Shrugging, he said, “Few see me, Rebecca. Fewer still can slip sideways through time with me.”
“Through time?” Now I looked around. The place was a flat treeless plain, not so much gray as hopeless. “Where are we?” I asked again.
He laughed into my hair. “‘When are we?’ is the question you should be asking.”
I gulped, trying to swallow down something awful-tasting that seemed to have lodged in my throat. “Am I crazy?”
“No more than any great artist.”
He knew I did art?
“You are a really fine artist. Remember, Rebecca, I travel through time. Past and future, they are all as one to me.”
Even in that gray world, I felt a flutter in my breast. My cheeks grew hot with pleasure. A great artist. A fine artist. In the future. Then I shook my head. Now I knew I was dreaming. Too much watered wine at the seder. I was probably asleep with my cheek on Nonny’s white tablecloth. Yet in my dream I painted a picture of Elijah brooding in that open door, dark and hungry, his lips slightly moist with secrets, his mouth framing an invitation in a language both dead and alive.
“You will paint that picture,” he said, as if reading my mind. “And it will make the world notice you. It will make me notice you. But not now. Now we have work to do.” He took my hand.
“What work?”
“Look closely.”
This time when I looked I saw that the flat treeless plain was not empty. There were humans walking about, women, girls, all dressed in gray. Gray skirts, gray shirts, gray scarves on their heads, gray sandals or boots. Oh, I could see that the clothes they wore had not always been such a color, but had been worn thin and made old by terror and tragedy and hopelessness.
“You must bring them away,” Elijah said. “Those who will go with you.”
“You are the time traveler, the magician,” I told him. “Why don’t you do it?”
That long face looked down at me, his dark brown eyes softening. “They do not see me.”
“Will they see me?” I asked. But I already knew. They were coming toward me, hands out.
“Elijah,” I asked him, “how will I talk to them?”
He reached out a hand and touched my lips. “You will find a way, Rebecca. Now go. I can tell you no more.” Then he disappeared, like the Cheshire cat, until there was only his mouth, and it wasn’t smiling. Then he was gone entirely.
I turned to the women and let them gather me in.
They told me where we were, how they were there. I had read their stories in books so I had no reason to disbelieve them. We were in a camp.
Oh, not a summer camp with square dances and macramé projects and water sports. I’d been to those. Girl Scout camp, art camp, music camp. My parents, like all their friends, saw the summer as a time to ship-the-kids-off-to-camp. Some were like boot camp and some were like spas.
This was a Camp.
I asked the question that Elijah told me was the one I should be asking. “When are we?”
And when they told me—1943—I couldn’t find the wherewithal to be surprised. I’d already seen a ghost out of time, traveled with him across a sci-fi landscape, been told about the future. Why not be landed in the past?
“Thanks for nothing, Elijah,” I whispered.
Something—someone—whispered in my ear, the accent softening what he had to say. “Thanks for everything, Rebecca.”
“I’ve done nothing,” I whined.
“You will,” he said.
And the women, hearing only me, answered, “None of us have done anything to put us in this place.”
SO my time in the Camp began. It was not Auschwitz or Dachau or Sobibor or Buchenwald or Treblinka, names I would have recognized at once.
“Where are we?”
“Near Lublin,” one woman told me, her eyes a startling blue in that gray face.
I knew that name. Squinting my eyes, I tried to remember. And then I did. My great-grandmother had been born in Lublin.
“Do you know a…” I stopped. I only knew my great-grandmother’s married name. Morewitz. What good would that do? Besides, she’d come over to America as a child anyway, and was dead long before I was born. I changed the sentence. “Do you know a good way to escape?”
They laughed, a gray kind of laugh. “And would we still be here if we did?” said the woman with the blue eyes. Her hand described a circle that took in the gray place.
I followed that circle with my eyes and saw a gray building, gray with settled ash. Ash. Something had been burned there. A lot of somethings. It was then I really understood what place Elijah had brought me to.
“So this a concentration camp?” I asked, though of course I already knew.
“There is nothing to concentrate on here, except putting one foot in front of the other,” said the blue-eyed woman.
“And putting one bit of potato into your open mouth,” said another.
“Not a concentration camp,” said a third, “but a death camp.”
“Hush,” said the blue-eyed woman, looking over her shoulder.
I looked where she was looking but there was no one there to hear us.
“I have to get out of here,” I said. Then bit my lip. “We all have to get out of here.”
A gray child with eyes as black as buttons peeked from behind the skirts of the blue-eyed woman. She pointed to one of the buildings, which had an ominous metal door that was standing open. Like an open mouth waiting for those potatoes, I thought.
“That is the only way out,” she said. Her face was a child’s but her voice was old.
I took a deep breath, breathed in ash, and said, “We will not go that way. I promise.”
The women moved away from me as one, leaving the child behind. One whispered hoarsely to me over her shoulder, “This is a place of broken promises. If you do not understand that, you will not live a moment longer.” Then she said to the child, “Masha, it’s time to go to bed. Morning comes too soon.” But she was speaking to me as well.
The child slipped her cold gray hand in mind. “I believe your promise,” she said. She looked up at me and smiled, as if smiling was something new that she needed to practice.
I smiled down at her and squeezed her hand. But I’d been a fool to promise her any such thing, and she was a fool to believe me.
“Elijah…” I began, “Elijah will help us.” But he’d helped me into this mess, then disappeared. I realized with a sinking feeling that I was on my own here. Now. Whenever.
“Elijah the magician?” She scarcely seemed to breathe, staring at me with her black-button eyes.
I nodded, wondering what kind of magic could get us away from this terrible place and time.
FOLLOWING the women, like a lamb after old ewes, the girl led me into a building that was filled with wide triple bunk beds. There were no sheets or pillows or blankets on the beds, only hard slats to lie upon. The only warmth at night came from the people who slept on either side. I had read about this, seen movies. What Jewish kid hadn’t?
The cold was no worse than a bad camping trip. The slats on the boards were like lying on the ground. But the smell—there were three hundred or more women squeezed into that building, with no bathing facilities but buckets of cold water. No one had a change of clothing; some must have been living in the same dresses for months. And those were the lucky ones, for they were still alive.
Masha snuggled next to me, her body now a little furnace, a warm spot against me. On the other side was the blue-eyed woman who introduced herself as Eva. But that first night my head raced with bizarre imaginings. Either I was crazy or dreaming. Maybe I’d had some kind of psychotic break—like my cousin Rachael, who one night after a rave party thought she was in prison and tried to escape through a window, which turned out to be on the third floor of their apartment building. I just couldn’t stop from wondering and I didn’t sleep at all. A mistake, it turned out. By morning I was exhausted. Besides, sleep was the one real escape from that place.
It was why the women went to bed, side by side, as eagerly as if heading for a party. After that there was the work.
YES, there was work. That first morning they showed me. It wasn’t difficult work—not as difficult as the work the men were doing, breaking stones on the other side of the barbed wire—but still it broke the heart and spirit. We were to take belongings from the suitcases inmates had brought with them, separating out all the shoes in one pile, clothing in another on long, wooden tables. Jewelry and money went into a third pile that was given to the blovoka—the head of the sorters—at day’s end. She had to give it to the soldiers who ran the camp. Then there were family photographs and family Bibles and books of commentary and books of poetry. Piles of women’s wigs and a huge pile of medicines, enough pills and potions for an army of hypochondriacs. There were packets of letters and stacks of documents, even official-looking contracts and certificates of graduation from law schools and medical schools. And then there was the pile of personal items: toothbrushes and hairbrushes and nail files and powder puffs. Everything that someone leaving home in a hurry and for the last time would carry.
I tried to think what I would have taken away with me had someone knocked on our door and said we had just minutes to pack up and leave for a resettlement camp, which is what all these people had been told. My diary and my iPod for sure, my underwear and several boxes of Tampax, toothbrush, hairbrush, blow-dryer, the book of poems my boyfriend had given me, a box of grease pencils and a sketchbook of course, and the latest Holly Black novel, which I hadn’t had time to read yet. If that sounds pathetic, it’s a whole lot less pathetic than the actual stuff we had to sort through.
And of course the entire time we were sorting, I alone knew what it all meant. That there were these same kinds of concentration camps throughout Poland and Germany. That six million Jews and six million other people were going to die in these awful places. And my having that knowledge was not going to help a single one of them.
Boy, it’s going to be hard for me ever to go to a summer camp again, I thought. If I get out of here in one piece. That’s when I began crying and calling out for Elijah.
“Who’s Elijah?” a girl my age asked, putting an arm around me. “Your brother? Your boyfriend? Is he here? On the men’s side?”
I turned, wiped my nose on my sleeve, and opened my mouth to tell her. When I realized how crazy it sounded, I said merely, “Something like that.” And then I turned back to work.
The temptation to take a hairbrush or toothbrush or nail file back to our building was enormous.
But little Masha warned me that the guards searched everyone. “And if they find you with contraband,” she said—without stumbling on the big word, so I knew it was one everyone used—“you go up in smoke.”
The way she said that, so casually, but clearly understanding what it meant, made my entire backbone go cold. I nodded. I wasn’t about to be cremated over a broken fingernail or messy hair. I left everything on the long tables.
THE days were long, the nights too short. I was a week at the camp and fell into a kind of daze. I walked, I worked, I ate when someone put a potato in my hand, but I had retreated somewhere inside myself.
Masha often took my hand and led me about, telling me what things to do. Saying, “Don’t become a musselman.” And one day—a day as gray as the ash covering the buildings, gray clouds scudding across the skies, I heard her.
“Musselman?” I asked.
She shrugged. A girl standing next to me in the work line explained. “They are the shadows in the shadows. The ones who give up. Who die before they are dead.” She pointed out the grimed window to a woman who looked like a walking skeleton dressed in rags. “She is a mussleman and will not need to go up in smoke. She is already gone.”
I shook my head vehemently. “I am not that.”
Masha grabbed my hand and pulled. “Then wake up. You promised.”
And I remembered my promise. My foolish promise. I looked out the window again and the woman was indeed gone. In her place stood Elijah, staring at me. He put a finger to the side of his nose and looked sad. The lines of his long face were repeated in the length of his nose. There were shadows, dark blue with streaks of brown, under his eyes. My hand sketched them.
“What are you doing?” Masha asked me.
“I need to paint something,” I said.
“Foolishness,” the girl next to me said.
“No—art is never foolish,” I told her. “It is life-giving.”
She laughed roughly and moved away from me as if I had something contagious.
I looked over the tables—the boxes of pills, the jewelry, the documents, the little baby shoes, the old women’s handbags. And finally, I found a battered box of colored chalks some child must have carried with her. I picked the box up, grabbed up a marriage certificate, and went into a corner.
“What are you doing?” asked the blovoka. “Get back here or I will have to report you.”
But I paid no attention to her. I sat down on the filthy floor, turned the certificate over, and started to draw. With black chalk I outlined Elijah’s body and the long oval of his face. I overlayered the outline with white till it was gray as ash. Having no gum eraser, I was careful with what I drew, yet not too careful, knowing that a good painting had to look effortless. At home I would have worked with Conté pastels. I had a box of twenty-four. But I used what I had, a box of twelve chalks, most of them in pieces. To keep my drawing from smudging, at home I would have coated the whole thing with a light misting of hairspray. But home was a long way—and a long time—from here. And hairspray was, I guessed, a thing of the future.
The blovoka began to yell at me. “Get up! Get up!” And suddenly there was a flurry of legs around me, as some of the women were shouting the same.
Masha sneaked through the forest of legs and sat by me. “What are you doing?”
“I am making a picture of someone you need to see,” I said. I sketched in the long nose, the black and wavy beard, and the closed-eye smile. I found a pink for his lips, then smudged them purposefully with fingers that still had black chalk on the tips.
The blovoka had stopped yelling at me and was now yelling at the women who had formed a wall around Masha and me.
I kept drawing, using my fingers, the flat of my hand, my right thumb. I spit onto my left fingers and rubbed them down the line of his body. With the black chalk I filled in his long black coat. I used the white chalk for highlights, and to fill in around his black eyes. Brown chalk buffed in skin tones, which I then layered on top with the ashy gray.
“I see him. I see him,” Masha said to me. “Is it Elijah?” She put her hand on the black coat, and her palm and small fingers became black at the tips.
Two of the women standing guard above us drew in a quick breath, and one said to the other, “I see him, too.” It was Eva’s voice. She knelt down and touched the paper.
Someone suddenly called my name. A man. I looked up. Elijah stood there, in the midst of all the women, though none of them seemed to notice him.
“Masha,” I said urgently, “do you see him there?” I took her head in my hands and gently turned it so she was looking up as well.
“How did he get here?” she asked, pointing right at him. “In the women’s side?”
Eva gasped at the sight of him.
But Elijah smiled, holding out his hands. I stood and took his right hand and Masha took his left. Eva grabbed hold of Masha’s waist as if to drag her from me.
“There they are!” came the blovoka’s shrill voice. “There!” The rest of the women had scattered back to the sorting tables, and Masha, Eva, and I were in her line of sight. Beside the blovoka were two armed guards.
They pulled out their guns.
This time Elijah laughed. He dragged us toward him, and then we turned a corner in the middle of that room, sliding sideways into a familiar long gray corridor.
Eva gasped again, then was silent, as if nothing more could surpri
se her. She held tight to Masha’s waist.
And then we were flying through the flickering starlight and rushing meteors. A strange sun stood still overhead. As suddenly as they’d begun, the lights and sounds stopped when we came to the other side.
Masha dropped Elijah’s hand and looked around, but Eva never let go of her waist.
This time I knew to ask the right question. “When are we?”
Elijah said, “We are still in the same year but five thousand miles away. We are in America now.”
“We are in America then,” I said.
He nodded. “Then,” and he touched my shoulder. “Kiss the child, Rebecca. Assure her that she will be well taken care of here.” His face seemed no longer gray, but blanched, as if the traveling had taken much of his energy. “The woman, while not her own mother, will watch over her.”
“Eva,” I said. “First mother.”
“Of course.” We both nodded at the irony.
“But I can’t just leave her,” I said, though I saw the two of them had already found a table of food and were happily filching stuff and hiding it in their pockets.
“You must. The child will have a fine life, a good family.”
“Will I ever see her again?”
“No, Rebecca, she will be dead before you are born. Besides, you have pictures to paint. Of me.” He smile was seductive, as if he were already posing for me.
I think my jaw dropped open. But not for long. “Why…you…you.” Suddenly I couldn’t think of a word bad enough for him. Had this whole thing, this trip into the past, into that awful place, had it just been to satisfy his enormous ego? I stared at him. His face was positively gaunt, the eyes like a shark’s, dead giving back no light. How could I ever have found him intriguing? My cheeks burned with shame. “I’ll never paint that picture. Never.”
He held up his hands as if to ward off the blow from my words. “Hush, hush, Rebecca. The picture has to be painted. This is not about me but about you. Not about you but about your people. For the children of the great Jewish diaspora. To remind them of who they are. It will begin a renaissance in Judaism that will last well beyond your life and the lives of your great-great-grandchildren and to the twentieth generation.”
Wizards: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy Page 15
