by Michele Lang
I too had defied my mother and the old ways to claim life on my own terms. I had broken with the past, with my mother’s restraint, and I well understood these girls’ ferocious despair.
We fought the good fight, together. Thus began a brief, but brilliant reign of terror orchestrated by the Hashomer against the Nazi administration in Kraków.
With Asher’s and Chana’s help, we disappeared into the forest, set up our camp not far from Yankel’s clearing. The boys and girls dug hiding places into the ground and brought provisions for the little army.
And then we planned our first attack by night, not three days after we arrived. I translated for both Gisele and Raziel, and back again for the Hashomer.
“The Nazis are flexing their muscles,” Viktor began. “We got word that they’ve arrested dozens of professors from Jagiellonian University, and shut the banks. They are proclaiming Kraków an ur-German city.”
Raziel and I looked at each other. “You know what that means,” I said. “Anyone not German is going to cease to exist.”
“Nonsense,” Viktor said. “They will need workers, lots of workers to feed the war machine. They may hate us, but they need us.”
I looked at Gisele, who was sitting near the cooking fire with her hands folded. I expected to see her twitching, crying, or otherwise in the throes of prophecy, but she sat quite calmly, a smile playing over her face.
“They need us to die,” Gisele said. “They need us to die to feed their killing machine. Demons need tormented souls. Vampires need blood. Nazis need ideology, they need to grind the innocent into the dirt. You seem to think that Hitler’s army is Napoleon’s, reborn. No. These are the servants of Moloch. They worship death and evil. Either we stop them, or we all die.”
I translated her dark words in a monotone. We all sat, struck dumb by Gisele’s happy little speech, thinking no doubt of all that we had already lost.
Yankel’s voice pierced the silence. “The girl speaks true. I have sensed this evil as well. A great calamity is upon us, and long have I prayed to the Lord to avert the harsh decree. He answered me. He sent you all. We may die fighting these evil men. But at least we die fighting.”
“To live is a more effective victory.” Viktor’s voice was dry; he alone seemed unmoved by Gisele’s and Yankel’s words. “We must retreat, if what you say is true.”
“Yes, but it will not be enough to stop the Germans,” I said. “No place is safe, retreat is not possible. Get those who cannot fight away, yes! But those of us who want to fight, must fight.”
“I will stay and fight,” Yankel said. The words seemed absurd: Yankel was too feeble to lift a gun, let alone fire one. But his declaration of war electrified the very air.
All of us now understood that the battle we fought was fundamentally a magical one, a clash of wills. And in that invisible, cosmic battle, Yankel’s power was formidable indeed.
“Every day, troops and supplies come in through the main rail yard. That is the Nazi nerve center of Kraków,” Raziel said.
“We’ve got to blow it up,” I said.
“It won’t be easy,” Viktor said with a sigh. “You really think a dozen, two dozen people can do it?”
“With the right people, yes. And you have a witch of the blood on your side.”
A heavy stillness settled over the group. I knew my magic frightened and disturbed them, but it was better to address their fear directly now, before we got down to the serious fighting.
“With the proper spells, I can blow that rail yard into oblivion better than a kilo of dynamite.”
“But—”
“Say it, Viktor. I’m as bad as the Nazis? No. I’m a danger to the mortals around me? Again, no.”
He sighed. “The central committee of the Hashomer will have my head for this. We Zionists have pledged to win our battles honestly, without magic.”
“Well then, die with integrity.” My patience was at its breaking point. It was only with great difficulty that I kept my voice calm. “Or, fight magic with magic, and live to see your precious Palestine.”
A low murmur rose among the Hashomer, and Viktor’s girlfriend Mina whispered urgently into his ear.
“Mina says you are worse than demons. If that is so, good that you fight on our side.”
Viktor’s smile was grudging, but it meant we would attack the Nazis together. It gave me deep satisfaction to resolve to fight, and to use everything that I had in me. Now that fate had brought me into Poland, I meant to stop as many Nazis as I could, and I would do it whether or not I had mortals to help me.
I had Raziel, I had Gisele and Yankel. And, as my final, secret weapon, I had Asmodel. I could secure his services for a fatal price, but if I had to, I was willing to pay it.
We would attack the rail yards later that night.
* * *
It was time to gather, witching hour, four in the morning. Yankel and Gisele joined me, Raziel, and the Hashomer in the forest to say good-bye.
“I promised you,” Yankel said softly, his face gray with weariness. “Refesh, Ruach…”
He muttered the Hebrew prayers under his breath, sounding careless and unmoved; I stole a glance at Raziel. He nodded in time to the watchmaker’s words, completely engrossed by Yankel’s casual-sounding prayer.
Suddenly, a chill shot down my spine. My body responded to his words before my mind could understand them.
Yankel was raising golems.
The ground itself began to undulate at his feet, as if the mud had turned into ocean waves. Gisele, standing behind him, touched the locket at her neck.
But Yankel had no need of a demon to work his miracles. As he had said the night I’d met him, Yankel’s miracles came straight from heaven, no magic required.
His prayer became a little song, nothing special or operatic, a lullaby, a nursery rhyme. And a half-dozen men made of crumbly, wet mud grew up out of the ground.
Yankel raised his hands, and Hebrew letters glowed upon their half-dozen muddy foreheads, blocked in places by dead leaves or little twigs, but clearly legible to anybody who could read them.
The mud men joined hands, shuffled around Yankel in a clumsy hora, then turned to face us, the fighters.
Yankel’s song was done. We stared at the golems in the sudden and complete silence. This was the stuff of Jewish legend; the Hashomer accepted the golems into our ranks without a word of protest.
Our band now included Raziel, sixteen Hashomer, and myself, with the six golems raised by Yankel to serve as an unkillable rear guard. The golems made me nervous; they smelled like swamp water, and they left a wake of footprints clearly marking our passage. A signpost could not have pointed the way to the refugee camp more clearly than those muddy tracks.
We were in a fierce and murderous mood. Thoughts of consequences and reprisals did not yet trouble us. Our goal was simple: destroy the rail depot in Kraków and make it that much more difficult for Nazis to ship weapons, soldiers, and supplies into the city. Viktor insisted that we also concentrate on remaining alive: if this action was a success, he wanted to tell the entire underground network in Poland, and accelerate the uprising as quickly as possible.
“Perhaps we can end the war almost before it starts,” I murmured to Raziel as we marched along through the darkness, following Viktor and his blond girlfriend back into Kraków. “If we stop the Nazis in Poland, kick them out even, the French and the English—”
“Forget the French and the English,” Raziel said. Unlike the rest of us, he sounded war-weary, pessimistic. It reminded me how very old he was compared to the rest of us. Raziel was no stranger to martyrs, noble and pointless sacrifices, to empires crumbling and entire peoples disappearing in conquest. “They won’t come to our aid. It’s Czechoslovakia all over again.”
“But this time the French and English both declared war against the Germans!” I said. A little stone had worked its way into the heel of my shoe, and I paused a moment to get it out before it raised a blister on my heel. The
Hashomer stretched ahead, not pausing for us, and the golems mindlessly lurched behind.
I saw that Raziel’s shoelaces were untied, and after a moment’s hesitation, I reached for his feet and tied them for him. I smiled up at him from where I knelt, and then I rose to stand beside him.
Raziel and I stood together in the moonlight. “What were you saying?” I asked, for the first time wavering in my determination to kill Nazis. “Are you saying that we are doomed to fail?”
For answer, he leaned forward and kissed me, not gently as he had the day he had first come to me as a man in Budapest, but roughly and with bruising passion, the kiss of a man fighting for his life.
I had no choice but to surrender to that kiss: it electrified me, sent shock waves of desire through my body. Finally he released me, and I looked up into his eyes, my lips whisker-scratched and tender, my pulse racing.
“We will blow up the rail yard,” Raziel said. “And the Nazi hornets will swarm. Undoubtedly, it will distract the Nazis from their work—but their focus will be upon us.”
He raked his fingers through my hair, hugged me close to him, and again he bewitched me with his scent of cinnamon and musk, with his wildly beating human heart.
I pulled him along the muddy track the golems had left behind, and together we raced to rejoin the others. But now my heart was heavy, where before it was innocent and well armored for battle.
* * *
At this time of night, the tracks were all but deserted. Two of the Hashomer made a diversionary attack on the guardhouse, and a large group of soldiers responded to their shouts and gunshots by leaping out after them, in the other direction.
“Quickly!” Viktor whispered, his face covered in a film of sweat. “Do it now—or it will be too late.”
I have no facility with inanimate objects. Other witches refract magic through gems, and goblins often work iron. My magic is of souls. I can summon them, find them, compel them to my will. I can protect them with my wards, and I can pull a soul right out of its living body.
But a railroad track has no soul.
In the far distance, the mournful whistle of a munitions train sounded. I sensed the frantic agitation of the engineer, his unverified but unshakable conviction that something was terribly wrong.
I forced the engineer’s hand to push the throttle forward, to make the train speed up, not slow down.
“Put a barrier on the tracks!” I screamed above the rising din. The engineer tried to put on the brakes, but I sent a burning into his left hand. He tried to let go of the throttle but I wouldn’t let him.
The Hashomer tossed a veritable junkyard of wire scraps, junk metal, and cinders over the tracks. Raziel shoved a huge barrel of pitch onto the tracks, and it fell over and split open.
Viktor’s girlfriend Mina raced forward and uncoupled the tracks by using the manual switch. If our pile of junk didn’t derail the train, it would fly off the track a hundred meters down the line, right before the guardhouse.
“Get back!” I screamed, my cries now drowned out by the shriek of the onrushing train. We leapt into the darkness and hid in the shadows as the train plowed into the pile of garbage at full speed.
The barrel of pitch disintegrated with a splintering crash, and the wheels scraped over the piles of baling wire, pieces of fence, and the cinders with a sickening crunch.
The train crushed over it all and hit the uncoupled tracks, slowed only a little by the debris. The train hurtled off the rails, and like a giant fist the engine smashed into the guardhouse itself.
The engineer emerged, screaming obscenities in German, and Viktor picked him off with a blast from the shotgun—he and I were huddled only about ten meters away.
The rear car contained a small contingent of soldiers, sent, I suppose, to guard the ordnance on the train, and we started shooting at them from the shadows.
Raziel shot into the overturned side of one of the cars, and a ragged explosion blew over the top: the car contained gunpowder or ammunition. A fire began to rage, and bullets began popping like popcorn in the flames.
A siren sounded in the distance; I was nearly deafened by the explosions. “Let’s go,” Viktor yelled, and Raziel simultaneously waved us away with his arms.
We ran for our lives, the golems staying behind to make a muddy last stand. We wanted the Germans to think that the golems alone could achieve this level of destruction, to focus on golems instead of human partisans.
I heard the silent shuffle of their great, muddy feet, their swampy bodies like walking sandbags taking the force of the bullets aimed at us.
All of us had survived the initial attack, even the two Hashomer who had courageously attacked the guardhouse. Our mission was a success.
But as we ran for the safety of the forest, my heart remained heavy. We had not taken any ammunition or weapons off the train for ourselves. Only the Nazi engineer had died, not even the soldiers for sure. Raziel was right: all we had done was stir up the hornets’ nest. Time to see how hard these hornets could sting.
If only I had used Asmodel …
Yankel had his own path to miracles, the way of his fathers. My mother had learned and followed the Lazarus creed, before she died. As for me, I didn’t know what the Lazarus creed would say about my spellcasting, whether according to my people’s law I was doing right or wrong. I was going to have to figure out my path for myself, to survive a world that had come undone.
And my fate was all tangled up in Asmodel’s. Without taming him or destroying him somehow, I could do no more than I had done in the Hashomer raid on the rail yard.
The raid was a tremendous success, and it still was not enough. In the end, our triumph endured less than a week. But while it lasted, it was glorious.
14
Gisele did nothing to put my worries to rest. Raziel led the warriors back to the forest, while Viktor and I, in a last-minute decision, made for Hashomer headquarters in Kraków. We wanted to spread the word of our exploits, and plan how to make the most of them.
Imagine our surprise when, opening the door to Viktor’s dusty little office over the pharmacist’s shop on Miodowa Street, we found my sister Gisele, framed by the big window by Viktor’s desk, the new light filtering through the venetian blinds and striping her face with strange, tribal bars of shadow.
“How did you get in here?” Viktor said warily.
“It’s my sister, you know, and she speaks no Polish.”
I was angry with her, for instead of greeting us with joy, as conquering victors, Gisi merely stood by the window, her enormous eyes as wide as a baby doll’s, her rosebud lips pursed tight.
“Let me speak to her. This won’t happen again.”
Viktor shrugged and lit a cigarette, and after a long appraising look at the two of us, he slipped back out the still-open front door.
We listened to his footsteps reverberating down the creaky wooden stairs to the street. As soon as the sounds faded away, I turned on her, barely able to restrain my annoyance now. “What are you doing? Viktor, Mina, and the rest are spooked enough by the two of us. Why are you sneaking into his office and scaring him worse?”
“I had to come, Magda,” she replied, low, in her soft, scratchy voice. She leaned her head against the dusty windowpane and sighed. “Chana got me here and the door was unlocked. I let myself in.”
“But how did you know I would be coming here and not to the forest? Even I didn’t know until after we were finished at the rail yard.”
But I didn’t need to ask that question. Gisele had always just known. Her magic didn’t manifest itself in great works, in terrible spells. My little sister just knew. About too much. It was a great gift and a great burden, all at once.
She stared past me, as if I were a ghost. “I’m afraid for you, Magduska.” Her voice trembled, and she gave me that big-eyed look again, as if she were looking at a ghost.
I took refuge in my grumpiness. “Don’t waste your time worrying about me.” I sauntered to Viktor’s desk
and sat down on his creaky office chair with the cracked leather. It felt so good to get off my aching, blistered feet.
I surveyed the world from behind Viktor’s desk. From this vantage point, Gisele looked small and frightened and helpless—a problem, an obstacle to victory.
“I came here to warn you.” An edge of my mother’s judgmental voice crept into Gisele’s from beyond the grave.
“Warn me of what? That fighting Nazis is dangerous? My darling, I could have told you that.”
Gisele took a half step toward me, then seemed to think better of it. She shook her head. “You know the attack on the rail yard was madness.”
I had to laugh. “Since when has that stopped me? Sanity would have us meekly marching into the ovens you foresee, you know.”
“You don’t understand.” She sighed with frustration and hugged herself. “At first, being with Yankel stopped my visions. I thought it was his goodness but now I understand, after this night—I have entered my visions, we are living them now. I see you in the darkness. It’s like a nightmare become real. Eva’s gone too, into a place of danger and death. Did you know she has become a spy? She is hiding within a world of illusion, but you are in more danger than she is.”
My heart twisted when I realized Gisele’s visions now included me—and Eva, too. I cringed at the thought of her lost in a tangle of lies and espionage. “Eva? What’s happened to her? What do you foresee?”
Gisele shook her head impatiently. “This isn’t about prophecy, it’s about you. Eva dances with the devil, but she knows what she is doing, the price that she must pay. And she serves the greater good. But will you? I see you heading into a dark place, with a fearsome adversary. If you don’t stop now, part of you will die there.”
Poor Gisele, I could never have borne her burdens. But I still had my own battles to fight, no matter how much she suffered. “You must admit, in the short term, this was a brilliant strike, the rail yard.” I was still too proud of our success to succumb to her dire words. I was sick of having to believe her; her visions were so vividly awful.
