The Trial of Fallen Angels (15 page)

17

S
eparating myself from Amina Rabun was one of the most difficult things I’d ever done in my life—or death. Amina Rabun’s story became
my
story. Unfortunately, as with many plays, her story was a tragedy.

On the rainy afternoon of 23 April 1945, a Soviet scouting patrol advancing south toward Prague stumbled upon the Rabuns of Kamenz. It was the day of Amina Rabun’s eighteenth-birthday celebration.

The Allies held Leipzig to the west and the Russians were massed along the Oder to the east, making the defeat of Germany inescapable. Amina’s father, Friedrich, and her uncle Otto had already pulled back to Berlin with the retreating remnants of Hitler’s forces. They advised their families against leaving Kamenz, however, reasoning that the Russians were interested only in Berlin, that the Americans would soon take Dresden, and that the armed forces of the latter were preferred to the former with respect to treatment of civilians. Privately, the Rabun brothers were also concerned for their affairs and property, which almost certainly would be looted if abandoned—if not by enemy soldiers then by their own German neighbors who had suffered such privation during Hitler’s desperate last stand.

Unaware of the approaching Russian forces, Amina rose early that day to begin baking for the party, but not before Großvater Hetzel, who had risen even earlier to slaughter a pig to roast in a pit dug several paces from the long garage full of polished Daimler automobiles resting on thick wooden blocks because there was no fuel to run them. By noon, the sweet scent of pork, yams, cabbage, and fresh
Kuchen
teased everybody, especially Aunt Helena’s four hungry children, two boys and two girls, who had been playing hide-and-seek all morning despite a soft rain and their mother’s unwillingness, in anticipation of the feast, to prepare their usual hearty breakfasts.

Sensitive to the effect displays of prosperity could have during such lean times, only family members had been invited to the party, all of whom, save those living in the manor itself, conveyed their regrets due to lack of transportation to the country. It was thus agreed that leftovers would be delivered to the hungriest of Kamenz by anonymous donation to the cathedral. Amina also planned secretly to smuggle a portion to the Schriebergs, who had enjoyed very little meat recently and, having long ago relinquished observance of kosher laws in their cabin, would happily accept scraps of pork.

All went merrily and well into the early afternoon, with everything and everyone cooperating except the weather. But even the rain that had been falling since morning was kind enough to resist becoming a downpour until just after Großvater Hetzel removed the pig from its pyre. Children and adults raced inside as much to stay dry as to enjoy the feast. They assembled in the formal dining room around a large table upon which had been arranged the finest place settings and two large hand-painted porcelain vases overflowing with bouquets of wildflowers freshly picked from the surrounding gardens. In the background, a phonograph whispered Kreisler and Bach into the air. Colorfully wrapped gifts were arranged near the seat of honor at the head of the table, including several packages for the birthday girl delivered by special SS courier from Berlin.

The anticipation continued to build until finally, with considerable ceremony, the grinning pig atop a tremendous silver platter made its debut to ravenous applause. The browned head and body of the beast remained intact, resting peacefully in a soft bed of garnishes as if it had fallen asleep there. Before carving into the meat, toasts of precisely aged Johannisberg Riesling were made first to the beautiful young Amina, then to the cooks of the feast, and finally to the safe return of Friedrich and Uncle Otto and a swift end to the war. Amid the happy conversation, laughter, and music, the revelers could not hear the Soviet scouting patrol approaching. They had no opportunity to defend themselves or flee.

The soldiers swiftly entered from three sides of the manor and herded everybody outside into the rain. After conducting a quick search to ensure they had everyone, they segregated Herr Hetzel and the young boys, ages six and twelve, from the group. Without warning or hesitation they shot them all on the spot before they could offer protest or prayer, as if this was simply a matter of routine for which the soldiers assumed everyone had been rehearsed. Amina’s mother and aunt were shot next while running to their aid. Left standing, like statuary in a graveyard, were Amina Rabun and her stunned cousins, Bette and Barratte, ages eight and ten. The three girls’ features were petrified into rigid sculptures of terror, waiting for the next bursts of gunfire that would join them with their fallen family members. The girls were spared such a fate, however.

Two gunshots were heard unexpectedly from the woods behind the house, from the direction where the Schriebergs lived in the cabin. The soldiers dropped to the ground and returned a fearsome barrage with their automatic weapons. Amina and her cousins stood motionless in the crossfire, afraid even to breathe. Then everything became silent. In the distance across the field, in the direction from which the two shots had been fired, Amina saw what appeared to be an American soldier holding his hands over his head as if he were surrendering. The Soviet commander directed two of his men to approach the soldier while the rest of the platoon held its position. Several minutes passed. Finally, Amina heard some Russian words shouted back from the woods and the commander gestured for his men to get up. After several more minutes, the two Russian soldiers returned, one of them carrying a simple double-barrel shotgun, the kind Amina had seen her father pack on hunting trips.

Laughing at the weakness of this threat, the soldiers presented their trophy to their commander. Soon the rest of the platoon joined in the laughter and cheering. But amid the backslapping and congratulations, as if the same idea had struck each of them at the same time, attentions were turned slowly toward Amina, Barratte, and Bette, who still had not moved.

The men looked hungrily from the girls to their commander and back to the girls. They began to cheer louder and louder, insisting that their request be granted. Amina could tell instantly what they wanted. The commander looked at the girls and then back at his men and shook his head in mocking disapproval. The cheering became even more frantic. Finally, like Pontius Pilate, the commander turned his back on the girls and wiped his hands. Amina, Barratte, and Bette were dragged into separate bedrooms of the manor and beaten and raped repeatedly throughout the night.

At dawn, the commander of the unit ordered his men to move on.

Amina staggered from the room in which she had been held captive, in search of her cousins. She found the older, Barratte, dazed, bruised, and bleeding but, thankfully, still alive. She already knew that the younger, Bette, was dead. When the drunken and gorged Russians had permitted Amina to use the toilet late during the night, she slipped briefly into Bette’s room and found her naked body cold and blue, her face broken and bloodied almost beyond recognition because she would not obey their orders in Russian to stop crying. Even after that, Amina had heard men with Bette at least three times.

—

I CRIED SO
long for Amina Rabun and her family. I cried for her more than I had cried even for myself after I lost my arm. I lived each horrifying moment with her. I believed I would die in the agony of the soul of Amina Rabun, if dying from death were possible.

I spent long periods alone on Nana’s front porch, mourning, convalescing, trying to make sense of what Amina Rabun had experienced during her life, and what I had experienced during my own. I searched for meaning within the endlessly conflicting seasons of Shemaya that struggled with one another for space in the cramped sky, like quadruplets in a womb. An entire year of days condensed into a single, dazzling moment of nature in rebellion against time. The apple tree I’d climbed as a child extended its limbs through all four seasons at once: some branches in blossom, some leafy, others tipped with ripe green apples, others in autumn and winter bare, like an unfinished painting. Always changing yet always the same. Endlessly, like human generations. Do trees mourn the loss of their springtime buds, or do they look forward to their arrival?

One day, Nana joined me on the porch. “You told me I had to discover why I was introduced to Amina Rabun, Toby Bowles, and Tim Shelly,” I said.

“Yes,” Nana replied. “Did you?”

“Katerine Schrieberg, Amina’s best friend, became Bo’s mother, my mother-in-law,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Amina saved Katerine from the Nazis. Without Amina, Bo would never have existed, I would never have known him, and Sarah would never have been born.”

Nana nodded.

“Toby Bowles saved Katerine from the Russians. Without him, Bo would never have existed, I would never have known him, and Sarah would never have been born.”

Nana nodded again.

“But I convinced Katerine to sue Amina and Barratte to recover her inheritance.”

“Yes, you did,” Nana said.

“I had no idea that Amina and Barratte had been raped by the soldiers or that the soldiers had murdered her family.”

“No,” Nana said. “You didn’t know.”

“And Amina didn’t know that it was Katerine’s father who fired the shots at the soldiers from the woods, or that he lost his life trying to save her and her family.”

Nana nodded yet again. “People on earth often judge each other without having all of the facts,” she said.

I thought about this for a moment. “But it happens here in Shemaya too,” I said. “We can’t read people’s minds on earth, but everything is available here and still cases are decided on only half of the facts. Nothing’s changed. I don’t understand it. What’s God’s excuse?”

Nana patted my arm. “Only the Judge can answer that question,” she said. “Maybe the facts of who did what and when become unimportant when judging a person’s soul.”

We sat together quietly for a moment, watching the merging seasons.

“Bo was named after Toby Bowles,” I said. “Katerine lost the sheet of paper with his name on it but she remembered the sound of his last name—Bowles, Boaz—she almost got it right.”

“Yes, she did. She almost got it right,” Nana said.

“But I still don’t know why I was introduced to Tim Shelly,” I said. “I don’t know how he fits into any of this, and I can’t remember how I know him.”

“You will when you’re ready, child,” Nana said. “You will when you’re ready.”

—

A FEW DAYS LATER,
Tim Shelly came to visit me. I was out walking along the Brandywine River behind Nana’s house. I had created a row of snowmen on the riverbank in the alternating bands of winter. Portly and resolute, they watched over the river and me, keeping me company. Tim jumped out from behind one of them and scared me badly. I always walked alone.

“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,” he said mockingly, as though he had exactly that intention. He reminded me at that moment of Wally Miller, the bully from my childhood who killed the crayfish and whom I had punched in the mouth after he knocked me to the ground. I thought that might have been how I knew him, that maybe he was using a different name.

“You’re not Wally Miller, are you?” I asked.

“No,” Tim said. “Who’s he?” He seemed genuinely puzzled.

“Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

I continued walking along the river and Tim followed me. He stopped acting menacing and started talking about his mother. He missed her terribly. He said she hadn’t been well since his father died and he worried about how she was taking his own death. They were mushroom farmers, and they had lost their farm and only means of income after his father died. He said his mother was too old to find a job. Tim was all she had left, and now he was gone too. How would she survive?

We stopped walking in a band of spring, at a patch of wild daffodils where a large tree hung out over the river, defying gravity. Tim seemed vulnerable at that moment, like a lost little boy. I felt sorry for him.

“Do you ever wish you could see your husband and daughter again?” he asked.

“Always,” I said. Tears welled up in my eyes, the way they did whenever I thought of Bo and Sarah. “I miss them so much that some days I can’t even get out of bed,” I said. “I have no photographs of them, no letters, nothing the way living people do. I’d give anything to see them again.”

“I miss my mom a lot,” Tim said. “My dad told me when I got here that we can’t go back. We can’t see the living or communicate with them.”

“I know,” I said. “My Nana told me the same thing.”

Tim broke a few pieces of bark off the tree and threw them into the river. They floated away like tiny ships in the current.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

But he looked nervous now, like he was hiding something.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Yeah, it’s just . . .”

“What?”

“It’s just that I did. I saw her the other day. I saw my mother. I went back and visited the living.”

18

S
hall I take you to them?”

Elymas appeared as Tim Shelly told me he would, during a moment of despair when going forward seemed no more possible than going back. That moment for me came on the rocking chair in Sarah’s room. I had not been home since my last visit there to disprove my mortality had instead so thoroughly confirmed it. Home teased me the way a casino teases a gambler, luring the eyes and the mind into a world offering pleasure and hope but delivering only pain and disappointment. Tim too had gone back over and over to his family’s mushroom farm, which was as deserted as Sarah’s room. This made the sudden appearance of Elymas so startling and so welcome.

Elymas was older than Luas and much more poorly preserved. His withered body floated inside a pair of green plaid pants that piled at his ankles and gathered high around his chest, held there by a moldy brown belt. A food-stained yellow shirt sagged over his narrow shoulders, buttoned crookedly so that the left side of his body appeared higher than the right. He had a corncob face and relied for balance upon a cane with four tiny rubber feet at the bottom. He was completely blind. His eyes glowed glassy, white, and terrifying.

“Shall I take you to them?” he asked again, hovering in the doorway of Sarah’s room, too vulnerable and frail to have made such an impossible, gigantic promise. A light breeze could have lifted his body like a scrap of paper and carried him off.

I had been crying, mourning the loss of my daughter and my life. “But they said it isn’t possible—”

“You did not listen carefully,” Elymas said. “They said it is not possible to direct the movement of consciousness from realm to realm. They said nothing about you interacting with it. Shall I take you to your husband and daughter?”

“But—”

The old man banged his cane fiercely against the floor. “Do not question me! Many wait for my services. You must tell me now whether you wish to see them.”

“Yes, yes, desperately.”

“Then open your mind to me, Brek Abigail Cuttler. Open your mind and you shall see them.”

The old man’s eyes dilated until they consumed his entire face from the inside out, and then they consumed me. I felt a sudden motion in the darkness of his eyes, as if I were being hurled through space. Two small points of light emerged in the distance from opposing directions, each emitting a soft, warm glow like the flames of two candles carried from opposite ends of a room, growing as I approached them. Suddenly the shapes of Sarah and Bo emerged, with our dog, Macy, barking at their feet! And around them an expanse of an azure sky, an outline of poplar and ash trees, a swing set, a slide, a jogging stroller. The playground near our home! I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Sarah toddled toward me. I swept her into the air, pulling her close, burying my nose in her hair, drinking in her sweet scent. She wrapped herself around my neck and pressed her face against mine. My tears dripped down her cheeks. Then Bo’s strong long arms enveloped us both. I felt his scratchy Saturday beard against my neck and smelled the clean sweat on his back from his long run through the town, the college to the playground. He wore his faded blue jogging shorts and a T-shirt with a large red “10” stenciled on the back. Macy whimpered and leaped into the air to get my attention.

“I miss you so much,” Bo whispered. “Sometimes I don’t think I can go on.”

“I know,” I whispered, “me too.”

I turned my face to his. We kissed, looked into each other’s eyes, and kissed again, longer and deeper. Sarah squirmed to free herself and return to the swing. Bo and I exchanged disappointed but happy smiles. He buckled her into the toddler seat, and we took positions in front and behind to push her, her face sailing within inches of ours as she squealed with delight. Bo had her dressed in my favorite denim jumper and sneakers, with her hair tied up into an adorable fountain on top of her head.

As Sarah flew through the air, I recognized my own features in her face—my dimpled chin and cheeks, my small nose and olive-shaped eyes—and behind them, an unbroken line of ancestors—of Bellinis, Cuttlers, Wolfsons, Schriebergs, and other family names long since forgotten, marching back in history and time, waiting there to step forward into the next generation. This little girl sustained their memories and kept alive their hopes and dreams.
And mine.

Bo and I talked over Sarah’s laughter and the squeaking chains of the swing. He said he had taken my death very hard and had just returned to work for the first time. They had stayed with his brother and sister-in-law at first. Then his mother visited for a few weeks to help out until he could get used to taking care of Sarah alone. He had put the house up for sale because the memories were too painful, and he was looking for a job at one of the New York television stations to be closer to his family. They were doing fine, though, he insisted. Work helped occupy his mind, and Sarah woke only twice during the night now looking for Mommy. He had the roof fixed and had gotten the garbage disposal running. Bill Gwynne from the firm had called to offer any help he could with settling my estate, which was kind of him. My parents called once or twice a week, but the conversations didn’t last long and were filled with awkward gaps of silence. Karen came by to talk and left some books about grieving that sometimes helped.

I tried to assemble my thoughts. There was so much to say—not about what had happened to me since my death but about what I wanted for their future. Bo looked so strong and handsome standing there in his shorts and T-shirt, so determined and resilient, yet so wounded and vulnerable. I fell in love with him all over again, deeper than before. I wanted to tell him that, and tell Sarah how proud she should be of her daddy. I wanted to tell her how I wanted her to be like him. And like me. I wanted her to know me—who I had been, how I had become who I was, the experiences to treasure, the mistakes to avoid. I wanted her to live life to the fullest because I could not. But as I struggled to form these words, the color suddenly began bleaching from their faces and with it the green from the grass and the blue from the sky. They were fading from view.

“No! No!” I cried. “Bo! Sarah!”

“We love you!” Bo called back. “We love you forever . . .”

And then they were gone.

I was back in Sarah’s room. Elymas stood in the doorway. I lunged at him.

“Take me back!” I pleaded with him. “Please, please, it’s too soon. Please, take me back.”

A toothless smile spread across the old man’s face. “But of course,” he said, patronizingly. “We’ll go back, Brek Abigail Cuttler. In due time. In due time.”

“No, take me back now!”

He turned toward the stairs. “That is not possible.”

“Wait,” I said. “Please, don’t leave me.”

He grunted for me to follow him. Using his cane to feel his way, he slowly climbed down the stairs. When we finally reached the bottom, he said: “Listen very carefully, Brek Cuttler. Whether you see your husband and daughter again is up to you. But know there are reasons you were told otherwise. Luas is concerned about your effectiveness as a presenter. He believes you should devote your efforts to the Courtroom, and he is concerned you will spend too much time with your family and that it may affect your work. Sophia is concerned that you will not be able to adjust to your death unless you let your loved ones go. It was easier for them to tell you contact is not possible. Do you understand?”

No, I did not understand. I was furious.

“I do not share their views,” Elymas said. “I do not presume to determine what is best for others. The choice is yours, just as they too have been free to choose. I come only to present you with possibilities. I do not criticize your decisions. Now, I must be going.”

“Wait, please. I want to see them again.”

“Yes,” Elymas said, “I’m certain you do. But you must understand that when Luas and Sophia learn of your decision they will be angry. They will deny that it is even possible and do everything in their power to convince you of this. They will tell you it is all an illusion, and they will slander me and claim I am nothing more than a sorcerer and a false prophet. They may even threaten your position as a presenter and insist that you leave Shemaya.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I just want to see my husband and my daughter.”

The toothless smile flashed again across the old man’s unseeing face. “We only visit them in their dreams,” he said. “Take your time, Brek Cuttler. They will be there when you decide. Think about what I have told you.”

Then Elymas banged his cane three times on the porch floor and he was gone.