When my laptop chimes with an incoming email, I look down at the screen. Genevra. 5 страница

The Reinigungsaktionen went as such: we would require the Jews to report at a given site—school or prison or factory—and then take them to a place that had been prearranged. Some of these places were natural ravines, some were dugouts built by the prisoners themselves. After they’d given up their clothing and valuables, we would drive them into the pit and make them lie facedown. Then, as the commanding officer of the regiment, I would give the order. The NCOs and volunteers, Waffen-SS men, would lift their Karabiner 98ks and shoot the prisoners in the back of the neck. Then some soldiers would haul in a load of dirt or lime before the next group was driven into the pit.

I would walk among the bodies, find the ones that were still moving, and deliver the coup de grâce with my pistol.

I did not think about what I was doing. How could I? To be stripped naked, shouted at to move faster and faster toward the pit with your children running beside you. To look down and see your friends and your relatives, dying an instant before you. To take your place between the twitching limbs of the wounded, and wait for your moment. To feel the blast of the bullet, and then the heaviness of a stranger falling on top of you. To think like this was to think that we were killing other humans, and to us, they could not be humans. Because then what did that say about us?

And so, after each Aktion, we got drunk. So incredibly drunk that we drove from our nightmares that unholy image of the ground bleeding, the red runoff swelling like a geyser after all the bodies were in the pit. We drank until we could no longer smell the shit that coated the corpses. Until we did not see, printed on the backs of our eyelids, the occasional child who clawed his way to the top of the tangle of limbs, shot but not dead, and who ran around the pit bleating for his mother or father until I put us out of our misery and killed him with a single bullet.

Some of the officers went crazy. I feared I might, too. There was another second lieutenant who had one of his men get up in the middle of the night, walk out of camp, and shoot himself in the head. The next day the second lieutenant refused—simply refused—to shoot anyone. Voelkel had him transferred to the front lines.

In July, Voelkel told us there would be an Aktion on the road between Równo and Zhytomyr. Eight hundred Jews had been rounded up.

Although I had given the men explicit orders about how they were to conduct themselves and when to shoot, when the third group of prisoners stood naked at the edge of the pit, shaking and weeping, one of my enlisted men began to fall apart. Schultz put aside his rifle and sank to the ground.

I ordered him to stand down and picked up his weapon. “What are you waiting for?” I barked at the soldiers who were responsible for bringing the next group of prisoners forward. This time, I was the first to fire my weapon. I would set the example. I did this for the next three sets of prisoners, and as blood and gray matter sprayed onto my uniform, I set my jaw and ignored it. As for Schultz, he would be posted behind the front. The SS did not want anyone on the front lines who might not be able to shoot.

That night, my men went carousing at the local tavern. I sat outside under the stars and listened to the glorious silence. No crackerjack of bullet shots, no screams, no cries. I had a bottle of whiskey that was nearly empty after two hours of nursing it. I did not go into the tavern until my men left, staggering down the street and balanced precariously on each other like a child’s wooden blocks. At this hour, I expected the tavern to be unoccupied; but instead, there were a half dozen officers gathered, and in a corner, Voelkel stood in front of one of the tables. Seated before him was Annika Belzer, the support staff who traveled with the Hauptsturmführer. An executive secretary, she was much younger than either Voelkel or his wife back home. She was also an abysmal typist. Everyone in the 8th SS Infantry Regiment knew exactly why she’d been hired, and why the Hauptsturmführer needed secretarial support even when his unit was mobile. Annika had hair that was an unearthly platinum blond, wore too much makeup, and was currently sobbing. As I watched, Voelkel jammed the barrel of his handgun into her mouth.

The others in the bar were not paying attention, or at least they were pretending not to, because you didn’t mess with the leader of the infantry brigade.

“Well then,” Voelkel said, cocking the trigger. “Can you make this come?”

“What are you doing?” I blurted out.

Voelkel looked over his shoulder. “Ah, Hartmann. So you think just because you got an enlisted man to listen to you, you can boss me around?”

“You can’t get it up, so you’re going to shoot her?”

He turned to me, his lips curling upward. “Why should you have all the fun?”

It was different. A Jew was one thing, but this girl, she was German. “If you pull that trigger,” I said calmly, although my heart was hammering so loud I could feel it move the heavy wool of my uniform jacket, “the Obersturmbannführer will hear about it.”

“If the Obersturmbannführer hears about it,” Voelkel said, “I will know who to blame, hmm?”

He removed the gun from Annika’s mouth and smacked her across the cheek with it. She fell to her knees, then scrambled upright and ran out. Voelkel strode toward a group of SS officers and began to drink shots with them.

Suddenly I had a headache. I didn’t want to be here; I didn’t want to be in the Ukraine at all. I was twenty-three. I wanted to be sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, eating her homemade ham soup; I wanted to be watching pretty girls walk down the street in high heels; I wanted to kiss one of them in the brick alley behind the butcher’s shop.

I wanted to be a young man with his life ahead of him, not a soldier who walked through death every waking day, and scraped its entrails from his uniform each night.

I staggered out of the tavern and saw a flash of something bright from the corner of my eye. It was the secretary, her hair catching the light of a streetlamp.

“My knight in shining armor,” she said, holding out a cigarette.

I lit it for her. “Did he hurt you?”

“No worse than usual,” she said, shrugging. As if she’d conjured it, the door to the tavern opened, and Voelkel stepped into the cold. He gripped her chin and kissed her hard on the mouth. “Come, my dear,” he said, smooth and charming. “You aren’t going to be angry with me the whole night, are you?”

“Never,” she replied. “Just let me finish my cigarette.”

His glance flickered over me, and then he disappeared back into the tavern.

“He’s not a bad man,” Annika insisted.

“Then why do you let him treat you that way?”

Annika looked me in the eye. “I could ask you the same,” she said.

• • •

The next day, it was as if our altercation had never happened. By the time we had arrived in Zwiahel, we were no longer using rifles but rather machine guns for our Aktion. Soldiers funneled the Jews in an endless stream into the trenches. There were so many of them, this time. Two thousand. It took two days to kill them all.

There was no point in spreading sand between the layers of the bodies; instead, others in the regiment simply herded the Jews on top of their relatives and friends, some of whom were still in the throes of dying. I could hear them whispering against each other’s necks, soothing, in the seconds before they were shot themselves.

One of the last groups had a mother and a child. This was not extraordinary; I had seen thousands of them. But this mother, she carried the little girl, and told her not to look, to keep her eyes closed. She placed her toddler between two fallen bodies as if she were tucking her in for the night. And then she began to sing.

I didn’t know the words, but I knew the melody. It was a lullaby that my mother had sung to my brother and me when we were little, albeit in a different language. The little girl sang, too. “Nite farhaltn,” the Jewess sang. Don’t stop.

I gave the command, and the machine guns chattered to life and shook the ground upon which I was standing. Only after the soldiers were finished did my ears stop ringing.

That’s when I heard the little girl, still singing.

She was slick with blood and her voice was not much more than a whisper, but the notes rose like soap bubbles. I walked through the pit and pointed my gun at her. Her face was still buried in her mother’s shoulder, but when she sensed me looming over her, she looked up.

I fired my weapon into her dead mother’s body.

Then the crack of a pistol shot rang out and there was no more music.

Beside me, Voelkel holstered his gun. “Aim better,” he said.

• • •

I had spent three months with the 1.SS Infantry Brigade, haunted by my nightmares. I would sit down for breakfast and see the ghost of a dead man standing across the room. I would look at my laundered uniforms, spotless, and still see the places where blood had seeped into the wool. I would drink at night so that I blacked out, because the space between wakefulness and sleep was the most dangerous one to tread.

But even after the last Jew in Zwiahel had been shot, even after Voelkel commended us on a job well done, I could still hear that toddler singing. She was long gone, buried beneath countless layers of her townsfolk, yet the breeze would draw a violin bow across the branches of a tree and I would again hear her lullaby. I would listen to the chime of coins being counted, and I would imagine her laughter. Her voice was caught in the shell of my ear, as if it were the ocean.

I started drinking early that night, skipping dinner entirely. The tavern bar was swimming in front of me, untethered; I had to imagine each shot that passed through my lips rooting me to the stool upon which I was seated. I thought maybe I could just pass out right there on the gummy tables that were never wiped clean enough.

I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there when she showed up. Annika. When I opened my eyes, my cheek pressed against the wood of the table, she was sideways and staring at me. “Are you okay?” she asked, and I lifted my head, which was the size of the world, and watched her spin upright.

“Looks like you need a hand getting home,” she said.

Then she was hauling me to my feet, although I didn’t want to go. She was talking a million miles a minute and dragging me out of the bar, to a place where I would be alone with my memories. I struggled against her, which wasn’t hard, because she was a tiny thing and I was considerably bigger. She immediately cringed, expecting to be hit.

She thought I was like Voelkel.

That, if nothing else, broke through the haze of my head. “I don’t want to go home,” I said.

I do not remember how we got to her quarters. There were stairs, and I was in no condition to navigate them. I have no idea whose idea it was to take off our clothes. I have no idea what happened, which let me tell you, is a great regret for me.

Here is what I do recall, with perfect clarity: waking up to the cold kiss of a pistol against my forehead, and Voelkel looming over me, telling me that my career as an officer was over.

“I have a surprise for you,” Aleks said, when I wandered into the kitchen. “Sit down.”

I climbed onto a stool and watched the muscles in his back flex as he opened the door to the brick oven and pulled something from inside. “Close your eyes,” he said. “Don’t peek.”

“If it’s a new recipe then I certainly hope you’ve still made the rest of the usual order—”

“All right,” Aleks interrupted, so near that I could feel the heat of his skin close to mine. “You can look now.”

I opened my eyes. Aleks was holding out his palm. In its center was a roll that looked just like the one my father used to make for me, and this alone made me feel like crying.

I could already smell the cinnamon and the chocolate. “How did you know?” I asked.

“The night I had to suture your neck. You talk a lot when you’re three sheets to the wind.” He grinned. “Promise me you’ll eat the whole thing.”

I broke it open. Steam rose between us in the shape of a secret. The crumb inside was slightly pink, warm, like flesh. “I promise,” I said, and I took the first bite.

SAGE

Can you blame the creationist who doesn’t believe in evolution, if he has been fed that alleged truth his whole life, and swallowed it hook, line, and sinker?

Maybe not.

Can you blame the Nazi who was born into an anti-Semitic country and given an anti-Semitic education, who then grows up and slaughters five thousand Jews?

Yes. Yes, you can.

The reason I am still sitting at Josef’s kitchen table is the same reason traffic slows after a car wreck—you want to see the damage; you can’t let yourself pass without that mental snapshot. We are drawn to horror even as we recoil from it.

Spread before me on the table are pictures—the photo he showed me days ago of himself as a soldier in a camp; and the photo clipped from the newspaper taken on Kristallnacht, with Josef— Reiner —grinning and eating his mother’s homemade cake.

How could someone who murdered innocent people look so... so... ordinary?

“I just don’t understand how you did it,” I say, into the silence. “How you lived a normal life, and pretended none of this ever happened.”

“It is amazing, what you can make yourself believe, when you have to,” Josef says. “If you keep telling yourself you are a certain kind of person, eventually you will become that person. That’s what the Final Solution was all about, really. First I convinced myself that I was of pure race, Aryan. That I deserved things others did not, simply by the accident of my birth. Think about that—that hubris, that arrogance. By comparison, convincing myself and others that I was a good man, an honest man, a humble teacher was easy.”

“I don’t know how you sleep at night,” I reply.

“Who says that I do?” Josef answers. “Surely you see now that I did horrible things. That I deserve to die.”

“Yes,” I reply bluntly. “You do. But if I kill you, I’m no better than you were.”

Josef considers this. “The first time you make a decision like that, a decision which rubs against all your morals, is the hardest. The second time, though, is not so hard. And that makes you feel a fraction better about the first time. And so on. But you can keep dividing and dividing and you’ll never entirely get rid of the sourness in your stomach that you taste when you think back to the moment you could have said no. ”

“If you are trying to get me to help you die, you’re doing a lousy job.”

“Ah, yes, but there is a difference between what I did and what I am asking you to do. I want to die.”

I think of those poor Jews, stripped and humiliated, clinging to their children as they marched into a pit filled with bodies. Maybe they wanted to die, too, at that moment. Better that, than live in a world where this sort of hell could happen.

I think of my grandmother, who—like Josef—refused to speak of this for so long. Was it because she thought that if she didn’t talk about it, she wouldn’t have to relive it? Or was it because even a single word of memory was like opening Pandora’s box, and might let evil seep like poison into the world again?

I think, too, of the monsters she wrote about in her story. Did they hide in the shadows from others? Or from themselves?

And I think of Leo. I wonder how he subjects himself to these sorts of stories, willingly, every day. Maybe it’s not so much about catching the perpetrators, after sixty-five years. Maybe it’s just so that he knows someone is still listening, for the sake of the victims.

I force my attention back to Josef. “So what happened? After Voelkel caught you in bed with his girlfriend?”

“He did not kill me, obviously,” Josef says. “But he made sure I would not work within his regiment anymore.” He hesitates. “At the time I did not know if that was a blessing or a curse.”

He reaches for the photo he showed me, the one of himself in the camp, holding a pistol. “Those who did not want to do their job in a shooting brigade were not punished or forced to do it. It was still their choice. They were just transferred instead.

“After the disciplinary hearing, I was sent to the Eastern Front. A Bewährungseinheit —a penal company. Now, I was a lieutenant under recall. I’d been demoted to sergeant and I had to prove myself or lose my rank.” Josef unbuttons his shirt and shrugs his left arm from the sleeve. There is a small circular burn mark on the underarm, at the armpit. “They gave me a Blutgruppe tattoo, applied to the members of the Waffen-SS. We were all supposed to have one, although it did not always work out that way. One small letter in black ink. If I needed a blood transfusion or I was unconscious, or my Erkennungsmarke had gone missing, the doctor would know my blood type and could take care of me first. And as it turned out, that saved my life.”

“There’s nothing there but a scar.”

“That’s because I cut it away with a Swiss Army knife when I moved to Canada. Too many people knew that SS had them; they were hunting down war criminals. I did what I had to do.”

“So you were shot,” I say.

He nods. “We had no food and the weather was brutal, and the Red Army ambushed our platoon one night. I took a bullet meant for my commanding officer. Lost a great deal of blood and almost died. The Reich, they saw it as an act of heroism. At the time, I had only been hoping for suicide.” He shakes his head. “It was enough, though, to redeem myself. I had irreparable nerve damage in my right arm; I would never hold a rifle steady again. But by now, in late 1942, they needed me somewhere else anyway. Somewhere not the front line. And you did not have to hold a gun steady against an unarmed prisoner.” Josef looks up at me. “I had previous experience in the concentration camps; it was where I started my SS career. So after nine months in the hospital, I was sent back to one. This time, as the Schutzhaftlagerführer of the women’s camp. I was responsible for the prisoners whenever they were present. Anus Mundi, that is what the prisoners called the camp. I remember stepping off the transport and looking at those iron gates, the words twisted between the parallel lines of metal. Arbeit macht frei. Work will set you free. And then I heard someone call my name.” Josef looks up at me. “It was my brother, Franz. After all that resistance to supporting the Reich, he was now a Hauptscharführer —a sergeant—working at the same camp, in administrative duties.”

“This Anus Mundi,” I say. “I’ve never heard of it.”

Josef laughed. “That was just a nickname. You speak some Latin, yes? It means ‘Asshole of the World.’ But you,” he said. “You probably know it as Auschwitz.”

He could hear every beat of her heart. It was almost in time with her boots, as she ran. She should have known better, he told himself. This was all her fault.

When she rounded the corner, he hit her from behind. She landed hard on the stones as he reached for the neck of her dress, tearing it halfway down her body while he rolled her onto her back. One arm pressed against her collarbone was all he needed to keep her steady. She begged, they always did, but he did not listen. Her heart was racing now, and it was driving him mad.

The first bite was the most gratifying, like a blade cutting through clay. Her pulse fluttered like an aspen leaf in the hollow of her throat. The skin was soft; it took only a gentle tug to peel it back so that he could see the exposed muscle, the veins throbbing. He could hear the blood, too, rushing like a swollen river, and it made saliva pool in his mouth. With years of dexterity he carved through the muscle, snapping sinew and tendon like bowstrings as he shredded the flesh, dissecting until the sweet copper blood burst from the artery onto his tongue. It dripped down his chin like the juice of a melon as she went limp beneath him, as her skin shriveled. When his teeth struck her spine, he knew she was of no more use. Her head, connected only by a strip of ligament, rolled a short distance away.

He wiped his mouth clean. And wept.

SAGE

Even though Josef has spoken so much of death that it darkens his lips like a berry stain; even though I cannot get the images out of my head of a little girl singing and a young man pointing to himself and reciting his age, what I find myself thinking about are the others. The ones Josef hasn’t told me about. The ones who didn’t even leave a mark on his memory, which is infinitely more horrible.

He was at Auschwitz, and so was my grandmother. Did she know him? Did they cross paths? Did he threaten her, beat her? Did she lie awake at night in her fetid bunk and redraw the monster in her story with features that matched his?

I have not mentioned Josef to my grandmother for good reason. She has spent over six decades keeping her memories bottled up. But as I leave Josef’s house, I cannot help but wonder if my grandmother is one of the ones he doesn’t recall. And if he is one of the ones she has worked so hard to forget. The inequity there makes me sick to my stomach.

It is pitch dark and raining when I leave Josef’s house, shaking beneath the responsibility of his confessions. What I want is someone I can run to, someone who will hold me tight and tell me that I’m going to be okay, someone who will hold my hand until I fall asleep tonight. My mother would have done that, but she’s not here anymore. My grandmother might, but she would want to know what has upset me so deeply.

So I drive to Adam’s house, even though I have told him I don’t want to see him, even though it is nighttime—the portion of the pie chart of his life that belongs to someone other than me. I park at the curb and look in the fishbowl window of the living room. There is a boy watching television, Jeopardy! And beyond the couch a girl sits at the kitchen table reading. Buttery light spills over her shoulders like a cape. The kitchen sink faucet is running, and Adam’s wife is washing dishes. While I watch, he appears with a fresh dish towel and takes a salad bowl from her soapy hands. He dries it, sets it on the counter, and then wraps his arms around Shannon from behind.

The sky opens overhead, which is surely a metaphor and not just a low-pressure system. I start to run and make it to my car just as the night is cleaved by a violet streak of lightning. I peel away from the curb, from this happy family, and drive too fast to the divided highway. The puddles on the asphalt are vast and black. I think of Josef’s image, the ground welling up with blood, and I am so distracted that at first I do not see the doe fly from the woods at the edge of the road to leap in front of my car. I veer sharply, struggling to control the wheel, and hit the guardrail, smacking my head against the window. The car comes to a stop with a hiss.

For a moment, I black out.

When I open my eyes, my face is wet. I think I might be crying, but then I touch my cheek and my hand comes away bloody.

For one horrible, heart-stopping moment, I relive my past.

I look at the empty passenger seat, and then peer through the shattered windshield, and remember where I am and what has happened.

The deer is lying in the road, screened by the white veil of the headlights. I stumble out of the car. In the pouring rain, I kneel down and touch its face, its neck, and I start to sob.

I am so distraught that it takes me a moment to realize that there is another car illuminating the night, a hand gentle on my shoulder. “Miss,” the policeman asks, “are you all right?”

As if that were an easy answer. As if I could reply with a single word.

• • •

After the cops call Mary, she insists on getting me checked out at a hospital. When the doctor puts a butterfly bandage on my forehead and tells her I ought to be watched for signs of concussion, she announces I will be staying overnight at her house, and does not allow me to argue. By then my head hurts so much I am in no condition to put up a fight, which is how I wind up in Mary’s kitchen drinking tea.

Mary’s hands are covered with dried purple paint—she’d been working on a mural when she was contacted by the police. The painting surrounds me, on the walls of the breakfast nook: a half-finished dreamscape of the apocalypse. Jesus—I’m guessing it’s Jesus, anyway, because he’s got the long hair and the beard but his face looks suspiciously like Bradley Cooper’s—is holding out his hand to those tumbling toward Mephistopheles—who is female, and resembles Michele Bachmann. The poor souls who are falling are in various states of undress, and some are still just roughly sketched, but I can make out the features of Snooki, Donald Trump, Joe Paterno. I touch my finger to a spot on the mural just behind my back. “Elmo?” I say. “Really?”

“How long has he been a toddler?” Mary asks, shrugging as she passes me the sugar. “He never gets old. Clearly he made a deal with the Devil.” She holds my hand across the table. “It means a lot to me, you know. That you called me.”

I choose not to point out that the police were the ones who called.

“I thought you were angry at me, because I told you to take time off. But really, it’s for your own good, Sage.” She smiles a little. “Sister Immaculata used to say that to me all the time when I was a kindergartner in parochial school. I never stopped talking. So one day she put me in the trash can. I was short enough that I fit. Every time I complained, she kicked the can.”

“I’m supposed to be grateful that you didn’t throw me in the Dumpster?”

“No, you’re supposed to be grateful that someone cares enough about you to help you get back on track again. You know it’s what your mother would have wanted.”

My mother. The reason I had gone to grief group in the first place. If she hadn’t died, I might never have cultivated a friendship with Josef Weber.

“So what happened tonight?” Mary asks.

Well, that’s a loaded question. “You know. I hit a deer, and my car swerved into the guardrail.”

“Where were you headed? The weather was awful. ”

“Home,” I say, because that isn’t a lie.

I would like to tell her all about Josef, but she already dismissed me once when I tried to confide in her. It is like he said: we believe what we want to, what we need to. The corollary is that we choose not to see what we’d rather pretend doesn’t exist. Mary can’t accept the thought that Josef Weber might be a monster, because that implies that she was duped by him.

“Were you with him?” Mary asks tightly.

At first I think she is talking about Josef, but then I realize she means Adam. “Actually I told Adam I didn’t want to see him for a while.”

Mary’s jaw drops. “Amen!”

“But then I drove to his house.” When Mary buries her face in her hands, I grimace. “I wasn’t going to go inside. I swear it.”

“Hello? Why didn’t you come here?” Mary asks. “I have enough herbal tea and Häagen-Dazs to compensate for any breakup, and I’m more emotionally available than Adam ever was.”

I nod. “You’re right. I should have called you. But instead, I saw him with his wife and kids. I got... rattled, I guess. And I was distracted, which is why I hit the deer.”

I realize that I’ve crafted this entire story without even mentioning Josef’s name. I have more in common with my grandmother than I originally thought.

“Nice try,” Mary says. “But you’re lying.”

I blink at her, my breath caught in my throat.

“I know you. You were driving to see him because you wanted to tell him you’d made a mistake. If you hadn’t Peeping Tommed the whole happy family scene, you probably would have climbed a trellis and thrown pebbles at the window until he came outside to talk to you.”

I scowl at her. “You make me sound like such a loser.”

Mary shrugs. “Look, all I’m saying is that it wouldn’t hurt you to hold a grudge longer than a single breath.”

“Isn’t that a little Old Testament for a nun?”

“Ex-nun. And let me tell you, that serenity crap from The Sound of Music? Bullshit. Inside the cloister, the sisters are just as petty as people on the outside. There are some you love and some you hate. I did my share of spitting in the Holy Water font before another nun used it. It was totally worth the twenty rosaries I said for penance.”

I rub my left temple, which is throbbing. “Can you get me my phone?”

She gets up and rummages through my purse to find it for me. “Who are you calling?”

“Pepper.”

“Liar. The last time you talked to your sister she hung up on you because you said tutoring a four-year-old to get into an exclusive preschool made as much sense as hiring a swim coach for a guppy. You wouldn’t call Pepper if you were trapped in the car and it was about to catch fire—”

Дата добавления: 2015-10-21