Death in Twilight

by Jason Fields

He tried to look beyond the light, and by squinting his eyes just so, he could begin to make out a wooden chair on wheels, like a secretary might use in an office. He could also see a table that sat near the wall. As there was little else to do, he spent some time imagining what might be on the table.

  Were those things on the right pliers? If so, how would they be used?

  And next to them, what else? Ah, perhaps a hammer? Nails beside it? That didn’t seem right, but then, who knew?

  He was stumped for a while by a box with a crank attached to it. Would a limb — or something else — be placed inside the box, to be ground up? But then what were the strings that dangled from it for?

  Strings …

  No! Of course not strings. Wires! Electrical wires, and the box with the crank would have to be a small generator.

  Something about it broke through Aaron’s haze of detachment and he began to grow very afraid.

  Still, the door stayed shut. No one came.

  As the time passed, boredom and terror fought a war for his soul. Neither had won a decisive victory when, finally, the door to the room opened and, to Aaron’s complete lack of surprise, Hermann Clausewitz walked in.

  He was in the uniform of the SS, but there was an unadorned black patch on the right side of his collar instead of any identifying mark. Of course the absence was identification in itself. Only the Gestapo wore that patch.

  Before he spoke, Clausewitz sat himself on the rolling chair and pushed off in Aaron’s direction, spinning to face him with a bit of a flourish. He took the damaged side of Aaron’s face in his hand, cupped it and then squeezed until Aaron shouted out.

  “I think you know already what I’m going to ask you,” Clausewitz said, removing his hand. “But there’s no harm in setting out some specifics and ground rules. First rule, when you understand what I’m saying, nod your head. You understand?”

  Aaron nodded.

  “Good. Let’s begin with who you were planning to meet last night?”

  Was this a trick question? Did Clausewitz know or not know? Was Yelena in custody, or still unknown to the Gestapo?

  At least Clausewitz’s question gave Aaron back some sense of time. No more than a day had elapsed since his capture.

  “We weren’t there to meet anyone,” Aaron said, reaching for the ring of truth. “We were there to escape.”

  “No,” Clausewitz shook his head. “No, that’s not a good place to start at all.”

  He stood and used his arm as a piston.

  Aaron collapsed around the fist, which struck him in the abdomen. He was lucky that some of the force was absorbed when his chair fell to the floor. He was less lucky that the back of his head also absorbed some of the energy when it struck the ground. He blacked out.

  Or perhaps that was a blessing as well.

  Aaron was woken by ice-cold water that first dripped onto his head and then came down in a rush, choking him. The man who was pouring the bucket wasn’t Clausewitz. In fact, Aaron didn’t recognize him at all.

  It took Aaron a minute to realize that he was no longer sitting in the metal chair. Instead he was lying on some kind of plank, his head slightly lower than his feet. He was still tied up, unable to move much beyond his neck, his toes and fingertips.

  He looked left and right, and lifted his head the little bit he could. There was little to see in the room other than bald, grinning Clausewitz.

  “You’re weaker than I would have guessed,” Clausewitz said as a greeting.

  Aaron said nothing.

  “So, no more punching.”

  Clausewitz nodded to the man who stood over Aaron.

  Aaron felt his head sinking, and realized his feet were also rising. Then frigid liquid grasped the back of his head. Then his ears, his eyes, his nose and, finally, his closed mouth.

  His eyes shut against the liquid, but they soon popped open against his will. He looked in the face of the man who was holding him under. There was no sign of physical strain on it. Aaron attributed that to how thin he had become.

  Enough of the liquid got into Aaron’s mouth for him to realize it was simply fresh water and, as he had received nothing to drink, he swallowed some. It was then Aaron realized that the cold water had led him to expel his breath.

  There was nothing in his lungs and time was passing.

  The urgency for air took a few more seconds to realize, but when the realization came, Aaron knew he wouldn’t be able to resist for long. His body, somewhere above him, struggled and scraped itself against its tight bonds. Pointlessly.

  It was done. Aaron tried with all his might to breath water, failed and began to convulse.

  He fell out of the water as the man above him lowered his legs. He retched, coughed, spluttered, turned his head and drooled, too. The water didn’t want to come out. He wasn’t able to curl up around his middle and use that pressure to push the water from his lungs.

  His torturer bent over and helped by pushing down hard on Aaron’s ribs and belly. The water — not all of it — came out and air took its place. Aaron could do nothing other than breathe and choke for a while. Clausewitz gave him that time.

  The Gestapo man then spoke casually.

  “Whom were you waiting for?”

  Yelena.

  “We weren’t waiting for anyone. We were waiting for the right time to escape,” Aaron said through a gasp.

  “I see. And the treasure you were found with?”

  Clausewitz spoke like a snake hissing to a mouse.

  “We were going to use it to buy our way out of Poland,” Aaron said, his voice coming nearly under control.

  “And the guns?”

  “The guns?” Aaron answered stupidly.

  Clausewitz again nodded at the man who was still hovering over Aaron, and again Aaron felt his feet lifting.

  “Wait! Wait!” Aaron shouted, not even knowing what he would say.

  His words had no effect.

  This time, Aaron was able to get a breath before he head was entirely covered.

  It made no difference, other than that the drowning took a bit longer. Apparently, the Germans had time.

  Aaron tasted death. It had practically no taste at all.

  Then, once again, he was brought out. He retched, choked and gasped again. The nameless German did his lifeguard routine. Aaron lived a little longer, if only to answer Clausewitz’s questions.

  “The guns, I assume, were meant for some kind of pointless resistance?” Clausewitz asked now. “Let’s talk about that. How many people are in this resistance?”

  “I don’t know,” Aaron said.

  “So there is a resistance, then?”

  “I don’t know,” Aaron said again, though he yearned to say something else.

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!” Clausewitz shrieked in a horrible falsetto. Then, in his normal voice, “Oh, Aaron. I’m not a stupid man, and you’re not even a man. Not really. Just a Jew, that’s all. Just a Jew.

  “Are you scared Aaron?”

  Every time Clausewitz spoke his name, Aaron felt it was a little less his, that his identity became a little more tenuous.

  But he said nothing.

  “Whom were you waiting for?” Clausewitz said, changing the subject again. “What was the delivery supposed to be? More guns?”

  Yelena.

  No. Instead, silence.

  Clausewitz himself edged over, grabbed the foot of the plank and lifted.

  “This time, you’re not coming out,” he said.

  Aaron screamed. He hit the water so fast there was no time for another breath.

  He thrashed his head, he flapped his fingers and feet.

  Time passed.

  He drowned.

  Aaron awoke in a cell, but this time he wasn’t alone in it. He was on the floor with a man’s crotch at eye level. His back was to the wall. Aaron reached up and weakly tried to push the other man further away, but instead received a kick. It was half-hearted.

  After a few minutes of c
onsciousness and the passing of several waves of nausea, Aaron wedged his back against the wall and slowly pressed his way upward, until he stood face to face with the man whose crotch he had become so intimately acquainted with.

  “I thought you were dead,” the man said.

  “Yes, nearly,” Aaron replied.

  “It’s a shame,” the man said. “Would have been nice to have a little more room.”

  “Thank you for your concern,” Aaron said weakly, “but I’m quite all right.”

  The man was dressed much the same as Aaron, which is to say ravaged pants and a shirt. On his feet were holes with a little wool to bind them together. When the man tried to shift away from Aaron, he couldn’t get very far. There were at least twenty-five men in the cell with them. Aaron doubted it was supposed to hold even ten. Certainly in Aaron’s time in the Zendarmerie, he had never seen so many crammed together a space this size.

  Still, it appeared to be a little better than the pens he’d passed on the way to his first cell — however long ago that was. There was room to sit, as Aaron had, and the air was comprised of something more than his neighbor’s exhaled breath.

  Aaron allowed time to pass, feeling his wounds, uncertain about the prospect of living; certain that Clausewitz wasn’t done with him. Not by a long shot.

  Finally, the man who wished Aaron was dead needed some conversation, some contact beyond the mere pressing of flesh.

  “What’s your name, then?” the man asked.

  “Kaminski.”

  “I’m Hirsch.” He tried out a grim smile.

  “Okay,” Aaron said.

  “I broke curfew,” Hirsch said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Okay.”

  Hirsch frowned. He must have hoped for something more revealing — or at least friendlier — in response, but Aaron was in no mood or shape to make friends. Instead, he stared dully around him.

  Every of age was represented in the cage, from the oldest grandfathers to boys hardly ready for school. He wondered what the old men could have done to attract the attention of the authorities. Were they guilty of curfew violations, too? Had the religious among them been caught praying where they could be overheard? Were they thieves, or even rapists?

  And the men of his own age. Aaron could imagine them guilty of any of a hundred crimes. The fact that he knew none of the faces didn’t mean that they weren’t fellow smugglers. Smuggling was the art of survival in Miasto.

  The worst, the saddest, Aaron thought, were the younger men, the boys. One in particular caught Aaron’s eye. He was stick-thin, with the luminous eyes of malnutrition. He looked neither Jewish nor Aryan. He was brown haired and simply Middle European, unremarkable. Except for the fact that no 10-year-old should be in a cage such as this one. No 10-year-old should be so frightened, so drawn into himself or work so hard to avoid the gaze of the people around him. If a boy could will himself invisible, the boy would have gone unseen.

  Aaron’s heart yearned to reach out, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to speak the words of false reassurance. His own despair was so deep that he had lost the power to lie to a child. The world was simply as he saw it. His eyes were clear. Nothing would be changed. At least not by anyone in his cell.

  Aaron closed his eyes and shifted to lean his head back against the wall. He wasn’t yet ready to lie down in the filth at his feet, so he took what rest he could standing up.

  He heard a rustle in the crowd and felt bodies shift around him. He opened his eyes, and now in front of him was a man who topped Aaron by perhaps an inch. His eyes were narrow and peeked out of a narrow mind.

  “My turn,” the man said.

  “Your turn for what?” Aaron asked, politely enough.

  “My turn against the wall.”

  It took Aaron a second to realize what the man meant. He wanted to lean his back against the wall and take some of the weight off his feet.

  Aaron was conflicted. It wasn’t such an unreasonable request. There were essentially no resources in the cell and so the walls of the cell had become a resource. There was a finite supply of wall and Aaron had a piece of it.

  Okay.

  On the other hand, Aaron had been beaten, drowned and would soon be dead. The tall man had been rude.

  “No.”

  Aaron’s voice was gravel and he spoke from somewhere beyond the cell.

  The other man reached out a hand to shove Aaron, expecting no resistance from the shade in front of him. Aaron grabbed that arm and used it as a lever to spin the man around, kicked the man’s knees out from under him and then kicked him in the back of the head, planting him facedown on the stone floor. There was just enough room because the sudden violence had sent everyone else pressing back against the iron bars of the cell door.

  The extra weight caused the metal to groan audibly, but no guards came to take a look. As long as no one escaped, it seemed like the Germans didn’t very much care what went on in the cells.

  The young boy Aaron had noticed squeezed through the crowd. He looked down at the man below him and spat, but said nothing. Then he turned and wormed away, deeper into the press of bodies.

  It was feeding time at the zoo. One by one, the men were allowed to come up to the front of the cell and receive a cup of broth from the same metal mug. There was a lot of pushing and shoving and men trying very hard to steal a second helping by taking their comrades’ place.

  As Aaron made his way to the front, he found himself looking for the boy. He wasn’t visible until Aaron ducked his head down below chest height. All the men seemed to be treating him like an obstacle to be gotten around. The boy was getting no closer to the broth, nor would he without help.

  Aaron swam through the crowd until he reached the boy, bent down and somehow lifted him. With the boy hugged to his chest Aaron waded toward the broth.

  And men moved. The crowd parted.

  Broth for both of them, and then Aaron put the boy back down, and resumed his own place along the wall. The boy had no words of thanks, but stayed at Aaron’s side.

  Aaron shook his head and closed his eyes, leaned back in the spot he’d earned and made the world go away.

  For less than a minute.

  He heard his name called from outside the cell. At first he didn’t move.

  He heard his name again.

  He knew the guard would offer him nothing that he wanted.

  The third time they guard asked it was by turning a hard jet of water into the cell. Spraying up, spraying down, spraying from one side to the other. The water was deadly cold and the men tried their hardest to get away from it. Aaron felt ever-increasing pressure on his chest. The boy had slipped out of sight, trying to take refuge below the crowd.

  It was hard to speak and harder to be heard above the general roar, but those nearest Aaron must have figured out what he was saying because suddenly they did everything they could to let him through. It wasn’t long until Aaron was vomited up and stood at the front of the cell, admitting whom he was.

  The door opened. Aaron was taken. The trip was a whirl of gray stone and institutional paint but, in the end, he found himself in the room with the metal chair, the bright lights, the pliers and the hand-cranked generator.

  Here, too, was Hermann Clausewitz, infinitely patient.

  Aaron was again put roughly in the metal chair, his arms tied ruthlessly behind him. He slumped as much as he could, enjoying the weight of his body resting comfortably on his ass, as God had intended.

  “Better?” Clausewitz asked, seeing Aaron’s posture.

  Aaron said nothing. If he began to talk, where would he stop?

  “They fed you?”

  No reply.

  “You know when I said I’d see you again, that first time we met at the hospital?” Clausewitz asked. “How did I know such a thing?

  “I have to admit, I didn’t. It was simply an effort to intimidate you. It worked, didn’t it?”

  Aaron kept his face blank.

  “I know
it did,” Clausewitz said. “It always does, especially with you people. Even if you did serve in the Zendarmerie and the army.”

  So, Aaron was more than a name, a man in a basement. He was a file now, with “facts” and details.

  “I’m sure you led the retreat. You Jews are always the first to run, if you can be made to fight at all.”

  Was Clausewitz going to insult him to death, Aaron wondered? It would make a nice change from physical injury.

  “You know what? I’m just going to stop talking,” Clausewitz said.

  Aaron couldn’t help himself.

  “That would be nice.”

  Clausewitz actually laughed.

  “Well, you’re not going to like what I do instead any better.”

  “I suppose not,” Aaron said.

  He didn’t know why, but he was talking, and now it was all just a matter of time.

  There were electrical shocks, punches and kicks, there was diesel fuel to drink and even breathe. There were fingernails slowly extracted.

  Aaron worked hard to be somewhere else, but this time there was nowhere to go.

  And this time he talked.

  Some of what he said was even true.

  Chapter 15

  “You’ve just had an enormous stroke of luck,” a voice in Polish said to Aaron. He was lying on the floor of another crowded cell, bleeding from cuts above his eye, lashes to his back and a gash in his thigh uncomfortably near his scrotum — not that it would have been comfortable anywhere else. The other prisoners had given him some room in order to let him die in peace.

  “How so?” It was a faint croak, but it still surprised the men in his cell that Aaron could make any sound other than moans.

  “You’ve just been shot trying to escape,” the Polish speaker said cheerfully.

  Aaron summoned enough energy to point an incurious eye at the man. It was the eye that could still open at all.

  “So, get the fuck up! Don’t just lie there like a dead man,” the Pole, who was wearing the uniform of the Blue Police, said.

  Aaron said nothing, nor did he move.

  The man and his partner opened the door to the cell. They were large men with no inclination toward mercy in their faces. They reached down and grabbed Aaron under the arms, turning him into a grotesque marionette, unable to either resist or cooperate.