The Holocaust Opera (5 page)

He must have read the look of terror on my face because he opened his dreadful mouth and laughed. “I do more good than bad, young woman,” he said in a meticulous tone. “I can assure you of that. A lot of these animals find homes through me. It is far better than them living out their miserable lives in the streets where a multitude of horrors abound.”

I wasn’t at all sure that I agreed with him, but I nodded nevertheless.

“What happened to Pop Shaw?” Jeremiah asked.

“Pop
who?”
Wilhelm Schroeder said in obvious irritation.

“Pop Shaw,” Jeremiah repeated. “This used to be a music store, you know.”

Wilhelm Schroeder’s cruel eyes once again retreated into his skull and his sallow skin seemed to sag on his face. “I’m afraid you’ve made some mistake, boy. I’ve been here since before you were born.”

Jeremiah stared expressionless for a long moment, but there was something in his posture that alarmed me, some deep-rooted rage that might surface at any moment. Schroeder had called him boy, and I remembered reading a reference that the Nazis had called male Jews ‘boy’, just as white southerners had once referred to blacks.

“Let’s go,” I said, turning and nudging Jeremiah toward the door.

I hugged the little gray kitten to my chest. “I’ll take her,” I told Wilhelm Schroeder, suddenly afraid that he would refuse to relinquish her in favor of the pleasures of execution. “What’s the charge?”

“There will be no charge,” he replied with a slight smile. “Saves me the cost of food...and, of course the unpleasantness of...well...you understand.”

I understood, all right. Somehow this twisted man found joy in killing. I could see it in those cruel, yet gleeful eyes and in that terrible yellow smile that now seemed more like a grimace. I shivered.

“Wait just a moment,” Schroeder said, looking at Jeremiah with circumspect eyes. “You look familiar. Do I know you?”

“No,” Jeremiah said, turning to leave. Schroeder grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around.

“Ah, but I believe I do. Your name is Gideon. Is it not?”

Jeremiah nodded, but he could not hide the incomprehension or the terror on his face.

“I knew your parents long ago,” Schroeder said.

“I don’t think so,” Jeremiah replied.

“Ah, but I did. I haven’t seen them about in quite some time. You look very much like your mother, you know. In fact, the resemblance is almost...supernatural. Tell me, are they well?” Schroeder’s gray, bushy eyebrows rose in inquiry above his cruel eyes and his revitalized grin was the most terrible thing I had ever seen.

“You’re mistaken,” Jeremiah said matter-of-factly.

“Tell me,” Schroeder inquired. “Where are your parents now? I would very much like to...see them again.”

“Fuck off!” Jeremiah said, grabbing me by the arm and pulling me toward the door. By the time we hit the sidewalk Jeremiah was shaking badly and I was near the point of tears.

“That anti-Semitic bastard,” Jeremiah said. “There’s something wrong in there, something about the feel of that place.”

“I know. I can’t stop shaking. He’s so creepy.”

“I don’t care what he said. The place used to be a music store.”

I shot Jeremiah a puzzled frown. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Jeremiah glared at me. “I grew up in this neighborhood. Pop Shaw’s music emporium was sandwiched between an Italian restaurant called Gino’s and a Chinese laundry. Tell me what you see there.”

I looked back and stared open-mouthed. There was indeed a Chinese laundry and an Italian restaurant called Gino’s. When I looked back at Jeremiah, I saw some kind of dreadful enlightenment come over his face.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t give me that, Jeremiah. What was all that about your parents?” I felt suddenly very confused about everything. Who was Jeremiah Gideon? Why wouldn’t he talk about his past? How come he lived in the basement of a large brownstone dwelling that had been mostly closed off from the world? Other than Jeremiah’s basement apartment, I had never been allowed in any other part of the house. On several occasions, I suggested the possibility of a guided tour, but Jeremiah always remained adamant in his refusal to allow me—or anyone else, as far as I knew—admittance into that seemingly sacred realm.

“It was about nothing,” Jeremiah said. “That sick bastard was just being nosy.”

“I don’t think so, Jeremiah. He knew your name.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“You haven’t talked about it at all!” I replied, anger inflaming my words. “I know nothing about you, for fuck’s sake! Jeremiah, we’re lovers. You have got to start trusting me.”

“I don’t have to do anything.”

“That’s right, you don’t, Jeremiah. I don’t even know who you are. Screw you!” I turned to leave. Jeremiah gripped my shoulder. I wrenched free of his grasp and whirled to face him. There were tears in his eyes and I felt tears of my own sliding down my cheeks.

“What you don’t understand, Roxanne, is, I
can’t
confide in you.”

“You can do anything you want.”

He shook his head adamantly. “I’m afraid,” he whispered, and it was the first time I ever consciously realized it. He was being clandestine because of fear, not arrogance. Jesus, he
was
afraid, but what on earth was he afraid of?

“I’m sorry I dragged you into this,” he said with a sigh.

“You didn’t drag me into anything,” I reminded him, softening like a little fool. “It was I who forced my way into your world. Remember?”

Jeremiah nodded and his gaze held mine. I thought again of the night I’d seen him through the window encased in some sort of fleshy sac. I’d been having nightmares ever since, afraid to fall asleep, beating myself up, seeing things, hearing things, thinking that I was the crazy one. Now, I wasn’t sure of anything. Jeremiah held my gaze and for the first time since making his acquaintance, I sensed something terrible inside him. There was something in those soft, sad brown eyes that wasn’t real, wasn’t natural.

He lifted his hand up and gingerly caressed the scar on his face, and then he put his hand out to touch my face with the fingers he’d used to touch the scar. I winced and drew away. Jeremiah showed no emotion. I stood on that sidewalk and I could not look away from his hypnotic stare, nor could I find my tongue to speak any more useless words.

* * * *

We parted company then, Jeremiah going his way, me going mine. My heart ached deeply. I did not want to lose him, yet I understood then that he had never really belonged to me. I think it was the first time I consciously realized that Jeremiah could never belong to anything except his dark destiny.

I did a lot of soul searching on the walk back to my apartment. I needed answers to a thousand daunting questions. In the beginning, it had been enough just to be with Jeremiah. Or so I’d told myself. The logic was always there, of course, that eventually I would be able to break down his barriers. Now, I was further away from that goal than ever before, and my heart ached with a terrible knowledge, a terrible burden. I could not just let him go, I realized. He was much too important to me. I now needed more than secrecy and empty hope, and I knew what I would have to do to get those things.

As my mind worked, I stopped at a market and bought cat food and a litter box. Out on the street, a cold autumn wind cut through the lonely canyons of brownstones. In the distance, the city groaned like a hibernating beast. I tucked the little ball of warm fur between my coat and my body and could not shake the eerie feeling that I’d just saved a living soul from the clutches of some unspeakable evil.

* * * *

I slept poorly that night. Nothing new in that. My mind would not let me rest. The plan that had been just a seed earlier in the day had now germinated into this ugly little bud that wanted to blossom. I kept it at bay, terrified of bringing it into the light. It would not go away. In the morning, I put a pot of strong coffee on and went down to retrieve the paper.

Upon my return, I discovered the yet unnamed kitten awake and mewing for milk. I busied myself feeding her, trying to occupy my mind with possible names. I could not concentrate. I poured a cup of coffee, sat down, and opened the paper.

The morning headline shocked me to the foundations of my being. It read:

POPULAR AND GIFTED JUILLIARD MUSIC PROFESSOR, DR. MAX FRIEDMAN, COMMITS SUICIDE

For a long moment, I could not breathe. I went back to the headline, hoping that it was a mistake, praying that it was another Max Friedman. There must be two Max Friedman’s in a city this size, my mind insisted
.
Perhaps there were, but the man I had encountered at the library that day more than a week ago was staring out at me from a recent photograph. There could be no mistake. I read the article and then read it again.

It seemed that Dr. Friedman’s body had been found by his wife at 1:00 AM, slumped over his desk in his study. It was presumed that he had been listening to a student’s compositions (something he did often for the purposes of grading and critique) because a portable cassette player was found on the desk before him with the power turned on and a tape in the slot. It was reported that he had left a suicide note, but that the contents were being withheld pending an investigation.

It seemed that Dr. Friedman had driven separate ice picks simultaneously into his brain through the openings in his ears. Both picks were embedded to the hilt, the handles still firmly gripped by blood-drenched fingers now inflexible with rigor mortis.

* * * *

I read the article a third time, and a fourth, shaken beyond articulation. My world was in the process of coming apart. There was a pattern here that I’d begun to recognize as the long night previous had passed. The bag lady all those months ago and her reference to Jeremiah’s music hurting the ears; the absence of pedestrians in Jeremiah’s neighborhood, as if some form of lethal poison was leaching out onto the streets; my own terrifying experience that night as I’d gazed through the basement window; Dr. Friedman and the things he had confided in me. What about Wilhelm Schroeder, I wondered? Could he be connected in some way? Yes, I sensed a connection there as well. It could not be coincidence. His method of animal extermination; his recognition of Jeremiah; his inquisition about his parents.

There was my own growing sense that something wasn’t quite right in Jeremiah’s world: the headaches of late, the accompanying depression, the woman in my dream. Who was she? Why was she haunting my darkest hours? As the weeks passed, I’d become increasingly convinced that she was relevant in some way, that she was trying to communicate with me, or perhaps warn me of some imminent eventuality.

The mathematics is skewed,
Dr. Friedman had told me on that day.
The compositions are tainted with something.

What? I wondered. What on God’s-green-earth could skew mathematics or taint ordinary music? Then I remembered something I had learned long ago about music from a teacher:

There is no such thing as original
music,
she had told me.
Do not kid yourself, music is not another of mankind’s clever inventions. It always has been, it is now, and it always will be. It is as constant as the tides or the changing of the seasons. As human beings, as artists, we merely pluck it out of the fabric of existence and temporarily call it our own. In time, it goes back into the collective pool and is recycled. It is merely one of the forces born of the same mathematics that created the universe. And though we are sentient and intelligent beings, we have little control over its designs.

We have little control over its designs!

That statement kept reverberating in my brain as I sat rereading Dr. Friedman’s obituary and drinking cup after cup of hot, black coffee. Perhaps Jeremiah’s music, for some inconceivable reason, was born on the
rim
of the universe—a place I had once fleetingly and stupidly delved into during a childhood bout of petulance—or perhaps it hadn’t been born at all, but conjured instead from some dark place.

We have little control over its designs.

This was the thing that had been nagging me. What if Friedman had been right? What if Jeremiah had little or no control over the music he was composing? What if some force beyond his power was pushing him onward, nudging him toward the realm of some terrible destiny?

I began to feel all hot and panicky.

I went back to the article and reread it.

The police were in the process of searching for the tape’s composer. If all else failed, they would air the tape on radio station WNBC at precisely 6:00 PM this very evening. The implication struck me like a hammer blow. What would happen when they played the tape on the radio? Dear God, what might happen if millions of people tuned in and listened to those compositions?

I stood up quickly, my knee slamming the underside of the table and spilling my coffee all over the article. I made a mad lunge for the phone. A gray, streaking mass came at me from out of nowhere. I barely had time to register its significance before the kitten slammed into my chest like a small locomotive, pushing the wind from my lungs and knocking me back against the table. Its tiny talon-like claws sank into my flesh like fishhooks. I screamed and tried to rip the wretched thing off me. Its strength was extraordinary. In an instant, it had shredded my clothing and ripped my flesh.