Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  PART SEVEN

  Kaufering Lager IV

  April 1945

  1.

  THERE WAS THAT STING IN THEIR NOSTRILS, and the sting wouldn’t go away. Sonny and the corporal would ride into some quiet little town in Bavaria that hadn’t been strafed by Allied fighter-bombers and had its roofs ripped off, and after the Twelfth had cleared it of die-hard, suicidal Krauts, with all the debris of abandoned artillery held by horse-drawn carts—the horses often limped and had bloodshot eyes. Sonny’s nostrils burned all the time, and he couldn’t quite identify that lingering acrid odor. He took over the Rathaus in the tiny village square, its picturesque cobblestones smeared with horse dung and its half-burnt Nazi banners still dangling from the dormer windows, and began to interrogate suspected war criminals and saboteurs. The local population wouldn’t help him at all. Sonny was rather suspicious of the town jeweler and his hairy hands. This jeweler had all the bearings of an SS torturer, with his Olympian shoulders, bullish neck, and leering smile. His papers were in perfect order, perhaps a little too perfect. Sonny knew they were forged. They’d been worked on by a wizard, a member of the SS elite.

  Sonny sat him down in an uncomfortable chair, with a naked lightbulb in his eyes. The athletic jeweler never blinked.

  “Herr Linder, isn’t it strange, that awful smell? Does your nose ever sting?”

  “Never, Herr Kapitän.”

  “Mensch,” Sonny growled, “you see the stripes on my shoulder. Call me Sergeant Salinger.”

  “Gut,” the jeweler said, with that same smirk, “yet you, a simple sergeant, have the authority to question me. That is what is strange, not the metallic aroma of war. I use carbolic acid all the time. And I assure you, the smell is much worse.”

  The jeweler had a logbook that offered every little detail of his whereabouts; he hadn’t left the village in two years. But Sonny could tell that this “jeweler’s” logbook had been inked less than a month ago, as the Twelfth had punched its way into Bavaria. None of the entries had faded, or turned brown. But Sonny still had to play the fox.

  “Herr Linder, why aren’t you with the Wehrmacht? You’re no invalid.”

  “Ah, but I am. I have a terrible hernia. And it cannot be corrected.”

  The doctor’s elaborate notations were right in the jeweler’s logbook, with the same forged hyperbole, the same crafty design.

  Sonny motioned to the MP beside him. “Take the jeweler back to Division and put him in a cage. Let him sit. I’ll deal with him another time.”

  “This is preposterous,” the jeweler said. “I will complain to your superiors.”

  Sonny smiled. “They will send you back to me. And you won’t have a Rathaus to protect you, with witnesses. You might not survive our next little chat.”

  Sonny closed the interrogation room and walked out onto the steps of the Rathaus, where he met Lieutenant Colonel Blunt. He watched the mayor of the quiet little town climb on a ladder and remove the Nazi banners. The mayor had tiny feet.

  “Sir,” Sonny said to Blunt, “I’d like to arrest the entire village. I think they’re all in cahoots with the Gestapo and the SS. They’re hiding officers, helping them to forge their logbooks.”

  Blunt winced at him. “That’ll look terrific on our dossier. ‘CIC arrests a Kraut village, claims they’re all complicit with the SS.’ Division will break my bones. Salinger, do your job.”

  But Sonny was persistent. “Sir, isn’t there some kind of terrible tickle in your nose? It feels like it’s burning my nostrils right off.

  Blunt growled, as if he were talking to a rebellious child rather than an agent of the CIC. “Salinger, we’re investigating that smell. Meanwhile, get back to work.”

  But it happened again and again. Local printers and proprietors with impeccable credentials and the build of Olympians, and he couldn’t break them under the lights no matter how hard he tried. He had a premonition about their tricks. He was interrogating fellow interrogators. They were prepared for Sonny, every single one of them, with their smoothness and martial manner. And he sent them all back to Division. He would break them there, disrobe them of their cover stories. He went on to another Bavarian village seized by the Twelfth.

  And then the stink grew unbearable. Sonny and the corporal followed behind the invaders, rode across the city of Landsberg, with its medieval inner walls and houses with orange roofs that seemed to exist at a slight tilt, so that Sonny had the illusion they were about to fall and he would be buried in all the rubble. He had been ordered to keep clear of Landsberg, and he didn’t know why. But all he had to do was follow his nose—and the path of E Company.

  And nine miles or so from Landsberg, Sonny and the corporal happened upon a Krankenlager—a camp for sick slave laborers who worked at some munitions factory. But it made little sense to Sonny, this Krankenlager in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by barbed wire. They met several of their buddies at the front gate. These boys marched about in delirious circles. A few of them were crying. Others muttered to themselves. And then Sonny saw Major Oliver, who no longer had the luminous eyes of a zealot.

  “Salinger, don’t go in there—don’t go through the gates. We’ve been abandoned. The Lord has left the lights out in Bavaria.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Sonny said. “Fireboy has lost his faith.”

  But he shouldn’t have mocked the major. A chill went through his bones. He could identify that atrocious smell—a mingling of excrement, stale urine, charred and rotting flesh. This was no Krankenlager—that was just a prettified name. It was a charnel house. Sonny had heard reports about them back at CIC—“concentration camps,” they were called. But no dogface had ever seen one. The SS had always kept them hidden, it seems, except for the acrid smell that pervaded the countryside. What a dope Sonny had been not to have guessed the source of that stink. He’d fooled himself, as if he were back in the time of Charlemagne, with warrior fighting warrior, like in The Song of Roland, not SS gangsters attacking the sick and the lame. He shouldn’t have pitied those child warriors in the snow. They must have known about this camp, Kaufering Lager IV, and others just like them.

  “Open the gate,” he barked at the MP on patrol.

  “Sarge,” the corporal whispered, “are you sure you wanna see it? Fireboy said it was an abomination. And I believe him.”

  “Drive,” Sonny said, “and that’s an order.”

  All the SS guards and officers had abandoned Kaufering IV, had melted into the atmosphere, or had found a new identity, like Herr Linder, the muscular jeweler, who would be sitting inside that cage at Division, sitting for Sonny. Skeletons in black-and-white pajamas approached the jeep. They wore some kind of philosopher’s cap inside the Lager. Their skin was translucent, with cheekbones that stuck out like horns. They wanted to clap for Sonny and the corporal. But they did not have enough skin on their hands. So their clapping was so faint that it was like the muffled caw of a forlorn bird. But these were the lucky ones. They could still stand and run after two GIs in a jeep.

  The corporal wanted to toss K rations at them, like some grand seigneur.

  “Don’t,” Sonny said. “They’ll choke on our chocolate. They have to be spoon-fed.”

  “Like babies?” the corporal asked.

  “Yes, like babies,” Sonny said. “That’s how much their stomachs must have shrunk. Their masters have been starving them to death.”

  Look for the narrative. That’s what his instructors always told him. And it didn’t take him very long to find it, despite the horrors that tore through his system and drained him of his strength. Their guardians had run away once they realized the Twelfth was rolling in. And they hid whatever evidence they could. There was a railroad siding that ran along the length of the Lager, with several boxcars on the single track. The ground was strewn with naked bodies that looked like dolls, with their arms and legs stretched out, as if they’d been caught in the middle of some strange and abrupt ecstasy. For one tingling moment, they reminded Sonny
of the mannequins in Bloomingdale’s window. Doris had been a window dresser for a while, and Sonny had once watched her handle Bloomingdale’s dolls. They had the same macabre, distant eyeless gaze….

  Sonny climbed down from the jeep. He saw several axes near the siding, axes covered with blood. The guards must have been in a great hurry. They’d slaughtered prisoners of the camp even while they were herding them into the cars. Sonny found several bodies without heads, hands, or feet. He could follow the path of their butchery, footprints etched in blood. Next to the railroad siding was the stationmaster’s shack, covered in ornate shellac, like a gigantic cuckoo clock. And Sonny was startled when he found the stationmaster still inside the shack. He hadn’t left with the guards, officers, and doctors on the last death train from Lager IV.

  The man had whimsical eyebrows. He was wearing some kind of uniform, but without the SS shoulder patch of double lightning bolts. He had ragged cuffs. His hands were trembling. And Sonny couldn’t find any compassion or comprehension in his pale, lusterless blue eyes.

  He isn’t compos mentis, Sonny muttered to himself, a dispatcher who’s lost his mind and can’t leave his itinerary of toys.

  “We’ll have to arrest you, Mein Herr.”

  “That is nothing,” the man said. “You must do much worse—come, come, I will give you a tour of our wonderful camp.”

  And he motioned to Sonny with his clean, elegant hands, while Corporal Benson wanted to remain there in the jeep, hiding from all the deviltry surrounding him, in this village of corpses without a Rathaus. Sonny couldn’t make sense of Kaufering. Lager IV went beyond his ability to imagine, or to think.

  “Follow us, will ya?” he growled. And the corporal crept behind them in his jeep, over the charred earth, with its trails of excrement and blood, and bits of SS paraphernalia—unpolished belt buckles and boots with missing toes. The officers and guards must have been shedding their uniforms and identities while they ran, recasting themselves as ordinary citizens of the Reich.

  “Stationmaster,” Sonny asked, “did you help those bastards escape?”

  “Of course I did,” this train dispatcher said, caressing the buttons on his uniform. “That was my job. I would have been remiss had I not done so. And I am very good at my job. But come, let me give you a guided tour of our Lager. It was my home. I slept here every night. I had my lunch and dinner right in the shack. The trains never stopped running. Kaufering would have been a pathetic shell without me.”

  “And the screams never bothered you, the butcherings right in front of your face?”

  “Of course it bothered me, Herr Unteroffizier. I fed these poor fellows as much as I could, from my own lunch pail. But I couldn’t interfere. I would have been executed on the spot. But you are distracting me—come, or you will remain a tourist and never see the camp.”

  The stationmaster led Sonny to three barracks that were partially underground, like wooden bunkers, but these bunkers had been nailed shut and set on fire while still packed with “citizens” of Kaufering, the camp’s slave laborers. Sonny had to wear a handkerchief over his mouth and nose, or he would have fainted right in the Lager. He couldn’t fathom how the stationmaster had survived the stench, the crippling acid of rotten flesh.

  “Open the barracks,” Sonny said, “every one.”

  “But that is impossible,” the stationmaster said. “It is not my job. I am responsible for the trains.”

  “Open,” Sonny said, handing him a bloody ax. “Or I’ll execute you—on the spot.”

  The stationmaster saluted Sonny with a sudden respect. “Yes, Herr Unteroffizier.”

  He chopped away at the wood, pried out the nails, and opened the barracks, one by one. Some of the charred bodies were still smoldering. They were packed so tight, skull-to-skull, covered in shreds of their own burnt hair, that they had a perverse, horrifying beauty, as if they’d been sculpted out of fire.

  “Come,” the stationmaster said.

  “But we can’t leave them there—like that.”

  “And what do you propose?”

  That’s when Sonny recited Major Oliver’s blessing from the burial service in the Green Hell.

    Naked came I out of my mother’s womb …

  Sonny was shivering. He couldn’t abandon this assembly of forgotten souls—Gypsies, Serbs, Jews, and half Jews, like himself—in their three Kraut coffins.

  “Come,” the stationmaster said. “You must see for yourself.”

  And Sonny followed the stationmaster along an earthen path until they arrived at a flower garden. None of the flowers had wilted among all that carnage and blood. They entered a barrack that had been converted into some kind of Swiss chalet with its own carpentered porch and shellacked window shutters.

  “Herr Salinger,” the stationmaster said, still clutching the ax. “I refurbished this—with my own hands.”

  “When did you have the time?” Sonny said as his cheeks began to twitch. He wanted to split the stationmaster in two with the ax, cleave him with a single blow, and watch the blood pour out.

  “I made the time,” the stationmaster said. “I turned this pigsty into an officers’ club.”

  They strode onto the porch and went into the chalet. All the files had been removed, all the records of Lager IV. The chairs had missing legs. The SS had left their own office in a shambles, as a parting gift to the Allies. But Sonny wandered into another room, with red wallpaper and fanciful couches and a vanity table that must have come from Berlin. It was the camp bordello. And his rage deepened, nearly blinded him. He found yet another victim, hiding under the vanity table. A girl of twelve, perhaps, with enormous eyes. He realized in a second that her tongue had been torn out, as she delivered a muted shriek.

  “Herr Stationmaster, who is that?”

  “Ach,” said the dispatcher, with a flutter of his free hand. “She’s nobody, a Polska, Little Alicja. We picked her up in a garbage pail, from another camp. She’s our mascot, Herr Salinger, our pet.”

  Sonny pulled the girl out from under the vanity table. She was wearing an SS officer’s tunic with nothing underneath. He gave her his own field jacket to wear and fed her tiny gulps of water from his canteen. He patted her head, and the shrieking stopped.

  “Don’t be afraid, Liebchen,” he said. “We will not harm you. We are your liberators.”

  He realized how foolish he must have seemed to the girl. Liberators. No one could liberate her. Alicja’s tongue had been torn out. She was covered in filth. The SS officers must have pissed on her as part of their play. He undressed Alicja, as if he had become her servant. The stark terror in her eyes had receded. He stood her over the sink and scrubbed her with an SS officer’s towel.

  “Herr Salinger,” the dispatcher said, “why are you bothering with such a person? She’s nobody—a toy.”

  “Shut up,” Sonny said.

  It soothed him to scrub her narrow shoulder blades. He did not even blink at her nakedness, the patch between her legs, like a silken beard. He bundled her up in his field jacket; then he seized the ax from the stationmaster and chopped at all the family photographs that the SS had displayed on the walls of their wives and children—this strange quest for normalcy they must have had, the remembrance of another life, before they were butchers and firebugs. Then he carried Alicja on his shoulders, as if he had become a hobbyhorse at Lager IV, and marched out of the officers’ playland.

  “Corporal,” he said to Benson, who stood outside, smoking a Camel from his K pack, “I’m done.”

  “What about me?” the stationmaster whined.

  “You can stay here—and guard your little kingdom.”

  “But I will be kaput when the other soldiers come.”

  “Not at all. You’re invaluable. You have all the secrets of this camp. You can give another guided tour.”

  And Sonny climbed into the jeep with Alicja on his shoulders.

  “Who’s the Mädel, Sarge?”

  “A friend of mine,” Sonny said, and he
knocked on the windshield with one musical rap of his knuckles—that sound ricocheted right through him, as if he were a tin man. He felt like tin.

  PART EIGHT

  Krankenhaus 31

  June–July 1945

  1.

  HE’D GONE ROGUE FOR A WEEK and didn’t report to his desk at Division; neither did he rejoice on V-E Day, drink piss-water champagne with the dogfaces of E Company, nor with his fellow CIC agents at the Villa Oberwegner, in the Bavarian village of Weißenberg, where he was stationed, near a sea of rubble. He could barely get out of bed. Yet he did deliver that tongue-torn Polska to a Catholic orphanage outside Nuremberg before the MPs could grab her. She had no papers, no identity cards. She’d been a plaything at an SS brothel in a Bavarian death camp. But Sonny was CIC, and he used the force of his credentials with the Mother Superior at the Catholic orphanage.

  “She’s vital to our cause,” he told her. “She has seen certain atrocities. And I have marked them down. We will need her as a witness.”

  “But she cannot speak,” said the Mother Superior, who wasn’t unkind. She had a tiny stain on her sleeve, a smear of blood.

  “I’ve taught her sign language,” Sonny said.

  The Mother Superior smiled under all that white armor. “I cannot flaunt the Allied authorities, Sergeant Salinger. They will come here and put her in a camp for displaced persons.”

  “Then hide her,” Sonny said. “I’ll pay for her upkeep.”

  The Mother Superior covered the stain with an ink blotter. “That will not be necessary. We will find a way…. But why does your cheek twitch, Sergeant?”

  Sonny recalled the chiseled cheekbones of those men in the camp, sticking out like horns, and that’s all it took to dismember him.

  “Habit,” he said. “My own wartime souvenir … I don’t want her behind barbed wire ever again.”

  But the girl wouldn’t let him go. She clung to Sonny, like some wild creature that had mated with him. And all the terror of Lager IV returned to her eyes. He stroked her face with his rough soldier’s hand.