Children of the Dusk (43 page)

"What is he saying?" she asked.

"He praise the spirit child of Ravalona." Bruqah handed the child to her and placed his hand over hers. She felt his sincerity. "Though he praises true, he seeks the afterbirth. He wishes to eat it, for strength--and seeing face of death."

"He wants to die?"

"He wishes to recognize she face so to dance out of she path."

At any other time Miriam might have chuckled at Bruqah's convoluted language. "The man helped me," she said simply. "Give it to him."

"No can do," Bruqah said.

At that, the Zana-Malata darted forward. Grabbing the caul, he began to stuff it hungrily into his mouth. When Bruqah lunged for him, the syphilitic sidestepped neatly and darted out of the crypt.

"Get him, Solly!" Bruqah shouted. But he was too late.

Bruqah veiled the eucalyptus branch in purple gossamer and, sticking his head outside the door and jamming the branch into a crack in the rockwork, struck a match and set afire each dangling cloth-end. Quickly the flames spread; leaves crackled. He re-entered the crypt and, squatting by her side, took her hands between his palms.

"Bruqah inform the Kalanaro. They will help drive demons away."

She wanted to smile but, realizing Bruqah was serious, instinctively put her hand on the child's back. Then she called out to Sol and Misha, for it was time they too saw the child of the dawn.

B
ecause it was so interpreted from the Talmud by some of them, the Jews buried their dead in the four days between the Day of Atonement and Succot.

Because it is written that the building of the
Succah
, the hut which commemorates the season of rejoicing--
zman simhatainu
--must begin immediately after Yom Kippur, they mourned privately and joined together to erect the tabernacle. For this, they gathered the traditional citron, the branches of palm trees, the boughs of thick-leafed trees, and the willows where the spring emptied at the bottom of the cliff. One-hundred surviving Jews, and the two dog trainers, Fermi and the family man, Holten-Pflug.

Having built three walls, they left the fourth one open and began on the roof, using only that which grows from the ground and has been cut off from the ground. They left a space in the roof, no more than ten inches wide, yet large enough to see the stars and let in the rain, thus showing that they trusted in God to provide and to keep them safe.

From the roof they hung decorations of fruit and flowers. In the same way they decorated the walls. A child and a young man named Max retrieved a zebu-horn Shofar from the debris of the encampment and placed it in a position of honor.

At dusk on the fourth day after Yom Kippur, a holiday was declared, and the Festival of Succot began. They sang and they danced, and they expressed joy in God and in their new-found, hard-earned, freedom.

While they sang and they danced, the Kalanaro poled from Nosy Mangabéy to the mainland. In the light of the rising moon, their pirogue looked like it was overflowing with glowworms. The fireflies winked on and off in unison.

A man watched them. In his arms he held an infant, wrapped in a
lamba,
perfectly content.

When he could no longer see the pirogue, he looked down at the beach and listened to the chanting that floated up to him.

Baruch ata adonai elohainu melech ha-olam shesheheyanu v'kee-y'manu v'hee-gee-anu lazman hazeh
.

"Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the universe who has imparted His wisdom to those who revere Him," he echoed softly, so that the child would not become alarmed. "Sweet Deborah," he crooned, and stared down at her in the light of the quarter moon.

Swept up by the power of the benediction, he entered the child's mind. There, in the flesh of his flesh, he rediscovered the dybbuk that had been in him for most of his life.

Entering Deborah's consciousness, he found himself back where the dybbuk began: with the nurse, Judith, who was killed by the grenade that took the life of Walther Rathenau. Entering the woman's cobalt-blue eyes, he discovered that Judith could have stopped the assassination through the conscious giving of her own life. Instead, she chose to live--and lost her life and her soul as well.

Unlike the five sparrows--Rathenau, Erich, Emanuel, Margabrook, and Lise, those who lost their lives to help others--Judith was never willing even to risk hers for someone else.

Ironically, though he was once nicknamed
Spatz
--"Sparrow"-- this man was not one of them. Unlike them, he had not lost his life. His gift, or curse, was to see into the future. Since boyhood, he has been able to see glimpses of what the dybbuk will bring.

Returning to the present--to the hilltop--he wondered if it were possible to change history so that the dybbuk that was now within his infant daughter had no chance to alter events in devastating ways.

He wrestled with the ultimate moral dilemma.

Staring out over the bay, he made his choice: He would watch over Deborah and make sure the dybbuk was not exorcised. He would teach her what wisdom he could, in the hope that her actions would allow the dybbuk to atone for its sins, and find rest at last.

A woman called out to him from the beach. He did not answer, for there was one more thing he must do before joining the others.

He held the infant against his chest. Her heart beat against his. Though he had promised himself he would never deliberately ask to be shown the future, he invited it to come to him.

"Please," he begged----

----
Please
....

The word snakes from the mouth of a girl of perhaps eight, wreathed in cobalt-blue light.
She is tied naked to a carved wooden post by ropes wound among the water buffalo horns nailed above her head. Behind her, the vent of a volcano boils against the dusk. Her face quivers, her eyes are huge with terror. Suddenly her body sags, and only the ropes that bind her fast keep her from slumping to the ground.

Bruqah help me
, she mutters, almost as if out of old habit.
Papa help me. I'm here. I'm here
. Then her voice is lost beneath the sputter and pop of red-orange lava fingers crawling among the stone menhirs and monoliths that surround her.

The eight-year-old glances between the saw-toothed leaves of the tanghin tree.

"Leave me alone, Jehuda!" she shouts.

Why Deborah! Do I offend you? You who deny my existence?

The voice comes from inside the girl's head.

In front of her, a thin spiral of smoke rises from black lava, and heat-charred snags smolder like damp torches. Out of that comes a snarling, a growling, and figures appear, men dressed in skins and carrying rifles and axes. Hunchbacked, they moved across the landscape.

Making wide ambulatory crossings along the hillside to avoid a molten area, stopping every now and then to shoot back down the hill, the figures close in. It is almost impossible to tell them apart, for their heads are draped with the heads of dogs.

Squatting, concentrating their firepower on the brush below, the bizarre coven watch in silence as a skin-dressed man emerges from a thicket of thorns. He, too, wears a dog head, but it lies upside-down between his shoulder-blades. Around his neck, he wears an Iron Cross.

He sits down and starts to beat a weir drum. The others dance. Slowly. All elbows and shoulders, moving clockwise along the swamp that edges the rain forest. Now counter-clockwise, soundless except for the occasional slapping of guns and sheathed knives against their skin.

The drummer rises. Passing between the others, he trudges up the black pumice and threads his way through the huge gravestones to stoop before the unconscious girl.

Taloned fingers lift her chin. Her eyes blink open and her facial muscles constrict with fear. Whimpering quietly, she tries to work her arms free. The rope scrapes uselessly against the totem and the dog-man raises his head and laughs----

Laughter from the beach and the whimpering of the child who was being held too close drew the man out of the vision.

"I'll be right down," he said, but he did not move. "It is not over yet, is it, Erich," he whispered.

He stared at the Madagascar mainland, toward the rain forest, where four days ago he saw a plane spiral down to Earth.