A Man Lies Dreaming (13 page)

‘You don’t know where she is, do you,’ I said.

‘Listen to me,
Wolf
, or whatever you call yourself these days – do you think I don’t
know
you? You are nothing, you are less than nothing; you are the shit beneath my shoe.’

‘Göring,’ I said – throwing it out to him.

He stopped and stood stock-still. That was enough for me. ‘You paid him to get her out of Germany, didn’t you,’ I said. ‘But she never made it out the other end and now you’re panicking.’

For a moment he looked murderous, then abruptly he subsided and shrugged. ‘So you still have some contacts with your old comrades,’ he said. ‘You think they value you? One thing that can be said for Nazis, Wolf, they make shitty sentimentalists.’

‘One thing that can be said for Jews,’ I said, ‘is that … no, I’ve got nothing.’

Unexpectedly he laughed. ‘You used to have plenty to say.’

‘I can help you find her. If you let me go.’

‘You?’ He gestured at the room, the broken furniture, my broken face. ‘You can’t even help yourself, you schmuck.’

I had a moment of clarity, then. Perhaps it was the whiskey. ‘You don’t think they did it, do you? You don’t think they did it because you work with them.’

Again he went still. This time, I had the feeling I was on thin ice. He was a man always in control, but it must have cost him, and inside he was coiled tight. The wrong pressure could set him off and then there’d be no telling what he’d do. ‘How can you, a Jew, work with—’

‘Nazis?’ He laughed. ‘Cock-sucking opportunists,’ he said. ‘That’s all they are. Rats growing fat having jumped a drowning ship.’

He kept mixing his metaphors or perhaps it was the whiskey and what it was doing to me. I felt so drowsy, drowsy and warm. ‘How much did you pay Göring?’

‘Comrade Göring is a good communist now.’

It was hard to believe that fat Göring had once been a decorated flying ace: he often boasted of having shot down twenty-two Allied airplanes during the Great War. He had even been awarded an Iron Cross, First Class: but then I had one myself.

‘You stay away from my daughter,’ Rubinstein said again. He sounded less sure of himself, somehow.

‘Whatever you say.’ I was too tired to argue, and I sensed he didn’t know any more than what he’d told me. It must have driven him mad, not knowing where his daughter was, what had happened to her. Did she lie dead even now in some Alpine fissure, or worse, was she even now being made to pleasure some rich old man in barbarous Egypt or Hindustan, another slave amongst many? Whatever he said I knew he didn’t truly believe in Göring’s innocence. You lie down with dogs and you’re liable to get up with fleas, as my mother used to say.

Though I loved dogs.

‘What did he say?’

‘He mumbled something about dogs,’ Dovele said.

‘Huh.’

Rubinstein stopped pacing. He leaned towards me, putting his face close to mine. I could smell his expensive cologne. His voice was quiet and lethal like a stiletto. ‘I want you to remember what I told you.’

I nodded, or at least my head fell on my chest. ‘I’ll remember …’

‘You will,’ he said. And then he smiled, and it was a smile that brought me suddenly wide awake. It was the coldest and meanest expression I had ever seen on a human being. ‘Hold him, boychiks.’

‘Yes, Mr. Rubinstein.’

‘Let’s do this.’

‘Do what?’ I said, but they ignored me. I tried to struggle against them but I was too weak. ‘Take his trousers off.’

‘What? Stop!’

I fought them. Panic gave me strength I thought lost. They knocked me about and then they pulled down my trousers and my underpants and I was lying there with my trousers round my ankles and my private parts exposed.

‘Cold, Wolf?’

His men obediently laughed. ‘Pick him up, pick him up! We haven’t got all day.’

They picked me up and righted the chair and sat me down again.

‘Dovele, you hold him still. Moishe, spread his legs.’

‘You fucking animals, you dirty fucking Jews—!’

‘Put a sock in it.’

‘Yes, Mr Rubinstein,’ Moishe said, though it had been addressed to me. He took off my left shoe and peeled off my sock and scrunched it up into a ball and shoved it into my mouth. My teeth bit down on cheap cotton soaked in sweat and I gagged and almost choked. Dovele held my body secure while Moishe took hold of my legs.

‘Don’t fucking struggle,’ he said. He sounded almost compassionate.

‘Tie his legs to the chair.’

‘With what?’

‘God damn it,’ Rubinstein said. ‘Just hold him still, will you?’

Moishe slammed his fist into my face. I felt my legs go limp.

‘Don’t knock him out!’

They had me the way they wanted me. I was too weak to struggle, and the men were too strong. My legs were spread wide, my private parts exposed to Rubinstein’s scrutiny. He leaned in, studied them dispassionately, like a scientist examining an insect. ‘Thought you’d have a bigger dick,’ he said, conversationally. ‘Saw you in Munich, once, you know.’ He mimed, his hand waving between his legs, near dragging on the floor. ‘Thought you’d be swinging like a bloody elephant, almost, the way you carried on,’ he said, and his men laughed.

I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe. I was hyperventilating, flooded with fear. He didn’t rush, Rubinstein. He savoured the moment. Outside the window I thought I saw the first rays of dawn, but I could have been imagining it. It was so very quiet.

In the silence the flick of his knife was as loud as the strike of a clock.

In another time and place Shomer lies dreaming. He tosses and turns on the upper bunk he shares with two other men, an emaciated ginger-haired Jew from Slovenia and a short once-fat Transylvanian trader whose folds of skin flap like loose sails in the wind. All around him are the groans and snores and murmured cries of the other inmates, hundreds of men crammed into this block.

Shomer dreams of women. Big busty Austrian girls with breasts as white as cream, nipples like dark chocolate truffles, girls who smile with saucy eyes and press close against him, murmuring filthy words, enticing him to touch, to feel, to experience their inherent goodness. Shomer dreams of small dark Jewish girls with bright clear eyes, whose modest dresses hide their lithe bodies and wanton desire.

Shomer dreams of gypsy girls moving in the light of torches, sweat glistening on their skin, a dancing bear sitting forlornly with its back to a tree, chewing on bark. The girls dance and clash their cymbals and their dresses rise and give him a flash of ankle, even of thigh. Shomer dreams of Viennese housewives waiting for the milkman all alone with their husbands and children out of the house, dressed in nothing but a shift they wait by the door, touching themselves through the thin material. He dreams of posh English girls and society ladies, slowly unlacing their elaborate dresses to reveal sheer nakedness underneath. He dreams of the women held prisoner in the Joy Division, the camp’s brothel explicitly prohibited to Jews, where the spoils of war wait every night for the other prisoners to come and rut with them like the animals they are. And out of nowhere comes the image of his wife Fanya, her small serious face and her dark eyes that could nevertheless twinkle so mischievously, and the smell of cholla bread fresh out of the oven and the sweet taste of kiddush wine and the candles burning on the windowsill and Avrom and Bina his children looking up to him as he breaks the bread and dips it in salt and passes it to them, on a Friday night dinner not that long ago. And he tosses and turns, fighting off the dream for he does not want to see their faces, does not want to hear the sound of their voices or their laugh, their baby smell, their love, and moreover and most of all he does not want to think of the day they had arrived here, in Auschwitz, and at the gates were parted, he to go one way, they the other, never to be seen again.

And all around him the men toss and turn and cry in their sleep ten to a row, dreaming of loved ones, and their dreams turn to ash in their mouths and they turn and they dream of food, masticating in their sleep, hollowly, that endless sound of hundreds of men all chewing food they would never chew again.

And Shomer is awake, his bladder pressing painfully, and so he climbs down cautiously from the bunk pushing and fighting his way and down to the ground and makes his way in the darkness of the block to the bucket, this big monstrous iron bucket full of piss, and he pulls down his prisoner’s pyjamas and holds his penis in his hand and stares down at it in wonder, this alien appendage, unfamiliar and awful strange. He urinates painfully, and the piss slops off the rim of the bucket and he knows he has lost tonight’s lottery, it is his lot to carry the bucket outside to be emptied, but something inside him almost welcomes the humiliation and pain. For a long moment more he stands there, listening to the camp and the sound of nightmares made literal and given voice. He shakes his penis sadly, with resignation, and folds it back into the uniform pants. At last he picks up the bucket and carries it with careful pained precision into the cold outside but the piss still slops onto his feet and soaks the bottom of his pants but at least he’s no longer thinking of Fanya and the children and the night so full of ghosts; there is that at least.

*    *    *

‘Hold him still, damn it!’

Wolf was struggling in the chair, his eyes bulging, the veins standing out on his forehead, pulsing with blood. He made strange, animal-like sounds.

Rubinstein knelt between Wolf’s legs with his knife in his hand. Wolf’s penis dangled uselessly, his stomach was knotted with revulsion and fear. Rubinstein grabbed Wolf’s penis in his hand. Dovele looked on, impassive, as Moishe turned his head away, in disgust or sympathy it was impossible to tell. Wolf was screaming, screaming through the sock stuffed in his mouth, the sound muffled but no less terrified for all that. Rubinstein, almost gently, pulled on Wolf’s cock, drawing forth Wolf’s foreskin until it protruded beyond the tip like a monk’s cowl. He pinched the foreskin, pulling it still, with Wolf shaking and shaking above him and the two men holding him down.

‘Filthy thing,’ Rubinstein said, dispassionately. He pulled, sharply, then with almost the same smooth easy movement, almost as though he had had plenty of practice, he brought the knife up to the penis and sliced neatly through the foreskin.

Wolf screamed.

On his knees before Wolf, Julius Rubinstein regarded the slice of human skin he held between his fingers.

‘Huh,’ he said.

‘Mazel tov!’ Dovele said. ‘It’s a boy!’

Still, for a long moment Rubinstein remained where he was, an almost puzzled expression, it seemed, clouding his face. He stared at Wolf’s foreskin like a scientist confronted with evidence; but evidence of what, he didn’t seem able to say. Slowly he raised his eyes, regarded Wolf’s withdrawn and shrunken penis. At last, with an almost contemptuous gesture, he tossed the shred of foreskin to the floor and stood up. ‘Who’s the fucking Jew now,’ he said.

He made a gesture with his head. His two men released their hold on Wolf and stepped aside. That head movement again, so slight as to be almost missed. Moishe kicked the legs of Wolf’s chair as Dovele back-handed Wolf across the face. The chair collapsed and Wolf was sent sprawling on his back, his pants down, his newly-circumcised penis flopping sadly.

Rubinstein took two steps that brought him directly over Wolf. He looked down on him, like Moses looking down on the people from the heights of Mount Sinai.

‘Stay the fuck away from my daughter,’ he said. He pulled at his belt buckle. Untied himself. His member loomed above Wolf, dark and foreboding. Rubinstein was built like an ape.

‘No, no,’ Wolf tried to say. It came out muffled. Rubinstein grunted. A stream of hot piss burst forth from his member, hitting Wolf. It was in Wolf’s hair, on his face, in his mouth soaking the gag until Wolf thought he would choke to death. Wolf moaned and tried to crawl away. No one said a word. It was silent in the room but for the hiss of urine. It seemed to go on and on. Wolf closed his eyes. For a moment it seemed to him it was his father standing above him, that this was just a repeat of the nightly ritual of childhood. Then Rubinstein grunted again and the stream trickled to a halt and Rubinstein buckled his belt. He bent down and, almost gently, pulled the sodden sock out of Wolf’s mouth. ‘Sweet dreams, sunshine,’ he said – whispered. Then he kicked Wolf viciously in the ribs. Wolf screamed and this time the scream was not muffled.