They set to work, like golems, like ragtag clockwork automatons.
Lack of sleep had drained what small reserves of strength Bruckman had, and the work was very hard for him that day. He had learned long ago all the tricks of timing and misdirection, the safe ways to snatch short moments of rest, the ways to do a minimum of work with the maximum display of effort, the ways to keep the guards from noticing you, to fade into the faceless crowd of prisoners and not be singled out, but today his head was muzzy and slow, and none of the tricks seemed to work.
His body felt like a sheet of glass, fragile, ready to shatter into dust, and the painful, arthritic slowness of his movements got him first shouted at, and then knocked down. The guard kicked him twice for good measure before he could get up.
When Bruckman had climbed back to his feet again, he saw that Wernecke was watching him, face blank, eyes expressionless, a look that could have meant anything at all.
Bruckman felt the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth and thought, the blood . . . he’s watching the blood . . . and once again he shivered.
Somehow, Bruckman forced himself to work faster, and although his muscles blazed with pain, he wasn’t hit again, and the day passed.
When they formed up to go back to the camp, Bruckman, almost unconsciously, made sure that he was in a different line from Wernecke.
That night in the cabin, Bruckman watched as Wernecke talked with the other men, here trying to help a new man named Melnick—no more than a boy—adjust to the dreadful reality of the camp, there exhorting someone who was slipping into despair to live and spite his tormentors, joking with old hands in the flat, black, bitter way that passed for humor among them, eliciting a wan smile or occasionally even a laugh from them, finally leading them all in prayer again, his strong, calm voice raised in the ancient words, giving meaning to those words again . . .
He keeps us together, Bruckman thought, he keeps us going. Without him, we wouldn’t last a week. Surely that’s worth a little blood, a bit from each man, not even enough to hurt . . .
Surely they wouldn’t even begrudge him it, if they knew and really understood . . . No, he is a good man, better than the rest of us, in spite of his terrible affliction.
Bruckman had been avoiding Wernecke’s eyes, hadn’t spoken to him at all that day, and suddenly felt a wave of shame go through him at the thought of how shabbily he had been treating his friend. Yes, his friend, regardless, the man who had saved his life . . . Deliberately, he caught Wernecke’s eyes, and nodded, and then somewhat sheepishly, smiled. After a moment, Wernecke smiled back, and Bruckman felt a spreading warmth and relief uncoil his guts. Everything was going to be all right, as all right as it could be, here . . .
Nevertheless, as soon as the inside lights clicked off that night, and Bruckman found himself lying alone in the darkness, his flesh began to crawl.
He had been unable to keep his eyes open a moment before, but now, in the sudden darkness, he found himself tensely and tickingly awake. Where was Wernecke? What was he doing, who was he visiting tonight?
Was he out there in the darkness even now, creeping closer, creeping nearer . . . ? Stop it, Bruckman told himself uneasily, forget the bogey tales. This is your friend, a good man, not a monster . . . But he couldn’t control the fear that made the small hairs on his arms stand bristlingly erect, couldn’t stop the grisly images from coming . . .
Wernecke’s eyes, gleaming in the darkness . . . Was the blood already glistening on Wernecke’s lips, as he drank . . . ? The thought of the blood staining Wernecke’s yellowing teeth made Bruckman cold and nauseous, but the image that he couldn’t get out of his mind tonight was an image of Josef toppling over in that sinisterly boneless way, striking his head against the floor . . . Bruckman had seen people die in many more gruesome ways during his time at the camp, seen people shot, beaten to death, seen them die in convulsions from high fevers or cough their lungs up in bloody tatters from pneumonia, seen them hanging like charred-black scarecrows from the electrified fences, seen them torn apart by dogs . . . but somehow it was Josef’s soft, passive, almost restful slumping into death that bothered him. That, and the obscene limpness of Josef’s limbs as he sprawled there like a discarded rag doll, his pale and haggard face gleaming reproachfully in the dark . . .
When Bruckman could stand it no longer, he got shakily to his feet and moved off through the shadows, once again not knowing where he was going or what he was going to do, but drawn forward by some obscure instinct he himself did not understand. This time he went cautiously, feeling his way and trying to be silent, expecting every second to see Wernecke’s coal-black shadow rise up before him.
He paused, a faint noise scratching at his ears, then went on again, even more cautiously, crouching low, almost crawling across the grimy floor.
Whatever instinct had guided him—sounds heard and interpreted subliminally, perhaps?—it had timed his arrival well. Wernecke had someone down on the floor there, perhaps someone he had seized and dragged away from the huddled mass of sleepers on one of the sleeping platforms, someone from the outer edge of bodies whose presence would not be missed, or perhaps someone who had gone to sleep on the floor, seeking solitude or greater comfort.
Whoever he was, he struggled in Wernecke’s grip, but Wernecke handled him easily, almost negligently, in a manner that spoke of great physical power. Bruckman could hear the man trying to scream, but Wernecke had one hand on his throat, half-throttling him, and all that would come out was a sort of whistling gasp. The man thrashed in Wernecke’s hands like a kite in a child’s hands flapping in the wind, and, moving deliberately, Wernecke smoothed him out like a kite, pressing him slowly flat on the floor.
Then Wernecke bent over him, and lowered his mouth to his throat. Bruckman watched in horror, knowing that he should shout, scream, try to rouse the other prisoners, but somehow unable to move, unable to make his mouth open, his lungs pump. He was paralyzed by fear, like a rabbit in the presence of a predator, a terror sharper and more intense than any he’d ever known.
The man’s struggles were growing weaker, and Wernecke must have eased up some on the throttling pressure of his hand, because the man moaned “Don’t . . . please don’t . . .” in a weak, slurred voice. The man had been drumming his fists against Wernecke’s back and sides, but now the tempo of the drumming slowed, slowed, and then stopped, the man’s arms falling laxly to the floor. “Don’t . . .” the man whispered; he groaned and muttered incomprehensibly for a moment or two longer, then became silent. The silence stretched out for a minute, two, three, and Wernecke still crouched over his victim, who was now not moving at all . . .
Wernecke stirred, a kind of shudder going through him, like a cat stretching. He stood up. His face became visible as he straightened up into the full light from the window, and there was blood on it, glistening black under the harsh glare of the kliegs. As Bruckman watched, Wernecke began to lick his lips clean, his tongue, also black in this light, sliding like some sort of sinuous ebony snake around the rim of his mouth, darting and probing for the last lingering drops . . .
How smug he looks, Bruckman thought, like a cat who has found the cream, and the anger that flashed through him at the thought enabled him to move and speak again. “Wernecke,” he said harshly.
Wernecke glanced casually in his direction. “You again, Isadore?” Wernecke said. “Don’t you ever sleep?” Wernecke spoke lazily, quizzically, without surprise, and Bruckman wondered if Wernecke had known all along that he was there. “Or do you just enjoy watching me?”
“Lies,” Bruckman said. “You told me nothing but lies. Why did you bother?”
“You were excited,” Wernecke said. “You had surprised me. It seemed best to tell you what you wanted to hear. If it satisfied you, then that was an easy solution to the problem.”
“‘Never have I drained the life from someone who wanted to live,’” Bruckman said bitterly, mimicking Wernecke. “‘Only a little from each man.’ My Go
d—and I believed you! I even felt sorry for you!”
Wernecke shrugged. “Most of it was true. Usually I only take a little from each man, softly and carefully, so that they never know, so that in the morning they are only a little weaker than they would have been anyway . . .”
“Like Josef?” Bruckman said angrily. “Like the poor devil you killed tonight?”
Wernecke shrugged again. “I have been careless the last few nights, I admit. But I need to build up my strength again.” His eyes gleamed in the darkness. “Events are coming to a head here. Can’t you feel it, Isadore, can’t you sense it? Soon the war will be over, everyone knows that. Before then, this camp will be shut down, and the Nazis will move us back into the interior—either that, or kill us. I have grown weak here, and I will soon need all my strength to survive, to take whatever opportunity presents itself to escape. I must be ready. And so I have let myself drink deeply again, drink my fill for the first time in months . . .” Wernecke licked his lips again, perhaps unconsciously, then smiled bleakly at Bruckman. “You don’t appreciate my restraint, Isadore. You don’t understand how hard it has been for me to hold back, to take only a little each night. You don’t understand how much that restraint has cost me . . .”
“You are gracious,” Bruckman sneered.
Wernecke laughed. “No, but I am a rational man; I pride myself on that. You other prisoners were my only source of food, and I have had to be very careful to make sure that you would last. I have no access to the Nazis, after all. I am trapped here, a prisoner just like you, whatever else you may believe—and I have not only had to find ways to survive here in the camp, I have had to procure my own food as well! No shepherd has ever watched over his flock more tenderly than I.”
“Is that all we are to you—sheep? Animals to be slaughtered?”
Wernecke smiled. “Precisely.”
When he could control his voice enough to speak, Bruckman said, “You’re worse than the Nazis.”
“I hardly think so,” Wernecke said quietly, and for a moment he looked tired, as though something unimaginably old and unutterably weary had looked out through his eyes. “This camp was built by the Nazis—it wasn’t my doing. The Nazis sent you here—not I. The Nazis have tried to kill you every day since, in one way or another—and I have tried to keep you alive, even at some risk to myself. No one has more of a vested interest in the survival of his livestock than the farmer, after all, even if he does occasionally slaughter an inferior animal. I have given you food—”
“Food you had no use for yourself? You sacrificed nothing!”
“That’s true, of course. But you needed it, remember that. Whatever my motives, I have helped you to survive here—you and many others. By doing so I also acted in my own self-interest, of course, but can you have experienced this camp and still believe in things like altruism? What difference does it make what my reason for helping was—I still helped you, didn’t I?”
“Sophistries!” Bruckman said. “Rationalizations! You twist words to justify yourself, but you can’t disguise what you really are—a monster!”
Wernecke smiled gently, as though Bruckman’s words amused him, and made as if to pass by, but Bruckman raised an arm to bar his way. They did not touch each other, but Wernecke stopped short, and a new and quivering kind of tension sprang into existence in the air between them.
“I’ll stop you,” Bruckman said. “Somehow I’ll stop you, I’ll keep you from doing this terrible thing—”
“You’ll do nothing,” Wernecke said. His voice was hard and cold and flat, like a rock speaking. “What can you do? Tell the other prisoners? Who would believe you? They’d think you’d gone insane. Tell the Nazis, then?” Wernecke laughed harshly. “They’d think you’d gone crazy too, and they’d take you to the hospital—and I don’t have to tell you what your chances of getting out of there alive are, do I? No, you’ll do nothing.”
Wernecke took a step forward; his eyes were shiny and blank and hard, like ice, like the pitiless eyes of a predatory bird, and Bruckman felt a sick rush of fear cut through his anger. Bruckman gave way, stepping backward involuntarily, and Wernecke pushed past him, seeming to brush him aside without touching him.
Once past, Wernecke turned to stare at Bruckman, and Bruckman had to summon up all the defiance that remained in him not to look uneasily away from Wernecke’s agate-hard eyes. “You are the strongest and cleverest of all the other animals, Isadore,” Wernecke said in a calm, conversational, almost ruminative voice. “You have been useful to me. Every shepherd needs a good sheepdog. I still need you, to help me manage the others, and to help me keep them going long enough to serve my needs. This is the reason why I have taken so much time with you, instead of just killing you outright.” He shrugged. “So let us both be rational about this—you leave me alone, Isadore, and I will leave you alone also. We will stay away from each other and look after our own affairs. Yes?”
“The others . . .” Bruckman said weakly.
“They must look after themselves,” Wernecke said. He smiled, a thin and almost invisible motion of his lips. “What did I teach you, Isadore? Here everyone must look after themselves. What difference does it make what happens to the others? In a few weeks almost all of them will be dead anyway.”
“You are a monster,” Bruckman said.
“I’m not much different from you, Isadore. The strong survive, whatever the cost.”
“I am nothing like you,” Bruckman said, with loathing.
“No?” Wernecke asked, ironically, and moved away; within a few paces he was hobbling and stooping, vanishing into the shadows, once more the harmless old Jew.
Bruckman stood motionless for a moment, and then, moving slowly and reluctantly, he stepped across to where Wernecke’s victim lay.
It was one of the new men Wernecke had been talking to earlier in the evening, and, of course, he was quite dead.
Shame and guilt took Bruckman then, emotions he thought he had forgotten—black and strong and bitter, they shook him by the throat the way Wernecke had shaken the new man.
Bruckman couldn’t remember returning across the room to his sleeping platform, but suddenly he was there, lying on his back and staring into the stifling darkness, surrounded by the moaning, thrashing, stinking mass of sleepers. His hands were clasped protectively over his throat, although he couldn’t remember putting them there, and he was shivering convulsively. How many mornings had he awoken with a dull ache in his neck, thinking it no more than the habitual body-aches and strained muscles they had all learned to take for granted? How many nights had Wernecke fed on him?
Every time Bruckman closed his eyes, he would see Wernecke’s face floating there in the luminous darkness behind his eyelids . . . Wernecke with his eyes half-closed, his face vulpine and cruel and satiated . . . Wernecke’s face moving closer and closer to him, his eyes opening like black pits, his lips smiling back from his teeth . . . Wernecke’s lips, sticky and red with blood . . . and then Bruckman would seem to feel the wet touch of Wernecke’s lips on his throat, feel Wernecke’s teeth biting into his flesh, and Bruckman’s eyes would fly open again. Staring into the darkness. Nothing there. Nothing there yet . . .
Dawn was a dirty gray imminence against the cabin window before Bruckman could force himself to lower his shielding arms from his throat, and once again he had not slept at all.
That day’s work was a nightmare of pain and exhaustion for Bruckman, harder than anything he had known since his first few days at the camp. Somehow he forced himself to get up, somehow he stumbled outside and up the path to the quarry, seeming to float along high off the ground, his head a bloated balloon, his feet a thousand miles away at the end of boneless beanstalk legs he could barely control at all. Twice he fell, and was kicked several times before he could drag himself back to his feet and lurch forward again. The sun was coming up in front of them, a hard red disk in a sickly yellow sky, and to Bruckman it seemed to be a glazed and lidless eye staring dispassionately
into the world to watch them flail and struggle and die, like the eye of a scientist peering into a laboratory maze.
He watched the disk of the sun as he stumbled toward it; it seemed to bob and shimmer with every painful step, expanding, swelling and bloating until it swallowed the sky . . .
Then he was picking up a rock, moaning with the effort, feeling the rough stone tear his hands . . .
Reality began to slide away from Bruckman. There were long periods when the world was blank, and he would come slowly back to himself as if from a great distance, and hear his own voice speaking words that he could not understand, or keening mindlessly, or grunting in a hoarse, animalistic way, and he would find that his body was working mechanically, stooping and lifting and carrying, all without volition . . .
A Musselmänn, Bruckman thought, I’m becoming a Musselmänn . . . and felt a chill of fear sweep through him. He fought to hold onto the world, afraid that the next time he slipped away from himself he would not come back, deliberately banging his hands into the rocks, cutting himself, clearing his head with pain.
The world steadied around him. A guard shouted a hoarse admonishment at him and slapped his rifle butt, and Bruckman forced himself to work faster, although he could not keep himself from weeping silently with the pain his movements cost him.
He discovered that Wernecke was watching him, and stared back defiantly, the bitter tears still runneling his dirty cheeks, thinking, I won’t become a Musselmänn for you, l won’t make it easy for you, 1 won’t provide another helpless victim for you . . . Wernecke met Bruckman’s gaze for a moment, and then shrugged and turned away.
Bruckman bent for another stone, feeling the muscles in his back crack and the pain drive in like knives. What had Wernecke been thinking, behind the blankness of his expressionless face? Had Wernecke, sensing his weakness, marked Bruckman for his next victim? Had Wernecke been disappointed or dismayed by the strength of Bruckman’s will to survive? Would Wernecke now settle upon someone else?
Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois Page 49
