The current curator was a middle-aged man who had not lived through the horror, but was born in its aftermath. His deepest personal connection was the coldness of his childhood winters, because his parents refused to burn wood in their fireplace, the stench of the smoke reminding them of the stench that blew across the miles from Auschwitz-Birkenau for four long years.
On the morning of December fourth, the curator ate his standard ham and eggs breakfast, kissed his wife and children good-bye, then headed out in his aging Citroen over the snow-dusted road connecting the town to Auschwitz, twenty miles away.
The “Facility,” (which was the accepted euphemism among the administrators) did not open until ten o’clock, but he found the road already crowded with buses. There were always buses on the road. Buses coming, buses leaving and on his weaker days the curator often wished that the abandoned railway that had once brought so many across the border from Hungary to their death, could be used now for the shuttling of tourists back and forth.
It was only after riding between two buses for ten minutes that he realized that they both were empty. In fact—they all were. Drivers, yes—but no passengers.
This did not bode well. A fleet of empty buses was unnerving in and of itself, but that coupled with bizarre rumors from some of the other memorials left him in a deepening state of dread. Rumors that they had been seized by foreign forces. Rumors that mystics were disturbing the bones and ashes of the dead.
He now recalled that several weeks ago some workers had come to his Facility from the Ministry of Public Works, with high-tech divining equipment. They claimed to be checking the state of the watershed, but when he phoned the Ministry they denied sending a team of workers. He hadn’t been concerned at the time—he knew that when it came to government, the right hand rarely knew what the left hand was doing.
But now, as he drove into the parking lot, he suspected that those workers had not been state workers at all. Buses already filled half the lot—at least thirty of them. All identical. All empty. What’s more, there were teams of laborers waiting at the gate. Their beige uniforms suggested some utility, but was nondescript enough to defy any definitive association.
“We were sent by the Ministry of Health,” the curator was told by a young woman as he approached the gate. “We believe your aquifer is contaminated, creating a risk to public health.”
“Funny that a representative from the Ministry of Health would talk to me in English,” he told the young woman, whom he took to be an American even before she had opened her mouth, by the way she held herself.
“Would you like to see our permits? I think you’ll find everything in order.”
She held out some official looking documents. “No doubt,” he answered and waved the papers off. She folded them and put them away.
The night guard, who had his own unspoken suspicions, had refused to let them in. Now the guard meandered behind the protection of the double fence, refusing to get any closer to these visitors.
Other workers, who should have been inside by now, lingered in the parking lot, smoking, making small talk, but keeping one eye on the curator, waiting to see what he would do.
“Do these buses have anything to do with decontaminating our aquifer?” he asked.
“The buses must be for tourists,” the young woman said without changing the stone in her expression. “Isn’t that what tour buses are for?”
By now the entire lot was full, and more buses were forced to pull off to the side of the road. Every one of them empty, save for the drivers.
The curator thought to say something about it, but instead just motioned to the day guard, who was waiting patiently to unlock the gate. He did so with shaky hands that dropped the keys twice, before the lock came undone.
The American woman passed some instructions to a team leader, who then translated them into Polish for the others in their company. The curator grabbed her before he went in. Maybe all the rumors he had heard were unfounded, but he felt compelled to know the truth. She shook his arm off, but waited for his question.
“The American boy,” he said. “That Cole boy—the one who did things.” He hesitated almost afraid to ask—almost afraid to know. “Everyone says he died, but he survived the breaking of the dam, yes?”
He thought he caught a glimmer of something in the young woman’s face, but he couldn’t be sure what it was. “Why, yes,” she said. “I believe he did.”
“And he is coming here?” the curator asked, but it wasn’t really a question at all. He knew. He knew without her saying anything—and her silence was deeply intimidating.
Finally she said, “Stay and find out for yourself.”
It was the most compelling invitation to leave he had ever heard. He stood there as her teams of workers flowed around him and in through the gates as if he were a stone in a fast moving river. Once they had gone inside he was left with his staff who looked at him, wondering what to do.
“Go home,” he told them, then he went to his old Citroen, and started it up, thankful that the engine was still warm enough for him to drive off without lingering.
Perhaps he would visit his children’s classrooms today. Perhaps he would take the family off on a winter holiday. But whatever he did, he knew that he would not be returning to the Facility anytime soon.
* * *
Still ten miles out, a wedge of helicopters beat across the belly of the clouds.
Without Michael, the skies over Poland slipped back to their natural state, which was not all that different from the atmosphere Michael had imposed upon them. The fog had lifted to become a colorless blanket that stretched from horizon to horizon, as if God had created the Earth, but had forgotten to create the heavens. Flurries of snow dusted the ground and all eyes looked to the blank sky that was blizzard-heavy and ready to burst.
Dillon and Winston maintained their silence in the lead helicopter with Tessic, who watched them as if they might leap out of the helicopter at any instant. He was, in fact, pondering the tally of days ahead, and portents the past few days held for the future.
The road to Treblinka had yielded only thirty-seven hundred souls over a two-day period. This time Tessic’s curiosity had gotten the better of him, and he had watched the making of the miracle. As Dillon had predicted, the road that had been broken down for his benefit mended the moment he arrived. Gravel became chunks of asphalt, chunks became slabs. The cracks zipped closed, and the worn texture of the road darkened, unseasoning into a black slurry as new as the day it was paved. Only then did the real work begin. Dillon had gotten down on all fours, slowly rocking back and forth, moaning, feeling the pain of the dead, resonating with it until the road began to break apart again—not in random chunks, but in a perfect pattern. An octagonal grid. The road kept dividing and dividing, until the fragments were no larger than grains of sand. Water trucks had already saturated the roadside and now the moisture seeped back into the black sand. Tessic had watched as Dillon sank into it about six inches. Still on all fours, grunting, bearing down, Dillon sent ripples of force out through the thick tar. He had called for Winston in a guttural voice, and Winston came up, kneeling as well, grabbing him around the waist. They looked like two wrestlers in starting position, and the moment they made contact, Tessic, who was only twenty feet away, felt a surge shoot through his body beginning in his feet, and exiting his eyes, ears, and mouth, like an electric current.
I’m feeling their life, he thought. I’m feeling their souls called back into flesh.
And all this time Dillon was sobbing, absorbing the pain and horror. Like a sponge he leached death from the earth, and with death gone, life had no choice but to replace it and find its form. The black quicksand turned deep maroon, growing brighter; bubbling. Then when distinct shapes that could only be bones began to appear, Tessic turned away.
Hour by hour, Dillon and Winston had inched their way forward through that road-turned-river, the revived peeling away in their wake into the arms of T
essic’s retrieval crew. But it was different than at Majdanek. After four hours, Dillon and Winston got up and left. They demanded a bath. They demanded food. They demanded privacy. And then four hours later, they returned to continue their task. For two straight days it went on like this; they pulled six shifts at the road of death and although they revived fewer and fewer with each shift, they never reached a level of exhaustion they had at Majdanek. Then after the sixth shift, Dillon came to Tessic.
“We’re done here,” Dillon said.
Tessic shook his head. They had barely covered a mile of the road and what remained was a river of organic debris. Bones that had fused in misshapen unnatural ways in a red river as thick as a lava flow.
“No,” Tessic told him, and quoted Frost. “We’ve miles to go until we sleep.”
“Not today,” Winston said. “Today this is the road not taken.”
He could sense that they were holding back—that if they stayed, there was more life they could squeeze out of this place. Perhaps, thought Tessic, the drawing of life was like the pressing of olives. The first pressing yielded the purest of oils, but each pressing beyond it became harder and harder to accomplish. Still, if it could be done, why not do it? Why not double the effort and press the road for all the life it could deliver?
But Dillon refused, with no further explanation. It infuriated Tessic.
“Do you think you can just indiscriminately choose where, when and who to resurrect, on a whim?”
And Dillon had laughed aloud in his face. “This has all been on a whim,” he had said. “But now it’s our whim, instead of yours. And besides, isn’t it your plan, to hopscotch from one site to another and back again, to keep the authorities confused.”
Tessic wanted to push it, but held his tongue. With Dillon as well, there was a point at which pressing yielded less and less. Dillon was there by his own grace, and by Dillon’s grace, Tessic remained in charge. Tessic was a lion tamer now, in the ring with no protection. He was in charge, only because his lion allowed it. Tessic knew not to push, for the fangs could cut deep.
In the end, Tessic ordered bulldozers in to bury the undifferentiated remains beneath darker earth, gathered a minyan to recite the mourners’ kaddish, and left. Now, in the helicopter, he stared across at Dillon and Winston, making sure his prize lions made no unexpected moves.
Dillon, on the other hand, had no interest in studying Tessic. He had to put all his attention into coming to terms with the new destination toward which their helicopter inexorably flew. Dillon had put the gruesome nature of the past few days out of his mind. He found dispensing with the past a powerful defense mechanism to keep him moving forward and not spiraling down into himself, as he had in the Majdanek memorial dome.
I will not dwell on whether this is right or wrong, he told himself. I will not make that judgment. I will bide my time, performing these miracles, until the time is right to stop.
He felt sure he’d know when that time would be. He’d feel the pattern of cessation in everything around him. He’d know when it was enough. And perhaps this is what Tessic was most worried about.
“We’ve heard nothing from Michael and Tory,” Tessic told Dillon, which was no news to him.
Dillon didn’t answer. Didn’t even shrug. He waited to see where Tessic would go with this.
“Are they still alive?” Tessic asked.
Dillon nodded. “Yes, they are.”
“You’d tell me if they had died?”
“Yes,” Dillon said honestly. “I would.”
“Then why have they not returned?”
This time Winston answered him. “Maybe they’ve decided to go and resurrect the Minoan Civilization.”
This piqued Tessic’s interest, and Winston grimaced, realizing the information he had just leaked.
“Minoans,” said Tessic. “Why would they be going to Crete?”
“No reason,” said Winston, poorly covering. “I just hear the Aegean Sea is beautiful this time of year.”
“Thank you, Winston,” Tessic said, miming a tip of the hat. “Not only do I know where they are, but now, thanks to you, I know where they’re going. I’ll be sending a search and rescue mission by sea plane. A whole squadron if necessary.”
“I wouldn’t,” Dillon said. “Lourdes can pull them out of the sky.”
“So I’ve been hearing.”
“If they are meant to be back—they will be back,” Dillon told him. “What’s fated is fated. Bashert, isn’t that what you call it?”
But Tessic’s smile was forced.
“Your faith has given way to your ego, Elon,” Dillon told him.
To which Tessic answered, “Faith only goes so far.”
Their helicopter turned, and Dillon gripped his gut, feeling their destination before he could see it. When he looked out of the window, he could see down below, among the low, barren hills, two huge square patches, about two miles apart. The work camp of Auschwitz and, looming behind it like a tidal wave, the massive death camp called Birkenau. He could hear Winston hyperventilating—he could feel the presence of death, too; even from a distance it was exponentially worse than Majdanek or the road of the dead.
“So cold,” Winston said. “So cold.”
Dillon tried to speak to him, to calm him down, but found he had no wind in his lungs. It was as if the atmosphere had been sucked away from the planet, leaving beneath them this barren moonscape of gray rubble. Death was already screaming out to them and they were still miles away.
“We won’t be able to control this,” Winston hissed. “Once we’re there, once it begins, it’s going to swallow us like the millions it swallowed before.”
From here they could see that the road leading there, and the visitor’s parking lot were clogged with buses. Since many of the bus drivers had deserted after that first day, a fair number of the drivers were now men and woman raised from Majdanek. Tessic took pride in the poetic justice, for just as these masses were forced to assist their own extermination, now they were given the chance to assist in their resurrection.
They set down in a clearing beside the Auschwitz guard tower, the down-draft of the helicopter blasting away the snow, which scattered like ghosts from a grave. When the other copters had landed, Tessic opened the door to let in the bitter cold. But it wasn’t only the cold that came in. There was a presence, almost sentient, that peered in through the open door. When you look into an abyss, thought Dillon, the abyss looks into you. It was the eye of old murder.
“Dillon,” Winston said in a panicked whisper. “I’m scared. I’m so scared.”
“So am I,” he admitted.
“Why don’t we just leave. Why don’t we just—"
“Shhh,” Dillon said. “It’s going to be alright.”
“But you don’t know that, do you? You don’t know anything, do you?”
Dillon closed his eyes. Even that vile sense of the Vectors was gone here, obliterated by the static field of earthly evil that now enveloped them.
“Why are we here?” Winston whined.
Why are we here? thought Dillon. The easy answer would have been to blame Tessic—but Dillon could have delayed this visit. He could have detoured them to any number of sites, but he hadn’t, because deep down he wanted to come here. Could Tessic be right? Could they have been meant for this? Was this his own intuition telling him so?
“We have to face Birkenau,” Dillon told Winston. “We have to face it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know yet.”
* * *
Tessic walked them through the oppressive Auschwitz gate—the wide brick arch through which a thousand trains of the condemned had once passed. Tessic pointed to red posts marking the ground. “We’ve used sonic imagery to locate the—" he broke off, his mind tripping over the thought—“to locate the spots most likely to yield new life. Begin wherever you wish.”
But Dillon did not need sonic imagery to know where the dead were. He could feel them, an
d they were everywhere. He could read their history in every inch of ground he crossed. There had been so many ashes, so many bones, there had been no way for the Nazis to dispose of it all. It was spread into creeks until the creeks choked. It filled ponds until the ponds were dry grey sores on the face of the countryside. And toward the end, the Nazis didn’t even try to conceal it. Within the camp and in the surrounding countryside were unnatural ash mounds that in the summer would sprout with weeds and wild flowers, but now in winter were as bald as granite, revealing their true nature.
They were led by Tessic and his entourage through the double fence, and into Auschwitz. Maddy was there supervising teams of workers that waited to assist. Dillon thought to say something to her, but changed his mind. What was there to say now? She had, in a strange way, fulfilled her military destiny, becoming a key cog in Tessic’s machine. He felt an intense pang of regret as he caught her gaze, but it was quickly taken under the cold waves of death rolling in all around him.
“Begin wherever you wish,” Tessic repeated.
Dillon turned from Maddy, and picked up his pace rather than slowing down. He could sense the dead already beginning to gather around him—but not like in the other places he had been. Here, it was unfocused—diluted. A million souls, each grasping a tiny, tiny fraction of his power all at once. Not one had yet been revived, and already he felt drained.
This place will swallow us.
He felt himself a single grain of salt dissolving in a sea. So he didn’t slow his pace, for fear that he would dissolve entirely.
The rear gate of Auschwitz opened to a road that led to Birkenau, three kilometers distant, its guard towers clearly visible through the flurries of snow. To the right, in the open fields were storehouses of stolen memory. “The Fields of Plenty,” the Nazis had called them. Each structure was still filled to the brim with eyeglasses, photographs, shoes, watches. Anything and everything that could be stolen from the victims, down to the hair on their heads, shaved and awaiting shipment to German textile mills.
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