Child of the Journey (28 page)

Cupping the knot in his palm, he turned it to the left and drew the rope tight. Gazing at the moonlight ribbed among the rafters, he took a deliberate, calming breath and shut his eyes. The stench of the blankets wafted into his sinuses. Around him the sound of snoring rose in crescendo. His pulse pounded behind his eardrums and the muscles along his calves tensed. He wondered if the Nazis would take his teeth; those of hanged men were supposed to be important in sorcery. Far away, he heard the mocking laughter of Erich Alois Weisser. He thought he heard the old man of his visions speak longingly of the taste of ginger tea.

"Yiskadal.. ,"
he began. But mourning for himself seemed blasphemous. Perhaps Miriam would...

Miriam.

"I'm so tired, Miri," he whispered. "So very tired."

Stepping from the stool, he kicked it gratefully aside. The noose around his neck held tight. His legs dangled. His body turned beneath the rope.

"You must live, Solomon. Live!"
said Emanuel, the Ethiopian Jew.
"You have not yet fulfilled your destiny."

Could the voices not leave him in peace even now, at the moment of dying?

"Survival, Solomon! Therein lies your duty!"
said Margabrook, the old man wrapped in the blanket.
"There are things to be done that only you can do."

"How dare you, Solomon!"
said Lise Meitner, raising her voice to be heard above the organ strains of the Bach Concerto he had heard earlier.
"Only God has the right to order the Universe."

Sol tried to respond. He could not. His own voice was no more his than his body, and the dark that surrounded him was an emollient, amniotic and safe.

"Don't you dare die, Herr Freund!"
 

Misha's voice reached out from the other side of death and Solomon opened his eyes. Moon-bathed rafters wavered and wheeled above him, and the sounds of his own gasping and choking roared in his ears. Shadows exploded before his eyes. A dry fire seared his throat. He clawed at the rope around his neck, tearing at flesh he knew to be his own.

"I've got your legs! Grab the joist!"
 

Through retinas that threatened to burst, Sol saw a hand groping at the air in slow motion, as if its fingers had a separate existence. He was a puppet, dangling, his strings intact, watching his hand--the puppeteer--relearn the art of manipulating its toy.

Grab the joist,
he tried to tell the hand.

His fingers clutched the wood. His vision cleared. It became intense, precise. He saw his fingers grip the wood, watched the splinters peel off and pierce his flesh. The pain was sweet. He leaned into it, accepting it with gratitude as, suddenly, he knew he was not ready to die.

With God-given strength, the child bolstered Sol's weight, suspending him like an upended log. For an instant, a window in time, gravity abandoned its grip upon Sol. It was time enough for him to loosen and open the noose.

Collapsing to the floor on top of Misha, he clutched his throat and struggled for breath. Stale barracks air passed in and out of his throat, cool and sweet as late-blooming lilac. The voices of the other prisoners demanding quiet greeted him like a symphony. He wanted to embrace them all. Then their voices stilled, and he was faced with the certain knowledge that he would never again have the passing courage to put an end to his life.

Cradling his face in the crook of his arm, he wept for himself and for all of the others without choices.

"You're...squishing...me!"

An elbow poked Solomon's ribs. Still weeping, he rolled aside.

"Why did you do it, Misha?" he asked, his voice hoarse from its recent battle with the rope.

"I owed you your life."

"So we are even," Sol said seriously. "Now go to your bunk. There is little enough time left for rest."

"You, too, Freund," someone said. "Hang yourself or go to sleep!"

Shaking, Sol arose and climbed up into his own bunk. Death had been denied him; as for sleep, there was little chance of that tonight. Some things, he thought, were a matter of choice, while others...

Just how much of life, he wondered, was truly a matter of choice? How much inevitable, given the impact of the collective unconscious of the past on man's actions?

A new idea came to him.

What if there were another collective unconscious, a storehouse that contained
future
knowledge? Imagine how
that
would impact man's present behavior!

The concept exhilarated him. Was
this
what he was meant to learn from the voices and visions that had plagued him through life and tried to keep him from dying? Nothing happened without reason, of that he was convinced. Yet was not what had happened to him and to his people insane?

Willing, for the first time, to try to induce the second sight with which he had been blessed--or damned--he lifted his secret place of roofing and closed his eyes. Perhaps the answers to his questions lay somewhere in his past. He would journey there through his own memories and through those of the two people with whom his life had been inextricably bound.

For what was left of the night, he journeyed through his own past...and Erich's...and Miriam's, but the answers to his questions still eluded him. All that was clear was that yesterday he and Misha had watered the commandant's roses with Hans' blood. That yesterday, he had tried to take his own life. And that the moment had passed. He could not give in now. He had to survive, if not for his own sake then for Misha's. For all of the Mishas, and for his mother and Recha, if they were alive.

For Miriam, if she still cared.

She had no place here, so he must not think of her except in the small dark hours when he could not help himself. Then, listening to the weeping and hacking, smelling the odor of death in the barracks, he would balance his love for her with his hatred of Erich, and wonder which was stronger.

A
s Misha had predicted, a line of trucks stood outside the camp. Their tailgates were down, and the back ends yawned open. Without being told, Sol knew that he and Misha were about to be swallowed up. Further than that, he refused to speculate, even when he, the boy, and over a hundred inmates, selected for whatever the Nazis had dreamed up, stepped through the gates of Hell and into the waiting trucks.

Always in the past, the selections had meant a new work detail, at one of the Krupp factories perhaps, or a transfer to another camp. A worse camp, though it was hard to believe that such places existed. Still, he refused to theorize. He accepted the clothes that were flung at him,
real
clothes, held his arm out to be vaccinated, watched to see if anyone dropped dead from whatever was introduced into their veins, and climbed into the truck. With Misha's hand in his, he listened to tailgates slam shut, and jerked forward as the vehicle set out down the road.

No one spoke on the journey. They sat on the trucks' wooden seats, backs bent, forearms on thighs, and retreated into their own worlds, jouncing without complaint and staring at the metal floor's landscape of scraped paint. When the trucks halted, they spilled out. Prodded by guards, they clumped along a dusty unpaved track toward a farmhouse that stood alone on a hill just beyond. Few of them looked up. Those who did, Sol among them, saw no Oranienburg lines of Jew-haters, no quarry, no shoe track. No one was bludgeoned or shot for faltering.

Around the fields, around the farmhouse, was the greatest miracle of all.

There was no wire.

No electrified, barbed, garroting wire, ready to be slipped for sport around the neck.

At the end of the dusty track they entered the huge farmhouse.

Holding firmly onto Misha's hand, Sol looked around him--at crumbling plaster walls and a floor which had been torn up in numerous places, revealing dirt below. The air within the house seemed preternaturally still and reeked of mildew. Clearly the place had been closed up for a long time.

Men coming in behind him forced him forward, away from the apparent safety of the first room into what looked more like a great hall than a farmer's quarters. His mind took in the impossible reality of a dozen crates marked with Red Cross stencils, knowing the guards had played such tricks before, replacing the precious cargo with body parts or human excrement.

A small murmuring began, but neither Sol nor Misha spoke. Then, with a suddenness that smacked of careful staging, an exceptionally tall, café-au-lait-colored man stepped into the room. He appeared from behind a mocha and cream colored curtain which hid an alcove that reminded Sol of the one at
Die Zigarrenkiste
. The shock of his appearance was as much due to the fact that he matched the curtain, as it was to its unexpectedness Sol might have thought he had plunged into a vision, had it not been for the tugging he felt from the small hand that clutched his.

The man who stepped into the room was a marvelous sight. His color and stature gave him the bearing of a character out of the pages of
The Arabian Nights
. He was white-haired, and swathed in a white cotton shift. A mouse-like creature crawled from his collar. It glanced around with huge eyes before retreating inside the shift.

The man smiled, a smile of reassurance and security that reached his eyes.

"I am wearing a
lamba
," he said. "My shy little friend is a lemur." He paused and smiled again. "And now you have had your first lesson about Madagascar. Welcome to your first stop on the road to my island."

"
Welcome
," the man called Mengele, the one in his vision, had said, Sol remembered. "
Welcome to the world of the dead
."

And there was another, older memory, but no less haunting: "
Send all the Jews to Madagascar. Pen them like wild dogs, tame them, and use what assets and abilities they possess for the good of humanity
."

Walther Rathenau had told him that, Sol thought, but they were not the statesman's own words. The Foreign Minister had simply been repeating what Hitler and the National Socialists espoused, even then, in the days before the Führer was empowered. Sol had been a boy, the Great War less than four years past.
 
Rathenau died, killed by an assassin's bomb, but the ugly idea--apparently born long before Hitler--had not.

The brown man stopped smiling. "Have you listened to your dreams, little sparrow?" he asked, looking directly at Solomon. "Have you learned from them?"

A chill tiptoed down Sol's spine. A gypsy woman had said almost the same thing to him once, long ago. And how did this man, apparently an African, know his childhood nickname? Was Erich behind this new madness?

"I am Bruqah," the African said, "a member of the first tribe to inhabit the island to which you are bound."

As he pulled the curtain fully aside, Solomon almost expected to see his father hanging by the neck. Instead, he saw two sagging shelves, filled with dozens of books. "Some I brought with me from my island," the man said, "others I find...found...in second-hand bookstores in Berlin." He lifted a rolled-up paper from the corner, glanced around as if assuring himself they were out of Nazi earshot, and said, "Maps, too. The Nazis have not yet burned all books. I wonder why they bother to burn books of the world when they wish to burn the world itself?"

He stepped forward and put a hand on Misha's head. "You are safe here, little one," he said to the boy. He looked at Sol, as if imploring him not to counter the lie. "Within the hour, the Nazis will order the Red Cross boxes opened."

Before Sol could say anything, the man stepped back into the alcove and was gone--doubtless, Sol thought, past some panel and into another room or into a passageway that led out of the building. Like going down into the cellar beneath the tobacco shop, where lay the sewer, and the rats, and Sol's memories.

Within the hour, the Red Cross boxes were opened. The inmates were instructed to eat their fill. They fell upon the food, but having been so long deprived, they could not eat much. Even the little they did consume made many of them retch.

Later, Bruqah returned.

Then began the first of many lectures, the African speaking to Sol in French--apparently more comfortable for him, despite his perfectly reasonable command of German--and listening intently as Sol sifted and interpreted for the others. Sol did not always fully understand what he heard, and had to ask Bruqah for explications. Occasionally, he was able to embellish with what he remembered from his own books, read so many years ago.

Madagascar lay, Bruquah and then Solomon related, in the Indian Ocean, off Africa's southeast coast. The world's fourth largest island, it was an enigma beside which many of Africa's darkest secrets paled. Having broken away from the mainland a hundred million years ago, it developed a unique flora and fauna. Its northern rain forests, the world's densest, teemed with orchids and lemurs; the spiny deserts of the south were home to latex trees, whose sap caused blindness, and to harpoon burrs which tore flesh to ribbons. Until they were hunted to extinction about a thousand years ago, pygmy hippos roamed the land. There, too, stalked the giant, flightless Aepyornis--the elephant bird known as the
roc
in the Sinbad story--whose rare, semi-fossilized eggs, still found on occasion, were worth a fortune.