Child of the Journey (16 page)

I'm just dreaming I'm awake, just dreaming!
he told himself, but he knew his eyes were open. As was his mouth.
If I can just say something!

No sound issued through his lips. He could not move even his tongue. Then, relieved, he felt movement, only to have his relief turn to horror. His tongue had not moved. Something else--

--a spider.

He felt its velvety pads claim purchase on his chin and cheek as it struggled to extricate itself--legs, head, thorax--from his mouth. He could see nothing in the pitch darkness, could not brush it away as it crept up his face and passed across his left eye, hairs twitching against his pupil.

Wake up!
he screamed at himself.
Wake up!

The spider climbed his upper eyelashes and tested his brow. Taking its time, it spun a web...crossing and recrossing the left side of his face...drawing sticky gossamer from his brow to his mouth. Still he could not move. Could not scream. Could feel only the spider--and tears spawned by fear rolling down his cheeks.

Time passed, how much he had no way of measuring save for the racing of his heartbeats, until the blue came, flickering, changing from hyacinth to cerulean and finally, to cobalt----

----dusk. The sky is deeply blue and refractive, as if a bowl of colored crystal has been turned upside down.
Angry clouds skewer the horizon. Mengele, scalpel in hand as though it is a cigarette, leans against a waist-high semi-circular balcony wall of whitewashed masonry carved with arabesques. The SS officers stand beside him and in the portal of shadow created by the open balcony doors.

On the ground far below, black men, women, and children--most dressed in white muslin tunics or colorful sateen robes--raise their voices in a litany sung in a strange tongue. Their skin appears darkly chestnut in the light, a sea of bronze faces.
         

"They call this event 'Maskal,'" Mengele tells his audience. "It honors Queen Helena's supposedly finding Christ's Cross. To give thanks, she lit a bonfire in Palestine so big her son Constantine saw its glow back in Constantinople. Christians never have been known for choosing verisimilitude over hyperbole."
 

The officers chuckle. Below, the sea of spectators parts; a procession of priests carrying tasseled ceremonial umbrellas, and laymen and boys robed in embroidered satins and carrying incense and elaborately molded golden crosses, serpentine in stately rhythm toward the tallest of three towers of piled wood.

"Time to show our respect for the newest subjects of our Italian friends," Mengele says. He and the other officers snap to a Nazi salute as the procession winds below, followed by a parade of white-gowned men holding straw torches aloft. Next come brass bands and then floats, heavy with flowers, sporting flaming crosses.

The trailing celebrants, more than a thousand strong, carry wicker baskets filled with bread and daisies.

"Perhaps in another two thousand years the Ethiopians will celebrate a much more lasting and meaningful cross," Mengele says in a low, impassioned voice, "the swastika!"

"Sieg heil
!" his listeners say quietly but earnestly.

Judith appears in the doorway behind them. She slips a scalpel and a piece of cut surgical tape into her lab coat, then clears her throat. "Herr
Doktor
," she says, "the X-ray films are ready."

The priests below begin to circle the towers, bowing, blessing what the flames will consume, swinging incense burners like pendulums and filling the air with the scent of jasmine and sandalwood. Mengele breathes deeply, appreciatively. "Let us go inside--committed with new purpose," he says.

The other officers stand aside respectfully as he enters the room. Brows furrowing, he pauses and covers his nose. "Our prince has emptied his bowels. He apparently has no respect for medical history or for our sensibilities."

Emanuel, apparently still bound to the chair, has fallen sideways onto the floor. When the doctor starts to nudge him with the toe of a shoe, the black man leaps up. Shrieking, babbling, he reaches for the doctor's neck. Pulls it close. Bites.

Mengele squeals. Gargles. Chokes. His thick flesh bulges against the black man's fury, and a bone snaps----

The scene dissolved. The voices stilled. Solomon felt warm blood on his hands and, in them, the movement of a furred thing.

Grimacing, he dropped the rat into the seepage. Without pity, he listened to it flop and cough in its death throes. If the Kabbalistic tradition of the transmigration of souls were truly part of the order of the universe, he reasoned, then transmogrification must also be possible: man becomes animal; and animal, man.

He forced himself to become calm. Had he not just now placated whatever spirit had pervaded the sewer, Berlin, and his life? The rat was Mengele. He--Solomon--was Emanuel...and free at last.

N
o matter what he did, the sadness in Misha would not go away. It so enshrouded his thoughts that he was hardly aware of the passage of the days.

When he had literally bumped into Fräulein Miriam after the beadle's departure from Berlin, he'd still had hope. He had waved farewell to her from the limousine when Konrad dropped her off at the tobacco shop, believing her when she promised to do everything she could to get news of his parents.

"It could take time, Misha. And the news will probably be bad," she said, holding him close. "Do you understand what that means?"

He understood. But understanding and acceptance were not the same thing.

Konnie drove him to a block of flats at the dark end of Kantstrasse. There he was taken in by a rough-looking group of young people who, he quickly learned, were part of the underground. The flats, Konnie told him, had belonged to the furriers who had owned the shop next door to
Die Zigarrenkiste
--above the sewer where he and the beadle had taken refuge. This was confirmed when one of young men gave him a fur coat to use as a blanket and identified himself as the son of the owners of
Das Ostleute Haus
. He was given enough food to survive, a blanket on the floor, a few books, and instructions to stay out of the way.

He was not sure how long he had been there when he ran his first message, perhaps about a week. He was given a tweed cap, a coat of sorts, and a pair of warm knickers, and sent out into the snow. Two days and half-a-dozen deliveries later, he was handed a note from Miriam to Solomon Freund. What he knew he would never forget was creeping uncertainly across the street to the tobacco shop and seeing Herr Freund's gaunt, bearded face appear behind the plate-glass window. He had scaly brown stuff on his face, and was coughing as if he had pneumonia or something.

And suddenly there were sirens, and a Mercedes with Gestapo and guns and shots, and he was racing down an alleyway like a hunted animal.

The next morning, one of his companions awoke him before dawn.

"The Gestapo know what you look like," the youth said. "It is too dangerous for us--and for you--to stay here. Go to the corner of Kant and Niebuhrstrasse. Konnie will be waiting for you there. Don't say anything. Just get into the car."

Misha did what he was told. By the end of the day he was ensconced at the home of Fräulein Miriam's dressmaker in Baden-Baden, where Konnie had driven him on the pretext of taking her several bolts of fabric to make into dresses for Miriam for the upcoming holiday season. The trip across the country and south was a long one, but the car was comfortable and warm, and he slept most of the way. It was dark when they got there and he was hungry.

Madame Pérrault fed him at once. She was a pretty woman, bright, cheerful, and practical. He liked her.

The next morning, she put him to work at the button-covering machine to earn his keep. To his surprise, he enjoyed the work.

The machine looked something like the microscope at school, except that the top was hinged. There was an indentation on the ledge for a metal shell, and another in the lever.

Madame Pérrault would hand him scraps of fabric that matched the outfits she was sewing. He laid a scrap on the ledge, pressed in a shell, and covered it over with the fabric. Then he inserted a smaller shell into the lever and pressed down.

The top fitted into the bottom and became a covered button which she could trim and attach to the clothing of her wealthy customers.

He quickly developed a rhythm and produced, she said, more buttons each hour than she could make in a day.

He expected to be hidden away, in a place like the sewer. To his surprise, Madame Pérrault simply told him to be careful not to talk to strangers, bedded him down in a small attic room where she stored her supplies, and introduced him as her cousin's son, come to visit from the city. He was well fed and reasonably well clothed. She patched his trousers, kept his shirt clean, and treated him with kindness.

Still, she was not his mama.

When Fräulein Miriam returned with Konnie, she returned the bolts of cloth, had a brief discussion with the seamstress about patterns, and took him into the garden.

"I have no news for you," she said, kneeling before him. "You must be patient."

"I want to come back to Berlin with you."

"You are safe here, Mishele." She stroked his head. "Is Madame not treating you well?"

"That's not it at all," he said, staring her down. "I want to be there when you find my mama and papa."

She sighed heavily. "I thought you understood, Misha. The chances are we will not find them. Berlin is a dangerous place. You are better off right here."

"Then I will walk to Berlin. I will. Truly. I want to come...home."

"But I can't take care of you," Miriam said. "Herr Freund, the man to whom you delivered my message, is in the sewer."

"I can stay with him in the sewer. Please."

"I cannot get him out, let alone get you in," she said.

"Please."

She looked as if she were about to say something more, but remained silent. He took that to mean yes. Remembering his manners, he went indoors to say farewell and thank you to his hostess who looked shocked, kissed him, and said he could return any time he wished.

He went outside to the car. It was gone. Only his earlier resolve kept him from bursting into tears.

"Sometime around Christmas I will have to go to Berlin myself for fabrics and threads, and to visit family," Madame Pérrault said. "If you still want to return, I will take you with me."

Reassured, but still angry at what he saw as Miriam's betrayal, Misha settled back into the routine of the household. Days passed, then more than a week, not unpleasantly, and as it did, so did his anger. He remembered how Miriam signaled him away on the day the beadle left, and then rescued him. He remembered her explanation and her kindnesses. When the time came for Madame Pérrault to make her trip, he had almost forgotten his anger.

But he had not forgotten why he had to return to Berlin.

"I cannot take you to Fräulein Miriam," she said, when he reiterated his wish to go with her. "She has more than enough worries. I will have to take you back to the underground. They will take you in if you are willing to be a messenger for them again."

"But the Gestapo...?"

"By now, hopefully, they have forgotten you."

"Do the others know that I am coming back?" Misha asked.

"Perhaps yes, perhaps no. I sent word, but I have not had confirmation. You will have to take your chances."

"Will you tell
her
where I am?"

"Of course. She would want to know."

At the end of the day, with a quick kiss, a hug, and a wish for his safety, Madame Pérrault pressed a bag of food into his hands and deposited him on the sidewalk, two blocks from the flats on Kantstrasse. Behind him he heard her say quietly, "Merry Christmas, boy. Happy Hanukkah."

Suddenly afraid, remembering no-neck and the sound of jackboots and gunshots, Misha ran the two blocks in the darkness of what he now realized was Christmas Eve. Though he slunk into the building and tried to be quiet, his footsteps echoed hollowly in the deserted stairwell.

When he reached the flat, he found the door ajar. The place had been ransacked and there was no one there. Terrified, careless of his own safety, he charged down the stairs and away from the building. When he stopped running, he found himself at the fence of a small, concrete school playground on Niebuhrstrasse. At the back of the playground, he could see a large tree, beneath which stood a cluster of garbage cans. He scooted over the fence and headed straight for them.

Upending one of them, which happened to be empty because, he supposed, of school holidays, he crawled inside and, despite the freezing cold, fell into a sleep filled with nightmares of fat men with boots and guns and no neck. He awoke at dawn to the sound of Christmas church bells. Shivering and stiff with cold, and silently thanking Madame Pérrault, he opened the bag of food and ate a roll and a piece of sausage and tried to plan his next move.

All he could think of was Fräulein Miriam and the sewer safe-house. He waited as long as he was able, hoping some other idea would come to him. Finally, driven by the cold, he crawled from his hiding place, scaled the fence, and started toward the tobacco shop. When he got there, the lights were on and the door was ajar.