Scheisshaus Luck (36 page)

‘‘Are you going home soon?’’

‘‘No. I’m waiting for that bastard to return so I can get even.’’

‘‘I wish you success,’’ I said and dropped the ledger on her desk.

‘‘I promised the women I would deliver this. What you do with it I could care less.’’

As I returned to the mayor’s office a group of women milling about in the marketplace caught my eye. They were wearing camp garb, striped uniforms, or civilian clothes with red X’s painted on the back. A few clutched bundles under their arms, most likely clothes and valuables left by fleeing Germans. None of them was older than forty. Seeing a survivor over that age would have been a rare sight, indeed. Approaching the women I heard two of them chatting in French. From their tattoos I knew they had been in Auschwitz.

‘‘
Ou allez vous
?’’ (Where are you going?) I asked.

‘‘We’re going to Berlin to be repatriated.’’

I asked her my usual question.

‘‘A young girl with red hair named Stella? It’s quite possible.’’

The other French woman, who had a distended stomach, grabbed my arm. ‘‘Yes, yes, Stella. We left her and some others on the other side of the lake, twelve miles or more from here. We had to make a big detour because there wasn’t any road. You can’t miss the house. It stands all by itself on the top of a hill.’’

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‘‘Are you sure her name is Stella?’’

‘‘I’m certain.’’

I asked her three more times. The woman was positive that it was my Stella. I could barely contain myself.

‘‘You better hurry. They’ve been there for three days, and they were all very ill, the poor things.’’

As I sprinted to the mayor’s office, she called after me.

‘‘Be careful, I think it’s typhus!’’

Typhus! If Stella has typhus and has gone three days without medical attention I would have to fear the worst. But the woman did say ‘‘she thought.’’ It might be influenza.

Arthur had a hard time understanding my German when I excitedly asked what was on the other side of the lake.

‘‘A woman told me there’s a house up on a hill.’’

Arthur thought for a moment. ‘‘There’s a hunting lodge. I was there once, a long time ago. I don’t think there’s anything else over there. Why?’’

‘‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’’ I told him and bolted out the door.

It was late in the afternoon, and I decided that the quickest route would be to cross the lake. I knew that the owner of one bungalow had a canoe stashed in the reeds. Having watched the man from Arthur’s dock, I also knew he hid the paddle in a nearby bush.

The canoe’s hull grated against gravel as I pushed off. Startled ducks flew off quacking. Looking out in front of me, the lake never seemed so vast. I paddled frantically, struggling to keep a straight course. I was skilled at canoeing, but I had never been so desperate to get to a destination. Muscle fatigue quickly set in, calming my stroke.

For a stretch, the lake was placid and I glided briskly over the glassy surface. Green patches of water whipped up by the wind began to blossom, bucking and bobbing the canoe and threatening to pull the paddle out of my hands. A huge gust came close to stopping me dead in the water. These blasts became frequent, 260

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steadily increasing in fury. When my efforts couldn’t keep the canoe moving forward, I threw down the paddle and let myself drift.

I was in the middle of the lake. Black clouds rimmed with gold were gathering above me and had already covered the setting sun.

A screen of opaque grayish rain was over the town. I began to look for a place to beach the canoe. Off to my right was a small island surrounded by rushes and home to a few willow trees. In my haste I had forgotten to take any provisions, but I decided to spend the night on the tiny island without food, then return and make the whole journey again in the morning.

Dead tired, I pushed my way through the reeds and drew the canoe onto solid ground. Great drops of rain began to fall. I gathered up a few willow branches, piled them together for a bed, and put the canoe over me. As the rain beat down I thought of Stella. It had been raining when we were separated. Those showers had mocked our tears, and this storm seemed to conspire against our reunion.

Toward midnight the rain and wind relented and the sky cleared. The moon glowed over the hills. In the distance a few lights shone in Wustrow. Even though I was spent, I couldn’t sleep.

Stella was too close. My mind was spinning with anticipation and possibilities. I slipped the canoe back into the water.

With a slight breeze against my back I was able to cut a quiet path. I slipped by floating white orbs—gulls sleeping with their heads tucked under their wings. To my right a black band bordered the lake; it was the woods Jean, Michel, and I passed through on our escape. Off to my left were the meadows that the Cossacks’

cattle grazed on. One of Boris’s men was rekindling a campfire.

From a tent came the melancholic notes of an accordion. I considered stopping to beg a little food, but the drunken soldiers probably would have taken me for a Werwolf* and filled my hide full of holes.

*
Werwolf
was a Nazi guerilla/terrorist movement formed by Heinrich Himmler in 1944 to harass Allied troops in occupied parts of Germany.

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Silhouetted hills rose up in front of me. The house the woman spoke of must be on top of one of them. Only a couple more hours, I thought.

A rosy hue was tinting the sky when I finally arrived at the foot of the hills. The shoreline was deserted—no bungalows, no docks, no footpaths. It appeared that no one lived on this side of the lake.

I made my way through the brush as best I could, and a little later was trampling through the thick damp grass covering the slope.

When I reached the summit, a new sun had risen. If only the lake were as small as it looked from where I stood. On an adjacent hill a short distance away I saw the hunting lodge, a solitary building with its wet tile roof glistening in the sun.

The next thing I knew, I was standing in the lodge’s courtyard, wet, muddy, and out of breath.

‘‘Stella, Stella,’’ I called, my hobnailed boots echoing on the paving stones. ‘‘
Ist da jemand
?’’ I yelled in German. ‘‘
Quelqu’un
?’’ I asked in French.

No one answered. My heart skipped a beat. Was I too late?

The courtyard was littered with rags, old paper, and broken boxes. The doors of the lodge were open and all its windows shattered. There was no smoke coming from the chimney. I bounded up the front steps and into a big room. The reek of mold and rot was heavy. Puddles of water sat under the windows. The furniture was no better than kindling. On the walls I could see where pictures and hunting trophies had once hung. Even with all the wreckage it was apparent that this had been a clubhouse for affluent sportsmen.

My boots crunched on shards of glass as I went from room to room. The beds were stripped of their mattresses, and tufts of eiderdown floated before me like lazy butterflies. In the kitchen I slipped on rotten vegetable peelings and bumped into pots and pans filled with moldy food. Dirty and shattered dishes were scattered everywhere. I could tell by the coat of dust that it had been months since anyone had used the two large stoves.

There wasn’t a hint of a living creature anywhere in the lodge, so I went back into the courtyard. Where could Stella be? Was it 262

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possible that she and the others had recovered and moved on? Hell, there was a damn good chance that Stella wasn’t even among the group of women. I looked around not knowing what to do next. It was then that I caught a glimpse of a red tile roof beneath the branches of an apple orchard. Moving closer, I discovered a walk-way that led to a long, wooden structure that seemed to be a hen house.

‘‘Stella? Stella?’’

Pigeons cooed from the rooftop. A rabbit that had been gorging on cabbage scrambled off. Against one wall, a tub of manure steamed in the sun. Swollen from the rain, the hen house door wouldn’t budge. Something awoke inside and it now sounded like I was going to enter a beehive. That meant only one thing. I said to myself that fate wouldn’t shit on me like this. The French women could have confused another for my Stella. It’s not such an uncommon name.

The hinges groaned as I kicked the door open. The pigeons took flight. A noxious odor that I was overly familiar with struck me in the face. A few tentative steps forward and I was inside.

I squinted. In the faint light I could see five female bodies lying in a row on a low wooden platform meant for nesting. A cloud of horse flies swirled above them as parasitical clusters feasted. Swat-ting them away, I bent over the bodies with my hand over my mouth and nose. Turning over those that had rolled onto their side, I looked at each one’s pale bluish face. None of them looked like the Stella I remembered, but that was eighteen miserable months ago. The body farthest from the door was the only one that was her size.

To get a better look and to escape the stench, I placed the rigid emaciated body on a wobbly bench outside the door. Her eyes were closed. Her lips stretched over teeth that were clenched on the tip of her purple tongue. Strands of red hair peeped from beneath a brown scarf tied around her head. She wore an off-green print blouse and a soiled black skirt. Her ankles were swollen and her PART VI | WUSTROW

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legs were tattooed with fresh rat bites. She must have outlived the others because she had the fewest bites.

Could this be my Stella? Staring at her face gave no answers.

Would I even recognize my Stella if she were breathing and standing in front of me? I had been avoiding mirrors, but I knew my mother would have to look three or four times before she could be sure I was her Pierre.

I slid my hand under the palm of her swollen left hand. The rats had done too much damage for me to tell if there was the pyramid scar that I had run my fingers across as we sat on that staircase. I let the hand drop. It slapped onto the bench like a fish tossed onto a cutting board.

It hit me. Stella’s eyes. No matter how much weight she had lost, no matter how hard she had slaved, no matter how broken her spirit, her eyes, her light brown eyes, would not have changed. I lifted her right eyelid. I couldn’t see the color of the pupil. The whole eye was coated with what looked like coarse white talcum powder—fly larvae.

Sickened and caught so off-guard, I stumbled backwards. My stomach clenched as I fought the urge to get sick. With all those flies I should have known what was going to greet me. I hugged myself to stop from shaking. There was no way I was going to be able to say without hesitation if that corpse was or wasn’t Stella.

I hadn’t prepared myself for this. Paddling across the lake I envisioned either finding Stella alive or finding her dead, or else finding a body that I knew wasn’t Stella. Not once had I considered not being able to tell one way or the other. I grew angry—angry with myself for wanting something to happen that could happen only in storybooks. I was not a child. I was not a teenager. After everything I had gone through, I was a man. Maybe not a wise or good one, but I was a man now and I wasn’t going to let anyone say differently. But here I was, wanting a happy ending straight out of a schoolgirl’s fairy tale. Was I too weak, too dependent on the dreams I created in Monowitz to admit that this was Stella? Or was 264

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I too afraid to hold onto hope for a reunion with my Stella? Hadn’t I lost enough?

I sat down next to the body. I pulled down the right eyelid. The harder I willed myself to believe the corpse wasn’t Stella, the further from assurance I seemed to lead myself. And the more I stared at her dead face, the less confident I felt that I had found my Stella.

The chances that she survived Auschwitz were laughable. Then, again, maybe shithouse luck had been on her side, too.

I had an urge to run away and forget what I found—forget that I ever sat down in that canoe. What would remembering accomplish?

Nothing but anguish. Even with the nagging doubt, I couldn’t let the body rot with the rest of them. If this body isn’t Stella’s, I thought, then maybe some day we would find each other. If it is Stella, then at least I got to say goodbye and see that she had a proper burial.

I went back to the house to find a crate or trunk that might serve as a coffin, but there wasn’t any large enough. While I was in the courtyard mulling over if I should bury her without one, I bumped against a tree trunk that had been hollowed out for a drinking trough. I dragged it into the orchard, then carried the body over. With my eyes shut, I laid her inside. I closed the coffin with boards that I had broken over my knee and a few rusty nails.

I dug the grave in the shade of the apple trees. I hadn’t held a shovel since Auschwitz. As I ripped open the rain-soaked earth, something inside me kept telling me that it was Stella who I was burying. Where inside me this new conviction came I had no idea, but I accepted it. I was too drained to squabble with myself any longer.

Now I sobbed as I carved out a hole in the earth. I didn’t want to believe that this was all that remained of the girl I had loved in Drancy and had dreamt about in Auschwitz, Dora, and Ravensbru¨ck. That she died alone, far from home, unable to ask her mother to hold her tight or have her father sing her a lullaby. I felt wrong hoping that she had thought about me, but I couldn’t help myself.

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Why had she come this far, paid so dearly for a freedom she would never enjoy? Why did she have to endure the death rattles of those four other women and feel the rats scurry over her to get to their meals? Why couldn’t she have died in Auschwitz? Why couldn’t she have hid in a neighbor’s cellar? Why couldn’t these be tears of joy?

I don’t know how long I cried, but at some point I realized that I couldn’t stand in that hole with a bowed head any longer. If I was going to return to Arthur’s before nightfall, I had to act now. By the sun I could tell it was mid-afternoon. I finished digging and slid the coffin into the hole.