Child of the Journey (26 page)

She handed Hempel the sheet of paper, and turned to Sol.

"In a few days you will be issued new spectacles," she said. "Meanwhile, take care of your eyes." She looked up at Hempel. "Pity. This case interested me. Freak diseases always do."

She lifted a canning jar from atop a black filing cabinet that stood behind her. Within floated testicles and a purplish, uncircumcised penis. Holding the jar before her face, she studied the contents. The jar magnified her face like a mirror at the Panoptikum. "Did I tell you, Otto, I have you to thank for this wonderful specimen? You were the one who first talked to me of tabun. Though your interest in it has, of course, a different base than mine, your enthusiasm led me to acquire a small supply of it in liquid form."
 

She set the jar at the desk edge nearest Hempel and went on speaking as if she had forgotten Sol's presence.

"Have you any idea how effective tabun is?" she asked.

"I just know the nerve gas works," he said.

"How
it works, that's the wonder!...inhibits the action of the enzyme cholinesterase...causes uncontrolled muscular contractions, followed by paralysis...and, finally, death." Her eyes were bright. "I placed a few drops on Hannes' spine during coitus, while he was performing in our brothel. You should've seen how it affected him--even with his special, shall we say, equipment." She put her hand on the jar and leaned forward confidentially. "When I was young, I read how Darwin cut off the legs of a frog engaged in coitus, and the frog continued to perform." She tapped the jar lid with a fingernail.
"This
rivals...no,
eclipses
Darwin's experiment." She gave Hempel a warm smile, then turned to Solomon. "Otto has arranged for this specimen to be shipped to Berlin via his mother in Strassbourg. She is fascinated with our work here."

"How can you, a doctor, do this?" Sol asked. Despite feeling weak with fear, he wanted to take hold of her neck and wring it like a chicken from his uncle's barnyard.

Schmidt patted the jar. "You think me a monster? You are wrong. I admire you Jews. You gave the world its first judicial system, its first efficient society, its first schools, some of its first doctors. The list of your achievements is endless."

She leaned closer. Perhaps realizing that the tops of her breasts were showing, she spread a hand across her lapels. Sol pulled back, as if she were diseased. He looked around for Otto Hempel. The captain had gone.

Relieved, Sol told himself that he had imagined it all. Misha and Hans were safely back at the barracks. He must take care to reconnect with reality.

"Listen to me," Schmidt said. Her voice held a lover's caress. Sol's gaze rested on the jar at the edge of her desk, the momentary flare of hope extinguished. "Though science and medicine interest me above all else," she said, "you would be hard pressed to find a better humanitarian."

C
rouched against the barracks' wall opposite Hans' empty bunk, Solomon watched those fellow inmates who were awake mill about the area. They were skeletal. Stuporous. Compliant. Gray, amorphous figures in striped pajamas.

May their souls find rest, he thought, trying one more time to pray for Hans. One more time, he could not find the words. No matter how deeply inside he reached, all he found was pain. He could not even pray for the living anymore; the prayers stuck in his throat. He just kept seeing that jar in
Pathologie
and hearing Schmidt's last words:
"You'd be hard pressed to find a better humanitarian."
And something else...he could not quite remember what...about Eichmann, and spectacles, and some absurdity about taking care of himself!
  

Not that anything Schmidt had said mattered. He did not care what diabolical scheme she and her colleagues were cooking up. He did not need new glasses. He needed to be left alone, to do nothing. Think nothing. To reach the state of
ayin ha'gamur,
that complete nothingness which the Kabbalah described as the last obstacle facing rational thought when it has reached the limits of its capacity.

He had imagined that when he reached that limit, that place where human understanding would be insufficient to make sense of the world, his consciousness would explode into nothingness.

But
ayin
was still denied him.

"Oh God, let me die,"
a woman pleaded, her voice filling the void inside his head.
"Let me die."
An infant mewled and something laughed, something at best partly human.

Cradling himself with bony arms, Solomon began to rock. Back and forth, back and forth.

Remembering.

...He saw himself as a boy Misha's age, being battered by disembodied voices and sounds that only he could hear. Painfully, he recalled the day that brought shape and form to those voices and sounds, bringing him a series of visions that terrified him beyond measure. He heard the squeal of brakes and the explosions that shattered the sun and gentle silence of a Sabbath afternoon. He saw his friend's car careen to the side of the road and looked at the face of death through cobalt-blue eyes filled with tears. He swam inside them, defenseless and drawn into the dying; he felt again the thing take residence in his body....

The thing
--that was how he had thought of it then, before he learned about dybbuks and ghosts, before his secret voices gave way to visions. A
thing
--bringing black moods, long silences, the easy tears and dark circles that came from sleepless nights spent agonizing over what sin he might unknowingly have committed to warrant such punishment.

He still did not know the source of the visions, but he had come to understand that the dybbuk inside him had given substance to the voices. It was the key to the visions. Strange, he thought, how repetition brought mundanity in its wake, no matter how fearsome or bizarre the experience. He had long since moved away from his childhood fear, through acceptance and curiosity, and on to a hunger for interpretation and understanding.

Some visions came to him in their entirety, but came only once; others began slowly, building over years like serial stories. And there were fragments, too, that came and went so quickly they might have been dreams had they not contained the common strains that appeared in each one: each had its hero, its victim, its dybbuk; each spoke of a Jewish homeland in, of all places, Madagascar.

Sitting there, he catalogued the visions: Jews forced to work for National Socialism, building bombs, fighting on the Russian Front, helping with medical experiments. Jews assassinating politicians, gathering huge sums of money for the Nazi cause, operating a death squad from a unique type of airplane they called a helicopter. There was even a Jew who taught others to counterfeit foreign currency, thereby ruining enemy economies.

Ultimately, each had a single, overriding theme: Nazi abuse of Jewish assets and abilities.

He would distract Schmidt by telling her some of the stories, he decided. She could study his flawed second-sight to find out why he could not apply his powers to something as simple as knowing what was going to happen to his friends. Better yet, to preventing it from happening. That would surely be more entertaining than diseased eyeballs.
  

The flashes of light that inevitably heralded a vision interrupted what was becoming a bitter discourse with himself.
"Dayenu
--enough!" he said out loud. "Oh Lord of the Universe, grant me
ayin."

But the flashes of light came again, followed this time by the cobalt-blue glow that also presaged every vision. God is apparently not listening, he thought wryly, or perhaps the patent on the concept of nothingness applied only to realms of theosophy--to His universe and not the devil's. Even for God, it must be difficult to distinguish a single voice in an outcry from Hell.

Since there was no escape, Sol gave himself up to a potpourri of scenes from a past and future as familiar to him now as a series of old films many times revisited.

----a full moon shines down on the domed keep of a ruined castle and on a dozen beehives rising up like ancient columns behind a black man.
He is lanky and rawboned, bald except for a bowl of hair at the crown of his skull. His left shoulder is draped with a white cloak. He sits on his haunches, forearms across knees--hands turned palms up, fingers crabbed. "I want to be considered a
whole
Jew!" His face is etched with anguish, his voice strained with emotion. "Can't they understand that?"----

----The scene faded. Another replaced it. Sol repositioned his body and watched----

----
a bulb in a blue metal collar hangs garishly from a slatted-board ceiling
. The bulb swings to and fro, to and fro, over the head of the tall, aproned doctor who has bumped into it and set it in motion. The room is awash in the cobalt reflection of the bulb's collar. The stench that fills the air is like that of aged Limburger cheese.

"Welcome to the world of the dead!"----

A hand shook Sol's shoulder. "Herr Freund," Misha whispered. "They are taking some of us somewhere tomorrow. I heard them talking about an experiment, and I saw trucks."

Sol saw an image of an Opel Blitz, its canvas back open like a carnival crier's mouth. "I prefer to die right here."

"Come to bed. Please!" The boy shook him harder. "You need to be rested."

Sol's unresisting head snapped back and forth against the boards. His lids were heavy, his eyes listless, his energy so sapped he had not enough left to curse the guards. He could see the boy, eyes swollen from weeping, but the child's face had a gauzy, pointillist quality. He thought of Hans. He is drinking honey wine with Emanuel, he told himself, deliberately confusing reality with the vision of Ethiopia.

"Don't you know what's happening to you!" the boy screamed. "You're willing yourself to die."
  

Yes, Sol thought. He was becoming
Schmuckstück
--costume jewelry--an ornament bejeweled by sores.

"Please be Herr Freund again," Misha begged. "Please don't die! I don't want the ghost inside you to jump into me!"

With slowly mounting resolve, Sol pulled himself away from the opiate of introspection. "What could you know of ghosts?" he asked Misha.

"Everything."

Misha's gesture took in the world. Solomon smiled. Even here, now, lost among the forgotten souls of Sachsenhausen, childhood encompassed enviable absolutes. "Why would my...
ghost
choose to go to you?"

"If I were right next to you and you were dying," the boy said, "it would come to me. I know about dybbuks. They're evil dead people, ones whose dreams we live in."

"If you believe in such things, Misha, you must stay away from me."

Though clearly terrified, the boy shook his head.

Even in his state of apathy, Solomon knew the urgency of the boy's fear of dybbuks--those souls unable to transmigrate to a higher world because of the enormity of their sins; souls that sought refuge in the bodies of living persons, causing instability, speaking foreign words through their mouths. He remembered begging his mentor, Beadle Cohen, to help him exorcise the dybbuk. The beadle had led him, instead, to the Kabbalah.

"You are strong, Solomon,
" the beadle insisted.
"The dybbuk has opened doors for you to see what other men cannot. Continue to be strong and it will leave as it came. Meanwhile, try to understand its message."

Why had that alien and separate personality cloven to him! If he were guilty of some secret sin that had created an opening for the unquiet soul to enter his own, it was one committed without knowledge or malice. Now, at nearly thirty, he believed that goodness rested in a single tenet of life--in treating your fellow man as you would be treated. Had that been his sin? Had he, at not quite thirteen, neglected to live by that creed?

Taking pity on the child, Sol let himself be led to Hans' bunk. They lay down together. Misha put his head on Sol's shoulder. A tear pressed out of his right eye and trickled down his cheek. He swiped at it angrily, as if it had no right to be there and prove him human.

Sol wanted to cry with him, but who was he to allow himself that luxury? He was nothing special, nor was his suffering. He closed his eyes and held them shut. He wanted nothing more of this world. "Tell me exactly what you meant just now," he whispered.

"My papa is...was a rabbi. One time a man came to the house so Papa could get rid of the ghost-thing inside him. Papa called it a dybbuk."

"What makes you think I have a dybbuk inside
me?"

"Your eyes are strange, like his," the child said. "Papa said the man saw things we could not see. Heard them too. You know. Inside his head. Things from the past and from the future."

Sol thought again about the recurring figures in his visions: the Ethiopian Jew, his black head bald but for the crown of hair that looked like a
yarmulke;
an old man and a woman, robed in tattered blankets and bent over a steaming tea pot; an infant held up to a horned totem by a disembodied brown hand. He knew of no such men, no such baby, no such realities. And the other visions, like Göring talking about something called critical mass, or experiments on the mummified corpse of an ancient Hebrew.