by Ellen Datlow
“But Eduard,” Bruckman said weakly, almost petulantly. “The Musselmänn …”
“Remember that he was a Musselmänn,” Wernecke said, leaning forward and speaking more fiercely. “His strength was going, he was sinking. He would have been dead by morning anyway. I took from him something that he no longer needed, but that I needed in order to live. Does it matter? Starving men in lifeboats have eaten the bodies of their dead companions in order to live. Is what I’ve done any worse than that?”
“But he didn’t just die. You killed him….”
Wernecke was silent for a moment, and then said, quietly, “What better thing could I have done for him? I won’t apologize for what I do, Isadore; I do what I have to do to live. Usually I take only a little blood from a number of men, just enough to survive. And that’s fair, isn’t it? Haven’t I given food to others, to help them survive? To you, Isadore? Only very rarely do I take more than a minimum from any one man, although I’m weak and hungry all the time, believe me. And never have I drained the life from someone who wished to live. Instead I’ve helped them fight for survival in every way I can, you know that.”
He reached out as though to touch Bruckman, then thought better of it and put his hand back on his own knee. He shook his head. “But these Musselmänner, the ones who have given up on life, the walking dead—it is a favor to them to take them, to give them the solace of death. Can you honestly say it is not, here? That it is better for them to walk around while they are dead, being beaten and abused by the Nazis until their bodies cannot go on, and then to be thrown into the ovens and burned like trash? Can you say that? Would they say that, if they knew what was going on? Or would they thank me?”
Wernecke suddenly stood up, and Bruckman stood up with him. As Wernecke’s face came again into the stronger light, Bruckman could see that his eyes had filled with tears. “You have lived under the Nazis,” Wernecke said. “Can you really call me a monster? Aren’t I still a Jew, whatever else I might be? Aren’t I here, in a death camp? Aren’t I being persecuted, too, as much as any other? Aren’t I in as much danger as anyone else? If I’m not a Jew, then tell the Nazis—they seem to think so.” He paused for a moment, and then smiled wryly. “And forget your superstitious boogey tales. I’m no night spirit. If I could turn myself into a bat and fly away from here, I would have done it long before now, believe me.”
Bruckman smiled reflectively, then grimaced. The two men avoided each other’s eyes, Bruckman looking at the floor, and there was an uneasy silence, punctured only by the sighing and moaning of the sleepers on the other side of the cabin. Then, without looking up, in tacit surrender, Bruckman said, “What about him? The Nazis will find the body and cause trouble….”
“Don’t worry,” Wernecke said. “There are no obvious marks. And nobody performs autopsies in a death camp. To the Nazis, he’ll be just another Jew who had died of the heat, or from starvation or sickness, or from a broken heart.”
Bruckman raised his head then and they stared eye to eye for a moment. Even knowing what he knew, Bruckman found it hard to see Wernecke as anything other than what he appeared to be: an aging, balding Jew, stooping and thin, with sad eyes and a tired, compassionate face.
“Well, then, Isadore,” Wernecke said at last, matter-of-factly. “My life is in your hands. I will not be indelicate enough to remind you of how many times your life has been in mine.”
Then he was gone, walking back toward the sleeping platforms, a shadow soon lost among other shadows.
Bruckman stood by himself in the gloom for a long time, and then followed him. It took all of his will not to look back over his shoulder at the corner where Josef lay, and even so Bruckman imagined that he could feel Josef’s dead eyes watching him, watching reproachfully as he walked away abandoning Josef to the cold and isolated company of the dead.
Bruckman got no more sleep that night, and in the morning, when the Nazis shattered the gray predawn stillness by bursting into the shack with shouts and shrill whistles and barking police dogs, he felt as if he were a thousand years old.
They were formed into two lines, shivering in the raw morning air, and marched off to the quarry. The clammy dawn mist had yet to burn off, and marching through it, through a white shadowless void, with only the back of the man in front of him dimly visible, Bruckman felt more than ever like a ghost, suspended bodiless in some limbo between Heaven and Earth. Only the bite of pebbles and cinders into his raw, bleeding feet kept him anchored to the world, and he clung to the pain as a lifeline, fighting to shake off a feeling of numbness and unreality. However strange, however outre, the events of the previous night had happened. To doubt it, to wonder now if it had all been a feverish dream brought on by starvation and exhaustion, was to take the first step on the road to becoming a Musselmänn.
Wernecke is a vampire, he told himself. That was the harsh, unyielding reality that, like the reality of the camp itself, must be faced. Was it any more surreal, any more impossible than the nightmare around them? He must forget the tales that his grandmother had told him as a boy, “boogey tales” as Wernecke himself had called them, half-remembered tales that turned his knees to water whenever he thought of the blood smeared on Wernecke’s mouth, whenever he thought of Wernecke’s eyes watching him in the dark.…
“Wake up, Jew!” the guard alongside him snarled, whacking him lightly on the arm with his rifle butt. Bruckman stumbled, managed to stay upright and keep going. Yes, he thought, wake up. Wake up to the reality of this, just as you once had to wake up to the reality of the camp. It was just one more unpleasant fact he would have to adapt to, learn to deal with….
Deal with how? he thought, and shivered.
By the time they reached the quarry, the mist had burned off, swirling past them in rags and tatters, and it was already beginning to get hot. There was Wernecke, his balding head gleaming dully in the harsh morning light. He didn’t dissolve in the sunlight—there was one boogey tale disproved….
They set to work, like golems, like ragtag clockwork automatons.
Lack of sleep had drained what small reserves of strength Bruckman had, and the work was very hard for him that day. He had learned long ago all the tricks of timing and misdirection, the safe way to snatch short moments of rest, the ways to do a minimum of work with the maximum display of effort, the ways to keep the guards from noticing you, to fade into the faceless crowd of prisoners and not be singled out, but today his head was muzzy and slow, and none of the tricks seemed to work.
His body felt like a sheet of glass, fragile, ready to shatter into dust, and the painful, arthritic slowness of his movements got him first shouted at, and then knocked down. The guard kicked him twice for good measure before he could get up.
When Bruckman had climbed back to his feet again, he saw that Wernecke was watching him, face blank, eyes expressionless, a look that could have meant anything at all.
Bruckman felt the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth and thought, the blood… he’s watching the blood… and once again he shivered.
Somehow, Bruckman forced himself to work faster, and although his muscles blazed with pain, he wasn’t hit again, and the day passed.
When they formed up to go back to camp, Bruckman, almost unconsciously, made sure that he was in a different line than Wernecke.
That night in the cabin, Bruckman watched as Wernecke talked with the other men, here trying to help a new man named Melnick—no more than a boy—adjust to the dreadful reality of the camp, there exhorting someone who was slipping into despair to live and spite his tormentors, joking with old hands in the flat, black, bitter way that passed for humor among them, eliciting a wan smile or occasionally even a laugh from them, finally leading them all in prayer again, his strong, calm voice raised in the ancient words, giving meaning to those words again….
He keeps up together, Bruckman thought, he keeps us going. Without him, we wouldn’t last a week. Surely that’s worth a little blood, a bit from each man, not eve
n enough to hurt Surely they wouldn’t even begrudge him it, if they knew and really understood…. No, he is a good man, better than the rest of us, in spite of his terrible affliction.
Bruckman had been avoiding Wernecke’s eyes, hadn’t spoken to him at all that day, and suddenly felt a wave of shame go through him at the thought of how shabbily he had been treating his friend. Yes, his friend, regardless, the man who had saved his life … Deliberately, he caught Wernecke’s eyes, and nodded, and then somewhat sheepishly, smiled. After a moment, Wernecke smiled back, and Bruckman felt a spreading warmth and relief uncoil his guts. Everything was going to be all right, as all right as it could be, here….
Nevertheless, as soon as the inside lights clicked off that night, and Bruckman found himself lying alone in the darkness, his flesh began to crawl.
He had been unable to keep his eyes open a moment before, but now, in the sudden darkness, he found himself tensely and tickingly awake. Where was Wernecke? What was he doing, whom was he visiting tonight? Was he out there in the darkness even now, creeping closer, creeping nearer? … Stop it, Bruckman told himself uneasily, forget the boogey tales. This is your friend, a good man, not a monster…. But he couldn’t control the fear that made the small hairs on his arms stand bristlingly erect, couldn’t stop the grisly images from coming….
Wernecke’s eyes, gleaming in the darkness …. was the blood already glistening on Wernecke’s lips, as he drank? …. The thought of the blood staining Wernecke’s yellowing teeth made Bruckman cold and nauseous, but the image that he couldn’t get out of his mind tonight was an image of Josef toppling over in that sinister boneless way, striking his head against the floor…. Bruckman had seen people die in many more gruesome ways during this time at the camp, seen people shot, beaten to death, seen them die in convulsions from high fevers or cough their lungs up in bloody tatters from pneumonia, seen them hanging like charred-black scarecrows from the electrified fences, seen them torn apart by dogs… but somehow it was Josef’s soft, passive, almost restful slumping into death that bothered him. That, and the obscene limpness of Josef’s limbs as he sprawled there like a discarded rag doll, his pale and haggard face gleaming reproachfully in the dark….
When Bruckman could stand it no longer, he got shakily to his feet and moved off through the shadows, once again not knowing where he was going or what he was going to do, but drawn forward by some obscure instinct he himself did not understand. This time he went cautiously, feeling his way and trying to be silent, expecting every second to see Wernecke’s coal-black shadow rise up before him.
He paused, a faint noise scratching at his ears, then went on again, even more cautiously, crouching low, almost crawling across the grimy floor.
Whatever instinct had guided him—sounds heard and interpreted subliminally, perhaps?—it had timed his arrival well. Wernecke had someone down on the floor there, perhaps someone he seized and dragged away from the huddled mass of sleepers on one of the sleeping platforms, someone from the outer edge of bodies whose presence would not be missed, or perhaps someone who had gone to sleep on the floor, seeking solitude or greater comfort.
Whoever he was, he struggled in Wernecke’s grip, but Wernecke handled him easily, almost negligently, in a manner that spoke of great physical power. Bruckman could hear the man trying to scream, but Wernecke had one hand on his throat, half-throttling him, and all that would come out was a sort of whistling gasp. The man thrashed in Wernecke’s hands like a kite in a child’s hands flapping in the wind, and, moving deliberately, Wernecke smoothed him out like a kite, pressing him slowly flat on the floor.
Then Wernecke bent over him, and lowered his mouth to his throat.
Bruckman watched in horror, knowing that he should shout, scream, try to rouse the other prisoners, but somehow unable to move, unable to make his mouth open, his lungs pump. He was paralyzed by fear, like a rabbit in the presence of a predator, a terror sharper and more intense than any he’d ever known.
The man’s struggles were growing weaker, and Wernecke must have eased up some on the throttling pressure of his hand, because the man moaned “Don’t… please don’t…” in a weaker, slurred voice. The man had been drumming his fists against Wernecke’s back and sides, but now the tempo of the drumming slowed, slowed, and then stopped, the man’s arms falling laxly to the floor. “Don’t ….” the man whispered; he groaned and muttered incomprehensively for a moment or two longer, then became silent. The silence stretched out for a minute, two, three, and Wernecke still crouched over his victim, who was now not moving at all….
Wernecke stirred, a kind of shudder going through him, like a cat stretching. He stood up. His face became visible as he straightened up into the full light from the window, and there was blood on it, glistening black under the harsh glare of the kliegs. As Bruckman watched, Wernecke began to lick his lips clean, his tongue, also black in this light, sliding like some sort of sinuous ebony snake around the rim of his mouth, darting and probing for the last lingering drops….
How smug he looks, Bruckman thought, like a cat who has found the cream, and the anger that flashed through him at the thought enabled him to move and speak again. “Wernecke,” he said harshly.
Wernecke glanced casually in his direction. “You again, Isadore?” Wernecke said. “Don’t you ever sleep?” Wernecke spoke lazily, quizzically, without surprise, and Bruckman wondered if Wernecke had known all along that he was there. “Or do you just enjoy watching me?”
“Lies,” Bruckman said. “You told me nothing but lies. Why did you bother?”
“You were excited,” Wernecke said. “You had surprised me. It seemed best to tell you what you wanted to hear. If it satisfied you, then that was an easy solution to the problem.”
“Never have I drained the life from someone who wanted to live,” Bruckman said bitterly, mimicking Wernecke. “Only a little from each man! My God—and I believed you! I even felt sorry for you!”
Wernecke shrugged. “Most of it was true. Usually I only take a little from each man, softly and carefully, so that they never know, so that in the morning they are only a little weaker than they would have been anyway….”
“Like Josef?” Bruckman said angrily. “Like the poor devil you killed tonight?”
Wernecke shrugged again. “I have been careless the last few nights, I admit. But I need to build up my strength again.” His eyes gleamed in the darkness. “Events are coming to a head here. Can’t you feel it, Isadore, can’t you sense it? Soon the war will be over, everyone knows that. Before then, this camp will be shut down, and the Nazis will move us back into the interior—either that, or kill us. I have grown weak here, and I will soon need all my strength to survive, to take whatever opportunity presents itself to escape. I must be ready. And so I have let myself drink deeply again, drink my fill for the first time in months….”Wernecke licked his lips again, perhaps unconsciously, then smiled bleakly at Bruckman. “You don’t appreciate my restraint, Isadore. You don’t understand how hard it has been for me to hold back, to take only a little each night. You don’t understand how much that restraint has cost me….”
“You are gracious,” Bruckman sneered.
Wernecke laughed. “No, but I am a rational man; I pride myself on that. You other prisoners were my only source of food, and I have had to be very careful to make sure that you would last. I have no access to the Nazis, after all. I am trapped here, a prisoner just like you, whatever else you may believe—and I have not only had to find ways to survive here in the camp, I have had to procure my own food as well! No shepherd has ever watched over his flock more tenderly than I.”
“Is that all we are to you—sheep? Animals to be slaughtered?”
Wernecke smiled. “Precisely.”
When he could control his voice enough to speak, Bruckman said, “You’re worse than the Nazis.”
“I hardly think so,” Wernecke said quietly, and for a moment he looked tired, as though something unimaginably old and unutterably w
eary had looked out through his eyes. “This camp was built by the Nazis—it wasn’t my doing. The Nazis sent you here—not I. The Nazis have tried to kill you every day since, in one way or another—and I have tried to keep you alive, even at some risk to myself. No one has more of a vested interest in the survival of his livestock than the farmer, after all, even if he does occasionally slaughter an inferior animal. I have given you food—”
“Food you had no use for yourself. You sacrificed nothing!”
“That’s true, of course. But you needed it, remember that. Whatever my motives, I have helped you to survive here—you and many others. By doing so I also acted in my own self-interest, of course, but can you have experienced this camp and still believe in things like altruism? What difference does it make what my reason for helping was—I still helped you, didn’t I?”
“Sophistries!” Bruckman said. “Rationalizations! You twist words to justify yourself, but you can’t disguise what you really are—a monster!”
Wernecke smiled gently, as though Bruckman’s words amused him, and made as if to pass by, but Bruckman raised an arm to bar his way. They did not touch each other, but Wernecke stopped short, and a new quivering kind of tension sprung into existence in the air between them.
“I’ll stop you,” Bruckman said. “Somehow I’ll stop you, I’ll keep you from doing this terrible thing—”
“You’ll do nothing,” Wernecke said. His voice was hard and cold and flat, like a rock speaking. “What can you do? Tell the other prisoners? Who would believe you? They’d think you’d gone insane. Tell the Nazis, then?” Wernecke laughed harshly. “They’d think you’d gone crazy, too, and they’d take you to the hospital—and I don’t have to tell you what your chances of getting out of there alive are, do I? No, you’ll do nothing”
Wernecke took a step forward; his eyes were shiny and black and hard, like ice, like the pitiless eyes of a predatory bird, and Bruckman felt a sick rush of fear cut through his anger. Bruckman gave way, stepping backward involuntarily, and Wernecke pushed past him, seeming to brush him aside without touching him.
