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 weary 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 and quivering kind of tension sprang 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 blank 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.
Once past, Wernecke turned to stare at Bruckman, and Bruckman had to summon up all the defiance that remained in him not to look uneasily away from Wernecke’s agate-hard eyes. “You are the strongest and cleverest of all the other animals, Isadore,” Wernecke said in a calm, conversational, almost ruminative voice. “You have been useful to me. Every shepherd needs a good sheepdog. I still need you, to help me manage the others, and to help me keep them going long enough to serve my needs. This is the reason why I have taken so much time with you, instead of just killing you outright.” He shrugged. “So let us both be rational about this—you leave me alone, Isadore, and I will leave you alone also. We will stay away from each other and look after our own affairs. Yes?”
“The others . . .” Bruckman said weakly.
“They must look after themselves,” Wernecke said. He smiled, a thin and almost invisible motion of his lips. “What did I teach you, Isadore? Here everyone must look after themselves. What difference does it make what happens to the others? In a few weeks almost all of them will be dead anyway.”
“You are a monster,” Bruckman said.
“I’m not much different from you, Isadore. The strong survive, whatever the cost.”
“I am nothing like you,” Bruckman said, with loathing.
“No?” Wernecke asked, ironically, and moved away; within a few paces he was hobbling and stooping, vanishing into the shadows, once more the harmless old Jew.
Bruckman stood motionless for a moment, and then, moving slowly and reluctantly, he stepped across to where Wernecke’s victim lay. It was one of the new men Wernecke had been talking to earlier in the evening, and, of course, he was quite dead.
Shame and guilt took Bruckman then, emotions he thought he had forgotten—black and strong and bitter, they shook him by the throat the way Wernecke had shaken the new man.
Bruckman couldn’t remember returning across the room to his sleeping platform, but suddenly he was there, lying on his back and staring into the stifling darkness, surrounded by the moaning, thrashing, stinking mass of sleepers. His hands were clasped protectively over his throat, although he couldn’t remember putting them there, and he was shivering convulsively. How many mornings had he awoken with a dull ache in his neck, thinking it no more than the habitual bodyaches and strained muscles they had all learned to take for granted? How many nights had Wernecke fed on him?
Every time Bruckman closed his eyes, he would see Wernecke’s face floating there in the luminous darkness behind his eyelids . . . Wernecke with his eyes half-closed, his face vulpine and cruel and satiated . . . Wernecke’s face moving closer and closer to him, his eyes opening like black pits, his lips smiling back from his teeth . . . Wernecke’s lips, sticky and red with blood . . . and then Bruckman would seem to feel the wet touch of Wernecke’s lips on his throat, feel Wernecke’s teeth biting into his flesh, and Bruckman’s eyes wo
uld fly open again. Staring into the darkness. Nothing there. Nothing there yet . . .
Dawn was a dirty gray imminence against the cabin window before Bruckman could force himself to lower his shielding arms from his throat, and once again he had not slept at all.
###
That day’s work was a nightmare of pain and exhaustion for Bruckman, harder than anything he had known since his first few days at the camp. Somehow he forced himself to get up, somehow he stumbled outside and up the path to the quarry, seeming to float along high off the ground, his head a bloated balloon, his feet a thousand miles away at the end of boneless beanstalk legs he could barely control at all. Twice he fell, and was kicked several times before he could drag himself back to his feet and lurch forward again. The sun was coming up in front of them, a hard red disk in a sickly yellow sky, and to Bruckman it seemed to be a glazed and lidless eye staring dispassionately into the world to watch them flail and struggle and die, like the eye of a scientist peering into a laboratory maze.
He watched the disk of the sun as he stumbled toward it; it seemed to bob and shimmer with every painful step, expanding, swelling and bloating until it swallowed the sky . . .
Then he was picking up a rock, moaning with the effort, feeling the rough stone tear his hands . . .
Reality began to slide away from Bruckman. There were long periods when the world was blank, and he would come slowly back to himself as if from a great distance, and hear his own voice speaking words that he could not understand, or keening mindlessly, or grunting in a hoarse, animalistic way, and he would find that his body was working mechanically, stooping and lifting and carrying, all without volition . . .
A Musselmänn, Bruckman thought, I’m becoming a Musselmänn . . . and felt a chill of fear sweep through him. He fought to hold onto the world, afraid that the next time he slipped away from himself he would not come back, deliberately banging his hands into the rocks, cutting himself, clearing his head with pain.
The world steadied around him. A guard shouted a hoarse admonishment at him and slapped his rifle-butt, and Bruckman forced himself to work faster, although he could not keep himself from weeping silently with the pain his movements cost him.
He discovered that Wernecke was watching him, and stared back defiantly, the bitter tears still runneling his dirty cheeks, thinking, I won’t become a Musselmänn for you, I won’t make it easy for you, I won’t provide another helpless victim for you . . . Wernecke met Bruckman’s gaze for a moment, and then shrugged and turned away.
Bruckman bent for another stone, feeling the muscles in his back crack and the pain drive in like knives. What had Wernecke been thinking, behind the blankness of his expressionless face? Had Wernecke, sensing weakness, marked Bruckman for his next victim? Had Wernecke been disappointed or dismayed by the strength of Bruckman’s will to survive? Would Wernecke now settle upon someone else?
The morning passed, and Bruckman grew feverish again. He could feel the fever in his face, making his eyes feel sandy and hot, pulling the skin taut over his cheekbones, and he wondered how long he could manage to stay on his feet. To falter, to grow weak and insensible, was certain death; if the Nazis didn’t kill him, Wernecke would . . . Wernecke was out of sight now, on the other side of the quarry, but it seemed to Bruckman that Wernecke’s hard and flinty eyes were everywhere, floating in the air around him, looking out momentarily from the back of a Nazi soldier’s head, watching him from the dulled iron side of a quarry cart, peering at him from a dozen different angles. He bent ponderously for another rock, and when he had pried it up from the earth he found Wernecke’s eyes beneath it, staring unblinkingly up at him from the damp and pallid soil . . .
That afternoon there were great flashes of light on the eastern horizon, out across the endless flat expanse of the steppe, flares in rapid sequence that lit up the sullen gray sky, all without sound. The Nazi guards had gathered together in a group, looking to the east and talking in subdued voices, ignoring the prisoners for the moment. For the first time Bruckman noticed how disheveled and unshaven the guards had become in the last few days, as though they had given up, as though they no longer cared. Their faces were strained and tight, and more than one of them seemed to be fascinated by the leaping fires on the distant edge of the world.
Melnick said that it was only a thunderstorm, but old Bohme said that it was an artillery battle being fought, and that that meant that the Russians were coming, that soon they would all be liberated.
Bohme grew so excited at the thought that he began shouting, “The Russians! It’s the Russians! The Russians are coming to free us!” Dichstein and Melnick tried to hush him, but Bohme continued to caper and shout—doing a grotesque kind of jig while he yelled and flapped his arms—until he had attracted the attention of the guards. Infuriated, two of the guards fell upon Bohme and beat him severely, striking him with their rifle-butts with more than usual force, knocking him to the ground, continuing to flail at him and kick him while he was down, Bohme writhing like an injured worm under their stamping boots. They probably would have beaten Bohme to death on the spot, but Wernecke organized a distraction among some of the other prisoners, and when the guards moved away to deal with it, Wernecke helped Bohme stand up and hobble away to the other side of the quarry, where the rest of the prisoners shielded him from sight with their bodies as best they could for the rest of the afternoon.
Something about the way Wernecke urged Bohme to his feet and helped him to limp and lurch away, something about the protective, possessive curve of Wernecke’s arm around Bohme’s shoulders, told Bruckman that Wernecke had selected his next victim.
That night, Bruckman vomited up the meager and rancid meal that they were allowed, his stomach convulsing uncontrollably after the first few bites. Trembling with hunger and exhaustion and fever, he leaned against the wall and watched as Wernecke fussed over Bohme, nursing him as a man might nurse a sick child, talking gently to him, wiping away some of the blood that still oozed from the corner of Bohme’s mouth, coaxing Bohme to drink a few sips of soup, finally arranging that Bohme should stretch out on the floor away from the sleeping platforms, where he would not be jostled by the others . . .
As soon as the interior lights went out that night, Bruckman got up, crossed the floor quickly and unhesitantly, and lay down in the shadows near the spot where Bohme muttered and twitched and groaned.
Shivering, Bruckman lay in the darkness, the strong smell of earth in his nostrils, waiting for Wernecke to come . . .
In Bruckman’s hand, held close to his chest, was a spoon that had been sharpened to a jagged needle point, a spoon he had stolen and begun to sharpen while he was still in a civilian prison in Cologne, so long ago that he almost couldn’t remember, scraping it back and forth against the stone wall of his cell every night for hours, managing to keep it hidden on his person during the nightmarish ride in the sweltering boxcar, the first few terrible days at the camp, telling no one about it, not even Wernecke during the months when he’d thought of Wernecke as a kind of saint, keeping it hidden long after the possibility of escape had become too remote even to fantasize about, retaining it then more as a tangible link with the daydream country of his past than as a tool he ever actually hoped to employ, cherishing it almost as a holy relic, as a remnant of a vanished world that he otherwise might almost believe had never existed at all . . .
And now that it was time to use it at last, he was almost reluctant to do so, to soil it with another man’s blood . . .
He fingered the spoon compulsively, turning it over and over; it was hard and smooth and cold, and he clenched it as tightly as he could, trying to ignore the fine tremoring of his hands.
He had to kill Wernecke . . .
Nausea and an odd feeling of panic flashed through Bruckman at the thought, but there was no other choice, there was no other way . . . He couldn’t go on like this, his strength was failing; Wernecke was killing him, as surely as he had killed the others, just by keeping him from
sleeping . . . And as long as Wernecke lived, he would never be safe, always there would be the chance that Wernecke would come for him, that Wernecke would strike as soon as his guard was down . . . Would Wernecke scruple for a second to kill him, after all, if he thought that he could do it safely . . . ? No, of course not. Given the chance, Wernecke would kill him without a moment’s further thought . . . No, he must strike first . . . Bruckman licked his lips uneasily. Tonight. He had to kill Wernecke tonight . . .
There was a stirring, a rustling: someone was getting up, working his way free from the mass of sleepers on one of the platforms. A shadowy figure crossed the room toward Bruckman, and Bruckman tensed, reflexively running his thumb along the jagged end of the spoon, readying himself to rise, to strike—but at the last second, the figure veered aside and stumbled toward another corner. There was a sound like rain drumming on cloth; the man swayed there for a moment, mumbling, and then slowly returned to his pallet, dragging his feet, as if he had pissed his very life away against the wall. It was not Wernecke.
Bruckman eased himself back down to the floor, his heart seeming to shake his wasted body back and forth with the force of its beating. His hand was damp with sweat. He wiped it against his tattered pants, and then clutched the spoon again . . .
Time seemed to stop. Bruckman waited, stretched out along the hard floorboards, the raw wood rasping his skin, dust clogging his mouth and nose, feeling as though he were already dead, a corpse laid out in a rough pine coffin, feeling eternity pile up on his chest like heavy clots of wet black earth . . . Outside the hut, the kliegs blazed, banishing night, abolishing it, but here inside the hut it was night, here night survived, perhaps the only pocket of night remaining on a klieg-lit planet, the shafts of light that came in through the slatted window only serving to accentuate the surrounding darkness, to make it greater and more puissant by comparison . . . Here in the darkness, nothing ever changed . . . there was only the smothering heat, and the weight of eternal darkness, and the changeless moments that could not pass because there was nothing to differentiate them one from the other . . .
Slow Dancing Through Time Page 30
