Children of the Dusk

by Berliner, Janet

  You must live his dybbuk's voices had told him. You have not yet fulfilled your destiny.

  Survival, Solomon! Therein lies your duty! There are things to be done that only you can do. Only God has the right to order the universe.

  God and not Hitler! he told himself bitterly. That madman and his insane designs on Madagascar had to be stopped. Hitler did not intend to make the island a homeland for Jews, a haven safe from a Europe that would like to obliterate them. It would not be a sanctuary but the world's largest prison camp. A place where Hitler could pen up Jewish assets and abilities and use them for his own evil ends. He remembered a joke Bruqah told him on the Altmark, which was no more funny now. Referring to a British pirate village that had once existed on the far side of Madagascar, he'd said, "This be the other side of Hell-ville."

  How, Sol wondered desperately, are we to stop this insanity and escape at the same time?

  "That awful man...the Zana-Malata!" Miriam whispered, slipping a hand up into Sol's and clutching her belly with the other as she rocked back and forth. "This place! I can't make it, Sol. I hurt. I...I hurt, Sol."

  Stooping beside her, Bruqah put his hand on her stomach and tilted his head as if he were listening to something or someone. "Your baby will come soon, Lady Miri," he said. "You must rest."

  Sol sat down on the grass, and placed his hands atop Miriam's, on her belly. How many days before the baby arrived? "We will escape this somehow," he said. "But we need to learn the terrain first, and gain strength."

  "You speak wisely," Bruqah said, standing up. "When time comes, I help."

  "What will you call the...our...child?" Sol asked Miriam, seeking more than anything to distract her.

  She looked into his eyes, and he could see her love for him through her pain. "Erich, if it's a boy," she answered. "I must. I am his wife, by Hitler's law. If it's a girl? Erich doesn't want a girl--"

  "What name would you choose for our daughter?"

  "She will be...Deborah."

  The three syllables seemed to tumble from her lips and hang in the hot, wet air.

  "Deborah," Solomon repeated dreamily. Then his body tensed and a cobalt-blue light engulfed the space around him.

  A girl of about eight fights against thin ropes that bind her, naked, to a carved wooden post almost twice her height. She runs her fingers along its chipped designs. Perhaps thirty other intricately carved posts are grouped behind her, each topped with the skull of an ox. In the background, beyond a flickering fire, stand monoliths and menhirs that evoke Stonehenge. Then, as though a sound machine were turned on, her voice breaks through into Sol's consciousness as she twists in terror against the ropes. "Help me, Papa. Help me!" she cries out. "I am Deborah. Why do you not know me!"

  The light faded and his body went slack as he emerged from the psychic flash, one he had experienced several times since the dybbuk had left him. The prophetic dreams of a visionary and psychic, according to Beadle Cohen. "Deborah, the prophetess and judge. The fighter who was instrumental in freeing the ancient Israelites from the Canaanites," Sol said.

  Hope from a well Solomon had long since thought dry flooded his being. "Perhaps, after all," he said, "there will be a next year in Jerusalem."

  CHAPTER TWO

  "Deborah means 'bee' in Old Hebrew," Miriam said. It took her a moment to remember how she knew that. The information came from the mouth of Judith, whom she did not know--who probably did not even exist--yet whose presence had been haunting her in these last days of pregnancy.

  "As there are no monkeys, so there are no common bees in all Madagascar," Bruqah said. "It is fitting name for first woman--"

  He seemed to be talking to himself, Miriam thought, assuming him to mean the first Jewish girl-child born in this place.

  "How would you know that meaning," Sol said, frowning at her. "You have not studied such things."

  "Judith told Emanuel--"

  "Miriam!" Sol shook her reasonably gently. "What could you know of what Judith said? She was the woman in one of the visions the dybbuk brought me."

  "Perhaps the dybbuk got bored with you and decided to vacation with me for a while." She made no effort to hide her weariness or to disguise the edge of impatience that took hold whenever Sol spoke of the dybbuk. His belief in its existence inside of him and, now, in its disappearance from him, was immutable. It was also his business. On the other hand, it had caused more than enough trouble for both of them over the years.

  Seeing the hurt and confused expression in his eyes, Miriam immediately regretted her lack of self-control. The truth was, she had heard what she had heard where she said she had heard it, still she knew that Sol hated her propensity for making caustic remarks in the midst of travail. It was the ex-performer in her, she supposed. The defense mechanism of the singer-dancer that had inured her from the lust and insults of Berlin cabaret audiences who had known she was Jewish, and therefore legally available for rape...if only alcohol could help them overcome cowardice long enough to climb onstage. Sol surely understood that veneer. He had one himself, only he called it philosophy.

  Distracted by introspection, she at first ignored an unfamiliar buzzing that was attempting to penetrate her consciousness. When it became so intense it was almost a thrumming, she looked upward to find its source. All that she could see against the canopy of tree and sky was Bruqah, staring with fearful eyes toward the outer fringes of the rain forest.

  She made a lethargic attempt to push herself to her feet.

  "Get down!" the Malagasy yelled.

  Even as the words left his mouth, a dark cloud emerged from the surrounding forest and spread across what little sun remained. The shadow touched Miriam and she squinted upward. Panic set her heart racing like waves against the shoreline as the darkness deepened. All human sound stopped in the clearing as heads and eyes turned upward.

  A quiet whirring began high in the air. Starting pianissimo, it grew rapidly into a crescendo that drowned out the incessant calling of the lemurs and chittering of the birds. Mesmerized, prisoners, guards and dogs watched the dark cloud move toward them. When it looked as if it would envelop them, the guards came to life, pointing their carbines this way and that.

  "The hand of God," said quietly.

  As if in answer, the sun went black, and Miriam realized the cloud was alive.

  Grasshoppers swarmed in from all sides, the cloud so thick that guards and prisoners alike danced and batted and cursed the deluge of whirring, maddening, gray-green wings. Sol threw himself across Miriam, who could not stop herself from whimpering with fear as the insects, some as long as fifteen or eighteen centimeters, alighted in her hair and on her face.

  "Get them off me, Sol, get them off!" she yelled, batting at them to no avail.

  He fought them, but it was a losing battle. They invaded his clothes, and then his nostrils and ears. He tore at his shirt and hair. Around him, Nazis jerked like marionettes. The dogs howled and leaped and snapped, or ran in terrified circles.

  Sol brushed the insects from Miriam's face but he was unable to stop the horde. He hugged her, covered his head, and squeezed shut his eyes. Miriam did the same, aware of grasshoppers on the bridge of her nose, exploring her nostrils, and fluttering against her eyelids.

  Suddenly she felt Sol go rigid. His arms felt like iron around her body.

  "Not here! Not now!" she thought, knowing immediately that the trauma of the swarming had triggered a psychic episode, and that the darkness behind his lids had exploded with cobalt-blue light. When she felt his body go slack, she knew that the vision held him in thrall. For as long as it did, he would be useless to everyone, especially to himself. Dybbuk or no dybbuk, he would always be a visionary, able to glance into the future.

  Not that it did anyone any good, Miriam thought. The visions always seemed out of context until the event was upon them.

  She felt Sol thrashing on top of her and pushed him off her belly. The vision had apparently ended, she thought, curious despite her skepticism
and her fear of what was happening around--and on--them.

  "Solomon?"

  The word emerged as a whisper. Sol rolled fully off her and looked around. He appeared to be dazed by fear and by the spectacle of the meadow, seemingly so benign when they had emerged from the track that ran up the rain forested hill, acrawl with myriad insects. Most of the grasshoppers had settled, and were eating. Now and again a few whirred into the air, only to alight again on the closest solid object. The Nazis and prisoners were brushing themselves off, the insects suddenly listless after the fury with which they had arrived. The guards wore sheepish expressions, a result, apparently, of their cowardice before something as innocuous as grasshoppers, disturbing though they were in a swarm. The prisoners picked off the insects gingerly, unafraid, unhurried. After all, what was an insect, after what they had endured in the camps and during the long, dark voyage in the Altmark's hold?

  The dogs shook themselves and pranced about like pups, sniffing the intruders. Except we are the intruders here, Miriam thought.

  "Solomon?" she asked again. "What did you see?"

  "A blue fog broken by sentry towers," he said. "Within the fog, people moved amorphous as ghosts. I felt ringed by darkness, by the fog, and by the moving bodies that stayed at the center of my sight, like players on a stage. Then bats winged past, hundreds of them, smelling of oranges--"

  "Bats?" Miriam shuddered.

  "I was holding a machine gun. I could feel the vibration of it. I squeezed the trigger, once, twice, three times, unable to stop, and laughed as spent cartridges flew from the weapon. Below, people shrieked and swore, and always there were the bats, soaring into the line of fire, bursting like balloons--"

  He stopped, and she realized he was not looking at her. She followed his gaze and stared upward, transfixed, past the foliage.

  Sweeping in arcs across the waning light were fruit bats. She had seen them in the half light of predawn, when the Altmark weighed anchor in the lagoon. They had hung like black lingerie from the trees just inside the forest perimeter, and Bruqah had regaled her with tales of what delicious stew they made, pungent with the odor of the fruit on which they gorged.

  But they had not come to gorge on fruit.

  They had come for the grasshoppers.

  Grateful for his protection, Miriam allowed Sol to cover her head with his arm as the bats wheeled down to feast. Though she knew they had not come to hurt her, this was hardly her idea of a day at the Tiergarten.

  She closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, her fear having given way to curiosity, she saw that the grasshoppers were still feeding on the grasses, oblivious or uncaring that they in turn were being eaten.

  "I'm all right now, Sol," she said.

  He removed his arm from her head and started to rise. As if on signal, the insects took flight. The flurry, followed by the bats again taking wing, nearly bowled him over. He sat down hard on the ground.

  Miriam chuckled. "I don't mean to laugh at you, Sol," she said, "but this is all too crazy for words. What else can one do but laugh?"

  When the last of the bats had flitted away into the shadows, she turned over and sat up. She felt amazingly calm as Bruqah helped her to her feet.

  "I suppose you're going to tell me those were the spirits of the dead on this island where the dead dream," Miriam said, her voice almost jocular.

  "Perhaps," he replied, "they be messengers from the dead."

  She shook her head in exasperation and brushed herself off. Bruqah took hold of her wrists.

  "You are bonded to the child you carry, Lady Miri," he said seriously. "Bruqah is bonded to this land." His eyes searched hers. "Maybe you chase away ghosts, you and Solly and the baby. But do not think the grasshoppers they come by--how do you call it--by coincident. Nothing happen by accident here."

  Sol nodded, and Miriam felt the echo of her own earlier musings. Maybe Solomon was right. Perhaps there was a reason for everything, and if so, perhaps this insanity would eventually make sense.

  But all of that notwithstanding, right now it was not reason that she sought. What she really wanted was a hot bath, a loofah to scrub away some of her weariness, and a real bed with a real mattress.

  All of which, she thought, labeled her--and not Solomon--as the ultimate dreamer.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Erich stood in the middle of the compound, watching the Jews use block and tackle to hoist logs for the three sentry towers. Other Jews were building the tall crib that would serve as a water tower. The camp would never survive on the meager spring at the bottom of the knoll.

  He was oddly proud of the efficiency of the Jews, managing to complete so much work in two days.

  The Jews!

  Next he'd be calling Hitler the Savior. Had he allowed the Party, with its insidious and constant propaganda, to infect his mind like those idiots had at the Passion Play at Oberammergau? He had gone there for solace and, he had told himself, spiritual healing after those sleepless nights in the Black Forest, where he had taken his advanced Abwehr training. Someone in the audience had whispered "Berlin" when Bethlehem was mentioned, and suddenly the program had taken on new meaning. By the time Christ was raised upon the Cross, people's eyes had become bright with anger and resolve. It hadn't taken genius to read their faces. The Jews had killed Him, of course. It was always the Jews. The audience, though, would not let that happen again. They would not crucify the new Messiah, for if the audience had its way, there would be no more Jews.

  No, he thought. He might have been gullible then, but not now, when he knew the real Hitler. Not the public man who stood on the Reichschancellery balcony and fluttered his hands like small birds, as Solomon's papa used to say. The one who thought nothing of insisting that a young Abwehr officer--who may not have loved the Party, but certainly his country and his Führer--put a bullet in the brain of his favorite dog, the only unwavering friend he had ever known. All because Achilles had bitten one of their screeching Pfaueninsel peacocks. What had the Führer expected, when the damn thing was strutting around like a long-lashed transvestite whore?

  As for Taurus, Killi's daughter, he had begun to live with the morbid feeling that she was nearing the end of her capacity to survive in this unrelenting heat and humidity. The dampness aggravated the existing inflammation in her hips; an open invitation to disaster. Her disability had increased markedly since they'd arrived--though perhaps the defect simply was more noticeable now that the animal was free of the ship's confines.

  With only minor satisfaction, he watched the log floor of the headquarters tent being emplaced. Next to it stood the medical tent, the first structure to be finished. He wanted to visit Taurus, to comfort her, but to go to the medical tent could mean seeing Miriam, and he didn't want a confrontation. Instead, he reached out, as he had done so many times, and touched Taurus's mind with his own. A dull throbbing grew in his hip, as he took some of her pain onto himself, trying to ease her burden for a short time. How he detested his inability to help her more!

  Angered, his thoughts returned to the people who had sent him here. He would show them all, Adolph Hitler included, he reassured himself. He would oversee the building of the base camp here on Mangabéy, and the creation of the docks at the mouth of the Antabalana River, over on the mainland. He would stand with his zodiac team of trainers and shepherds and watch the first voyagers of the greatest exodus in history disembark from the ships from Europe. But Madagascar would not be another concentration camp. As far as he was concerned, his charges were colonists--not slaves or prisoners. If every one of them happened to be of the Jewish faith and that satisfied the Reich's larger plan, so much the better.

  Come what may, he would spit in the Führer's eye. Whatever Hitler wanted he would get, but not the way he wanted it. He, Colonel Erich Alois, would see to that. At the top of the list was presenting the head of Major Otto Hempel on a stick. On the beach on a stick, turned toward the East, so the son-of-a-bitch could watch the sun rise each morning while t
he flesh rotted off his face. He would crush them all. All. Whatever it took.

  Erich lit a cheroot and watched the match burn down. Deliberately, he let it singe the unfeeling flesh of his damaged left hand. He stared at the skin, fishbelly white ever since his fingers were caught in a falling sewer grate during childhood. Despite the lack of full use of his hand and by virtue of his unwavering regard for what it meant to be a soldier, he had risen in the world of perfect Aryan men; by unfaltering compassion for the animals that were his charges, he had ventured close to the heart and soul of Germany. Had it not been for that night on Peacock Island, he might have become Hitler's personal security. As it was, he had come so close that Himmler, fearing the heat of an encroaching new power, had named him head of the Madagascar Plan and shipped him off to Africa, hopefully to be forgotten.

  Well, they would find out that he wasn't to be discarded that easily, but first he had to cure this weakness of his for compromise.

  Thinking of the Jews, his Jews, as colonists, was fine in the long term, but perhaps not immediately expedient. Hempel must not know his larger design, or the major would be on the radio to Himmler. Then it would be Erich's head on the stick.

  Along with those of all the colonists.

  He and his trainers were all that stood between Hempel and the colonists' slaughter. The major had no more wanted an African assignment than he himself had. Why Hempel had not turned it down was a mystery.

  Because he wanted to kill the Jews?

  Ridiculous, Erich thought. Hempel could have done that much more conveniently in Sachsenhausen.

  Erich came to the same conclusion he had come to each time he'd posed the question: Hempel was in Africa because of him. That and some other agenda which had not yet come clear. Meanwhile, Hempel would try to kill the colonists--for himself, for Hitler, for the Reich. For whatever sick reasons he gave himself. Like the good people of Oranienburg; Erich had watched them last April, spending Easter sunrise stoning Jews for Jesus.