Child of the Journey

by Berliner, Janet

  "Erich would never allow it," Perón said.

  "Then," Miriam said quietly, "he must not know until it is too late."

  "You cannot get your hopes up, Miriam," Perón said. "This may not be possible. Besides, from what you have told me your Solomon is hardly an artisan. Did you not say that he is a scholar by avocation and a bookkeeper by trade?"

  "He has the heart and mind of a professor. He is also a linguist. There will surely be a need for someone able to speak...what is the native language?"

  "Sad to say, my education is lacking. I admit, I do not know the answer." He thought for a moment. "How good is his French? I do know that the French influence is enormous in that part of the world."

  "He speaks excellent French," Miriam said, "As do I."

  "I am not sure how much I can influence the choice of settlers," Perón said. "This much I promise you. I will do what I can."

  "And I," Miriam said, "will do what I must."

  PART II

  "Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself."

  --Elie Wiesel

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  June 1939

  The dying sun cast an orange glow across a sky feathered by clouds and painted a web of intricate shadows on the concrete at Solomon's feet. He laughed bitterly at God's sense of the absurd.

  Why provide such beauty to watch over a concentration camp?

  Sol stood at the hub of Sachsenhausen, one of Germany's monuments to Hell. Within the pyramid of the outer fences, the camp's eighty-six barracks, hospital, and guards' quarters spread out behind him in an enormous semi-circle. As he looked at the barbed, electrified wire and at the sentry towers placed at one hundred and eighty meter intervals, a seductive thought occurred to him: one false move--a single motion toward freedom--would set the whole barbaric machine into motion. For a split-second...before they mowed him down...he would be in control.

  A surge of power infused him. His heartbeat increased. Contemplating death, he pulsed with new life. It was a heady sensation, meaningless to anyone not in his position, probably beyond their comprehension. With a single, casual pace beyond the boundaries set for him and his fellow prisoners, he could impel a small army into action, disrupt its mealtime, create disorder. Best of all, he could add to the mound of paperwork with which the ever-so-meticulous Nazis documented their days and nights.

  Then the crack of the Kapo's whip announced evening roll. As Sol turned to stare at the barracks guard, his sense of hopelessness returned to ask, "And so?" He discarded the urge for martyrdom and began to search the faces of the gathering inmates for his friends, Hans Hannes and nine-year-old Misha Czisça, who had been missing for two days--they and that damned pederast, Captain Hempel.

  Instinctively Sol glanced in the direction of Pathologie. The hospital's windows winked obscenely at him in the sunset, like the ten diamond-fruits of the Kabbalah's Tree of Life. Inside lay the face of death, eyes shiny and open and eager...promising, finally, a surfeit of terror.

  Roll call began and ended, and still he stared at the building, certain that it held the answers to his friends' disappearance. Yet he hoped. Always hoped...and prayed.

  Two screams came from Pathologie.

  The Kapo, a convicted murderer elevated to the status of barracks guard, turned toward the building and smiled. He intoned the daily litany: "You must make ever greater efforts to honor the Reich and throw off the burden of the Jewish yoke--dismissed!"

  The prisoners moved toward the barracks, all but Sol who set out grimly in the direction of Pathologie. Before he reached it, the clopping of a horse's hooves rang through the yard, and Captain Otto Hempel emerged from between the hospital and another barracks. He rode easily atop his mount and, as always, his black-muzzled wolfhound loped alongside. The boy, Misha Czisça, staggered in the lead, his movements impaired by a lidded, army-green watering can attached to a strap across his shoulder. The can hung awkwardly beneath his armpit.

  The horse snorted and shook its head, as if bothered by the presence of youth.

  Sol whipped off his cap and snapped to attention. "Good evening, Hauptsturmführer Hempel!" Give the required greeting. Do not look at the deputy commandant. "May the Teutonic gods and the spirit of our Messiah Adolf Hitler go with you this night!" Sol added, trusting in Hempel to misread the sarcasm.

  "A beautiful evening."

  His tone benign, Hempel reined up beside Solomon. Leather creaking, he rose in the saddle like a handsome lord-overseer--lean, without appearing hard-muscled, silver-haired without appearing elderly. Except for a red and black scarf around his neck, his uniform was without decoration: the quintessential captain. "Someday the Reich will be so far-reaching, there will always be such a sky beaming over it." The captain gestured upward with his bone-handled riding crop. His other hand rested lightly on his pistol. "Such weather makes a man feel truly alive--eh, prisoner?"

  "Ja, Hauptsturmführer!"

  "Good! We are in agreement." He relaxed into the saddle and thrust out his boots in wordless command.

  It is our duty to survive and tell the world, Sol reminded himself. Do whatever the captain wants. Lick his boots. Shine them with your cap. Pay special attention to the instep. Say, "Ja, Hauptsturmführer."

  The horse urinated, splashing Solomon. He kept at his job.

  "You are the one they call Professor, not so?"

  "Ja, Hauptsturmführer."

  "Your name?"

  Sol held up his arm. Prisoner number 37704

  "And they call you Professor! You have the mind of a sparrow." The riding crop rose. "Your name!"

  "Freund, Hauptsturmführer. Solomon Freund."

  "I thought so." Hempel smiled as if at some private joke. "Long-time friend of Major Erich Alois."

  He touched Sol between the eyes with the butt of the crop. "You will keep yourself alive. You will remain healthy in mind and body. One day you will have the privilege of testifying in a court of law about your friend!" Using his whip, he pointed at the puddle the horse had left. "Clean that up, then follow us."

  He spurred the mount. Misha, who had not once met Solomon's gaze, hurried to stay ahead of the animal as they headed in the direction of the Gärtnerei, site of the commandant's hothouses, huge flower and vegetable gardens, and--source of his greatest pride--his hog farm. Sol quickly joined them. It was dusk, and sentry spotlights swept the area. There is a world, Sol thought, where dusk is the time for drama and love.

  "Take care of the roses," Hempel told the child.

  Misha nodded. Dazed, he lifted the lid of his watering can, then raised on tiptoes to kiss the tip of Hempel's riding crop.

  Turning to Solomon, the captain said amiably, one gentleman addressing another, "Those are the Kommandant's prize hybrids. His 'Centurions,' he calls them. They've won several awards at the Reichsblume Konkurenz in Hamburg." He drooled his expensive Indian chewing tobacco into the can. "Go with the boy. Help him tamp the soil--get a little German earth under your nails."

  Misha moved to the rose beds, weeping softly. Sol backed down the row and crouched beside him. The blooms smelled almost obscenely sweet after the sour odors of the camp. He glanced in Hempel's direction, wondering what lay behind his being allowed to linger here.

  Hempel waved pleasantly.

  Sol buried his face in a cluster of roses. Assailed by a memory he could not quite touch, he closed his eyes and placed the petals, warm and velvety, against his skin. His mother's nightgown had smelled like this, fresh out of the dresser drawer with its sachets of dried rose petals, but it was Miriam's spirit that suffused him. Miriam, the love who once...still...embodied for him all that was beautiful.

  He opened his eyes and reveled in the rose's color, red as a sailor's sunset.

  "Miriam," he murmured, caressing the blossom gently with his lips, as if its petals were her womanhood and he a free man making love to her for the first time, drinking in her softness.

  A drop of warm liquid touched
his skin. Thinking it to be one of Misha's tears and pleased that the boy had at last been able to allow himself the solace of tears, Sol looked up at him.

  "I'm sorry," Misha said.

  "It's nothing. " Sol smiled. "If a drop of water on my arm is the worst crime you ever commit against me--"

  "I'm sorry, Uncle Hans." Sobbing, the boy tilted the watering can. Talking to it and not to Solomon, he said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

  The searchlight moved and returned, capturing the child like a player on a stage. Sol stared at the fine spray of burgundy liquid. He felt another droplet on his skin. When the spotlight returned, he stared at it lying on his flesh like a perfect garnet.

  "The Kommandant insists there is no better fertilizer," Hempel called out.

  Sol looked from the watering can toward the captain, who nodded and laughed. A sudden urgency started Sol's heart pounding like a jack hammer. "Misha? What have you been saying!"

  "They d-drained him," the boy stammered. "Like all the others." His tears came more freely now as he began to water, his back rising and falling with each exhalation as though he were an ancient pump. "Mama!" he called out. "Mama!"

  "Put the can down, Misha. God of our Fathers! Put it down!" Sol took the boy by the shoulders. "Listen to me! That's not our friend in there. He's here with us. His spirit is in us both."

  The boy's face tightened into a bud of hatred. He flailed his arms, hitting Solomon's chest, scratching his cheeks as he tried to break free, and spilling the remainder of the blood from the watering can as it flew from his grasp.

  "One day I'll kill him." He looked up at the captain, who had dismounted and was ambling toward them. "I'll kill all of them!"

  "Misha, listen to me--"

  Sol stopped. The wolfhound, gliding like a phantom between the rosebushes and gardenias, had joined his master. They were now within a meter of the boy.

  "Kiss it!" Hempel held out his riding crop.

  Misha leaned forward and Hempel instantly twisted the handle hard against the boy's lips. "The Professor and I have business to attend to," he said. "Remain here at attention until I return."

  He looked at the dog and snapped his fingers. "Guard!" Hackles raised and teeth bared, the dog moved in front of the boy, watching him with shiny eyes. Hempel shifted his gaze to Solomon. "If the boy moves so much as an eyelid, the dog will kill him. You come with me!"

  They went along the west wall and cut in at Pathologie. Sol wanted to run from the place. Beneath the harsh lights of the outer room were rows of neatly labeled jars filled with formaldehyde and human organs. Eyeballs floating in fluid watched his fear.

  The captain knocked at the slightly open door of the examining room.

  Doctor Schmidt looked up. "I see you found him. Well, don't just stand there. Come in, come in, both of you."

  Sol blinked against the fluorescent desk lamp that turned the doctor's face into a serene blend of light and shadow. She had removed her surgical cap. Her dark well-brushed hair cascaded across her shoulders and her eyes were soft, expressive, brows and lids set off with just the right touch of make-up.

  "I didn't have to go far to find him, Medizinalrat."

  "Today we had a fruitful session with a friend of yours," the physician told Solomon. "His name was..." She ran a slim finger down a long list. "Ah, yes. Here it is. Hans Hannes. Original name Hans Fink." Smiling sweetly, she added, "He called out your name several times."

  "What do you want with me, Medizinalrat?"

  "All in good time," the woman said. "We try to observe

  the niceties around here whenever possible, don't we, Otto?" She looked up at the captain. They exchanged a confidential nod.

  Hempel picked up a folder from the desk. Opening it, he drew out a paper rimmed with a logo of golden wreathwork. "Why we have to go through these formalities is beyond my understanding."

  "It is the law," Schmidt said.

  Fighting to keep calm, Solomon squinted at the tiny print. He could read the line in bold and the signature beneath it:

  IN ORDER TO RID MYSELF OF MY PERVERTED SEXUAL INSTINCTS, I HEREBY APPLY FOR CASTRATION.

  Hans Hannes Fink

  A wave of helplessness weakened Sol's knees and he sagged against the wall. Some twisted logic dictated that castration needed the written permission of the victim. Mere sterilization--a privilege generally reserved for the handicapped, the retarded, and Jews who'd had intercourse with Aryans--could be carried out without consent. In truth, homosexuals were rarely castrated, but Hannes had suffered fiercely from priapism--muscular deterioration that left him with a perpetual, excruciatingly painful erection. That made him different...just as Sol's eye disease set him apart. He knew Schmidt must be longing to scoop out his eyeballs and add them to her collection.

  "I won't sign anything," he said. "Not now. Not ever."

  Hempel raised a fist and took a step forward.

  "Now, Otto, you told me you needed him alive and, besides, you know how easily your blood vessels tend to break at the knuckles." Schmidt picked up what looked like a list of names printed beneath an official letterhead. "We have another reason to keep him reasonably fit, which is why I asked you to find him for me. My old friend Eichmann is taking another stab at immortality. This prisoner is on the list of those selected. See for yourself."

  She handed Hempel the sheet of paper, and turned to Sol.

  "In a few days you will be issued new spectacles," she said. "Meanwhile, take care of your eyes." She looked up at Hempel. "Pity. This case interested me. Freak diseases always do."

  She lifted a canning jar from atop a black filing cabinet that stood behind her. Within floated testicles and a purplish, uncircumcised penis. Holding the jar before her face, she studied the contents. The jar magnified her face like a mirror at the Panoptikum. "Did I tell you, Otto, I have you to thank for this wonderful specimen? You were the one who first talked to me of tabun. Though your interest in it has, of course, a different base than mine, your enthusiasm led me to acquire a small supply of it in liquid form."

  She set the jar at the desk edge nearest Hempel and went on speaking as if she had forgotten Sol's presence.

  "Have you any idea how effective tabun is?" she asked.

  "I just know the nerve gas works," he said.

  "How it works, that's the wonder!...inhibits the action of the enzyme cholinesterase...causes uncontrolled muscular contractions, followed by paralysis...and, finally, death." Her eyes were bright. "I placed a few drops on Hannes' spine during coitus, while he was performing in our brothel. You should've seen how it affected him--even with his special, shall we say, equipment." She put her hand on the jar and leaned forward confidentially. "When I was young, I read how Darwin cut off the legs of a frog engaged in coitus, and the frog continued to perform." She tapped the jar lid with a fingernail. "This rivals...no, eclipses Darwin's experiment." She gave Hempel a warm smile, then turned to Solomon. "Otto has arranged for this specimen to be shipped to Berlin via his mother in Strassbourg. She is fascinated with our work here."

  "How can you, a doctor, do this?" Sol asked. Despite feeling weak with fear, he wanted to take hold of her neck and wring it like a chicken from his uncle's barnyard.

  Schmidt patted the jar. "You think me a monster? You are wrong. I admire you Jews. You gave the world its first judicial system, its first efficient society, its first schools, some of its first doctors. The list of your achievements is endless."

  She leaned closer. Perhaps realizing that the tops of her breasts were showing, she spread a hand across her lapels. Sol pulled back, as if she were diseased. He looked around for Otto Hempel. The captain had gone.

  Relieved, Sol told himself that he had imagined it all. Misha and Hans were safely back at the barracks. He must take care to reconnect with reality.

  "Listen to me," Schmidt said. Her voice held a lover's caress. Sol's gaze rested on the jar at the edge of her desk, the momentary flare of hope extinguished. "Though science and medicine interest me above al
l else," she said, "you would be hard pressed to find a better humanitarian."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Crouched against the barracks' wall opposite Hans' empty bunk, Solomon watched those fellow inmates who were awake mill about the area. They were skeletal. Stuporous. Compliant. Gray, amorphous figures in striped pajamas.

  May their souls find rest, he thought, trying one more time to pray for Hans. One more time, he could not find the words. No matter how deeply inside he reached, all he found was pain. He could not even pray for the living anymore; the prayers stuck in his throat. He just kept seeing that jar in Pathologie and hearing Schmidt's last words: "You'd be hard pressed to find a better humanitarian." And something else...he could not quite remember what...about Eichmann, and spectacles, and some absurdity about taking care of himself!

  Not that anything Schmidt had said mattered. He did not care what diabolical scheme she and her colleagues were cooking up. He did not need new glasses. He needed to be left alone, to do nothing. Think nothing. To reach the state of ayin ha'gamur, that complete nothingness which the Kabbalah described as the last obstacle facing rational thought when it has reached the limits of its capacity.

  He had imagined that when he reached that limit, that place where human understanding would be insufficient to make sense of the world, his consciousness would explode into nothingness.

  But ayin was still denied him.

  "Oh God, let me die," a woman pleaded, her voice filling the void inside his head. "Let me die." An infant mewled and something laughed, something at best partly human.

  Cradling himself with bony arms, Solomon began to rock. Back and forth, back and forth.

  Remembering.

  ...He saw himself as a boy Misha's age, being battered by disembodied voices and sounds that only he could hear. Painfully, he recalled the day that brought shape and form to those voices and sounds, bringing him a series of visions that terrified him beyond measure. He heard the squeal of brakes and the explosions that shattered the sun and gentle silence of a Sabbath afternoon. He saw his friend's car careen to the side of the road and looked at the face of death through cobalt-blue eyes filled with tears. He swam inside them, defenseless and drawn into the dying; he felt again the thing take residence in his body....