Death in Twilight

by Jason Fields

  “Yes, I think so,” Kaczynski said solemnly. “Even those of us who are only supposed to be here for three months, six months. As you can see, we’re all treated the same.”

  The mug that Aaron grabbed was cold in his hand, but the woman with the dull eyes and the ladle poured in wonderful warmth.

  The two men took their steaming soup and stood apart. Aaron brought out the brown bread and broke it, careful not to let a crumb fall to the ground. He passed precisely half to Kaczynski. The two men dipped the bread and brought it to their lips slowly, savoring the moment and the most simple of pleasures, now a treat.

  The taste was terrible, the broth mostly water, some beets perhaps playing a peripheral role. The bread was rough-textured and Aaron wouldn’t have been surprised if sawdust had been stored too close to the flour. But hunger and cold were the only spices the meal needed, and those were available in abundance.

  “I wonder what my wife is eating tonight.” Kaczynski said, as he chewed slowly.

  “Hopefully it’s better than this,” Aaron said.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Even in the ghetto, I ate better than this,” Aaron said.

  “It’s bad there?”

  “Yes, it’s bad. Not much for anyone to eat. Not much medicine, warm clothing, fuel. Not much of anything, really.”

  “I’m not sure there’s much of those things anywhere. Outside of the German storerooms, I mean,” Kaczynski said.

  “No.”

  Aaron didn’t want to argue with his new friend, or compare suffering with a man who had lived in Kronberg for more than a few days.

  The two men shared a bit more of their lives with each other, but were cautious lest they reveal anything of interest to the guards.

  More shouting. It was time to head to the barracks. No one minded. There wasn’t any food left, anyway. There hadn’t been for a while. The men and women brought their bone-dry mugs back to the tables. People in different barracks nodded to each other as they passed. A man saw his wife, their hands touched and then both were forced to turn away.

  In the barracks, Aaron saw the man who had taken a beating for a coat. He was curled up in it, and though his lips were split, he was smiling.

  At least someone was warm, Aaron thought wryly.

  “Six days,” Kaczynski said as he turned away from Aaron, positioning himself for sleep.

  They were the last words spoken that night.

  Chapter 17

  Aaron was woken by dreams of Yelena and the erection they brought with them. He was astonished to find that his body was capable of such a reaction and relieved to find himself lying on the outer edge of the bunk and facing out as well. As knowledge of his surroundings returned to him, he wondered at his unconscious mind’s ability to feel lust for anything other than food or warmth.

  Aaron still had no idea what had happened to Yelena on the night that he was captured. Much of his interrogation by the Gestapo was fog. The pain and exhaustion had melded days and nights together, along with conversations and waking dreams — nightmares rather. Still, one name had never come up. Aaron had never mentioned Yelena and neither had his interrogator, Clausewitz. If Clausewitz had her — or even knew about her — he would have used Yelena ruthlessly, and without hesitation. She would have become the primary implement of Aaron’s torture.

  Still, it spun and spun in Aaron’s mind. Why had she failed to make the rendezvous? Had she seen the Germans readying for the raid and held back? Had she been killed without the Germans ever learning who she was, or her relationship to Aaron?

  Had she faced her own betrayal? Aaron had never been happy with bringing in Andrusz, the gunrunner. He’d only agreed because there was no other way to get the weapons.

  But a necessary risk wasn’t necessarily a smart risk. While Aaron had reasons to believe that Andrusz had nothing to do with his own capture, none of them was a guarantee of the man’s fidelity. Just because he hadn’t betrayed Aaron didn’t mean he’d kept faith with Yelena.

  The need for answers had helped keep Aaron alive in both frying pan and fire. The answers lived in Miasto and Aaron was going back to find them. Soon.

  It had been seven days spent in Hell. Aaron had used that word indiscriminately all of his life, but now it was more than a mild expletive or even an abstract notion. Aaron had grown to know Hell intimately, along with its demons, devils and the condemned. He knew which guards killed for pleasure or caused pain to pass the time. He knew which of the other prisoners were still capable of compassion and those who had turned feral in their time at Kronberg labor camp, stealing what they could and informing for the slightest imagined infraction.

  Seven days had been enough for Aaron. It was time to go, and he knew how he would do it.

  Contemplating his task kept sleep at arm’s length. An extra dose of exhaustion would be no help, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  Aaron listened to the sounds that filled Kronberg’s walls.

  Within the barracks were the snorers, the moaners, the night farters.

  Generators pounded, keeping the spot and floodlights on, perhaps creating heat for someone.

  A little further out, a dog was barking, a guard was cursing, complaining about the cold. Further yet, a scream, its cause unknown.

  Night.

  Aaron saw no hint of a sunrise, had no watch to check, so he took the word of the bugle and the hollers of the guards as proof of approaching dawn. Kaczynski stirred next to him. Everybody groaned and turned, stretched as they could and climbed down from the bunks. As always, the guards urged them to move faster.

  On the way to the latrine ditch, Aaron noticed a bunk with a solitary, unmoving figure on it.

  Isaac, Aaron said to himself, putting a name to the body. A hint of guilt tickled the back of his mind when he realized he’d already assessed the dead man’s possessions before remembering his name. But Isaac’s rags had become shreds. Aaron had no need of them.

  He passed on and did what was necessary, making it out to the parade ground to stand pointlessly without being hit. He stood with everyone else, slumped at attention — if such a thing was possible.

  A slow hour passed. A woman in some other group fell, as someone seemed to do every morning during this assembly. Maybe that was the point. No other reason had ever been given for the time they stood every day in freezing inactivity.

  The woman’s friends — comrades? bunkmates? — gathered her up quickly and there was no punishment meted out.

  Nothing else happened. Then it was time for breakfast and a grateful sigh swept the open place, unheard beneath the morning’s wind.

  Kaczynski looked particularly weak to Aaron. He’d been watching his friend closely. In the week before his scheduled release, the man had grown sicker and more frail. The bloody cough was more frequent and Aaron had seen more blood in the man’s urine.

  After they had received their breakfast Aaron gave Kaczynski half of his bread, though he knew it wasn’t going to make a difference. Both welcomed the warm water flavored with just a touch of dirt and remembered coffee.

  The two men returned their mugs, picked up their heavy tools and joined the march to the quarry. As the sun finally rose, the air changed. The edge seemed to have fallen off the wind. It was blowing from behind for once, making the walk a little easier. Aaron wondered, looking around, if maybe the snow was melting a little? Was water streaming at the side of the road?

  It would be a good day to go home.

  Kaczynski stumbled ahead of Aaron, his feet crossed up. His shovel fell to the ground with a clang. Aaron sprang into action, grabbing his friend under his armpits, desperately trying to get him back on his feet and in rhythm with the rest of the line. Kaczynski had already called attention to himself, which was dangerous enough. Falling out of line might have been the end of him.

  The man behind Aaron also did his part to save Kaczynski, grabbing up the shovel as he passed it with a quick bobbing motion. The man passed the shovel forward t
o Aaron; Aaron passed it forward to Kaczynski, who took it up as if he was bearing a cross to Calvary.

  “Thank you,” Kaczynski breathed and immediately started coughing, blood flecking the ground.

  One of the guards opened the gate to the quarry as usual and the men took their places, with the exception of a few prisoners who had arrived on a train the night before. There was little to teach, and in a few minutes the new men were situated and could hardly be told from the old, except by their strength.

  In his week breaking rocks, Aaron’s hands had grown callused and the tools he used familiar. Today they were heavier than yesterday, when they had been heavier than the day before. He became lost in the rhythm, left himself behind. Around him, people worked, they fell, they were beaten. The guards laughed and tried to keep warm by stamping their feet and drinking brandy. They drank through every day and their amusements turned darker the drunker they became.

  Aaron needed the guards to get good and drunk today and they were happy to oblige. As the sun — which, in a break from Eastern European tradition, was visible today — began to lower itself toward the far horizon, the SS began to sing a sentimental favorite. A few swayed slowly back and forth, arm in arm. A Jewish man in his pit made the mistake of looking up at the guards with an expression of disgust. A guard who wasn’t singing looked down and saw him.

  “What do you think you’re looking at?” the guard shouted. “And what’s that look on your face? You don’t appreciate a little patriotic signing?”

  It was time for Aaron to move.

  Kaczynski was working next to him. Aaron grabbed his arm and dragged his friend against the wall of their own pit, into the shadows.

  “I’m sorry,” Aaron said, and grabbed Kaczynski by the throat. He squeezed the thin reed that supported the Pole’s gaunt head. Kaczynski’s arms flailed feebly at his unimagined attacker. His eyes bugged out, but still they managed to ask, “Why?”

  Aaron knew this wasn’t a moment to listen to his conscience, but he couldn’t finish what he was doing without trying to justify himself.

  “Every day that we’ve been here, you’ve been sicker and sicker. You can hardly lift your shovel. You cough blood in the day and it’s worse when I’m lying next to you at night.

  “But you don’t die!” Aaron hissed. “You won’t die!

  “You won’t last two days after they let you out, but they’re going to let you go any hour now. You keep saying so yourself! What choice do I have? I need to live! I have to find my wife! I can’t die now!”

  Kaczynski’s head began to slump, finally falling to the side and still. The eyes remained open. Aaron denied the urge to close them. Dignity had no place in what had happened. Instead, he kept Kaczynski’s body standing against the wall by leaning his own body in. He reached down, fumbling with numb fingers at the buttons of his own coat, followed by Kaczynski’s. He struggled, tugged and pulled. He felt the air on his sweating skin as his coat came off.

  In a second, he was wearing his friend’s jacket with the crucial red patch on the lapel. It took longer to get Aaron’s warmer coat unto Kaczynski’s uncooperative body, but then it was done.

  Aaron put his arms under Kaczynski’s, holding him up as he had on the morning march. This time it was no kindness. He did it only to drag Kaczynski back into the light and lay him down. Aaron picked up his shovel and went back to work, trying very hard not to look around to see if he’d been observed. He kept his back to where Kaczynski’s body lay.

  Finally, Aaron reached up to wipe sweat from his forehead. He used the motion to surreptitiously check if anyone had noticed the dead man. No one had. The guards were still busy with their fun. The man who’d dare disapprove of their antics was screaming in a way Kaczynski had never had the opportunity to. Finally, Aaron couldn’t take it any longer.

  “A man’s dead here, I think!” he shouted.

  That got the attention of two of the guards. In no rush, they ambled over to confirm what Aaron had said.

  “You think?” one of the guards asked. His name was Weber and he was known for his particular sense of humor. “I would imagine you’d be able to tell by now.”

  The other guard laughed.

  “Yes,” Aaron said. “He’s dead.”

  “Good, good. A little more for the rest of you on the chow line tonight!” he said, and both of the Germans laughed. The joke was so funny because no matter how many slaves died in a day, the portions at breakfast or dinner never changed.

  When Weber had recovered himself, he turned back to Aaron.

  “What was his name? I’m sorry, but I can’t keep track of all of you. You never seem to last long enough. It’s not that the name matters, really, but we have to keep the paperwork straight.”

  Aaron looked Weber in the eye, on the edge of impudence, but lowered his gaze before he crossed the line.

  “Chaim,” Aaron said, “Chaim Rosen.”

  “Not Rosenstein or Rosenberg, or one of those other names you all have?”

  “Rosen,” Aaron said, once again skating the edge of defiance.

  “Good, good.”

  Weber was quite cheerful.

  “So, what are you waiting for?” the Nazi said. “Don’t just leave him there!”

  It was grim duty, but Aaron had done it before. Kaczynski was so thin that dragging him to the pit outside the fence was easier than lifting a shovel. A guard opened the gate and followed Aaron out to the shallow burial ditch. Aaron laid Kaczynski down and pushed a few clods of dirt on top of him while saying the Kaddish for a Catholic Pole he had killed with his bare hands.

  No one at the quarry had bothered to glance closely enough at Kaczynski’s body to see the obvious cause of death.

  The walk back to Kronberg took years. Aaron felt trapped by the pace of the column. He needed to get away from Kaczynski, he needed to get back to the camp so that he could be released. He had no time for the walking corpses who were plodding in front and behind.

  An unexpected kink in the line, caused by someone’s attempt to remove a rock from his shoe without entirely stopping, caused Aaron to hit his nose on the top of another man’s head. Aaron cursed, but not loudly.

  With the sun sinking, the water on each side of the path was slowing to syrup. It would be frozen before Aaron had finished his evening soup. He turned his thoughts from what he’d done and tried to imagine where he would be when all of Poland’s snow had melted. Feverish daydreams of Yelena and a cottage in a world turned green distracted him from the march and helped him finish it.

  The camp, when he got there, was the same, but the soup tasted more wholesome. Neither the guards, nor the loudspeakers said anything about an impending release of prisoners. Aaron was not worried. After all, it was only the sixth night since Kaczynski told Aaron that he had a week left on his sentence. The announcement would come in the morning.

  As the curfew descended, Aaron shared his bunk with the two men who had always lain beside him and Kaczynski. If they noticed there was a different man wearing the red patch on his coat, they said nothing. If they noticed anyone was missing at all, they asked no questions. By the end of the day, exhaustion had dulled the eyes of the keenest observers and starvation lulled the senses.

  How could one tell the difference between two men with light-brown beards, dirty blond hair and muddled blue eyes? Dirt and a beard could hide a multitude of sins.

  At first Aaron slept badly, and then he slept worse. A shout in a dream became a squeal in the dark that woke no one, except himself. For a second night in a row, sleep wouldn’t return. For the first night since his arrival, Kaczynski’s body offered no warmth.

  Aaron lay and listened again. He heard the winds wake up and saw the first new snowflakes landing, obliterating yesterday’s promise of warmer weather. Kaczynski’s face covered the walls, but Aaron tried to focus on his freedom, on the fact that he wouldn’t have to carry a hammer or shovel a thousand miles out in the snow and crush stones until his back was broken. Even if he had
to wait for every second to pass, the morning and freedom were coming for him, he told himself. He brushed away voices telling him that he didn’t deserve to see either.

  Somehow he dozed. Not for long, but long enough for the guards to start another day. Aaron fled his bed and was the first to the latrine, thinking that it would be the last time he used it. That fact didn’t make it smell any better. Nor did it make the stares of the guards and their heckling easier to take.

  Aaron took his place in the pointless parade in the camp’s central square, the filthy red patch on his lapel there for the guards to see.

  Time froze. The men and women in the square froze.

  And then it was breakfast. No one was called out of line, no one was exempted from duty.

  Aaron drank his coffee alone, though he nodded to a few others. He told himself that the guards would stop him before he picked up a shovel.

  Then the ten minutes of breakfast were over. Aaron returned his mug. He’d eaten his bread. He had no one to share it with, and what reason was there for hoarding it?

  The line for the tools formed and Aaron hung back. Not in the line, not separate from it. The men inched forward and the distance between Aaron and his nearest neighbor grew. The man behind gave Aaron a little shove. He refused to be beaten just because someone else was half asleep. Aaron moved forward a step, then another. Finally, he had no choice but to grab a shovel.

  The line of march was beginning to form up, and again Aaron held back. He was carrying a shovel but surely it was a mistake. He would be stopped before he marched out the gate. Aaron joined the others when the guard — Weber again — swatted him playfully and painfully on the back of his thigh with a truncheon.

  It must be some kind of mistake, he said, I’m supposed to go free today.

  But he’d been in the camp too long to speak the words aloud. Whatever was going on, he knew there was no chance of mercy from the men who would lead him to the quarry, and he saw no officer to ask.