At dusk, the guards broke the hypnosis of lifting and grunting and sweating and formed the prisoners into ranks. They marched back to the camp through the fields, beside the railroad tracks, the electrified wire, conical towers, and into the main gate of the camp.
Bruckman tried to block out a dangerous stray thought of his wife. He remembered her as if he were hallucinating: she was in his arms. The boxcar stank of sweat and feces and urine, but he had been inside it for so long that he was used to the smells. Miriam had been sleeping. Suddenly he discovered that she was dead. As he screamed, the smells of the car overpowered him, the smells of death.
Wernecke touched his arm, as if he knew, as if he could see through Bruckman’s eyes. And Bruckman knew what Wernecke’s eyes were saying: “Another day. We’re alive. Against all the odds. We conquered death.” Josef walked beside them, but he kept stumbling, as he was once again slipping back into death, becoming a Musselmänn. Wernecke helped him walk, pushed him along. “We should let this man become dead,” Wernecke said to Bruckman.
Bruckman only nodded, but he felt a chill sweep over his sweating back. He was seeing Wernecke’s face again as it was for that instant in the morning. Smeared with blood.
Yes, Bruckman thought, we should let the Musselmänn become dead. We should all be dead . . .
Wernecke served up the lukewarm water with bits of spoiled turnip floating on the top, what passed as soup for the prisoners. Everyone sat or kneeled on the rough-planked floor, as there were no chairs.
Bruckman ate his portion, counting the sips and the bites, forcing himself to take his time. Later, he would take a very small bite of the bread he had in his pocket. He always saved a small morsel of food for later—in the endless world of the camp, he had learned to give himself things to look forward to. Better to dream of bread than to get lost in the present. That was the fate of the Musselmänner.
But he always dreamed of food. Hunger was with him every moment of the day and night. Those times when he actually ate were in a way the most difficult, for there was never enough to satisfy him. There was the taste of softness in his mouth, and then in an instant it was gone. The emptiness took the form of pain—it hurt to eat. For bread, he thought, he would have killed his father, or his wife, God forgive me, and he watched Wernecke—Wernecke, who had shared his bread with him, who had died a little so he could live. He’s a better man than me, Bruckman thought.
It was dim inside the barracks. A bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling and cast sharp shadows across the cavernous room. Two tiers of five-foot-deep shelves ran around the room on three sides, bare wooden shelves where the men slept without blankets or mattresses. Set high in the northern wall was a slatted window, which let in the stark white light of the kliegs. Outside, the lights turned the ground into a deathly imitation of day; only inside the barracks was it night.
“Do you know what tonight is, my friends?” Wernecke asked. He sat in the far corner of the room with Josef, who, hour by hour, was reverting back into a Musselmänn. Wernecke’s face looked hollow and drawn in the light from the window and the lightbulb; his eyes were deep-set and his face was long with deep creases running from his nose to the corners of his thin mouth. His hair was black, and even since Bruckman had known him, quite a bit of it had fallen out. He was a very tall man, almost six foot four, and that made him stand out in a crowd, which was dangerous in a death camp. But Wernecke had his own secret ways of blending with the crowd, of making himself invisible.
“No, tell us what tonight is,” crazy old Bohme said. That men such as Bohme could survive was a miracle—or, as Bruckman thought—a testament to men such as Wernecke, who somehow found the strength to help the others live.
“It’s Passover,” Wernecke said.
“How does he know that?” someone mumbled, but it didn’t matter how Wernecke knew, because he knew—even if it really wasn’t Passover by the calendar. In this dimly lit barracks, it was Passover, the feast of freedom, the time of thanksgiving.
“But how can we have Passover without a seder?” asked Bohme. “We don’t even have any matzoh,” he whined.
“Nor do we have candles, or a silver cup for Elijah, or the shank bone, or haroset—nor would I make a seder over the traif the Nazis are so generous in giving us,” replied Wernecke with a smile. “But we can pray, can’t we? And when we all get out of here, when we’re in our own homes in the coming years with God’s help, then we’ll have twice as much food—two afikomens, a bottle of wine for Elijah, and the haggadahs that our fathers and our fathers’ fathers used.”
It was Passover.
“Isadore, do you remember the four questions?” Wernecke asked Bruckman.
And Bruckman heard himself speaking. He was twelve years old again at the long table beside his father, who sat in the seat of honor. To sit next to him was itself an honor. “How does this night differ from all other nights? On all other nights we eat bread and matzoh; why on this night do we eat only matzoh?”
“M’a nisht’ana halylah hazeah . . .”
Sleep would not come to Bruckman that night, although he was so tired that he felt as if the marrow of his bones had been sucked away and replaced with lead.
He lay there in the semidarkness, feeling his muscles ache, feeling the acid biting of his hunger. Usually he was numb enough with exhaustion that he could empty his mind, close himself down, and fall rapidly into oblivion, but not tonight. Tonight he was noticing things again, his surroundings were getting through to him again, in a way that they had not since he had been new in the camp. It was smotheringly hot, and the air was filled with the stinks of death and sweat and fever, of stale urine and drying blood. The sleepers thrashed and turned, as though they fought with sleep, and as they slept, many of them talked or muttered or screamed aloud; they lived other lives in their dreams, intensely compressed lives dreamed quickly, for soon it would be dawn, and once more they would be thrust into hell. Cramped in the midst of them, sleepers squeezed in all around him, it suddenly seemed to Bruckman that these pallid white bodies were already dead, that he was sleeping in a graveyard. Suddenly it was the boxcar again. And his wife Miriam was dead again, dead and rotting unburied . . .
Resolutely, Bruckman emptied his mind. He felt feverish and shaky, and wondered if the typhus was coming back, but he couldn’t afford to worry about it. Those who couldn’t sleep couldn’t survive. Regulate your breathing, force your muscles to relax, don’t think. Don’t think.
For some reason, after he had managed to banish even the memory of his dead wife, he couldn’t shake the image of the blood on Wernecke’s mouth.
There were other images mixed in with it—Wernecke’s uplifted arms and upturned face as he led them in prayer, the pale strained face of the stumbling Musselmänn, Wernecke looking up, startled, as he crouched over Josef—but it was the blood to which Bruckman’s feverish thoughts returned, and he pictured it again and again as he lay in the rustling, fart-smelling darkness: the watery sheen of blood over Wernecke’s lips, the tarry trickle of blood in the corner of his mouth, like a tiny scarlet worm . . .
Just then a shadow crossed in front of the window, silhouetted blackly for an instant against the harsh white glare, and Bruckman knew from the shadow’s height and its curious forward stoop that it was Wernecke.
Where could he be going? Sometimes a prisoner would be unable to wait until morning, when the Germans would let them out to visit the slit-trench latrine again, and would slink shamefacedly into a far corner to piss against a wall, but surely Wernecke was too much of an old hand for that . . . Most of the prisoners slept on the sleeping platforms, especially during the cold nights when they would huddle together for warmth, but sometimes during the hot weather, people would drift away and sleep on the floor instead; Bruckman himself had been thinking of doing that, as the jostling bodies of the sleepers around him helped to keep him from sleep. Perhaps Wernecke, who always had trouble fitting into the cramped sleeping niches, was merely looking for a place wher
e he could lie down and stretch his legs . . .
Then Bruckman remembered that Josef had fallen asleep in the corner of the room where Wernecke had sat and prayed, and that they had left him there alone.
Without knowing why, Bruckman found himself on his feet. As silently as the ghost he sometimes felt he was becoming, he walked across the room in the direction Wernecke had gone, not understanding what he was doing or why he was doing it. The face of the Musselmänn, Josef, seemed to float behind his eyes. Bruckman’s feet hurt, and he knew, without looking, that they were bleeding, leaving faint tracks behind him. It was dimmer here in the far corner, away from the window, but Bruckman knew that he must be near the wall by now, and he stopped to let his eyes readjust.
When his eyes had adapted to the dimmer light, he saw Josef sitting on the floor, propped up against the wall. Wernecke was hunched over the Musselmänn. Kissing him. One of Josef s hands was tangled in Wernecke’s thinning hair.
Before Bruckman could react—such things had been known to happen once or twice before, although it shocked him deeply that Wernecke would be involved in such filth—Josef released his grip on Wernecke’s hair. Josef’s upraised arm fell limply to the side, his hand hitting the floor with a muffled but solid impact that should have been painful—but Josef made no sound.
Wernecke straightened up and turned around. Stronger light from the high window caught him as he straightened to his full height, momentarily illuminating his face.
Wernecke’s mouth was smeared with blood.
“My God!” Bruckman cried.
Startled, Wernecke flinched, then took two quick steps forward and seized Bruckman by the arm. “Quiet!” Wernecke hissed. His fingers were cold and hard.
At that moment, as though Wernecke’s sudden movement were a cue, Josef began to slip down sideways along the wall. As Wernecke and Bruckman watched, both momentarily riveted by the sight, Josef toppled over to the floor, his head striking against the floorboards with a sound such as a dropped melon might make. He had made no attempt to break his fall or cushion his head, and lay now unmoving.
“My God,” Bruckman said again.
“Quiet, I’ll explain,” Wernecke said, his lips still glazed with the Musselmänn’s blood. “Do you want to ruin us all? For the love of God, be quiet.”
But Bruckman had shaken free of Wernecke’s grip and crossed to kneel by Josef, leaning over him as Wernecke had done, placing a hand flat on Josef’s chest for a moment, then touching the side of Josef’s neck. Bruckman looked slowly up at Wernecke. “He’s dead,” Bruckman said, more quietly.
Wernecke squatted on the other side of Josef’s body, and the rest of their conversation was carried out in whispers over Josef’s chest, like friends conversing at the sickbed of another friend who has finally fallen into a fitful doze.
“Yes, he’s dead,” Wernecke said. “He was dead yesterday, wasn’t he? Today he has just stopped walking.” His eyes were hidden here, in the deeper shadow nearer to the floor, but there was still enough light for Bruckman to see that Wernecke had wiped his lips clean. Or licked them clean, Bruckman thought, and felt a spasm of nausea go through him.
“But you,” Bruckman said, haltingly. “You were . . .”
“Drinking his blood?” Wernecke said. “Yes, I was drinking his blood.”
Bruckman’s mind was numb. He couldn’t deal with this, he couldn’t understand it at all. “But why, Eduard? Why?”
“To live, of course. Why do any of us do anything here? If I am to live, I must have blood. Without it, I’d face a death even more certain than that doled out by the Nazis.”
Bruckman opened and closed his mouth, but no sound came out, as if the words he wished to speak were too jagged to fit through his throat. At last he managed to croak, “A vampire? You’re a vampire? Like in the old stories?”
Wernecke said calmly, “Men would call me that.” He paused, then nodded. “Yes, that’s what men would call me . . . As though they can understand something simply by giving it a name.”
“But Eduard,” Bruckman said weakly, almost petulantly. “The Musselmänn . . .”
“Remember that he was a Musselmänn, “Wernecke said, leaning forward and speaking more fiercely. “His strength was going, he was sinking. He would have been dead by morning, anyway. I took from him something that he no longer needed, but that I needed in order to live. Does it matter? Starving men in lifeboats have eaten the bodies of their dead companions in order to live. Is what I’ve done any worse than that?”
“But he didn’t just die. You killed him . . .”
Wernecke was silent for a moment, and then said, quietly, “What better thing could I have done for him? I won’t apologize for what I do, Isadore; I do what I have to do to live. Usually I take only a little blood from a number of men, just enough to survive. And that’s fair, isn’t it? Haven’t I given food to others, to help them survive? To you, Isadore? Only very rarely do I take more than a minimum from any one man, although I’m weak and hungry all the time, believe me. And never have I drained the life from someone who wished to live. Instead I’ve helped them fight for survival in every way I can, you know that.”
He reached out as though to touch Bruckman, then thought better of it and put his hand back on his own knee. He shook his head. “But these Musselmänner, the ones who have given up on life, the walking dead—it is a favor to them to take them, to give them the solace of death. Can you honestly say that it is not, here? That it is better for them to walk around while they are dead, being beaten and abused by the Nazis until their bodies cannot go on, and then to be thrown into the ovens and burned like trash? Can you say that? Would they say that, if they knew what was going on? Or would they thank me?”
Wernecke suddenly stood up, and Bruckman stood up with him. As Wernecke’s face came again into the stronger light, Bruckman could see that his eyes had filled with tears. “You have lived under the Nazis,” Wernecke said. “Can you really call me a monster? Aren’t I still a Jew, whatever else I might be? Aren’t I here, in a death camp? Aren’t I being persecuted too, as much as any other? Aren’t I in as much danger as anyone else? If I’m not a Jew, then tell the Nazis—they seem to think so.” He paused for a moment, and then smiled wryly. “And forget your superstitious bogey tales. I’m no night spirit. If I could turn myself into a bat and fly away from here, I would have done it long before now, believe me.”
Bruckman smiled reflexively, then grimaced. The two men avoided each other’s eyes, Bruckman looking at the floor, and there was an uneasy silence, punctuated only by the sighing and moaning of the sleepers on the other side of the cabin. Then, without looking up, in tacit surrender, Bruckman said, “What about him? The Nazis will find the body and cause trouble . . .”
“Don’t worry,” Wernecke said. “There are no obvious marks. And nobody performs autopsies in a death camp. To the Nazis, he’ll be just another Jew who has died of the heat, or from starvation or sickness, or from a broken heart.”
Bruckman raised his head then and they stared eye to eye for a moment. Even knowing what he knew, Bruckman found it hard to see Wernecke as anything other than what he appeared to be: an aging, balding Jew, stooping and thin, with sad eyes and a tired, compassionate face.
“Well, then, Isadore,” Wernecke said at last, matter-of-factly. “My life is in your hands. I will not be indelicate enough to remind you of how many times your life has been in mine.”
Then he was gone, walking back toward the sleeping platforms, a shadow soon lost among other shadows.
Bruckman stood by himself in the gloom for a long time, and then followed him. It took all of his will not to look back over his shoulder at the corner where Josef lay, and even so Bruckman imagined that he could feel Josef’s dead eyes watching him, watching him reproachfully as he walked away, abandoning Josef to the cold and isolate company of the dead.
Bruckman got no more sleep that night, and in the morning, when the Nazis shattered the gray predawn stillness by burs
ting into the shack with shouts and shrilling whistles and barking police dogs, he felt as if he were a thousand years old.
They were formed into two lines, shivering in the raw morning air, and marched off to the quarry. The clammy dawn mist had yet to burn off, and, marching through it, through a white shadowless void, with only the back of the man in front of him dimly visible, Bruckman felt more than ever like a ghost, suspended bodiless in some limbo between Heaven and Earth. Only the bite of pebbles and cinders into his raw, bleeding feet kept him anchored to the world, and he clung to the pain as a lifeline, fighting to shake off a feeling of numbness and unreality. However strange, however outré, the events of the previous night had happened. To doubt it, to wonder now if it had all been a feverish dream brought on by starvation and exhaustion, was to take the first step on the road to becoming a Musselmänn.
Wernecke is a vampire, he told himself. That was the harsh, unyielding reality that, like the reality of the camp itself, must be faced. Was it any more surreal, any more impossible, than the nightmare around them? He must forget the tales his old grandmother had told him as a boy, “bogey tales” as Wernecke himself had called them, half-remembered tales that turned his knees to water whenever he thought of the blood smeared on Wernecke’s mouth, whenever he thought of Wernecke’s eyes watching him in the dark.
“Wake up, Jew!” the guard alongside him snarled, whacking him lightly on the arm with his rifle butt. Bruckman stumbled, managed to stay upright and keep going. Yes, he thought, wake up. Wake up to the reality of this, just as you once had to wake up to the reality of the camp. It was just one more unpleasant fact he would have to adapt to, learn to deal with . . .
Deal with how? he thought, and shivered.
By the time they reached the quarry, the mist had burned off, swirling past them in rags and tatters, and it was already beginning to get hot. There was Wernecke, his balding head gleaming dully in the harsh morning light. He didn’t dissolve in the sunlight, there was one bogey tale disproved . . .
Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois Page 48