Children of the Dusk (2 page)

"I'm all right, Lady Miri." Bruqah signaled Solomon to come closer. "That thing." He stepped aside for a moment to allow Hempel and his machete crew to work past them.
"Liguaan
, like you," he told Sol. "She eye the future while she eye the past."

"How do you know...?" Sol stopped. He would examine the meaning of Bruqah's words later. Right now Miriam needed his attention. He helped her to her feet. She looked exhausted. He wanted to pick her up and carry her, but he was too debilitated; even with Bruqah's help it was all he could do to half-drag her along.

The climb grew steeper, the forest more dense. Layers of branches crisscrossed overhead. The leaves underfoot were slick from the humidity and lack of sunlight. Millipedes and beetles ran over their legs, stickers jabbed their arms, wet ferns, rough as a cat's tongue, stuck to the sides of their faces. Looking for ballast, they found themselves grabbing onto the yellow pitcher plants that seemed to flourish in the forest despite the weak light. When they did, a sticky syrupy substance erupted, bringing armies of flies and ants and mosquitoes against which there was no defense.

"Be careful," Bruqah said, when he saw them touching the pitcher plants. "For some people, pitcher plants dangerous. Make them breathe bad. Die, even."

Sol slapped at his neck and looked at his hand. On it lay a mosquito the size of an average fly. "Look at this thing," he said. "It's big enough to roast for dinner. We'll probably all need quinine, which doubtless our Nazi friends have brought along.” If we don't die first from malaria, he told himself. “For the time being, we had better do what they say."

They resumed their climb. Eventually they found themselves in a boggy meadow. Only the lack of incline, the larger expanse of clear flat ground between trees, and the fact that those who had gone ahead of them were gathered together at the far end of the clearing, gave them any sense that they had crested the hill and exited the forest. Near them, leaning against a tree, was Hempel. "Wait here," he told Pleshdimer. "Shoot anyone who gives you trouble. I'm going to see what's beyond those trees."

After Hempel walked away, Sol helped Miriam to sit down, her back against a log. "Nothing happens without a reason."

He said the words out loud. He had to. For one thing, nothing short of his favorite rationale, which generally worked for him even under the most arduous circumstances, would stand a chance of reaffirming his faith. For another, the steady deterioration of his eyesight brought on by
retinitis pigmentosa
required--demanded--the reassurance of the sound of his own voice. As if knowing his hearing was unimpaired would somehow make the fact of his loss of vision bearable.

Now if I could only discover what those reasons were, he thought, life would begin to make sense.

Maybe.

Gasping after the hike up through the rain forest, he wiped his glasses and looked around as best his tunnel vision would allow. He watched the guards and his fellow prisoners...free laborers...file onto the relative flatness of the boggy hilltop meadow.

Dusk was descending, the sun setting behind the western edge of the dark overstory of foliage that surrounded the meadow. Night, he had been told, would come quickly in the tropics, almost like a curtain being rapidly drawn, but for the moment the side of the meadow in which Sol stood was cast in brilliant light. The air was so moisture-laden that the sunlight seemed to refract, lending the meadow an ethereal quality which was quite unnerving after the brooding darkness of the rain forest. He wondered how much of the odd light was due to the sunlight and humidity and how much to his own weak eyes. The disease had stolen all of his sight except for a circle of clarity, nearly devoid of color.

He wasn't going to be much use to himself, let alone anyone else, once blindness set in. When that would happen was anybody's guess;
that
it would happen was inevitable.

He moved his head from side to side to examine his new environment. Wreathing him in green, slender white-barked trees rose two hundred feet, where they spread their dense leafy canopy, blotting out the sky and perpetually dripping water. Curtains of gray moss, and creepers and lianas, hung down in a tangle from the trees; parasitic orchids sprouted from the trunks. At ground level, huge ferns, gleaming with moisture, grew higher than a man's chest.

Here and there, Sol intuited rather than saw a spot of color: the red acanthema blossoms, which Bruqah had warned them were deadly poison; the blue dicindra vine which opened in the early morning, closed up as the sun reached its height, and reopened briefly at dusk. His basic impression was that of a vast, oversized, gray-green world, an alien place, inhospitable to man.

By contrast, the hilltop meadow seemed almost congenial. Judging by the charred snags partially sunken in the marsh and by the singularly large count of dead trees, there were times of the year when there was relief from the wetness that hovered around them like a living entity.

At the far side of the meadow stood what Sol took to be a tanghin tree, at least judging from what he remembered seeing in Bruqah's crude drawings. Beneath the tree, a lopsided, thatched shack, constructed of mud and wattle and pandanus palm fronds, stood on uneven stumps that elevated it a meter off the ground.

"Man who lives there carries storm in she heart," Bruqah said, misusing the personal pronoun as he almost habitually did. He sauntered closer to Sol, walking stick in hand, long, bronze-colored legs moving him with fluid ease through the meadow grass.

"Is he one of your people?" Sol asked, hunkering down next to Miriam, who was resting at his feet, her head against a log and one hand on her nine-month pregnant belly.

Bruqah shook his head vehemently. "Zana-Malata can live only within she own self. Same as me. My people, Vazimba, no longer a tribe. We are like traveler's tree. We nourish Malagasy who need us."

Miriam opened her eyes and looked down the west side of the hill through a break in the foliage. She pointed toward another, smaller hill. "This island can't be more than five kilometers square," she said to Sol. "One of Erich's books called it two hills and an apron of rain forest."

Bruqah spread his arms as if to encompass the sun. "Once before, this island drowned in blood. Bruqah died, then."

"You mean your ancestors died," Sol said.

"I mean Bruqah," the Malagasy said quietly. "You know little, Solly. But you will learn...next time island drowns in blood."

Sol watched what looked like a ground squirrel poke a berry into its mouth, masticating with absolute concentration. The human intruders were of no concern, the food its universe. A deep envy overwhelmed Sol. How dare it be wiser than he, to know such single-mindedness of purpose? He must learn survival from such animals.

He looked around, assessing his friends and adversaries, who sat or stood milling in four groups. The largest group were his fellow Jews, one hundred and forty-two men who, against his better judgment, called him rabbi and leader. They had been plucked, like himself, from the degradation of Sachsenhausen, to be in the lead party for the Nazi's planned forced exodus.

Next in number were forty Nazi guards, also products of the camp, hand-picked for the expedition by Hempel, who had returned and stood with a hand on the shoulder of Wasj Pleshdimer, the murderer who in Sachsenhausen had been elevated to barracks guard. Both men appeared to be looking at something down slope of the shack. At Hempel's feet, his wolfhound whined. Also at Hempel's feet, leashed like the dog, was young Misha. A great sadness took hold of Sol, and he promised himself that he would find a way soon to communicate with the boy.

He looked at Erich, the man whom he had once called blood brother and, at Erich's insistence--inventing a ceremony to match --a brother-in-blood. Why, Sol chided himself, had he never before considered the implications of that syntactic twist? For him,
blood
had meant kinship. For Erich it had meant...what? He claimed he had no family. His mother and father, though still living, were dead as far as he was concerned. Miriam was his by right of marriage but not love, and the child only possibly his, and that perhaps by virtue of rape. He loved his dogs and communed with them, or so he asserted, but they were hardly blood relatives. Still he did love them, all twelve of them but most especially Taurus, and he certainly felt affection for the eleven other trainers who made up his zodiac team. The Abwehr canine command had been selected by Himmler himself for the expedition, probably because Erich and his men had proven too powerful, and possibly too non-Nazi, for Reichsführer Himmler to allow them to remain in Germany any longer.

As for the Nazi Party, which so many officers loved as family, Erich Alois hated it.

Lounging in smaller groups among the others were sailors from the
Altmark
, the supply ship for Germany's indomitable raider, the
Graf Spee
. They would leave soon, Solomon was sure, and with them Tyrolt, the ship's doctor. Miriam was doubtless dreading that, for she would soon need medical attention. And Sol too needed Doctor Tyrolt. Not for his physical needs but for his psyche. Tyrolt alone among all the Nazis he had met was a man Sol felt he could trust.

Several dogs jumped up, growling, as two ox-like animals, humped and sporting enormous dewlaps, huge ears, and curved horns, wandered from beyond the shack and into the clearing. Their appearance broke Sol's reverie.

"Zebu," Bruqah said, brightening.

Sol knew that the animals, while not sacred to the Malagasy, were the main measure of wealth among the islanders.

"
Zebulun,
" he said to Bruqah. "Jacob's tenth son. Father of the tribe of Israel. What might he have thought of this place?"

Bruqah wasn't listening. He stood, hands on hips and head thrust forward. The mouselemur perched on his left shoulder also leaned forward. It was as if both man and animal were appraising the zebus' worth.

Pleshdimer raised his rifle and Bruqah's face went vapid with horror.

"No!" Bruqah ran toward the Kapo. "Please, no, do not shoot!"

Pleshdimer hesitated. Hempel squeezed his shoulder and the Kapo swung the rifle across his back and took off in a waddling run toward the animals. Waving his arms and yelling, he chased the zebu from the clearing.

Sol looked down at Miriam. He was about to tell her he would find her some water to drink when Erich came striding across the meadow and stopped beside them. Sol ignored him, effecting a studied nonchalance. Erich steered his gaze clear of all of them. "Will whoever lives there come back, Bruqah?" he asked, pointing at the lopsided shack.

"Of course." The mouselemur, which seemed to be perpetually on Bruqah's shoulder, shifted position away from Erich. It clung to Bruqah's hair, its sad, dark eyes too large for so tiny a head. "All Malagash come back. Living or dead, they come. As Bruqah come back."

"Bruqah is Vazimba. His ancestors came from Indonesia," Miriam said, to Sol's surprise. He wondered how she could talk to Erich, after all he had done to her. "He told me that his people were Madagascar's first inhabitants."

Sol started to say something to Miriam, then stopped as it dawned on him that she was not speaking to Erich at all, not looking at him but through him. As though he did not exist. What had Bruqah called Nosy Mangabéy, back on the ship?
Island where the dead dream.

He shuddered, wondering where the ghost that had inhabited him for seventeen years had gone.

"Vazimba, first race," Bruqah said. "Zana-Malata, last race." His teeth were bared in what could have been mistaken for a smile, but a hard look had risen into his eyes. "We are beginning and end, he and me."

"You know the man who lives there?" Erich asked.

"For too long." As if to end the discussion, Bruqah reached up to one side, plucked a fig from a tree, and handed it to Miriam along with a piece of wild ginger.

"
Ha-haai! Ha-haai!
"

Like spectators at a stadium, heads turned in unison to look in the direction of the sound, Erich's among them.

The cry came again from the northern edge of the surrounding forest, this time followed by the body of a creature that looked like a cross between the flying squirrel and the lemurs Sol had seen illustrated in the books about Madagascar. With the grace of a trapeze artist, the animal leapt from the overstory and landed on a beech branch entwined with liana the size of a man's arm. Slowly, almost insolently, the creature raised its plumed tail.

"
Ha-haai! Ha-haai!
"

Sol stared at the coppery ball of fur. Its two enormous, sad-looking eyes seemed to stare back at him with human intelligence. Its tail was wrapped around the liana and its fingers gripped the branch.

As if carefully timing his action for maximum dramatic effect, Hempel unsnapped his holster, and lifted and aimed his Mann. Misha seized the opportunity and scuttled toward the closest group of Jews, two of whom put their arms around him protectively. The wolfhound hunkered down in the grass and waited.

"
Ha-haai! Ha-haai!
"

The major smiled a tight-lipped smile and clicked off his safety catch.

"Don't shoot," Erich ordered, apparently fascinated by the creature.

Hempel did not immediately lower the Mann. The aye-aye, with almost human understanding, lifted its left hand and pointed at Hempel. It had a thumb and three fingers, the middle one of which extended far beyond the other two--fleshless as the finger of a corpse long dead.