The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  He did not like to see her there, standing on an orange box, eyes screwed half-shut in that triangle of light; he feared that someone might see those eyes, that triangle of face, and report it to the occupation forces. He no longer remonstrated with her on the matter, though. He knew that whenever he slipped out the secret door up into the streets of Amsterdam, she would be at the shutter losing herself in those twenty centimetres of sky. He would not remonstrate with her because he felt guilt that many of his trips to the surface were for the same reason of escaping from the dreadful claustrophic sameness of life in the cellar.

  Once, on one of his trips out from the ruins of the house on Achtergracht—he had burned it himself, to allay suspicions that Jews might be hiding there—he had seen occupation troops pulling a Jewish family from their hiding place in a house on Herrengracht. A mother, a father, a grandfather clutching an ornamental wooden clog, two little girls in print frocks. Their faces were pale and sickly from life hidden away from the sky. He saw the troopers pull out the householders, an elderly couple he vaguely knew from the Jewish Shelter Society, and push them into the back of a canvas-covered truck. As he went on his way not too quickly not too slowly, he heard the officer announce through a loudspeaker that those who harboured Jews were no better than Jews themselves and would warrant the same treatment. Those who reported Jews to the occupation authorities would be rewarded for fulfilling their civic duty. Even those who were now harbouring Jews might escape punishment if they fulfilled their civic duty.

  As he went among the safe shops buying meat and bread and candles and paraffin for the camping stove, the faces of the plump, homely Dutch couple as they were pushed into the back of the truck haunted him. In the small room behind Van Den Beek’s dry-cleaning shop, the organiser of the Jewish Shelter Group said that he had been approached by a family whose safe house was threatened by house-to-house searches; would he be able to take them in the Achtergracht cellar? In his mind he saw the truck drive away under the trees that lined the canal, in his mind he heard the cries and moans penetrate the unnaturally quiet street, and he had said, I do not know, I cannot say, give me a day or so to think about it.

  She envied him his trips above ground. She understood his reasoning; safer by far for just one to take the risk of being seen, but the taste of sky had made her hungry for more, to feel its vast blue vault above, around, enclosing her. In the night, when the others slept on their mattresses, he whispered to her about the new family who needed shelter. She would have loved them to come. New faces, new lives, new stories were almost as welcome as freedom in this place where the major entertainment was the narration to each other of the dreams of the previous night.

  But the new family did not come and the days continued to be counted out by the passage of the triangle of light across the cellar floor and the endless, endless recounting of dreams that grew ever more colourless and impoverished. When, in the night she heard it, she was awake in the instant. The rest slept on, dreaming out their dreams, minting their cheap and tinny coinage, but to her it was as clear and piercing as an angel’s clarion. The note of an accordion, far distant among the canals and high-gabled houses of Amsterdam, yet close, and sharp, and sweeter than wine. As if in a dream, perhaps in a dream, a dream that is more solid and tangible than what we call reality, she rose, went to the secret door and stole out through the warren of passageways and charred ruins up onto the street. She did not fear the curfew; with the same assurance that the music played only for her, she knew that she was invisible as a ghost, or a dream, to the occupation forces in their grey trucks.

  She found the aged man struck by a stray moonbeam in a street that opened onto a wide canal, bent over his instrument, intent upon his melancholy music. The cobblestones were invisible beneath a shifting, stirring, moon-silvered carpet of rats.

  As she walked toward the aged aged man, the rats parted silently, liquidly before her. The wandering Jew looked up from his self-absorbed improvisation.

  “Gnädige Frau, you should not have come. You are placing yourself in considerable peril.”

  “I do not think so.”

  He smiled; teeth long, yellow in the moonshine, like the ivory keys of his accordion. The liquid carpet of rats seethed.

  “You are right, of course. Things are ordained by the will and grace of God. It was ordained by God that our destinies be tied together; that we be yoked together for a little while. When first we met, all those years ago at the spa at Baden, remember how afraid you were, how you ran? But we have been yoked together. We could not escape each other. He does that, God, yokes me for a little while to the lives of others. To save them. Or to damn them.”

  “Would you damn me?”

  “I already have, alas. Forgive me. It was not personal, Anna. My ludicrous vaudeville act, my burlesque gospel, my cellars in cities across this continent, my rats, they have played their part in accomplishing the will of God. Apocalypse descends upon us, hastened by my actions, so the Master will return soon and free me from this weary undyingness.”

  “You think you are responsible for … this?”

  “I have served my part in God’s will.”

  “You are mad.”

  “That is one interpretation. The only other is that I am exactly what and who I say I am.”

  “An apostle of darkness?”

  “An apostle of a wrathful God. The Jews have their just punishment now, the Christ-killers. Do I hear the brass hooves of the Four Horsemen on the cobbles? Come Master, come…”

  “Mad, and evil.”

  “Or good beyond your conception of the word. I have damned, now I may save. Come with me. This place is finished, you are all finished. It does not take the gift of prophecy to tell that. Even the rats are abandoning the city, and I with them. Will you heed them, and come with me?”

  The rats moved silently over the cobbles, little pink clawed feet hurrying, hurrying. Noses, whiskers, quested for the moon.

  “I have a family, I have a husband, my father, my friends.”

  “Unless a man hate his mother, and his father, and all his family, he can be no true disciple. So it is written.”

  “I am not a disciple. I am a Jew.”

  The aged aged man bowed deeply, took her hand in the moonlight, kissed it.

  “Kuss die Hande, gnädige Frau, as they said in Old Vienna.” His fingers squeezed a quiet chord from the accordion. He turned away, walked away toward the canal. His music filled the street. The rats stirred and swirled and followed on.

  He was awake when she returned. He whispered his fury through clenched teeth.

  “You were out.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? My God, why did you go out after curfew…”

  She shrugged, any explanation would be impossible, but her shrug was invisible in the darkness of the cellar. For the first time she noticed a little triangle of moonlight fell through the wooden shuttering to lie on the cellar floor.

  The next day he went out to buy more paraffin for the stove, and some blankets, for the first autumn chill had found its way into the Achtergracht cellar. When he returned he kissed her full on the mouth and then went to sit, strangely quiet and withdrawn, in a chair apart from the others and stared at the steeple formed by his touching fingers as if he had never seen them before.

  At five o’clock the patch of sunlight vanished and the soldiers came. They burst down the door with axes, the soldiers in their black boots and helmets. The old people screamed at the sight of their black machine guns. With the muzzles of their black machine guns they herded the people out through the secret door, out through the warren of collapsed cellarage and fire-blackened walls they had penetrated with such ease, as if they had been told where to go, out into the five o’clock sunlight, to the street, and the waiting truck.

  “You forced me to do it,” he said to her as the soldiers with grim dutifulness began to push the Van Hootens and old Comenius the clock-doctor into the back of the truck. Old Comenius was clutching
an Ormolu clock to his chest. “You went out, you put us all in peril. You could have had us all punished if anyone had seen. So, I had to go to the local headquarters and inform. You think I wanted to do that? You think I wanted to sell the Van Hootens and old Comenius? You forced me to make that bargain, to sell them, in return for our freedom. It was either them, or all of us. That was what the officer promised. If I did my civic duty, we would all go free. I had to sacrifice them to keep us safe, and together.”

  Then a soldier with black rifle stepped between the man and the woman and the woman and her children and her father with his violin case in his hand were pushed away, pushed toward the truck, pushed into the truck while the man struggled against the smiling soldiers who had taken grip of his arms. The man shouted, the man screamed, and the woman screamed back, and her father with his violin, and her son and daughter, but the soldiers pulled shut the canvas flap and tied it and in a moment the roar of the engine had drowned the voices, shouting screaming the betrayal of their betrayal. And the truck drove away down Achtergracht, and the officer stepped from his staff car and stood before the man and said,

  “Jews. Are Jews.”

  THE STRING QUARTET

  Hurrying hurrying, faster faster, hurrying hurrying, faster faster, through the flat black darkness of the night forest, through the endless waiting trees, cleaving the darkness with the beam of its headlight and the shout of its hundred wheels, cleaving through the darkness that lies across the heart of the continent, the night train, hurrying hurrying, faster faster, toward its final destination.

  Though it must be hours since your Father said goodnight and blessed you into the care of God with a kiss on your forehead, as he used to kiss those nights when you were afraid and came into his bed to sleep, you are not asleep. Your Father has rolled his old bones into a corner of a cattle truck and has managed sleep of some kind; your children on either side of you are asleep also, leaning against your body; but you, alone of all the people crammed into the cattle truck, are not, it seems. You envy those crammed people their sleep. There is enough light in the boxcar for the dark-adapted eye to distinguish their shapes; old Comenius still clutching the clock to his chest, its heavy tick ticking away to the beat of his heart, the Van Hootens curled around each other like kittens, reverting to the innocent intimacies of childhood; all the others, clinging to their precious possessions; an umbrella, a carved wooden lugger, a book, a prayer shawl. Mighty and mean, prince and pauper, priest and prostitute, all rendered anonymous, stationless, estateless, shapeless mounds of pain in the night-glow inside the boxcar.

  You must have slept. The rhythm of the night train’s hundred wheels must have lulled you to sleep, for it is the cessation of that beating, beating, beating rhythm that wakes you. A grey dawn light ekes through the gaps between the ill-fitting planks. The cold is intense, a cold breath from the heart of the continent. The hunger is devouring. How many days since you last ate? Beyond remembering, like an entire life sunk without trace, beyond all remembering.

  The train is stationary. You press your face to the cold planks, screw up your eyes, squint to try and make out where it is you have arrived. A rural railway station, somewhere, deep in the night forest, surrounded, encircled, by the waiting, stooping trees, like aged aged men. Figures moving on the platform: soldiers? Voices, talking among themselves in a language you do not understand. Loudspeakers crackle, come alive. In the cattle car, in each of the twenty-five cattle cars that make up the night train, people are starting to awaken. Your children stir, cold, hungry, uncomprehending, where are they, what is happening? You cannot help them, you do not know yourself. The voices draw near. With a crash and a blinding blare of dawn light, the boxcar doors are flung back. Soldiers. Slow, stupid, brutal faces. Slavic faces. They start to pull the people from the cars. Down, down, down. All change. All change. From each of the twenty-five cars the people are pulled down to stand shivering and blinking in the brilliant dawn cold on the platform. They hug themselves, their breath steams in the bright dawn cold. The soldiers with the slow, stupid, brutal faces go among the people to take away their possessions. Prayer shawls, books, carved wooden luggers, umbrellas. Dr. Comenius’ clock is taken from his fingers. Your father clings to his violin in its case, cries out, no, no, do not take away the music, you cannot take away the music. He does not realise, you think, that they took away the music years before. The soldiers, with impassive determination, smash his fingers with rifle butts, smash the fallen violin to a shatter of polished wood and gut.

  You press your children to you. You fear that the soldiers will want to tear them away from your broken, bleeding fingers, smash them to silence and nothingness with rifle butts. There is nothing to say, no words that will help. Not now. The soldiers push you down the platform toward the station office. The crackling voice of the loudspeaker welcomes you. Welcome welcome welcome. You notice that a pall of smoke is rising beyond the trees, as if from a great conflagration. The cold morning air draws the smoke in low and close over the station; a vile smoke, a choking suffocating smoke, the stench of something unclean, burning there in the night forest.

  Shouting in their stupid, brutal voices, the soldiers herd you toward the office. You do not want to go there, you cannot go there, you must not go there, but you are incapable of resisting the pressing, pressing, pressing bodies. There are figures behind the latticed windows of the waiting room. Seated figures, bowed in attitudes of concentration, as if over musical instruments. Then above the voice of the loudspeaker come the sweet, sad notes of the string quartet, rising up to mingle with the smoke that lies across the waiting trees of the night forest, over all the dark continent, the final movement from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; rather badly, you think.

  “It is all right, Anna,” your Father says, “it is only for a little while, until the next train comes, to take us on to the place we are meant to go.”

  ANGELS IN LOVE

  Kathe Koja

  One of the most exciting new writers to hit the scene in some time, Kathe Koja is a frequent contributor to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and has also sold stories to Pulphouse, SF Eye, The Ultimate Werewolf, A Whisper of Blood, and elsewhere. Her first novel, The Cipher, was released last year to enthusiastic critical response, and her new novel, Bad Brains, is just out. Her story “Distances” was in our Sixth Annual Collection, and her story “Skin Deep” was in our Seventh Annual Collection.

  In the powerful and unrelenting piece that follows, she shows us that you’d better be careful what you wish for—you just might get it.

  Like wings. Rapturous as the muted screams, lush the beating of air through chipboard walls, luscious like sex and, oh my, far more forbidden: whatever it was, Lurleen knew it was wrong.

  Knew it from the shrieks, gagged and that was no pillow, no sir, no way—she herself was familiar with the gasp of muffled sex, and this was definitely not it. And not—really—kinky, or not in any way she knew of, and with a half-shy swagger, Lurleen could admit she had acquaintance of a few. Kiss me here. Let’s see some teeth. Harder.

  The sounds, arpeggio of groans, that basso almost-unheard thump, thump, rhythmic as a headboard or a set of baritone springs, but that wasn’t it, either. Subsonic; felt by the bones. Lying there listening, her own bones tingled, skin rippled light with goose bumps, speculation: who made those strange, strange sounds? Someone with a taste for the rough stuff, maybe, someone who liked the doughy strop of flesh. Someone strong. An old boyfriend had used to say she fucked like an angel; she never understood the phrase till now. Her hands, deliberate stroll southward, shimmy of familiar fingers on as-familiar flesh; her own groans in counterpoint to the ones through the walls.

  Waking heavy in the morning, green toothpaste spit and trying to brush her hair at the same time, late again. “You’re late,” Roger would say when she walked in, and she would flip fast through her catalog of excuses—which hadn’t he heard lately?—and try to give him
something to get her by, thinking all the while of last night’s tingle, puzzling again its ultimate source. It was kind of a sexy game to Lurleen, that puzzling; it gave her something to do at work.

  Music store. No kind of music she liked, but sometimes it wasn’t too bad, and the store itself had a kind of smell that she enjoyed, like a library smell, like something educational was going on. Sheet music, music stands, Roger fussy with customers, turning the stereo on loud and saying stuff like, “But have you heard Spivakov’s Bach? Really quite good.” Like he had probably heard Bach’s Bach and could have suggested a few improvements. Right.

  Today she felt dopey and sluggish, simple transactions done twice and twice wrong; Roger was pissed, glowered as she slumped through the day. At quirting time he made a point of pointedly disappearing, not saying good night; sighing, she had to find him, hide-and-seek through the racks. He was a stickler for what he called the pleasantries: Good night, Lurleen. Good night, Roger. Every day.

  Finally: hunched behind the order counter, flipping through the day’s mail like he hadn’t read it nine times already. Lurleen leaned tippy-toe over, flat-handed on the cracking gray laminate: “Good night, Roger.”

  Chilly nod, like he’d just caught her trying to palm something: “Good night, Lurleen.” Waited till she was almost out the door to say, “Lurleen?”

  Stopped, impatient keys in hand. “What?”

  “We open at ten o’clock. Every day.”

  Asshole. “See you tomorrow.” Not banging the door, giving herself points for it. Outside, her skin warmed, like butter, spread velvet all over. He always kept the fucking store too cold. Like the music’d melt or something if he turned it up past freezing. Rolling all her windows down, singing to the Top 40 station. Stopped at the party store for cigarettes and to flirt with the clerk, old guy just about as ugly as Roger, but round where Roger was slack, furry where Roger was not.