The White House

by O’neil Sharma

  #

  A discrete distance from the café, sitting in a parked car Steffan and Torsten waited for Saul to exit. It had been Torsten’s job to observe and learn. The debrief began.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Torsten stroking his moustache.

  ‘Fragments of the truth.’

  ‘How did he know that Blum was alive when his teeth were pulled?’

  ‘You were awake! There may be hope for you yet. All that from a picture he hardly looked at.’

  ‘You think he could do it?’

  Saul left the café unaware that he was being watched. Steffan started the car.

  ‘Sure. But what’s the need? Anyway, if Isaac Blum was scared, why go to him and not us?’

  Steffan was dissatisfied with his performance in the meeting. He had been shown up by this old man, made to feel bad for asking legitimate questions. Reflecting on what had just taken place he felt it was he that had been probed and tested not Saul. He had also placed that look in Saul’s eyes at the mention of The White House: panic.

  As Saul breathed the fresh air he made his decision to get the prescription filled. He had a reason now and he could not afford to be unclear. Isaac’s death had convinced him of one thing: he was next.

  CHAPTER 8

  Saul sat on a bench in the shade of a large apartment block that bordered one of the neighbourhood’s many playgrounds. Aisha, who had proudly shown him that she could swing standing up, was now sitting on said swing eating an ice cream in haste so she could return to play. It did not seem to bother her that there was a queue of children building up behind her waiting to use the swing. Catching the looks from mothers and the other children Saul got up and convinced Aisha to sit with him on the bench until her strawberry ice cream was finished. That way other children could play too.

  Side by side they both watched the children play in the unflinching sun. Mothers tried in vain to keep hats on and slap suncream on faces. The floor of the playground was covered in sand and some children were trying to discover how deep it went. Others slid, swung, chased each other, pumped water into the sand to make castles or played in a large wooden hut that was meant to be a shop of some sort; pretending to buy, sell and eat items they had made from sand or picked up from the floor. One boy did not pretend and Saul watched an irate mother chastise her son who had a mouth full of sand. The children, having no sense of volume control filled the space with cries, laughter and high-pitched shrieks that could set one’s teeth on edge. The shouts of mothers trying to be heard added an adult frequency to the cacophony. All the children were happy and it was hard for Saul not to let their mood infiltrate his.

  Saul had indeed left the café and gone straight to the pharmacy. Annoyed that having made the decision to take the pills he would have to wait another day before he could start the course. The pharmacist had delicately pointed out that such drugs were not asked for on a daily basis but he was welcome to look elsewhere if he wanted. Saul suspected he would hear the same story five times over and still be no closer to taking his smart drugs, so he’d begrudgingly placed his order and gone to the kindergarten to pick up Aisha.

  Watching the children play soothed him and he was able to focus on the task at hand. He accepted the death sentence as a given and put it to one side as an irrelevant detail. He might die for sure, but this time it would be on his terms. This time he could fight and if he should die then it would be a death well met and certainly better than the alternative.

  Never again like lambs to the slaughter.

  The next move proved difficult. With Mark and Isaac dead he had to assume that the killer knew who he was and had been doing his research. Saul tried to think of anything that he had noticed that was out of the ordinary, but came up empty. He had a shop and aside from the regulars there were a steady flow of strangers that were impossible to keep tabs on. He was seldom in the front anyway. That was Hannah’s realm. The real questions he struggled with were: why now and why them?

  Isaac.

  The head start afforded to the killer was formidable: he might be ready to strike already and his offensive would all be over before Saul had a chance to put it into play. The one advantage he had was that the killer did not know that he had been alerted. At least he hoped that was the case.

  He changed tack: If the secret had been leaked then how and by whom? Mark would never have told. He was as sure of that as he was of his own integrity. Isaac was the weak one. Isaac. Always on the verge of telling his wife. Saul shook this idea away. Even if Isaac had told his wife it was hardly something she would advertise and surely the police would know by now; their innocence in the matter was the one thing he was sure of.

  He had only speculation: no clues and no leads and no proof.

  I have proof.

  That was it - Isaac said he had proof. He needed to find out what Isaac knew.

  ‘I’m full,’ said Aisha, thrusting the ice cream into his hands and running back to join the queue for the swing. Saul ate the remainder of the ice cream and worked his way down the cone.

  Saul watched as three young men dug a hole in the sand and buried something that he could not quite make out. All three men had short hair and wore ill-fitting clothes. One of the men looked back at him while stamping down on the sand and Saul noticed he was barely a man at all. He looked familiar, but Saul could not put a name to the face. It never struck Saul as odd that three grown-up men without children should be in the playground. No one else seemed to mind either. Their was something hypnotic about the way they worked. Aisha was calling to him to watch her but she could not get him to stop daydreaming so she gave up.

  #

  OPEN THE DOOR!

  Saul screamed and sat bolt upright in bed. Instantly Hannah’s bedside lamp came on and she was beside him, holding him while he panted for breath. She felt the warm dampness of his cotton T-shirt and held him firmly as he shook.

  She had never known Saul to dream as vividly as he had of late: having a nightmare was unprecedented. Normally he slept like in those sci-fi movies: suspended animation they called it; in any case, he managed to make himself imperceptible.

  Hannah followed his gaze to the full-length mirror and what she saw chilled her to the bone. Her husband was gone. The reflection that stared back contained no anima, no vitality. She held a corpse and stifled a scream of her own. For a beat he tensed and she thought he was going to push her off him.

  The shift was infinitesimal but as Saul calmed down she witnessed the return of his soul to his body and relaxed the grip she had on him.

  The nightmare that bubbled to the surface, evading all his defences had been powerful, the pain refusing to die with the dream. However, Saul was not sure he was awake. The reflection in the mirror attested to that. An old man he did not know looked back at him, a face familiar yet alien. He touched his face and the reflection did likewise, but where his hand touched smooth sixteen year old skin the reflection’s hand traversed a craggy terrain. Then there was the old woman next to him. He had no idea who she was but she was stuck to him like glue. He wanted to push her away. He grabbed her hand and was about to do just that when the smell of her musky perfume hit him: he did know her.

  The how and the who were not there yet, but the doubt was enough to prevent him taking the action. He kept working on the puzzle. A molecule at a time it came together in his mind; forming a spinning ball that became so dense it attracted other molecules and span faster and faster, gravity pulling bigger and bigger chunks into the mass.

  He was back.

  Humiliated almost to tears, Saul tried to fathom how he could not have recognised the woman that had been by his side for nearly all of his life. At that moment he wanted to tell her everything. Confess and wipe the slate clean so they could live the rest of their lives in the knowledge that they had been true to each other.

  Even as he thought it he knew this was a lie; the cleansing would be one way and she would resent him for the burden.
r />   ‘Isaac is dead,’ he said flatly. ‘I’m going to his funeral.’

  ‘Oh, Saul-‘

  ‘Can we move this-?’ he pointed to the mirror.

  ‘The mirror?’

  Saul was already on the move and not wanting to upset him further she joined him in dragging the offending furniture to the other side of the room.Hannah got back into bed and expected Saul to do the same but as she turned she saw that he was getting dressed.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  There was a long pause as he tried to remember the word. Hannah waited, watching him. Was he going to answer her at all?

  ‘Work.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Saul. You need to rest. Come back to bed.’

  He closed the door quietly behind him.

  CHAPTER 9

  Isaac was buried in a non-Jewish cemetery close to his home in Spandau. The Rabbi protested strongly until Edna pointed out that the sanctity of a Jewish burial place need not necessarily extend to the cemetery as a whole but rather to the individual grave. Besides, it had been his wish not to be surrounded by the followers of his faith and given what he had done she was not surprised; not that she told the Rabbi that. Isaac’s confession would be something she took to her grave. It had explained a great deal about why the man she married turned out to be a failure and disappointment. It also disgusted and shamed her.

  The Rabbi relented having checked his facts and found her to be correct. He insisted; however, that there should be one grave width between Isaac’s and the next. The German committee that ran the cemetery, eager to demonstrate their tolerance, had readily agreed to the condition. Edna put this down to German shame; recognising that shame was not the sole preserve of the Germans and that she now had something in common with them.

  Saul waited outside the funeral house. In the distance he could make out a small crowd of people gathered at Isaac’s grave. Edna was unmistakable even from this remoteness. Time had swelled her and he could see that the mop of curly black hair had turned white and wiry. He was not religious and everyone who knew him well was aware of the fact, however this was about as close as he could bring himself to the burial out of respect for those that did believe. He hadn’t eaten anything yet and his toothpaste had started to taste like metal in his mouth. His tongue wiped his teeth as if they could lick away the taste. He needed a coffee.

  It was imperative that he saw Edna and as the cars were parked close-by, he knew she would come this way when it was all over. So he waited, his black shoes scrunching the gravel as he shifted his weight. He took another look at the funeral and then counted the cars: There were too many for such a small gathering. He assumed that there must be a second funeral somewhere. The funeral house looked new and it had a chimney to accommodate cremations: Multi-functionality in practice.

  Time is money, he thought, even in death.

  No, time is nature and money is something we invented to help us measure time.

  For a brief moment his mind ambled over whether money or watches were a more accurate measure of the passage of time and examined the possibility of getting rid of one of them. What could we live without? In the extreme circumstances he had lived through, money had meant very little. The richest could not buy their way out of their destinies and he and his colleagues had reverted to barter; at his age it was not more money he wanted but more time.

  Everyman’s life is sufficient.

  Death came to everyone and everything: what matter if you lived one day or one hundred years? In universal time these periods of life were nothing. In the end they would all return to nature and whatever they knew and whoever knew them would be forgotten. The other problem Saul had with the Stoic ideology was exactly this: if it all did not matter, if they should all accept their fate: why does one struggle to live? Why fight against the injustice? Of course the Stoics would argue that they should have done what they could to show their brothers the error of their ways and guided them back to universal brotherhood. Marcus Aurelius had not spent time in a concentration camp. Did it all really come down to relinquishing one’s ego? If he could do that, would it all be okay?

  Two dark men in dark clothing walked from the building towards him. As they got closer Saul realised that the men were not dark they were dirty, their shirts had actually been white and he could tell they were also white skinned under all that filth: Coal miners. Here?

  The young Saul, tired and confused from the trip, his arm hurting from the tattoo and with a freshly shaved head was busy trying to orientate himself to his new home.

  After the train journey from Hell, just being outside in the fresh air was like a present and he wanted to take his time unwrapping it. So this is where they want me to work, he thought to himself looking at the factory, wondering what kind of work he would be doing: he had no trade or skills as yet, not that they had asked. They had merely told him where to stand and told his family to stand somewhere else. This was Selektion: having gotten off the train all the families were relieved off their possessions and separated in groups. His group being the smaller one and rumour had it they would have a special job.

  He was worried for his family. Father was not really a practical man, mother had not worked a day in her life –outside of the house anyway - and as for his brothers and sister, what work could children do? The coalminers were almost with him now so he asked:

  ‘Where did they take our families?’

  One of the men pointed at the chimney that was now spewing smoke.

  ‘There they are, going to heaven.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ replied Saul.

  ‘First day, eh?’

  They kept walking and Saul turned to follow them wanting to ask more questions. He opened his mouth, but it was too late, the moment had passed.

  Turning back to the funeral house Saul saw more men working at a huge pile of dirt, shovelling it into an army truck. The pile of dirt stood taller than the men and Saul thought: this must be the slag heap.

  He raised a hand to wave at them and realised his hand was also covered in dirt.

  But now he could see that it was not dirt. It was ash and it was all over him.

  They are burning bodies in there!

  Reducing them to particles. How many bodies could make all that ash? He started to dust himself off and then the smell hit. How could he have missed that?

  A perverted barbeque of burning flesh. He felt like being sick but controlled himself. He had just eaten a meal for the first time in God knows how long and he was not about to waste it.

  Panic took control of the young Saul as he desperately tried to rid himself of the layer of ash that smothered him.

  At the graveside Saul’s frantic movements caught Steffan’s eye. He nudged Torsten and both men watched, unsure what to make of Saul’s dance.

  The vision was gone as quickly as it started. Saul discerned that he was not covered in ash and not sixteen. The chimney was not smoking. He glanced around furtively making sure he had not been seen. Safe in the knowledge that he had been unobserved he began to calm down.

  He dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief and then flapped his jacket in a vain attempt to dry his back. Taking hold of his shirt he pulled it away from his skin and attempted to maintain a position that would keep it off his back but this proved impossible, as his body seemed to be magnetised sucking the wet shirt in as soon as he let go. There was also the tiredness that made his legs weak. He desperately wanted to sit but there were no benches nearby. The ones he could see were too far out of the way; he would not be able to observe the funeral and he might miss Edna. He locked his right leg at the knee and shifted his weight onto it forcing himself to stand.

  That moment of disjointedness came to him this time with the added bonus of uncertainty.

  Did I scream?

  How could he tell? No one had come running to help him so he assumed he had not. He was still standing in the same place so that must have meant he had not
moved. Would a time come when his hallucinations made him exhibit a physical response? He worried about hurting people. He worried about hurting himself.

  What if I do things I can’t remember?

  It dawned on him that he had used the H word: Hallucination. He was not time traveling and he was not jaunting.

  What bothered him the most was what he hallucinated. Why should it always be these nightmares that he had buried so long ago? He had many happy childhood memories and even happier adult memories.

  Why not my wedding day or the birth of my children or my tenth birthday when I got my first bike?

  Saul could recall those days quite vividly. How the bike had been too big, his father telling him he would grow into it and the summer he had spent jumping off the thing just before it came to a complete stop.

  How he had not cried when Sara was born, but how six weeks later when she smiled at him for the first time, his eyes had welled up with joy. He had walked into the room and had seen the recognition on her tiny face followed by the smile and a tear escaped his eye. From that day on he spent his life trying to make her smile.

  How he and Hannah had made love on their wedding night: like children fumbling in the dark and then the awkwardness of not knowing where to put his nose when they kissed, how their teeth bumped and grated, how his elbows could be used to make sure he did not crush her and how it was not as fun as he hoped but wanting to do it again immediately after. Of course it had gotten better, much better, not that he had any other point of reference. Later he admitted it had been his first time too. He called to mind how shy Hannah had been and how he had teased her hoping to provoke the reaction he eventually got. She had not let him see her naked for a week and then when she did, throwing off her clothes and parading proud around the bedroom as if she had never worn a stitch of clothing her whole life and then crawling onto the bed to join him…