Passover

by Aphrodite Anagnost

  “You’re starting to panic.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “The truth is,” said Dave. “You’ve been a bundle of nerves since your horse died last year.”

  “What do you expect? Aristino was shot. That could’ve been one of the boys.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “I loved that horse. He trusted me. I could ride him in the moonlight after work, with airplanes flying overhead. I could take him horse packing in the mountains, or to swim in the sea. I could have put a blindfold on him and he would still have done anything I asked. I had him for twenty years. I’ll never find another one like him.”

  “You think it’s your fault, don’t you?”

  Tears slid down her cheeks. “Isn’t everything?” She wiped her face with the bottom of her apron. “Go on, leave me alone.”

  “All right,” said Dave. “But try to calm down. We’re figuring this thing out. Nothing that bad is going to happen tonight.”

  “It’s already happening.” She put down the big knife, got up and took a peeler out, slamming the drawer shut with her hip. “One deputy already run over.”

  Dave grimaced. He didn’t know what to say to that. He groped for something comforting to tell her that would go to her heart like roses on Valentine’s Day. Nothing came. She was past consoling. Something twisted inside him. Anger bubbled up and he tried to swallow it. The taste was bitter and sour all at once, like an under-ripe persimmon.

  “I’m gonna go help the sheriff.” He turned away from his wife and left.

  • • • •

  Rachel was alone. Finally. She peeled a beet, standing directly over a trashcan pulled out of its cabinet. It was difficult to remove the red skin without cutting into the flesh.

  Her hand slipped and she scraped a cuticle from the thumb gripping the beet. “Damn it!” She pitched the peeler and the root overhand. Garnet-red beet juice splattered onto the pine floor and the quartzite counter as they flew across the kitchen. They landed in the stainless steel sink with a clank. The beading juice on metal reminded her of an autopsy table. Or an embalming table. She pulled a fresh blade out of the knife-block and tried to slice neat rings that reminded her of orderly rows of vegetables at a salad bar after church. Her hand slipped again and she cut her finger. Shed blood, she thought, putting the cut in her mouth and sucking. She closed her eyes for a moment, inhaling through her nose, trying to think of the golden red leaves of fall, the snow-hung boughs of winter. Of how Aristino’s coppery coat would pick up spots of light from the quiet waters of the bay in summer. Of a happier time. Of anything, but spring. She put her head down on a folded arm. Soon she slept, sitting, drooping over her butcher block.

  Dave worried about there not being enough light. The vanished sun had dragged the daylight away and the storm had blotted out the stars. Having donned his battle fatigues, Leo had raced through every room, turning on the lights. Dave trailed him, also flipping switches. There would never be enough light.

  Dave joined the four other men at the refectory table in the living room, the materials from the moldy cellar in loose stacks before them. Lev held a photo up to a hundred watt bulb, lips tight, his cheek scar puckering. Holding the picture flat in his open palms like a Rabbi offering a page of Holy Scripture, he passed it to Dave, whose stomach turned. Each man presented it to the next, in silence, as if it were an icon. The five sat still as statuary, expressions of mourning carved onto their faces, studying the materials.

  Dave’s mind was at odds with his feelings as he examined each image. A naked girl sprawled in deep mud as if raped to death. Emaciated corpses slung into pits by men in raincoats. Mounds of the dead bulldozed into trenches. A young woman with a bullet hole in the middle of her forehead, eyes wide and staring. Thin men lined up in front of a firing squad, shoulders slumped and heads down.

  Only the sound of brittle paper changing hands broke the silence at the table. Finally, Wise stood and collected the pictures in a large manila envelope, then returned it to the center stack. He leaned between Dave and Lev and picked up the pile of newspaper and magazine articles, handling yellowed, inspissated sheets like a collection of ancient pressed flowers, as if at any moment they would splinter to dust and blow away. He passed a clipping to each man.

  “Looks like all these are written by a guy named Nuno Sievers,” said Creed. He shook his head. “Never heard of him.” He looked toward the sheriff. “You?”

  “Seems sorta familiar.” Wise shrugged, forehead creasing. “Maybe way back somewhere.

  From before I was sheriff.”

  “I’ve got something here,” said Dave, tapping his article gently. “In the New Yorker.” He set each of the five pages carefully down on the table, in order. “Same guy. Nuno Sievers.”

  “What’s the gist?” said the sheriff, looking over the cliff formed by the nearly touching shoulders of Dave and Lev.

  Dave inhaled decades of old must that hung like a cloud over their workspace. “A piece about the slaughter of the Sievers family at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1942.” He raked a hand through his hair. “The author calls it Memoir of Belsen: Forget You Not. As a child, Nuno Sievers was freed by the British in 1945. Both of his parents and two brothers had been hung two days before and he’d been made to watch. Then he was forced to hand over surgical instruments as his brothers were autopsied by Nazi doctors. Listen to this.”

  Dave read, voice shaking.

  Every day we got weaker. Our gums bled and sores formed over our protuberant bones from sleeping shelved on thin pallets, stacked from clay floor to ceiling and infested by fleas. We were dizzy all day, hallucinating, and could do no more work. Not even drag ourselves from our bunks to drink at the water trough. My family had been physicians for generations, since the Middle Ages when they settled Jerez and built the most famous hospital on the Iberian Peninsula. So the new order of Germans required our assistance in human experimentation—on ourselves—and then forced my parents and brothers to dissect our fellow prisoners and organize data. After that the Nazi doctors executed all my immediate family except me and my cousin Sylvie. They made us watch and then clean up the blood. I was eight years old.

  On the final day, when I thought I had nothing left, no will, no desire, no strength to keep breathing, I decided to lie down and say goodbye to life. Sylvie, only seven years old, came to me in my cocoon of rags and said, “Get up! There’s something funny going on out there. Something good. People are running all over the place.” I told her she must be crazy. “Just lie down and die in peace.” But she pulled at my hand and said, “No, come look. There’s a man in a tank speaking English on a loudspeaker. The gates are all open.”

  “Thanks, Dave.” said the sheriff. “I’ll look through the rest of this. Go get on your computer and Google the guy—Nuno Sievers.”

  “I’ll be right back.” Dave rose and rolled up his sleeves, then was startled as a series of knocks came from beneath the middle of the table: dot dot dot space dot dash dot dot space dot dash space dash.

  The other men jumped up out of their chairs.

  “All right,” said Dave, rolling his eyes. “You can come out now.”

  A pair of jump boots wiggled out from under the table, followed by two legs in combat fatigues and then a compact body dressed in camouflage right up to a duck-billed cap. The whole thing, connected to a squeaky voice and weighing maybe ninety pounds.

  “Looks like you guys have seen a ghost,” said Leo, his canteen slamming Creed’s knee as he squirmed out and leapt to his feet. “What can I do you for?”

  Dave paused to wipe cold sweat from his forehead onto his shirt. He leaned over to gaze at Leo at eye level. “Listen carefully, son. Go upstairs. Find your tarp, not the tent with the hardware. The canvas one. The one that matches this gear. Spread it out, then fold it up nice and tight and neat. Put it in the bottom of your backpack. We might need to use it later on.”

  “Roger that, Dad,” said Leo, slipping out of the li
ving room and marching up the stairs.

  Dave followed the little soldier halfway up the stairwell and paused. The sound of Zack mumbling love poetry that he’d written himself flowed down the cold stairs like a waterfall of rhyming couplets.

  My love for you like secret sin/ Lives for me to languish in/

  At night I laugh, by day I cry/ I ask the gods to tell me why/

  The surest joy, the wildest woe,/ Can never end. Where

  shall we go?

  Dave waited until the poem was over. When he’d been an adolescent he had written old-fashioned romantic poems and recited them to empty air for practice before unleashing his love on his first girlfriend, Emily. Curious. He was not Zack’s biological father, but the boy seemed to take after him. Zack had the heart of an artist. Dave smiled as he passed the boy sitting on one side of the sofa, looking up as if he’d been caught with a girl. His palm was turned up and resting on his knee as if he’d been holding hands with someone. Zack smelled like fresh aftershave, something Italian, maybe Bulgari. Something Rachel must have bought the last time she went to New York and visited Sachs.

  Sheriff Wise got up from his chair without saying a word. At the window his digital recorder was still pointed toward the north pasture. It was possible the camera’s eye had been wide enough to capture images from the patch of ground near the barn where the tarp had covered Deputy Leveaux. But the sheriff was less than hopeful. As he remembered it, only the back forty were in the viewfinder when he’d pushed the record button.

  “One of you men plug the cable into the TV,” he said.

  The sheriff moved the tripod, replayed the recording only briefly, and turned on the screen. They all stood and watched. From upstairs came the hum and clicking of Dave’s printer.

  The picture was clear enough. In spite of the darkness of the image, Wise could make out the flat tarp at the edge of the screen.

  “Run it back further.” Creed hollered like a drill sergeant. He drained his martini glass and put it down on an end table.

  “Guess I could,” said the sheriff.

  He hit the play button, again. This time the tarp covering the body looked more like a blue shroud.

  “Real smart to think of this, Sheriff,” said Dave.

  “Look here,” said Wise, mostly to himself. He felt chilled, as if a window had been left open and he’d been attacked by cold air.

  Only Creed managed a laugh. But Wise didn’t believe Creed’s smugness. He figured the man had gotten himself deep as quicksand and was covering up his fear. And fear was the enemy, a nameless, unreasoning, justified terror that can paralyze the best minds in circumstances not nearly as bad as this. No. The first duty of man is to conquer fear, with that Wise agreed.

  He studied the faces of his crew and drew in a breath. Their faces seemed expectant, foreheads beaded with sweat. In only seconds, they would know what had happened to Deputy Leveaux’s body. After that, they could rewind further and find out how the deputy was killed by the tractor.

  The sheriff played the recording forward in slow motion. One moment, the body was there. The next, it wasn’t.

  “Hot damn,” said the sheriff, his voice drowning out the shouts of the others.

  Creed stopped laughing. He took a step toward the camera, only to be pushed back by Wise. Lev moved closer to the screen. Crockett, holding his book, backed up a step. Deputy Ruiz’s elbow knocked the martini glass off the end table and she scrambled to pick it up, smashing the olive under one sole by accident.

  The sheriff reversed the footage, then replayed it. Same result. The tarp had a body under it. Then it didn’t.

  “There’s a problem with the camera,” Crockett said.

  “I doubt it.” The sheriff hit the reverse button again. “Let’s try to find Leveaux alive and the tractor in the same frame.”

  Sheriff Wise pressed PAUSE, then replayed the last quarter of the recording on high speed until the image of him and the men finding Leveaux’s body came into view. His jaw tensed as he stopped and rewound until an image appeared of Leveaux leaning on the barn, holding his rifle.

  Wise fast-forwarded and then let it run. Suddenly, without having fallen, Leveaux was lying on the ground, immobile, dead. The sheriff replayed it at low speed. Same result. Leveaux standing, Leveaux fallen. No in-between, no tractor.

  “Someone’s playing games with us,” Crockett said.

  Lev collapsed in the nearest chair, looking stunned. Creed ran to a window and looked out, rifle cradled in his arms like a baby.

  The sheriff hit PLAY again and the digital recorder hummed. He walked to the window, abandoning the camera. Nothing but dark sky and rain hurling itself against the glass.

  “Hey. What’s that?” said Creed.

  Dave returned from upstairs with a printout in his hands.

  Creed and the sheriff stood transfixed, Crockett paled, and Lev rose to his feet, shaking.

  On the flat screen TV, the black hoof of a buried horse was just breaking through the earth.

  • • • •

  “Rachel cannot see this recording,” Dave said. “Turn it off.”

  The sheriff packed the up tripod and camera and put them on a chair beside the bookcase looming over the baby grand.

  “Brrr,” said Dave. “It’s freezing in here.” He crouched in front of the stove and lit a teepee of kindling, then rolled a bundle of sawn locust branches onto the grate.

  The rain stopped its incessant beating and the storm clouds, blowing by, let a glimmer of moonlight slip through the window.

  An overstuffed chair groaned as the sheriff lowered himself into it. “Anyone here still think we’re not up against something unnatural?” he said.

  No one spoke. The fire crackled. The wall above the woodstove thumped as if a bat were trapped in the flue.

  “Good,” said the sheriff. “Because we are.”

  “It’s also lethal,” said Dave.

  Creed laughed, then stifled himself as if finally becoming aware no one else thought anything happening was funny. But Wise knew better. Creed was scared. He must be scared. But his face was open as ever, his posture relaxed.

  Johnny Crockett rose from the piano stool and walked to the window. He bit his lip and put a fist to his mouth.

  “Something you want to say, Johnny?” Wise’s eyes narrowed.

  “If there are ghosts or other creatures in Zebulon, so be it,” he blurted. “No point in carryin’ on about it.”

  “How do you kill a ghost?” Creed said, as if waiting for specific instructions.

  “Creed,” muttered Wise, gesturing for the other man to join him in the far corner next to the window. “Can I have a word?”

  “Sure.”

  “Son,” said Wise, tugging at his gun belt. “You find something about this situation amusing?”

  A smirk crawled across Creed’s face. “Guess I just think there’s something interesting about it.”

  “Well, knock yourself out,” said Wise. “I guess it takes all kinds. Jes’ don’t be irritatin’ everybody.”

  “To tell you the truth, Sheriff, I kinda’ like the excitement. You just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

  Wise turned back to the rear window of the living room and stepped in next to Ruiz. Dirt devils were rising, spinning across the pasture behind the house. “By golly,” muttered Wise. “Guess I got a man who’ll do something crazy now, if I need something crazy done.”

  • • • •

  His face grown warm, Dave backed away from the fire in the woodstove and noticed Deputy Ruiz’s knees were making nervous little movements as if she were about to wet herself. When he put a hand on her shoulder it felt as if the deputy’s fear had somehow jumped into his own body. His legs felt suddenly de-boned, about to give out from under him, so he sat abruptly on the sofa. He had Rachel to protect, and Leo and Zack. And Beatricia. And he had already cost Leveaux his life by refusing to flee Zebulon with his family.

  “What have you figured out?”
said Wise from his post at the window.

  Dave was too dizzy to realize, for a moment, that the sheriff was talking to him. “Dave,” said Wise. “What’ve you got there in your hand?”

  “Oh,” muttered Dave, slamming his eyelids shut against the spinning room.

  The sheriff took the printout from Dave and read it out loud, barely moving his lips. The article was from the local paper, the Eastern Shore Times, dated Wednesday, April 30, 1988. The caption read, “Jewish Scholar Burns to Death on Passover.”

  A reclusive, much published Jewish scholar, Nuno Sievers, was found severely burned in the bomb shelter of a dilapidated house on the outskirts of Zebulon. EMTs transported him to the local Northfield-Accomac Memorial Hospital, and later, to the burn unit at Johns Hopkins. After repeated revival attempts over a two-week period, Sievers died on Thursday. Sheriff David Doughty of Northfield County has confirmed that the fire was arson. The case is considered a homicide.

  Four suspects are being held at the Northfield County Jail without bond. The suspects are being represented by Onancock attorney, Tripper Enwright, who has denied that his clients are “skinheads,” as alleged by Sheriff Doughty.

  The sheriff whistled. “How ’bout it,” he said. “The suspects were represented by Mayor Enwright. That means they were probably skinheads, probably guilty, and probably got off.”

  “You’ve got that right,” said Crockett.

  The sheriff continued reading, frown deepening.

  According to sources, Sievers was forcibly wrapped in sheets and old rags which had been soaked in kerosene, then set on fire, along with his house, and thrown into his bomb shelter. An eyewitness, a minor, ran into the burning cellar, threw some blankets over Mr. Sievers to smother the flames, and called the Nassawadox fire department.

  Dr. Sievers was a retired Professor of Iberian Art History at NYU and had published numerous articles in newspapers and national magazines. He is survived only by two distant cousins. His nearest relative, Sylvie Chagall, has confirmed that Sievers suffered a nervous breakdown in 1980 after a complicated divorce and had moved to the rural Eastern Shore to live in the woods in seclusion.