Transgression (19 page)

T
he convoy turned down a narrow lane and pulled up behind a screen of trees. It was time for lunch. A Spartan meal was laid out on folding tables, but no one was hungry. Pierre, Char and Adele went for a walk.

“What do you think, Adele?” Pierre asked.

“About what?”

“About what happened in Stuttgart.”

Char answered for her. “All that bombing is the reason the war is over. We were fighting for our lives.”

“We were under occupation, we weren’t fighting for our lives,” Pierre replied.

“My father was,” Adele said. She could feel her nerves unravelling, twitching under her skin.

“Adele’s father was a soldier,” Char explained. “He was killed in the first month of the war.”

“I’m very sorry,” Pierre said.

“And her mother died of grief.”

“Oh, no.” Pierre looked doubly sorry.

Adele clenched her teeth. “It’s all right.”

“Doubt and guilt never fed anyone.” Char sounded upset. “We don’t have time for such things. It never clothed anyone or nursed anyone, either. Everything has been wrong and nothing has been right. That may be true, but still, the war is over and now we can be of use.”

“We’ve been bombing women and children for over two years, Char,” Pierre said.

It was almost dusk by the time the trucks rattled across a plank bridge over a wide river. They pulled up along the edge of a woods. Gathering everyone around him, Maurice explained that though they were only forty miles from Weimar, because of all the shattered machines of war clogging the road and the bomb craters and uncertain bridges, it was too dangerous to push on in the dark. They’d spend the night there.

After a skimpy meal, the drivers and mechanics put up two tents, a large one for the nurses and a smaller one for Maurice. As for themselves, they were happy enough to curl up in the truck cabs.

Since the night was promising to be clear and the sky was already filling up with stars, the young workers voted to sleep on groundsheets in the open air. Char and Adele lay their bedrolls down beside each other. The warmth that had followed the convoy all that day was disappearing. A swampy smell of decay, coming from somewhere deeper in the woods, crept coldly over them.

“What do you think of Pierre?” Char whispered once they had settled in.

Adele had been lying there thinking about Dresden, wondering what it must look like. Did it look like Stuttgart? Was all of Germany a charnel house?

“He’s very honest with his feelings,” Char said.

Adele couldn’t bring herself to look Char’s way. Frivolous and mindless and foolish feelings in the midst of other people’s horrors and nightmares-it reminded her too much of someone she knew. It reminded her of herself.

Char chatted on but as Adele wasn’t answering she soon gave up and fell asleep. Adele continued to lie there wide awake, feeling nothing but a smothering confusion. She could hear her father. “Be of service to other people. That’s the most important thing,” he had said. She could see his kind face. And all she was doing was looking for Manfred.

When Adele woke up the next morning, the first thing she saw was a dazzle of dewdrops sparkling all around her. Her hair felt wet, her bedroll freezing. She looked over at Char, who was still asleep, the early morning sun just beginning to colour her face. She looked as innocent as an angel.

They reached Weimar before noon. It had been bombed, too, but not devastated. On the outskirts gutted buildings stood side by side like rows of haunted houses. Deeper into the city nothing seemed to be touched at all.

The trucks didn’t stop in Weimar but drove straight through and began to climb a series of rising hills. After a few miles, they slowed to a crawl.

Adele smelled the camp before she saw it-it smelled like an open sewer. Soon they were passing by barbed wire fences and watchtowers and long wooden buildings. The trucks pulled through a wooden gateway, rattled into a dusty compound and stopped. Adele looked out the back of the truck. Some men were sitting along the edge of a veranda in front of a large central building. They looked for all the world like a row of cadavers.

An officer poked his head around the canvas opening into the truck. “Welcome to Buchenwald, we’ve been waiting on you folks,” he said in English. “Good to see you all.”

His heartiness seemed wildly out of place to Adele.

“We’re pleased to be here,” Pierre responded, also in English. Char smiled. Pierre was a man of many talents.

They began to climb out of the trucks. Maurice came hurrying up, and he and the army officer walked off together. A few of the men who’d been sitting on the veranda began to step haltingly across the yard.

“French?” the one in the lead asked.

“Yes.” Nurse Sarraute had climbed down from a truck cab and was positioning herself between the advancing men and her workers. “I remember you. Do you remember me? We’ve come back to help.”

“Many have left. Not us.”

“I know.”

The young workers tried to avoid staring at the men’s bone-like arms, yellow skin stretched like parchment, skull faces, but they couldn’t.

“Sweets? Chocolate?” One of the men held out an emaciated hand. The others crowded in aggressively. “Cigarettes?”

“Yes, of course. As soon as we get organized.” Nurse Sarrutte turned away and, clapping briskly for her flock to fall in line, walked across the compound toward a smaller building. The young workers hurried to follow her.

A large American flag was hanging listlessly from a flagpole. The dusty yard was full of army trucks, stars and stripes painted on their doors. Groups of soldiers were lounging around. As the young women filed by, the soldiers pushed their caps back off their foreheads and smiled.

Adele turned away, shielding her face with her hand as if the sun had suddenly struck her eyes.

They filed through a double screen door into the foyer of a small infirmary. Nurse Sarraute, with the help of Pierre’s translation, began an animated discussion with a blond army nurse as to where the supplies they’d brought should go and how best to deploy her people. The smell inside was almost as powerful as the smell outside, and now it was mixed in with the sharp odours of disinfectants and medicines.

Half-dead men in nightshirts, eyes and faces expressionless, shuffled past Adele and the rest of the young workers. They didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, just a restless, endless circling up and down the narrow halls.

A naked man, his ribcage protruding grotesquely just under translucent yellowish skin, came up to Adele and stared at her as if he were trying to remember something that had happened a long time ago. Adele took a step back. Char picked up his hand. “Can I take you somewhere? Can I take you back to your room?”

“Third door on the left,” the army nurse called out in English, “try to make him keep his gown on.”

“Third door on the left,” Pierre translated, “try to get him to put his shift back on.”

Char nodded and with the naked man teetering beside her, she walked off down the hall.

“Adele,” a voice called out.

Adele turned to see Maurice poking his long solemn face in past the screen doors. He motioned to her.

By the time she’d caught up to him, he was some distance away from the infirmary, striding toward a small building sitting on top of a knoll.

“The people here are the in-between men. That’s what I call them, anyway,” he said to her as she caught up. “These are the men balanced between
life and death. The Americans stumbled on this place a few weeks ago. Twenty thousand souls were packed into these buildings, though apparently the Germans had marched off another twenty thousand two days before. The Americans gave them food. Some died just from that. And some died because they were going to die anyway. Most of the healthier ones have left, trying to find their way back home.”

Adele could see a group of tiny old men with yellow faces sitting on the wooden steps of the building. As she and Maurice drew closer, the men stood up and stared. Now Adele could see that her eyes had played a trick on her. They were children.

“Good day, boys,” Maurice said, walking up and smiling broadly. “Who speaks French?”

None of the children answered. A few looked down at their tattered shoes but most stared straight at Adele with deep, enormous eyes.

More yellow faces peered out of the gloom of the building.

“Come now,” Maurice insisted, “I know some of you are French. Speak up now.”

A boy of about ten, wearing leather breeches and with an American soldier’s cap on his head, stepped forward. Though his stick-like legs were caked with mud and his skin was stretched in creases across his face, unlike the men in the infirmary, his eyes were full of light. “I speak French.”

“Who else?” Maurice asked.

A few others put up their hands.

“These are the orphans of Buchenwald,” Maurice said. “There used to be about nine hundred but most have already been shipped to Switzerland or America. We’re trying to find places for everyone. There’s only these few left.”

“What about their relatives, they must have relatives?”

Maurice stared at her. “No,” he said.

The boy who had spoken up moved closer to Adele. When he smiled, Adele could see that his teeth were rotting. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Adele.”

“Are you going to stay with us?”

Adele looked at Maurice. Maurice nodded and walked away.

The boy took her hand and led her through the door of the building. The other children shuffled in after them. It seemed dark at first and then Adele began to make out rows of crude plank beds stacked to the ceiling. There seemed hardly space enough to crawl between the layers, even for the smallest child.

“You can sleep here.” The boy led her to a bunk with a little more head space. Adele sat down on the edge of it. The boy took off his cap and sat down beside her. Some pieces of his hair stuck up in random tufts; the rest of his head was bald.

“My name is Étienne,” he said.

“Hello, Étienne.” Adele was feeling desperate to make some kind of normal conversation. “And can you tell me your last name?”

“Étienne pushed up his ragged sleeve. Bright blue numbers were tattooed on the underside of his wrist. “A-4133,” he said.

All the children crowded around and pushed up their sleeves and showed Adele their numbers.

“That’s not your last names,” Adele said. She touched the numbers on Étienne’s wrist. They felt raised under her fingertips. She glanced at him.

Étienne was watching her, his eyes like two beams of light.

Over the next few days Adele discovered that she didn’t have to do everything on her own. The Americans had arranged for selected citizens of Weimar to come up to the camp to do the dirty work, as a kind of punishment or, at least, as a penance. On her first day, two middle-aged women arrived to scrub the floor of the barracks.

The nurses from the infirmary made periodic visits, and some of the Red Cross workers did as well, especially Char and Pierre, but it was Adele who had been given the job of permanent nanny. She slept with the children, organized their meals, demanded that they bathe regularly, led them in gentle exercises, sorted through a mountain of donated clothes, altered everything to fit on a clattering old sewing machine, moved from bunk to bunk quieting the children who had bad dreams, the criers and the screamers. Sometimes she was up half the night.

For the first time in a long while Adele felt like she was of some use. When she’d first tried to organize a game no one had moved. They’d just stood there as if to play was as foreign to them as if she’d asked them to fly. Lost little Ukrainian boys. And Czechoslovakian, Polish, Belgian, French.

She’d decided to divide them into three groups depending on their size and to play games that required no language. She’d thought up variations of hide and seek for the little ones, games of tag for the middle ones, football for the biggest.

As the days went by, the boys began to find their smiles, and then they began to laugh. The big ones crowded around her eager for the next game, the middle ones organized secret competitions to see who could hold her hand the longest, the small ones began to follow her around the camp like a clutch of ragged ducks.

Étienne became Adele’s lieutenant. He did any job she asked him to do. He kept order in the barracks. He ate beside her at the table. He slept on the bunk above her.

One night, when the other boys were supposed to be asleep, he hung upside down from his bed and peered down at her.

“Go to sleep, Étienne,” Adele whispered. She could see him quite clearly. She always left the light on just inside the door. Behind the circle of children, rows of empty bunks receded into the dark. Étienne’s tufts of hair were hanging down like long ears.

“You look like a bat,” Adele said.

Étienne smiled. “Do you know what my real last name is?”

“No.”

“Adler.”

“Is it? That’s a nice name, Étienne.”

“Étienne Adler.”

“Where do you come from, Étienne?

“Auschwitz.”

“I don’t know it.”

“It’s in Poland.” Étienne watched her for a moment, the downward flow of blood making his face go red. “They marched us through the snow.”

“To Buchenwald, you mean?”

Étienne swung down and landed on Adele’s bunk. He sat cross-legged by her feet. He pulled the bottom of her blanket up over his lap. “My brother died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My father didn’t die. He died here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My mother died in Auschwitz. My two sisters died in Auschwitz.”

Adele could see his hand moving up and down under her blanket, his pinched face falling into a kind of trance.

“Please don’t, Étienne,” she said, reaching out and gently drawing him down beside her, covering him up with her blanket. “Try to go to sleep. There.”

“They sprayed my father with water,” Étienne said. “It was night but they had big lights on. I could see. There were other men, too.”

“Sleep, Étienne,” Adele whispered.

“He was covered in ice. Then they sprayed him again until he could hardly walk. They sprayed him again. Then he fell down. Then a doctor came. He looked at him and all the other men. Then they sprayed them all again. When they were frozen, they lifted them and took them to the hospital.”