Children of the Dusk

by Berliner, Janet

  Fermi's dark brows tugged down in concern, and for a moment Erich wondered if the trainers might also mutiny--in an effort to save their dogs. Then, with pleasure, he saw their faces harden like those of their shepherds.

  "Zodiac!" Fermi uttered, and everyone murmured in assent.

  "Who'll take one o'clock?" Holten-Pflug asked.

  Erich patted his MP38. "This," he said, "will take Aquarius' place."

  "And the center position?"

  "We are all the center. Or else there is no center."

  Glancing toward the ghetto, he saw that the Zana-Malata was in that sector, and Hempel was at five o'clock--Taurus' area. How serendipitous, he thought, his excitement growing.

  "Spread the dogs wide and let them ease in close so they can attack before too many guards can raise their weapons. When I signal, use your pistols to take out anyone else in your sector."

  To hell with saving some of these Kalanaro, he told himself. There was a compound to control. If all the pygmies in the compound got killed, he would find some other way to acquire the pitchblende. Find other Kalanaro.

  "Ready?"

  The guards nodded. Erich could feel their resolve and the dogs' sense of battle. Just like during those early days at the estate. Unified.

  He counted Mausers. Only ten guards were holding weapons, plus Hempel with his Mann. Perfect. Eleven dogs, eleven deaths. Glancing up anxiously toward the sentries in the towers, he saw that they too were watching the Kalanaro sideshow. Once the attack began they would initially withhold fire, he figured, to avoid hitting their comrades.

  Taurus would tear out Hempel's throat before the major had time to utter much more than a strangled scream.

  Erich smiled to himself as the trainers and dogs moved into position. It was going to be like wolves slaughtering sheep.

  He made a small, circular motion with his hand, signaling the trainers to release their charges, then unhooked and patted Taurus. She perked up her ears when he unobtrusively pointed toward Hempel. Good girl, he said silently. Kill him. Kill him for Papa.

  Their muzzles removed, the dogs hunkered down as they spread silently out along the edges of the light. Each is an extension of its trainer, Erich thought proudly, the culmination of years of effort and drill.

  He lay down and, savoring the moment as the dogs closed upon the guards and Kalanaro, rested the submachine gun on a hillock of dirt and took aim on the syphilitic. He would shoot the bastard right in that stinking vagina he called a mouth.

  He raised his left hand in signal and, as he jerked it down, felt a sense of power surge through him as he squeezed the trigger.

  The gun did not fire.

  The dogs did not move.

  He swore under his breath and worked the action, but no round ejected. He heard another round chamber. If he fired now, the weapon was likely to explode. Go! he desperately, soundlessly commanded the dogs as he lurched to his knees and fought with the gun.

  Around him, the trainers wrestled with their pistols. Somewhere inside his head he heard the Zana-Malata's raucous laughter, and the gunmetal began to heat in his hands.

  "Kill them!" he cried. "Kill them, Taurus!"

  He thought he could smell the pungent odor of burnt flesh. He dropped the machine pistol and stared, stupefied, at his palms. The skin was severely burned, yet in his state of somnipathy he felt neither pain nor anxiety. Then he lifted his head and saw the dogs ease down from a crouch to their bellies, tails ticking as they crawled at an oblique angle away from the guards and Kalanaro and toward the ghetto. He tried to call the animals back, but no words formed. There was nothing: not hate or anger or sound, nothing within him save emptiness and a giddy sense of the searchlight's glow.

  Taurus and the other dogs rose, shook themselves as if they had been swimming in the Wannsee. Heads down, they meandered around the outer fence until each stopped and lay down, facing the ghetto rather than the guards.

  Each in its respective position on the clock. A Zodiac position, with the wrong targets. Watching the Jews.

  "Vahilo minihana," his mind whispered. His mouth tasted the way it had after Taurus' surgery, of vomit and flour gruel.

  "Vahilo minihana." Softer still. From deep inside. An animal hunger that he could not appease, like the throbbing pain of the dysplasia, somehow transferred to his hip after the surgery.

  Slope-shouldered as a dullard, he started forward, holding the MP38 by its sling while the butt bounced along the ground. Grasshoppers sprayed up before him. He thought of stew made of dog meat, fruit bats, insects.

  Hunger.

  "Sagi?" he heard one of the trainers plead. The man had reached the dog, but the animal, watching the Jews, did not appear to notice. It eyed a prisoner who stepped forth from behind the mosquito netting.

  The dog's tongue moved. Two licks, each beginning at the back end of the mouth and moving to the front.

  Hunger.

  The Kalanaro who had been killed struggled to his feet and steadied himself with his spear. He glanced at the burn stripes across his flesh, and managed a small, crooked grin as Erich strode past him.

  Erich kept walking, eyes averted from the Kalanaro. He did not want to continue looking at the pygmy. Did not want to know that the dead had risen.

  He reached the ghetto gate. The guard opened it for him. He stood at the entrance, staring, asking himself how he could have been so stupid as to want to save these wretches. He had lost his wife's love, almost lost Taurus, and now he was losing what shred of sanity he had left. And for what?

  For them?

  If they were so important to Hempel that the major would instigate mutiny, then Hempel could have them. He, Erich, would show them--show them all--just how little the Jews meant to him.

  "Guard the prisoners!" he shouted at the dogs. "Kill any one of them that moves!"

  Head held high, Solomon moved toward him.

  Erich shouted again, and pointed, but the shepherds continued to mill, whining impatiently, looking toward the Zana-Malata.

  At last, Erich realized his mistake. It was all so simple, that he almost smiled at his own naïveté.

  The dogs had never been his. Never been chattels of civilization. They belonged to themselves--and to the syphilitic, who demanded that the only law they or anything else adhere to was that of the jungle.

  They too hungered as Erich did. They too felt an anger in the pit of their bellies that made them want to devour their enemies.

  The Totenkopfverbände took positions around the ghetto, equidistant from one another, maddeningly precise in their deployment.

  As a single being, the guards snapped their Mausers to their shoulders and sighted on the Jews.

  Teutonic efficiency, Erich thought sardonically. The German mind so exactly ordered that the nation's children emerged, as if from an assembly line, as perfectly oiled killing machines.

  Rather like the shepherds.

  Just shoot the creatures that huddle in the ghetto, and save a bullet for me, he thought.

  Anything to appease the hunger.

  For a moment, he watched the dance of the Kalanaro along the outer perimeter of the fence, then he looked longingly at the gun, wondering if Benyowsky would consider him worthy of suicide.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  When the shadow fell across the camp, Sol suffered the momentary terror of thinking he was losing the last of his sight. He was actually grateful for the reassurance of the searchlights cutting through the darkness. His participation in what followed was as much a function of relief and what felt like a reprieve with his vision, as it was a determination that he would not allow the Jews to be the butt of the Kalanaro's jokes. He did not really care what the little black men thought of them, if indeed they thought at all. But the fact was that the carnival event was put on for the amusement of Hempel and his men.

  He cared about that.

  To have had to leave Miriam in her fatigued state hurt greatly, and to his surprise seeing Erich so diminished hurt almost a
s much. It was clear to him, and not only because of the electrification of the fence, that Erich had lost control of the camp. He was drunk or hung over much of the time, he walked with difficulty and most often with a stick, bent over like an old man --or as if he would have preferred to drop to his knees and walk on all fours like his dogs.

  Even now, reappearing around the Jewish quarters from the direction of the latrines, he looked aged and defeated.

  Solomon looked at the shepherds and guards surrounding the ghetto and wondered if any prisoners would survive if Otto Hempel took full control of the camp, something he feared they would all soon have to face.

  He watched Hempel saunter toward Erich, the major smiling suavely. When the two men were less than a meter apart, Hempel halted. Then he took another step forward, as though breaking through whatever aura of invulnerability Erich might think he still possessed, and another step. The men were nearly chest to chest, Hempel with his hands raised as if expecting the formal delivery of a sword of surrender. Even with his fading eyesight, Sol could tell that the smile on the major's lips--and doubtless in his eyes--was one of overbearing disdain.

  For the first time in the more than two decades that Solomon had known him, Erich looked thoroughly defeated.

  "Your aborted attempt on my life makes you guilty of treason," the major said. "I demand that you hand over your weapon."

  Erich did not respond.

  The trainers stepped forward, crowding around the officers. They were clearly dismayed and confused.

  "Gefreiter?" Hempel asked. "Private? As of now I am your commanding officer. Obey me, or I will have you shot. You and your Jews."

  Erich's lips remained clamped shut, but his facial muscles had gone slack; he appeared incapable of lifting his eyes above Hempel's belt buckle. With a shudder, Sol remembered where he'd seen that apathetic, wearied expression before. Schmuckstück. Costume jewelry: the living dead--those in Sachsenhausen who had given up hope.

  "Gefreiter!"

  Hempel's face had reddened with wrath. His eyes narrowed like those of a fossa. "Pick your targets," he hissed to the guards, without taking his gaze off Erich. "Choose any who appears weak or without proper respect toward the Reich. Fire in rotation. One round per Jew!"

  Turning his head to compensate for his limited vision, Solomon watched his fellow prisoners straighten and draw into a tight circle, facing outward like musk ox to a storm, eyes cold with determination. Gone was the fear and the hope of the past. In place of both was the look of men for whom death held no mystery. Some gripped tent-pole spears--the canopy sagging where the poles had been removed--others had rocks and sharpened sticks retrieved from God knew where, still others held their wooden clogs like spanking paddles.

  Even those with bare fists clearly intended to die fighting.

  Or in the pose of fighting, Sol thought with a feeling of sad certainty. Of what value were such Maccabean heroics against Mausers?

  He wondered if a scapegoat could satisfy the need for blood.

  Could he trade his life for a reprieve, however temporary, for the lives of his fellow prisoners?

  There was only one way to find out, and that was to find out. Bracing himself for the agony of a bullet, he took an exaggerated step toward the gate.

  "Sturmbannführer Hempel!" he called out, watching with a kind of raw pleasure as the guard nearest the gate leveled his rifle.

  "If you will kill but one Jew tonight--me, their leader, their rabbi--I will publicly renounce Judaism and all its evils."

  The gasps behind him only served to steel his resolve. They will understand, he promised himself.

  They will.

  Hempel either did not hear the challenge or chose not to. Abruptly doing a right face, he strode toward Taurus. With his arm stiff, he aimed his Mann toward the dog's neck.

  Taurus lifted her head, sniffing the air.

  "Don't hurt the dog," Erich said quietly.

  "All inferiors are to be eliminated," Hempel replied. "Our work here in Madagascar will not be slowed down by those with physical problems."

  Erich's head jerked up, and Sol saw him glance around uneasily, as though he had awakened in a strange place. "She's cured," he said in a boyish, petulant voice.

  Hempel smiled and shook his head. "My friend the Zana-Malata has indicated to me that the affliction was merely diverted--into you, Gefreiter. Should your death be necessitated, the disorder will seek out its former host, thus again rendering the dog useless."

  Sol watched Erich turn toward the Zana-Malata as if for confirmation. The syphilitic gave a slow, regal nod.

  After staring at the shepherd for a long time--her tail wagging and her tongue hanging out as she lay panting--Erich lifted the MP38 and held it palms-up across his hands.

  "Gefreiter." Hempel clicked his heels together, strode back to Erich, and again clicked his heels. Without any show of emotion, he ripped the colonel's insignia from Erich's blouse, then stepped back and handed the insignia, along with the weapon, to the nearest guard.

  Pleshdimer came forward, saluted Hempel, and with theatrical flourish presented the major with a rolled-up paper tied with a black ribbon.

  Hempel accepted the roll of paper almost absently, as though deep in thought. "The letting of blood is wholesome," he said, enunciating each word carefully. "It keeps the body politic in balance. The Medievalists knew that, but sometimes lately we seem to forget. Maybe the wound has been opened enough for now. Maybe if...." He allowed his words to trail off, waited, and began again.

  "If the men were reassured of your loyalty to the Reich." He paused. Holstering his pistol, he stepped forward and laid his hand on Erich's firearm. "The SS and Abwehr have never been friends," he said quietly. "The German race should be united, should it not, in its quest for its rightful destiny?"

  Before Erich could reply, Hempel continued. "I can assure you that the first time you kill a Jew is like your first taste of fine cognac."

  Erich took what appeared to be an involuntary step backwards.

  "Watch," Hempel said. "I will show you how simple it is."

  Once again he unholstered his Mann. Turning to face the Jews, he called out, "Bring one forward. Any one of them will do." A smile crossed his face. "On second thought, bring me Solomon Freund."

  "This will stop. Now." Erich's voice rang with fury. "There will be no killing simply to prove a point. Not in my camp."

  "Your camp? I think not, Gefreiter."

  Without any further preliminaries, Hempel removed the ribbon from the paper-roll he had been handed. Holding the document at arm's length, he read in a deep voice: "In the judgment of a special court convened on this sovereign land of the German Isle of the Jews on this the twenty second day of September in the year of our master and Führer, the vermin-monger Erich Alois née Weisser has been reduced to the rank of Gefreiter for crimes committed against the Fatherland and against humanity. All semblance of privilege, including that of leading the canine unit he attempted to pervert to his own Jew-inspired principles, has been revoked. He is to continue to serve the Reich and its Madagascar processing center, but he is to be considered by all other personnel, upon penalty of death for acting otherwise, as persona non grata. The command of the canine unit shall be placed in the hands of its rightful heir, Sturmbannführer Jurgens Otto von Hempel."

  He looked around as if to see if anyone objected.

  Pleshdimer hopped around like a child who needed to go to the bathroom. "And me," he said. "You promised."

  "So I did." Hempel's voice was benign, his lips turned up in amusement. "The Sturmbannführer shall be assisted by Canine-Commander Rottenführer Wasj Hänkl Pleshdimer," he went on. "Signed, Sturmbannführer Jurgens Otto von Hempel, Commander-in-Chief of our master's and of the Führer's Southeast-African Felsennest Force, on behalf of Gauleiter Franz Josef Goebbels."

  He released the lower end of the paper; it rolled upward with a crinkling. His arm stiff, he thrust the paper beneath his left armpit, did a right-face, a
nd surveyed the Totenkopfverbände with a look of fatherly authority. "I will restate the order, so there can be no mistake," he snapped. "Gefreiter Alois is your servant," he told the guards. "Treat him as such!" His arm leaped up in salute. "Seig heil!"

  Those with the Mausers remained rigid--sighting like pointers on the prisoners. The rest of the Totenkopfverbände sprang into salute and answered in unison. Even the trainers lifted their arms, though their lack of zeal was apparent.

  Raising their spears, the Kalanaro shouted, "Minihana!"

  "Aim!" Hempel ordered the guards with the Mausers.

  Mentally bracing for the blaze of a bullet, Solomon lifted his hand, fingers spread against the glare of the searchlights, and stepped closer to the gate. His head was bowed--as if to blunt the sacrilege he was about the commit: the denial of everything he held sacred.

  "Sturmbannführer!" he called out to Hempel.

  The major looked toward Solomon, diverting his attention from the guards, who grunted with dissatisfaction, having waited too long, heavy carbines in hand, for an order either to fire or to shoulder arms.

  Solomon felt strangely apart from the happenings around him, ashamed and alone. Would Papa have been so quick to deny our faith? he asked himself.

  Outside the fence Erich Alois stood motionless, head bowed, while a swarm of bats descended to feast, as they had done on the day of their arrival on the island.

  "Solomon?"

  Judith's voice, vague and distant, filtered through the frenzy. Sol dismissed it.

  "Solomon...Freund."

  Sol fought the buffeting waves of flying rodents as though pushing aside window curtains flapping against his face.

  "It's time, Solomon!" Though Judith called his name, she seemed to be speaking to no one in particular. "It's time!"

  The dogs pulled back from the fence, tails between their legs. Sol rushed toward the wire, but two of the guards jerked the muzzles of their Mausers in his direction despite the swirling bats, and he was forced back, hating his helplessness.

  As if on impulse, Erich beat his way toward Solomon. Gagging on an insect, he stopped to spit it out.