by Dennis Bock
The men didn’t seem to have any interest in him. They didn’t look up as he approached or seem to care at all that a figure prowled at the edge of their silent meeting. One of them held an arm skyward, the arm and hand perfectly still, as if pointing to some distant planet. He wondered if the typhoid hallucinations that had taken the camp weren’t upon him now. He knew the symptoms, had seen them a thousand times over.
The men didn’t flinch when he stepped forward, closer still, and now he saw they were not men at all but empty old coats and hats hung on a single shovel-plough and wheat seeder, the trick of some child’s game or a gargoyle constructed to ward off nighttime visitors.
He removed the field coat from the shovel-plough and put it on. He checked its pockets and found a box of matchsticks, a cork, and a heel of bread. He broke a piece off and returned the rest to the pocket. It was hard and smelled like leather but he ate it hungrily, swallowing down its dryness with great effort.
He walked to the far side of the compound and placed his ear to the slab-wood barn door. The wood was cold and rough against the side of his face. He listened and eased it back and peered through the dark and saw the animal, head lifted, already staring at him.
She watched as he entered.
He spoke softly, leading with his voice as he studied her, the broad haunches of the animal shifting, the head rolling towards and away from him.
“There you are,” he said in a whisper. “Yes, you’ll do just fine.”
He unlatched the swing gate of her enclosure and waited before entering, speaking in a calm, tuneless voice, and then pulled the gate open and stepped forward and slowly raised his hand to touch her muzzle.
She allowed him to run his hand down the hard bone of her face. He leaned in close for her warmth, placing his neck on hers, and when he finally knew he’d gained her trust he stepped away and located the bridle hanging from a spike on the heavy beam to the inside right of the swing gate. He removed the halter from the animal’s head and coaxed her mouth open with his thumb for her to receive the bit. He eased the bridle over her ears and head and pulled her forelock out from the leather browband and ran his left hand down along her face again.
When he was done he led the animal from the barn into the compound, past the gargoyle tableau, and up he slid onto the mare’s back. He kicked her into a trot and out they rode in the direction of the Rhine.
HE CAME ACROSS THE checkpoint before dawn. Ahead in the darkness were soldiers with carbines slung over their shoulders, cigarette embers aglow. He wondered if this wasn’t another illusion of the type he’d seen in the compound. There was a booth off to the side of the road, and in it a man sat reading under the green light of a desk lamp.
He drove the mare a hundred yards into the field and around the checkpoint in a wide semicircle that added time to his journey but finally returned him to the road he’d meant to gain. He travelled on until he saw the first moments of dawn breaking in the east, and he heard the river sounding its slow, deep call through the line of hedge in the distance.
He drew the horse to a stop and slid down and walked her on until the river and the bridge, with its five spans over the water, came into view. For two weeks he’d laboured here, setting down the ties and rail along this stretch of line, before the typhus rolled through camp. He’d counted the skiffs and coal barges and the frequency of their passing as they cut their way north. Now he heard only the broad presence of the river and the blood pulsing in his ears and that call inside his head that told him he would die soon if he didn’t leave this place.
He unharnessed the mare, slung the horse tackle over his shoulder, and smacked her on the backside. He studied the intricate iron latticework of the bridge in the grey light. The horizon was brightening now. There was no guardhouse or sentry on the bridge that he could see as he began along the towpath, which in a hundred yards rose in a gradual incline to meet the gravel bed of the rail line.
He walked tie by tie onto the bridge until, midway over the river, he stopped and looked to the opposite bank, still grainy in the half-light, and up the long length of current. He descended on the metal rungs into the open space beneath the track where light streamed through the angles of grille-work as in a church of stained-glass windows. Below him the current moved slowly, the surface turning in small eddies that swelled and flattened again and reappeared. He lay forward on his chest and secured the leather strap unloosed from the horse tackle to the girder at his feet. He bound the double hitch, pulling downwards, testing it where his weight would fall. He would remove the knotted rein from the girder if men came. With a double hitch he could do this with a single pull and retreat unseen into the latticework to wait. Once the knot was tied, he righted himself and wrapped the other end of the leather strap around his fist three times until the blood pounded in his fingers and the fingers began to lose all feeling. He unwrapped it and relaxed the grip, exercising the hand to allow the circulation to return.
At first he didn’t hear the approach of the barge as it emerged from the bend a quarter mile distant. It was as if an island of earth had dislodged itself from the bank and now floated towards him. It came fully into view in stages, plugging downriver, its coal cargo still only a grey-black smudge over the water. As he reached for the leather strap, he heard the first footsteps at the far end of the bridge, then the sound of a cough and a man clearing his throat.
In a moment he saw their black boots above his head. The grey of their coats flashed through the latticing and the ties and rail. He’d learned the schedule and faces of the Schutzpolizei who’d crossed on patrol every morning and throughout the day while he’d driven those spikes and watched the river traffic below. They were earlier today than usual, come down from the village whose lights had just now begun to shine against the muted landscape, and there was no time to remove the leather strap he’d secured to the girder. One of the men stopped and leaned forward into the railing half a bridge span from where Elser crouched.
He saw him clearly now, up and to his right, coat flaps opened wide as he urinated into the river, holstered sidearm strapped to the heavy leather belt at his hip, and the grey shako on the man’s head with its plume tilted against the rising light. He heard the urine hitting the water far below and the phlegmy cough, and he receded deeper into the ironwork and waited for the footsteps to move off.
He wondered if the other man wasn’t pissing into the river from some other point, or leaning out to check the ironwork beneath the bridge to make sure all was clear. He couldn’t know this wasn’t part of a game of Cat and Mouse his captors might be playing with him, but he gripped the rein below the knot and descended the length of the leather as the barge passed under the bridge’s centre span. He hung there a moment, then dropped twenty feet and hit the coal bed at an angle that threw him down against the futtock to portside. The force of the impact loosened a slide of coal that half-buried him, turned on his side, like a ship scuttled in the shallows.
FOR HOURS HE WATCHED the bank slip by as the barge sailed downriver.
Mostly he saw trees and bush and rolling hills, but in the late afternoon of that first day he understood there was another camp out there, set far enough back from the river that he saw no sign of it but not so far as to hide the smell of burning corpses.
Soon after, a church spire and a smattering of stone buildings came into view. Behind these a vineyard rose on a yellow and grey hillside crested by a medieval castle whose slate turrets glinted in the dull afternoon light.
He’d moved as little as possible, still too aware of the pilot in the wheelhouse at the stern who might have seen him drop but had not come down to kick about in the coal looking for what might be a stowaway or simply a trick of the light. Yet the rare beauty of the hillside and the castle had so moved him that he shifted his head and body and watched the view for as long as he could before it disappeared upriver.
A three-span bridge lit by torchlight appeared from the darkness just before midnight. At first he didn’
t understand what he was looking at when the silhouettes began to assemble —a line of two-headed beasts waiting on the parapet, the glow of the torches behind them as soldiers blew into cupped hands—but then he saw these were people roped together two by two, and as the barge passed under the centre span, they were pushed over the edge and fell and sank below the surface.
The violent shivering and fever were well upon him now. He closed his eyes and dreamed that the body he stood over in the cremation pit was his own. He watched the flames crawl up his arms and said, “There but for the grace of God,” and the sky swirled and darkened and cast angel and demon shapes before his eyes.
THE EVENING SUN WAS low in the sky when he came to. He didn’t know where he was or how many days had passed. He was thirsty now, more than he’d ever been. A small triangle of rainwater had gathered in the fold of the left arm of his coat. It hovered inches from his mouth. For hours he waited like this without moving, staring at the small puddle, his mouth afire with thirst, for fear that he’d cause the coal to shift and draw the river pilot’s notice. He waited for dark before he drank, and when he did he held the small mouthful of water on his tongue until it disappeared, like rain into parched soil.
IT WAS THIRST THAT finally lifted and rolled him over the rail into the water the following day, and fear that made him float face up without moving as he watched the length of the barge slip past. The pilot standing at the helm came into view. He watched Elser for a moment, as if to determine that this was a man and not a dead body, then raised a pistol and sighted Elser along its length. He would remember this as he lay on the stone floor of the Parish Church on the outskirts of London four months later—that in this moment the world in its finality turned serene, as if with the acceptance of death came the understanding that it was his fear of life and not death that bound him in doubt. But the pilot lowered the weapon, watched him a moment longer, and returned to his position in the wheelhouse.
THAT AFTERNOON HE SLEPT in a tumbledown structure, and at dusk he found eggs still warm from their laying in a coop behind a barn over the next hill. Fifty yards on was a timber-frame farmhouse with a thatched roof and a gaunt cow roped to a stake out front. He ate two of the eggs as he watched the house, drinking them from their cracked shells. He placed the three eggs that remained in his coat pocket, warmed his hands with his breath, and waited for the chickens to settle again. The coop was constructed with heavy posts and freshly cut planks, its ceiling so low that it brushed the crown of his head if he stood straight. In a moment the chickens were quiet again. He took one from its roosting perch and broke its neck. Then he stripped it of its feathers and quietly opened it against the end of a nail driven into a mooring post. He sat in the hay and ate the heart and liver, and soon after he left the coop and hid in the woods until it was dark enough again to travel.
IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS he avoided villages and cut through fields and meadows and thick stands of beech and oak, the river always to his right. He never travelled in daytime. By day he slept in clumps of trees and abandoned buildings and once under a bridge that spanned the river that was his guide. He knew where he was now. Railway crossings were marked, which made him understand that the war had not yet come to Germany.
In an old shed one morning he found a pair of boots sturdier than his own and a month-old copy of Der Stürmer. He slipped his feet into the newer boots, then settled against the clapboard wall and studied the paper.
On the whole it was little more than propaganda, the pages stained and difficult to read, oil-soaked and torn. But he devoured the news about the Yalta Conference and the meeting between Chancellor Göring and President Kennedy like a starving man. He scanned down to the words Bewunderung and Jüdische Verschwörung and read that the American president spoke of his admiration for this brave nation that dared to take a stand against the international Jewish conspiracy. With this renewal of the non-aggression pact between the two nations, Kennedy said, the United States would applaud the German people’s heroic efforts to return their country to the German people, as America itself would return to the first principles that had shaped its history.
He carried the paper with him for days, hoping to see that he’d misunderstood it when he returned to read it again the following morning. But the report did not change. Göring had stayed the course Hitler had set.
ON THE WINDLESS SIDE of a stack of sweet-smelling birch one evening, when he attempted to conjure in his mind’s eye the lost Eden of his childhood, he knew this was only an attempt to save himself from the nightmare he was living. There was no lost Eden, only hard and unforgiving reminders that life was to be endured, your spirit thrashed, hardships borne. The future too was now a dying hope, at the very best a vast uncertainty into which he’d be drawn deeper and deeper. This endeavour to restore order to the world had only plunged the dagger with more violence into the heart of the nation, and now the world was coming apart. He felt the need to ask forgiveness. In that grandfather clock’s pendulum he’d held in his hand years earlier, when he’d frozen time with a boy’s sense of mischief and wonder, he’d glimpsed the powers of hope and mercy and vengeance, and now he yearned only to return to that moment so that he might undo what he’d done. Doubt plagued him. The idealism that had propelled him into this new world had disappeared brutally, removed from his life like the warmth of a blanket taken from a sleeping child, and here all that remained was the cold, damp evening of his failure.
IN JUNE THE RIVER carried him in the dark over the border into neutral Holland and on into the final leg of his journey to Rotterdam. He spent the first night in a shunted boxcar at the edge of the city. Next morning he set out again along the river by foot, and in the portlands, after half a day’s walk, he found a dry-docked beam trawler that became his home for the next six weeks while he took handouts on street corners and opposite the Pilgrim Fathers’ Church, where on his third day in the city he learned to kneel to collect his miserable alms.
A week passed before he discovered the location of the British Consular Office. Once he did, he took to leaning against the red brick of the Lumière Cinema across the street, on Rochussenstraat, and watching the visa applicants come and go. Only days before he died, the Bavarian typesetter had told him what he needed to know—that the Dutch had no motivation to restrict the movement of refugees. The problem was on the British end, he’d said. No refugee was allowed to sail without that visa.
He attempted anonymity as he loitered, and when his feet began to trouble him he retreated to a table at the coffee house five doors down where he could observe the consulate. He counted more than a hundred petitioners on his first day alone and wondered who of them had received what they’d come for. There was no one he resembled closely enough to pull off what he’d planned. On a number of occasions he abandoned his vigil and walked through the port, studying the cargo ships and steamers docked there. He learned their schedules and boarding rituals. A week earlier the Empress of Asia had sailed for Edinburgh carrying three hundred passengers. Nine days before that the Pharaon had embarked for Cardiff. It was not possible to board without the papers he needed. From the far side of the cordoned zone he studied the inspection process as a queue of hundreds of passengers was boarded. Occasionally he saw a man near his own age, of similar weight and height and hair colour, emerge from the Consular Office wearing a smile that, to Elser’s mind, suggested his United Kingdom entry permit had been approved. There was no way of knowing, of course, but in any case the similarities, again, were never close enough for him to engage his plan.
THE DAY HE’D BEEN waiting for came in early August when he saw a man, similar in stature to himself, emerge from the consulate. He’d not seen him enter—he’d arrived late that morning—but now the similarities they shared were clear. With dark eyes and hair and dimpled chin, they were also roughly the same age and height and weight.
He followed the stranger down the road, where, five blocks on, the man purchased a clutch of geraniums from a curbside flower-seller.
He carried them to the same church where Elser often collected alms.
At the entrance of Pilgrim Fathers’ Church, he watched the man place the geraniums at the foot of the Madonna and make the sign of the cross, then seat himself in a pew. The hem of the man’s jacket touched the floor when he knelt to pray. Elser entered, crossing himself as he did so, and took a seat behind him. The concentration the stranger gave to his prayer seemed to consume him completely, and Elser wondered if he’d ever know the purity of faith that this man seemed to possess.
He reached forward now, watching the back of the stranger’s head, and removed the documents and wallet from the open side pocket. And then he rose to his feet, crossed himself, and exited the church.
RENTING A ROOM WAS the first test. The man’s eyes in the photograph he’d stolen were not down-turned, as Elser’s were. He could do nothing about that, or the wider mouth, but the full black hair and eyebrows were similar, as were the nose and cheekbones. The concierge at the Hotel Atlantisch seemed not to notice or to care. She stared at the document for a moment before returning it to him without a word, then took the room key from the hook on the wall behind her and placed the thirty guilders he gave her in the drawer behind the desk.
THREE DAYS LATER HE watched the coast of England rise in the west. He took a mouthful of sea air and felt the tapping of joy touch his heart for the first time since Munich. The documents he carried identified him as Julius DeGroote. He’d barely slept the previous night, cramped and nervous in his berth below deck, fearful that he’d be caught and identified, but now his confidence grew as the line on the horizon deepened, and the dream that had carried him this far suddenly seemed ready to be made real. Within days of arriving in London he’d find someone to tell his remarkable story to. The authorities at Westminster would be notified. He’d be sent for and interrogated, his information confirmed, and before long his heroic deed would be celebrated and used to inspire and embolden those back home.
