In the Land of Armadillos

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  He dragged off his hat, wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his arm. He should eat something, he thought dully. When was the last time he’d eaten? He didn’t remember. The droning of flies in the saddlemaker’s yard reminded him of Drogalski’s corpse, and he was almost sick right there on the doorstep.

  Inside, an adolescent girl was rocking the baby. He was crying, a thin, reedy sound. She rattled a halter trimmed with sleigh bells, but it wasn’t working. Even in his current state of distress, Reinhart still noted her soft-looking mouth, her high breasts, the simmering mass of hair.

  “Why is he crying?” he said.

  “He’s sick.”

  “Maybe he should see a doctor.” Reinhart took a step toward her. She paled and clutched the baby tighter. He knew why. There were too many terrible stories about SS men and crying babies. “Kitchy-kitchy-koo,” he crooned. The baby gripped the proffered finger in his little fist and regarded him with dark, serious eyes.

  “He’s warm,” he said to her. “Where’s your father?”

  She was so surprised that she forgot to answer. Soroka materialized in the doorway, wiping his hands on a rag.

  “Haskel,” said Reinhart. He was having trouble controlling his voice. “You probably already know. My manager, Drogalski . . . someone killed him.”

  The saddlemaker’s eyes were red. “His father is one of my oldest friends,” he muttered. “Jozef was a good boy. A very good boy.”

  They were quiet for a moment. Reinhart spoke first. “I know you, Haskel,” he said heavily. “People tell you things. What do you know about this?”

  Soroka hesitated, then bobbed his head. A forester, going through the woods on his regular rounds, had seen it all from start to finish. Drogalski, already bleeding as he stumbled over roots and stones. Drogalski, sobbing as he dug his own grave. Drogalski, on his knees, begging for his life. And right behind him, Hahnemeier, drinking and laughing, delivering the final blow.

  Perspiration rained down Reinhart’s back, and the world began to go out from under him. One Soroka fetched him a chair, another Soroka laid a cold wet cloth on his forehead, a third Soroka passed him a glass of something clear and fortifying.

  “He needs air,” someone murmured, and opened the shutters with a bang. A shaft of light streamed into the room. It fell across his face, warming one side with an amber glow.

  He had to save them. All of them. His workers, their families, their friends, people he’d never met and would never know. Too many decent, unremarkable folks were losing their lives, destroyed by men committing unforgivable crimes in the name of his Fatherland. Why the war in Eastern Europe turned men into monsters, he couldn’t say. What he did know was this: Someday the frenzy of killing would end, and the rule of law would return. Until then, Willy Reinhart would save everyone he could.

  The baby started to fuss again. Soroka’s wife took him in her arms, clucking to him in a silly singsong voice. But nothing worked; the little red face was screwed up tight, and his tiny fists were white-knuckled as they pumped the air.

  A memory. His son Matthias, the sweet smell of him after a bath, swaddled in a downy yellow quilt. “May I try?” said Reinhart. “I used to do this with my boys.”

  Gently, she deposited the youngest Soroka on his shoulder. The bramble of soft black curls tickled Reinhart’s nose. After a very few pats, the baby gave a loud, satisfying braaaaaaaaaap! His eyes flew wide open, as if he had surprised himself.

  He didn’t know who started laughing first, maybe it was him. But then Haskel joined in, and then everyone was doing it, they laughed and laughed until the force from their laughter shook the walls, rattled the dishes in the cupboard, pushed against the ceiling.

  Carefully, he handed the wiggling baby to the lovely daughter. Got to his feet, passed his hand over his hair, dropped his hat back on his head. Tipped it just so. And then he climbed back into his Mercedes and drove away.

  * * *

  There was no trial. The police went to Hahnemeier’s house, picked him up, and threw him in jail. After two weeks, he was out again.

  Reinhart had to shout over the orchestra. “Perhaps there’s been a mistake. This man is a murderer.”

  “Really? They gave him two whole weeks?” Streibel burst out laughing, pink and effusive on Reinhart’s brandy. “Come on, Willy, he killed a fucking Polack!”

  In the ballroom of Reinhart’s castle, corks popped, jewels sparkled, women laughed, couples danced. Someone’s girl sang sentimental pop songs. There was a buffet of boar and venison, goose and wood pigeon, shot earlier in the day by the guests and prepared to perfection by the palace chef. On all counts, the hunting party was a smashing success. They’d bagged two boars, a bear, a timber wolf, an enormous stag with antlers half the width of the room, an entire aviary of game birds. More important, his beloved Fallada had performed magnificently, sure-footed, always a lady, soaring effortlessly over gates and streams. Soroka’s saddle was such a sublime fit, it was as if horse and rider were fused into one supreme mythical being.

  “Who painted those murals?” said Haas. Thorough and humorless, behind his back the others called him “The General of the Jews.”

  “I don’t know. It was done in the twenties, I think.”

  “I could use a good housepainter,” he mused. “I’d like something like that in my dining room.”

  “Are you married, Haas?” asked Falkner from across the table. Younger than Reinhart by ten years, he had a topknot of dark hair, a pale elongated face, and soft, surprised-looking brown eyes. He was the brains behind the drainage project, a massive network of scaffolding and canals meant to turn the swamps around Włodawa into fields of waving grain.

  “Yes. To the most wonderful woman in the world. She’s joining me here in two weeks.” Haas’s eyes shone.

  “A lovely idea,” agreed Lina Falkner. Her voice was polite, but her grave gaze lingered disapprovingly on Petra’s décolletage. She didn’t approve of the way Reinhart flaunted his mistress in public.

  A fire crackled in a medieval fireplace big enough to roast an ox on a spit. Reinhart drew a gold cigarette case from his dinner jacket, lit one for himself and one for Petra. She was a knockout tonight in a bouffant of silver silk the color of moonlight.

  There would be no justice for Drogalski, he knew that now, not as long as the Nazis were in power. To replace him, Soroka recommended a big, steady fellow named Wysocki to oversee the farming, and a Jew named Friedman to handle the books. Reinhart liked the Poles, and he could tell they liked him. Conscientious, respectful, hardworking people, a thousand times more honest and dependable than the psychotic pigs he served with. After the atrocities he’d witnessed, he had no illusions left about the superiority of the German character.

  Just yesterday he’d visited the gristmill, a real jewel of a business, a marvel of efficiency, run by an orphaned-brother-and-sister team. The boy, so young he didn’t have a beard yet, told a story he’d heard last at his grandmother’s knee. One dark and stormy night, a midwife was called to deliver a demon’s baby. An incredible coincidence, the demon’s wife turned out to be a stray tabby cat the midwife had been feeding. Though the demon’s cave sparkled with gold and jewels, the cat advised the frightened woman not to accept any food or presents no matter how hard she was pressed. Taking the cat’s advice, she was led safely home. Upon waking the next morning, she found piles of treasure heaped in every corner.

  Reinhart glanced at the inlaid long-case clock next to the fireplace. It was a hundred years old, at least, maybe two, from the now-defunct pharmacy of a certain Pinchas Grinstein. By the time he asked Haas if he could have the pharmacist installed at his castle, Grinstein had already been shot for some infraction. But Reinhart’s eye had fallen upon the clock, and later that day he’d sent a wagon for it. It wasn’t stealing if the owner was already dead, was it?

  The table laughed at something Hackendahl said. “Aktzia,” Gruber was shouting to Haas across the table, but his eyes were following a bosom
y, honey-haired girl around the room. “Saturday morning.”

  Reinhart frowned. “What Aktzia?” He leaned forward. “What about my workers? We’re in the middle of hay season. Without them, it’s going to rot in the fields. Nobody told me anything about any Aktzia.”

  Gruber, his eyes still on the bosomy blonde, put a fat, conciliatory hand on his arm. “All right, all right, don’t get your panties in a bunch. They’re not taking essential workers this time. Just children, twelve and under. Now, will someone pour me another brandy?”

  * * *

  The solution was obvious. He had a castle. The castle had stables, a henhouse, storehouses, workshops, sleeping quarters for seasonal field hands. His Jewish workers could stay with him until the current madness blew over.

  The trick was getting the wives and children to Adampol. Technically, what he was doing was hiding Jews, and everyone knew how that ended, a bullet in your brain, a trip to a concentration camp for anyone you’d ever said hello to. He couldn’t just have them waltz past Streibel’s men, saying, “Excuse me, can you let us through, please, we’ve been invited to stay at Reinhart’s castle.”

  Alone in his office, under a painting of an eighteenth-century Zamoyski ancestor surrounded by hunting dogs, he buried his head in his hands. It was already Thursday; he had only one more day to come up with a plan.

  Images of Soroka’s daughter kept interrupting him. Could it be a coincidence that her hair, which she kept in a long thick braid that reached to her waist, had all the same autumnal tones as Fallada’s tail, mahogany, bronze, a rusty gold? He shook his head, irritated with himself. This was getting him nowhere. He pushed himself away from his desk and went to the window.

  From his corner office, he could look out to the front of the house, at the vast trimmed expanse of lawn that rolled on and on until it disappeared into a fringe of old-growth forest. Most important, he had a view of the drive, the better to see which farmer was coming in with his produce—or which Party big shot might be paying him an unexpected visit.

  The castle looked its best in late afternoon, he thought, when the sun washed her white pavilions in gold. Rising squarely from the flat Polish landscape, the baroque facade was dramatic, spectacular, complete with towers, a crenellated turret, wide sandstone steps leading up to a domed portico ringed with enormous ionic columns. A flagstone walkway meandered all the way around the courtyard, with exotic ornamental trees carved into geometric shapes. On sunny mornings, he liked to breakfast on the terrace, where potted geraniums were set at precise intervals atop the balustrade.

  His own Shangri-la, insulated from the insanity consuming the civilized world . . . except for the smell that floated in sometimes from the camp at Sobibór, only six kilometers away, a smell that didn’t belong among the fields, the farmers, the forests, and the plowed earth.

  A dusty brown mule lurched into view, hauling a wagon up the long drive. A delivery of hides. He didn’t recognize the driver, the tanner must have hired a new man. Wysocki was already out there, directing him around the back. The hides were for Soroka. They were keeping him busy with a flurry of new saddle commissions (the Nazi officers loved their horses), a set of wagon harnesses for Falkner’s drainage project, and oh yes, one of the Volkdeutscher farmers wanted his carriage reupholstered.

  Reinhart’s gaze settled on the wagon, broad, deep, and wide, stacked high with cowhides. His brows contracted in thought. And then he smiled.

  * * *

  It wasn’t bad, it wasn’t bad at all, he thought, pacing meditatively through the muddy lane to the stable. Having all his workers together in one place offered a distinct advantage. He didn’t have to worry about the Gestapo accidentally rounding them up while he was away on business, for instance, which happened once to Falkner.

  Here in Adampol, he was isolated from the horrors of the world outside by a thick forest . . . but it was a forest bristling with partizan activity. There were Polish partizans, Russian partizans, Jewish partizans. There was even a German deserter or two.

  As for him, he didn’t wear the uniform, and he had a reputation for being a good German, but he wouldn’t count on it to save his life if he were confronted by a band of resistance fighters. His duties had him constantly traveling, on the road or in the fields, through the woods, in and out of villages. Everyone knew who he was. He’d taken to carrying a gun wherever he went.

  He turned up the path that led to the stable. Linker, his stableman, had Fallada out in the middle of the aisle, brushing her down. She nickered inquisitively.

  “Hold on a minute, princess,” he said, and fished for the sugar cube he always kept for her in his pocket. She snatched it from his palm without a jot of gratitude. “How are you, my girl?” he murmured. “Did you enjoy your bath?”

  She whinnied and tossed her head. Her forelock fell in her eyes like a little girl’s bangs. The irises were a pale moonstone blue, practically human. Not for the first time, he thought he detected a sentient wisdom keeping watch in their opalescent depths. One of these days, he was certain, she would answer him.

  Soroka’s younger son was there, too, polishing the saddle his father had made. Though he was small for his age, the little redhead was agile and alert, an expert at making himself useful.

  Reinhart lifted the saddle to inspect it, tilting his head one way, then the other. The leather shone with the translucent luster of an old oil painting.

  “Good job, kid,” he said. “You’re going to be the best saddlemaker in Poland, just like your papa.”

  The boy wriggled and glowed under the praise. He was about the same age as his own Matthias, he realized, funny that he’d never noticed it before. With a surprising stab of regret, Reinhart wondered what his boys were doing at that moment. Getting dressed? Eating breakfast? Or were they already in school?

  Soroka’s boy wasn’t alone, he had his little sister with him. She had made herself at home in the hay, where she was watching the barn cat nurse a litter of kittens. The cat, a mean yellow tabby, didn’t seem to mind the little girl’s presence, acknowledging her now and again with a switch of her tail or a slow blink of her yellow eyes.

  Soroka and Wysocki lumbered through the stable doors, conferring in Polish. When they saw Reinhart, they switched to German.

  “Novak is here with a dead sheep,” reported Wysocki.

  “Where?”

  “Right outside. Should I tell him to leave it behind the stable?”

  He scribbled his signature on the form Wysocki offered him. “Yes, same as the others.” The carcass would be gone by morning. Officially, he had to account for his farmers’ dead livestock. Unofficially, he left them where his hungry workers would be sure to find them.

  He turned to Soroka. “All right, what is it, Haskel? You look like you’re sitting on pins and needles.”

  The saddlemaker was carrying a package wrapped in a blanket. It smelled enticingly of neat’s-foot oil. “First things first. What does Miss Ostrowski think of her new saddle? Does it need any adjustments?”

  “Petra asked me to tell you that she has never owned anything that fits her behind as perfectly as your saddle. She made Linker carry it to her room so she could look at it while she’s in the bath. She says you’re an artiste. She also wanted me to tell you that your beautiful daughter raises the tastiest rabbits in the county.”

  Soroka chuckled, but tension hummed in the air between them like a live wire. “I have something for you,” he said.

  “I’ve been out all day visiting farms around Natalin,” Reinhart said. “I have a metric ton of paperwork I need to fill out. Come to my office. We can talk there.”

  Soroka followed him past the grand staircase, past the stone fireplace with the earl’s coat of arms carved in relief, past the alabaster bust of Mars, the god of war, that sat on the mantel. In his office, Reinhart pushed a stack of ledgers from a needlework chair and motioned for Soroka to sit.

  The saddlemaker pulled off his cap and scratched his head. “That kid you hir
ed to deliver messages for you. He’s an informer.”

  Reinhart went wobbly in the knees. He had to sit down. “How do you know?”

  “His bicycle. No Pole has a new bicycle unless he’s working for the Germans. It’s a dead giveaway.”

  His insides were turning to water. Where had he sent him? To Bobak, who seemed to have an endless supply of hard-to-find redcurrant jelly; to Ulinski, who organized French champagne . . . Zygoda, who could always be depended on for a Leica camera. “Christ. I’ve already sent him to three different places Rohlfe shouldn’t know about. And those are just the ones I remember. What am I going to do?”

  Soroka fitted his cap back onto his head. “From what I understand, it’s, ah, not a problem anymore.”

  Reinhart sagged with relief. “Thank you, Haskel. How do you hear these things?”

  “Oh, you know. A little bird told me.” Soroka never talked about it, but he had a son living in one of the illegal Jewish camps in the forest. Was he also a partizan? Reinhart didn’t want to know.

  Soroka massaged a freckled hand over his sunburned neck. “Listen, Reinhart. There’s no pretty way to ask you this. If it ever got to a point where you didn’t think you could protect us anymore . . . you would tell us, wouldn’t you?”

  Reinhart’s eyebrows steepled up. “I think you forget who you’re talking to.”

  “I know, I know. Willy Reinhart, the man with the silver tongue. No one can say no to him! Do you know the story of the fireflower? No? Famous Polish folktale. In the heart of the forest, there grows a fern that blooms only once a year, on Kupala Night. The flowers of this plant are fiery flames. To collect this flower, you must enter the forest before midnight on the longest day of the year. Demons will test you, bombarding you with questions. If you allow yourself to be distracted, the fireflower burns to ash. But if you resist the demons, the fireflower gives you the power to read minds, find treasure, fight off evil!” The saddlemaker flashed a smile. “Sure you don’t have a fireflower around here somewhere?”