Children of the Dusk

by Berliner, Janet

  What was most frequently said of him was no exaggeration-- that his greatest talent lay in turning enemies into friends.

  Erich sensed rather than heard a soft whimpering. He cocked his head and listened. Convinced that it was Taurus calling out to him for help, and angry at himself for wasting time better spent, he rushed down the hill and across the marshy ground toward the compound.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Miriam awoke in a stupor and gazed blankly around the medical tent, her eyes bleary and puffy. She remembered heat shimmering on the meadow; guards, with knives drawn, descending on a fallen zebu; sudden light-headedness. Right at this moment, she had no active memory of how she had made it back after watching the nauseating display of bloodlust in the meadow.

  She lay there concentrating and bits and pieces returned to her. Like fragments of a dream, they did not fully add up, yet she had confidence that ultimately they would. She saw herself sitting on the grass; Bruqah's singsong voice and kindly hands held her safe and she did not pull away.

  "What do you wish to say to me, Bruqah?" she'd asked, looking up into his eyes.

  "We believe the dead speak softly through the voices of the unborn, but only some can hear them."

  The rain forest had seemed close, as if the pasture and compound had shrunk. She felt protected by it. Sunlight had seeped into the verdant growth. Where before she had seen only darkness, she saw slim unbranched trunks, speckled with light and latticed with tree-fern, and lace-fans of lichen and moss.

  There is a way through the forest, Bruqah's eyes told her. Hempel's men dragged the zebu carcass toward camp, leaving a wet, fly-ridden trail. Pleshdimer pranced along, a clown in a parade, the intestines around his neck like a boa, and she'd felt ashamed to be part of their human race...

  With effort she sat up. Her flesh felt clammy. A medical gown, damp with sweat, clung to her skin. Someone had undressed her, probably Franz, the corpsman. Certainly not Erich, whom she vaguely recalled having seen striding toward one of the hills.

  He was doubtless angry at her for something, and if not at her directly, then at himself for loving her.

  She put up her hand to her face as if it still stung--as if the handprint were even now upon her cheek where the bastard had slapped her while they were aboard ship.

  And why had he hit her?

  That one was easy to answer, she thought. Because she'd lost patience with the whole lie and admitted her love for Sol. As if Erich hadn't known that all along. The question that was far less simple to answer was why his hitting her had been unexpected; she had long known of his uncontrollable temper, his violence, his subsequent remorse...so seemingly heartfelt, so ultimately shallow.

  Not only had he hit her, he'd hit so hard that she had immediately begun what proved to be false labor. In the midst of contractions, she had begged Erich not to hurt Solomon.

  "I won't kill him, if that's what you mean," Erich had said, looking at her with a scorn he had in the past reserved only for the likes of Otto Hempel. "I'm going to let him get as close to you as he can before I take you away from him. Forever." His look of contempt had darkened. "I can live with a marriage of convenience, but not with being made a fool of!"

  Since then, with each passing hour, she had grown increasingly sick with apprehension. It wasn't just the pregnancy or the mind-numbing heat that was making her ill; it was waiting for Erich's anger to resurface. Someday, she knew, he would drop his pretense about wanting to help the exiled Jews, however much he might currently believe in the façade, and act out his hatred of Sol. If that meant killing everyone to rationalize his revenge, so be it. He had the capacity for such a thing, though he swore that violence repelled him. In reality, it was violence in others that he loathed, not his own.

  In an effort to stop the replay in her mind, she pushed aside the mosquito netting, grabbed her hairbrush from the bed stand, and began to brush with firm and practiced strokes. How Erich had loved to look at her, she thought, loved to stroke her legs and hair. Especially her hair. How she hated that hair, right now!...lank and sticky against her skin. She hacked at it with the brush but, quickly enervated, let her hand drop to the sheet. She sat staring down at the brush, too emotionally drained even to cry.

  From beyond the screen separating her cot from the rest of the tent she heard the dogs' whimpering. Scissors, she thought. Corpsman's kit.

  She swung her legs over the side of the cot and struggled to stand. The action, though minimal, made her head swim. The tamped-earth floor felt cool against her bare, swollen feet, but only momentarily relieved her stupor. She took off her gown and put on a cotton slip-dress. Giving up, she grabbed the hand mirror from the bed stand and stumbled forward.

  The two sick dogs who were her tent companions lifted their heads as she neared. For now, they were the only patients in the tent other than herself. Two other patients, showing the onset of malaria, had been quarantined in their tents. Several prisoners were also suffering from illnesses and accidents, but Erich had given in to Hempel's demand that they be treated in the wired-off, Jewish sleeping area the guards had named "the ghetto."

  Miriam gave Taurus, craning up the furthest, a scratch on the ear, and looked around. Except for the mess tent, the medical tent was the largest in the compound. One screened-off corner, with pallets for flooring, served as a scrub area and held the trestle table that would be her delivery table. Though she was frightened about delivering in such a remote area, she felt confident with Tyrolt. The ship's doctor was gentle, caring, and obviously skilled from his years of mending men at sea, despite his lacking all the academic training a city physician might possess.

  She found the corpsman's bag beside the microscope and rummaged among tubes and tools and gauze until she located the scissors. A mosquito droned near her ear; she batted at it hard enough to kill a horsefly. Damn things! Despite her request that the flaps be left open in the hope of a breeze, the tent was a bug-filled hothouse. Petroleum jelly smeared on the cot braces helped keep crawling insects out of her bed, but the flying bugs ate unremittingly. No matter how she arranged the cot's mosquito netting, insects found a way inside, especially the vicious gnats the soldiers called no-see-ums.

  She leaned on a pallet that had been left propped against a tent pole, positioned what passed as a mirror between the slats, and gripped a clump of hair. Taurus whimpered and put her head down, looking up with woeful eyes. Miriam stared into the mirror, at a blotchy, puffy face she barely recognized. Had pregnancy changed her so much, or was it the awful voyage and this heat, this terrible heat?

  Or just being married to Erich Alois?

  She snipped--hard. Hair dropped into her lap. She cut again, and the second clump seemed to fall in slow motion. She felt faint and sick to her stomach at the same time.

  Taurus nuzzled her head against Miriam's hand. "Poor thing," she said, dropping the scissors. She glanced over at Aquarius, who was making a feeble attempt to get into the act. "And you," she said gently. "You aren't going to make it, are you?" Erich's dog was in horrible pain from dysplasia, but it was Aquarius, unable to recover from seasickness, that was dying. Miriam listened to the breathing. Hers, theirs. Taurus', raspy but regular; Aquarius', a rattle. She felt sorry for Ernst Müller, Aquarius' trainer. The man was so upset by his animal's condition that he'd become hysterical the last time he had visited and been ordered from the tent. She had seen the hurt in Erich's eyes when he had had to do that, and wondered anew how any one man could love so much and hate so much at the same time.

  If only it weren't for the child, she'd even now be with Sol.

  Or maybe she wouldn't be on this island at all. Maybe none of them would. With Juan Perón's help, and without Erich's knowledge, she had finagled Sol's release from Sachsenhausen and onto the ship bound for Madagascar. Getting herself on board was no problem as long as Erich believed the child she carried was his.

  As to which of the two men was the natural father, she had no idea. She and Sol had been secretly married, n
ot by civil decree but in the sight of God, before Sol left for Amsterdam. Her civil marriage to Erich had come later, when he told her that Sol had been captured and sent to one of the camps. She'd believed she needed someone with influence in the Party to keep Sol alive.

  New fury filled her. She retrieved the scissors and chopped at her hair again. If this would relieve the heat and Erich's ardor, she would crop herself bald.

  She stopped and shut her eyes. Block out the world, she thought. Let me faint----

  ----She is lying on stone, her ankles fastened by straps, Shallow depressions in the stone fit her form perfectly. As though made for her. She turns her head, and beyond the open door she sees tiny gyrating men, dancing jerkily as marionettes. Sweat streams off her forehead as contractions roll through her with a pain she swears aloud she cannot endure. Not one more----

  The baby kicked hard, drawing Miriam out of her dream. If indeed it had been a dream. In a state of semi-awareness, she tuned in to several conversations that seemed to be taking place around her. She had heard a few of the voices before, at other such moments, though where she could not at once recall. Emotionally, she had a sensation of déjà vu, that sinking sense of eavesdropping on the past, and yet it did not seem truly to be her past. She was bathed in sweat and filled with a new fear. Judith, Emanuel, Lise--the names were linked by only one thing: Solomon's dybbuk-inspired visions.

  As a lover and a friend, as a wife and a Jew, Miriam knew she should, must, consider Sol's visions real--both the ones inspired by the dybbuk, which appeared to be happenstances in some kind of universe that paralleled their own, and the psychic flashes, the glimpses into their own futures, to which he had become so much more prone since the dybbuk had left him.

  Had not Beadle Cohen called him a visionary? Had not Rabbi Nathan, internationally recognized for his writings about the Kabbalah, confirmed this?

  Had they not both said that he had been possessed by a dybbuk--a wandering soul seeking atonement for sins it had unintentionally committed while alive? But when Nathan tried to exorcise it, the dybbuk was already gone. Only the visions remained. Haunting Sol.

  And now me, Miriam told herself in terror. And now me.

  She shook her head. She could not fall apart, not with the baby to consider. Besides, her trials were nothing compared to what Solomon and the other prisoners had endured.

  One way or another, she would figure this out. "Right, Taurus?" She scratched the dog's head again.

  Taurus looked at her with dark, velvety, pain-dulled eyes and responded with a whimper. She tried, and failed, to wiggle from the box. Miriam stood up and, clinging to a tent pole for balance, looked out through the green netting at the encampment. A light rain had begun, more mist than drizzle and completely unlike the previous quick tropical downpours that had struck with the swiftness of a passing cloud and ended as quickly. She stepped outside and lifted her face to the mist, as if she were welcoming a lover. The slightly cooler air enfolded her like a huge sweaty hand. The grass will like this, too, she thought, noticing that a considerable amount of grass was gone already, tramped down to spongy, red laterite soil as the men worked. During the time she had been in the tent, an hour or so, she guessed, looking toward the dusky, sunset sky, its clouds the color of dirty gauze, the prisoners had finished putting up the northern fence. Taut barbed wire twisted between rolls of concertina wire. It was beginning to look like Sachsenhausen.

  Then she heard the quiet cadence of Hebrew coming from near the spring, and she felt her spirits lift.

  "Dog food would taste better than what they've been feeding us!" A voice called from the direction of the mess canopy.

  "Couldn't taste worse! I can hardly wait for that zebu to be ready."

  She jumped as a guard pounded his mess kit against the garbage bucket for emphasis and metal clanged against metal.

  "Dog food? Those goddamn shepherds eat better than us," one of the men said, loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  Several others with Mausers over their shoulders formed a knot around him, dangling their kits by the handles like a group of armed beggars.

  As usual, it occurred to her with a kind of perverse pleasure, she did the opposite of what Erich would have wanted. She pushed through the men and, conscious of the hard lust in their eyes, entered the mess tent. What sexual innovations, she wondered, could they think up for a woman nine months pregnant!

  The smell in the tent added to her nausea.

  The cook strode forward and joined in the complaints. "It's that damn canned meat! How do they expect me to cook decent Klopsen with canned meat? Tonight, at the party, when we eat the cow, you'll taste cooking." He pressed together the tips of his fingers, kissed them noisily, and waved them in the air. "Once the generator's hooked up for refrigeration, all the food will be fine. Just like the Sturmbannführer says."

  He walked away and stood, spoon in hand and arm against the tent pole, watching the Jews.

  "He used bad meat on purpose. I'm sure he did," one of the men said under his breath.

  Surely there's something in there that they like to eat, Miriam thought. She looked across at the supply tent which held enough food to keep the nearly two hundred men fed for three months, until they learned to live off the land and on what the prisoners cultivated. It occurred to her that food was not the issue. Boasting was. These idiots were actually boasting about the hardships they were enduring. Good German soldiers, priding themselves on hardship. On hardship and on victory, no matter what the price.

  Uncomfortable beneath the lurid stares from the guards, she crossed her arms beneath her breasts and looked apprehensively toward the knoll. While she was inside the mess tent, darkness had fallen with the rapidity of a stage curtain. She could just make out Erich half-striding, half-running toward the encampment. Over to one side, she noticed the ship's doctor and the unit corpsman, in earnest conversation, walk slowly in her direction.

  "Don't worry about the delivery, Franz," she heard Tyrolt tell the corpsman in a hushed voice. "You'll do fine. I feel terrible having to leave her like this, but orders are orders. The Altmark must be gone by morning. Not that I'll be sorry to be away from this heat."

  Leave? Miriam felt rising panic. The corpsman was pleasant enough, but he was no physician. She had thought--been told--that Tyrolt and the Altmark would still be around when she gave birth.

  "She's more blutarm than I would have expected," the doctor went on, "but anemia is common under these circumstances. Make sure she eats red meat, and get rid of that man Pleshdimer. I know he's been helping out, but he has no business in a medical tent."

  So the blood workups were more than mere precaution!

  "I won't be able to bother the Herr Oberst unless it's an emergency. Even then one must be very careful unless it is a problem regarding the dogs."

  Tyrolt looked around, and then replied quietly, "A fourth of this company treat dogs like humans, the rest treat humans like dogs. It makes me damn glad I'm navy. Your job, Franz, if you're half the humanitarian I think you are, is to bring what sanity you can to this craziness by giving the woman your utmost. She needs rest, proper food, and loving attention. Keep the Rottenführer and that goddamn syphilitic away from her. I saw them peering around the screen at her while she slept. Imagine waking to those two!"

  He spotted her in the semi-darkness.

  "How are you feeling, Miriam, and why aren't you resting?" he asked, in his gravelly voice. He smiled at her, and she returned his smile. She liked this tall, skinny man, with his Kaiser Wilhelm mustache and ever-present five o'clock shadow. He had made the long sea-voyage bearable for her, and along with Bruqah had helped her keep body and mind together following Erich's blow-up. Maybe Tyrolt did lack some of the experience and fancy academic training of a city physician, but he was gentle, caring, and obviously skilled. If only the Altmark were not sailing so soon, or if at least she had some guarantee that he would be on it when it returned with fresh supplies and, according to the plan, a new load
of Jews.

  "How do I feel? Hot, scared, irritable, and not a little terrified. What about you?"

  "I feel...apolitical." He put an arm affectionately across her shoulders. "And more than a little philosophical. But then I usually do...which is doubtless why they've kept me so long at sea. I'd bore my patients to death if they didn't have to listen."

  Releasing her, he stood back and looked at her carefully. "Your hair," he said. "What did you--"

  "I cut it. It's my hair!"

  Tyrolt chuckled. "Seems reasonable to me," he said. "I trust the Herr Oberst will not be too upset."

  Miriam shrugged. She had bigger things to think about, like what it was going to be like giving birth here, with only Franz, an inexperienced corpsman, to help. The guards' stares drilling into her back made her feel all the less secure. Whom did they hate more, she wondered, the Jewish prisoners, or the Jewish wife of the colonel in charge of operations?

  Not that she was Jewish anymore, according to the Reich. Hitler had decided that she had been "orphaned at birth and stolen by the Jews." She was a Rathenau, he said, only by name, not blood.

  An unlikely charade, but not all that uncommon. One of Hitler's top generals had been Jewish, she was aware; his heritage had likewise been changed by official decree. Political and military need overruled prejudice when the situation warranted. She had consented to the decree, even to the making of a propaganda film in which she renounced Judaism "and all its evils," not only to save her own life and possibly Sol's, but also to put herself in a position where she might help other, less fortunate Jews.

  Many of the prisoners did not consider her Jewish. "Better death than denial," she had heard whispered. And the guards, she was sure, considered her just some "Jew whore masquerading as a German."