Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (7 page)

It wasn’t a smell; it was an acrid stench, one whose density made the eyes water. Automatically, I tried to associate it with images out of my past: smoke from a chimney behind a rendering plant on a wintry day; the liquescence of unburied offal; cattle dead of anthrax sliding off the beds of dump trucks into a chemical soup. I thought of rats trapped in compacted garbage that had been sprinkled with kerosene and set aflame. The stench was all of these things but worse. In my mind’s eye, I saw thick curds of yellow and gray smoke rising from human hair and skin stretched on bone. I saw fingernails curl and snap, and the eyes of the dead pop open in the heat. I saw lesions and blisters spread across the faces of children and mothers and fathers and grandparents, as though their expressions were being reconfigured long after they were dead.

I realized the sergeant and I had stepped through a door in the dimension and were about to enter a place that had no equivalent except perhaps in photos from the devil’s scrapbook.

Chapter

4

T
EN MINUTES LATER,
we climbed up an eroded embankment on the creek and rested on our stomachs among the trees, staring out at an iron arch and a set of gates that formed the entrance to a fenced camp where there were at least four barracks-like tarpaper buildings and a gingerbread house.

Spirals of rusted barbed wire were strung along the top of the fence; poplars had been planted along it. The rusted arch and its stanchions were scrolled with English ivy that had turned to black string and bits of red leaves. The only sounds I could hear were a tin door banging incessantly on a tarpaper building, and the muttering of birds and a combative fluttering of wings.

Evidently, the camp had not included a crematorium when it was built, and the SS had made do with the materials they had on hand. Segments of train rails had been laid across bricks stacked four feet high, then piled with felled trees. Buckets of pitch that had been used for an accelerant lay empty on the ground. From the amount of ash under the rails, I estimated the fires had been burning for at least a day. Some of the bodies had been reduced to bones and leathery scraps hanging from the rails; others were smoldering, only partially consumed by the flames. Not far away, on a railroad spur, was a giant pit where other bodies had been thrown naked, one on top of another, and doused with lime.

Directly behind the improvised crematorium was a gallows, a single noose made of steel cable hanging from the crosspiece.

“What is this place, Lieutenant?” the sergeant said.

“Probably a supply depot for forced labor,” I said.

“Where are the guards?”

“The guys who work in these places don’t do well against armed troops. They probably got rid of their uniforms and hauled freight.”

The sergeant wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Maybe there’s grub in that gingerbread house,” he said.

We had one weapon between us, my 1911-model army .45 automatic. I got to my feet and pulled it from the holster. It felt cold and heavy in my hand. “Let’s take a walk,” I said.

The gates were unlocked, the smoke flattening in the wind, the smell of charred flesh unbearable. I cleared my mouth and spat, then pulled my sweater over my nose. The sergeant kept looking sideways at the crematorium, his eyelids stitched to his brows, his cheeks sunken. “Lieutenant, there’s a little-bitty child in that pit,” he said. “Right yonder. Oh, man.”

“We’ll talk about it later, Sergeant. Concentrate on what’s in front of us.”

“Yes, sir. If this is a camp for slave labor, why is a child here?”

“Don’t try to make sense out of a place like this,” I said. “There are more of us than there are of them. That’s what we have to keep remembering.”

“Sir, maybe we should forget the house. I think there’s poultry in that tarpaper building. Maybe turkeys. Maybe we should wring the necks of a couple and get out of here. Sir, pardon the expression, we’re standing out here like shit in an ice cream parlor. Sir, I want to get out of here.”

“You’ve got a point,” I replied.

A gust of wind slammed the tin door shut on the tarpaper building. The sergeant grabbed it by the handle and jerked it open. Carrion birds clattered into the air, their wings beating against the walls and roof, their beaks red from their work. The building was not a barracks but a charnel house. The only difference between the bodies in the pit and those in the building was some of them were wearing clothes, if rags could be considered clothes. The bodies at the bottom were festooned with pustules, the skin waxy, almost luminous. Who were these poor creatures? Did they once have families and homes like the rest of us? Did they die from typhus or diphtheria, pneumonia or cholera? Or bullets? No one would ever know. From what I saw, I would say they died a little bit from all those things, and for most of them death came as a blessing.

“Did you hear that, Lieutenant?”

“Hear what?”

“A woman’s voice,” the sergeant said. “I heard it.”

“I think you heard the hinges on the door.”

“Listen. That’s not the wind. Somebody’s alive back there.”

My hand was tight on the grips of the .45, my eyes trying to adjust to the weak light.

“There it is again,” Pine said. “It’s a woman. Who are you, lady? Tell us where you are.”

“It’s too late to do anything for these people, Sergeant.”

“We cain’t just walk out of here, sir.” He was trembling from the cold, moisture running from his nose. “Right, sir? We cain’t pretend we didn’t hear what we heard. Look at this goddamn place. Oh, Jesus, sir, I cain’t forget the way I talked to Steinberg.”

I walked deeper into the building and saw her lying on the floor in a filthy gray dress pooled with blood that appeared to have come from the bodies around her. Her face was turned toward me, her eyes too big for her face, her hair thick and dark brown with streaks of black, cropped on the neck, probably with a knife or a very dull pair of shears. A number was tattooed in blue ink on the inside of her left forearm. I knelt beside her and looked into her face. “I’m Lieutenant Weldon Avery Holland, United States Army,” I said. “Who are you?”

I thought she was trying to speak, but I couldn’t be certain. I cupped my hand to her forehead. It felt as cool and smooth and bloodless as marble. “Can you tell me your name? Are others alive, too?”

She tilted her head slightly; her lips moved without sound. I leaned down with my ear to her mouth. Her breath smelled like shaved ice.

“I’m sorry, I can’t understand you,” I said.

“I never went to the whorehouse,” she said. “My name is Rosita Lowenstein.
Viva la República. No pasarán.
”

I would have sworn she winked at me.

W
E FOUND AN
overcoat and a scarf and a pair of shoes in the house and put them on her. She told us that the camp staff had become frightened three days earlier, when British planes bombed a German convoy one mile away. The staff had also heard rumors that Americans were executing SS in retaliation for a massacre in Belgium. She said she was twenty-three years old, had grown up in Madrid, and spoke Spanish, German, English, and French. We found a jar of preserves and a half loaf of bread and part of a smoked ham in the larder. We fed her and ourselves, all the while eyeing the road.

“What was that you said to us back there in the building?” the sergeant asked.

“I told them if they put me in the whorehouse, I would kill the first officer I could. Then I would open my veins and tell the other women to do the same.”

“What was the other thing you said?” the sergeant asked.

“‘Long live the Republic’ and ‘They shall not pass.’ I was talking about the Spanish Republic and Franco’s Falangists.”

The sergeant looked at me for clarification. “She’s talking about the Spanish Civil War,” I said. “ ‘They shall not pass’ is a famous statement made by a woman called La Pasionaria. She was a speaker for the Popular Front. She lives in the Soviet Union now.”

“You’re a Communist?” the sergeant said.

“No. I was for the Republic,” Rosita replied. “But they blighted themselves with the murder of the clergy. I am not political, except for my hatred of the fascists.”

“Do you know if others are alive?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“You mean no?” I said.

“The difference between life and death is not measurable here,” she replied.

Even after eating, she could not walk, and the sergeant and I had to take turns carrying her. Her body had no odor, as though her glands had dried up and her pores were no longer able to secrete moisture. We carried her through a network of irrigation ditches and hid in a culvert under a road that had been bombed and rendered impassable. We also hid under a train trestle and slept in a forest where we kept warm by heaping leaves and dirt on ourselves. My feet were blocks of wood. I unlaced my boots but did not remove them, for fear I would not be able to fit them on again. When I woke in the morning, three inches of snow had accumulated on top of me without my being aware of it.

The weather continued to worsen. The grayness of the day and the snow swirling out of the fields allowed us to keep walking; otherwise, we would have had to stay hidden in the woods until dark. We saw dead cattle in a field and a farmhouse pocked with holes, including the roof, probably made by aerial gunfire. We also saw a convoy of trucks filled with German infantry going up a dirt road toward the front, followed by three armored personnel carriers and two ambulances and a motorcycle with a sidecar on it. The motorcycle sputtered to a stop, and the driver and the officer in the sidecar climbed into one of the trucks. Later we saw a train carrying rail cannon and panzers boomed down on flatcars. Late in the afternoon the sergeant worked his way under the back wall of a farmer’s barn and returned with five potatoes stuffed in his pockets, his face as red as sunburn from the wind, snow speckling on it like bits of glass.

We kept traveling into the night and stopped only out of sheer exhaustion. The moon was up, the countryside bright and cold and empty of sound or movement. Just before going to sleep, I wrote these lines in my notebook:
The woman is carrying lice. If she has typhus, Pine and I will soon have it, too. She sleeps with her head against my chest while I walk. My lower back is on fire and I have trouble straightening it. Pine is a yeoman and a solid fellow, with far more humanity in him than he is aware of. I hope he gets through this all right. Good night, Grandfather. Good night, Mother. Good night, Lord. See you all in the morning.

Just before dawn, Pine shook me awake. We were at the bottom of a gulley, sheltered by spruce and fir trees that were white with fresh snow. “It’s crawling with Krauts out there, Lieutenant,” he whispered. “Mechanized infantry, lots of it.”

“Going which way?”

“East. I think they’re running out of gas. They parked a light panzer in the field. Three guys got out and left it.”

“Where’s Rosita?” I said.

“Still asleep.”

“If they set up a perimeter in the woods, we’re in trouble.”

“Sir, when I went after food last night, I saw another farmhouse. It’s just north of here. It looked deserted. I saw a cellar door in back.”

I couldn’t think. Those given to asceticism might disagree, but I never found hunger a friend when it came to imposing order on one’s thoughts. “How far is the house from the trees?”

“A hundred yards, maybe. The woman was coughing, sir. She needs to be in a warm place. She needs a lot more food, too. We could use some of the same, Lieutenant.”

“You regret taking her along?”

“I don’t know how I feel, sir. I’m supposed to be a Christian. I got a wife back home. We’d only been married four months when I enlisted. I’d like to see her again.”

“Spit it out.”

“I don’t regret taking the Jewish woman with us. I won’t ever get rid of what we saw back there in that camp. If I get the chance, I’m going to write Steinberg’s folks.”

I heard the rushing sound of a 105 round arcing out of its trajectory, then a dull, earth-shuddering thump behind us, one that shook snow out of the trees. A second round landed out in a field, close to the road where Pine had seen mechanized infantry. The explosion blew a fountain of dirt and snow and ice into the air. Pine and I stared at each other. “We’re registered,” I said. “Get Rosita.”

She was already up, standing on her own in the bottom of the gulch. Her scarf was tied tightly under her chin, her overcoat powdered with snow, her feet lost inside the big shoes owned by an officer who probably ordered her death and her fellow prisoners’. The cold flush in her cheeks, the hunger in her eyes, the tangled brownish-black thickness of her hair bunched inside her scarf, sent a pang through me that I could not quite explain. “Why are you staring at me?” she asked.

“You remind me of someone I met when I was sixteen. Her name was Bonnie Parker.”

“Sir, they’re going to throw a marching barrage in here,” Pine said.

“You’re a strange man,” Rosita said to me.

“You want me to he’p you, ma’am?” Pine said.

“Who is Bonnie Parker?” she said.

“A beautiful outlaw woman,” I said. “She was my first love. I ended up shooting a bullet through the back of her automobile while she was in it.”

For the first time I saw Rosita smile.

I suspect it was foolish to be musing upon the allure of a young woman when there was a possibility that we might be blown into bits in a snowy, tree-lined gulch in the heart of a medieval forest. But the prospect of death sometimes creates an interlude when time stops and you see a portrait of what existence should be like rather than what it is. The artillery crews began firing for effect, the 105 rounds arcing into the fields, blowing craters in the earth that boiled and hissed on the rims and rained dirt clods on the snow. Pine and I each grabbed Rosita by an arm and labored up the gulch, the 105s marching through the forest, smacking down like Neptune’s net on all of us, Jew and Gentile, German and American. Inside the roar of the explosions, I think I shouted out my mother’s name.