Children of the Dusk

by Berliner, Janet

  If only Miriam could understand that. Solomon, also, but Miriam most of all.

  He watched her move toward the zebu. The cow about to be killed seemed to draw her irresistibly, as if it needed her presence to dignify its slaughter. She stood slightly apart from the guards, who had lined up in front of it like a firing squad.

  The animal kept feeding, pulling up her head every now and again to stare at her executioners, as if she defied them to look her in the eye.

  "Let's not ruin the meat," Hempel said, striding up. "Just one of you will do. Johann?"

  "Sir?" the blond radio operator asked.

  "You're the youngest. Put a bullet through her brain."

  "Yes, sir!" The youth raised and sighted his Mauser. Erich felt a brief though undefined satisfaction when Miriam turned away, momentarily shutting her eyes.

  The shot sent birds twittering from the forest.

  The cow bellowed and staggered in a circle, head turned around nearly to her back as though she were troubled by insects along her spine. Her protest rolled through the morning and set the dogs howling. Then she toppled sideways, as if she had been pushed over by some enormous force. Her legs stiffened even as she dropped and her head nodded twice against the ground; her tail slapped once, and she lay still.

  Johann grinned and lowered the gun. A hush fell upon the pasture and the surrounding ring of forest. Erich could see the animal clearly: ribs prominent, rheumy eyed, covered with flies.

  Shouting, the guards pulled out daggers and threw themselves upon the beast, laughing as they slashed the belly and gutted her. Pleshdimer squirmed among the others like the largest member of a litter, squealing as he tore out the upper intestines. They gleamed like sausages. He drew them toward his mouth, as if he could not wait for the cookpot before he gorged himself, then changed his mind and wrapped them around his neck like a boa.

  CHAPTER SIX

  "A pretty killing, you think?"

  Bruqah knew that to the foreigners' ears--all but Miriam who understood him intuitively, and Solomon, who was learning to do so--his words, spoken in his melodic voice, often acted contrapuntally to his meaning. Eventually they would all understand, even Colonel Erich Germantownman. Understand and remember.

  "You walk with the grace of a man who hears secret music in his head," Miriam said, as if the dancer in her had suddenly become acutely conscious of her clumsiness.

  Bruqah smiled, acknowledging the compliment. As always, he carried his polished, carved, lily-wood walking stick, and the mouselemur sat at the nape of his neck, clinging to his hair. He was shawled from shoulders to waist in his white lamba. Already taller than everyone else, it created the illusion he wanted--that he towered above them. They were so easy to trick, these foreigners, he thought. They drew fast and faulty conclusions because doing so was less tedious to them than thinking. By creating the assumption of magic for themselves, they rendered his skills as a master illusionist superfluous. He had appeared with the mouselemur no more than twice before they took to whispering of it as his familiar. The same was true of his appearances and disappearances...as if from nowhere, to nowhere. They never quite felt his absence and always anticipated his presence, which was just the way he wanted it.

  "I tell myself this Rosh Hashanah of Solomon's must be of great concern to you. Must be, or you would not encourage this sacrifice," he told Miriam.

  "Killing the zebu has nothing to do with what the Jews want," Erich butted in. "The guards know nothing about the Holy Day."

  Bruqah smiled again, condescendingly this time, and brought the mouselemur around against his chest. He stroked its fur and ran his fingers along the thick tail that tapered abruptly at the end like the nib of a fountain pen. The creature made stuttery, appreciative sounds.

  "I think they know. I think they know more than you think, Mister Erich Germantownman. You are full of death, you Germans. Yes, I think they know." He pointed toward the Nazi flag, which dangled--as though wilted by the humidity--from the first pole the Jews had erected, one near where the gate was being built. "Even your flag is the color of death. We Malagash wear red and black as shrouds."

  "So do we, since the Nazis came to power," Miriam said.

  Bruqah shifted his gaze back toward the zebu. The animal's master had allowed it to overgraze. He pointed toward the cow's barren patch of ground. "All over Madagascar...the same." He allowed his anger to enter his husky voice. It was simple, yet no one seemed capable of understanding: they burned the forests for the savoka to grow, then grazed the zebu until even that grass was gone. He shook his head sadly. "I was once the worst offender."

  "You?" Miriam asked.

  Until the trees taught me, Bruqah thought, and I learned from the lemurs. All of which took lifetimes. "There is a saying. Omby milela-bato, matin'ny tany mah-zotra--the zebu will lick bare stone, and die in the earth it loves." He ran his hand from the mouselemur's head to its tail, causing the tiny animal to shudder with apparent joy. "We Malagash measure our worth by our cows, but we allow them to kill the land that is our mother...and theirs."

  "We Germans measure our worth by--what, Erich?" Miriam said in an ugly tone, looking at the butchered zebu with undisguised disgust. An apparent wave of pain, reflected in her face, passed over her. "By our...our scientific accomplishments?" Her breaths began to saw. "Or our industrial efficiency?" She shot Erich an angry glance. "Or by our capacity for killing?"

  "You weren't always this harsh, Miriam." Erich's voice trailed off. He stared past them, as though something held him motionless. Neither was it a sight that gave Bruqah pleasure.

  At the edge of the rain forest stood the Zana-Malata, holding up the head of Hempel's huge wolfhound. Bruqah watched Erich carefully. He saw him glance from the dog to Hempel and back. Rather than revulsion, the colonel's face held an expression of anticipation and something tantamount to envy. He wants the major's head on a stick, and the sooner the better, Bruqah thought.

  "I wasn't always hard and you weren't always a Nazi," Miriam said.

  The words were barely out of her mouth when her eyes rolled backward and her knees buckled. Bruqah stepped forward, but Erich was closer to her. He caught her as she collapsed. She winced and, clutching her belly, doubled over in pain.

  "I am ashamed to be part of the human race," she said in a whisper. She looked at Bruqah, and the animal wrapped around his neck. "Small wonder you hold lemurs in higher esteem than man." Glaring at Erich, she straightened up and pulled free of him.

  "Concerning some men," Bruqah said, "I could not agree more."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  "The guards do delight in death," Erich said.

  "Don't all Nazis?" Miriam asked.

  With what he felt was great self-control, Erich refrained from making an angry retort in the face of her insolence. He watched a zebu foreleg being drawn down like a lever while the meat was sliced near the socket. Someone produced an axe, and a hacking against bone began. Why don't they just quarter the cow and be done with it, he thought.

  "I need to sit," Miriam said.

  She stared at the grass for a moment as if examining it for crawling things, then, holding onto Bruqah's arm, sat down. He stood over her like a bodyguard--the two of them apart and yet together in a way that Erich envied. Away from the compound, he felt closer to her, less restricted. He experienced a territorial need to defend her, as if Bruqah represented a threat. He was worried about her, in much the same way that he was worried about Taurus. They were his; they belonged to him. He had brought few enough possessions with him to the island, so it made sense to him that he would want to ensure that the ones he had brought were not endangered.

  He started to say something to Miriam, but saw by the set of her mouth that anything he said would only trigger more harsh words. Turning on his heel, he walked toward the hill that he had been wanting to explore. It lay at the other side of the pasture, a fair enough distance away from the encampment that he thought it might afford him a place to be alone when he needed t
o think things through without constant interruptions.

  In no mood to encounter anyone, he skirted the meadow and the Zana-Malata's hut by taking a trail through the jungle on the steeper, northwest side of the saddle formed by the island's two hills. En route, he distracted himself by trying to identify some of the flora and fauna he had read about in the books he'd passed on to Miriam. According to those, the rain forest abounded with life, yet he had seen comparatively little of it. He could only conclude that his eyes were not yet trained to see through Madagascar's disguises--the way his stomach was not yet trained to digest the figs and wild ginger he had eaten, forcing him to drink half a bottle of schnapps during the night to quiet his stomach cramps.

  Erich began to climb. At first he found himself fascinated by the series of tall, carved, wooden posts which, judging by the curved zebu horns at the top of each one, were the burial totems he had seen pictured in his books about Madagascar. A few were taller than his head, but most were chest-high and about the size of his biceps in diameter, stuck like ornate needles in a green pincushion. He found them beautiful and odd and could not but wonder who might be buried beneath them.

  Slowly his interest gave way to fatigue. As his calves and thighs started to feel the strain of the climb, he regretted his lack of a machete and thanked whoever it was who had forged the existing narrow path to the top. If this was to become his hill, his refuge from the problems of Hempel and Miriam and the Jews, there would have to be a wider path. And, he thought wryly, he had better rid himself of the thirty-one-year-old city-boy weakness that had developed in his muscles since the demands of rank and family had curtailed his daily workouts. He would take Miriam's advice, he decided, ignoring the spirit in which it had been given. He would fashion himself a javelin and use that and daily walks up this hill to get into shape.

  He put his arm back, took several long strides which carried him through the last of the trees and onto the top of the hill, and threw an imaginary javelin. The action felt good.

  Very good indeed.

  He leaned against a heavily sculpted totem and saw that there were more than two dozen of them, each bearing the skull of an ox. At the crest of the hill stood a stone menhir--what looked like a three-sided rock house dug into the hillside. The roof was a huge stone slab overgrown with moss. At the northwest corner stood a larger totem. It, too, bore the skull of an ox, this time crowned with a woven liana garland.

  He examined it up close. He could make out miniature zebu horns, curling leaves, carved lemurs standing on top of one another's backs and looking outward with enormous eyes.

  He put out his hand to touch the totem, and quickly withdrew it as the thought occurred to him that the syphilitic had probably forged the path and woven the garland. Automatically, he turned full circle to make sure that the hideous black man wasn't standing somewhere watching him. Assured that he was alone, he forced himself to relax.

  He resolved to order Hempel and his men to open and examine the crypt, for who knew what buried treasure might lie inside. It could even contain some key to the true story of his hero, Count Augustus Benyowsky.

  Standing on the crest of the hill, Erich watched the tropical evening prepare to swallow the Altmark. By morning, the ship would be gone, on its way to rendezvous with the Spee, which needed "mother" to feed her oil and pick up prisoners, British seamen from the Africa Shell--her third victim sunk south of Madagascar. He felt little regret that they were leaving so soon. He had only been on the island for two days, yet he felt oddly at home.

  If only....

  He looked down at the area he had chosen for the base camp. The encampment was roughly the size of a soccer field. The far corner had been set aside for the Jews, some of whom were still at work emplacing the tall posts of an eastern sentry tower. Others, barehanded, strung barbed concertina wire across the fences they had just completed. As for electrifying the fences--which Hempel was trying to insist upon--there were other, more urgent uses for the generator when they got it up and running. First and foremost, it had to be used for lighting the compound at night and for pumping water into the water tank if the rain could not keep it full.

  He turned his attention from the compound to its second flanking hill, a second knoll. The hill itself was starker and narrower than this one and looked almost like a natural chimney. It was shielded by a canopy of trees alongside the sheer limestone cliff that formed its western edge. The natural camouflage made it a perfect southeast sentry post for the encampment. He’d have the Jews cut a road up the back and build a breastworks, an easy job, once that Jew, Goldman, finished welding the armor plate to the front of the small tank as a blade. The kleiner Panzerbefehlswagen, with its machine gun and armor plating, would serve as bulldozer and, later, as a deterrent to any would-be attackers from the main island. So it had proved to be a good idea after all, bringing the tank instead of the obvious equipment. Proved that no one, not even Otto Hempel, could be wrong about everything. Of course, Hempel had wanted to waste precious cargo space on a large raft-barge to bring the tank ashore. Erich had found the much simpler solution of using the emptied fuel drums from their resupply of the Spee to make a raft much like the floating bridges they'd built in his Wandervögel days.

  Which left only the plane, in terms of large equipment. There was certainly no place on this little island for a landing strip, so the Storch had been retrofitted with floats. It would take off from the lagoon. That was Hempel's domain, as were the reconnaissance flights which had to be made over the mainland.

  Yes, Erich thought, he could be happy here, if only Taurus were not taking the climate so hard, and if only he could avoid conflict between his trainers and Hempel's men, and the major's syphilitic friend, and....

  Putting the question of Miriam and Solomon aside to examine later, along with his assessment of Hempel's true motives in accepting this assignment, he looked across the meadow at the trainers, exercising their animals while Taurus lay helpless in the medical tent. Picturing her haunches swaying like the butt of an overweight old woman, he cursed the responsibilities that separated him from the dog. Yet, guiltily, he admitted he was also thankful for the whirlwind of duties. Achilles' execution was merciful compared to what he was watching her daughter endure.

  The pampas of Argentina yearned for the likes of his shepherds! Maybe he should use the seaplane for escape. Take the dogs and the baby, and let the rest rot. From what Perón had told him, Buenos Aires seethed with women beside whom Miriam was a dishrag.

  Yet despite his desire to leave, Mangabéy island seemed to speak to him in tongues he understood. It was his, in a way the Rathenau estate could never have been.

  Gazing at the horizon, he tried to imagine with what newborn hope Benyowsky must have stood on this same hill and peered over the aquamarine bay that was to become his kingdom--the site of his heldentod--his hero's death. After the white suffocation of Siberia, the Hungarian must have been enraptured by the green lace shawl of rain forest and swamp. It was here, on Mangabéy, that he had built a block-and-bamboo hospital to quarantine those of his men who suffered from smallpox. Here, he found rest from the rigors inland...until he was forced to open the veins of his beautiful French wife, to bleed her of malaria.

  Or maybe the other version was true, the one that had been as much in his dreams as in Benyowsky’s diary. Erich had dreamt about the ships Peter and Paul--which the Count and his fellow prisoners had stolen in Vladivostok with the aid of Aphanasia, the warden's daughter. Barred by France from founding a colony on Formosa but given a go-ahead for Madagascar, he had sold the leaky vessels in Canton, where Aphanasia had expired of a fever. Then Benyowsky sailed to Paris, to fetch his French wife. In the dream she had become a ballerina with the Stuttgart and was on tour in Paris. He had seen them sailing into Mangabéy.

  Erich struggled to recall the rest, but the memory eluded him. He lifted his hand and with an index finger surveyed the shoreline, until he located the mouth of the Antabalana River. There, in l776, Beny
owsky declared the island independent and, inspired by his friend Benjamin Franklin, wrote its first Constitution. He could feel the Count's presence, flickering pure and transcendent in the gathering evening, like the light of the fireflies that sparkled along the meadow's edge. Even the bats, wheeling and diving and soaring, seemed like black, winged offerings in the Hungarian's honor, and the very frogs seemed to chorus his name: Ben-yow-sky, Ben-yow-sky, Ben-yow-sky.

  Erich shut his eyes, the better to recall one of his favorite scenes in the Count's diary. He could see it clearly: three thousand Sakalava warriors, in a circle according to region and rank, prostrate at the Hungarian's feet. He could hear the drums pounding as dancers swayed in the moonlight, see the Count and the King of the North slicing open their left breasts with an assegai, throwing the spear aside, sucking each other's blood and swearing fealty while the warriors rose to toast Benyowsky with clay chalices brimming with the blood of freshly killed zebu.

  Ampanandza-be! they cried.

  "Chief-of-chiefs!"

  Ampanandza-be!

  "We have returned," Erich said in a low, strained voice as the warriors' yowling echoed through his skull.

  Learning about the Count and knowing that he, Erich, was coming here, had been more than enough inducement for Erich to do his homework.

  So what had he learned, outside of the obvious, he wondered.

  That the rain forest of northeastern Madagascar--the world's densest--was home to the Betsileo, and scattered groups of Antandroy and Tstimileo also lived there, as did the Tanal, the warriors legendary for their ferocity. That together, the tribes could prove a formidable force, and with the probable exception of the Tanal were known to unite against a common enemy. Hadn't Benyowsky said in his diary that thirty thousand northeastern Malagasy had gathered to pay him homage? The Count was given to hyperbole, but the point was not lost on the colony's European financiers: the tribes could come together, and quickly, in support of a new venture. Or against it.