“They’re just paper cuts.”
The man shook his head, in obvious pain. “No cut is just anything. Not to me, anyway. Come back here with me, I’ll fix you up. Lots of doctors in my family. I’m not one of them but I’ve picked up a few tricks here and there.” He started to say something else but then noticed the Fitzgerald lying on the counter and the new book that had taken its place on the display block. “Excuse me one moment,” he said. He grabbed the bell jar and covered the new book, and then glanced for a moment at the Fitzgerald. His face blanched, but he quickly gathered himself and smiled at Annette. “Sorry. I’m a bit fussy about certain things. People say it makes me colorful. That’s what happens when you get to be as old as me. You become colorful. A local character, even.” He led her to an area near the back of the store that was separated from the sales floor by a large wall of frosted glass.
“I was trying to close early. I guess I didn’t check the sign.” He wore a pressed white shirt open slightly at the collar so that the thin gray-and-black-striped tie wasn’t completely strangling him. He sported not one but two pairs of glasses: a regular black-rimmed pair with a second, wire-framed pair just an inch farther down his nose; judging from the thickness of the lenses, this second set had either bi- or more likely trifocal lenses. His vest, like his tailored, cuffed pants, was pin-striped. A chain led from one vest pocket to another, where Annette could see the outline of a gold pocket watch.
Definitely old-school, she thought. She liked that.
He pulled out an ancient-looking wooden rolling stool and helped her to sit, then opened the tambour of a rolltop desk and removed what appeared to be a well-stocked medical kit from beneath stacks of receipts and order forms. The entire room was stuffed with books, stacked from the floor to almost shoulder height, and in some places the stacks were three deep. Annette couldn’t help but marvel.
“I’ll bet you know where every last book in this store is, even if it’s buried in a stack like one of these and in the basement or something.”
“You’d win that bet,” said the bookseller. He opened the lid of the medical kit and began assembling everything he needed to tend to Annette’s cuts. As he reached over to take hold of her hand his sleeve rode up slightly, and Annette saw the row of fading-but-not-faded numerals tattooed near his wrist. The bookseller caught sight of what she was looking at and so pulled his sleeve a bit farther up, turning his wrist to give her a better look.
“I’m sorry,” said Annette. “I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just that I . . . I’ve never met anyone who was . . . was . . .”
“Yes, I was in a concentration camp,” said the bookseller. “I was taken there as a child. My family and I were marched from our home in Hungary, along with thousands of others, to a camp called Gunskirchen Lager in the Austrian forest. Most of my family died on the way. My sister lasted until two days after we arrived. She’d hurt her feet on the march and gangrene set in. Her death was slow and agonizing—I still cry when I think about it too much. I haven’t been one for long walks ever since. If it hadn’t been for a boy named Uri who befriended me in those early days, I think I would have just willed myself to die.”
His tone was so matter-of-fact that Annette felt momentarily anxious. Was this man a little on the crazy side? Who could talk about something so horrible in such an almost nonchalant manner, and to a total stranger?
“I don’t mean to sound unfeeling,” said the bookseller as he set about cleaning her cuts with some kind of ointment that immediately killed the pain, “but I find that if I talk about it any other way, I just . . . implode. Please, don’t be offended. Sometimes I talk too much and go into stories by rote. I don’t get a lot of company these days.”
A dozen questions that she wanted to ask him flooded across Annette’s mind: Was he a widower? Didn’t he have any children? Was he always alone here? But the question that won out was: “What happened out there with the books?”
He hesitated a moment, a fresh cotton ball hovering over the cut on her palm, and then released the breath he’d been holding and continued ministering to her. “That, I’m afraid, will take a bit of explaining, and I’d rather that you not think I’m loony-tunes and go screaming off the premises. Also it would be nice if you didn’t sue me because of these cuts.”
“Like I said, they’re just paper cuts.”
“And like I said, no cut is just anything, not to me.” He finished cleaning the cuts and began rummaging around in the kit for a small tube of superglue. “Cyanoacrylate,” he said, showing her the tube. “Believe it or not, it wasn’t invented so guys could suspend themselves with their hard hats from steel beams—it was developed for medics to use in the field during Vietnam. Best way in the world to quickly and safely close a bleeding wound.”
“Believe it or not,” said Annette, “I already knew that.”
“Of course you did. Anyone curious enough to take a Fitzgerald out from under glass would know something like that.”
Annette cleared her throat. The bookseller paused and looked up at her.
“Speaking of the Fitzgerald . . . ,” she said.
“You’ll think I’m crazy.”
“Will I? Let’s review: I took a book out from under a bell jar. That book had pages with dog-eared corners that I swear bit my fingers. The pages absorbed my blood and the book grew thicker. And when I turned around, another book had taken the Fitzgerald’s place, even though you were back here and I was alone in the store. Does that about cover it?”
“A worthy highlight reel if ever there was one.”
“Do you think I’m crazy?”
“You don’t strike me as being particularly unbalanced, no.”
Annette smiled. “So tell me what happened out there. It wasn’t normal.”
The bookseller shrugged. “That depends on your definition of the word normal.”
“Please?”
He stared at her for a moment, then rubbed the back of his neck. “You want a drink? I’m going to have one. Pick your poison; I got a little bit of everything stashed around here.”
“Got any wine?”
“White or red?”
“Red?”
He went behind the rolltop desk and emerged a few moments later with a bottle of red wine and a pair of tulip-shaped wineglasses. After pouring each of them a glass, the bookseller held up his wine and said, “Doamne apara-me rău.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s a kind of Romanian blessing. It’s a good thing, trust me.”
“Okee-day,” she replied, and took a drink of the wine. It was incredible. “This is the best red wine I’ve ever tasted.”
“Really? I made it myself. I have another bottle in the back if you’d like one to take home.”
“Oh, I’d love that.”
The bookseller smiled widely; this genuinely pleased him. “What do you know? Someone thinks something I made with my own hands is the best they’ve ever encountered. And here I thought there wasn’t going to be anything special happening today.”
He put his glass aside and returned to Annette’s hand. “Have you ever heard those rumors about Hitler seeking occult or supernatural assistance during the war?”
Annette shrugged. “I just thought it was the stuff of legend, or pulp fiction.”
The bookseller snorted a laugh and shook his head. “Not all of it was as far-fetched as you might think. The Longinus spear, for instance, the spear that supposedly pierced Christ’s side while he was on the cross—I know, I know, what a very Catholic way to describe it, it’s late, I’m tired, so sue me. Anyway, that spear was purported to possess great power. It was said that whoever possessed the spear would have the power to conquer the world. Hitler very much believed that, and until the moment he blew his brains out down in the bunker, he had hundreds of people searching for it.
“One of the things that made Gunskirchen an oddball among the concentration camps is that the majority of people sent there were professionals—physici
ans, lawyers, professors, artists, musicians. During the first weeks there, Uri and I could almost get drunk on the conversations that were whispered at night in the barracks. Philosophy, music, law, mathematics, and myth . . . it seemed early enough on that maybe it wasn’t going to be as horrible as we’d been told. That notion was quickly put out of its misery.
“The conditions were subhuman. There was a series of twenty toilet pits that had been dug out at the far edge of the camp, and if you went to the bathroom anywhere but in one of those pits, the Germans shot you dead on the spot. These pits were never covered and so the stench of it was always in the air. But the thing is, disease spreads quickly, and many people became afflicted with diarrhea. It didn’t matter if a person was standing in line for one of the pits; if they lost control of their bowels—and many did—and soiled themselves in line, they were dragged out of line, made to kneel down, and shot in the head. We weren’t allowed to move their bodies. The Germans liked to laugh at the dead Jews lying in a puddle of their own liquid filth. Of all the images I can’t rid myself of, it’s the image of all those people, those skeletons, standing in the pit lines, shuddering with all the strength they had, trying not to shit themselves.” He blinked his eyes and shivered. “Yeah, I’m a cheerful guy with many happy stories . . .”
“But what about—”
“—the bell jar and books, I know. Hang on, I need a refill.”
“I think I do, too.” Annette held out her glass. The bookseller refilled both, and they drank in an awkward, sad, sudden silence.
They came for us, as they always did, when the sun shone high in the safe daytime sky.
We waited in our majestic trees as the bulldozers and other heavy equipment came toward us. We listened as they broke through the heavy woods and overpowered the shale beneath the hillsides. We readied ourselves as they neared us. We heard the grinding of their gears, the snarl of their gas-powered saws. We stood tall and proud, so we could see them clearly as they arrived. The stench of their smoke and diesel fuel reached us before they and their machines did.
Workmen walked up to us wherever we stood across the surface of the planet, craning their necks to see our glory.
“Damn shame this has to come down,” said one.
“Don’t matter what we think,” replied the second. “We got our orders.”
The first one picked up his ax. “Trees’re supposed to feel things just like a person does, y’know? My grandma told me that. Let’s try to make it quick and clean, huh?”
“I’ve heard enough of that griping from you,” said the second workman, powering up his chain saw. “Bad enough we got to cut down all these trees without you bellyachin’ over every one of ’em. Least they’ll be put to good use. That’s something, anyway.”
They set to work.
Our waiting was over.
Within half an hour, we came crashing down.
This was not death; it was the first stage of our rebirth.
And this time we did scream, but in ecstasy—sweet, all-consuming ecstasy.
The sound of rebirth.
“There was a group of occultists,” said the bookseller, “called the Studiengruppe für Germanisches Altertum—‘Study Group for Germanic Antiquity’—but most people know them by the name the Thule Society. The Thules had members like Hans Frank, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler . . . it was even rumored that Eichmann and Mengele were members. One of the commandants at Gunskirchen Lager, Gruppenführer Joseph Karl Steiner, was a member. I remember as a child huddling down at night in the mud and filth and cold—God, I hope you never experience that kind of cold, it almost made you wish for the warmth of a grave. At least then there would have been something above you to hold in the heat and gases as your body disintegrated and putrefied.
“Anyway, there were those nights when Steiner would have other Thule members in his expansive quarters, and the lights would burn, the glow mocking us, and I remember the sounds of their cackling laughter, their murmuring voices; sometimes they would sing drunken, obscene songs . . . there was so much . . . haughtiness in their tones. But always—always—there came a time during the night when they would send two SS officers out into the camp to select one of the healthier prisoners, a worker, to bring back into the building. I remember that I used to feel envious of those selected to be taken inside—and they were always taken by fellow prisoners. There were Jews in the camps who became . . . well, collaborators with the Germans. They were called ‘kapos.’ Many did whatever was commanded of them in order to secure more bread, or an extra blanket, or cigarettes. Sometimes the kapos did it in order to ensure the safety of a friend or family member. To this day, I cannot find it in my heart to condemn these poor souls for their actions, even though some of those actions led to the deaths of fellow Jews. But the kapos almost always took men. Rumor had it that these men—mostly it was men, sometimes a stronger woman or a younger boy, I never saw them take a young girl . . . but the rumors persisted that those who were selected were fed meat and cheese, given wine, a warm, clean blanket, and treated well. But we never saw them again. They would enter that building, there would be more celebratory noise for a while, and then things would quiet down. There was never silence . . . only an ebbing of sound. I swear to you I could hear the sounds of someone . . . not exactly groaning, there wasn’t enough strength for it to be a groan, but a noise somewhere between a whimper and a grunt. And it would continue for a minute or two at a constant but low level, just low enough that I was never certain if I was actually hearing it or if it was just the cold and sores and hunger making me imagine some unseen depravity going on there. I was six years old, and the images those sounds created in my mind should never have existed in the mind of any truly decent human being.
“Uri would hold me close to him on these nights and hum soft songs in my ear. One of his favorites was ‘Over There.’ He always hummed it off-key. It made me laugh. He was taken away one morning for a burial detail, and he never came back. I prayed that he had gotten away somehow.
“The last time our dear Gruppenführer held a Thule gathering in his quarters, the SS officers came out and took nearly a dozen men, women, and young boys into the Gruppenführer’s quarters. That night, there was no mistaking the screams; children begging for their lives, women pleading that they be tortured instead of the children, men weeping and wailing. We saw blood spatter on the inside of the windows. We saw shadows jerking back and forth, some of them flipping, fluttering, but always there was the blood, and the wailing, and the screaming . . . and then the not-quite-silence, the muffled noise of many throats releasing something between a whimper and a grunt.
“That was late April 1945. The Germans had received word that the Americans were coming. You have to understand, rumors that the war was ending soon—was perhaps even over—had been whispered for weeks, but that night was the first time that I allowed myself to think that maybe, just maybe, the end was finally here. If that meant my death, then so be it. I was so hungry and sick by then that I almost didn’t care.
“The next morning all of the Germans left the camp but made certain to lock the gates so none of us could escape, as if any of us had that much strength or hope left. They gave us what they called a ‘generous’ amount of food—one cube of sugar to each person, and one loaf of moldy bread for every seven people. There were nearly as many of us dead as there were still alive, if you can call what we were ‘alive.’ Men, women, children so drawn and weak and starving they could barely walk, but that didn’t stop them from trying when the Americans arrived. The Seventy-First Infantry Division shot through the locks and entered Gunskirchen on the morning of May 1, 1945. By then we’d been trapped in the abandoned camp for over a week. What little rancid food we’d been left was gone, and we had been without water for several days even before that. I can still hear the cries from the throats of those who could still speak, calling out, ‘Wasser!’ and ‘Ich habe Hunger!’ One child whose legs had been broken and were now blackened with infection us
ed her elbows to pull herself through the mud toward an American soldier. I saw her die in his arms as he gave her a drink from his canteen. All around me, skeletons crawled or shuffled through stinking, ankle-deep mud and human excrement. I saw the decayed bodies of horses and dogs that lined the road, carcasses that had been torn into by the teeth of the starving as they wandered from the camp days before, after the Germans had abandoned it; physicians, lawyers, people of education, men of letters, rabbis, women and children . . . all reduced to chewing on rotting animal intestines like beasts.
“It was then I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see my friend Uri, still alive and standing. I hadn’t seen him in months and had assumed that he was dead. He smiled at me—his teeth were rotted, many of them missing, but it was still one of the most beautiful smiles I had ever seen. I hugged him and wept. As the Americans moved into the camp, many of the prisoners lined the way, hands outstretched to touch the sleeves of our saviors. Uri took my hand and led me through the throng toward the Gruppenführer’s quarters. The Americans were too concerned with ministering to the prisoners to bother then with going through the buildings. I did not want to see whatever it was that waited in there, but I was too weak to resist, and—I hate admitting this—a part of me wanted to know if there had been any truth to the hideous, perverted images that the sounds had helped put into my head. If there were horrors waiting in there that were worse than those I had imagined, then perhaps my soul wasn’t forever tainted. Perhaps God had given me a glimpse of something horrible to prepare me for something even worse. In such ways is spiritual strength tested and achieved.”
He fell silent after this for a few moments as he finished up ministering to Annette’s wounds. He completed what could only be called an expert job of bandaging her hand, turning it first to the left, then to the right. “Does it still hurt?”
Seize the Night Page 12
