I was having trouble swallowing.
“I’m so sorry,” Ernesto said.
My wife’s headstone was even simpler than Angela’s. Just her name, the dates, no phrase below it. I knew nothing of what she wanted done in case of death—we were far too young to ever think that it was a possibility. I kept it together at the funeral up until the first shovelful of dirt was tossed onto the casket. That sound—the hollow tumbling of soil hitting wood—reeled up a bucket of grief from a well that I had left unprotected, and my father pulled my heaving shoulders into his chest.
I tried to continue living in the basement of her parents’ house, but I could hardly look at them without one of us breaking into tears, and so I moved home. I stayed in my bedroom for several weeks. I took my meals there and read a little bit, but, mostly, I just lay on my bed and looked up at the ceiling and thought about her. I told my father that I would not see any visitors, and the phone rang and rang until my friends stopped trying.
There was something about being a widow at eighteen that felt grossly unfair. My father and I never discussed it much—that we had each lost our wives at a young age—not until I was in my late twenties and he was dying of pancreatic cancer. It was only then that I would sit on his hospital bed for hours at a time, and we would lay our stories out carefully between us like two old men playing cards.
“I want to let her go,” I said, “but I can’t.”
Ernesto looked surprised. “Why would you want to let her go? There’s lots of room in there. In any case, it’s not that easy.”
I must have had a look on my face, because he put his hand on my arm. There was a tenderness to the gesture that I hadn’t expected. “Keep her there,” he said. “It doesn’t mean you won’t meet someone else or get married again. It just means that you’re giving her a place to stay, someplace warm and protected.”
I had been putting on a performance for myself—acting for all these years as if I wanted to let her go, when, in fact, I wanted her to stay. I felt something in me release—there was an unclenching somewhere inaccessible.
“I want to tell you something,” I said to Ernesto, once we were back in the library, “but you need to keep it to yourself.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“There are boys here from Santiago for boarding school. There’s one who is going to be made a Sprinter this Sunday. One of the boys—his mother hired me to get him out of here.”
Ernesto raised his eyebrows. “You’re not a reporter.”
I ran my hand along the top of a bookcase. “I haven’t been entirely honest,” I said. “Not with you, not with anyone.” I was thinking of the Manipulations I had been running for years—always playing this part or that, always trying to get something from someone. Julio had told me to find someone I could trust, and I realized that, without him or Rodolfo, I would need help.
“I’m working on a plan,” I said, “but it still needs some work.”
Ernesto nodded seriously.
“And I need your help,” I said.
Most of the colonists were already sitting at tables when we arrived at the dining hall for lunch.
“A short announcement!” I called out.
The colonists slowly turned their heads in my direction.
“We’ll be putting on our play next week, and I still need people to help out with costumes and with the set.”
There were some whispers and nods.
“Come see me,” I said.
By the time I had piled my tray with food and made my way over to an empty seat, there were already a few interested colonists hovering around me. I spent the rest of the meal assessing skills and assigning jobs. I spotted Greta walking by with an empty tray, and I asked my eager volunteers to give me a moment.
“Greta!” I said, getting up. She pretended not to hear me and kept walking. I caught up with her as she was leaving the dining hall.
“The colonists have been talking to me about your orchestra—they want you to be a part of the play.”
“I am too busy,” she said.
“It would be a gift to everyone to have your music there.”
Greta shrugged.
I needed to try something else. “Uncle Peter wants you to do the music for the play.”
“Which is the music he want?”
“We’re going to need some upbeat German folk music,” I said, “and something sad and dramatic. And some music that would work for funny scenes.”
“I can do,” she said, sighing.
I wanted to say something nice but could think of nothing. “You’re giving these children something special by teaching them to play music,” I said, finally.
Greta nodded. Her face softened a bit, and she said, “They are getting better. Very slowly, but better.”
When I returned to the library, I found Ernesto telling a story to a group of young boys. I stood at the back and listened for a bit. It was about a village in which there was a monster that ate some little boys but not others. He would snatch the children from their bedrooms at night—some of them he would gobble up, and others he would simply return to their beds unharmed. The villagers had a big meeting to try to figure out why he ate some and not others. Perhaps the monster didn’t like boys who ate sugar? But no, then he ate little Robin, whose parents did not allow a single grain of sugar to enter his mouth. Perhaps the monster didn’t like boys who disobeyed their parents? But no, then he ate Nigel. Those who obeyed their parents? Nope, he soon gobbled up obedient little Elsworth. The parents began to fight amongst themselves—wondering why their boys were eaten while their neighbours’ boys were spared, and so on.
The monster continued to terrorize the village until one day, when the smallest boy finally figured it out. He got up in front of all the villagers and told them that there was no rhyme or reason to who the monster ate. He only made it seem like there was so the villagers would be so busy fighting amongst themselves that they would forget about fighting the monster. The monster had tricked the villagers into trying to figure out what they were doing wrong. “We’re doing nothing wrong!” cried the smallest boy. “And that monster has got to go!” The next morning, the villagers tracked down the monster and tried giving him a big hug—maybe he needed love! Nothing happened. Then they carried him up to a fiery volcano and tossed him in—that worked much better. The End.
Everyone cheered. I went into the Library Staff Only room and locked the door. I found a blank cassette tape and wrote “ANGRY REBUTTAL TO ANY COMMENT.” Then I put it into one of the tape decks. A tape containing one of my interviews with Uncle Peter went into the other. I went through it until I found words and phrases that would serve my purposes, then recorded those onto the blank cassette tape. It was tedious and repetitive work, requiring lots of rewinding and re-playing.
THIRTY-NINE
The dinner bell rang, and Ernesto yelled for me to take a break. We walked over to the hall together and had not yet entered the building when Ernesto said, “He’s back.”
I stopped walking. There was something about the tone of the muted voices leaking out the door that did, in fact, indicate a subtle change in mood from the past few meals, when Uncle Peter had been gone.
Sure enough, there he was—standing at the front of the room, microphone in hand. I got into the line and tried to hide behind Ernesto. A colonist who was standing behind me tapped me on the back. I half-turned my head and raised my eyebrows. The colonist pointed at the stage, where Uncle Peter was smiling and signaling for me to come talk to him. I gestured at the lineup, but he shook his head and continued to signal.
“We’ve got a long night ahead of us,” he said, putting an arm around me. “Make sure you eat a big dinner and have a few cups of coffee.”
I got back in line and filled my bowl with porotos granados, the first traditionally Chilean dish I had eaten since arriving at the Colony, and one of my father’s favorites. He would make it at least every other week, often letting me stand on a chair by the stove a
nd gently stir the bubbling stew of beans, squash, and corn. We would eat it with ensalada a la Chilena, an invigorating salad of paper-thin slices of raw white onion and tomato wedges. There was no such salad with this meal—though the kitchen had prepared a limp lettuce salad that I doctored with a generous splash of vinegar. I took a seat and let my head hover above the steaming bowl of stew. I needed to cook more when I returned home. More cooking, more fishing, more gardening. I soon found myself in the middle of an especially pleasant daydream (Elena and I hard at work in our garden, harvesting vegetables for dinner while Claudio entertains us on his clarinet) but was pulled out of it abruptly by a burst of microphone feedback.
I felt someone shaking my shoulder and looked up. There was a guard standing over me—Leonardo, from the other night.
“It’s time to go,” he said. The room was mostly empty, and a woman who must have belonged to the evening kitchen crew had already begun wiping down the tables while another swept the floor. Ernesto was patiently sitting beside me, worrying away at a bump on the bench with his fingernail. Then the lights flickered on and off—one, two, three times—and my heart sank. I followed Leonardo out of the dining hall. We went by the library to pick up the tape recorder and a notepad, and, once we were outside, Leonardo pulled a blindfold out from his pocket.
“It’s alright,” I said. “I know where we’re going.”
Leonardo looked down at the ground. “I’ll get in trouble if I don’t,” he said.
I let him put the blindfold on me, and I grabbed onto his arm the way I had seen blind people do. Leonardo fended off my attempts at starting a conversation, and we continued on in silence. We entered what I knew was the church, and I felt the space around me constrict.
“Are you a religious man, Leonardo?”
“We’re here,” he said. “Just down these steps, and then you can take off the blindfold.”
Leonardo led me to the interrogation room and removed my blindfold. I opened the slot at the bottom of the door and announced my presence. There was silence from within, and then the door swung open. Uncle Peter’s hair was sprouting every which way, and he could hardly keep still.
“Come in, come in,” he said, pulling me into the room. “You’ve been missing out on all the fun.”
I looked over at the bed. There was a man lying there, strapped down tightly. I glanced at Uncle Peter and then back at the man. It was Tibor.
FORTY
Tibor’s eyes were glazed over. His arms were littered with burn marks, and the rising and falling of his chest was erratic and shallow.
“Who is this man?” I said loudly, not taking my eyes off Tibor. There was a danger here—that, in his current state, he might not realize that I needed him to pretend not to know me.
“This man,” Uncle Peter said. “No, not this ‘man.’ This is not a man, this is a Jew.”
Tibor looked up at me. “You,” he said, his voice weak.
I looked at Uncle Peter—he was busy fiddling with the straps on Tibor’s legs. I shook my head at Tibor, ever so slightly, and opened my eyes wide in warning.
Uncle Peter walked over to the machine and put his arm around it. “Me and Schnapps here have been having a lot of fun,” he said. I couldn’t look at him, nor could I look at Tibor anymore.
“He killed a Nazi,” Uncle Peter said, raising his voice. “This creature, this Jew,”—he spat the word out—“has killed one of my own!”
I nodded.
“He’s already admitted to killing the man—Dr. Koehler,” Uncle Peter said, “but he claims to have acted alone. He won’t tell me who helped him—I’m going to find out who it was and make him pay.”
I approached Uncle Peter. “He looks like he’s barely hanging on,” I whispered.
Uncle Peter walked over to the bed and grabbed Tibor’s face.
“I have a scalpel,” he said. “This is an interesting fact: when I was a child, I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to see what a lung looked like. A heart.”
Tibor looked up, his eyes suddenly clear. “Sure,” he said. “A doctor. You already know what I do to doctors.”
Uncle Peter yelled something in German and slapped Tibor.
The room was quiet then, and I thought very hard for a few moments. Then I spoke up, not sure what I was going to say until I said it. “I don’t know much about Jews,” I said, “but I do know this: they hate Nazis—and a man like this one, you’ve got to think about how much he’s hated them ever since he was a child. How he hated nothing more than having to walk around his village with a yellow star on his—”
“Get on with it, already!” Uncle Peter yelled. His mouth twitched violently, and I knew I would have to be better than him.
“What I’m thinking here,” I said, hurriedly, “is whether there’s something we could do that would be far worse than playing doctor.”
He gestured impatiently for me to get on with it.
“I’ve learned something important from you,” I said. “That emotional torture can be more painful than physical torture. What if we postpone this Schnapps business for just a bit, we take him out to the barn tomorrow—the goat barn, it’s got that electric fencing—and put him in there to live with the animals. We’ll sew a star on his jacket, bring back some memories.”
“The goat barn,” Uncle Peter said, slowly.
“He’ll be ready to talk to you after that,” I said. “And we would be reminding the other colonists that they are very fortunate.”
Uncle Peter hooked his finger around one of the levers on Schnapps. He tilted his head back in thought. “A few days of living with the animals,” he said, “on his hands and knees.”
I looked at Tibor. He sagged against the bed, his eyes opened wide, waiting for yet another man to decide for him—go this way and you die, go that way and you live.
FORTY-ONE
I awoke earlier than necessary and headed of f to the barn. The guard on duty confirmed that they had received a new animal this morning. I asked if I could see the new animal, and the guard gestured over to the open-air barn. Tibor was sitting on a bale of hay in a corner. The rest of the barn was home to a dozen or so goats.
“Am I safe from him?” I asked the guard.
“He’s not chained to anything,” said the guard, “but there’s high-voltage electrified fencing around the entire barn. He can be anywhere inside the barn, but he can’t leave the structure itself.”
“Good,” I said. “Though I have to say, he doesn’t look very dangerous at all. I’m a bit disappointed.”
“That’s how Jews are,” said the guard. “Uncle Peter said so when he dropped him off last night.”
“Well, I won’t keep you,” I said. “I just wanted to watch him for a bit.”
The guard told me I could take as much time as I wanted. Colonists were encouraged to come see Tibor, after all. After he had walked away, I took a step closer to the fence and looked at Tibor. He had been studiously ignoring the conversation, but now he turned to look at me.
“I wouldn’t get too close to that fence if I were you,” he said. “It’s not a pleasant experience.”
“Are you okay?”
Tibor shrugged. “There’s no Schnapps here.”
“Do you have food and water?”
Tibor unhooked a tin cup from a nail on the wall. He walked over to one of the goats and squatted down beside her. He stroked her head gently and then squeezed her teat so that a stream of milk shot into the cup. After a minute or so of this, he tipped the cup back and drank the milk. He stood up and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Food and water,” he said, “all at the same time.”
“Just hold on for a few days,” I said.
Tibor nodded.
“I have to go make breakfast,” I said. “I’ll be back soon.”
Tibor patted the goat on her head. He reminded me that he had grown up a goatherd and knew how to live amongst them.
The kitchen was a flurry of activity. Anita was n
owhere to be found, so I asked a woman who was chopping potatoes if she needed any help. She pushed a pile of potatoes my way and gratefully accepted. When we were done, I left to find someone else who looked like they might need help, and I continued on in this way until the breakfast bell rang.
“I have a very exciting announcement, my dear children!”
Uncle Peter was looking positively radiant—his cheeks ruddy and a smile pasted on his face. He passed the microphone from one hand to the other, waiting for the colonists to be silent.
“I was in Santiago yesterday,” he began, his voice dropping down to a whisper, “hunting down a killer.”
The colonists leaned forward, anticipating a good story.
“Some time ago, my dear old friend Dr. Koehler fell ill. He was taken to a hospital, where he slowly began to recover his health. One night, a man sneaked into his room and gave him an injection that would take his life. He injected Dr. Koehler, STRAIGHT INTO HIS HEART, with nothing other than a syringe full of GASOLINE!”
The colonists gasped and put their hands to their mouths.
“Through the help of some trusted friends, I was able to find him in Santiago and capture him. AND NOW, my friends, I have brought him to here to the Colony, where he will be living in the goat barn, with HIS FELLOW ANIMALS!
“There is another thing you should know about this animal, and this should come as no surprise to any of you. He is a Jew–a dirty, rotten Jew, and that is why he will be living with the goats, LIKE THE ANIMAL THAT HE IS!”
Uncle Peter invited the colonists to go visit Tibor at any time they liked. He told them that Tibor would be wearing a yellow star on his coat—like all Jews were forced to do during the Holocaust—and that reminding him of this would be a good way to punish him for the unspeakable crimes he had committed.
I retreated into the kitchen to eat a bowl of oatmeal, but I was not very hungry and could eat only a few spoonfuls. Ernesto was waiting for me on the front porch of the library. “We’ll go for a short walk without the chickens,” Ernesto said, “and then we’ll come back and take them out.”
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