by Jim Shepard
“What are you talking about?” Karel said frantically.
“That leaves you,” Albert said. “I’m supposed to be here to show you what can happen, or urge you to avoid it. I forget which. But I do want to tell you: after me he’ll come for you.” He looked at his hand, the way he used to look at a lizard’s mite infestation. “He always believed you were closer to me than you were, he wanted to recruit you, sure, but he also wanted to get at me, at the organization. After me he’s got nobody. After me he’s got to get it from you.”
Karel felt his forehead and back chilled, and he shook Albert’s pallet. “Can’t you tell him I don’t know anything?” he asked.
“I don’t think he believes me,” Albert said. He smiled, his eyes closed. “I am in amazing pain,” he said.
He opened his eyes and looked up at Karel. “Are you okay?” he asked.
Karel nodded, though he wasn’t sure the old man could see him.
“I am sorry,” Albert said. “For everything.”
Karel was crying again. “Listen,” he said. “I need to tell you something.”
The old man waited, his breath wheezing a little.
“I need to tell you,” Karel said, in agony. “When Kehr wasn’t going to let the Schieles go, when Kehr—” The old man was looking intently at him while he fumbled for the words, as if he didn’t want to forget anything of what Karel was about to say. “I identified you,” Karel finally said. “I gave them your name.”
Albert lay there on the pallet and just looked at him. The moment expanded into an awful vacuum. “I thought you did,” he said finally. He just looked, and nothing in his expression suggested absolution.
“Please,” Karel said.
“They already knew about me,” Albert said. He lifted an arm toward Karel and gave a small wave. “I’m going to try to help the girl.”
“Have you seen her?” Karel asked wildly. The door opened and two soldiers came in and lifted Albert’s pallet. “Have you seen her?” Karel repeated, and Albert said no and gripped Karel’s hand and then they were gone.
Only a few hours later there was a noise at the door again. “I don’t even know why I bother to lock this,” he heard his guard grumble. More soldiers came in and grabbed him and dragged him into the hall. Kehr and Leda were waiting there, next to the open door of Leda’s cell. The soldiers released Karel and she hesitated and then ran to him and they embraced in the dark stone hallway, with Kehr, three soldiers, and the sad man who guarded the table all looking on.
“Oh God,” Leda whispered in his ear. He wanted to tell her about her family, tell her what he’d done, but there was no time. He covered her head with his hands. “I wish I could be more for you,” she whispered, and he hugged her more closely and gave an involuntary cry. “He wants something he thinks you have,” she whispered in his ear. “Listen to me: when he does what he does most people do what he wants. But some don’t.” She had her cheek to his and her lips to his ear and he could feel her tears. “Maybe that’s what we have now,” she added, and tightened her hug so that he would feel the urgency in what she said. “Maybe this is our life’s work.”
“I hope you’re telling him the compelling reasons he should cooperate,” Kehr said. “I hope you’re telling him where you’re going.”
Karel held her arms and separated himself from her. “Where are you going?” he asked wildly. “What’s happening?”
She hugged him again despite his resistance. “I love you,” she whispered, and holding her then was like what he felt when his eyes were closed and still he knew the sun had come out from behind clouds, a suffusion of warmth, of tenderness, and when they pulled her away before the sad man pinioned his arms he realized as she gazed back at him that he had no words or gestures for this, nothing to convey to her the extremity of his feelings but those words and gestures he used every day for everyday things.
They held him in the hall and made him listen. She was only two or three doors down, with Kehr and one of the soldiers. She shouted she loved Karel and then something else about the regime he couldn’t make out and then she screamed. He fought and tore at the arms holding him but the sad man had him around the throat and one soldier hit the side of his knee with something that made him cry out and unable to put weight on it anymore. Leda screamed again, and he could tell from her voice that she stood on the edge of something she couldn’t master, and he registered that he was breathing in and out and had to continue to do so or else he would suffocate, and the screaming went on and on until there was one more that rose above the others and seemed not to come from a human being but from some sort of terrified instrument. The stone rang with it. In the silence that followed Karel was shrieking and shrieking her name, and they hauled him back into his cell and threw him across it with such force that he hit the opposite wall and bounced back toward them.
It was warmer. He found himself gazing on an astonished cloud through the high square of his window. There was blue sky behind it. He’d been up all night and he was chilly and spent. When he closed his eyes his head reeled and he tumbled through empty space. He thought with some simplicity of the things he would never have: time, happiness, Leda. He would have told them anything at that point; he would have told them anything earlier, but no one asked.
He touched the edge of his mattress. His knee was in intense pain and swollen to twice its size. He seemed surprised by the resiliency of objects.
He sat where he was for he didn’t know how long, gazing up at his window. Transparent knots swam across his eye. He wanted Leda to know: he would have helped her, together they would have acted the way she’d wanted to.
He heard the door unlocked and someone pacing behind it, back and forth, as if that someone were the prisoner. Then his father came in and shut the door behind him. He looked terrible, but Karel felt his sensibilities had coagulated or stiffened inside of him and so just sat there, watching his father enter.
He knelt beside Karel and Karel looked at his face and saw his pain, saw the pain of someone who now could do nothing to protect his child, who couldn’t fulfill even that responsibility, and couldn’t be forgiven because of it. His father was talking to him. His father was asking for something. His father was telling him that Leda had died feeling nothing bad was happening to her, after that first part. His father was saying he had to let him help. Karel said, “I don’t want anything. I don’t want you. I don’t want help.” It occurred to him that his father had in a profound way never realized what he’d been doing; that there was an interdependence, in his father’s and his own case, between thoughtlessness and evil.
His father was asking him for something, pleading, and he had nothing to give. He was helpless in the face of this suffering. There were no words left to exchange whose value he trusted. His father said, Please, Karel, and he said again that his father had to go, and Kehr came into the cell, and looked at them both, and said the same thing.
“There is, I think, in every one of us something mineral and unteachable,” Kehr said. “You see it when all evidence—all the dictates of logic—suggest one course of action, and the individual persists in doing something else. It interests me,” he said.
They were in the room Leda had been taken to. It was different and darker than the room in the other Prisoner Assessment Center. On the wall there was tin shelving that held instruments with silhouetted long and narrow attachments. They reminded him of the mandibles and antennae of insects. The floor was concrete and had been washed and was puddled with water. In one corner a sump pump labored on and off. There was a sign embroidered like a sampler over the door: If You Know Something, Sing for Us. If You Don’t, Suffer. It brought back to him the calendar from his home.
He was led to a slanted iron rack painted yellow and spotted with rust. The bottom of the rack had a gutter. Two weak and bare bulbs burned above it. Kehr had two assistants, heavy men in bright yellow shirts who helped Karel off with his clothes and looked at him with the neutrality of old cows. They locked his wrists an
d ankles into shackles so he was spread-eagled on the rack, the iron cold everywhere against his bare skin. While they worked on him he said harshly to Kehr, “Is Leda Schiele dead?”
“Leda Schiele is not your concern right now,” Kehr said. “Believe me.”
“I’ll kill you if I get out of here,” Karel said. “I’ll kill you.”
“Well said,” Kehr said. “Now.” He shook out Karel’s two shirts before him. “Who are the people we’re interested in?”
Karel looked at him, breathing hard. He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he shouted, straining and banging at his shackles. “I never knew. I would have told you. I would have told you.”
Kehr nodded as if that was exactly what he’d suspected, and gave Karel’s bare shoulder a reassuring pat. Karel shivered involuntarily. Kehr folded his clothes carefully and gave them to one of his assistants, who looked around for a moment and then dropped them on the floor.
“We’re going to start with the knee, and the face,” Kehr explained. “They’re already—how should I put it—sensitive.”
“Please,” Karel pleaded. His hatred for Kehr was gone. Fear was sweeping over him like cold air after a shower. Kehr was rummaging around the shelves, and the instruments made a quiet racket on the tin.
He returned with a simple pair of pliers and an awl and a complicated something that Karel didn’t recognize that looked like a plumber’s helper.
“Now,” Kehr repeated, with an exhalation of breath like someone sitting down comfortably to a long monotonous job, “who are the people?”
“Please please please,” Karel said.
One of the assistants put a soft piece of wood in his mouth. He looked at the man’s eyes in wonder and shock and felt he was watching things happen in which he only vaguely participated, that this couldn’t be true, because no one would do what they were about to do, and no one would do it to him.
“Who are the people?” Kehr asked.
“Please,” Karel said. One of the assistants held his leg with both hands.
Kehr put the tip of the awl under Karel’s kneecap and drove it through the swelling.
Karel shrieked and jolted upward and cried out so that the sound tore his throat.
Kehr was holding the awl in place and Karel could feel it under his kneecap, probing the joint. He jiggled it. Karel howled and thrashed out of the assistant’s grip, and the awl came out.
He could feel the blood and the pain and he swept his head from side to side. This was worse than anything and he would have renounced anything to stop it.
“So who are the people?” Kehr asked.
“Please,” Karel cried. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“It occurred to me a while ago,” Kehr remarked, “that this for me could be an intriguing test. Do you know what I mean? What would it be like, doing someone I genuinely liked? Someone I genuinely had hopes for?”
Karel writhed on the rack, feeling only a bestial, desperate terror. It paralyzed everything in him but physical reaction.
Kehr reinserted the awl and Karel felt it get purchase on something inside his knee and then Kehr levered it outward and there was a tearing and cracking sound and Karel screamed so that he brought a blackness on himself, and when it passed the pain was a disk within his skull, tilting and oscillating, and then in his knee, flexing and spiraling outward. It rolled and pulsed and there was a grate of bone and he shrieked again. Kehr took the pliers and they clamped onto the kneecap with a wet and gritty sound and then he lifted and pulled.
The room reassembled like a pattern discovered in a cloud and Kehr was putting the instruments away on the shelf. Someone was wrapping Karel’s knee in a large loose gauzy bandage that was soaking through. Karel’s head was down and he was bringing up slaver and his chest was wet with it. He raised his head and the light through his tears prismed in concentric and iridescent circles. He couldn’t breathe and the air seemed to come back to him from a great distance.
Kehr came up close and asked him who were the people. When Karel didn’t answer Kehr hit him so hard across the face that it changed the taste in his mouth. Then he went away and the two assistants unshackled Karel and carried him back to his cell.
He lay on the floor feeling his nausea as a kind of acidic chill. He had nothing to fall back on in his attempt to understand what had just happened. He was aware of flies, houseflies and smaller flies with greenish heads. They buzzed and helixed before him when he moved his leg.
He thought, Am I better now? He was always aware of his knee, the pain like metal within it. He came to with a strange man bending over him. The man said he was the doctor and sat him up and showed him his knee. There were petals of flesh curled back from the opening and the whole thing seemed to him like meat on a plate. The man touched a white sponge soaked in something yellow to the area and Karel’s whole leg moved independently while he watched. The man held Karel’s palm open and tumbled three orange aspirins into it, to get him, he suggested, over the rough patch. He suggested when he left that Karel shake off the past and look to the future.
They brought him back to the torture room while he was still half muddled and he struggled and cried and tried to hold on to parts of his cell door like someone searching a sandy ocean bottom in murky water. Kehr asked him who the people were and he wailed and jabbered and tried everything to keep it from happening again. They leaned him back against the rack with one of the assistants supporting him since he could no longer support himself, and he tried feebly to keep his hands together so they couldn’t be shackled. The assistant patiently pulled them apart.
Kehr said, “Long ago we figured out, in laboratories like these, that certain things can be done to human beings without the sky falling in. Most people really don’t know that everything’s possible. You resist,” he said. “So you’re back again. Who are the people?”
“I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you,” Karel said, but images and information all milled around in his head and he couldn’t think of a name to give or invent.
Kehr had something metal on Karel’s thigh and sawed into it and tore back whole sheets of muscle. It was as if his leg had been inverted into fire.
He came to dizzy and weak from the loss of blood. Behind his eyes ovals and whorls of light cascaded. Somebody save me, he thought.
“Why are you resisting?” Kehr said. “There’s no one left. Do you think there’s anyone left?” But Karel couldn’t focus on the words, overwhelmed with a suffocating and implacable fear. He refused to think, tried in every way possible to preoccupy his mind: Eski, he thought, and the little dog passed untouched through the darkness.
“Do you recognize this?” Kehr asked, and he held up bloody clothing. Karel didn’t.
They started to strip the skin from the soles of his feet. He had the sensation they were trying to separate the skin at the edge of the wound with a pair of pincers. He passed out and came to and slid down a huge slippery tube where he would disappear and it would all stop. When he revived he was fully horizontal on a pallet, still in the room. His feet were on fire and he was howling and whining and his legs galloped weakly in place to make it stop. Something was holding them down. Kehr was over him.
“Let me tell you what you’re hoping for,” he said gently. “The good that saves the day, that turnaround moment when the point of light expands and drives away the darkness. If Karel was like Kehr, then why couldn’t Kehr be like Karel?
“Let me tell you what will happen,” he said. His eyes were close to Karel’s and Karel closed his own and tried to raise an arm, like a blind man groping to ward off a blow. “We’re taking everything. No one is left for you. No one will be sorry. We’re taking your life and your death. You’re resisting, but I’ve taken away the world you’re resisting for. Your martyrdom is impossible. With no witnesses there’s no testimony. Who’s going to record your gesture? Who’s going to record hers?”
“I am,” Karel whispered. He was crying and wanted only to be put o
ut of his agony. “I do.”
You should have been born in another time, Kehr was telling him, after it had been quiet. This was a chosen time and a chosen place. What chance did you have? Kehr stood and signaled to someone, and he felt himself being lifted up. So many never fully understood, Kehr was saying from somewhere behind him, the way that in places and times like this it was just a matter of history being let off the leash.
In his cell he lay across his mattress, too weak to move, shivering violently. He thought he could hear the faint scraping and tapping of mortar and trowels and imagined his cell expanding in all directions. His thigh and knee swayed and throbbed in steady waves and he could feel his blood purling out of him. He wrote his name and Leda’s name with his finger on the floor. At times he thought to himself, Now it’s time to get ready, now’s the time they’ll come for me, or I’m not ready, I’m ashamed, I’m alone, I’m guilty, but at other times he could let feelings and sensations from his time with Leda enter him as he might enter shade, and he tried to hold on to parts of her, small memories that faded and wavered unreliably as he tried to keep them still. Maybe they won’t come, he thought, and heard them at the door, and he could feel his heart within his chest and the fear of facing this alone like a single transparent hand against his back. They cleaned his cell while he lay there, and when they lifted him to his feet his mattress was dragged away, and even supported as he was by two men he was trembling and unsteady and desired to press his heel against the stone floor to steady himself. He told himself he should be calm and controlled and lucid for this and closed his eyes to shake off the numbness and he felt he wanted to say a measured goodbye to even this world but his breathing would not allow it, and the sensation he felt as they brought him across the cell and laid him on their pallet was that of sliding slowly across warm sheet ice. They settled him into it and tied him down and he registered from the feel of the air and the paleness outside his window that it was sometime before dawn, and he began an incantation of names: Leda, his mother, his father, Albert, Eski, Seelie, David, Nicholas, Herman, Mrs. Fetscher, and Leda, the loop allowing him the sense that his past was there with him still breathing in the darkness, and as they lifted him and rocked him along he felt he was being allowed a dream, David and him at the ocean, David gone, himself on a sandbar surrounded by fog and everything silent except the lapping of waves. There was a nonvisual sense of Leda, a certainty she was there because of the weight of her arms and the warmth of her body, and because he thought Kehr was wrong and the mercy he would be granted had no conditions.