The Color of Light

by Helen Maryles Shankman

I was standing a small distance apart from her, my hands like weights at my sides. She came close, took my face in her hands and pulled it down to the delectable swan’s curve of her white neck.

  “There is one more,” she murmured.

  “No.” I pushed her away, resolutely shaking my head. She almost lost her footing in the sticky mud underfoot. “I won’t do it! Don’t ask me!”

  “Raphael, please,” she said softly.

  “No!” I roared. Backing away, I went crashing into a babushka-ed group of women behind me, scattering them like bowling pins. People in line muttered, craned their necks to see. Soldiers with submachine guns turned their heads to pinpoint the source of the ruckus.

  In my last memory of Sofia, she is staring at me. No, not at me, behind me. Her great black eyes are filled with horror.

  I turned to look. Something struck the back of my head. And then everything went black.

  I was being dragged. As I swam back to consciousness, I became aware that someone was trying to get my shoe off my foot.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Stop that!” And yelped with pain; it felt like the roof of my head was coming off.

  With a frightened look, two inmates, dressed in the striped uniforms I had seen earlier, dropped my legs and scattered.

  In the east, the sky was beginning to lighten. Lucky for me, I thought. Any closer to morning, and I would have been burnt to cinders.

  I had lost my hat. I hauled myself up into a sitting position, cradling the top of my head. It felt like someone was hammering at it with a pickaxe. Cautiously poking around, I found a small, round hole at the base of my skull. I had been shot. My fingers were slippery with blood. Perhaps that was what Sofia had seen.

  Sofia.

  I leapt to my feet.

  The line of people was gone. It was as if they had never been there at all. Above me, a churning pillar of smoke billowed from the smokestack, drifting high into the atmosphere. Swiftly, I turned around in a circle. I was completely alone.

  Fluffy traces of ash, like gray snowflakes, drifted down from the red sky. One fell on my cheek.

  O, Sofia.

  O, Isaiah.

  I howled, then. And howled again.

  A guard in a tower trained his rifle on me. It was early in the morning; he must have been tired. I heard the bullet whistle past my head. I lumbered forward, started to run. Dodging among the buildings, I dived into the first one with an open door.

  It seemed to be some kind of a warehouse. Suitcases filled the room. Thousands of them. Suitcases stood open on tables, their contents splayed promiscuously for the taking; suitcases were stacked high against the walls.

  On the table closest to me, a brown leather valise perched on top of two others, waiting for attention. Painted upon it in white was the name Wizotsky.

  I stayed on for a time in Auschwitz. I never saw her body, you see; and as I told you, the human heart has an infinite capacity for hope.

  When night fell, I crept forth, hugging the shadows. My plan was to search for Sofia, but I didn’t know where to start. The camp was enormous, hundreds of low wooden buildings, with signs in German that I didn’t understand.

  As I stood there, pondering what to do, a woman crossed my path.

  She shambled forward in a loose, jerky manner, slowing only to drag her ill-fitting wooden clogs out of the sucking mud. On this frigid night, she was dressed in layers of thin cotton rags, a kerchief tied around her bald head. She was wretchedly thin. I wondered where she was going, all alone, this late at night. As I watched, she reached forward to take hold of the electrified fence.

  I lunged forward, pulled her back into the shadows with me, just in the nick of time.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, looking into her eyes. “You don’t want to go that way.”

  When she returned my gaze, I shuddered. I knew those grave gray eyes.

  Beata Grunzweig, respected journalist, stationed in Paris in the years leading up to World War II. Beata Grunzweig, the lover and companion of well-known German newspaper photographer, Willie Erlichmann. Beata Grunzweig, who had disappeared off the face of the earth in 1941.

  “Beata?” I said. “It’s Raphael Sinclair. We knew each other in Paris. Remember?”

  But the mechanism was broken, the eyes smudged and blown, like burnt-out bulbs. There was no recognition in her hollow, starved face. The body was still moving, but there was no one left inside.

  “Don’t do it, Beata,” I begged her, with all the supernatural persuasiveness at my command. “Don’t you want to know how it all turns out?”

  She jerked her hands out of mine to resume her agonizing, bent gait towards the electric fence and the five thousand liberating volts of electricity that it carried.

  I seized her then, unable to watch. She struggled, reaching for the wire. And then, wishing for a kinder, gentler end to her life, for my old friend’s lover, I drew her close and put my teeth to her throat.

  There was so little life left in her; it was like blowing out a candle. When it was done, I laid her gently on the ground. And then I got down on my knees and prayed to God for both our souls.

  The other inmates had a name for people like Beata. They called them muselmen. They came to the electric fence every night; the ones who had seen too much, or eaten too little; the ones who were the sole survivors of an entire village, the ones who had lost all their children. The ones who could not bear to see the light of another dawn.

  Night after night, I asked them the same question. “Don’t you want to know how it all turns out?”

  Sometimes, it worked; something would click on behind the eyes; a woman would stare at me as though she had never thought of it in exactly that way, then vanish back into the night.

  But for most of them, it was too late. They would look past me with those smudged, blown-fuse eyes and reach for the wire. Gently, I would take them into my arms, and gently I would send them on to the next world. It was the last act of kindness I was capable of performing for anyone in that place.

  A woman, still sentient enough to wonder who I was, responded with, “Raphael? Like the Angel of Healing?” when she heard my name. One of those who chose to live another day, she must have told somebody. The next night, a poor, shivering, ragged creature looked up at me from shadowed, sunken eyes, and asked me in perfect Parisian French if I was the Angel of Healing. And if I was, could I please heal her of this miserable life. It happened again the next night. And the next night. And the night after that. And the night after that.

  For six months, I glided through the different barracks, gazing hopefully into the poor, starved, sleeping faces. Eventually, I faced the truth. She wasn’t there. Clinging to one last illusion, I persuaded myself that she had been transported to another camp.

  So I left Auschwitz. In the end, it was as simple as peering into the open window of a car, putting the driver under my thrall, and asking for a lift. I would leave the hell that was Hitler’s Poland behind me. But first I planned a quick trip to a small town on the Ukrainian border, near the city of Wlodawa, where I asked around until I found the isolated, out-of-the-way farmhouse in which an American bloke known as Skip lived with his pretty Polish potato-farming mistress.

  I left their bodies to the animals.

  So, sweet girl. You asked me about the Angel of Healing. Now you know.

  Sofia said she would haunt me, and now she did. Safe in my bed in London, I would jolt awake in a cold sweat, convinced that I had locked Sofia into the root cellar and forgotten to let her out. Dozing on the train, I would leap to my feet, crying Isaiah’s name, certain that I had left him at the last stop. Passing children at play in a park, I would turn my head and break into tears. It happened again and again. People stared.

  I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t stay anywhere. It wasn’t long before I was walking down a gangplank into New York City.

  For a long time now, I have been successfully going through the motions. I talk, I smile, I joke, I charm, I screw the pre
tties that come my way. It makes me feel alive for a little while. Up until this year, I have been, like it says in the song, comfortably numb.

  I’m not sorry I told you; it needed to be told, and you needed to hear it; but in the telling, my demons have awakened, opened sleepy, malevolent yellow eyes, and I find I cannot outrun them any longer.

  I am haunted. The only peace I have ever found has been with you.

  There was a bit more, something to do with lawyers, something to do with where to lay his body to rest, but she had read enough; she laid the letter down in her lap and covered her face, for she was crying, tears coursing down her cheeks.

  Rising from her seat, she went to the window, pushed aside the heavy velvet curtain. A cotton-candy-colored glow suffused the eastern horizon. It was dawn.

  She turned to find him awake. He had changed considerably overnight. Death was stealing color from his face and replacing it with lines of gray. He was looking at her. No, not at her. At the letter she was holding in her hand.

  She sat down beside him. The letter lay open between them like a small corpse.

  “But what else could you have done?” she said.

  His eyes, the color of smoke, the color of shadows, flared with the fiery brilliance of a gemstone.

  This time, when she put a cup of water to his lips, it dribbled out the side of his mouth. Unquestionably, he was at the end of his struggle. A soft pink sunbeam crept towards him from a crack between the curtains, lighting a path that fell across the carpet, across the covers, across his face. Tessa put her arms around him, rested her head over his heart. He summoned what was left of his strength, put his hands in her hair.

  “Please, Rafe,” she begged him, one more time.

  “No,” he breathed.

  She sighed and climbed to her feet. Her knapsack was sitting next to the couch, and she went to it now, fished around inside until she found what she was looking for. When she returned, she was holding at arms length the silly little gun with the silver bullet they had sold her at Magikal Childe.

  “I thought you would say that,” she said. “Can you reach the phone?”

  They both glanced at the alcove near the stairway. It was a good thirty feet away. Not a chance. He could barely lift his head.

  “Because you’re going to need to dial 911.”

  He tried to start up off the couch, found he couldn’t. She went on. “I took Anatomy. I know where to shoot myself so that I don’t hit any major organs. But I’m still going to need a doctor. If you’re going to help me, you’re going to have to save yourself first.”

  He tried to reach a hand out to stop her, found he couldn’t do that, either. “Don’t,” he croaked desperately. “Don’t do this, Tessa. Bullets are funny things. You never know what they’re going to do.”

  She stood before him, a pre-Raphaelite Joan of Arc in a camisole and blue jeans, her untamed hair in a halo around her face. She put the muzzle of the gun to her side.

  “Save me,” she said, and pulled the trigger. There was a loud pop. She jerked back and fell down.

  Tessa lay on her back on the Persian carpet, stunned. A small red dot appeared, then began to bloom across the front of her camisole.

  “Wow,” she said. “That really hurt.”

  With great effort, he slid off the couch and knelt beside her. “Oh, you stupid girl,” he said. “You stupid, stupid girl.”

  She actually smiled at him, her eyes shining with faith and trust. And then the pain set in. She squeezed out a moan, her eyes clamped shut. “Damn,” she said. “This was a stupid idea.”

  Uselessly, she cupped a hand over the wound. Blood puddled up between her fingers, crept out on the floor beneath her, spreading out in a circle on the carpet.

  She had left him no choice. Rafe dropped over her, his arms barely able to support his own weight. The world was spinning; he rested his forehead in the soft curve between her neck and her shoulder until it passed. His mouth moved to the place on her throat where her pulse throbbed at the surface of the skin.

  Inhaling deeply, he took in her summery blackberry scent and the salty musk of her blood. His fangs dimpled the surface of the white skin of her throat.

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  And then he bit down.

  Blood spilled into his mouth, sweet and salty and rich. She cried out, arching her body into the air. He loosened his grip, afraid she was trying to get away, afraid she had changed her mind. Fiercely, she wound her arms around his neck, pulling his face back down.

  He lapped tentatively. Swallowed. Waited fearfully to be sick again. Instead, he tingled all over, a prickly warmth returning to the surface of his skin. Something was definitely happening.

  He lowered himself over her. Sucked harder. Stronger. Faster.

  Strength came surging through his fingers, his arms, his legs. Electrical impulses arced and sparked and blew and vibrated, blasting their way along neural pathways and nerve endings to his brain. His arms went around her, and he clutched her small, fragile figure to his bare chest so that he could feel her heart beating against his, faster and faster, as he drew life from her body. It felt so good, it felt so right, his soft full lips against the curve of her neck. He had never been this close to anyone before. She lived inside of him, for now and forever.

  Let go, a voice said inside his head. You’ve had enough.

  Something else, something dark and grotesque whispered to him from the burnt, shadowy edges of his history. Look at her, it urged him. She wants it. Come on. Just a little while longer. Heart’s blood of a virgin. What is that, anyway?

  But wait, there was something he was supposed to do, something he had to remember. Something important. Something about Tessa. What was it? He closed his eyes, gave himself up to it.

  Save me.

  His fangs retracted, he released her. Gasping, he pushed himself off of her. He hovered between her knees for another moment to cup the side of her face, to kiss her lips, before springing to his feet.

  He vaulted over the couch to the phone, dialed 911. Told them his address. Told them to hurry.

  He grabbed a dishtowel from the kitchen, pressed it to the hole in her side. Were you supposed to press on a gunshot wound? He didn’t know.

  “They’re coming, you little idiot,” he said.

  She was gazing at him as if she wanted to take the memory of him into the next world. The flecks of green in her eyes sparkled like stars. Though he was trying to keep it to himself, he was frightened; she looked like she might pass out at any minute. His considerable experience with death told him she needed to stay awake.

  He took her hand in both of his. “I never told you this…I first noticed you back in September. You didn’t see me. I was passing by your studio. There was a sliver of space between the curtain and your doorway. You were bending over, putting away the heaters. I had an uninterrupted view of your sweet bottom. And then you straightened up…and your hair tumbled down to your waist…” he smiled at her. “I created the student liaison committee and put Graciela on it just so I could ask her about you.”

  She smiled drowsily at him. “What about you?” he prodded. “When did you know?”

  Her eyes closed and opened, closed and opened. Closed. He was beginning to panic, when they flew open again. “That time on the pier,” she said. “I knew I loved you. In the middle of a crisis, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the Hudson. I knew.”

  He bent over, rested his cheek on her forehead.

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “They’ll take you to the hospital,” he told her. “Fish out the nasty bits. Sew you up. Let you rest up a bit. Then you’ve got to get back to work on your thesis project. You’re behind, you know.”

  “I know,” she said. Then, “Is it cold in here?”

  Her voice was shaking. Now he noticed that she was shivering. Her skin was pale, clammy. He moved his thumb across her wrist. He could feel her pulse galloping as her heart worked harder to make up for
the quantities of missing blood. Her lips were turning from pink to purple. She was exhibiting all the classical signs of shock.

  He wrapped her in a blanket, pulled her close for warmth. Tessa’s sweet face, smiling up at him adoringly. Her eyelids were growing heavy. Where are they, where are they, where are they? “You’re going to be fine,” he said firmly.

  “Mmmm,” she said. She loved the sound of his voice, like a lullaby. She wanted him to go on talking forever. “Tell me a story.”

  “Hmmm, a story, a story…let’s see. Once upon a time there was this girl. Let’s call her, Little Red Riding Hood. Her mother packs her a basket to take to the Seven Dwarfs’ house, because one of the dwarfs isn’t feeling very well.”

  “There aren’t any dwarfs in that story,” said Tessa.

  “Well, there are in my story,” said Rafe. “Anyway. It’s getting near dark. The way to the Dwarfs’ house runs through the woods. ‘Just one thing,’ her mother tells her, as she leaves the confines of her cozy cottage. ‘Whatever you do, don’t stray off the path.’

  “So Little Red Riding Hood skips off into the woods. The path is bright and clear. She trots along, making good time. However, soon enough, she slows down, starts looking around, noticing just how pretty it is in the woods.

  “Then it happens. The most beautiful flowers she’s ever seen, growing just off the side of the path. ‘Just the thing to cheer up a sick dwarf,’ she tells herself. She stands there for another minute, just looking at those flowers, thinking about how nice they must smell, how much the dwarfs would like them. Finally, she comes to a decision. ‘Come on,’ she tells herself. ‘What harm can there be in one teeny-tiny step off the path?’

  “So. She takes just one teeny-tiny little step off the path. And there, standing right in front of her, is the Big Bad Wolf. ‘What’s in your basket, little girl?’ he growls.”

  “That’s a loaded question,” said Tessa.

  “You are a very naughty girl.” he said sternly. “This is just your standard, G-rated fairy tale. Now, hush.” He continued. “She opens up her basket, and it’s full of, oh, all kinds of yummy things you people like to eat. But that’s not all; there’s paper, and paints, and brushes, and pencils, and everything else a girl might need to make great art.