This Shared Dream (21 page)

Levi led them through a dark tunnel to another stone gallery. A set of tracks ran along one side. Precisely organized sections of paintings, statues, and suitcases stretched as far as Sam could see; he had a feeling that if the next section of lights were switched on this astonishing wealth of European art would continue, and continue, and continue.

A man knelt next to a stack of folios, jotting on a clipboard. He stood and wiped both hands on his pants. “Marsh.”

“Dance and Winklemeyer. They’re going to figure out how to move all this stuff.”

“Know anything about art?” asked Marsh.

“Not much.”

“Well, over here I have six Rembrandts.” He bent and flipped large, framed paintings forward. “I can’t put a price on them. I mean, I was an art dealer. I’ve never seen anything this fantastic. Apparently it was Goering’s collection.”

“His adviser tells us that he paid for every piece,” said Levi, with a grim edge to his voice. “Just had to wait till the price was right, I guess. Let’s see—a Rubens here, a Dürer there. It adds up. Probably took ten train cars to cart this stuff up here so it could rot.”

“That’s a Kandinsky,” said Wink. Marsh looked at him with respect. “Saw it in a book. It’s huge!”

“Yes, well, it’s a great surprise to me that they have this so-called decadent art here, but it does have a monetary value. Kandinsky was at the Bauhaus for ten years, and the whole liberal lot of them had to decide either to toe the party line or get the hell out of the country. Kandinsky is still alive, you know. At least, I think he is. He’s Russian, but he moved to Germany when Russia threw him out, and then he moved to Paris.”

In the dim light, Sam drank in the strange juxtapositions of lines and shapes, the sheer motion of the piece. “He has some interesting thoughts.”

“Indeed.” Marsh rubbed moisture from the braided coronet of an exquisite marble nude with a rag he held. “Salt water can’t be good for this. I guess Goering was thinking he’d be back soon.”

They stood in silence for a moment.

“Well,” said Levi briskly, “I think we’re almost done counting it. I’ll get the lists to you tomorrow. One thing,” he was leading them back toward the head of the tunnel, the brightly lit office and stopped at another doorway. “I haven’t found anyone to catalog this yet.”

Inside yet another gallery, three-foot hoops strung solidly with gold rings hung on metal rods ten feet long, rows and rows of them. Sam lifted his hand to touch one of the hoops, then dropped it. He tried to estimate the weight of what he saw. Levi gestured hopelessly toward what looked like hundreds of barrels, opposite the rings. “Go on,” he said, his voice hoarse.

Wink lifted the lid of one of the barrels.

“What is it?”

“Teeth,” Wink finally said. “With gold fillings.” He set the lid down gently and stood with his head bowed for a long moment.

Levi was gone. Without speaking, they returned to the elevator and held their silence as it clanked to the top.

Night had come to the mountains.

“I don’t want to stay here,” said Wink.

“Me neither.” Sam put the jeep in gear and drove back down the road, on the lookout for craters.

Near the Rhur, where the air was river-damp, they found an empty house and set up camp, carrying candles, food, and wine into the house in silence.

Finally, as they ate bread and cheese and washed it down with Rhine wine, Sam spoke.

“I think we need to make that damned Device work.”

“Seconded.”

But as Sam lay awake in the darkness, he knew it would be much more difficult than just deciding. He wasn’t sure why.

Maybe it was only because it seemed like much work, and that it could drain his soul.

*   *   *

Brian snapped back into the present, nauseated. The experience of his father had flown off the old, fragile paper directly into his brain, as if he was
there
with Sam,
feeling
the horrific revelation.

One’s normal reading of the discovery of the Merkers salt mines, which held gold, art, and some of the first evidence of the depth of Nazi atrocities, did not give the full import of
being
there. He mopped his forehead with his T-shirt, and got to his feet, shaken. Yes, of course: After that experience, anyone would want to stop war—and that was far from the worst of it. Compared to the discovery of conditions at Bergen-Belsen a few weeks later, compared to a day of combat in which soldiers saw their buddies blown to bits, or parents their children killed, this was nothing. Brian didn’t know if he could stand reading Sam’s next entry while in this new, strange state of mind.

But he had heard about the war all his life, at second- and third-hand; these atrocities were common knowledge. New genocides occurred constantly, worldwide, a steady, somber note beneath humanity’s bustling, forward-leaning gloss of civilization.

Was he inured, somehow, to the outrage and astonishment that stunned Sam in that salt mine? Was that why he lacked—even mocked—Jill’s antiwar fervor?

Jill was always talking about ending war for all time, but then, she was a bleeding-heart liberal, who deeply believed in the goodness of humanity. In fact, before he’d come up to the attic, they’d had quite a discussion about the Q-Schools, which would grow from artificial DNA and cure the world of war, never mind those who didn’t want them.

Brian was a cynic. It had always seemed so easy to defeat her arguments, to ridicule her utopias, although while she was working on her doctorate, it had become more of a challenge. She had studies and statistics at her fingertips, a great and unfair lot of them. History, however, was squarely on his side.

Brian reread the last few lines. Wink and Sam had to make
what
work? The question sprang a lock deep inside of him, one of those things from childhood, when he’d overheard his parents arguing.…

Closing the notebook, he placed it back in the box. There were several boxes of material, and he carried them all to the top of the stairs, his sweat making little plops onto the dusty cardboard. Each drop spread out in the dust like a tiny bomb crater landing, the dirt landscapes where his beloved little green Army men had attacked, rallied, and moved strategically across the creek. He’d carried them around most of his childhood, setting them up and knocking them down with incoming rocks. Spacies had taken over that mental space in most kids’ psyches years ago. They battled not one another but ignorance, greed, and oppression.

He went back and got the instruments, turned off the lights, and stepped onto the landing. The air, a mere ninety degrees, washed over him with marvelous coolness. He remembered to turn around and close the attic door.

After assembling his finds at the bottom of the stairs, he pushed open the kitchen door just a crack. Nobody was in the kitchen. Good. He hoped to smuggle the saxophone out the back door, and then somehow get it into his truck, without Jill noticing it, and then the boxes.

Whens galloped into the kitchen. “Uncle Brian! Come and play with us! What’s that?”

“What’s what?” asked Jill, as she approached down the hallway.

Brian shoved the saxophone under the table. He held one finger over his mouth. “Shhh.”

As Jill came into the room, Brian opened the other case. “Look, Jill. It’s your old trombone!”

She looked at him suspiciously. “You know I never liked playing the trombone. I really liked playing the saxophone.” She bent down, looked under the table, and pulled out the saxophone case. She sat on a chair and opened it, picked up the tarnished instrument. “Look, Whens. This belonged to Grandpa.”

“Oh.” He frowned. “How do you play it?”

“Well…” She took the mouthpiece from its separate compartment, then searched the entire case. “You can’t, without a reed.”

“That’s right,” said Brian. “I’m going to get it spiffed up and working again.”

“And then you’ll bring it back.” It was a command.

“I played this saxophone too.”

“I played it better.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” His own kids were in the kitchen now, with Cindy and Abbie. He really wanted to say “Finders, keepers,” but it would be such a bad example for the children.

He smiled. “Jill, why don’t you show them how to play the trombone? I’m sure it still works.” The kids dragged Jill and the trombone out of the kitchen; soon he heard the blatting, sliding notes of “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain” issue from a thankfully distant part of the house.

Fortified with iced tea, Brian began to clean up the sax, polishing the nickel until it shone. In some places, the metal was pitted. The pads were in bad repair; many of them were missing felt and the leather had been eaten by some strong-jawed insect.

As he worked, he recalled sitting on the stairs one night in the wee hours, watching his father play. The radio, records, and live music of his father were a hardwired part of his nocturnal life as a child.

His father would put a record by Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, or Ben Webster on the turntable and play along about ten times. Then he’d try to play it without the record until he faltered. Maddeningly, he’d put the needle on the part he was trying to master again and again, until it was perfect, and then he’d try to play the whole thing again. Even though it looked and sounded tedious, it fascinated Brian so much that he’d taken saxophone in band.

Over the years, the sound of distant jazz at night became as familiar, as soothing, as the sound of wind combing the trees. Now, when he found it hard to sleep, he’d switch the twenty-four-hour jazz station on low and lie on the living room couch. It always worked.

He hadn’t mentioned his other recurring nightmare to Megan. In that one, he was flying a bomber over, improbably, Cambodia, one of the most peaceful countries in the world, bombing the daylights out of it. Until he himself went down in flames while on his way back to his base in Vietnam.

It was horrifyingly real. As real, actually, as being at the Merkers salt mines in April 1945.

Cindy stood in front of him. “Head in the clouds again? Time to get to work. Do you even know how to play it?”

“Kind of. I played it in high school band. I never told you?”

“Jill said you were awful and would drive us out of the apartment and the neighbors would call the police.”

“Just an underhanded ploy to try and get me to leave it here. Pretty unfair, if you ask me.”

Brian put the saxophone back into the case and carried it out to the truck. Then he went back to the kitchen and opened the door to the attic stairs and picked up the first box of his father’s journals. He paused for a moment, struggling. Jill would want to hoard this too, if she saw it. He’d bring it back as soon as he’d read everything. How long could it take to read this stuff?

The coast was clear. He went outside with his haul and slipped it into the backseat of the truck. As he slammed the door, he sighed. He had to tell her.

He went back to the kitchen, where Jill stood on a stepstool, rummaging through a cupboard. “Where would the paper cups be?”

“Jill, remember Dad’s journals?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I just put them in my truck. I’m going to read them.”

“What?
I’m
going to read them.” She slammed the cupboard door, climbed down, and leaned back against the counter, a wild, lost look on her face.

Even afraid?
wondered Brian. “When?”

“Soon. Any day now. Maybe tonight.”

“That would be great. Come over to the apartment. We’ll order a pizza and read them together.”

“I don’t—” She shook her head.

“What’s wrong?”

“I— Oh, I really don’t have time to read them right away. Take good care of them, okay?”

“Are you kidding?” Once again, there was something she was not telling him. “Jill, do you remember—” He was going to mention the weirdly haunting space under the loose attic floorboard.

“Mommy! Help!” Whens had suspended himself upside down by the knees from a crossbar on the swing set.

“Be right there,” she yelled out the window.

“Jill—”

“Look, don’t worry about it.”

“But—”

She snarled—Brian could only think of it as a snarl, flung over her shoulder as she ran down the back stairs—“I said,
never mind
!”

With Jill, that was that. He and Megan planned to sit down and try to hash things out with her, but this certainly was not a good time to mention it.

*   *   *

Zoe, upstairs, was hard at work.

It had been a day of awakening when Zoe realized that she could hear her mother even when she couldn’t see her. Using her markers, she could write her mother’s sound when she was in another room, when she was at work. Sometimes she was baroque, sometimes she was rock ’n’ roll, sometimes she was a cello concerto or a funny cartoon piece, rushing fast toward a roaring conclusion.

She could hear her father too, and write him, but sometimes she didn’t want to listen, because her father was complicated to listen to. His music was strange and sometimes even unpleasant, so that it might make Zoe sick to her stomach. She guessed she couldn’t really hear everyone, at least not all of them.

Bitsy was just too simple. Happy, all primary colors, the sound of water burbling over smooth rocks in a creek, an unending roar of good stuff.

Whens?

Whens was distant, like a star. His explosions of color were symmetrical and so intense that they sometimes gave Zoe a headache. But he was always there, there, there, like daylight, the sun-star come close, like he was bathing everyone in light but he didn’t know it. One Christmas Eve her Crazy Aunts, which was what she and the other cousins called them, had taken everyone to midnight Mass at their old Episcopal church on Connecticut, even though they never went there any other time. Aunt Jill handed her Whens, and Whens was six months old and kind of heavy but not too.

The service was most soothing to Zoe, and deeply beautiful. Candles flickered in wall sconces and the organ music was so magnificent that tears rolled down her face.

Whens was just as deeply happy. Zoe had been afraid that the baby would wail, or squirm, and disturb her enjoyment of the music, but he just stared in wonder at everything around him and Zoe could hear him absorbing everything, like a reverse kind of music. That was when Zoe fell in love with Whens, who before that had just been another boring baby. And after that night, Whens started giving off that music, like a switch had been flipped inside of him, like he was suddenly himself and knew it.