For the first time in his life, Sol felt his father's bitterness as his own. "In a year," Sol said, "they will blame his murder on the Jews."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
"It's been some time since your bar mitzvah, Sol," Beadle Cohen said. "I have missed you. Will you be returning for advanced Judaic studies?"
Sol rubbed his temples, hoping to ease his headache. Bar mitzvah boys went two ways: some swore they would never read another word of Hebrew or Judaica in their lives; others, suddenly filled with sentiment, expressed the intention of becoming rabbis or Hebrew scholars and never doing anything else. Unsure of how he felt, he had devoted what little time he had--when not studying or working for Papa--to reading and rereading his growing library of books on Jewish mysticism.
He had come to no conclusions, except to decide that, for the time being, he fell somewhere between the cracks.
As a bar mitzvah gift, the beadle, already responsible for the library of mystical books in Sol's room, had given him the Book of Formation and the first book of the Lurianic Kabbalah. Both were inscribed with his usual message: "When you are ready, you will understand."
Thus far, all Sol understood was that Luria believed Jews were born with a consciousness of their heritage--a sort of untapped well of accumulated experience and knowledge.
"Beadle Cohen, I need your guidance. I know I want to continue learning," he said, "but I don't really want to be part of a set traditional program."
As always, the beadle got straight to the point. "You don't look well. Is there something I can do to help you?"
Sol paced around the beadle's study--wondering where and how to begin--suppressing the urge to shout, scream, throw something across the room. He was moody and depressed most of the time, struggling with unaccountable angers, convinced he was being haunted by the soul of the woman who had practically died in his arms, and fighting blinding headaches. The voices came more and more, repeating words and phrases that made no sense.
"I have nightmares," he said slowly. "I see Erich hanging from the grating. I hear...sounds. Strange, ugly laughter that is Erich's, but isn't human."
Except for the bar mitzvah, which Erich had attended despite the pressure of his Freikorps-Youth friends, Sol had seen little of his friend since Rathenau's death. He knew that the Weissers had finally given Erich permission to belong to the group, and he had watched Erich's uniformed comings and goings, but they had not done anything together. They had not even gone to the hideout, which was just as well. He was still trying to escape his memories of the assassination and of Erich's ugly behavior that day.
"I keep thinking Rathenau's assassins are after me...."
"Tillessen, von Salomon, and the Techow brothers are in prison," the beadle said.
Sol knew that. And Kern and Fischer, the ringleaders of what had proven to be a conspiracy, had been tracked down, too. One was shot to death; the other committed suicide. Yet in his nightly imaginings, they came to his window, holding knives and grenades, looking for the boy-witness.
"I get headaches," he said. "I hear voices...one woman cries out 'Oh God, let me die. I did not know...I did not know.' Another talks of sweetbreads to someone called Margabrook who speaks to her of lice and the dreams of dead men."
Haltingly he told the beadle about the sounds in the sewer, and about the feeling that something had entered him, taken possession of him as he had looked into the eyes of the dying woman.
The beadle listened without interruption. "Ever see flashes of light?" he asked when Sol fell silent.
Sol nodded. "Right before the headaches come. The doctor says it's part of them."
"That is one possibility. There are others. You have read The Book of Formation?"
Again Sol nodded. Terrified, searching for answers, he had read and reread it. The more he came to understand, the more afraid he became.
"Solomon ben Luria was a mystic and a prophet," the beadle said. "He knew the past and had visions of the future. They were always presaged by brilliant flashes of light."
"I see nothing. I just hear voices, over and over--"
"Give it time, Sol."
"Are you saying--"
"God has the answers. The only help I can offer is to suggest possibilities."
"For example?"
"Are you sure you want to hear this, Solomon?" The beadle looked extremely serious. When Sol nodded, the beadle sighed in resignation and said, "All right, then. I'll tell you what I think. I have known you for a long time, Sol, and I do not say this lightly. I believe it is entirely possible that, like Ben Luria, you are a visionary. I also believe you have a dybbuk in you, and that it is muddying your abilities. When...if...the dybbuk leaves you, everything will become clear."
"I don't what any...any thing in me," Sol said, then mentally backed away, embarrassed even to countenance such an outrageous possibility. Like most Jewish boys, he had heard of dybbuks--vaguely--some kind of soul that was unable to transmigrate to a higher world because the person had sinned against humanity.
"I just think I'm going crazy," he said. "Am I? Tell me...please!
"Sometimes," the beadle said, "dybbuks seek refuge in the bodies of living persons, causing instability, speaking foreign words through their mouths."
"You're saying that that's what is wrong with me?" Sol asked, dazed.
"Perhaps."
"Well, get rid of it! It's affecting my schoolwork. It's affecting my whole life! My parents are worried--and I don't blame them. I can't talk to them about something like... How could I possibly tell them!" Exasperated, he put his head in his hands.
The beadle waited for Sol to calm down. "Sometimes a rabbi can exorcise a dybbuk," he said at last. "But that is not always the right answer. You are strong, Solomon. For those who are strong, a dybbuk can open doors into worlds that other men cannot enter. Eventually it will depart as it came--unbidden--and then you will understand its message. Go home and think about it."
Leaving the question of his studies unanswered, Sol went home. That night, lying in bed, he wished he had opened himself up to the beadle sooner. He had almost forgotten how much he treasured their discussions. The man was the only person he knew who was not afraid to acknowledge the difference between rhetoric and original thought. He really listened, debated each point, gave of his knowledge, yet left the conclusions open so that Sol never felt like a young know-nothing fool when he expressed his views.
It was amazing, Sol thought, how quickly life could change. Bedtime had once been the best part of his day. In bed, it had no longer mattered that when he took off his glasses he could not see things in sharp focus. He had liked the way his lace curtains clothed the night sky in crisscross patterns and the way the moon looked dressed in lace. He had even made up stories about moon men and about beautiful princesses held captive in lunar craters.
But, as with so many other things in his life, the death of Walther Rathenau had altered all that. Reality had conspired to draw aside the lace curtains in his life. These days, after his parents made sure he was in bed and closed the door, his inclination was to reach for his glasses; as he watched the clouds chase each other across the moon, his head was filled with thoughts of the Adlon luncheon and of assassins who lusted after blood and power, instead of Hessian princes who fought moon men with swords bejeweled with stars. More often than not, he fell asleep with his glasses on, even on nights like this when he could see the full moon with clarity. Ringed with dark clouds, it was set in a night filled with questions. Why did God allow assassins? Why am I a Jew first and a German second? Falling asleep was no longer an easy drifting, but a time for doubts and fear--and headaches--
He felt a sharp stab of pain in his left temple. Groaning he pressed his knuckles into the pain. There was another stab of pain and a flash of light which dissolved into pinpoints floating in the night like fireflies. A cobalt-blue glow superimposed itself over the darkness and he huddled, terrified, under his eiderdown.
Don't think about it, Margabrook.
Just drink the tea, he heard a woman say, her voice familiar.
Best you get rid of it now, Peta, a man said. Sol knew the voice well. If you don't acknowledge the soldiers' twisted idea of a joke, who knows what they will put in the teapot the next time.
Then the lights...and the headache...were gone. All that was left was the blue glow and, emerging out of it----
----a paraffin lamp casts a lavender shadow across a rude table in the center of a one-room wooden shack. Snow blows through gaps in the wall-boards. Beyond a single small window, curled edges of snowdrifts mass like breaking waves. Smoke veils the ceiling. A man in a ragged army overcoat and woolen scarf huddles close to a brazier's red coals. Frostbite has scabbed and pockmarked his dark sunken cheeks. His eyes are dull, his hands wrapped in bloodstained gauze. An emaciated woman wearing an old blanket, an ancient carbine slung across her back, steps from the shadows in the corner and leans over him. Carefully she unwinds the gauze from one of his hands. The fingers are gangrenous stumps.
Eyeing the old man angrily, the woman uses the edge of her blanket as a pot holder and removes the cast-iron teapot from the brazier's grate. She raises the lid of the teapot and looks inside.
Her face hardens.
"You've seen worse," the old man mutters. Lifting the edge of his coat, he unsheathes and hands her the bayonet that was strapped to his leg. "Pick out the thing and save the tea."
She has started to pour the contents of the teapot into the snow through a large crack between two of the unplaned floorboards. Apparently deciding the old man is right, she takes the knife and clanks it around inside the pot.
"What a waste." She pulls out a steaming thumb, stuck through with the knife. "Looks like sweetbreads, eh Margabrook?" She swipes the knife against the brazier. The thumb slides off the blade and onto the floor; she pokes at it like a child worrying a snail.
"Doesn't matter what it looks like," the old man says. "Don't even think about putting it in your mouth. Between us, we get enough food to stay alive."
"So what."
"You'll hate yourself."
"The only thing worth hating is hunger." The woman reinserts the bayonet and turns the thumb over to scrutinize it. "You Nazis! Your mandate is hatred. Mine is survival."
"Nazi? No! But I am German, and proud of it." He lowers his voice. "I joined the Nazis because, like you, I thought survival was everything. I have learned. It is what survives in here that counts." He thumps his chest with a gauze-wrapped fist. "Retain what little dignity the world still accords you, Peta. Forget what the others out there have become and leave that thing alone."
"You don't know what hunger is," she says. "When you had nothing to eat, you fed on idealism. I've had none of that with which to fill my belly or heart."
Unbuttoning his coat, the old man takes out a tin cup and holds it up. The woman fills it and her own cup from the teapot, gulps down her tea, and pours herself a second cup.
"What I'd give for fresh goat's milk," he says, touching palsied fingers to his lips as if complimenting the chef. "You city dwellers know nothing of such delicacies. My mother milked the goats every morning--"
An explosion rattles the shack and snow billows through the cracks. The old man shakes his head sadly and returns to his tea, ignoring the yellow and red starbursts that bruise what sky can be seen through the window. "Again the steppes test us," he says, putting down his cup.
The woman unslings the carbine and checks the bolt, dry-firing the weapon three times. "Here, put on your Kopfschützer, old man." She hands him a balaclava. Having pulled one over her own head, she helps him up. "Make sure there's enough paper stuffed inside or your ears will fall off from the cold, like Hansie's did."
On crippled feet he hobbles to the door and waits for her to open it. A gust of wind pulls it from her hand and slams it against the outer wall of the hut.
Facing them is a long gentle slope ending in what appears to be a frozen lake shining like a silver platter beneath thick low clouds. Except for clumps of rushes, feathery with ice and sticking up here and there at windblown angles, the area seems without vegetation--a white treeless waste. Along the edge of the lake, white-clad infantry move like phantoms before a line of tanks. Bursts of smoke from the armored vehicles are followed seconds later by the sharp crack of firing and sprays of snow farther up the hill.
At the crest of the hill, behind a breastwork of what looks like ice-covered logs, a group of men crank howitzer barrels into position. Others pull white canvas tarpaulins off mortars and machine guns. From that distance, the men and machinery look like a collection of animated pewter miniatures.
"I've had goat's milk." As she surveys the battle scene, the woman speaks as if their conversation has never been interrupted. "I have eaten and drunk almost anything you can name."
"Your family was wealthy?"
Through knee-deep snow they crunch uphill toward the gunnery. From all over the hill, people like them emerge from huts and, like disconnected threads, move toward the battlement.
"Non-practicing Jews and Party members like us managed some luxuries," she says. "Unfortunately, Papa had reservations about the Party and talked too much. Someone informed on him. They convened a Kolhosp court and accused us of being exploiters of the poor--Kurkuls. My parents were sent to help dig the Baltic Sea-White Sea Canal, or so we children were told."
Her expression softens as she speaks of her parents. Now it hardens again. "They disappeared. The Komsomol sent my brothers and me to a collective and assigned us to the worst of the subunits--the crocodiles."
The man nods, saying nothing.
"They said we who gobbled the bread of the Soviets had to meet harvest quotas. We were villagers and townspeople competing against farmers and even they could not meet the quota, because whenever they did, it was raised."
She halts in front of a pair of boots sticking out of a snowdrift. "These will keep the chilblains away from my toes." She tugs at them. "Come on. Help me."
The old man bends to help. They both pull, but nothing budges.
"If we failed to meet the quota, we were put on the chorna doshka, the blacklist." Gasping, she lets loose of the boots. "Our rations were halved. Not until the Soviet is satisfied! they'd tell us. Nurse the fields. Nurture them. Fill up on the conscience of the collective!"
"Bastards," the old man says. "I was much luckier than you. I grew up in the Oberharz, in Hahenklee, right next door to Paul Lincke's house. Once he even walked to Goslar with us, to watch the figures dance around the old town Glockenspiel. He said they should be dancing to his music. Often my friends and I watched the cable car carry tourists around Bad Lauterberg and or watched them eat cake in the cafés. Before going home, we dug in the garbage for leftovers. When the tourists stopped coming, we roasted crickets and field mice and picked gooseberries and wild mushrooms. We thought ourselves kings--except for those who died because they could not tell toadstools from Steinpilze."
"They say seven-hundred thousand have died in the Ukraine," the woman says. "God only knows how many of those starved to death! We thought it a blessing when you Nazis came to liberate our village. We thought you'd put us in ghettos and leave us alone."
She looks up; the howitzers are returning fire. "Lend me your ax," she says.
The old man ignores her demand. "When this war started, I was too old to enlist. Like an idiot, I pulled strings and became a soldier for the Reich! I was assigned to an extermination center in eastern Poland. Would you believe I thought I'd be killing lice? Lice!"
"You're an old fool, Margabrook."
"Daily there came new truckloads of Jews. They were asked for volunteers who could operate heavy equipment. The endloaders were assigned to dig graves. Each hour we shot so many people we had to soak our rifle barrels in cold water to cool them." He snorted sarcastically. "The Jews dying by the hundreds, and we worried about rust! At twilight, when the graves were filled and covered, our Untersturmführer made the endloader operators lie on the mounds, heads
together and feet outward like daisy petals. Then he shot them in the stomach and watched them bleed to death. A flower of death to commemorate man's capacity for evil."
"I suppose that is why you won't carry a carbine, even here at the Front?"
"There are no real Fronts. This is a world without Fronts. Only backstabbing and lies...lies," he repeats softly.
"You're right, old man. Now give me your ax or I will take it from you."
He touches her arm and points at the breastworks. "Let the dead dream their dreams in peace. Look at them. A wall of dead soldiers masquerading as logs to protect their living comrades in a treeless land."
He steps closer to the battlement. The woman follows.
"Don't give in...as I did." He stares at the frozen bodies. Icy limbs protrude in impossibly contorted positions. Faces are molded into snow-covered masks.
The woman shrugs. "Stalin starves people, Hitler shoots them, we use them as logs. What's the difference?" When he doesn't answer, she turns back toward the boots. "The hatchet, please, old man. I am younger and stronger than you are, and I intend to survive. I want those boots. When the rest of you run out of paper to wrap your feet in, mine will be warm."
He hands her the hatchet. "Three days now the clouds have held." Knee-deep in snow, the old man looks up at the sky. A worker next to him grabs hold of a corpse and flops it down as if it is a sandbag. The old man glances at it, then at a row of fresh bodies. The setting sun--its palette congealed blood and military uniforms--decorates the dead with ribbons of russet and gold.
With the woman's first determined swing, one of the soldier's legs cracks like a large dry stick----
Sol sat upright. His heart was pounding madly, but his headache was gone. So were the blue glow and the voices. All that remained was the stillness of midnight.
He recalled that the beadle had spoken of visions. Could this...he shook his head and lay down again. A nightmare, he decided. He had fallen asleep while trying to analyze the voices, and his night-mind, encroaching upon his wakeful efforts, had created faces, bodies, a story to match some of the voices: the woman's, talking of sweetbreads; the old man, Margabrook, speaking of lice and saying, "Let the dead dream their dreams in peace."
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