Children of the Dusk

by Berliner, Janet

  From up the hill, though muffled by the forest, came shouting and barking. By the sound of it, Hempel had realized that something had interfered with the shepherds' human retrieval. If Sol was going to take one of the dinghies and attempt escape, it would have to be now. The knife Erich had given him itched in his palm and he froze for a moment at what he was contemplating--to not only take a man's life, but to do so on Yom Kippur.

  More than that, to abandon Miriam and the baby to Hempel, and Erich to madness. For the first time in many decades, he had heard his nickname on Erich's lips. Now, in his mind's eye, he heard the echo of the people in his dybbuk-inspired visions: Emanuel, Margabrook, Lise, all of whom had conspired to stop him from taking his own life at Sachsenhausen by telling him that he had a destiny to fulfil.

  Was this that destiny, killing a man to save himself?

  The images of David, his face blown away by Hempel's bullet, and of Lucius Goldman, shot to death and savaged, rose to remind him that Hempel had struck without mercy on this Day of Atonement.

  Telling himself that only by surviving could he return to free the others, Sol squirmed forward on his belly, elbows and toes digging into the wet sand, fingers around the blade so that it would not glint. The boat guard, perhaps stirred by the noise from up the hill, shifted position, and the Mauser slipped from his grasp. He caught the weapon instinctively and sat up. Then his head lolled against his shoulder, and his snoring joined the other sounds of the night.

  Sol released a slow breath, blinked against the assault of insects drawn by his sweat, and kept crawling toward the man's back. Huge, khaki-clad, unprotected, it seemed to be the only object in the universe.

  Gripping the knife by the hasp, Sol covered the blade with his free hand and rose to a crouch. Pretend that you are Erich, he told himself. One hand over the guard's mouth and snap back the head at the same time you thrust.

  Now!

  The guard's breathing roared in Sol's ears, but he found himself unable to move the final step or to raise his arm. A small cry of despair passed through his lips and he stared down stupidly at his knife hand, wondering if his inability to kill was gallantry...or cowardice.

  The sound was enough to awaken the man. Intuitively, he turned toward Sol. "What--?"

  Sol's arm leapt up, and as if he were watching himself he saw himself backhand the man across the nose with the butt end of the knife. There was a crack as cartilage shattered. The guard moaned and crumpled into the boat's open half, blood streaming from both nostrils, rifle clattering against the planking.

  Hands protecting his skull, Sol hit the ground and huddled beside the boat, expecting a bullet. He lay with his face in the sand, listening to the guard take what had to be his last labored breaths.

  The sounds from the hill grew louder. Squinting toward the forest, Sol regained his feet. At this stage it was too late to worry about other guards, so he chose to decide that there were none. Erich had maintained two, and sometimes three guards at the boats; for Hempel the "enemy" was within the compound. He believed that he needed to keep the Jews corralled and the trainers scrutinized, not worry about mainlanders encroaching.

  Deciding that for the moment he was safe, Sol straightened up and splashed into the water, moving toward the other dinghies. Staring at the boats and the black metal oars, he asked himself what he thought he was doing. Even if he did make it to the mainland without being riddled by rifle fire, where could he get help? If he found French authorities, would they risk their lives for the Jews when, according to Erich, the French had formulated the original Madagascar Plan?

  He could hear people coming down the hill--the longer but easier way, by the path. They were talking and laughing. Taking their time. That meant they felt that they still had him under control.

  Which they did, he thought disconsolately.

  Unless...

  He waded back to the landed boat and threw himself across the side, ready to smash down again with the knife. The guard was either still out cold, or dead. Sol lifted him in a fireman's carry and hustled him to the boat in the water. Cutting loose the lines that tied it to the others, he pushed the boat into the currents. It began at once to drift away from the island. He watched until the guard, sprawled in the bottom, was no longer in view, then he waded back to shore and ran up the beach and into the trees. Treasuring silence over distance, he eased between bamboo pickets and entered the foliage.

  By then, he had formulated a plan. Without questioning the odds of its working, he headed for the bottom of the strangler fig which abutted the jungle and whose branches overhung the gunner's station at the top of the limestone knoll.

  The huge strangler fig's roots had sought the soil, creeping beneath the leaves of the forest floor. As it took of the food and water there, it killed the tree upon which it had germinated and became a gigantic, chaotic ladder.

  There was a lesson there somewhere, Sol thought. He located a vine, tied on the knife, and looped it like a necklace around his head, with the knife hanging down his back. He spat upon his hands, rubbed them in the duff, and began to climb up into the thick overstory.

  He had heard of South American Indians and African Pygmies--the latter said to be the greatest tree climbers in the world--winding rope between their ankles to form a brace so that they could shimmy up the slickest trunks imaginable, climbing into the heavens in quest of fruits, insects, and honeycomb. The death wrought by the roots of the strangler fig made the goal more attainable to a city dweller like himself.

  Still this was crazy, his trying to ascend the tree. Crazy even if he had daylight or lamplight by which to operate, given the tree's towering height. In fact, his whole plan was crazy. But escaping without trying to free Miriam and the others was crazier still.

  In the darkness there was no way to measure distance. He had no way to tell how far he would climb, nor to determine how far he'd fall. Each handhold was a challenge; he could not discern if there would be another above it or if, sliding his fingers up the thick roots, he was pulling himself into a dead end and would have to descend and try another route. He attempted to pick bark off the roots as he went, thinking he might be able to locate the marks and thus better orient himself should he have to go down again, but the process slowed him, so he gave it up and concentrated on moving upward.

  He reached leaves, leathery against his cheeks as he forced his head between the whorled foliage and supported his weight by hooking an arm, at the armpit, over a branch. Above the leaves a tiny breeze blew, and he could see a patch of sky. To his right loomed the pale, deeply convex cliff face. Peering up, he saw that the cliff bulged under the top branches of the tree; he had picked the correct strangler.

  He took a breath and tried to get his bearings. Though some sounds, like the calling of birds and lemurs, carried remarkably well through the forest despite the natural buffer of the trees, others were evasive. He could hear the chugging of the generator, but it was impossible to tell if he was level with the camp, or if it was above or below him. High up through the seep of moonlight he could sometimes discern the side of the limestone chimney, a ghostly gray-green that bulked above the forest canopy. His goal, the small breastworks that formed the formed the fourth sentry post, lay atop the hill.

  Sol moved along steadily, with an agility that surprised him. He could only see his hand clearly when he held it close to his face, yet he felt a sense of comfort in these strange environs. This despite the danger of the climb and the almost deafening hiss of a million insects whose origins were foreign to him. Perhaps, he thought, it was his old friend, darkness, comforting him with the familiarity of his days and nights in the Berlin sewer beneath his father's tobacco shop.

  Again, he tried to get his bearings. Toward the bottom, where the sunlight rarely reached, the foliage had been dense; here, higher up, where occasional patches of moonlight filtered through, the shadows formed patterns in chiaroscuro.

  Something high in the canopy caught his eye. Face tilted up, for once blessing
the tunnel vision that enabled him to concentrate on a tiny area or single object as though through a telescope, he caught the flashing signals of what had to be hundreds, if not thousands, of fireflies. Paul Lincke's melody began to play absurdly in his head.

  "Glühwürmchen, Glühwürmchen, Glimmre, Glimmre," he murmured, as he wiped sweat from his eyes and, parting a veil of loosely dangling lianas, struggled to see more clearly.

  The moonlight increased, and climbing became easier. Every time he poked his head through the foliage, the fireflies loomed closer. Bright with promise, they blinked above him like the lights at KaDeWe department store during the holiday season. He almost felt as if he could reach up and capture them, and could not but wonder if the winking were a code to prevent just such a happening.

  Twenty more meters, he guessed, anxiously peering up past the gnarled roots and foliage, and trying without success to see the top of the knoll. Here, higher than many surrounding trees, the effect of the moonlight was greater. He could see some of the overstory below, stippled in dark green. A fresh breeze blew, sending waves through the leaves like ripples on the surface of a lake.

  Hearing a movement above him, he stopped climbing, put his face against the bark and drank in the air. Resting like that, he thought through more of his plan.

  It was simple enough in concept.

  He would knock out the sentry, secure the machine gun, and...what?

  Free the entire camp?

  He had never fired any kind of gun. Just how many of his own people would be killed or injured by his lack of experience?

  What he had believed was an excellent idea became a jumble, and he was almost relieved when something growled above him. He was less relieved when he heard a jaw snap shut and felt teeth graze his fingertips. Yellow almond-shaped eyes with elliptical pupils glared down at him, and he reached for the knife.

  The animal drew nearer. A fox-like head entered the weak light, and a fossa padded toward him, down the thick branch.

  The knife felt suddenly clammy in his hands. He drew back, trying to get as much trunk as possible between them. The fossas had looked fierce enough on land; they were the largest carnivores on Madagascar other than boars, Bruqah had said. Now it seemed both fierce and comfortable, and in control, here, in its own milieu.

  Snarling and hissing, it raised onto three legs and swiped at him with a forepaw. Sol parried, thrusting half-heartedly with the knife. The fossa slashed her claws across the back of his hand and leapt over his arm and onto the trunk, legs outstretched as she clung for balance, one back leg braced against a knot. Again she leapt, suspending herself between another branch and his head, squalling her rage at his intrusion, tearing at his shoulders and face with her claws. Drawing blood.

  He twisted in terror, lost hold of the tree, and teetered in space, the rear legs of the huge cat scratching for purchase on his forehead and cheeks as the animal discovered itself in a similar predicament.

  He screamed as the knife fell from his hands, and managed to clutch the tree, slamming himself against the trunk with such force that the fossa, spitting and caterwauling, toppled into his arms. For an instant he saw only fur and fury. Then, as quickly as it had attacked, it jumped back onto its branch.

  Sol swiped angrily with a forearm at his bloodied face and stared away from the fossa, lest the meeting of eyes provoke another attack. As silent as it had earlier been furious, the fossa stalked along a branch and loped down to what appeared to be its mate.

  He looked down into darkness and wondered if returning to the forest floor would not be wiser. Maybe he should, after all, attempt an escape to the mainland.

  Both fossas began moving toward him--sleek shadows, upper lips curled back, incisors showing. He steeled himself, thinking that he could punch one hard enough to dissuade both from combat.

  The fossas tilted their heads one way and another, snarling in displeasure. Two dozen pairs of eyes peered down from the dim heights. Lemurs. Defending the living coffin they called home against a common enemy.

  The fossas glared at Solomon and made off into the foliage. Slowly the chittering declined, and the tiny lemurs, too, pattered away between the leaves.

  Sol drew up his shirt tail and mopped his face before continuing. As he pulled himself upward, a pecking began. The vibration ticked through the roots as his hands touched them.

  "Ha-h'aye."

  Sol saw the creature for only an instant, tapping its skeletal finger against the host tree's rotted trunk and looking for insect life in the dying wood. When it looked up, the eyes--betrayed by moonbeams breaking between the leaves--seemed to Sol as large and commanding as the radio speakers on the Funkturm. He shivered, and before the aye-aye disappeared among the maze of roots and lianas that encased the once vital tree, it pointed at him with its skeletal finger. He began to climb again, faster this time, wondering what there was about the aye-aye's sound that filled him with hope rather than despair. Because the animal reminded him of Bruqah, despite the Malagasy's fear of it? Because he yearned for some foghorn to pipe him through his emotional storm?

  What, he wondered, had caused the aye-aye to be branded as a harbinger of ill fortune? Bruqah said that his people believed it brought bad luck or death to any village where it appeared. The only escape was to kill it and if possible to burn down and relocate the village. Even dead, it was powerful magic. The sorcerer who dared to keep its finger gained occult strength which increased exponentially in power if he had the courage to twist or bite the finger from the still-living animal.

  The limestone chimney bulked against the tree, so close to the trunk that Sol could touch it. He switched to the other side of the trunk and kept climbing, the going easier now despite the branches delaying him, the night clarifying his limited field of vision as he continued to rise above the surrounding canopy.

  He was drawing closer to his goal: the sentry post was just overhead. Someone coughed. He strained to hear if there was more than one sentry, but couldn't tell. He could hear no voices except those that floated up to him from the main part of the compound.

  Through the latticework, he thought he could see part of the northeast sentry tower and a section of the kennel area; the chimney of limestone blocked the rest. He heard shouted commands and saw a string of half a dozen lights as men--guards, he assumed--double-timed down the path that led into the forest and toward the beach.

  He ascended with increased determination, making sure of his handholds as he moved up through the overstory. A snapped branch might alert a sentry.

  Then the chimney appeared to fall away from the tree as though he were leaving the earth entirely, like the one time he had ridden in an airplane. The branches thinned out. Hunching his chest over a crotch of branches, he reached out and parted the foliage.

  Perhaps it was the danger of falling and the vertigo--part of him wanted to step out and walk across the overstory, positive the sea of greenery would support him--but for an instant he felt closer to God than at any other time he could remember. Here where bromeliads bloomed like clusters of gemstones, the realm of God seemed more certain.

  He moved downward until he reached a thick branch extending out over the chimney, and crawled out as far as he could without being seen. When the broad back of the sentry hunched over the machine gun atop the limestone chimney was directly below him, reality quickly cut him down to size.

  Even given the element of surprise--assuming he managed to drop behind the guard before the man noticed him--the Nazi could probably overpower him easily. And even if that were not so, how was he to kill the guard?...throw him off the chimney? Go back and try to find the knife he had dropped?

  Now that was a truly stupid idea, he thought, eyeing the bats that flitted around the knoll and envying them their ease of movement in the darkness. His lack of fear of the creatures surprised him.

  The guard, apparently, felt differently. When one of them flew too close to his head, he stood up abruptly and waved it away.

  Sol seized
the moment.

  He fell upon the guard, knowing now that he was capable of killing and that he was strong, far stronger than he had realized. He also had the advantage of surprise. Sol landed just behind him. The man turned, eyes registering shock, and swung a fist. Sol ducked, searching for a weapon--anything! He shoved the ammo box, heavy with machine gun belts, at the guard. The man grabbed the box. He stumbled backwards, lost his balance, and plunged over the side of the knoll into the forest below, his cry like that of a bird. The belts, still attached to the gun, uncoiled from the box as he fell.

  That's another one down, Sol thought, acknowledging to himself how much easier anything, even killing, was the second time. Feeling only relief that the other man and not he had been disposed of, he gathered the belts and squatted behind the machine gun. Now all he had to do was to figure out how to use it, and how to wipe out the encampment without also wiping out the Jewish contingent.

  Leaning on the gun, he stared at the compound until his attention was drawn toward the Zana-Malata's hut. In the glare of a searchlight, he saw Misha's small figure disentangle itself from the zebu-hide. It tore from the door-frame as he fell down the steps and stumbled away from the hut. There was a loud series of pops and within moments the hut was ablaze. A second figure emerged. Sol was shocked to recognize the huge form of the Kapo, staggering in a circle, his shirt aflame.

  A siren blared and searchlights swept the area. Misha opened his hands. Immediately, a flame erupted from them. The boy froze like a mesmerized deer. There was a shot. The boy did not move.

  "Run, Misha!" Sol shouted. He looked down at the machine gun. "Dear God," he whispered. "Show me how to do this."

  And he began to fire.