Death in Twilight

by Jason Fields

  One dark block, another.

  A sound from up ahead. Drunken laughter.

  He could hear the men getting closer. They certainly weren’t trying for subtlety.

  Aaron was alongside a fence that protected nothing more than a vacant lot, and therefore wasn’t in great repair. He reached down to see if he could lift it from the bottom and felt some give. A little more, he thought, just a little more.

  I’m thin enough, this should hardly be an issue, he thought. I should be able to squeeze through anywhere.

  But when the fence was barely six centimeters off the ground, he couldn’t lift it any further. There was no way to burrow under it. He’d have to rely on Stefan Kaczynski’s paperwork again to see him through. At least it was dark enough that the photo would be hard to make out, Aaron thought.

  Rather than wait for the patrol to come to him, Aaron decided he would walk to them. Perhaps if he walked like a man who had every right to be on the streets, they wouldn’t even stop him.

  Sure.

  Louder and louder — and drunker and drunker from what Aaron could tell — but now they were close enough for him to realize the jokes were in Polish, not German. That didn’t mean he was safe. After all, many Poles who traced their ancestry back to Germany had joined the Blue Police or even the SS itself. Still, Aaron felt himself relax the least little bit.

  Finally, Aaron was able to see the men fairly clearly. They weren’t moving fast and what little light that had escaped from one of the factories was enough to present them in fair detail.

  They were Poles. They looked like they had come off shift at one of the factories and were on their way to or from a bar. From their state, Aaron guessed it was from.

  So, he picked up his pace further and walked past the men, on the opposite side of the empty street. He didn’t look at them, just kept moving, his eyes down. A turn around the corner, and they would be gone. Aaron felt eyes on his back.

  Then he heard the words, “Too good to drink with us?”

  He kept walking and hoped the man wouldn’t feel the need to follow up on his dig.

  One breath. Two breaths. One step. Ten steps.

  Nothing.

  Aaron felt his muscles pop as the tension eased. The Poles were back in their world and he was alone again in his.

  Within a quiet hour, he was in sight of the bridge he needed to cross. The neighborhoods that surrounded it were bathed in light from street lamps and a sliver of newly risen moon.

  The illumination showed him that, as he’d feared, checkpoints had been set up at either end of the bridge, complete with sandbags and soldiers. Aaron wasn’t thrilled with any of his choices for getting past.

  He could present his papers and brave it out, but Aaron was loath to put himself in the hands of German soldiers again, especially alone and at night. He would try it only as a last resort.

  All he needed to do now was think of other resorts.

  Swimming was out of the question. The river wasn’t wide, but it was cold and the current strong. His coat would instantly become waterlogged, dragging him toward the bottom. Even if he made it across, he’d have no way to warm himself again.

  A boat? The problem there was that he’d have to find one to steal and then take it across the river unobserved. Besides, he knew little about boats and had trouble believing he’d be able to make the trip silently.

  That left only one option that Aaron could think of, and he wasn’t fond of it.

  Below the level of the street, a quay ran along both sides of the river. It met up with the foundation of the bridge, which was constructed of brick and ornamented stone. As a child, Aaron and a few of his friends would climb up and try to make it across the bridge by scaling its outer wall. They used only the handholds unintentionally created by the architect in designing its elaborate façade. It was possible — though not likely — that Aaron could get across using the same method now.

  There were a couple of facts that discouraged Aaron:

  First, when he’d played there as a boy, it had been midsummer and the water was warm. Since the bridge wasn’t particularly high, the price for falling was mainly embarrassment. That and a bath his mother would have made him take in the evening anyway.

  Second, he’d never made it across. He’d seen it done by others, but he’d always had trouble finding his next handhold. He’d had the courage but not the coordination he needed. After he’d endured enough laughter, he’d gone on to other things.

  Aaron stood for a while, hoping a workable fourth option would come into his mind. It didn’t.

  He’d have to try the circus act, he decided. Without a net.

  Shit.

  In order to approach the bridge, he first had to get farther away, walking far enough from the guard posts to climb down to the quay without being seen. He walked briskly and in the shadows, pausing in doorways to make sure the next little patch of road was safe.

  It took ten minutes to walk three hundred yards, but Aaron was able to find a spot where there were no lampposts to give him away as he climbed down the embankment. There he removed his boots, tied their laces together and strung them around his neck. The quay was stone and he wanted to make no sound as he neared the bridge.

  The walk back was faster, even though each step was precisely calculated before Aaron took it. The light was uniformly dim on the quay and there was no sign of anyone else. Aaron assumed it was now long past curfew on the Aryan side of Miasto, though he had no watch to confirm it.

  The bridge loomed ahead, a single span no more than one hundred meters long, built where the river was narrowest.

  How hard could it be? Aaron asked himself.

  Every sense in his body and his powers of reason had a single answer to that: Very.

  No matter how revived he felt now that he’d eaten and slept, four days was barely a start on his recovery. When he’d tried to cross the bridge like a circus performer as a teen, he’d been something of an athlete, always strong, if not particularly agile.

  Aaron shook his head. He decided to be done with doubt because he had to be. He’d made it to the bridge without drawing attention, now it was time to climb. He’d heard of a little lizard once that walked up walls and even on ceilings. A gecko?

  Be a gecko, he told himself, and reached up with a hand, finding a space in between the bricks. He was then able to lodge his foot a little less than a meter off the ground. He pulled with the hand and pushed with the foot and found himself a little closer to his goal. As he reached around for the next foothold, he realized his decision to remove his boots was helping him to get and keep a grip. He’d always had long toes, showing off for friends by picking things up and throwing them with his feet.

  He made better progress than he’d expected and, when he next reached up, he felt the stone carving of an ancient king’s crest. The sculpted relief was deep enough to give Aaron a chance to rest and see where he was.

  He’d climbed level with the bottom of the roadway, making it time to start the trip out over open water. He could hear it running below him and it wasn’t enticing. Aaron paused for a long minute. He didn’t want to let go of the — what was it? — dove he was holding and take the next step into space. He felt the cold of the water enveloping him, even though it was still far below.

  Fuck it, he thought, and stepped sideways on faith.

  His long, cold toes found a chink in the bridge’s armor that allowed him to take another step. He worked slowly, feeling his way. What had been a mere hundred-meter span when seen from the ground was clearly more than a kilometer long from where Aaron stood.

  But perhaps because he was more careful as an adult than he’d been as a child, or because he had so little bulk to carry, he came close to death only once as he inched his way across.

  When he had only ten meters left to go, a solid handhold metamorphosed into a chunk of ice looking to break free from the wall. His toes became his savior, keeping their grip just long enough for Aaron to fall forwa
rd and find a new gap to jam a hand into.

  On the far side, Aaron climbed down as quietly as he’d crossed, jumping the final half-meter and absorbing the force with his knees. There was no sign that anyone had noticed his act of lunacy. He heard nothing from the guards.

  For a fleeting moment, Aaron wished his school friends had been able to see his feat. As far as he knew, no one had ever made the trip in the dark — certainly not in the dark in the winter. Aaron could now claim bragging rights for all time.

  If there was anyone alive for him to tell.

  Aaron turned left up the quay, in the direction of Yelena’s apartment. As he walked, the river kept him company.

  Chapter 20

  The neighborhood that surrounded Yelena’s apartment was similar to many parts of the ghetto in outward appearance. Brick- and stone-fronted buildings of three and four stories, most with narrow doorways. It was a cozy, residential area with cafes nestled on every block. None were open and there was no sign of nightlife.

  Perhaps because of that, Aaron had seen no German or Polish patrols for quite some time.

  Aaron had never visited Yelena’s flat. She’d rented it after his capture and confinement to the ghetto, but he had no trouble finding it. Miasto was his city and he knew it like he knew how to breathe.

  There were no lights in the building’s windows, but it was late enough that he hadn’t expected to see any. If Yelena were inside, she’d likely be asleep. Aaron hoped she might be dreaming of him.

  He needed her to be alive. He needed a reason to live beyond simple revenge. Without her, all that would be left was hate for the people who had tortured him and self-loathing because of what he’d done to survive.

  Everything else had burned away. His concern for his people — even his father — still suffering only miles away, meant nothing. Yelena was his only buffer against the blackness.

  Aaron tried to shake all these thoughts away, as he had a thousand or million times before. He stared up at the building in front of him, suddenly hesitant.

  What if Yelena wasn’t upstairs? If the apartment was empty? Would it mean that she’d reached safety? Or that she’d been tortured and was now dead?

  He almost walked away then, giving in to cowardice. It was only the distance he’d already traveled that led him to take the final steps

  Aaron entered the building’s entryway and was confronted by a single line of buttons, one with Yelena’s name on top of it. A deep breath. A pause. He reached out the quivering index finger on his right hand and pressed. There was a buzzing somewhere between the lobby and the flat upstairs. Aaron hoped the noise wasn’t enough to cause some insomniac tenant to get curious.

  The buzz was followed by silence. After more than a minute, Aaron tried another, longer push. That, too, was followed only by silence.

  Unless Yelena had gone deaf or the buzzing hadn’t made it up to her apartment, she wasn’t home.

  Yelena and he had always known that Aaron might have to flee the ghetto someday. Both thought it would be a pretty sad end if he was shot or captured simply because Yelena was out at the store. She was supposed to have hidden keys in a window box on the ground floor. He hoped to God she’d done it.

  In less than a minute he was back outside leaning precariously off the front step and into a window box that was filled with nothing but brittle stalks and hard dirt. The digging wasn’t easy and he was worried that the person who lived behind the box would see his shadow through their curtain and figure him for a burglar. How far could he push his luck in a single night?

  At least this far.

  The sleeves of both his coat and shirt were literally soiled but a small ring of keys dangled from his fingers. Aaron took a second to do a sloppy job of smoothing over the dirt in the box. He didn’t figure anyone would notice the mess he’d made, but it couldn’t hurt to make it look like he’d never been there.

  The door to the building opened easily and with only a whisper once he found the right key. He didn’t dare turn the switch for the light over the stairs, so he felt his way to the bannister and then carefully up each step. The staircase was made out of wood and wasn’t new. There was a creak with each step that made Aaron wince.

  It was a long, slow climb. When he reached Yelena’s landing it was so dark that he was forced to feel the letters on the doors to distinguish unit B from the others. He was deeply grateful that the letters weren’t simply painted on.

  It took an eternity to find the proper key for each of the locks and turn them the right way. He got none of them right the first time.

  He opened the door in stages, hoping to catch a glimpse inside the flat before giving himself away. He didn’t expect anyone to be inside, but caution was a habit that had saved his life more than once.

  Once the door was open wide enough, he slipped in quietly. Enough light came in through the window at the end of the long, narrow hallway to give him a sense of direction. The hallway itself was filled with peeling paint and items in need of throwing out, including refuse, a bicycle and several bits of machinery. It was all roughly strewn about and Aaron had some trouble picking his path through.

  A tiny kitchen was at the end of the hall and in the sink was nearly everything from the few cabinets, which hung open above. Many of the plates, bowls, glasses and teacups were shattered. Shards of ceramic and glass covered a floor made of tile.

  He touched his boots to the ground as lightly as he could with each step, not wanting to hear crunching china. He hadn’t found the bedroom, yet, and there was still the possibility that someone was asleep in the flat.

  The silence was broken when he missed a step, crushing a wineglass under his boot heel. It shattered loudly, and if his boots hadn’t been as thick as they were, he probably wouldn’t have been able to walk again for weeks.

  Aaron heard the sound echo off the hard walls of the tight space, but nothing stirred. He told himself it was impossible for the noise to have been as loud as he’d heard it. It wasn’t a gunshot or a bomb blast, after all.

  Finally, he was through the kitchen and into what appeared to be the living area, complete with a daybed. This room wasn’t large either, and every inch of the floor was taken up by what appeared to be the contents of a smashed dresser that leaned against the far wall. The bedclothes were torn and on the floor near the mattress. The mattress itself had been slit and was on the other side of the room from its cheap iron frame.

  Surveying the damage as best he could, Aaron was sure of one thing: Yelena wasn’t here. He had no idea how long she’d been gone, or whether she’d been taken or had left voluntarily. Until he had sunlight to work by, he was unlikely to figure it out.

  Aaron decided the best thing he could do was rest. Dawn was close and his trek across the city had been exhausting. He knew if he lay down for a while, things would become clearer.

  He bent down and picked up what was left of the mattress and placed it on the frame again. Much of the stuffing was missing from it and the blanket he grabbed was in tatters, but after the week he’d spent in Kronberg, Aaron didn’t think he’d ever be tempted to complain about sleeping conditions again.

  He closed his eyes as his back hit the mattress, pulling the blanket’s remnants over himself. Not quite as comfortable as the warm basement at Tadeusz and Lucja’s farmhouse, he thought, but not bad at all.

  He expected to fall asleep quickly, but didn’t. Instead, he found himself thinking about his time with Yelena before the war. Their little house. Her cooking. Their lovemaking. Somehow, every day of that life had been sun-filled. Everything after the German invasion had turned gray.

  Aaron tried to imagine a life after the war, but couldn’t. He wasn’t even sure what after would mean. Could the Germans lose? They had most of Western Europe, too. He knew Poland’s government was in exile in Britain, but never heard anything more about them.

  Britain itself was still fighting, but it was so far away. The diplomats’ pretty words about friendship with Poland had turne
d into the purest bullshit. It had been no secret the Germans were coming, but the British and French sent none of their promised aid.

  And the Americans, of course, dithered and dawdled, crying out against evil but doing little to fight it.

  No, Aaron was afraid the war would end only because the Nazis had won, when the world’s other nations agreed either to surrender or let the Germans keep whatever they could grab.

  What then for Poland? Aaron knew that it wasn’t just Jews that the Nazis hated. They didn’t think much of the Poles, either. Unless they had German blood in their veins, Poles counted as Slavs. Not as low on the scale of sub humans as Jews, but no prizewinners, either. Would the Poles be turned into slaves when the supply of Jews dried up? Would they slowly be starved the way the Jews were being starved now? Jews headed the shit list, but they didn’t make up entirety of it.

  Aaron again wished for a cigarette, but he wasn’t likely to find anything except splinters and glass in the dark. He let that thought go as he let go of all the others. He reached for clarity, briefly finding oblivion instead.

  Yelena’s window faced east, so the sun wasted no time in filling the room. Aaron felt its caress and his eyes twitched open. He’d woken in so many different places recently, he was completely baffled by which one it was today.

  What brought him back to the flat in Miasto was a faint smell of Yelena in the mattress. He was surprised he hadn’t noticed it before. Her scent was one of many things he’d always loved about her.

  He sat up and rubbed his eyes, surveying the damage to the room. Books had been pulled down from the single shelf and their spines had been slit. The dresser must have been disassembled in an effort to find any hidden compartments. It didn’t look like any had been found.

  A small bathroom was attached to the living space. A medicine cabinet had been pulled from the wall. Behind it was a rectangular hole, large enough to store a pistol and perhaps some ammunition but little else. The toilet bowl itself had been cracked. With few options immediately available, Aaron used it anyway.