The Savior (6 page)

Practicing the Ysaÿe, he had hoped that this wash of color would soothe and delight the reawakened senses of the prisoners. As he began to actually play the sonata, his only wish was to get through it with as few mishaps as possible and to be done with the whole performance for that day. He no longer thought of trying to please those people; he wasn't crazy enough to believe he could.

It took him until the “Danse Rustique” to realize just what had happened after the Paganini; the silence had numbed him. No performance of his had ever been greeted with silence, not even when he played for the soldiers. And then that applause! It was a mockery, worse than silence. The guards could have stopped it sooner, but he was convinced they let it go on as long as possible just to humiliate him. They themselves didn't clap at all, because the Kommandant's order wasn't directed at them. They'd be damned if
they
would clap with the Jews.

Finishing the Ysaÿe, he expected the same idiotic routine, perhaps with a guard giving the order instead of the Kommandant. But the prisoners started clapping right away—still an unenthusiastic dribble of applause, yet they didn't have to be forced. Keller wondered why. Maybe they were more afraid of the guards when the Kommandant wasn't around to restrain them; a second silence might be interpreted as disobedience to the order they had already received.

Then he hit upon a more convincing explanation: the Kommandant had turned the key in his mechanical puppets by yelling “Clap!” Though at first they were a bit rusty, by now they could do a passable imitation of one example of human behavior. This time the applause even died away after a suitable period.

Keller continued to play his role in the mechanical ritual; like the Jews, he had no choice. His next and last piece for the day was the Partita in E Major by Bach, the most accessible of the master's six works for unaccompanied violin. It starts with a brilliant prelude, full of spirals and cascades of running notes, followed by five dance movements. The whole partita, though richly varied in tempo and character, is full of joy.

Now Keller understood that it probably made no difference how he played or how they reacted. Only there was a slight chance that if the playing was good enough, it might produce some hints of life in his listeners. Not pleasure, not understanding, just…a response to a stimulus. He wasn't sure what that would mean to the Kommandant, other than achieving the immediate goal of his bizarre experiment. An idea began to take root, though, while he was playing the graceful, poignant Loure: if music had the power to revive, the Kommandant might not want to send these people back to their “living death” once the experiment was over. Not that he cared about them; Keller couldn't let himself believe that even for a moment. But wouldn't he be proud of his results? Wouldn't he want those results to last?

There was no way to know. His job was simply to make it through the next few days, give the man what he wanted and get out of there. If he had to muffle his reactions, had to deaden his brain and heart in order to do what was required, so be it.

Anyway, I won't become like them, he thought, half-opening his eyes and taking in the rows of gray, blocklike forms in front of him. But if he did or said anything out of line—surely the guards would report every detail of his behavior—the Kommandant could easily keep him there as long as he liked. Who outside the camp would know?

Looking back on this performance, Keller would have been hard pressed to say how he played the Bach. Did he convey any of its joy? Unlikely. The best he could do here was to adjust to the situation, not rise above it. And he could forget about trying to play as well as he used to.

He was so wrapped up in his thoughts and worries that he let the partita play itself, without listening too much. The final notes came as a relief: his ordeal was finished, at least for that day. He bowed three or four times and forced a smile in response to the dull applause, then turned away to put the violin in its case.

When he turned back, they were still sitting there, as if awaiting further orders. The guards were motionless. Keller cleared his throat and spoke. “That was the end of today's concert; thank you very much for your attention.” He hesitated, scanned their faces. “If you have any questions about the music, I would be happy to answer them.” He often said something like this at the beginning of his hospital appearances. Here, though, he had simply announced the pieces before playing them. Further explanations seemed unnecessary, or useless. He didn't really expect these people to ask anything.

After a few seconds he picked up his violin and took a couple of steps toward the door. Suddenly a toneless, broken voice pierced the stillness.

“Why did you come here?”

Keller stopped and turned around. He couldn't see who had asked the question; it was getting dark, and the voice had come from somewhere in the back of the room.

“Why did I come here?” he repeated, looking from one expressionless face to another. Was the question hostile or simply curious? “I'm here to bring you music…to give you pleasure…to help you.” His voice dropped with the last few words; he himself could barely hear them.

“I…” He should have left before opening his mouth again, but stood there transfixed until the real answer came stammering out. “I was ordered to come here.”

 

Shortly after Keller was escorted back to his room, he forced himself to open the violin case and tried to practice the next day's repertoire. Tomorrow he had to do better; otherwise it would be hard to live with himself. But he was much too tired to get anything done. He lay down on the narrow bed and dozed off for half an hour.

Emerging from sleep, he felt like he had to fight his way back to the surface from the depths of a pit. He groped for the light switch on the wall. Squinting, trying to reorient himself, he looked around the room—at the single plain, hard chair, the unvarnished wood of the desk at the foot of the bed, the grayish paint chipping and peeling from the upper walls. He shivered, and glanced at the window to see if it was open a crack. During the concert he'd longed for nothing so much as some fresh air. Now, in his room, he was afraid a draft was seeping in from somewhere, carrying with it the smell from the chimneys. He sniffed a few times, then decided it was just his imagination.

A guard brought his dinner at seven o'clock, without a word. After the door closed behind him, Keller stared at the tray. There was a plate of sauerbraten with red cabbage, a bowl of spätzle and a carafe of red wine. It wasn't gourmet fare—the meat was overcooked and dry. But it must have been better than what the prisoners were getting, even the Kommandant's chosen ones.

The memory of that smell from the rubber plant was an unwelcome seasoning to his food; he had no appetite, yet forced himself to eat a little. After dinner there was nothing for him to do, no books to read, no way to take his mind off the gloom of the camp.

That night he dreamt he was playing a concert in a large hall that was very dimly lit. Only thirty or forty people were scattered through the first few rows, and beyond that he could hardly see anything.

He felt no response from the audience as he played; they didn't seem to be listening. He expected them to start coughing or shuffling in their seats, but they didn't move. It wasn't as if he had them spellbound, either. God, no—his playing didn't warrant it.

He stopped in the middle of a phrase, to see if that would have any effect. “Are you deaf?” he shouted.

No response. He came down from the stage and approached a cluster of people, grabbed one of them by the shoulders and shook him. Since only the stage was lit, it was too dark for him to see the man's face. Crouching, leaning forward, he could make out a pair of lusterless eyes staring at him. He touched the man's cheek. It was ice cold.

“This man is dead!” he whispered. He looked around and repeated those words, his voice rising, but there was still no answer.

A woman was huddled in a seat not far away, her face covered by a veil. He pulled away the veil and a skull grinned at him. He jumped back, gagging on the dust he'd stirred up, then ran down the aisle. They started to move, grabbing at him with icy fingers. He turned and bolted back toward the stage, scrambled up the side steps, pushed and pulled and banged at the door that led to the wings.

Retreating toward the center of the stage, he saw his violin and bow on a chair. He picked up the instrument and tried to play again, his hands shaking uncontrollably. At the first notes he woke up.

Oh God, where am I?

He staggered out of bed and pulled open the door, gasping for air. A gust of freezing wind took his breath away.

The light of dawn was gray, metallic, just enough for him to see row after row of low, drab buildings, all exactly alike with a sort of no-man's-land between each row. He longed for the narrow streets of his town, could almost cry when he pictured his little apartment, with its familiarity and modest comforts.

There was barbed wire not far from his door—the internal fence that separated the administrative buildings from the prisoners' barracks. As the wind buffeted him, he stared at the patches of frost on the uneven ground, wondering what this place had looked like before they built that monstrous grid.

Through the wire he saw a cluster of inmates emerging from one of the barracks a few hundred feet away, herded, prodded along by a few guards. Then another barracks spewed out its human stuffings, then a third, and so on until the whole area was a sea of striped uniforms, a tide of automatons moving slowly toward the main gate.

When they stopped in the Appellplatz for roll call, the guards counted and re-counted each row of prisoners. A burly Oberscharführer strutted back and forth between the rows, barking at the cowering inmates for half an hour about God knew what. From time to time he interrupted his harangue to shove or hit those standing closest to him. Then he would place his hands on his hips and plant his feet far apart, triumphantly watching them totter and fall like toothpicks. Whenever the Oberscharführer tapped his thigh with the truncheon he was holding, one of his underlings would run over and kick the fallen inmate until he managed to pull himself up.

Keller wondered if he was still in the throes of his dream.

A sudden blast of noise made him jump, but the guards and prisoners had no reaction. Music? From where? He looked up and saw four loudspeakers towering over the Appellplatz. Could that be a waltz crackling through the static? A spirited accompaniment to this brutality?

During that endless roll call, waltzes, fox-trots and tangos blared from the speakers. The music was so loud that the simple melodies were blurred and grossly distorted: Everything ran together in a merry-go-round of shrill gaiety. Only the highest overtones could cut through the static and the Oberscharführer's shouting.

Suddenly he recognized a tune that Ernst had often played at the Goldener Adler. Dear, fiery Ernst. He had seen it all so clearly in 1933 and had gotten out. Thank God. Or he would have ended up in a place like this, absorbing insults and blows, hopelessly waiting for deliverance from this nightmare.

He had the good sense to leave, but what about me? Why didn't I see this coming? And how in God's name have I ended up here, in this place meant for Gypsies and Jews?

 

The roll call was over, and the tide of shadow-creatures had been shoved through the gate. He leaned out of the doorway and breathed deeply, trying to calm himself. The smoke that had hovered over the camp yesterday was no longer visible; nothing was coming out of the chimneys, but the smell was still there.

Suddenly it became clear: the main purpose of this place couldn't be the work it was extracting from those wretched people. They would work a lot faster and better if they weren't treated like this.

A thin layer of soot coated his window. He passed one hand across the glass, then stood there a few moments, staring at his blackened fingertips.

W
ith respect, Herr Kommandant…”

“You haven't slept well, I see.”

Keller hesitated.

“Did you have bad dreams?”

He knows.

Had someone been looking through his window as he slept? Had he cried out? Or were the dreams a normal part of life here?

“I had a rough night.” His head ached, his mouth was dry. The Kommandant waited for him to continue, shuffling some papers on his desk.

Perhaps there was still time to make up some pretext for having come to his office.

“You may speak freely,” said the Kommandant, glancing at him over the rims of his glasses. He scribbled a note in the margin of one of the sheets he was holding.

Keller was tempted to change course—to ask for advice about what he should play that afternoon, thank the Kommandant and return to his room. But ever since the roll call a few hours earlier, he'd had only one thought: to find some way to convince this man to let him go. He couldn't face those people again.

“May I ask, sir…is this only a labor camp?”

The Kommandant looked up quickly from his papers. His eyes held Keller's until the violinist had to look away; he could tell that the Kommandant knew what he was really asking. There was neither confirmation nor denial in his face, neither guilt nor pride. Just a matter-of-fact, slightly bored expectation, as if he was trying to gauge what Keller might do next.

“I told you all you needed to know,” he said finally. “We put them to work here.”

“But I can't understand…why they look like that.”

“I said yesterday, conditions are brutal and not everyone can survive.”

“Yes. At first I thought, if some of them died, it was due to the harsh conditions you described—the hunger and cold, the hard labor. That's what I believed, until I saw them.”

“And then?”

I've started down this path
.
I can't turn back now.

“Then…I remembered what you said about the necessity of separating the Jews from the rest of us, to avoid contamination. I began to wonder what happens to them after they've been here awhile. I mean, when they're no longer able to work.”

The Kommandant's face hardened slightly. “And what did you come up with?”

“Isn't it true, Herr Kommandant, that one of the purposes of this camp”—he paused, searching for an indirect way to put it, then gave up and plunged forward—“is to get rid of these people?”

“How did you arrive at this conclusion?” His lips barely moved as he spoke.

Keller didn't dare mention the endless roll call, the Oberscharführer's shouting and shoving, the hideous music.

“They wouldn't look like that otherwise, they wouldn't
act
like that if they had any hope.”

“I see. Well, you're a very acute observer.” He put down the papers he was holding, took off his glasses and leaned forward, almost halfway across his desk. “What are you going to do about it?”

Keller pulled back under the pressure of his stare. His heart was racing, and he wanted to make sure his voice wouldn't shake when he responded. “I'm not going to do anything
about
it. It's just that I can't perform well under these circumstances. I wasn't trained for it, and I don't think I'll be able…to give you what you want.”

“Ah, an aesthetic problem. And an ethical one, too, I suppose.”

“Herr Kommandant, you yourself said yesterday that an artist can't do his best when he is merely following orders.”

For a moment the Kommandant seemed amused to hear his own words offered back to him. “Well, I must admit I'm disappointed for the experiment. I thought it had a lot of potential. Of course, you won't be kept here against your will.” He paused a few seconds. “I gather this is a request to leave.”

Keller remained silent; all morning he'd been worrying about the consequences of making such a request.

“I'll instruct the guards to open the gate for you immediately. Only, you should bear in mind that we live in a state of martial law, since it is wartime. The security of the Third Reich comes before everything; the Gestapo sees to that. People are often arrested for no apparent reason.”

Keller took a deep breath and tried again to keep his voice steady. “You mean I might be arrested if I leave?”

The Kommandant shrugged his shoulders.

“But I present no threat to the security of the Third Reich.”

“You have seen this place.”

“Nothing I've seen would compromise…”

“Look, you don't seem to understand the opportunity you have here. Patriotic services performed at a camp like this could go a long way toward erasing any suspicions that the authorities might have about you.”

“Suspicions? Why should I be under suspicion?”

“Oh, most people have something in their past that can be dug up when necessary.”

Marietta. It had to be her. Or maybe Ernst, with his damned letter to the editor of the
Völkischer Beobachter.

The Kommandant looked down at the papers on the desk and began to busy himself with them again. “There's another thing, too,” he added after a few moments. “I am obligated to write a periodic report about everything that goes on here, including unusual events like your concerts. It seems that you don't approve of the camp. I'm afraid I'll have to mention that.”

“Approve of it, Herr Kommandant?”

Those eyes were fixed on him again.

“It's not that I'm against what's being done here,” Keller heard himself say. “I wouldn't presume to question the judgment of our leaders, to know better than they what's best for the German people.”

“If you decline to participate in the experiment, no matter how I characterize that, it will be interpreted as disapproval of the camp. So perhaps you'll reconsider and stay.”

Keller sank back in his chair.

“You'll be surprised at how quickly you get used to it. Besides, it seems to me you'd have your own reasons for wanting to stay—under a pretense of unwillingness, of course. The experiment suits your purposes.”

“My purposes?” It took an effort to keep his voice from rising.

“You must admit it's a tremendous challenge. To kill them is easy, of course. But to bring them back to life…that's something I couldn't do alone. So I yield to your talent. Think of it, the power of life and death over your audience. Not in the usual sense of the phrase: I mean power of life and death
in both directions.
To bring death or to grant new life. That's what I'm offering, even though you'll claim you want nothing to do with the first half.”

As the Kommandant spoke, Keller thought of the automatons he'd played for the day before, their pallid, parchmentlike skin, the brittle bones just beneath. And then the corpses in his dream—the lifeless eyes, the empty sockets, the bony grip of their fingers.

He got up and made for the door, then forced himself to look back, to see if the Kommandant had anything further to say.

But the Kommandant was silent; he was staring at the wall behind Keller, who turned around to find himself face-to-face with a portrait of Hitler in full uniform, standing on a rocky plateau in gloves and a billowing cape, looking heroic against a background of dark clouds rent by lightning. Next to the oil painting was a framed page from a “German War Christmas” album, with an inspirational message from the Führer in elegant Gothic script beneath a spray of flowers: “All nature is a gigantic struggle between strength and weakness, an eternal victory of the strong over the weak.”

When Keller pulled open the door, the guard waiting at the end of the corridor turned his head sharply. Keller forced a look of calm onto his face, hesitated a moment, then left the building and made his way alongside the internal barbed-wire fence toward his little cell of a room. He wanted to get his violin and get the hell out of there, but he felt the energy and determination draining out of him as he thought of what the Kommandant had said about the Gestapo. His pace slowed; by the time he got to his room, he was very tired.

He sat down on the bed. After a few minutes he got up and grabbed his instrument, but stopped at the door, staring at its crudely fitted planks. He backed away and sat down again, brooding on what he had seen and heard.

The Kommandant's meaning was clear enough. He didn't want him just following orders, but he'd have to report him if he didn't stay and do as he was told. Not just obediently: willingly, cheerfully, with commitment. He understood the needs of artists, but he expected Keller to do his best—on command.

Once again Keller picked up his violin, and once again he hesitated at the door. It would be dangerous to leave before the experiment was over, but it might also be dangerous to stay. This time he turned the knob and, without any clear idea of what he should do, headed toward the main gate.

He could see the Kommandant speaking with a group of guards as he approached. Within the group he noticed two men in long leather coats. His throat tightened when he remembered that the Gestapo didn't always wear uniforms. One of the men took a final puff of a cigarette, tossed it to the ground and stepped on it with a leisurely swiveling motion as he looked around the camp. The other, holding a briefcase, nodded slightly in response to something the Kommandant was saying. Keller veered away from the gate and walked as calmly as he could toward a cluster of warehouses not far away.

He slipped behind the corner of a warehouse and waited for his heartbeat to slow down. He was sure they had been talking about him.

Keller peered through a grimy window, expecting to see crates or sacks piled up against the walls. There was nothing inside but a thick layer of shoes carpeting the floor—hundreds, no, thousands of them.
Leather shoes.
Men's, women's, children's. Mostly simple walking shoes, but also a sprinkling of sandals, heavy boots and house slippers. Some were in good condition, but most of them were dried out, dusty, weather-beaten, shapeless, a mute chorus of gaping mouths.

I'm sorry if this shocks you. We just don't have enough food or clothing to provide adequately for the entire camp.

How many layers of lies and half-truths would he have to peel away before he understood what was going on here? He stared at the other warehouses nearby, wondering what else had been plundered from those people.

He could see a small group of inmates just beyond the gate, hauling sacks onto a train. A whistle blew; doors were pulled shut, and a caravan of five or six freight cars started to move away from the loading platform. As the train picked up speed, Keller began to guess at some gigantic process of exchange grinding on from day to day, linking this camp to the world outside.

Uproot them, enslave them, murder them, and recycle their possessions back into the economy of the Reich. It's wartime, after all; we're stretched to our limits; we need everything we can lay our hands on. And let's not forget to experiment on some of them before it's too late.

The Gestapo agents, still surveying the camp as they spoke to the Kommandant, walked with him toward his office. Before anyone could see Keller, he turned around and hurried back to his room. He put his violin case on the bed, opened it, and stared at the instrument for a few minutes. Its reddish-orange varnish glowed seductively, even in the harsh, unshaded electric light of that room. He picked it up. It was so beautiful, the only thing of beauty he'd seen since his arrival there. He turned it around several times; as usual, the back of the violin took his breath away, with its gorgeous deep red flames converging on the center seam. Then he looked out the window, barely able to believe that those hideous barracks beyond the fence were made of the same material as his violin.

He had a lot of practicing to do, and the day passed quickly. It was pretty quiet, at least in that corner of the camp. He needed those scales and arpeggios, needed the methodical buildup of difficult passages from slow to fast tempos. He tried to remember everything his teachers had taught him before the insanity started, tried to recall everything he'd learned on his own. He had to forget where he was. After all, what could he do to change any of it?