After Dachau (16 page)

Now that I was finished huffing and puffing my way through the wall, I noticed that the silence around me was absolute. Mallory and her flashlight beacon were nowhere in sight. I switched on my own flashlight and looked around. The pipe I’d crawled in on continued in its eastward course, disappearing into a wall three feet ahead, and nothing bigger than a rat could have followed it. Behind me, the wall of the tunnel curved up and away into a ceiling four feet away. The floor below, obviously the same as the floor of the tunnel we’d just left, made a north-south passageway running parallel to the tunnel.

As far as I could see, Mallory had vanished into thin air.

At last I understood why I might think she was playing with me. In fact, I was about one-third convinced she
was
playing with me. More to the point, however, I was two-thirds afraid that maybe she
wasn’t
playing with me—that she’d fallen into some hidden chasm and was gone forever.

I called out her name but got nothing back except echoes.

She’d said ten feet. Having crossed two of them to get to the middle of this passageway, there were presumably eight still to go. I slid down off the pipe and began digging through the junk on the floor, looking for trapdoors. There were none, of course. I checked the pipe itself for openings on the underside. There were none. Mallory had snuck in a reference to Eddie Tucker’s “loose brick,” so I looked for loose bricks in the east wall of the passageway. There were none. I played my flashlight over the ceiling without getting any more bright ideas than I’d had the first time. Resting atop the masonry of the tunnel like a board on a cylinder, the ceiling presented a smooth, unbroken surface.

I was reluctant to call out again—reluctant to admit I was stuck—but if she was honest in her ten-foot estimate, then that’s what I was. I thought of a way to end the standoff without humiliating myself. Speaking in a perfectly normal tone of voice, I said, “I’m beginning to think you’re playing with me.”

“Turn off the flashlight,” Mallory replied. Her voice bounced off the walls in a way that left me clueless as to its point of origin, but I couldn’t resist sending my light around again anyway, hoping to catch her hovering in midair, perhaps. No wiser, I turned it off.

For a moment I was blind. Then, as the rods and cones of my eyes gradually came to an agreement about the situation, I perceived an arm reaching into the darkness from a spot where no arm could be. It was apparently issuing from the juncture between the ceiling and the tunnel some four feet above and four feet to the north of the pipe we’d come in on.

“Do you see it?” Mallory asked.

“I see it.”

She withdrew her arm. Switching on my flashlight and directing it to the spot, all I now perceived was that no one could possibly be there. I climbed up on the pipe, then flattened myself onto the upper curve of the tunnel wall. From this position I could now see the opening Mallory’s voice was coming from.

“Get as much of your body as you can above the middle of the bulge,” she advised.

That made wonderful sense from a theoretical point of view, but turning theory into practice was a different matter. Standing on tiptoe, I was able to embrace a lot of the tunnel wall, and that was fine, but I couldn’t lift my feet off the pipe without sliding back down.

“Wait a second,” Mallory said. “I’m trying to think how I do it myself. Start with your left leg.”

“Start how?”

“It’s sort of like getting up on a horse. You need to throw your left leg up over the bulge. Then climb up and to your right, pulling your right leg up. You need to end up lying stretched out above the bulge. After that, it’s easy.”

She was right, provided you were talking about a horse the size of an elephant and were meant to ride not sitting on top but lying on one side of it. I managed to get up there and once in position felt secure enough to creep forward toward Mallory’s hand, visible four feet away.

Mallory was reaching down through an opening just above the juncture of the ceiling and the apex of the tunnel. To someone on the floor below, the bulge of the tunnel wall not only hid this opening, it persuaded the eye that no such
opening could exist. There just wasn’t room for such an opening, so it was pointless to look for one.

Struggling through this opening, about twelve inches wide by twenty-four long, I found myself in a low-ceilinged, windowless, doorless room some eighteen feet square. Again, to call it a room is misleading. It was a leftover space, a purposeless and unintended volume created by the random intersection of six unrelated surfaces, and the fact that it could serve as a room was the sheerest accident.

Mallory added the area light from my backpack to the one she’d already set up. Without these lights, the room would have been as dark as the Carlsbad Caverns’ deepest pit. With them, it was surprisingly homelike. There were two or three makeshift chairs, a few crate tables showing signs of what might have been recent use if they hadn’t been covered in a thick layer of dust. There was a sizable sleeping pallet, which had been laid out on a pair of pallets of the kind used for storing cargo. Only later did I realize that all this furniture had been disassembled below and reassembled here once the parts had been passed through the narrow entrance to the room.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“This is where I spent the last three months of my life as Gloria MacArthur.”

Mallory returned my gawk with a cool, passionless gaze. Then she turned away to an area where she’d arranged two chairs and a crate table.

“Sit down,” she said. I saw that she’d cleared the chairs of the bulk of the dust they’d collected over the centuries, not that it mattered much, considering the filth we’d picked up in the last hour.

She sat down and started disassembling the crate with a rusty screwdriver she’d found somewhere. When she had the top off, she tipped it at an angle like a conjuror so I could see it was empty. Then she went back to work, taking it apart piece by piece till she was ready to make her next revelation. The crate had a false bottom, a space twenty-four inches square by four inches deep, packed solid with small bundles fitted together with painstaking precision to maximize the available room.

“Our treasury,” she said. “The collected remains of two lives.” She reached for one of the larger bundles, wrapped in what looked like oilcloth, explaining that they’d had room for only one book. She unwrapped it just enough to be able to flip through the pages till she came to a snapshot, which she handed me.

It showed a grinning African girl, a skinny sixteen-year-old, cute as a proverbial button, all nappy hair, blazing white teeth, and eyes as big as saucers.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“That’s Gloria MacArthur.”

I reeled.

I WAS AS MUCH
staggered by my own blindness as anything else. What else had she been preparing me for but this?

Staggered or not, before I could stop myself, I glanced up from the face in the photo to Mallory’s face, checking the resemblance as an entirely automatic reflex. She caught the glance, understood its point, and laughed, uncannily creating a resemblance I wouldn’t have seen there two hours before, when her face was still clean and lily white. Now it was closer to being black than the grinning face in the snapshot.

She took back the photo, replaced it between the pages, and started to shove the book into her backpack when I asked her what book it was. She turned back the oilcloth to expose the cover. It was something called
The New Negro
.

“It was a very influential book in the twenties and thirties, even in the forties,” she explained. “Influential but also controversial. The guy who put it together had a tendency to see the ‘New Negro’ as someone who was
almost
white, as someone who had cut off his cultural roots well above such low life things as jazz and blues. The New Negro was expected to be much more drawn to Beethoven and Bach than to Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith. All the same, it had some valuable stuff in it that no one wanted to lose.”

“Who is this ‘we’ you keep referring to?”

Mallory rewrapped the book and put it in her backpack before giving me an answer. “I’m not going to let you piece the story together through interrogation,” she said. “I’ll tell it my own way.”

“Of course. That’s fine.”

The woman had a positive knack for putting me in the wrong before I even had a chance to
go
wrong.

“I’m not going to
spend a lot of time telling you things you already know,” she began. “Americans weren’t crushed by losing the war, because they didn’t think of it as losing. Hitler’s scientists had beaten ours to the atomic bomb by a matter of months, and that was all it took. The planned Allied invasion was called off in a hurry, and a cease-fire was in place practically overnight. Germany had the whip in its hand but was too exhausted to use it. The United States was out of the war without ever having been bombed, invaded, or even threatened.

“It was different for the people of Europe, of course. Places like France, Belgium, and the Netherlands became
virtual provinces of Germany. Great Britain barely talked its way out of being occupied. Those were the losers. The Americans weren’t losers, they just hadn’t quite managed to be winners. It was time to pick up the pieces and move on. People were glad to forget about it.

“Nobody officially ‘knew’ what had happened to the Jews. There were rumors about death camps, places like Buchenwald and Belsen and Dachau, but it gradually came to be believed that these rumors were being manufactured by the Jews themselves. The Jews were doing their best to keep alive hatred of the Hun—this is the way it was perceived, the way we were
encouraged
to perceive it. The Jews weren’t going to let things get back to ‘normal.’ They wanted the war to go on. I’m sure your little girls would have no difficulty explaining that.”

“That’s right. They wouldn’t.”

“I’m talking about the middle to late forties here, the years when television was just beginning to catch on. Writers for this new medium were producing a lot of cheap spy melodrama, and it was handy to have a ready-made class of enemies to draw on. Gradually this class of enemies became more and more distinctly Jews. It wasn’t necessary to
call
them Jews. You could identify them by their names, their clothes, their profiles, their accents. These were the people the good guys were always struggling with, always on the verge of losing to.

“I’m sure you know that life imitates art. The gangsters of the thirties and early forties learned all their moves from the movies. In the late forties, all the gangsters in the movies were Jews. No one was surprised if in real life the papers reported that police had ‘broken up a gang,’ and it turned
out to be a ‘Jewish’ gang. Arresting Jews came to be seen as working against crime. The Jews were hiding out. Of course they were hiding out—they were criminals! By 1948 you didn’t have to have a specific crime to charge a Jew with. If he was hiding out—and they were all hiding out—then he was a criminal, and tracking him down and locking him up automatically made the world a better place.

“The Jews
we
knew were different, of course. These were artists, not criminals. Then one day Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb disappeared—both on the same day. Two or three of the guys said, ‘Well, this is some kind of mistake,’ and they went downtown to talk to the police about it. They ended up in the office of some captain, who looked at them with great interest and said, ‘Oh, so you know these two men, do you? Close associates, are you?’ He made his point very clear, and by the time the guys left, they were practically saying they’d never heard of Rothko and Gottlieb. Eventually all the Jews were taken—guys like Barnett Newman, Herbert Ferber, and Seymour Lipton. Lee Krasner wasn’t taken, she killed herself.

“By the late forties, as I said, the gangsters were all Jews, according to the movies—but their thugs were all blacks. They made very willing thugs, you see, being glad to have a chance to get back at their former slave-masters. The new language of film made it clear that blacks were all seething with rage and ready to rise up to murder white folks whenever their Jewish handlers gave the word.

“More and more white politicians and pundits were telling us that if us colored folks didn’t like it here, maybe we should get ourselves back to Africa, and more and more of us were thinking that maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea.
Wholesale deportations began in 1950. The word was given out that the people of Africa were longing to have us back and were preparing a regular paradise for us. Of course, not all Negroes were going to be deported—that’s the word that was being given out. The
worthy
ones, the ones who were really
contributing
something, were welcome to stay. Naturally Roy and I saw ourselves as falling into that category—we were artists, after all, not thugs.

“But by the end of 1951 people like us were getting nervous. No one was hearing from friends and relatives who had returned to the Old Country, and it was beginning to be rumored that ships carrying deportees were never arriving. Government officials pooh-poohed all this, of course, producing carloads of happy letters supposedly received in this country from emigrants.