The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  Half an hour later they left in the General’s car—his driver apparently, had fled with the others. Esther sat on the front seat, the case containing the General’s violin resting on her lap. “I will spend my remaining days of freedom practicing the Mendelssohn F Minor,” he had said, “now that it will no longer be proscribed.”

  They didn’t dare use the headlights, but there was a moon and the night sky was like glass. She didn’t want to look at anything anyway, her arm burned where he had tattooed on the number.

  They had had to go over to the prisoners’ side of the camp to find the instruments, and she had seen the open parade ground where fifteen hundred corpses were stacked together like cord wood. She had heard the shooting. She had known all afternoon what they were doing, and she still couldn’t believe it. All those men, some of them still bleeding through the bullet holes in the backs of their necks. The General hadn’t even glanced at them.

  “It is your authentication,” he had said. “This way, no one will ever be able to say you were anything here except a prisoner. I will drop you off at Hamburg—when the war is over, you will be well inside the American occupation zone. I myself plan to go on to Ulm. My mother lives in Ulm, and it is as good a place as any. It will be interesting to see how long the Allies take to arrest me.”

  What had he been talking about? The words had buzzed in her head like flies, just an empty noise. She didn’t understand anything anymore. She had imagined she understood, but she had been mistaken. It was impossible, even indecent. There were no reasons. There was only death—and the terrible emptiness of the living.

  And why had he branded her? He had the number on a slip of paper—he had taken it from his wallet, even as they sat in the officers’ mess, staring at each other over their broken meal. This had been no inspiration of the moment.

  She could wonder, but she found it impossible to care.

  “I was very fond of you, Esther. You must always remember that.” As the car lurched over the pock-marked road, unrepaired since the winter because there hadn’t been time for anything except the suspense of fear, he spoke as if he were already dead. “I saved you from the gas chambers and kept you alive. Think of me with some kindness, since I don’t imagine this chapter of your life will ever quite close.”

  They had hardly escaped the perimeter of the camp when the first artillery shell exploded behind them. The sound was like nothing she could have imagined. The air seemed dyed red with noise. And then the cold, numbing silence afterward. . .

  Have I been hit? she wondered. This pain in my belly—I think. . .

  Oh. God. she would die. Now she would. Now. . .

  She opened her eyes with a start. It was like catching herself in a fall, only she hadn’t been falling. There was no cannon fire now, only blackness. Where was the—? Gone—dead for months now. Even in the darkness, the prison walls closed around her. She had been dreaming.

  And then the pain came again, shooting straight through like a ragged piece of metal. That was real.

  She rolled over on the plank bed—why had they switched off the light?—and found its edge with the palm of her hand. She wanted to get up, to reach the door, to cry out that she needed help. If she could just. . .

  When it came again—like something twisting, cutting at her bowels—she screamed. It made the pain worse, but she couldn’t help herself. The scream came of its own accord, pushing the sharp point in deeper. It wore her out so that she couldn’t breathe; she tried, but it was agony. The pain came in surges now, tearing at her. She screamed again, but there was no air.

  When the door opened, all she could think about was how the light hurt, how it seemed to be part of the pain. Someone was kneeling beside her, speaking to her, but she couldn’t hear the words.

  How had she gotten onto the floor? She couldn’t remember.

  “Fräulein. Fräulein. . .” It was the guard, the one who had brought her supper. The voice faded away sometimes. He tried to roll her over onto her back, but she clutched at her legs, keeping herself wrapped up in a ball. Each time he touched her she thought she would die of the pain.

  Finally the door closed again. She was alone for a long time in the cool darkness. As long as she was alone she found she could just bear it.

  It was only then, as she lay on the cold cement floor—she wished the cold would go right through her; she wanted it to turn her to ice—that she remembered the capsule. They were killing her, and she had helped them. She would be dead now, just like General von Goltz, and it was all right because she had lived a pointless, worthless life. She should have died at Chelmno, to be turned into ashes that could shame no one. She had been dead since that day when she had lifted her eyes and smiled at the German officer, hoping he would save her. She hoped it really was the Jews who were killing her now. They had a right to their revenge. The bodies, stacked so neatly at Waldenburg. . .

  Slowly, gradually, she began to straighten her legs. If she took her time, the pain wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t any worse when she lay on her back, if she kept her knees up. Her belly felt tight and angry and she held it gently between her hands, pushing in at the sides.

  And then it went through her again, the stabbing pain. She held her breath, waiting for it to pass off, fighting hard not to scream again. She felt sick with pain—oh. God, if she became sick; she felt it would split her apart.

  When the door opened again, Esther put her hand over her eyes to keep out the light. She heard voices—there were two of them now.

  The nurse—yes, the nurse. She could tell from the smell of carbolic soap. She had heard terrible things about the nurse. Hard, blunt fingers probed at her belly and now she couldn’t help herself, but her voice was only a thin wail.

  Everything that happened after that was vague, shadowy, like the flicker of pale light. People took her by the arms and legs and lifted her up, but they weren’t real people. Only pain was real and it filled her, as if her skin were only a membrane to hold it. Once she opened her eyes and saw Filatov—always Filatov, even now he wouldn’t leave her be—his face only a few inches from her own. He looked demonic, like a monster in a dream, as if even now he would have liked to. . . As if he enjoyed this, even more.

  And then everything was quiet. She was lying on a stretcher and they were outside—she could feel the cold night air, a little trembling breeze against her bare arms. She felt better. She couldn’t move, but the pain was almost gone and there was only a terrible weakness. They were on a loading dock, people were standing around, the nurse and Filatov and another guard, as if they were waiting for something.

  Filatov and the other guard were speaking in low voices. She couldn’t understand what they were saying; she only knew a little prison Russian. Filatov nodded. The thing seemed to be settled.

  Was she going to be all right now? As if the same question had occurred to her, the nurse came over, slipped a hand under the blanket, and pressed her fingers against Esther’s belly, just a little below and to one side of the navel.

  God, there it was again! She couldn’t scream. She tried, but she could only cough. And the coughing made it worse, like fingers, like the nurse’s thick fingers, tearing her open to see what was inside.

  They left her alone until the ambulance came. The man who came out through the rear doors was wearing a white hospital jacket—she was going to the hospital? Yes, of course, why hadn’t she guessed, except that her mind wouldn’t work beyond the immediate present. He was very thin, and his wrists came a long way out of his sleeves. His face looked as if it had been cut from wood with a sharp knife, all lines and edges. She saw it all, everything, with astonishing clarity. It all seemed to be happening to someone else.

  The stretcher had short wooden legs. There was a metal ring bolted to the one nearest Esther’s left foot, and Filatov was busy threading a chain through it which he cuffed on her leg just above the ankle. When he had finished, he dropped the key into his pocket, grinning at her, showing his teeth. You will find anywh
ere we take you is a prison, he seemed to be saying, and I am the guard.

  There were negotiations going on, all in Russian. It seemed that the nurse thought she should come along too, but she was only a civilian and was therefore in no position to insist. The man in the white hospital jacket kept shaking his head, and neither of the guards seemed to care.

  All Esther could do was to lie quiet, trying not to take a deep breath. Her pain left her no time to think, or even to feel afraid. It occupied her attention completely, becoming the frame of reference for everything else. She dreaded the moment when they would begin to carry her to the ambulance because the slightest movement would make the pain move too, stabbing into her, twisting. Let them keep talking, she thought; let me lie still here.

  She was afraid of the nurse and of Filatov. They might touch her. They might do anything. She watched them, waiting, dreading.

  Finally the man in the white jacket took the upper end of the stretcher, letting Filatov take the foot, and they began the slow, careful process of moving her. They lifted her up, trying to keep her level, and then the attendant backed her through the open doors of his ambulance. They set her down, fixing the legs into slots, and Filatov jumped inside and closed the doors. It seemed a long time before they began to move.

  The inside of the cabin was cramped; no one, not even Esther, who was small, could have stood up. Filatov sat crowded into a rear corner, bracing himself against the walls with his arms, watching with evident suspicion as the attendant, who was kneeling beside the stretcher, sorted through the contents of a small, flat black bag no larger than a woman’s purse. Perhaps he simply didn’t like leaving the security of Mühlfeld Prison.

  “You mustn’t be frightened.” the attendant said, in German. It was not very good German. Esther realized with a slight shock that the man could not possibly be an Austrian, but she was unable to carry the idea any further because the ambulance’s side-to-side movement as they made their slow progress over the cobblestones of the prison courtyard was a torment. She opened her mouth, but it was only to moisten her lips with the tip of her tongue.

  “I’m going to give you an injection. In a few minutes, you will feel much better.”

  He had a nice face, with kind eyes. The eyes of a married man who still loves his wife, Esther thought. She wanted, more than anything, to believe in this man’s kindness.

  The man with the kind eyes brought a hypodermic needle out of his bag. It had been prepared in advance—the tip was buried in a ball of cotton about the size of a cherry. It was very large; she couldn’t remember ever having seen a needle so long. The liquid inside the glass shaft was a smoky yellow. He tied a piece of rubber tubing around the upper part of her arm and dug the needle into a vein on the inside of her elbow. She could feel something coursing up her arm, cold and burning at the same moment. It reached her armpit and then poured into her body. It made the inside of her mouth feel pasty and dry, but the pain was beginning, very slowly, to die away.

  Filatov didn’t like it. He shouted something in Russian, loud enough in that narrow space to be actively painful, and made a gesture with his arm as if warning the attendant away from her. Even though he was sitting behind her, Esther could still see the arc his hand made through the air. They were all close enough to touch each other.

  “Calm down, you bastard,” the attendant murmured, again in the German which he must have guessed Filatov would not understand. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the haze from the ambulance’s rear window, peering outside. “We haven’t reached Tabor Strasse yet.”

  What was he talking about? As her mind cleared, Esther began to remember about the rescue—that was why she was so sick, wasn’t it? “Just let things take their natural course,” the woman with the burning eyes had said. “By tomorrow morning you’ll be out of this place.” All right, Esther would stick by her bargain. She would simply lie back and let everything happen. After all, she was outside the prison walls, wasn’t she? She didn’t care what the man with the kind eyes meant, if he meant anything.

  The ambulance turned a corner—she could feel the swaying of her own body, and Filatov pressed the tips of his fingers against the wall just above her head to balance himself. The attendant pushed himself back from the rear window and Esther saw his hand slide guiltily into the pocket of his coat. He twisted around a few degrees, looking back over his left shoulder at Filatov. It was impossible to read his face.

  “Eedeletyeh syoodah,” he said, looking at Filatov. His hand came out of his pocket, but there didn’t seem to be anything in it. “Skawruh!”

  Filatov’s eyes widened, as if he felt he wasn’t being shown proper respect. For an instant he didn’t seem to know what he should do—he might have been getting ready to say something—but then he began to rise up to a half crouch. He was frowning, he seemed to feel it was all a great imposition. But the fool was still too completely wrapped up in his prison guard’s sense of invulnerability even to begin to be afraid.

  Didn’t he see? Wasn’t it obvious? Esther could almost smell the menace in that tiny enclosure. It was like a fourth person in the compartment with them, sitting there between the two men. turning his eyes from one to the other, smiling like an idiot.

  The attendant reached out and took Filatov by the lapel of his heavy double-breasted overcoat, as if to help him up. The right hand went back a few inches and, yes, there was something in it. With an ugly snap, like the sound of a hammer glancing off rock, a bright tapering blade, only a little longer than a man’s finger, shot out from the attendant’s clenched fist. Filatov seemed to fall forward to meet the thrust, and the blade disappeared into his chest, cutting through the overcoat just inside the left-hand row of shiny metal buttons.

  It was over in a moment. The attendant pulled his knife free and stabbed again, in almost the same spot, but he was only making sure. Filatov stared at him helplessly, his arms hanging limp. He seemed not so much surprised as ashamed and a little insulted—he hadn’t expected anything like this. He must have died in that instant, his lips seeming to form some sound of reproach.

  He sank down to his knees and then collapsed forward, brushing the attendant’s shoulder as he fell. The expression on his face never changed. He lay there, his head just to one side; he seemed to be staring at her. Even now, even in death. . . Suddenly Esther felt she was about to scream.

  But the attendant clamped his hand over her mouth. There was blood on his fingers; she could smell it. She began to struggle, trying to push his arms away from her, when all at once she realized what she was doing and that the pain was gone. She wouldn’t scream now. She would be very calm.

  “Are you all right now?” he said to her, holding her hands together above her lap. “No—don’t look at him. Are you all right?”

  She nodded slowly, trying to remember when she had sat up, wondering if it was true. Yes, she seemed to be fine. No, she wouldn’t look at Filatov. Why did she feel sorry for him? She didn’t know.

  “We’ll stop in a minute. When we do, I’ll open the back of the ambulance and help you down. Then I’m going to point a direction, and you’re going to run. Run as if your life depends on it, because it does.”

  He let go of her hands—tentatively, surprised perhaps when she didn’t fall over—and then he looked at her feet and his eyes tightened.

  “You can’t run anywhere in those. Kick them off.”

  Her wooden clogs fell to the floor, one, two, and then she remembered the chain around her leg. It pulled tight with a rattle.

  “We’ll get you out of that,” he said, and his hand disappeared into Filatov’s overcoat pocket. In a second the chain was coiled up on the stretcher like a snake.

  “That stuff I gave you won’t last forever. You’ll have about five more minutes before it quits on you. Get as far away as you can.”

  As he spoke, the ambulance glided to a stop. He picked Filatov up by the lapels and dumped him back away from the doors, face down. And then be pushed open t
he doors and everything turned dark, cold, and silent. Before she knew she had done it, she was down and standing beside him in the street. There was no traffic—why had she expected there would be? The pavement felt wet under her bare feet.

  “Are you one of the Jews?” she asked. It sounded such a stupid way to phrase it.

  “No questions now. You see that?”

  He raised his arm and pointed to what looked like a vast emptiness. It took a second or two before she realized it was a park and the blackness was threaded through with the trunks of leafless trees. There was nothing else there. Just an empty park in the middle of the cold night.

  “Yes.”

  “Good, then run. Run!”

  She didn’t wait, she ran. Across the pavement and into the darkness, feeling the air sweeping around her legs, not caring about anything except that she was free. She was really free! If she died in the next moment, it would have been worth it. Nothing could hold her. She ran as fast as she could, her foot splashing into a puddle of water she hadn’t seen, free as air.

  And then she stopped—she didn’t know why. Perhaps she had heard something. She looked back over her shoulder; she saw the ambulance.

  And then, an instant later, it wasn’t there. It was gone, lost inside a smear of smoky orange light. A flash like the end of everything. Nothing moved.

  Her chest tightened as she braced against the concussion, but there was no shock. The air seemed to die around her. It was the sound, the angry, strangely hollow rumble that did it. She felt the hem of her dress whipping around her legs, and her own scream was lost in the roar of the explosion.

  Waldenburg. That last night, with the Russian artillery banging around them. It was back. They. . .