by Unknown
But Obermann could only stare.
He was staring into the trench.
He was looking at the skull-faced Jew, lying there on his back, limbs splayed, with a bloody, fist-sized hole in his forehead. The Jew appeared to be looking back at Obermann, the incandescent madness in his eyes only faintly diminished by death’s embrace.
And he was smiling. Yes, smiling.
Obermann could feel it start then, at the back of his mind. Could feel it building, growing, moving forward and gathering momentum, like white-hot magma under million-ton pressure, desperate for release; could feel his entire body begin to quake uncontrollably as a force of sheer, primal terror unlike anything he had ever before experienced burned a fiery trail through his mind, causing him to throw hack his head and cry out in utter horror—
Vogel cried out in horror.
But the old wino clung to him desperately.
“Bitte, Mein Herr!” he pleaded. “Please … a few coins … I’m a good Catholic!”
Vogel struggled furiously with the man, dragging him halfway into the Street before finally breaking his grip.
The pathetic old bum lay there on his side, sobbing.
His heart racing, his breath coming in painful, convulsive gulps, Vogel tried to steady himself. He was still rattled by the memory of the skull-faced Jew. The image of that deathly apparition … and all that choking sulfurous quicklime sent a chill through him …
Vogel turned to look at the whore. She stared back at him coldly, silently, her face an unreadable mask. Vogel tried to peer behind that mask, tried to grasp something of this strangely private woman’s essence. Yet he found nothing, sensed nothing, understood nothing at all.
Vogel looked back down at the wino, at the wasted scarecrow of what was once a man, possibly a good man, a good German, before those filthy Russian beasts stormed in, with the sanctimonious Jew-loving Americans in their wake.
“Bitte … Helfen sie mir …” the old bum pleaded. Please … help me. The cry of thousands—millions of Vogel’s countrymen. Displaced, homeless, hungry, and sick, they wandered the cities and the countryside from Munich to Hamburg in search of themselves, their lost identities, and their lost Fatherland.
We will give them back their Fatherland. Vogel thought determinedly. We will give them back their pride, their hope, their dignity. The Plan shall succeed. The Will shall triumph. The Great German Nation shall rise again in glory!
Vogel reached under his topcoat, withdrew a mark from his wallet, and shoved the bill into the wino’s decrepit, outstretched hand. Then he looked at the whore. “Now,” he ordered her. “Go!”
For the first time the woman truly smiled at him.
After a short while they entered a residential district unknown to Vogel. None of the street names were familiar to him. He thought they had been moving to the northeast, but he couldn’t be sure. With his naturally poor sense of direction, Vogel had long since lost track of where he was.
Snow fell heavily now and it seemed to have grown colder, grayer as the night deepened. Vogel shivered as he felt the chill seeping into his bones. His arthritic hands felt stiff and cold: he rubbed them, flexed them, trying to keep them warm and loose, but to little avail.
Tired and aching, Vogel felt himself nearing the end of his patience. Despite how beautiful, how sensuously intriguing the whore was, he was ready now to simply luck the bitch and be done with it. Then he could return to his friends at the beer house. Provided, of course, he could find his way back—
“Stop!” he commanded.
The whore came to an abrupt halt, turning on spiked heels to face him.
“I’m tired of walking,” he said. “I want to know where we’re going!”
The whore smiled at him and said, “We’re here.”
They were standing at the edge of a wide courtyard flanked by a pair of brownstone apartment buildings. Four stories tall, with darkened windows—many of which had been broken out, Vogel noted—the buildings appeared to be vacant. At the rear of the courtyard, beyond a small fountain and perhaps thirty yards from where they stood, perched a smaller, three-story building, with walkways on either side leading to an alley in back.
The whore nodded toward the smaller building, then led Vogel into the courtyard. As they walked, Vogel noticed scattered about them, sheathed in a fine covering of snow, the detritus of people’s lives a rusted bicycle lying on its side without any tires; a worm-eaten feather mattress with the stuffing yanked out; three empty bottles of Beck’s beer; an old splintered crutch (Where, Vogel wondered in passing, was its mate?); a child’s doll with its head and arms torn off.
As they passed by the disused stone fountain Vogel could see a layer of ice at the bottom, embedded in which was a child’s plastic ball, crushed and deflated, with a swastika emblazoned on its side.
A moment later they arrived at the front steps of the smaller building. In the snow-covered bushes off to the side lay an old, fat derelict woman bundled up in what appeared to be several layers of threadbare sweaters. Her skirt was grayish, nondescript; her single-strap shoes were faded and scuffed, and one of the heels was missing. Within her turn stockings her ankles looked thick and swollen. A spoor of whitish, crusted vomit trailed from the side of her mouth and onto the outstretched arm which served as her pillow. Within hand’s reach lay an empty bottle of Schemer’s schnapps.
For a moment Vogel thought the woman was dead. But looking closer be saw the faint rising and falling of her chest, and realized that she was still alive.
She is tough. Vogel thought. A survivor, like the old bum back in the alley. Like all good Germans. Survivors.
The whore touched his arm and Vogel looked up. They ascended the steps and entered the building
The foyer was poorly lit. A single light fixture, depending from a long wire in the ceiling, provided the only illumination.
Vogel knew the place immediately; he had been here before, many times, with many different women. Not here, in this particular apartment building, but in others like it: crumbling old tenements with fallen plaster and cracked paint, scarred by graffiti, reeking of sweat and urine and piled-up garbage: Vogel knew the terrain well. He was at home here.
As he followed the whore up the warped and creaking stairs leading to the second floor, he savored this feeling of déjà vu, let it comfort him, and soon he began to relax.
By the time they had come to the whore’s room, Vogel felt himself in control of the situation: now he would lead and she would follow. When she opened the door, he stepped in ahead of her.
The room was sparsely furnished with a bed, a dresser, a chair, a table with a candle on it beside the bed, and a rug on the floor. In the dim light emitted by the unshaded bulb in the ceiling, Vogel could see a door which he assumed led to a closet, and a single window that looked out onto the taller building across from it. Another door opened onto the bathroom.
No pictures graced the walls, he noticed; no potted plants nestled on the windowsill; there were no personal adornments.
The ascetic simplicity of the room confirmed what Vogel had already concluded: the whore did not live here, it was merely the place where she conducted her business.
Smiling assuredly, he took off his coat.
The woman did the same, removing her plumed hat and fluffing up her thick, wavy mass of blonde hair. She wore a blue satin dress, cinched tightly at the waist, with a slit up the side revealing a long, slender thigh.
Vogel found it difficult to take his eyes off her. She was so distant, so self-possessed; so unlike the fawning, drunken sluts he usually picked up. There was about her an almost lunar coldness which infused her beauty with a special magnetism he could not resist.
But Vogel was in control now, and wasn’t about to reveal the ache, the need he had for her.
As he removed his shirt, she said to him, “You can wash in there”—pointing to the bathroom.
Vogel nodded. Draping his shirt over a chair, he went into the tiny room, shutting
the door behind him. He took off his clothes and started the water in the sink; it grew hot slowly. He found some soap and began washing himself, feeling the warmth spreading through him, feeling himself grow erect. Then, after rinsing and toweling off, he turned and opened the door.
The room was quite still. The overhead light had been turned out, the only illumination the faint glow from the candle on the bedside table.
In the flickering golden light the whore lay on the bed, propped on an elbow, sheet up to her shoulder, watching him.
Vogel lay beside her. He smiled greedily. And pulled her face close to his, moving his mouth roughly against hers. He liked the way she tasted: tart, almost citruslike, leaving a not unpleasant tingling sensation on his tongue. Then he pushed her back and looked at her.
She looked back at him with cold blue eyes.
That same look: challenging, inscrutable, mysterious. And something else, something Vogel could not quite apprehend, flaring behind the cold.
Her icy composure unsettled him: he felt his confidence begin to falter and feared he was losing control again. In an effort to reassert his dominance he reached out and took her nipple, squeezed it sharply and twisted, watching her lips part in sudden pain. Ah. He smiled at that: still in control. It was going to be easy after all.
Vogel touched her skin: So pale and smooth and flawless. He trailed his fingers over the exquisite architecture of her face: the prominent cheekbones; the taut, angular jawline; the full, sensuous lips and that delicious cleft chin. He felt the firmness of her breasts, the gooseflesh running beneath his fingers. He caressed the rounded softness of her shoulders and ran his fingers down the long slender muscles of her arm …
And then the sheet fell away.
Vogel’s eyes widened in shock as he stared at the place where her hand should have been.
His mind whirled as he tried to comprehend the polished steel nub depending from her wrist.
Feeling a sudden spasm of revulsion, he turned away, and as he did, his gaze chanced upon the dresser beside the window. Two white gloves were laying there. One was flat, limp; the other was filled with something—difficult to tell with what, in the dim light. But when Vogel peered closer, he could see the firm outline of an artificial hand, a hint of flesh color at the glove’s mouth, and the locking attachment at the wrist.
Now he understood. And was embarrassed for having reacted so childishly to her handicap. Turning to her he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—”
Her eyes fixed him with a fierce, hypnotic intensity. Her lips contorted to a strange, misshapen smile, and Vogel felt a shiver of fear run up his spine. Fear mingled with pure unrestrained lust for this sensuous female enigma.
The woman then sat up on the bed and, beginning at the soft hollow of his throat, ran her forefinger lightly down his chest, through the tangle of salt and pepper hair, over the slightly knobby sternum, teasingly, tantalizingly, all the way down to the still-firm flesh of his belly.
At first Vogel found her touch ticklishly pleasurable, but then, in a sort of curious delayed reaction, he felt his skin begin to grow hot. Uncomfortably hot. Looking down, he saw an ugly red welt rising up where her finger had passed, as if he had been singed by a burning trail of quicklime …
Suddenly Vogel looked up at the woman. Her eyes shimmered with hatred. Then, with a surgeon’s precision, she calmly inserted the tip of her finger into his navel and pushed it all the way through to his stomach.
Vogel shrieked as the sudden explosion of pain racked him, curling him foetally; unbearable, excruciating pain, as if someone had rammed a red-hot poker into his guts. His body trembled convulsively and a wave of nausea swept over him: he could taste bile at the back of his throat. As he clutched himself and felt the warm blood oozing onto his hands, the sharp, piercing pain in his abdomen expanded swiftly outward, searing each cell of his body.
Vogel fought to remain conscious. With great difficulty he half-opened his eyes and through a blur of tears struggled to comprehend the images before him.
The whore was moving slowly, as if through a dark dream, across the room. Lifting her artificial hand off the dresser; reattaching her hand to her wrist … grasping her hair … blonde hair … pulling it loose: dark hair beneath … Slipping on her dress and shoes … Then turning and moving toward him again …
Vogel looked up, his eyes filled with fear and confusion.
Who was she? What was she? Why was this happening to him?
Slowly the woman lowered her left arm to his face. When her artificial hand rested but inches from his eyes, she twisted her arm suddenly inward, forcing him to see the inside of her wrist. Burned into the skin was a blue tattoo. Her concentration camp identification number. As Vogel watched, the tattoo suddenly began to blur, to shimmer, to change and multiply, until there were thousands of tattoos, millions, driven out of the depths of memory by a cold wind from the past.
A woman … This woman … men, women, and children … prisoners at Strassenberg … guinea pigs in Doctor Franz Obermann’s experiments … Obermann: the Nazis’ pioneer researcher in the field of cryogenics … the prisoners—their arms and legs and hands—her hand—frozen, to study the effects of freezing temperatures on living tissue and the gangrene, the dead and blackened limbs, the amputations … The Jews, the Gypsies, the Slavs, the homosexuals, the mentally defective, the politically undesirable, the Jews …
The Jews …
The Jews …
Hundreds, Thousands. Millions. Dead.
Doctor Franz Obermann looked up at the woman, his executioner. There were tears on his cheeks. In the cold blue depths of her eyes he saw sleep, eternal sleep.
In his mind he watched a flower open, a blood-red flower with a bitter bloom …
He knew who she was now. What she was. She had come to claim him. She, and all the others whom she represented. She was the instrument of his punishment, the witness to his atonement. The darkness that would enshroud him.
The woman moved in close, covering Obermann’s mouth with her artificial hand. She spread the first two fingers of her real hand into a broad “V,” and brought the tips close to his face. Obermann could feel their heat, could imagine them burning like hot coals through the moist yielding flesh of his eyes, down the optic nerves, to the soft gray jelly of his brain.
She brought them an inch from his eyes—
Then Obermann reared back and punched her hard in the temple.
Stunned, the woman toppled off the bed and onto the floor.
Naked, bleeding from the wound in his stomach, Obermann rolled out of bed and kicked her in the face before she could get up. Feeling a soft crunch under his foot, he knew that her nose was broken.
But the woman refused to quit. She tried to rise again—
This time Obermann kicked her in the chest, just below the sternum.
The woman fell back with a hoarse, rasping moan.
Breathing heavily, trying to stave off the pain ripping through his guts, Obermann looked down at the woman. She was still alive, this Lilith-like apparition, still clinging to life. Obermann fell on her, his hands closing tightly around her throat. The woman struggled against him, but her energy was diminishing, her spirit fading. Obermann could feel it: going, going … with her good hand she tried to break his grip, tried to burn him, but the Promethean fire her fingers had once possessed had dissipated, leaving only flickering embers of warmth.
Then her muscles relaxed and a glassy look came into her eyes. Her hand fell away.
Obermann slowly removed his hands from her throat. He drew in a deep breath. Then he found himself opening her dress, gently touching her bare breasts, running his fingers over the pink nipples.
He took her hand, admiring it, a lovely slim-fingered hand—deadly, but beautiful
…
But she was no longer beautiful.
Dead, Obermann thought. Ein underer tote Jude. Another dead Jew.
Exposed. Naked to the world.
Another dea
d Jew.
In an exquisite moment of pristine clarity it struck him that the past had somehow looped back to join the present, that this woman’s death was an extension of—a continuation of—all the other deaths for which Obermann had been responsible. The gnawing hunger within him, the burning desire to kill, to bring death with his own bane hands, had been fulfilled.
And he had survived.
He had defeated them all—all of them.
He had defeated Death: brought death to Death.
Feeling an exhilarating rush of energy course through his body, Obermann shivered in pleasure. He felt invincible, exalted, triumphant. He felt that he could live forever.
Then he heard something, or thought he did: a haunting strain of music, a gentle distant threnody, which seemed to slip beyond the threshold of his hearing as suddenly as it had begun …
Obermann looked down. The woman had begun to dissolve, to glow insubstantial. He was not surprised: it seemed part of the pattern. Though he was a practical man who believed only in what he could see, what was real, what he had seen tonight, what he had experienced in the flesh, had been real, as real as death incarnate come to claim him.
But now Death, having failed, fled.
The woman grew vague. Her body continued to discorporate, to fade, along with her clothes and her artificial hand.
Then she was gone. The only trace left of her was a fine layer of powdery ash along the hardwood floor.
Obermann became aware again of the pain in his stomach. It was growing worse. It throbbed and burned and he feared that an intestine might have been punctured. If so, fluid rife with fecal matter was leaking out, building up a major infection.
But Obermann knew that if he could get out of this forsaken building and find a telephone, Klarsfeld would come pick him up and take him to his clinic. He could operate tonight, if necessary. With comrade Klarsfeld’s help, Obermann knew that he would survive.
He grabbed a pillow from the bed, pulled off the case, and folded it lengthwise, like a large bandage. He let out a brief cry as he secured the cloth tightly around his midsection.