Child of the Journey (37 page)

Sol awakened to a pounding headache and to cobalt-blue light. Trying to ward off a vision so close after a nightmare, he pressed his palms against his temples, but succeeded only in increasing the ferocity of the pain in his head----

----a girl of about eight fights against thin ropes that bind her, naked, to a carved wooden post almost twice her height.
She runs her fingers along its chipped designs.

Perhaps thirty other intricately carved posts are grouped behind her, each topped with the skull of an ox. In the background, beyond a flickering fire, stand monoliths and menhirs that evoke Stonehenge.

"This is no dream." The voice comes from the girl, but her lips do not move. "Your father is gone and you stand in
aloala,
the shadow of death. This
valavato
was built by the Antakarana as a dwelling for restless souls whom they sought to honor and console with sacrifices.

"Human
sacrifices, Jehuda?" This time the girl's lips move, the voice frightened, girlish...hers. "Are you to be my
alo
when the Nazis sacrifice me to their god? Are you to mediate between my family and my ancestors?"

"You have no family left and they have no god but Hitler." Tough, older, masculine, the voice comes from somewhere inside her.
 

"Father said the Antakarana believe in Zanahary, the Creator, and in Andiamanitra, the Fragrant One," she tells the voice.

"The Antakarana are gone; dog-men now own the
valavato."

"Does that mean that I am not to be sacrificed?"

"It means I believe you will be given a choice between torture or staying alive in the dog-men's service. You will need all the strength and hope you can gather, Deborah."

"You
chose life!" the girl shouts.
"You
chose to survive no matter what the cost to your soul--or to mine!"

"To choose survival was a sin only because I did so out of fear," the inner voice answers.

"Will you help me overcome my fear, Jehuda?"

Laughter floats among the stones. "I cannot help you," the voice answers. "This is the time for your gift to me."

The girl strains at the ropes. "Help me!" she calls. "I'm over here!"

Here,
her voice echoes against the stones.
Here
----

Solomon awoke to tumbling sensations. He did not know the girl or understand the vision, but from Bruqah's lessons he recognized the totems, fashioned to celebrate the death of an island nobleman, someone whose social standing also warranted the water buffalo horns that guarded the burial area.

"Madagascar." He let the word roll from his mouth. It echoed behind his residual headache like the obscure music of a calliope.
Mad-a-gas-car.
He said it again, louder; it seemed to hang in the darkness like a banner.
 

"Why a homeland there?" someone asked.

"Why not?"

True to tradition, Solomon answered the question with a question. There was laughter in recognition of the rhetoric.

As silence resettled, Solomon could sense each man mull the word, allowing it to absorb strength and texture, like moist terra cotta under the touch of a blind child.

"Madagascar," someone said.

Leaning against the hold's metal wall, Sol relaxed into the familiarity of his old haunting-ground, darkness, and took comfort in it. Like the Jews after their Babylonian exile, like Moses' followers, the prisoners must come to terms with another Diaspora, he thought. Like those other times, the end was in God's hands, but daily survival was in their own. Meanwhile, he was ready, at last, to think of the present--about Erich; and Misha, now Otto Hempel's cabin boy; and Miriam. At the farmhouse, Colonel Perón had told him she was well. And pregnant.

Whose child!
he had wanted to ask. Mine or Erich's? Instead he chided himself.
Why should it matter?
"At Sachsenhausen there are more learned men than I," he had said to Perón. "Ones far more deserving of being given a second chance at life."
 

"Thank Miriam's obsession with getting you out. She talked me into engineering this. You may not be able to thank her in person until you arrive in Madagascar--"

"Miriam is going?"

"Miriam and Erich. But how could you have known? Your old friend is in charge of the expedition."

Later, Bruqah also brought word of her; they had even managed to exchange a few notes, cryptic and hopeful--

A man across the hold shouted in his sleep. What kinds of nightmares, Sol wondered, haunted him? Did he dream of people he would never see again, and times he would never relive? Did Miriam? How he longed to hold her--

Patience, he told himself. You are alive, she is alive, and you are headed in the same direction. The rest is up to God,
mazel,
and our inventiveness.

To calm himself he let his mind roam over his lessons in the Kabbalah. How happy the times had been when he and Beadle Cohen explored the cosmos and the eternal!

"Nothing
is random," the beadle had told him. "Before the beginning of time, when light had not erupted from its shell and our universe was miniscule, then--
then!
--chance ruled the cosmos. And God was that universe.
Everything,
opposite of nothing, is not random, and
everything
is now the universe. Therefore, the cosmos as we know it is no longer miniscule--and this cosmos is also God."

The discussion had ended there, only to be taken up again a week later, when Sol had had a chance to try to understand what the beadle was saying:

"We are the mind of God or, more exactly, a single thought in the mind of God. The universe will continue to expand while this thought continues, and when the thought dwindles and dies, the universe will again contract to that tiny
nothingness,
and randomness will again prevail. The process of the beginning, expansion, and death of the cosmos may take a hundred billion years, yet all that time is but one thought in the mind of God."

"So
everything
is God," Sol remembered saying. "Everything, and nothing."

Many Gentiles, the beadle explained, limited God through their belief that man existed in His image. Jews conceded only that the soul of man might exist in God's image. Still, he said, there was a time when man was one with God, and true ecstasy lay in knowing that we contained in our hearts a microscopic memory of that unity.

Sol thought about that now, as he had then. It led, as always, to a re-examination of
ayin
.

According to the beadle, God directed
everything,
while
nothing
by definition could not be directed--there was nothing to direct. Humankind was the mind of God or, more exactly, an anomaly in the mind of God. God was the universe, which meant the universe was itself sentient. When He ceased to think that thought, the universe would contract and, at least as we knew it, cease to exist.

The correlation excited Sol as much now as it had the first time he had come to that conclusion. He felt a need to talk. Since he could not expect the others to be interested in the complexities of chaos versus order, he spoke to them of his meeting with Walther Rathenau and of how he had walked with pride in the Foreign Minister's shadow. He spoke of the Adlon, and of the assassination. Later, urged on by the others, he warmed to other tales: lunch in Luna Park, the morning Recha tried a cigar, the smell of potato pancakes, evenings on an astrakhan rug strewn with tinsel and pine needles. At first, he spoke only of Berlin and of his own experiences, but increasingly he found himself digressing into the Talmud and the Kabbalah. The more he talked, the more his voice, whose timbre had so embarrassed him in his teens, took on a power that enthralled his listeners, and the more he found he could comfort the others with his rich images.

"What does it really mean, this Madagascar business?" a voice asked, after Sol had finished repeating a Talmudic parable about a wanderer who had to learn to obey the unfamiliar laws of a strange land into which he had stumbled.

"I don't know. Perhaps a chance at freedom?"

"How will we break free of our Nazi captors?" another asked.

"Only God and fear are masters of men," Sol said with as much conviction as he could muster.

"We have no chance against their guns or their dogs."

"Chance is random, as at some points in time the universe is," Sol said, hoping his listeners would at least recognize the concept. "Unity must be our weapon. Only therein lies hope."

When no one responded, he felt lonely, set apart, as if his academic skills were somehow less valuable or manly than their physical ones. Few of the others were educated men, as if Hempel or Erich Alois, or whoever had done the selecting, had deliberately ignored other men of scholarship. He alone among them had attended a university. Each possessed specialized training of some sort, but their thoughts and responses were couched within the confines of job skills and religion rather than academe. They could all read and write, Sol thought proudly--surely no other culture could boast of such universal literacy--but the Nazis had obviously decided they had little need for men of gown and mortarboard. Or perhaps the Nazis were as afraid of scholarship, and other Jewish assets and abilities, as they were respectful and fearful of the mantic arts.

If Hitler were not a maniac, Sol reasoned, he was either stupid or possessed by his own dybbuk, in whom was vested the conscience of past German guilt...a guilt deepened by the terror and shame of the Great War. The Führer could own the world if he chose to ransom those Jewish assets and abilities, use them to his own ends, use such men and women as those who inhabited visions.

"Please,
Reb,"
the man next to Sol whispered insistently. "Give me your blessing."

"I am not a rabbi," Sol said.

"You speak like a rabbi, and you have chosen to be our teacher. Are not all rabbis teachers?"

"Yes. But not all teachers are rabbis," Sol answered.

"Bless me, Reb," the man repeated.

Sol placed his hands over the man's head, and in his heart he felt the sadness of the man's soul. Though he told himself that such intimate knowledge came out of comradeship, he knew better. In some part of his being, he had always known better.

"I am Goldman," the man said. "Pray for me. Teach me. Teach all of us."

During the voyage, Solomon had resisted names and identities; he had wanted no more attachments like Hans Hannes and Misha Czisça--one dead, the other...

"I will tell you all what the beadle taught me." He lifted his voice. "More than that, I cannot do."

The lessons began in earnest. Mostly they dealt with emotional and spiritual survival. The voice and confidence of the teacher in him surfaced; passages and parables filtered through and began to flow. The world of action, the world of human existence, had two parts, he explained: the physical, where natural law and material things prevailed; and the spiritual world of ideas and ideals.

In language reduced to its simplest form, he described the existence of the world of angels, the world of formation or feeling according to the Zohar. The human soul, living as it did in the world of action, was multi-sided, capable of distinguishing between good and evil and equally capable of failure and backsliding. In contrast, the angel was unchanging, its existence fixed within the qualitative limits it had been granted upon its creation.

"Then an angel has no chance at self-betterment," someone said.

"That's right," Sol answered, pleased with his student. "On the other hand, humankind can better the angels."

Sensing that he was on the verge of passing on the beginnings of understanding, he continued with growing fervor. "We are the fathers and mothers, and midwives of the angels. Each sacred act we perform, each spiritual transformation we create, is part of an angelic essence." He let that settle in. "The angels we create must live in our world, the world of action, but they can influence the higher worlds, especially that of formation. In that manner, we can reach out for the Divine and, in a sense, direct it."

He paused to feel the effect of his words.

"I have heard that angels sometimes come down from the higher realms," a pleasant voice said from across the hold. "Also that a prophet or seer or holy man, sometimes even an ordinary person, can be visited by angels from the higher worlds."

"So it is said," Sol replied.

"Then I think you must have received such a visitor."

Whispered assent became clearly voiced approval and, finally, applause. Sol received the accolades in shocked silence. Was it possible? Had the visions from which he had tried so hard to divorce himself not been ones of evil, but rather keys to a higher kingdom beyond his understanding or interpretation?

"I--" he began, knowing a response was expected.

From far to his left came the clanking of metal. Light leapt into the room as the hatchway was thrown open by two guards with carbines at ready arms.

Lifting his hands to shield himself from the glare, Sol waited for his eyes to make the adjustment. At the bottom of the ladder well, crammed into the small space, were forms he assumed to be other guards.