“I did this work. And I accepted the consequences…the contempt that was spit at me, the random beatings in the barracks, and the total isolation from my fellow Jews. The autumn of 1944 was a harsh one. The camp was running at peak capacity, fed by the trains that converged from much of Europe. The gassings and the ovens, day and night. I would stand beside the window at night as the barracks slept, and watch as the tongues of flame rose up from the tall, black stacks, licking at the dark, hungry lips of a night that seemed to have settled over the entire world. The ashes would sting my eyes and settle upon my tongue. My people. But I could no longer allow myself to care. I had made my choice. I had offered up the sacrifice of my conscience, had burned out all human feeling, for the slimmest of chances that doing so might somehow benefit my wife.”
Isaac fidgeted in his seat. His feet tapped at the ground like his fingers on his knees. He knew that he had no choice about whether to tell the next part of the story…the part that would reveal his utter unworthiness to be called a human being. But the telling of it was still an act of inner violence. He hadn’t even spoken these words to Father Connor. Finally, like something being spat out into a clogged and overflowing toilet, he brought the words up from the deepest, darkest part of himself.
“This work…that wasn’t the worst of it. After removing the bodies of those women and children, of our elders, I had to take them all to a tiny, claustrophobic room where a guard stood over me as I removed any gold fillings from their mouths. I would stand there, the corpses shoulder-high around me, dragging them all in their turn onto the table…and then. Oh, God. And then…I had to search the cavities of their bodies for any hidden valuables…the little babies, still clutched in the arms of a stranger because their young mothers would have been spared as workers…and…and they made me search them, too. The bastards thought our people so hideous that we would hide our jewelry in the rectums of our children….Ahhhhh! It was worse than death. My shame should have caused my body to seize up, and fall dead among the withered sacks of bones around me. Or, at the very least, the disgust of the guards as I did these things should have compelled them to place the barrels of their Lugers against my shaved skull and send me directly to Hell. But my body refused to die. Long after my soul had fled, I continued this work, as numb as a winter pond. Saying this now, I still want to die from my shame. How had I strayed so far from that lover in the field, in such harmony with his beloved, to become this sub-human so despicable that he could rob the fillings from his people’s gaping mouths? How can I ever justify it? You must relieve me of this life right now! Lessa’s love made her an angel! And my fear turned me into a horrible, terrible monster! Kill me, Julian! Please!!!”
Bright, heavy tears filled the lines of Isaac’s weary face. Julian had to turn away. This was more than even he had witnessed. After six hundred years he was no longer surprised by man’s callous brutality, but he was also not jaded to personal tragedy. The story was ripping the very heart from both of them. But Julian knew now, beyond any doubt, that it had to be purged from the old man. As difficult as it was for Isaac, the vampire could now see how it all fit so perfectly together. Someday, Isaac would as well. He touched him gently on the shoulder.
“Not yet, Isaac. Not yet. You must continue. This must be done.”
Isaac wiped the tears from his face. After several minutes, he gathered himself, nodded, and drew a deep, ragged breath.
“Another four or five months passed and we began to hear whispered, tenuous rumors that the Russian army was advancing toward Auschwitz…and that we might be liberated any day. But now I came into a new world. One with a landscape that was nearly as terrible as Auschwitz. Hope.”
He looked up at Julian, who nodded in understanding, then continued.
“I had never struggled with hope before because I had no faith in things working out. This went all the way back to the apathy of my youth. Now I needed faith and there was little to be had. So, in my fashion, I set about to find it. I knew that I, personally, didn’t deserve anything. But Lessa did. So I grabbed hold of faith in her name. And I was determined that I would see it justified. Since there was nowhere else to plead my case, I knelt down into that most awkward of positions for a man of no faith, and I attempted prayer. I prayed with intensity and with sincerity. I prayed incessantly. Walking, standing and kneeling. I prayed over the gassed bodies and I prayed when sleep betrayed me. I prayed until my throat was raw and my lips were dry and cracked. The days passed. As the war drew to its grizzly climax, the Nazis somehow managed to increase their slaughter even more. Each day that I waded through the suffocated bodies, searching for that familiar angelic face, I held my breath.
“But my fragile, embryonic hope had learned to walk. I actually began to make plans for our future. A family. I had heard other rumors as well. Palestine…it would be our sanctuary from all the ugly savagery of the world. Lessa and I would be pioneers. Zionists. The future was coming, and Lessa had been right. Auschwitz held no power over love. Of course! Love was a power that worked through, and beyond, mortal circumstances. I was beginning to see the truth of Lessa’s faith.
“Now I jumped through every hoop the Nazis could devise. I had convinced myself that it was me, my actions and my prayers, that were saving Lessa from those lethal vapors…and from the blazing ovens that had already made ashes of so many other dreams.
“Then, on a cold, bright afternoon, just after the New Year of 1945, the guards called for volunteers to turn the fields outside the village. My hand went up, as always. I remember the unease that seemed to penetrate me like the cold…” He looked up again into Julian’s face. “Have you ever had that peculiar feeling? When everything is too quiet…like the whole world is holding its breath because something significant is about to happen? Like the very clocks don’t want to budge, for fear of rushing into something that can never be undone?
“The sky that day was as blue and fragile as a robin’s egg. I stooped to retie a bootlace when I noticed a large crow glide low over the field and land ten feet from me. It stood there, peering off at the forest bordering the clearing. I followed its gaze to the trees, then looked back to the bird. A hot, fluid anguish rose suddenly in my throat, just as eight gunshots rang out in succession. The crow beat its wings heavily against the sound, and I watched it rise into the air until it became just a black punctuation mark, a period against the sentence of the blue sky. I was still staring up into the heavens when the guard came and took my arm, and returned me to the camp.”
He paused again and swallowed against the spools of wire in his throat. There was a drought forming on his lips, and he longed for a drink.
“That night, Patrik came and sat beside my bunk. He didn’t speak. But he had brought the old man, Viktor, with him. Viktor had been spared from the ovens because of his rare gifts with the violin. All through that terrible night, Viktor played the Nocturnes of Chopin while Patrik held my hand. It was Lessa’s favorite music…”
Isaac stopped and looked at Julian, but Julian was looking away once more. And for a long while the two of them sat still, heads turned in different directions as their hearts recalled the same tune.
“Lessa had nearly made it. She had come so very close to being vindicated in her unwavering faith. Where had that faith wound up? Was it in a trench, a shallow grave in the woods outside the camp? Was her faith soaring up there with the crows, looking down from the heights, from a place where everything on earth was small and patched together without seams…without madness? Where was she? Where was her faith that seemed to mock all the violent hatred, that placed all that human cruelty in the margins of a greater message? Where was that undying resolve that I so desperately needed now…now that I had sold my very soul?
“When the Russians arrived, just two weeks later, I was all but dead myself. A corpse that wouldn’t lie down. I had eaten only what Patrik could force into me of his own meager rations. I weighed ninety-seven pounds,
and could barely raise my hands to shield my eyes when the big, Russian trucks with their blazing lights entered the gates to signal our freedom.
“I was numb with loss. Patrick wanted to find the nearest refugee camp and eventually make our way to Palestine. I didn’t care one way or another at first, but I had to return to Warsaw before anything else. Lessa and I had buried our wedding rings near the wall, and I wanted to retrieve them if at all possible. I could not have accomplished it without Patrik’s help. He never once turned his back on me…even knowing what I had done, and how I had shunned him for the amusement of those butchers. It had all come to nothing. But Patrik was true.
“So I returned to what was left of Warsaw, and that ghetto…for one miserable day. The Germans had flattened the place to crush our gallant and futile uprising. But I was able to find the rings that we had exchanged in some other world, in some other time. Then I left Warsaw without looking back.
“Patrik and I went our separate ways. I had decided to scour the refugee camps that were spread our across Eastern Europe, just in case Lessa had survived. Patrick could only shake his head. ‘Isaac, you will never let go of your fantasies, will you, old friend?’ We embraced and he set out for the Promised Land. He died three years later in Israel’s War for Independence. He died a free man, fighting for his own homeland.”
Isaac slumped back against the bench and blew a long, exhausted whistle from his lips. Another lengthy silence enveloped them. Then Julian rose and began to pace back and forth in front of the bench, considering.
“There is more,” the vampire whispered. He stopped and peered down at Isaac, who was trying his best to shrink into the bench. “You have revealed much. But nothing more than one would tell a doctor, or a priest. Now I am commanding you. Tell me exactly what you felt when your wife was murdered.”
Isaac could hardly breathe. His eyes darted about like a trapped animal. There was no escape.
“Damn you…” he muttered between clenched teeth. “I have told you how I love my wife. I was reduced to nothing when she was killed. Don’t you understand? The bond between us was such that, though I didn’t actually see her die, I felt it as if it were my own death. Doesn’t that tell you how I felt?”
“Let me be more blunt then, Isaac. Who do you blame for her death?”
Now Isaac was visibly agitated. He clenched his teeth together, unwilling to utter the words that he knew must surely damn him. Julian rose above him like an angry master commanding a stray. “Speak, Isaac!”
“Me! I blame myself! Please, stop this! I am responsible for her suffering. And I had no right to hope after my mistakes had led her to that place. I had no right…”
“Everyone has a right to hope!” Julian interrupted him with an angry waving of his arm. “Man is nothing without it. There is nothing noble in hopelessness. You hoped as any man would. But your hope was…”
“Betrayed!!” Isaac cried out the word with fifty years of anguish. “Yes! He kept her for all that time…forced her to endure nearly two years of that horror…only to take her at the very last moment before our rescue. He is no loving God! He mocks us, toys with our hearts. We are inferior little creatures for His perverse amusement. I prayed. I made promises. Was it so crucial to His plans to take her as He did? Was it too much to ask that love might actually triumph over that God-forsaken evil? What does God know of love? Lessa could have given lessons to His angels!”
Isaac was standing now, shaking with the rage that he had suppressed for decades. He counted to ten, and then to ten again, trying to regain some composure…enough to keep from shouting.
“Is that what you wanted to hear, Julian? Did you need to hear my angry words directed at God, when you know that He is the only hope I have of seeing my wife again? Yes, I have been betrayed. And I live with an uncomfortable situation. I am forced to depend on the same God who has already denied my prayers when I needed Him most. Does this prove your superiority over this pathetic little species? Can you go out tonight with a clear conscience and feed on another wretched old woman? Yes, I have my hate. And it may well keep me from the dream that I have guarded for fifty years. But how close are you to fulfillment? Do you even have any dreams left, Julian?”
Now it was Julian’s turn to sit down. He hadn’t expected Isaac’s words to sting like they did. He knew that Isaac was wrong. Mostly wrong, anyway. But he also knew that Isaac’s last question would haunt him for some time.
Isaac was breathing a little easier. As some measure of calm returned, it brought with it just the slightest remorse for what he had said. He wanted to try another tack.
“I became a Catholic after the war. Made a full confession of my anger towards God. I like to think that I was forgiven. But who knows? Perhaps even my conversion was just another old-Isaac tactic for covering the odds…trying to persuade without conviction. In truth, there has never been a real change in my feelings. I am still angry. I am still betrayed. I thought that I could cover it up. Or at least put my nose to the grindstone and, through sheer force of will, rid myself of this damned faithlessness. But you saw through me to the lingering bitterness. I suppose that I will die this way.
“If I have one saving grace, it is that I sincerely want to believe in an afterlife. I want to believe in that glorious reunion with my wife. Is it so uncommon to feel an angry betrayal at the loss of a loved one? Who is responsible if not this God that so many of us put our trust in? My anger is more passionate because I know too well what she suffered for so long before she met her violent end. If God is love, then He must surely understand my rage. And if He isn’t love, then it was all for nothing, anyway.
“There IS a lesson I learned. One that was taught to me by Lessa, not by God. And that is that love, on some level, really is eternal. Somewhere, right now, Lessa is loving me. In our past, and possibly in our future, the living energy of our love is there for both of us. She can feel it as certainly as I do. I may never hold the warm, sweet creature that was Lessa, ever again. But what there is of our love remains beyond all that is transient and sorrowful.”
He circled the bench where Julian remained sitting. It was time to resign himself to his fate.
“Perhaps there is no balance. My anger is great. Lessa would have argued love’s superior advantage. Either way, I will know the truth soon enough, I imagine.”
He looked down at Julian, and Julian raised his eyes to return the stare.
“Yes. But not tonight. Return to the street and wait for the taxi that I will send for you. It will take you back to your hotel. Tomorrow night, walk to the front of St. Louis Cathedral. I will meet you there at nine. It will be our final meeting. Goodnight, Isaac.”
Chapter Sixteen
As Isaac’s taxi sped him back to his hotel, at the frayed edges of the French Quarter, and a sleepless night during which he would restlessly recall the night’s revelations, Julian stood alone beneath the arching canopy of a two-hundred-year-old oak tree. His heart and mind were awash in the agitation of mixed emotions. It had turned out to be one of the most incredible nights of his life. Just as he had suspected, Isaac had not come into his world by accident.
He had to proceed carefully now. There were great forces at work here. This was not intuition; Julian was in possession of physical proof. Fate had been busy in their lives. The thought brought a wan, fleeting smile to the vampire’s lips.
But now what? What did this portend for him? Was it a promised answer to a long-suffering prayer? Had enough damned time passed that he could finally seek his rest? Or was it more mockery?
It was all too much to consider in his weakened state. He had not fed since meeting Isaac. The encounter with the old mortal had startled him, inspiring thoughts that had turned out to be a sort of prophecy of what had transpired tonight. Julian had fasted, like Christ and the Buddha in the wilderness, emptying himself of himself and preparing the hollow place for an epiphany. And wow, had the epiph
any been delivered.
But now he must feed. His strength was declining noticeably. And he would have to feed here in his own city…a thing he had done on only the rarest of occasions.
An hour later, he was walking along the lakefront of the city’s northern boundary and into the homeless haven of City Park. He passes silently among the sleeping forms, communing with the vitality of those he passed, until he found what he was looking for.
A very old man lay at the base of an anonymous Civil War statue. He was curled into a tight ball and breathing with rapid difficulty. Julian kneeled beside him and examined the drawn features of his face. Grey stubble dotted his jowls and head. He was emaciated…the weakest of the weak.
Julian pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. Wrapped inside it were a syringe of morphine and a rubber tube. He took the handkerchief and wiped the draining mucous from under the old man’s nose. His eyes fluttered open at the contact, startled and widely afraid. Julian looked deeply into them and whispered reassuringly.
“It’s alright. There is nothing to fear. I’m here to take you home. You have lived like this for too long, my friend.”
“Are you an angel?” The old man asked with toothless awe.
Julian’s hands trembled as he inserted the needle into the man’s vein.
“Yes. And I am going to take you to a place of great comfort. Where the warm breezes blow through the windows of your room and someone you love attends to your needs. Now close your eyes, and we will go…”
After a few minutes, the aged features assumed a contented repose. Julian withdrew the needle, inserted the tube, and fed on the man’s ebbing life flow.
Then it was over. He touched the man’s head, rose and walked to a nearby bench, where he slumped into the seat. The old familiar feeling, experienced every single time, that pointed self-loathing, washed over him. The same story. It never changed. How many times had they asked him that question? How many times had he suffered their prayers? He was bone-weary of the routine. But he was convinced that it would be over soon. One way or another, it was all drawing to a close.
Nocturnes Page 13