Child of the Journey

by Berliner, Janet

  The thing--that was how he had thought of it then, before he learned about dybbuks and ghosts, before his secret voices gave way to visions. A thing--bringing black moods, long silences, the easy tears and dark circles that came from sleepless nights spent agonizing over what sin he might unknowingly have committed to warrant such punishment.

  He still did not know the source of the visions, but he had come to understand that the dybbuk inside him had given substance to the voices. It was the key to the visions. Strange, he thought, how repetition brought mundanity in its wake, no matter how fearsome or bizarre the experience. He had long since moved away from his childhood fear, through acceptance and curiosity, and on to a hunger for interpretation and understanding.

  Some visions came to him in their entirety, but came only once; others began slowly, building over years like serial stories. And there were fragments, too, that came and went so quickly they might have been dreams had they not contained the common strains that appeared in each one: each had its hero, its victim, its dybbuk; each spoke of a Jewish homeland in, of all places, Madagascar.

  Sitting there, he catalogued the visions: Jews forced to work for National Socialism, building bombs, fighting on the Russian Front, helping with medical experiments. Jews assassinating politicians, gathering huge sums of money for the Nazi cause, operating a death squad from a unique type of airplane they called a helicopter. There was even a Jew who taught others to counterfeit foreign currency, thereby ruining enemy economies.

  Ultimately, each had a single, overriding theme: Nazi abuse of Jewish assets and abilities.

  He would distract Schmidt by telling her some of the stories, he decided. She could study his flawed second-sight to find out why he could not apply his powers to something as simple as knowing what was going to happen to his friends. Better yet, to preventing it from happening. That would surely be more entertaining than diseased eyeballs.

  The flashes of light that inevitably heralded a vision interrupted what was becoming a bitter discourse with himself. "Dayenu--enough!" he said out loud. "Oh Lord of the Universe, grant me ayin."

  But the flashes of light came again, followed this time by the cobalt-blue glow that also presaged every vision. God is apparently not listening, he thought wryly, or perhaps the patent on the concept of nothingness applied only to realms of theosophy--to His universe and not the devil's. Even for God, it must be difficult to distinguish a single voice in an outcry from Hell.

  Since there was no escape, Sol gave himself up to a potpourri of scenes from a past and future as familiar to him now as a series of old films many times revisited.

  ----a full moon shines down on the domed keep of a ruined castle and on a dozen beehives rising up like ancient columns behind a black man. He is lanky and rawboned, bald except for a bowl of hair at the crown of his skull. His left shoulder is draped with a white cloak. He sits on his haunches, forearms across knees--hands turned palms up, fingers crabbed. "I want to be considered a whole Jew!" His face is etched with anguish, his voice strained with emotion. "Can't they understand that?"----

  ----The scene faded. Another replaced it. Sol repositioned his body and watched----

  ----a bulb in a blue metal collar hangs garishly from a slatted-board ceiling. The bulb swings to and fro, to and fro, over the head of the tall, aproned doctor who has bumped into it and set it in motion. The room is awash in the cobalt reflection of the bulb's collar. The stench that fills the air is like that of aged Limburger cheese.

  "Welcome to the world of the dead!"----

  A hand shook Sol's shoulder. "Herr Freund," Misha whispered. "They are taking some of us somewhere tomorrow. I heard them talking about an experiment, and I saw trucks."

  Sol saw an image of an Opel Blitz, its canvas back open like a carnival crier's mouth. "I prefer to die right here."

  "Come to bed. Please!" The boy shook him harder. "You need to be rested."

  Sol's unresisting head snapped back and forth against the boards. His lids were heavy, his eyes listless, his energy so sapped he had not enough left to curse the guards. He could see the boy, eyes swollen from weeping, but the child's face had a gauzy, pointillist quality. He thought of Hans. He is drinking honey wine with Emanuel, he told himself, deliberately confusing reality with the vision of Ethiopia.

  "Don't you know what's happening to you!" the boy screamed. "You're willing yourself to die."

  Yes, Sol thought. He was becoming Schmuckstück--costume jewelry--an ornament bejeweled by sores.

  "Please be Herr Freund again," Misha begged. "Please don't die! I don't want the ghost inside you to jump into me!"

  With slowly mounting resolve, Sol pulled himself away from the opiate of introspection. "What could you know of ghosts?" he asked Misha.

  "Everything."

  Misha's gesture took in the world. Solomon smiled. Even here, now, lost among the forgotten souls of Sachsenhausen, childhood encompassed enviable absolutes. "Why would my...ghost choose to go to you?"

  "If I were right next to you and you were dying," the boy said, "it would come to me. I know about dybbuks. They're evil dead people, ones whose dreams we live in."

  "If you believe in such things, Misha, you must stay away from me."

  Though clearly terrified, the boy shook his head.

  Even in his state of apathy, Solomon knew the urgency of the boy's fear of dybbuks--those souls unable to transmigrate to a higher world because of the enormity of their sins; souls that sought refuge in the bodies of living persons, causing instability, speaking foreign words through their mouths. He remembered begging his mentor, Beadle Cohen, to help him exorcise the dybbuk. The beadle had led him, instead, to the Kabbalah.

  "You are strong, Solomon," the beadle insisted. "The dybbuk has opened doors for you to see what other men cannot. Continue to be strong and it will leave as it came. Meanwhile, try to understand its message."

  Why had that alien and separate personality cloven to him! If he were guilty of some secret sin that had created an opening for the unquiet soul to enter his own, it was one committed without knowledge or malice. Now, at nearly thirty, he believed that goodness rested in a single tenet of life--in treating your fellow man as you would be treated. Had that been his sin? Had he, at not quite thirteen, neglected to live by that creed?

  Taking pity on the child, Sol let himself be led to Hans' bunk. They lay down together. Misha put his head on Sol's shoulder. A tear pressed out of his right eye and trickled down his cheek. He swiped at it angrily, as if it had no right to be there and prove him human.

  Sol wanted to cry with him, but who was he to allow himself that luxury? He was nothing special, nor was his suffering. He closed his eyes and held them shut. He wanted nothing more of this world. "Tell me exactly what you meant just now," he whispered.

  "My papa is...was a rabbi. One time a man came to the house so Papa could get rid of the ghost-thing inside him. Papa called it a dybbuk."

  "What makes you think I have a dybbuk inside me?"

  "Your eyes are strange, like his," the child said. "Papa said the man saw things we could not see. Heard them too. You know. Inside his head. Things from the past and from the future."

  Sol thought again about the recurring figures in his visions: the Ethiopian Jew, his black head bald but for the crown of hair that looked like a yarmulke; an old man and a woman, robed in tattered blankets and bent over a steaming tea pot; an infant held up to a horned totem by a disembodied brown hand. He knew of no such men, no such baby, no such realities. And the other visions, like Göring talking about something called critical mass, or experiments on the mummified corpse of an ancient Hebrew.

  How tired he was of it all--of visions of people in a past and future that made no sense.

  "Do you know what legends are, Misha? Myths?" he asked.

  The boy nodded. "Papa called them stories based on a grain of truth."

  "Did your papa rid the man of his dybbuk?"

  Misha disentangled himself and turned on
his side. "When the ghost came out of the man, I thought it went into me," he said in a whisper. "Papa laughed and said he had made sure the closest thing to the man was a big black cat. That was right before..."

  "Before what?" Sol asked.

  "Before they took Mama and Papa away. Papa put me outside on the fire-landing. He said, 'Mishele, now you must be quiet as a ghost.' I heard noise. Shouting. I stayed out there all night. When I went back in, the front door had been knocked down. Mama and Papa were gone. Sometimes..."

  The boy hesitated. "Sometimes," he went on, "I think I turned into a ghost and that's why the Nazis punished Mama and Papa." He was trembling--weak with memories. "Maybe the Hauptsturmführer is my real papa, as he says...."

  "Stop that!" Sol insisted. The child must have an aunt, an uncle, someone who could attempt his release. Such miracles did happen. Money. Someone knew someone willing to...

  Sol stopped himself. There were dreams and there were dreams. Better to be Schmuckstück than to hope falsely, for that could just bring deeper despair. Especially to Misha. Hempel would never let the child go. Not alive.

  "Listen to me, Misha. I cannot, will not, return to that hospital alive."

  He lay on Hans' bunk, listening to the echo of his own words inside his head. Hempel had recently ordered the windows and doors kept closed for "security." Sweat, breath, and body effluvia mingled in a heat as oppressive as a steam bath. With less than a foot of sleeping space per person, the inmates slept spoon-style, arms thrown about each other like caricatures of connubial bliss. He could not so much as lift an arm. In his own bunk, no more than a hand's width separated his face from the roof joist. Searching for air in the stifling barracks, he had worked free a composition tile. By lifting a bit of the roofing, he could breathe in the night.

  Whatever this was, it was not living.

  When sleep had claimed the boy, Sol made himself a promise. He would have no more of this. Head twisted toward the moonlight, he planned his own execution. He would carry no more stones, hobble no more with bleeding feet along the shoe-track designed to test footwear for good German soldiers. Above all, he would not lie alive beneath Schmidt's instrument.

  If they wanted his eyes or his testicles, they could remove them from a corpse.

  Gripping the edge of the bunk, he wriggled out of it. Below and beside him were the sweat-slicked faces of over three hundred wretches hacking and choking in their sleep...swaddled in striped bunting, asleep in the Führer's arms.

  Sol moved among them, careful to awaken no one. Oddly calm, he made his way toward the far corner of the barracks, where the inmates had hung a tattered blanket to provide suicides with a triangle of privacy. As he reached out to pull aside the blanket, it occurred to him that he might not find the noose empty. There were not too many days or nights that it went unused.

  The noose dangled empty and alluring.

  As if wanting a witness to his act, he shuffled to the window and wiped away the accumulation of breath with his sleeve. The sentry tower was silhouetted by a new moon, and he could see a helmeted guard bending his head to light a cigarette. A good German soldier, smoking on duty? Shame!

  He turned to face the noose and bumped into Misha.

  "Herr Freund, you mustn't." The boy tugged at Sol.

  "You should not be here," Sol said sternly.

  The boy let go and took a step backward. "I am here," he said, "and I will stay. You're in this camp because of me. The Nazis would never have found you if I hadn't led them to you. Only I didn't know it was going to happen. It will be your fault if your dybbuk finds me--but you will know...."

  The sentry light swept across the window, highlighting the expression of raw fear--and courage--on the young face. The child was right, Sol thought, relinquishing the moment. He must alleviate Misha's fear.

  Then he would be free to do this for himself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Under cover of night, the religious among the almost-dead gathered outside Barracks 18 to pray for themselves. Sometimes they were led by a rabbi. More often than not, the task of leading the prayers fell to the physically strongest among them. The bodies of those who died during prayers simply lay there until the morning detail carried them away, along with the others who had died in their bunks during the night. For the time being, the Nazis found this piling of corpses convenient and chose not to interfere.

  Tonight was Shabbat--Sabbath. Rumor had it that a rabbi known for the depth and breadth of his studies had recently been brought into the camp. If the reb, whose name Sol had not been able to ascertain, remained among the living, Sol thought, he would be conducting the Service. When he had first come to the camp, Sol had tried, for Misha's sake, to find out whether the boy's parents had ended up here. Often, people were sent to Oranienburg first from Berlin, so he had asked everyone who had been there if they had met Rabbi Czisça and his wife. He discovered only, from someone who had shared the journey with them, that they had indeed been transported to Oranienburg. Whether or not one or both of them were still there, alive, was a question that remained unanswered. Since men and women were separated upon arrival, here at Sachsenhausen and at the holding camp in Oranienburg, he was unlikely to learn more about Misha's mama. As for the rabbi, Misha's papa, he would ask that again tonight. Perhaps this new rabbi would turn out to be Rabbi Czisça himself; such coincidences abounded in the strange sub-culture of the camp.

  "Go back to sleep, Misha," Sol whispered, saying nothing of this to the boy for fear of raising his hopes in vain. "I will find the rabbi and he will get rid of the dybbuk so that you need not be afraid."

  He led the boy to the bunk and made it out to Barracks 18 without incident. In the quadrangle separating the barracks from Nazi quarters, thirty men hung from a crossbar. Each time the searchlights swept the area, he could see them jerking and convulsing. Earlier that evening, they had been hooked onto the crossbar by the same rope that cuffed their wrists together behind their backs. Though they would be dead by morning, in their present pain they begged for death now. Huddled against the wall, in the blackness of the night, Sol listened to their wails and to the chanting of the congregation of the dying.

  Almost at once, as if their lament had drawn it to him, the strains of a Bach concerto began inside Sol's head----

  ----gossamer veils of blue dust-moted light filter through a stained-glass window and onto a man seated at a pipe organ. Blond and broad- shouldered, he is obviously as athletic as he is musically talented. His outward appearance is that of the idealized German farm boy.

  The Bach concerto he is playing reverberates throughout the tall reaches of a rococo church that looks as if it were once a castle. Pale blue Grecian designs and rectangular moldings trimmed with gilt separate the walls from the ceilings. Everywhere there are frescoes with Biblical themes----

  "Who is there?"

  The words, heavy with Spanish accent, dissipated the vision and the music and the blue light. Sol turned toward the voice. A searchlight swept the area and he caught a glimpse of dark skin.

  "Solomon Freund."

  "Welcome. I'm Reb Nathanson."

  Sol felt a deep sense of disappointment and realized how much he had been hoping to be able to bring the boy good news. "I need help, Reb," he said without further preamble.

  "Who among us does not?"

  Despite himself, Sol chuckled softly at the hint of humor in the rabbi's voice. "I have long believed there is a dybbuk in me," he said, feeling more at ease. "The time has come to have it removed so that I can--"

  "I understand," the rabbi said. "I have dealt with such matters before. If you are right, God willing I can make it disappear. At worst, I will persuade it to leave you for one of those wretches on the crossbar. It can cause no harm in that labyrinth of the dying."

  "Can that be done?"

  "Anything is possible. Now be quiet. It is enough to risk our lives for a purpose. For idle chatter it is stupidity."

  "Is there.. ?" Sol restrained himself
from laughing aloud. He had been about to ask if there were danger in the ritual. What could be more dangerous than being out here after roll call, shrouded only by the night and threatened by the constant sweep of the searchlights. If the Nazis so much as suspected the performance of a Kabbalistic ritual inside Sachsenhausen...

  "I'm ready," he whispered, though for what he could not imagine. "What do you want me to do?"

  "Lie flat on your belly. That way, if you must cry out, the ground will muffle the noise. I will put my hands on your head and keep them there until I have removed the demon."

  If there is one, Sol thought, lying down.

  The searchlights passed again and he waited for the rabbi to begin...what? An exorcism in a charnel house! The incongruity of it was absurd. "Aren't you afraid it will enter you?" he asked.

  "It wouldn't dare." Moving soundlessly, the rabbi straddled Solomon's back. "I'm sorry there is no time for niceties." His face was so close that his warm breath raised the hairs on Solomon's neck.

  "You are named after Solomon, the wise king and arch magician of the Hebrews." The rabbi was panting, bearing down hard. "He created the incantation I am about to use. When you are ready, repeat it with me until I tell you to stop: Lofaham, Solomon, Iyouel, Iyisebaiyu--Leave this man and give yourself to..."

  "Lofaham, Solomon, Iyouel, Iyisebaiyu..."

  "Don't stop! When I feel the dybbuk coming, I am going to use an ancient Hebraic incantation. Take no notice. You keep repeating those four words...."

  The taste of bile filled Sol's mouth and a wave of nausea engulfed him. He saw, again, some of the people in his visions--a woman, eyes anguished, begging to die. A blanket-robed old man, lashes and brows furred with frost, kneeling in the snow beside the frozen body of a young soldier. The Ethiopian, staring unmoving at the disemboweled body of his ancestor.