Child of the Journey

by Berliner, Janet

  "Crazy," Perón said, having reached them.

  "To you, perhaps, but not to them! Try to watch with an open mind and then tell me how crazy it is."

  From the direction of the sand spit that formed Lüderitz's western end, there emerged two men carrying a ratty stretcher. On it lay a small naked boy. The crowd parted and the bearers passed between the Herreros and the inner ring of Bushmen, who threw dried crushed leaves mixed with dust onto the prostrate figure. While the Herreros continued their spear-throwing motions, the Bushmen in the middle of the circle leapt high into the air and fell on their knees, twitching and trembling and rolling their eyes upward, their chanting more rhythmic now except for the occasional wail that rose into the branches of the acacia tree like the cry of an exotic bird.

  Erich edged forward to look more closely at the patient. The boy was a classic case of malnutrition: his belly distended, arms and legs thin as sticks, face so gaunt it seemed all eyes.

  "Kai!" the woman screamed, toppling to her knees. "Kai!"

  "KAI MEANS...," Leni started to yell in Erich's ear. Abruptly everyone was quiet. "...pain. Now watch."

  "You appear to know a lot about them," Perón commented.

  "A director can't film unless she knows what to film."

  The woman wrapped her arms around herself and tilted toward the flames, beside which the stretcher bearers had laid down the boy. Her nose and forehead were among the embers. When she lifted her head, smoke plumed from her hair. Her face was unscathed.

  "It's not possible," Erich said weakly as the woman crawled toward the boy and laid her hands gently on his cheeks. "Some kind of trick."

  The stretcher was withdrawn. The woman lay beside the boy, her arms around his shoulders and his head cradled against her chest; she began groaning and wailing. Her limbs jerked uncontrollably. Four squatting male dancers surrounded her. One massaged her with dust. The second rubbed sweat from his armpits onto her body, while the third dipped into a small tortoise shell held by the fourth and rubbed herbs into her scalp.

  When they stepped away, a hush came over the crowd. The circle tightened.

  "She's near death," Leni whispered. "The others are trying to bring her back from the spirit world."

  All of this time there had been no sign of life in the boy. Now Erich could see tears emerging from the outside corners of the child's eyes and rolling down the sides of his face.

  The woman opened her eyes and raised her head. Leaning over the boy, she scraped his cheeks with her fingernails--a cat sharpening its nails against a piece of bark. She was purring softly, her trembling less violent, like a woman after lovemaking.

  The boy's head moved slowly side to side. When it was stilled, his mouth opened and Erich saw something twitch inside. One of the male dancers seized it and, with a milking motion, drew it slowly from between the boy's lips.

  Erich's stomach turned over as he watched a two-meter-long worm emerge from the boy's mouth.

  "Tapeworm." Leni kept snapping the shutter.

  "Sleight of hand!" Erich insisted.

  "Believe what you want."

  The four males drew knives from sheaths attached to their legs and hacked at the worm, cutting it into a hundred pieces. The crowd began to depart. Two women, one elderly and one in her late teens, lifted the boy to his feet. With their help, he walked away.

  The male dancers collected the pieces of tapeworm and, crossing the street, pitched them into the harbor. One of the men returned to kick apart the small fire. Lifting a stick on which a flame continued to burn, he glanced at the woman. Her hips bucked once and she lay still, one arm crooked beneath her cheek, the other stretched out above her head. She appeared at first to be asleep; but apparently sensing the man's presence, she opened her eyes and looked up at him.

  "Hamba Gashle," she said.

  "Salamba Gashle," he answered, and wandered off, leaving her where she lay.

  "What did they say to each other?" Erich asked Leni.

  "Hamba Gashle," Bruqah said, coming between them. "Go softly." He gave Erich a tolerant smile. "Salamba Gashle." He took a swig of beer. "Return softly."

  "What about the woman?" Erich asked. "Are they just going to leave her there?"

  "She might as well rest there as anywhere."

  Erich checked his watch. "I'd better get back to the ship pretty soon."

  "Then it is time to begin our farewells. You take care of that young Frau of yours," Perón said amiably, lifting his beer bottle as though in a toast. "If you two need to get off that island, ever, you know what to do."

  Erich settled back in the chair. The ship, and Miriam, could wait. He glanced at the line of dirt along the nape of Leni's neck and wondered why it added to her attractiveness. He wished she were going on to Madagascar now, instead of weeks, maybe months, from now. And Perón. Erich hated to see him depart, too, though he was uncertain if he genuinely liked the Argentinean or whether it was a matter of Perón being an ally in a ship filled with enemies.

  Perón would accompany Leni as far as Windhoek, help her and her crew hire the native guides and rent the trucks they would need for the Kalahari, then board the train for Walvis Bay, where a Spanish freighter waited to take him to Buenos Aires.

  One last beer, Erich decided, and he would call for the tender to take him back to the ship. He tipped his chair back slightly against the stucco wall. Evening was coming on quickly. The acacia's shadows lengthened, ribbing the street like the scarifications he had seen on some of the Negro faces. Cicadas began to shrill.

  "The Bushmen believe the moon is hollow, and that's where their souls go when they die," Leni said, her camera pointed toward the darkening sky. "What a wonderful sense of eternity, to feel that on desert nights you can reach up and touch Heaven."

  Erich glanced up. "If what I saw today was an indication of Heaven, I'd rather live in Hell." He sucked at the beer and looked at Perón. "That spectacle reminded me of Luna Park."

  "What we witnessed was hardly what I would call an amusement," Leni said. She turned to Perón. "What would you call it?"

  A heated discussion ensued, about Left and Right wing politics, as it inevitably did when those two got together. Not wishing to get involved, Erich shut his eyes. The cooler temperature relaxed him, and he found the sounds of the insects strangely satisfying. He thought about a girl he had kissed at Berlin's Luna Park. That same girl, a woman now and waiting in his cabin aboard ship, had grown all too quiet of late. He had almost welcomed her outburst this morning, when he told her that he would not allow her ashore.

  A warm hand touched his cheek, moved down his neck, and returned to caress his forehead and massage his closed eyes.

  "I'll miss you, Leni," he said softly, and kissed her palm.

  She ran her fingertips over his nose and up and over his left ear. The gesture was more playful and exploring than erotic, filling him with a drowsy comfort rather than with urgency. He felt no need to open his eyes or lift his arms to embrace her. His mind slid with the ease of an otter through a wealth of memories and pleasant imaginings. He saw a white moon, large as he remembered his first wafer at Eucharist to have been, and beneath its brilliance a heavily mustached man in parka and mittens, standing with outstretched arms on a bald mountaintop. Below, as far as the eye could see, was jungle.

  Benyowsky, he heard his subconscious say. He opened his eyes.

  The Negress healer was huddled before him. She reached up to his chin, wiped away his sweat, licked her fingers. "Kamadwa."

  He lurched off the chair and grabbed it to fend her off as he might a circus tiger. A camera flash flared, and for an instant he experienced red blindness. When the color cleared, he saw Leni who was frantically changing bulbs.

  "Kamadwa!" The woman inched toward Erich and made a crabbing motion with her outstretched hand. "Kamadwa mastna ha!"

  "Get away from me!"

  "Calm yourself, Herr Oberst Germantownman," Bruqah said. "She wants to drink your sweat only. She says she has seen your s
oul." Now he looked at Erich meaningfully. "A jackal's soul, she says."

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The Sogne bellowed her position, plowing through the Cape's gray night and storming sea. A foghorn sounded as if in answer.

  Jackal, Erich thought, clinging to a handle on the wall of the darkened bridge. You're goddamn right.

  He had been drinking heavily since Lüderitz, but he had always been a heavy drinker. However, unlike his papa, the sullen-drunk, he could handle it. When he got tight, he became...he tried to think for a moment. Logical. That was it. He would sit straight as an arrow on a stool and be Goddamn Logical. He might reel when he attempted to walk, but as long as he stayed in one place he was Goddamn Logical. Some of his best thinking had come at such times.

  Javelin Man, Jungle Man, Jackal Man...Goddamn Logical Man The foghorn seemed to sound it out. Fuck Hitler and Hempel and Papa and Dau. He was Goddamn Logical.

  "She's closing, Sir," a seaman said as he shut the bridge's sliding door, muffling only slightly the bellowing of the foghorn and the shrieking of the wind. "Bearing south-southwest at twenty knots, as nearly as I can tell." The seaman shook the water off his listening-horn and set it down in the corner. It looked more like a megaphone than a listening device. One more thing to announce Jackal Man to the world, Erich thought.

  "As nearly as you can tell?" Dau removed his pipe from his mouth and lifted a brow.

  "Bearing south-southwest and twenty knots, Sir."

  Dau smiled wryly, replaced the pipe, and flicked on a tiny light above the maps, which were covered with plastic and fastened down with gold screws. Sweat gleamed on his forehead. "Hold steady," he told the seaman at the helm. "We must appear to be just another freighter fighting a storm."

  "Yes, Sir."

  Clinging to the rail that bordered the instrument panel inside the darkened bridge, Erich looked over Dau's shoulder. The nautical maps meant little to him, but the oncoming ship, its horn increasingly loud despite the closed door, was an obvious danger. Almost certainly British. A destroyer of the Hipper class, the seaman had guessed.

  Erich turned to stare again through the spray-washed windows at the windswept seas. I am not afraid, he assured himself. I am not drunk. I am Javelin Man. I am Jackal Man. I am Jungle Man. I am Goddamn Logical. Just seasick, is all. And...tense. It is logical to be tense in such a situation. Goddamn logical. How effective was a soldier, after all, without a little tension?

  The scene outside was mesmerizing. Froth spilled across the decks with the ferocity of boarding pirates as the bow disappeared beneath the ocean. As the ship reared again, water cascaded off her sides to the dancing accompaniment of St. Elmo's Fire--balls of static electricity that glowed inside the fog and along the edges of the sea. Despite the transfer of supplies at Lüderitz, the Sogne remained heavy with oil and provisions for the Graf Spee and for the landing at Nosy Mangabéy. The weight slowed them down, yet did nothing to stabilize the ship against the storm that had the Sogne pitching like a canoe.

  The seaman again opened the door and stuck the listening-horn outside.

  "It's the Jews in the hold," Dau told Erich, having to nearly shout to be heard. "I knew they'd bring us ill luck. You must ready your guards to lighten the ship."

  "The Jews caused the storm?" Erich struggled to keep from laughing. "Aren't you according them too much power?"

  "Every major power that's tolerated them since the Diaspora has been destroyed."

  "Coincidence."

  Dau shook his head. "History's no more random than the sea."

  "I understand that storms like this are common off the Cape."

  "So is calm. I've stood at Agulhas..." Dau sucked thoughtfully on his unlit pipe. "The southern tip of Africa isn't the Cape of Good Hope, you know. It's Cape Agulhas." He tapped his forefinger against the map. "That's where the Indian meets the Atlantic. I have been there on calm days when there is a perfectly straight line of foam between the two oceans, all the way to the horizon. Uncanny. Makes a man believe in God."

  He put his hand on the map. "Care to see where God held the world while He shaped it? Here is the imprint of His thumb." With his pipe stem Dau pointed toward where his own left thumb was, in the gap separating Java and western Australia. "Here, between Burma and India, see the index finger? And here," he indicated the Arabian Sea and the coast of Somalia, "is the impression of His other fingers." He poked Erich gently in the chest with the pipe stem, and smiled. "An old sea dog's musings."

  "Instructions, Sir," the seaman asked, shutting the door.

  "Maintain course." Dau turned to Erich, his face hardened. "Have the Jews shackled and brought topside, Herr Oberst."

  They go overboard over my dead body, Erich thought, but instead of arguing--Goddamn Illogical to argue with an asshole like that--he went below, staggering toward the stairs that led to the maze of corridors and the hold. Slamming against the walls, he lurched up the hall and down the steps, until he found his way to the windlass room.

  The trainers were there, seated cross-legged on the floor like a bunch of Indians from an American cowboy film, holding or grooming their charges. The dogs lifted their heads when Erich entered, but other than cursory glances the trainers paid him little heed.

  To keep from falling down in front of them, he held onto the handrail, which ran around the room like a ballet barre, but pretended to hold it nonchalantly, as if he did not need its assistance, even in the storm. At his feet, Müller vomited into his puke bucket and went back to ministering to Aquarius, apparently not giving his own seasickness a second thought.

  The atmosphere was sullen, sullen as Papa at his sherry. At first Erich could not understand why, or why they continued to ignore him. Then it came to him: all of the trainers had been there during the worst of the storm, tending to their animals. All except Krayller, of course. And him. The only dogs' cages not open were Taurus' and the wolfhound's. Maybe he had been drinking a little too much, thanks to that goddamn Dau, always beckoning him to the bridge. Except Dau had not called him up there this time. Or had he?

  Erich couldn't quite remember.

  He unlatched Taurus' door. She slowly padded out, and lay down again. He sat beside her and maneuvered her head across his lap. Borrowing a rag from Fermi, the little wire-haired trainer he had nicknamed after the Italian physicist, he removed the lid from the water bucket, dipped the rag, and began washing her. Her coat was stiff with vomit.

  His own stomach clenched. He wanted desperately to throw up, and, with equal desperation, wanted not to do so in front of the men. It was the usual problem: if he opened his mind to the dog, he would feel her joy...and pain; if the dog were in pain, he had difficulty keeping his mind closed.

  "The wolfhound's trainer hasn't been here?" he asked, as usual avoiding using either the man's or the dog's name. He had been forced to allow them into the unit, but he refused to absorb them into it. They would remain outsiders until he could rid himself of them.

  "Franz comes down fairly often," one of the trainers mumbled.

  "Franz? I thought the trainer was--"

  "It is the corpsman," another said. "He's the only one of those bastards you can trust. Sturmbannführer Hempel's man," the trainer seemed to choke on the word, "hardly ever shows his face around here."

  Erich looked at the wolfhound, so sick its muzzle lay in a puddle of bile, and felt like shuddering. Keep your mind closed, he told himself, remembering suddenly what had brought him down here.

  He patted Taurus, who responded to the affection by attempting to lick his hand, then he stood up, this time unashamedly holding onto the rail. "Zodiac," he said.

  The men continued their grooming.

  "Zodiac," he repeated, with greater emphasis. One by one they looked up at him, their faces registering shock that he was serious about the command.

  "Now?" Holten-Pflug asked, his face so white that even seasickness could not account for the pallor.

  "Impossible...Sir," Fermi said. "The dogs are too sick."

>   Perhaps, Erich thought, he had trained his trainers too well. The need to question orders, if the dogs' welfare were at stake, had been a top priority with him, though such preaching had gone against everything he had been taught--if not everything upon which the entire German army and the very character of the country was built.

  Dau's earlier words, though, overrode all other considerations: You must ready your guards to lighten the ship. Have the Jews shackled and brought topside."

  The order, not meant to be questioned, was insanity. They were his goddamn Jews, and no goddamn sea captain with barnacles for brains was going to tell him what to do with them.

  "Not a complete Zodiac," he told the men, backing off his original intention. "You go outside the door. I'll see if the dogs take their respective positions."

  Reluctantly, the trainers patted their charges, rose to their feet, and filed out.

  He would not, Erich decided, use Zodiac unless Dau pushed him to the wall regarding the Jews-overboard issue. He had no intention of obeying that order; it was merely a matter of how far he would go in disobeying it. Zodiac protected, insured him against Dau. The strategy divided a field of battle into a clock, with each of the twelve shepherds securing the position respective to its name. The wolfhound, occupying what had been Grog the affenpinscher's position was the hub, the center of the wheel.

  If he thought of the ship as that wheel, the dogs could attack its various parts should Dau insist on carrying out his insane order regarding the Jews. Or, Erich decided, he could call only the bridge the wheel--appropriate, after all--and have the shepherds attach there. If they were not too sick to respond at all.

  There was only one way he could balance the illness. He must open his mind to them. Not just to Taurus, whose lead they would follow. To all of them. Given the situation, they would need the emotional wherewithal he could provide.