Jacob's Oath: A Novel

by Martin Fletcher

  At the front door, Ari looked from left to right, saw Topf busy with his bone. Behind Ari, Langenscheidt, his hands tied behind his back with the steel cord, glanced upstairs. Omri’s gun pressed below his right ear. “One sound and she dies,” Omri whispered.

  Ari gestured, Follow me, and they moved down the garden path. Omri was tall but Langenscheidt was taller, and broader, he was an ox. In the street they were alone in the dark, Omri’s gun now in Langenscheidt’s back, Ari leading the way. Langenscheidt began to say something but Omri pressed the gun harder and hissed: Shut your mouth.

  They came so silently Yonni started when they loomed before him. He was standing by the jeep with his Webley .38 in his hand. He looked at Langenscheidt with a face of pure hatred.

  “Who are you?” Langenscheidt said, at last. “What do you want?”

  Yonni said something in a strange language and stepped forward.

  “What are you speaking? Who are you?”

  Standing clear of the jeep, with Yonni’s pistol cold against the skin between the Nazi’s eyes, Omri and Ari took off their German helmets and combat jackets to reveal their brown British army uniforms. Omri stuffed the German clothes back into the kit bags. Langenscheidt took a step back. “You’re not German. You’re English?” he said. His voice was strong, he had regained his composure, he had the confidence of the biggest man in the room, even with his hands tied behind his back and a gun in his face. “What are you doing here, this is the American zone. You have no rights here.” And then he added, placatingly, “The war is over, what do you want?”

  Ari said, “Auch kein Engländer.” Not English either.

  Bluish light from the quarter-moon filtered through the clouds and the branches. They were all shadows, silhouettes in the woods.

  “You are SS-Obersturmbannführer Uwe Langenscheidt,” Ari said.

  “What? Who? Of course not, I am Winkler, Kurt Winkler.” Now he seemed confused. He looked desperately from man to man, and struggled with his bound hands. “I was never a Nazi. I worked on the railroads. I don’t know this man. This is a mistake, a terrible mistake.”

  “You are SS-Obersturmbannführer Uwe Langenscheidt,” Ari said.

  “No. No. You are wrong. I am Kurt Winkler, come back to my house, ask my wife my name. I will show you my identity card. My ration card. My library card, for God’s sake. This is all a terrible mistake. My name is Kurt Winkler. Please. You must believe me.” His forehead gleamed with sweat.

  Blue had shown them a photo of their target. Big, swept-back brown hair, fleshy eyebrows, a drinker’s red-veined nose, fat lips.

  Omri said, “You coward, and liar, and murderer. Do you speak English?”

  “Yes, a little.”

  Ari, gripping his commando knife, grabbed Langenscheidt by the hair from behind, and yanked his head back, exposing his throat. He pressed the blade above his Adam’s apple. He hissed in English into his ear, “SS-Obersturmbannführer Uwe Langenscheidt. In the name of the Jewish people, I sentence you to death.”

  Langenscheidt responded as if a red-hot rod had been stuck up his ass. His body jerked so hard he appeared to rise from the ground, knocking the knife away. His hands still tied behind his back, he roared and charged into Omri, knocking him against the jeep fender, which tripped him up. Out of knife range, he kicked backward with his heel and caught Ari below the knee. His leg went from under him. Langenscheidt whirled around and kicked Ari in the head, a glancing blow, for Ari managed to roll to the side, though he lost the knife. As Omri scrambled to his feet in the slippery mud, Langenscheidt kneed him in the head and began to run. He’d taken three steps and passed the back of the jeep when Yonni pointed his gun at his head from two meters. Langenscheidt froze. Yonni pulled the trigger. Nothing. The gun jammed. Langenscheidt roared in relief and began to run again, toward the lane, but Yonni spun around, dropped the gun, grabbed the spade, and wheeled it over his head and caught Langenscheidt smack in the face on the run. The force of the blow lifted the big man off his feet and stunned him. Blood poured from his crushed nose as he lay motionless.

  Ari whipped out the other steel cord and garroted Langenscheidt from behind. Lying in the mud behind him, he pulled with all his strength while he pushed with his foot against the big man’s neck. Tighter and tighter he pulled and the cord cut into the Nazi’s throat as Langenscheidt kicked and squirmed and finally gargled and groaned until his giant body went limp. To verify the kill, Ari whipped his seven-inch blade from his boot and cut Langenscheidt’s throat.

  Ari lay back gasping, spent, with Langenscheidt’s bulk pinning his leg. “Get the bastard off,” he said. “Oh, my fucking knee.”

  Omri stood above him, one hand covering his swelling forehead. “Well,” he said in Hebrew, “that went well.”

  EIGHT

  Elbe River,

  May 8, 1945

  “Where are we? Are we there yet?” Sarah’s slurred little voice barely reached the front.

  “That’s twenty-seven,” Lieutenant Brodsky said, turning around. He saw deep into Sarah’s yawning mouth.

  “Oh, excuse me,” she said as the yawn faded. “Oh, my neck. It’s stiff, I think my head weighs more than my body.”

  “It probably does. We’ll have to fatten you up.” He smiled and touched her hair. “You look rested, believe it or not.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Dessau. About a hundred clicks from Berlin. On the river Elbe. We’re waiting in line. There’s a holdup on the bridge.”

  “How far to go?”

  “By the way, that’s twenty-seven,” Brodsky said. “I’ve been counting.”

  Sarah leaned out and sucked air as deeply as she could. The din was deafening: engines roaring, gears crashing, people yelling, but the night was fresh and the wind was cold on her cheeks. She strained her head down, massaging her neck. “Twenty-seven what?” she said.

  “Twenty-seven times you’ve asked if we’re there yet. You even ask in your sleep. You’re like a little girl.” Brodsky pushed open his door and stuck his legs out stiffly, rubbing his knees and thighs. He groaned in relief. Next to him his driver’s head was slumped over his chest. Each time they’d halted for more than a minute he’d fallen asleep. Brodsky looked back. “You look comfortable,” he said.

  The backseat was crammed with piles of documents, box files, and maps. A blanket draped them and Sarah was squeezed between the mound of paperwork and the metal frame. She was slumped against the boxes, with the blanket providing some comfort. At her feet was a wooden ammunition box full of food.

  “What is it?” Brodsky asked a driver walking back to his command car behind them. They were in a vehicle convoy with half a dozen officers escorted by soldiers in two “Bobik” armored cars. The war was not yet officially over; it was too early to celebrate. Germany’s final surrender could come at any moment, but with armed soldiers from the Wehrmacht mingling with refugees on the roads, remnants of German units still wandering in the woods, and the guerrilla threat from Nazi Werewolves militias, nobody wanted to be the last person to die on the last day of the war.

  “You ask what is it, Tovarich Lieutenant?” the driver answered. “What isn’t it? Take a look. Everyone wants to cross at the same time. It’s a mess.”

  There was shouting in English, Russian, and German, engines revved, soldiers stood around smoking, and even now, an hour before dawn, German children were dashing between the cars, looking for handouts or something to steal. Dessau, an industrial town on the junction of the Elbe and Mulde rivers, had been bombed to bits in the last weeks of the war and the old steel bridge destroyed. The only way across the Elbe was an American pontoon bridge that the Yanks thought gave them priority.

  An American sergeant stood at the entrance to the bridge, waving, pointing, ordering, as if he owned the place. A line of American armored cars and Willys jeeps with mounted machine guns clattered off the wooden struts onto the cobbled ramp that led to the street. They gunned by, Stars and Stripes flying, their camoufla
ge paint and olive stars barely visible beneath the caked mud and dust. There was a sudden flurry of hands and shouts, leaving a little boy jumping up and down in delight, right in front of Sarah. He was waving a Hershey bar until a friend made a grab for it, but he was too quick and whipped it away and ran off. His friend, left with nothing, held out his open hand to Sarah and made a sad clown face. She began to smile but the smile went away. Unfair, she thought. He’s just a little boy.

  “Kiss, kiss. Hello, beautiful,” the boy said in American.

  Brodsky laughed. “He’s right!”

  “Fuck, fuck?” the boy said, hoping to wheedle some candy out of her.

  * * *

  It had all been so quick. When Isak had asked in the basement how long it would take to get ready, she could only laugh. She had nothing but the clothes she wore, and one little dusty purse of documents and photos she had guarded with her life for three years. They were all that remained of her life and her family, her only link with the past. In her loneliest moments, and they were many, she would stare at the creased and cracked photos of Mutti and Papi, and Hoppi, and kiss them, and would smile. She would look at them for so long, and so intently, it was as if she dissolved into the photo with them, they were together again, their bodies merging, until slowly her hands would fall and her head would follow and sleep would take her to a peaceful place.

  Get ready. She tried to laugh. It came out as a snort. Sarah could have walked straight out the front door, if there had been one, if it hadn’t been used for firewood long ago, but first she went upstairs to say good-bye to the Eberhardts and to give them the last of Viktor’s food. They had been kind, as kind as anyone could have been while risking death to help a Jew in hiding.

  She emerged from her basement like a troglodyte from its cave, throwing her hands up to protect her eyes from the sudden light. She had cowered from the explosions of the last few days, and now she saw what she had escaped.

  Houses leaned dangerously to the side with smashed roofs and ragged gaps in the walls, scarred with pockmarks from bombs and shrapnel, some with façades ripped off so you could see into the rooms. There were people sitting inside as on a stage. It made sense. Where else would they go? It stank, of sewage and stagnant water and God knows what diseases. Fat blue-black flies swarmed around a pile of garbage. There was a scarlet pile of torn, discarded swastikas. On top was a torn German poster with its stale warning: “Any Man found in a House with a White Flag will be Shot.” In the garden opposite were two stakes driven into the ground, with steel helmets on top. German graves. But whereas the street had been deserted after the German army had fled, with everybody hiding in their shelters and basements, with just the booms and cracks of bombs and guns, now it was like market day.

  Russian military vehicles lined the street, soldiers lounged about at a roadblock, each one of them smoking and chewing. Soon the bottles would come out and trouble would start for the girls. That’s why young women searched for food and water only in the mornings, when the Russians were sleeping it off. Older Berliners, shabby and beaten, wandered among the soldiers, docile yet full of disdain for the eastern peasants, even while begging them for food and cigarettes. Sarah prayed she wouldn’t see Viktor.

  Her head lurched against the sharp edge of a box as they hit another bump in the road. Viktor. She felt her lips turn into a snarl, even as she felt her head for blood. There was none. She should have let Isak punish him. Why did she stop him? Isak had said he would make sure Viktor got a taste of his own medicine, he’d leave orders to beat him badly, at night, he had the authority. But Sarah had said, No. Why? Despite what he had done to her, she could not bear the thought of such low revenge. Stop him doing the same thing to another woman? Yes! But beat him? That wasn’t the way. It wasn’t right. It would make her as bad as him. Violence was never the answer, look at the Nazis. That was what she had thought at the time. But now? Tapping her forehead with her fingers, feeling for blood again, she wondered, Why not? She should have said yes. Beat the animal. But no. That’s really not the answer. There’s been enough violence, enough killing. Please, she prayed, let it stop.

  She looked at the back of Isak’s head, swaying with the movement of the vehicle. He meant well, she thought.

  Now, this is a good man.

  The lieutenant had taken her to his quarters in a solitary grand house spared by the bombing. He had issued orders and half an hour later, as she sipped hot sweet tea under a cherry tree stripped of its blossoms by bomb blasts, an orderly came and led her by the hand to a room with a bath and four, yes four, large buckets of water. Cold, but she couldn’t dream of hot. Soap. A towel. And a pile of clothes for her to choose from. She wondered who had been forced to hand them over. The lieutenant had thought of everything. On top of the clothes was a red apple, a hairbrush, and a cracked mirror.

  * * *

  After they finally crossed the bridge, Sarah dozed. Her head slumped against the box files, it flopped with the craters in the road. A gentle warmth oozed through her, a sense of comfort and the stirring of elation. I’m going home. She could see the apple tree in the garden, could smell the Lebkuchen baking in the oven. She smacked her lips in her sleep. Mutti, on the bed, brushing wisps of black hair from her brow, smiling down at her and singing a soft song. And Hoppi. Brown curls falling over his ears. Wise brown eyes like pools of evening light. In the photo, bare-chested, pulling himself out of the pool, when Jews could still swim there, the sun glinting on his wet body, laughing into the camera. It was her favorite photo, a young Hoppi, she had stared at it for hours, for days. Yet now it seemed to lose body … to fade away … wait!

  Sarah’s stomach tensed, a wave of shock tore through her, she woke with a start and wanted to vomit.

  The purse! She tore the blanket off the boxes, kicked the ammunition box aside, clawed at it, swung her body from side to side, crying, “Oh no, oh no!”

  “What is it?” Brodsky said.

  She tried to stand, to feel if she was sitting on it, patted between the boxes and the seat, but, feeling the bile rise, she knew. “My purse!” Sarah shouted. “I forgot my purse. My photos!”

  Brodsky pawed under the seats, searched the front of the vehicle, made the driver lean forward as he checked under him. He understood. He’d carried his own photos ever since he went to war. Every soldier did. But there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t use the radio transmitter for a personal request. And he wouldn’t be back in Berlin for at least a week. Instinctively he patted his left chest pocket. Felt his photos.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “That’s awful, but don’t worry. I’ll try to find them when I get back to Berlin.” He smiled in encouragement, turned to the front, and looked at the road ahead. That’s the last she’s seen of that purse, he thought. They’ll sell it or burn it for heat.

  Sarah couldn’t believe she had been so stupid. She must have left the purse with her clothes when she put on her new ones after the bath. And then they had called on her to hurry to get into the staff car. After all she’d been through. To lose them now!

  How could she? She stared out of the window, at the passing fields and the farmhouses, the churches, the clusters of refugees huddled by the side of the road, with their carts piled high with bedding and all their possessions. Their photo albums?

  Oh, the photos: Hoppi pulling himself, his triceps bulging, he was so strong and young and beautiful. Papi, sitting at the dining room table in his suit and Tyrolean felt hat with a feather, his stained mustache and a pipe with a lion’s-head bowl, gazing at the camera as if lost in thought. Papi and Mutti, sitting on a rock by a lake, her hand in his lap, with big smiles, all teeth and hair and wrinkles. She had spent days with those photos, and now she had lost them. Just as the war was almost over and she could look for her family again, she had to lose the photographs. Was that a good omen? That she no longer needed the photos? Or a bad sign? That all was lost. How stupid …

  Desolate, Sarah stared, trying to fix the pictures into her
memory forever. They passed shattered, splintered trees; gutted cars; burned-out tanks; crushed field guns. They look how I feel, she thought. In the fields around each smoldering village were yellow-and-black posters: Beware—Mines. The sky was gray. There was a drizzle and raindrops slid across the tarp cover.

  Her eyelids became heavy, her head drooped. “Where are we now?” she murmured.

  “About thirty kilometers to Leipzig,” Brodsky said.

  “What time is it?” Sarah’s voice trailed off.

  “Eleven fifteen.”

  Sarah slipped into sleep again, curled against the piles of papers, in the back of the Russian GAZ jeep, which hooted and swerved through the narrow country roads, crowded with exhausted families pushing overladen carts. American drivers waited for the refugees to pass. The Russians drove straight through them.

  * * *

  Sarah had studied English and could read and write quite well. But she understood hardly a word the American soldier was saying. He spoke so fast with a whine and seemed to stress all the wrong syllables and he looked so young, too young to be an officer. She could pick out some words, though, and it didn’t sound good. She kept hearing “No.”

  She had woken up to see the Red Army officers shaking hands with soldiers in different uniforms. They wore helmets, not the cloth garrison caps of the Russians. She saw they were Americans by the Stars and Stripes flying over a circle of vehicles in a field on the edge of the large town that appeared to have been entirely demolished by bombs.

  She’d never seen an American soldier before. After ten minutes of introductions, talking, more soldiers joining them, back-slapping, laughter followed by deep discussions, most of the Russians and the Americans disappeared into a big green field tent. Outside, two American soldiers stood guard. The Russian drivers sat by a truck, smoking.