams, intensely compressed lives dreamed quickly, for soon it would be dawn, and once more they would be thrust into hell. Cramped in the midst of them, sleepers squeezed in all around him, it suddenly seemed to Bruckman that these pallid white bodies were already dead, that he was sleeping in a graveyard. Suddenly it was the boxcar again. And his wife Miriam was dead again, dead and rotting unburied . . .

  Resolutely, Bruckman emptied his mind. He felt feverish and shaky, and wondered if the typhus were coming back, but he couldn’t afford to worry about it. Those who couldn’t sleep couldn’t survive. Regulate your breathing, force your muscles to relax, don’t think. Don’t think.

  For some reason, after he had managed to banish even the memory of his dead wife, he couldn’t shake the image of the blood on Wernecke’s mouth.

  There were other images mixed in with it: Wernecke’s uplifted arms and upturned face as he lead them in prayer; the pale strained face of the stumbling Musselmänn; Wernecke looking up, startled, as he crouched over Josef . . . but it was the blood to which Bruckman’s feverish thoughts returned, and he pictured it again and again as he lay in the rustling, fart-smelling darkness. The watery sheen of blood over Wernecke’s lips, the tarry trickle of blood in the corner of his mouth, like a tiny scarlet worm . . .

  Just then, a shadow crossed in front of the window, silhouetted blackly for an instant against the harsh white glare, and Bruckman knew from the shadow’s height and its curious forward stoop that it was Wernecke.