Child of the Journey

by Berliner, Janet

  Instead of effecting his release, his priapism had brought him under Schmidt's scrutiny. He was made to move from woman to woman while Kapos whipped him, used electro-shock, or shoved numbing suppositories up his rectum...all in the name of science.

  "Sooner or later they'll neuter me," he told Solomon. "Then I will kill Schmidt and myself."

  The choice, he insisted, was his.

  They were given a choice, all right, Sol thought bitterly. Cooperate and survive; fight and die...if you're lucky.

  He thought back to the first day of his own reassignment, the day he became Doctor Schmidt's prime guinea pig in her eye experiments...an attempt to reduce the problem of night blindness in pilots. She had injected dye at the outer edge of each of his eyes. When it took effect, there was an hour of photographing and peering and examination through various lenses. He had to lie still and keep his blinking to a minimum, or suffer Schmidt's syringe in his stomach.

  The choice, she insisted, was his.

  The process was repeated once or twice a week. Each time she repeated the same questions. Was your father sensitive to light? As a child, did you prefer dark places?

  After the sessions in the laboratory, he was free until roll call--not out of compassion, but because Schmidt wanted him nearby in case she wished to repeat some part of her experiment. He was to have no food or water until dinner--why, he did not know. His was not to question, but to accept and survive.

  That was his mandate.

  Meanwhile, he could not ignore the fact that Schmidt's dyes were accelerating the deterioration of his eyesight; he was beginning to perceive colors differently, like the gray pebbles beneath his feet, which were beginning to look purple. But as his peripheral vision deteriorated, the clarity of his central vision improved. He wanted to see less, not more. Blindness would spare him the sight of all the horrors; with luck, it might even induce the SS to bless him with a bullet in the neck.

  Until then, life would continue to be made up of eye days and, when Schmidt did not send for him, foot days.

  Today was a foot day.

  He looked down at his shoes. Inside, his feet were slimed with blood and dirt, and crammed so tightly into the too-small shoes that he made macabre jokes to himself about being a Chinese princess.

  At the request of local shoe manufacturers looking for "a true test of durability," a walkway was built along the edge of the roll call area. The walkway's raison d'être was the provision of superior footwear for Germans to more comfortably carry the banners of truth and racial purity to the ends of the earth.

  Sol picked up a sandbag and began to walk. As he did at the beginning of each foot day, he read the signs along the edge of the walkway, hand-lettered, blooming like large white flowers: Give Sacrifice and Glory to the Fatherland! Obedience. Industry. Honesty. Cleanliness.

  For the rest of the day, the track would define his universe. Each path-length averaged six thousand steps. He was required to walk it--back and forth--seven times. Even wearing good, firm shoes, negotiating forty kilometers of stretches of cement, cinders, crushed stones, and broken glass embedded in tar, gravel, and sand would have been difficult and painful; in shoes a full size too small, carrying increasingly heavy sandbags, the foot days added a new color to the fresco that was Sol's life: the color of blood.

  He smelled it everywhere, tasted it. Saw it in the wake left by the line of feet walking the shoe track. Up and down--

  Familiar with every hazard on the track, his only defense against the deadly combination of pain and boredom was to resort to the same tactic he had used in the sewer: counting his steps.

  Seven hundred twenty-six...seven hundred twenty-seven....

  He continued walking and counting until he reached the far end of the walkway, the one nearest Pathologie. A scream interrupted his counting.

  In the brief silence between screams, Sol turned and started back toward the beginning of the crescent-shaped walkway.

  ...six thousand and one...

  Like a flagellant, he had learned to relish the pain. Dragging his feet, feeling the blood ooze, he gritted his teeth in a kind of pleasure as a matching pain pulsed behind his eyes. There was a flash of light, and then another. A blue glow grew out of the walkway and enveloped him.

  Grateful that the universe defined by the track was about to be expanded, he did not try to shut out the vision----

  ----Lise Meitner and her assistant sit on the edges of their cots, staring hopelessly at the floor. Göring stands over them.

  "Our lab...shut down!" Lise utters in disbelief. Now she peers up, her face strained. "But we were making such progress."

  Göring chuckles haughtily. "We have no need of parasites like you, now that we'll soon have," he pauses for effect, "the bomb."

  "Impossible!"

  "The Copenhagen plant made certain breakthroughs--"

  "So Bohr did give you heavy water before he escaped."

  "Before he was kidnapped!" Göring snaps.

  "But the partisans--they blew up the Norsk-Hydro power plant!"

  "Those inept traitors?" The Feldmarschall tilts his face toward the ceiling and laughs so hard that he takes out a handkerchief and wipes tears from his eyes. "We let the British jellyfish think they had succeeded. We hadn't counted on the Americans having Bohr as well as Einstein, so we circulated the sabotage story so people would think we were still using heavy water as a neutron moderator instead of...graphite."

  "You're lying." Suddenly pale, she speaks without conviction.

  "We no longer need your cooperation or your brilliance, Doktor Meitner. We have everything we need in the notes that Doktor Hahn coded into your love letters. We've had your material for months."

  Lise goes white.

  "That's right, Doktor. Critical mass. We've had your notes, Copenhagen's success, and now we're tooling up at the Mauthausen camp at Ebensee. The bomb's to be built in a cavern carved out of granite by Jewish half-wits and whores just like you two."

  "My letters. My notes. How!" Lise asks desperately, of no one.

  "Oh my God." Sobbing, Judith reaches for her. "You said the letters were just reminiscences, and I believed you. I thought I was tricking them...protecting you...."

  "Perhaps we'll keep you alive, Doktor, until the weapon is finished and field tested. You will love the site we've picked. A second-rate military target, but ideologically perfect." Bending with difficulty, he lifts Lise's head by the chin, as if to kiss her. "The heart of the land of milk and honey. Jerusalem."

  "My soul is dirty," Lise whimpers. "Let me die."----

  "Get on with it!"

  The crack of a whip, Captain Hempel's personal gift to Kapo Pleshdimer, punctuated the order and dissipated the vision. Sol stooped to pick up a heavier sandbag. He squeezed his feet into a pair of shoes yet another size too small and began, again, to walk--and to count--

  Five thousand, six hundred twelve...five thousand six hundred thirteen....

  The usual screams filled his imaginings as he tottered toward his milestone. Pathologie, directly in his line of vision, expanded and contracted like a creature alive, its brick belly filled with shrieking death. How he longed to suck at that breast. Sol slowed down. Leaned his body toward her.

  "Walk, Professor!"

  The Kapo's stick cracked against Sol's ribs. He doubled over, straightened up, counted, turned, pushed himself forward. Five thousand and.... Had it been days since he had seen Hans? Weeks?... Five thousand and...

  "Walk!"

  Let me die, Lord! Sol's thoughts echoed the voice from the vision. It contained all of the elements of the others. Again it showed the abuse of Jewish talents; again it talked of a Jewish homeland in Madagascar. If only he understood what it all meant--not that it mattered anymore. Still, he would rather go to his death knowing than unknowing. He was almost happy when he saw a blue glow----

  ----gossamer veils of blue, dust-moted light filter through a stained-glass window onto a man seated at a pipe organ. He is blond and broad
shouldered, and looks as athletic as he is musically talented. The Bach concerto he plays reverberates throughout the tall reaches of a rococo church that was obviously once a castle.

  Göring enters the nave, pushing a stumbling Lise before him.

  The man at the organ continues to play feverishly, his arched fingers pounding the huge, tiered, ivory-inlaid keys. His head is lifted as though he sees something reverent in the tall brass pipes.

  Göring opens the door. The organist does not turn around. Outside there is a bell tower and a flagstone landing. A long, very steep flight of stone stairs serpentines down the thumb-shaped limestone ledge on which the Schlosskirche perches. Beyond the castle-church lies farming country and half-timbered houses with gingerbread roofs.

  "At least let Judith go," Lise pleads.

  "As soon as my bodyguards finish with her, we'll let her go--to Auschwitz." Göring grabs her by the hair and drags her down the steps.

  "I didn't deceive you about the graphite, Herr Feldmarschall! I swear I didn't."

  He hits her--twice. She staggers back, then rocks forward and...pushes. He fights to keep his balance, but is too heavy. Fat arms flailing, screaming, he tumbles down the stone steps----

  ----The vision faded. Sol twisted uneasily on his bunk. Dawn filtered through the barracks window. There was movement in the barracks as others who had not slept prepared for a new day.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Lately, the Rathenau rose garden had become Miriam's place for private and often dangerous thoughts. No one interfered with her inside the house, but that did not diminish her feeling that somehow her mental plotting and scheming could be overheard.

  It was, she knew, a monumental foolishness. The only person who could possibly know what she was thinking was the baby, if, in fact, fetuses, embryos--whatever it was at this stage--could know anything.

  Sitting in the rose garden at sundown on the day of summer solstice, she contemplated her future. She could see herself, with Erich; in her more optimistic moments she could see herself with Sol. But she found it almost impossible to place a child, her child, in the picture.

  If by now, almost six months into her pregnancy, she was supposed to be feeling maternal, something had gone wrong. If she were master of the universe, she decided, the first thing she would do would be to make men's bodies capable of childbearing.

  Even feeling the way she did, she could not help but smile at the very idea. Husband, home, children--weren't those what women were supposed to want? When this was over, this black period in German history, there would surely be those who would tell her that she should have been satisfied with what she had. It was, after all, so much more than most.

  Maybe so, but she wanted more.

  Had she fought against the flow, and failed, she might have been content. Or maybe she was just being optimistic and naïve, the inveterate performer thinking that life was going to work out with the form and balance of a play. Poverty did not appeal to her, but it had never frightened her either. At least, having tried and failed, her failure would have been of her own volition. But the Nazis had come, and taken away her will. They tore her mansion from her womb, and tore her from her mansion. Her birthright. She was back again, but it was not the same, for it was no longer hers. Its walls did not enclose and protect her, they were her cage--as her body was the child's.

  One thing she did know: men would surely be more careful about making babies if there were no way to know before the fact who had to go through nine months of physical changes and emotional instability.

  "What you're feeling is perfectly normal," the doctor kept saying. "Your body chemistry is not the same as it was, why would you expect to feel like yourself? Get out more, Frau Alois. Walk in the rose garden. Occupy yourself. Knit baby clothes."

  Frau Alois.

  There was never a time that she could hear herself called that without cringing. She kept telling herself that a rose was rose was a rose, but it didn't work.

  Knit baby clothes! She should sit and knit when her world was falling--had long since--fallen apart.

  Well, at least one thing had gone right. Erich had managed to remove the threat of the blood transfusion. Never in her life would she forget that conversation between the two men, walking ahead of her on the night of Hitler's birthday party. A beautiful spring evening, the air still, allowing snatches of their discussion to be easily overheard as she walked behind them. "In my opinion, your wife's reformation needs something more. A doctor at Sachsenhausen...conducting experiments.... Total blood transfusions.... If Miriam were to be transfused with Aryan blood, no one would dispute her place beside you in the New Order."

  She stared at the blood-red profusion of roses around her and, lulled by the warmth of the day, fell into a state between sleeping and waking. She felt her head nod and saw a figure with a watering can, spraying roses with water that ran the color of blood. The roses fell to the ground, but on the bushes, here and there a petal remained, dangling between thorns like pieces of torn flesh.

  She jerked herself fully awake. She could not allow herself to become morbid. It was not healthy for her or for the baby. She had asked the doctor about that. Whether her thoughts could transfer themselves to the child she was carrying.

  "We're not sure how much transfer there is between mother and embryo," he'd said. "Or, for that matter, the other way around."

  She hadn't really thought about that until now. Perhaps she was being influenced by whatever was growing inside her. Was it a boy or girl, normal or shaped by her past and its father's. Bonded to her, and yet a stranger. Stretching her, she feeding it, blood and food intermingled, one with the other.

  "I thought I might find you out here, Señora."

  Miriam jerked herself fully awake. "Domingo," she said happily.

  "You sound pleased to see me. How pleasant," the South American said, bowing with mock formality. He plucked a rose from the closest bush. "Why do all beautiful things have thorns," he said, sucking a drop of blood from his finger where a thorn had scraped it. He breathed in the scent of the rose. "It smells almost as lovely as you," he said, presenting it to her. "I had no time to purchase flowers for you before coming here, though why I would continue to do that when you are surrounded by the best I do not know."

  Miriam smiled. "Don't ever change," she said. "I would be lost without your flattery. I am happy to see you."

  "I just returned to Berlin and was told that you had been trying to get in touch with me. And I have news for you besides."

  "Of Solomon?" She started to rise from the small bench upon which she had been resting.

  "Mostly of Erich."

  She sat back down. "Tell me," she said listlessly, as if the conversation no longer held her interest.

  "May I sit down? I have not slept in many hours and I am more weary than usual."

  She felt immediately apologetic. "I'm sorry, Domingo. I am not always polite of late."

  He sat down next to her and took her hand. "You must not speak to anyone of what I am going to tell you. It is the reason I returned to Berlin sooner than expected, but for now it must remain a private matter between us. Soon, very soon, the Herr Major will be called in to headquarters. He is to be given a double promotion--"

  "A double promotion?"

  "It is not quite what it sounds. There are strings attached. I am not sure how to phrase this. The words sound so ridiculous."

  He looked at her, as if to be sure he had her full attention. Apparently satisfied that he did, he continued. "I won't go into the history of all of this," he said. "You may even be aware of some of it. Certainly you must have heard that there has been much debate about what the Führer calls 'the Jewish question.' Part of that debate has included suggestions for the deportation of all Jews to a homeland far away from Germany. It appears that a location has been settled upon. Madagascar."

  "Madagascar?" Miriam said the word slowly, but her mind was racing, remembering. There were two people who had spoken to her of
Madagascar. One of them was Sol. Over and over, he had told her about his visions, and about the single link between them: the creation of a Jewish homeland in Madagascar. The other was her Uncle Walther.

  "He told my Uncle that all Jews should be penned like animals in Madagascar."

  "He?"

  "The Führer. I remember Uncle Walther telling me about it. And Sol...." She stopped. She would think about that connection later. "No matter," she said. "What does this have to do with Erich and his promotion?"

  "I suppose the only way to say this is to say it. Erich--and his canine unit--are to lead the first resettlement effort."

  Miriam frowned. "Erich and his dogs? I don't understand."

  "Before the end of the summer, a ship will leave for Africa. He and his dogs and trainers will be on it. There are military reasons that I cannot discuss which require my presence on board, and--"

  "--Am I to stay here," Miriam asked slowly.

  Perón shook his head.

  Miriam stood up and began to pace agitatedly. Perón simply watched her. "There's more to this than you're telling me," she said, stopping to stare down at him. "Who else is to go? Which Jews?" She sat back down heavily beside him. "Which Jews?" she repeated.

  "I am not sure, Miriam. Rumor has it that they will be--perhaps have already been--handpicked from one of the camps. They will be artisans, mostly. Builders, carpenters. Farmers, too. People logically suited to be part of such an advance party. Fewer than two hundred in all, but enough to use for a major international propaganda effort."

  Miriam started to shake. "Solomon," she said. She gripped Perón's arm. "You must do it for me. You must arrange for Solomon to be on that ship."