In the Land of Armadillos

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  “Jews, march!” the needle-nosed policemen yelped. A few men turned around, darted inquiring looks in the direction of his office. The horror of the situation swelled up and overwhelmed him. Dear God. They’re waiting for me to show up and save them. Then the line seethed forward, filing out of the courtyard and toward the woods. Reinhart leaned out as far as he could without falling. Once they passed the stable, they’d be out of his range of view.

  But at the stable, the parade lurched to a stop. “First row,” the policeman bawled, “follow me!”

  Obediently, Friedman and his family scurried off, following the sergeant behind the stable and out of Reinhart’s sight. Friedman wasn’t a big man, but the little boy’s legs still pumped to keep up with his father’s pace.

  For a long moment, there was a curious silence. Then crack crack crack crack. The gunshots echoed, reverberating off the windows and walls, loitering for a while on the thin, cool air.

  The line shuddered like a living thing. The mass of waiting Jews writhed and churned, husbands and wives calling to each other in alarm. Another police officer trotted to the front. “All right, all right,” he groused. “Let’s have order!”

  For the past three years, in a thousand other villages throughout Poland and the Ukraine, this approach had undoubtedly worked. But this was Adampol Palace, just six kilometers from Sobibór concentration camp, and each of Reinhart’s handpicked Jews was a wary veteran of previous Aktzias. All hell broke loose. The line spun apart and dissolved, three hundred and fifty men, women, and children punting off in all directions. In a matter of seconds, there was no one left in the courtyard, nothing to see but the yellow lawn, some stripped trees, and a fountain wrapped in burlap for protection against winter winds.

  Reinhart closed his eyes and concentrated. Go, go, go, he urged his workers silently. There are only a few guards, and the woods are fifty feet away. You can make it. Come on, Linker! Come on, Goldfeder! Come on, Trachtman and Stein and Cohen and Amsel and Baumgarten! Faster, faster, faster!

  He didn’t know which God had awarded him his magical abilities, Jesus Christ, the God of the Jews, Buddha, or the Holy Trinity, but he prayed to Him now with all his might. This is it, Lord. Anything you say. I’ll stop screwing around, I’ll eat fish on Fridays, I’ll go to church on Sundays, I’ll leave Petra and cleave to my wife, I’ll divorce my wife and marry Petra, I’ll become a priest if that’s what you want, only please, Holy Father, just one more miracle.

  It startled him away from the window, the unmistakable spitting of machine guns, so out of character with the bright blue morning. Tat tat tat tat tat tat tat . . . it came from all directions, and he realized that the missing policemen must have fanned out and made a perimeter around the camp. Tat tat tat tat tat tat tat . . . the barrage of bullets went on and on and on.

  Groping for his chair, he lowered himself down into the cushions. Surrounded by items of peerless beauty, helpless in his handsome home, Willy Reinhart sat and listened to the gunfire.

  * * *

  It is finally quiet. The captain holsters his gun and departs; he has a special operation just like this one designated for Natalin, one town over. “You’re free to go,” he says before he rides off. “It was only house arrest.”

  He can tell his Poles to come out now, the captain adds with an ironic glint in his eye, he’s going to need their help.

  Has there ever been a silence as thick as this one? Every child can imitate the sounds of a farm. Cocks crow, pigs grunt, horses neigh, sheep bleat, the cow goes moo. But not here, not now. Crossing the courtyard, he sees no one. Maybe it worked, maybe they all got away, he thinks hopefully. He walks through the empty stable and steps into the paddock.

  They are spread out before him, his Jews, his marvelous, gifted Jews, each one a master craftsman, tops in his field, crumpled and rigid on the hard-packed earth, their blood blackening the dust. Their eyes are open, as if they are still looking to him for help. He doesn’t recognize anyone. Death has already begun its chemistry, altering appearances. He knows that if he turns, he’ll see what’s left of Friedman slumped beside the stable wall, but he doesn’t have the courage.

  The sun is beginning to sink over the trees. The day ends early in November, but today the golden light lingers, slanting a vibrant pink glow on the softness of a cheek, an outstretched arm, a shapely thigh, the arc of a throat, the inside of an open palm. When the first chilly breath of nighttime riffles through a young girl’s hair, even the sun shivers, withdraws its warmth, and slinks away.

  * * *

  “Can you fix it? My wagon driver says he can’t use the harness the way it is,” said Rohlfe. “The breast collar needs to be replaced.”

  The Russians were coming. Today, tomorrow, no one knew for sure, but the German colony was packing up and leaving Włodawa. Truck after truck gusted down the road, their tires churning up clouds of dust that lingered long after they were gone, coating everything in a fine ashen powder.

  Yesterday porters had begun carting Reinhart’s furniture to the train station. A particularly fine bird’s-eye maple tallboy was now going on the boxcar. The porters, a titanic tattooed Pole and a tiny bowlegged Ukrainian, shoved it into a niche between a forest of grandfather clocks and a dining room table carved from burled walnut. Stacked sideways and upside down and inside and on top of one another, the pieces he’d collected over five years filled three boxcars.

  Reinhart’s gaze roved restlessly over his furniture. “I don’t have any more workers, Rohlfe. They’re all gone. Anyway, that last saddlemaker had two left hands.”

  It was a sticky afternoon in late August. A well-fed fly hummed lazily around their heads. Rohlfe sighed. “I can’t argue with that. Since last winter, the level of craftsmanship has really deteriorated.”

  That Reinhart had been able to find any workers at all was a miracle. After the massacre, no one wanted to work for Willy Reinhart anymore. “What can I say. My best people are buried in the ground.”

  “It’s a shame to leave anything behind for those savages. But the Führer is a genius, he knows what he’s doing. The army is stretched too thin. We’ll regroup, and then you can be sure we’ll be back.”

  Reinhart nodded to the soldier guarding the train. With a grinding screech, the boxcar door was closed and latched.

  “I admire your dedication,” said Rohlfe. “And I’m sure there are those in the Fatherland who will welcome your shipment of antique furniture. But what we’ll really need is fighters. Better get going before the Ivans arrive.”

  “I’m leaving in a few hours,” he said. Screw the Fatherland, he was routing the furniture to Breslau.

  “Then I guess this is auf Wiedersehn. Good luck to you, Reinhart. What times we’ve had. I’m going to miss your parties.” He crunched over the cinders back toward his car.

  What the hell. He was never going to see Rohlfe again. He had to know one way or the other. “So who did it, Rohlfe?” he called to him. “Who gave the order to execute my Jews? Was it you?”

  The Gestapo chief turned around, genuinely surprised. “No,” he said. “I always assumed you did it yourself.”

  This was so ludicrous that Reinhart was momentarily speechless. “Why would I do that? They were my best workers, every one a master craftsman, tops in their field.”

  A fly emerged from Rohlfe’s ear. Its body was a metallic gold, like the foil that came wrapped around chocolates. “I figured you were covering something up. Maybe you got a girl pregnant . . . maybe you liked little boys . . . maybe you thought they were going to kill you while you slept.” Adjusting its lacy wings, the fly hopped down to his pink earlobe.

  “If you didn’t do it . . . who did?”

  Rohlfe shot him a scornful look. “What’s the difference? Whatever else comes of this war, at least we accomplished one thing: ridding Europe of the plague of Jews. The world will thank us for what we did here. No one else had the guts.”

  An enormous green fly streaked out of Rohlfe’s sleeve. It circl
ed his head a couple of times and came to a rest on his cratered nose. “And what about you, Kommandant Jew Lover? Tell me, how is it you survived that partizan attack on the hunting party when everyone else was killed? Is it just possible that you knew about it beforehand? I still don’t know how you talked yourself out of that one.”

  To Reinhart’s amazement, a third fly, this one a flashy electric blue, launched itself from Rohlfe’s nostril and settled into droning orbit around his fleshy head.

  Rohlfe sagged, haplessly pawing at his ear. “Ach, these flies,” he sighed gloomily. “I don’t know where they come from. They won’t leave me alone.” Distracted, he turned back to his car. By the time he reached the door, his head was enveloped by an angry black cloud of flies.

  Once more, Reinhart navigated the rutted roads back to Adampol, swerving around tanks, overburdened trucks, refugees pulling carts, teams of horses towing artillery, officers on horseback, infantrymen on foot. Behind the wheel of the Mercedes, he gratefully breathed in the stench of gasoline fumes; it was a nice change from the stench of death.

  He turned down the avenue of cool green firs that signaled the entrance to the estate. Trucks had been coming and going at all hours, stripping the barnyard, the henhouses, and the pens of their inhabitants, emptying the silos and storehouses. They even took the beehives. After the commotion of packing up—the squawks and moos and grunts, the incessant sawing and hammering, the revving engines, the thudding of crates and sacks, the calls and commands of men—the silence was overwhelming.

  Reinhart switched off the ignition and stumped slowly up the steps. Already, the castle exuded an air of abandonment. In the past few days, a gauzy film of dust had settled on the windows and the facade. Some departing infantryman had written his name in chalk on one of the sandstone columns. Reinhart used his handkerchief to wipe it clean.

  He straightened up to admire his handiwork, then took a startled step backward. A soldier hung from a rope in the willow tree next to the automobile. While Reinhart stared, the hairs rising on the back of his neck, the branches creaked, and the soldier’s corpse danced gently in a semicircle. There was a cardboard sign around his neck, with words printed in thick black strokes: I’m a deserter.

  Suppressing a shudder, Reinhart wrestled open the heavy oak door and ducked inside. The click of his heels on the parquet floor echoed through the imperial, empty chambers. He let his eyes wander over the width and breadth and span of the Great Hall, the timbered walls, the murals painted by some 1920s artist whose name he’d never learned. On the stairs leading up to the second floor, looking like she owned the place, sat the yellow-striped barn cat. “Who let you in here?” he said, frowning. True, there were no couches or carpets left for her to ruin with her claws, but she could still wreak havoc on the drapes. “Scat! Shoo!”

  The cat gave him a look of undisguised contempt. With a flick of her tail, she leaped to the mantel over the fireplace, where she wound in and out between the bust of Mars and a vase of shriveled flowers.

  He went straight to his office. Sitting behind his desk for his final minutes as Reich Regional Commissioner of Agricultural Products and Services, he ran loving fingers over the cool marble surface, the whorls and swirls of the wood grain, the polished brass drawer pulls.

  Petra’s voice lilted through the galleries like a spill of musical notes. “Willy? Is that you?”

  “In here.”

  She had exchanged her chic dress for a bulky brown skirt, a flowered apron, and a white babushka, but she hadn’t managed to surrender her lipstick. She rested her suitcase on the floor. “The last truck left hours ago.”

  “I know. I needed something from my desk.” A sense of irremediable loss tore at his heart. “You should leave, darling,” he said quietly. “God knows what the Russians will do to women who shared German beds.”

  Not for the first time, Petra wondered if it was possible that her lover had shrunk in the last year. There were wrinkles she hadn’t seen before, and flecks of gray in his hair. His legendary smile was rare and fleeting. The murder of those poor martyred souls behind the stable had broken something in him. He flew into unexpected rages, and complained of odors no one else could smell, things no one else could see.

  Reinhart went to the window and cranked it open. Outside, a warm breeze rippled like a river through the tall grass. The onion domes of St. Adalbert’s basilica were just visible over the treetops, shimmering like a mirage in the heat.

  He tried to imagine shoehorning himself into normal life. Moving back to the cramped city apartment tenanted by his rigid, disapproving wife and children he barely knew. Workdays spent mediating between bickering siblings and their parents’ money. Making small talk with neighbors and shopkeepers who had pushed an old woman out a window, or shot only mothers, because it would be too painful for them to watch their children killed.

  “I’m not going back,” he said. He hadn’t known it himself until now.

  “Not going—? Are you crazy? The Gestapo are hanging deserters.”

  He wheeled around, his sorcerer’s green eyes hollow and haunted. “I don’t belong in Germany, Petra. I belong here.” She drew a sharp breath. He plunged on. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but now I’m sure. I want to stay. Can your partizan friends find me a place to hide until things settle down?”

  Petra patted down her voluminous skirt. “I don’t think it will be a problem,” she said. “They were grateful for your help, especially with the supply train schedules. But Willy, we have to get out of the palace. The Russians will be here any time now.”

  “My bag is already packed. Let me get what I came for, and we’ll go.”

  Critically, she surveyed the dashing cut of his suit, his crisp white shirt, the fresh shine on his onyx oxfords. “You’re not going anywhere dressed like that. You look too prosperous. Let me find you a different shirt, maybe a pair of baggy pants with some honest proletarian dirt on them. Unless you prefer to be dressed like a woman. You’d look nice in a babushka.”

  Reinhart laughed. “Thank you, love. But don’t just grab the first thing you see. If I’m going to be a woman, I want to look pretty.”

  “Wysocki may have something you can borrow. I’ll see if he’s still here.”

  Petra went off on her mission. Alone, Reinhart slid open the bottom desk drawer and removed his diary. Folded beneath the cover was his map of killing sites, dating back to 1939. Surely, after the war was over, there would be an agency to give it to, a commission appointed to investigate Hitler’s crimes.

  Under the diary was a black velvet bag with Hebrew words stitched in gold metallic thread. A few weeks ago, out for a ride on Fallada, he’d practically knocked over Soroka’s youngest daughter, straggling down the road behind an assortment of farm animals and accompanied by a dog the size of a Volkswagen. She denied it, but she was definitely a Soroka, no one else in the county had hair like that. He was so pleased to see her that he’d swooped her up in his arms and hugged her. The Sorokas were alive! For a few days, he’d felt like the old Reinhart, with magic in his eye and a devil in his smile.

  He pressed his cheek to the soft velvet nap. Inside the bag were Soroka’s prayer book, a striped shawl, and leather phylacteries. It must have been a mistake, left behind in the rush to escape. When the war was over, the Nazis gone, the Jews returned to their homes, he would seek out Soroka in his shop and return it to him.

  “You were right to leave me,” he would say. “I couldn’t protect you. I couldn’t protect anyone, only I was too vain to see it. I should have spent my days telling everyone I met to find a hole to hide in and stay there until the war was over.”

  He always insisted that the massacre wasn’t his fault, the Jews of Adampol were destined for slaughter no matter what he tried. But now, with the German occupying forces fleeing to escape the punishing fury of the Red Army, he let the tendrils of his unconscious probe deeper. The morning of the final Aktzia, as he’d stood before his window and complacently observed fo
rty Waffen SS troopers amble up his driveway, why hadn’t he warned his people to run and hide?

  That day in October, when the executioners had already driven his Jews into the forest before he managed to talk them around . . . that was also the day Soroka saw through his pretty promises and disappeared. The angels had been giving him one last chance, he saw that now. He had ignored it. After all, he was Willy Reinhart, the man with the silver tongue. He could talk anybody into anything.

  He tucked the diary and the velvet bag into his valise, dropped his hat on his head, tilted it just so. He turned the key in the door to his office, then smiled to himself. Who was he locking out? The cat?

  Footsteps crunched up the stairs leading to the palace. “I hope you brought me something green. It highlights my eyes,” he said, holding open the front door.

  A Soviet rifleman was silhouetted between the columns. Reinhart had taken him by surprise. He grunted what must have been the Russian equivalent of Oh shit! as he trained the barrel of his weapon at Reinhart’s chest.

  He dropped the valise and raised his hands in the air. Fear scoured him raw. Desperately, he dredged up his best smile, the one that greeted you like a long-lost friend, knew your dirtiest secrets, and liked you anyway. The rifleman yelled even louder. Reinhart didn’t understand Russian. For all he knew, he was wishing him happy birthday.

  A muddy jeep with a red star on the hood wheezed to a stop in front of the palace, and two Red Army soldiers jumped out. One was an officer, with stars on his red epaulettes and a red band around his cap. The officer tugged off his cap and wiped his forehead on his sleeve. He looked hot and angry. When he saw Reinhart, he unleashed a torrent of loud and furious Russian syllables.