The Tribe

by Bari Wood

  “No,” Abrams said gently.

  “The point is, I looked at the flask so I wouldn’t look at what was all around us. We drank, and checked lists to keep from looking at it. Ah, the lists . . .” Bianco finished his third whisky, and Abrams poured another.

  “The Krauts kept lists of everything. Who the prisoners were, where they came from, when they died. Lists of kapos, and the Jews who wouldn’t be kapos. Lists of the supplies that came in and of the stuff that went out. . . . That was some list, that was.” He leaned forward, holding his cup. “Clothes, money, jewels, gold by the ounce, from their teeth, Captain. But you know that. They cut the women’s hair, weighed it, put it on a list, and sent it home to stuff mattresses . . .”

  Bianco’s voice had gotten shaky, and he stopped. Abrams was quiet, and after a moment, Bianco went on.

  “By noon, we’d checked the dead and dying in Barracks 552, and went on to 554 . . . pretty drunk by then. Staggering in the mud with the wind blowing rain off the pine needles. I remember I had to keep wiping my glasses. We stopped in front of 554, swigged some more, then pushed open the door. It was pretty dark at first, so I couldn’t see who was there and who wasn’t. Then the sun came out, lit the place up, and two little boys ran to us . . . ran . . . and yelled ‘Welcome, Americans!’ in English. I realized then that the place didn’t smell. I mean it did, but only of mud and wet wood. So I thought they were long dead and gone, except for the kids. Then I saw them. Thirty-­five of them standing next to their bunks in a line, like soldiers at inspection. We all stared at each other for a long time. They had hair, and teeth. Oh, they were thin, but not starving. And pale, but winter pale, not the color of starvation.

  “Then one little man left the lineup and came up the aisle. He had dark hair, with a beard, and a little cap on his head. Tears ran down his face and he held out his hand to me, and said, ‘My name is Jacob Levy. Thank you for coming,’ in English. I didn’t want to touch him; the prisoners were covered with lice and there’d been typhus in the camp. But I took his hand. I couldn’t help it—something about the man—and I started to say something, I don’t know what; ‘you’re welcome’ maybe. But all at once I started crying. Then Reynolds shook hands with him, and he cried. Christ, what a scene. They all came toward us then, all in tears, but all smiling; and me and Reynolds and the little guy stood at the door like hostesses at a wedding, and shook hands with those ghostly-­looking men as they went out into the open air. They hugged the little guy, and he was the last one to leave. Just before he did, he looked back at the place, and I watched his face. But it was blank, except for the tears. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Then he followed the others outside as one of the transport vans pulled in through the mud.

  “I know I was drunk. But even so, I knew it was nuts for thirty-­five men, all from one village . . . they were, you know . . . one village . . . to be alive, and well. So I stayed there to look around. I didn’t expect to find anything but I looked anyway. I walked down the aisle between the bunks with the sun going and coming, and at the back wall, behind the bunks, I found this pile of sealed cartons. I ripped one open, and found the answer.”

  Bianco paused, and Abrams leaned forward.

  “They were full of cans of food,” Bianco said. “Cans and cans. Beans and figs, fish, and some kind of meat paste. Meat, Doctor. In Belzec in 1945. They were from Poland, Germany, Latvia, and I picked them up and looked at them like I’d never seen a can before. I tore open the other cartons and found more food, enough to feed a platoon. I sat there on my haunches, a little dazed and trying to figure where they got the stuff. Who they murdered or bribed. Then I saw some gray stuff on the wall in front of me; and I stood up to look closer at it. It was faint, but there all right, and I touched it gingerly because it could have been any kind of crap. It was powdery, and it came off on my fingers. I looked around and saw that it was everywhere. You just had to look for it. It was under the windows, embedded in the wood grain of the wall and floor. Everywhere. The sun had stayed out, the barracks was getting hot, and I started to sweat. But not just from booze and sun. There was something about the place all of a sudden. About those cans of food, and that gray stuff all over. I didn’t like having it on me for some reason, so I bent down and ran my fingers against the floor to get it off. But more got on me from the floorboards, and I was really getting spooked. Then I heard something behind me and I pulled my gun. I don’t know what I thought I’d see, but there was this hazy figure in a dusty beam of sunlight, and I was so shaky I almost fired at it; but it was the little Jew. He stepped out of the sun and looked at me, then at the torn-open boxes.

  “I said, ‘I found this food.’ And he nodded and said something in German. I don’t know what. Then I said, ‘Where’d it come from?’ and he smiled at me—the sweetest, gentlest smile I’ve ever seen—and he said in broken English that it came from God.

  “I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t believe that. God wasn’t at Belzec that I could see, and I wanted to ask him about the gray stuff on the walls and bunk sides, but he shook his head, and, like a magician doing a trick, he stepped back into the sunlight. I yelled at him to stop, but he didn’t answer. Then I ran after him, but the place was empty. I just stood there for a second, all alone with the cans of food, and that dried mud or whatever it was. I meant to go back and make one more list of what I’d found. I even turned around to do it; but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. Don’t ask me why, that’s part of what I have to ask Speiser. Something in there scared the shit out of me, and after a minute or two, sweating and shaking, I gave up and left the place.

  “The van was gone by then, but I wasn’t worried. They were taking the healthy ones to DP camps, and I thought they’d be there for days yet and I could question them in the morning. But Resistance Jews had started hijacking the trucks and helping the refugees get to Palestine; or as close to Palestine as they could. And they got that truck and all the men on it.”

  Bianco put the paper cup down, “I don’t know where they are now. Or if they’re anywhere.”

  Abrams stared at Bianco for a moment without saying anything, then he asked, “Is that it?”

  Bianco nodded.

  “Cans of food,” Abrams said, “and gray dust on a wall? That’s what you want to ask Speiser about?”

  “Yes,” Bianco said.

  “You waited seven months in Nuremberg, away from your wife, kids, home, to ask about shit like that? And a spooky feeling that grabbed you after you’d had a couple of flasks of whisky?”

  “I know it sounds lame.”

  “Lame isn’t the word. Speiser probably won’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “He will though. He requisitioned that food . . . he forged the papers to get it, and we thought it was for him and his brass. But all we found in their mess was moldy potatoes.”

  Abrams opened Bianco’s file and started writing. “I’m asking Pearce to send you home, Major.”

  Bianco jumped up. “You can’t do that. If you send me home now, I’ll never find out. . . .”

  Abrams went on writing.

  Bianco said, “Listen to me, for Christ’s sake; just listen.” He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and shoved it in front of Abrams. It was a list: of names arranged in alphabetical order:

  Alldmann, Dabrowa, Poland

  Dworkin, Dabrowa, Poland

  Feldsher, Dabrowa, Poland

  Fineman, Dabrowa, Poland

  Gershon, Dabrowa, Poland

  The list went on down the page.

  “Thirty-­five of them,” Bianco said, “all from that one village. Some were old, two were little kids. All transported in 1941, and all alive. Why? And not just alive. Fed! That was a death camp, Captain. They were killing them day and night at the end. Thousands of ’em. But not these men. These men they fed when they were starving themselves. Thirty-­five Jews ate applesauce and canned fish
while the SS ate garbage. Why?”

  General Pearce closed Bianco’s folder. “Captain Abrams says I should send you home, Major. I’m sending you home.”

  “I thought we had an agreement,” Bianco said.

  “We did,” Pearce said. “I’m breaking it.”

  “Why now . . . sir?” Bianco asked.

  “You are, according to Abrams, ‘at serious risk emotionally’; he recommends you go home to get treatment.”

  “Do you think I need treatment, General?”

  Pearce didn’t answer; he concentrated on folding the orders. When Bianco first saw him, he’d had a pink, tight, midwestern-­looking face and the beginnings of a belly. Now his face was gray and slack, like Bianco’s, and his uniform was too big. Pearce put the orders in an envelope.

  “Kind of sudden, isn’t it?” Bianco asked without the sir.

  Pearce looked up. “There’s a truck convoy leaving for Frankfurt tonight from Dürer House at nineteen hundred. Don’t be late. From Frankfurt you have a lift to Kirkwall. . . .”

  Bianco loved night flying, looking down at the black North Sea flecked with white foam. At Kirkwall there’d be strong tea waiting for him, oatmeal in the morning, and a view of Scapa Flow.

  “From Kirkwall you catch a morning flight to Mitchell.”

  Mitchell was fifty miles from home. Bianco had planted hemlocks the spring he left, and juniper to edge the driveway. That was four years ago.

  Pearce held the envelope out to Bianco. Bianco didn’t move.

  “I’ve been waiting for Speiser for seven months, and all I got for that were some drunken questions at the Easter dance. Now all of a sudden, I get an hour with the busiest psychiatrist in the world and orders to leave tonight. Why?”

  Pearce said, “Take the envelope, Major.”

  Bianco hesitated, then took it. “You’re going home, Major,” Pearce said softly. “Good luck.” He swiveled his chair to the side and picked up the phone. Bianco saluted and left the office carrying the envelope.

  He was going home. The thought was so sudden, so full of emotion, that he had to stop and lean against the hall wall. Men passing looked curiously at him, and he pushed himself away from the wall and went into the men’s room. Like everything else in Nuremberg, the toilet belonged in a palace. The commode was raised on a marble pedestal, the sink was chipped marble, shaped like a shell. He ran water and looked at himself in the gilt-framed mirror over the sink. He looked sick and old, nothing like he had the last time he saw his wife, and he wondered how she’d react to this face.

  He was smoothing water through his black and gray hair when it hit him that they weren’t sending him home because he’d waited longer than was sane for a man who’d never be found. They were sending him home now . . . tonight. . . because they’d caught Speiser at last, and they were afraid he’d find him and kill him before the Tribunal could hang him.

  Abrams was half-­drunk when Bianco tracked him to the club. They were showing Grapes of Wrath for the third time and a bunch of officers sat in the club lobby, drinking and waiting for the movie to start.

  Abrams sat alone, threading his fingers through his beard, drinking. He looked away when he saw Bianco, but Bianco came to the table and sat down.

  “They got Speiser, didn’t they?”

  Abrams closed his eyes. “How’d you know?”

  “Just figured it out.”

  Abrams said thickly, “They found him in a basement, in Munich. Munich. You’d think he’d have gotten farther in all this time. Still, he’s lucky it was us, not the Russians.”

  “Why?” Bianco asked. “They’d hang him higher?”

  Abrams finished his drink without answering.

  “Did you believe what I told you today?” Bianco asked.

  “I guess so,” Abrams said. “Yes, I did. Yes.”

  Bianco grabbed Abrams’s hand; officers at nearby tables noticed and looked away, embarrassed.

  “Let me see him,” Bianco said, trying to keep the pleading out of his voice. “It means everything to me. If you believed me, you know I won’t hurt him. Let me see him.”

  They looked into each other’s eyes. Abrams looked away first.

  “I can’t . . .” he said.

  Bianco squeezed his hand. “I won’t have a second’s peace if you don’t. Not for the rest of my life.” Bianco was whispering, but the pleading in his voice was raw. He felt Abrams’s hand go limp in his.

  “You swear you won’t hurt him?” he asked.

  “I swear,” Bianco said.

  Then Abrams said, “I want to hear what he says. What those men did.”

  “Okay,” Bianco said.

  Abrams thought another minute, but Bianco knew he had him. Then Abrams said, “It’s my ass if they find out.”

  “Do you care?”

  “No,” Abrams said, “I don’t.”

  They stood up together; Abrams bought a half-­pint of vodka, and they opened the bottle and drank from it as they walked through the empty ruined streets to the Tribunal. Nearby, everything was quiet, but they heard yells in the distance, and the echo of someone running in another block. It was almost nine, but still light. The long northern twilight had just started and their shadows blended with the shadows of broken walls. At the Tribunal entrance, Abrams capped the bottle and put it in his pocket. A WAC with high, pointy breasts pushing her khaki jacket sat in the hot marble reception area. She nodded at Abrams and barely looked at Bianco, and together the two men went up the curving marble staircase to the second floor.

  At the top of the stairs, MPs guarded double carved-oak doors. Abrams asked if the prisoner had been fed; one of the men said he had, but hadn’t eaten much. Abrams asked if the Judge Advocate’s man had been there yet. He had, said the MP, and they were coming back at ten to move the prisoner. Then the MP opened the door and closed it after them.

  Bianco thought the room was empty until a tall man came out of the shadows next to the windows and stood in the middle of the room looking at them. Abrams and Bianco saluted, and the man returned the salute. He looked like Bianco thought he would: thin and blond with wide-­set blue eyes and white lashes. His hair was combed back from his high forehead, and a protuberant ridge in his skull made a line from his hair to his eyebrows. His nose was thin, so were his lips, but they were well formed, with a deep bow. He would have been handsome except that his skin was yellowish-­white, and Bianco remembered that he’d been in hiding for six months. In a basement without sun or fresh air.

  The room they’d put him in was typical Nuremberg; except for the scarred oak-­paneled walls, everything in it was red—carpet, drapes, torn plush chairs. It was a deep red, almost maroon, and where the fabrics were worn, the nap was pink. The color of the room trapped the heat. Bianco’s shirt stuck to his back in a second and Speiser’s face shone with sweat.

  “Ah, the Jewish doctor.” Speiser’s English was good. “I didn’t expect to see you again. But I welcome visitors. This room isn’t restful.”

  Abrams said, “This is Major Bianco.”

  Speiser smiled at Bianco and Bianco saw that his gums were swollen and gray, and his teeth looked loose. If he had scurvy, the Army would give him fresh oranges and massive doses of vitamin C before they hanged him. Bianco smiled back.

  “And who is Major Bianco?” Spieser asked.

  Abrams answered, “He commanded the American squad that opened Belzec and he has some questions to ask you.”

  “I’m not required . . .”

  Bianco interrupted, “I’m not from the Tribunal. In fact I’m going back to the United States tonight. This is a . . . personal question.”

  “You don’t have to answer any questions, Commandant,” Abrams said quickly. “You have the same right as any prisoner in a democratic . . .”

  Speiser waved at Abrams to be quiet, and he looked closely at B
ianco. “Bianco’s an Italian name, isn’t it? Are you Italian?” he asked.

  “My grandfather was,” Bianco answered.

  “Ah . . . so it’s the grandfather who comes from that country of yellow scum that sold out the noblest army in history. . . .” He was full of life for a second; Bianco could imagine him in the gray uniform with the lightning on the lapels. Then the man sagged and lowered himself shakily into the worn plush armchair. “You hear the creaking of a corpse,” he said. “I don’t care where you or your grandfather came from.” He turned to Abrams. “Before the major asks his question, could I have some tea, and maybe a small piece of cake? They gave me meat to eat, but I couldn’t get it down. Still, I’m very hungry.”

  Abrams almost ran to the door. “Of course,” he said. “Of course . . . in a second . . .”

  He left them alone, and Bianco offered the commandant a cigarette, then lit it for him. Speiser inhaled deeply, then said, “The question is about Belzec.”

  “It is.”

  Speiser grinned, showing those ghostly gums. “I would have thought everything you found there was clear.”

  Staggering rage overcame Bianco. He wanted to hit Speiser in the face, to smash the cigarette against his mouth. He took a deep breath, and said as steadily as he could, “It was clear.”

  Abrams came back with the tea and a plate of cupcakes. They poured the tea, held their cups, and drank. Speiser put four cubes of sugar in his cup, and ate three of the cupcakes, then licked his fingers, poured another cup of tea, and sat back and said to Abrams, “Leave us alone, Captain.” It was an order. Abrams looked at Bianco and Speiser said, “He won’t hurt me, but I don’t care if he does. Neither should you.”