More Wandering Stars

by Jack Dann (ed)

  “Josie,” he asks through cottonmouth, “aren’t I due for another shot?” Josie is crisp and fresh and large in her starched white uniform. Her peaked nurse’s cap is pinned to her mouse-brown hair.

  “I’ve just given you an injection; it will take effect soon.” Josie strokes his hand, and he dreams of ice.

  “Bring me some ice,” he whispers.

  “If I bring you a bowl of ice, you’ll only spill it again.”

  “Bring me some ice….” By touching the ice cubes, by turning them in his hand like a gambler favoring his dice, he can transport himself into the beautiful blue country. Later, the ice will melt; and he will spill the bowl. The shock of cold and pain will awaken him.

  Stephen believes that he is dying, and he has resolved to die properly. Each visit to the cold country brings him closer to death; and death, he has learned, is only a slow walk through ice fields. He has come to appreciate the complete lack of warmth and the beautifully etched face of his magical country.

  But he is connected to the bright, flat world of the hospital by plastic tubes—one breathes cold oxygen into his left nostril, another passes into his right nostril and down his throat to his stomach; one feeds him intravenously, another draws his urine.

  “Here’s your ice,” Josie says. “But mind you, don’t spill it.” She places the small bowl on his traytable and wheels the table close to him. She has a musky odor of perspiration and perfume; Stephen is reminded of old women and college girls.

  “Sleep now, sweet boy.”

  Without opening his eyes, Stephen reaches out and places his hand on the ice.

  “Come, now, Stephen, wake up. Dr. Volk is here to see you.”

  Stephen feels the cool touch of Josie’s hand, and he opens his eyes to see the doctor standing beside him. The doctor has a gaunt, long face and thinning brown hair; he is dressed in a wrinkled green suit.

  “Now we’ll check the dressing, Stephen,” he says as he tears away a gauze bandage on Stephen’s abdomen.

  Stephen feels the pain, but he is removed from it. His only wish is to return to the blue dreamlands. He watches the doctor peel off the neat crosshatching of gauze. A terrible stink fills the room.

  Josie stands well away from the bed.

  “Now we’ll check your drains.” The doctor pulls a long drainage tube out of Stephen’s abdomen, irrigates and disinfects the wound, inserts a new drain, and repeats the process by pulling out another tube just below the rib cage.

  Stephen imagines that he is swimming out of the room. He tries to cross the hazy border into cooler regions, but it is difficult to concentrate. He has only a half hour at most before the Demerol will wear off. Already, the pain is coming closer, and he will not be due for another injection until the night nurse comes on duty. But the night nurse will not give him an injection without an argument. She will tell him to fight the pain.

  But he cannot fight without a shot.

  “Tomorrow we’ll take that oxygen tube out of your nose,” the doctor says, but his voice seems far away and Stephen wonders what he is talking about.

  He reaches for the bowl of ice, but cannot find it.

  “Josie, you’ve taken my ice.”

  “I took the ice away when the doctor came. Why don’t you try to watch a bit of television with me; Soupy Sales is on.”

  “Just bring me some ice,” Stephen says. “I want to rest a bit.” He can feel the sharp edges of pain breaking through the gauzy wraps of Demerol.

  “I love you, Josie,” he says sleepily as she places a fresh bowl of ice on his tray.

  As Stephen wanders through his ice-blue dreamworld, he sees a rectangle of blinding white light. It looks like a doorway into an adjoining world of brightness. He has glimpsed it before, on previous Demerol highs. A coal-dark doorway stands beside the bright one.

  He walks toward the portals, passes through white-blue conefields.

  Time is growing short. The drug cannot stretch it much longer. Stephen knows that he has to choose either the bright doorway or the dark, one or the other. He does not even consider turning around, for he has dreamed that the ice and glass and cold blue gemstones have melted behind him.

  It makes no difference to Stephen which doorway he chooses. On impulse he steps into blazing, searing whiteness.

  Suddenly he is in a cramped world of people and sound.

  The boxcar’s doors were flung open. Stephen was being pushed out of the cramped boxcar, which stank of sweat, feces, and urine. Several people had died in the car and added their stink of death to the already fetid air.

  “Carla, stay close to me,” shouted a man beside Stephen. He had been separated from his wife by a young woman who pushed between them as she tried to return to the dark safety of the boxcar.

  SS men in black, dirty uniforms were everywhere. They kicked and pommeled everyone within reach. Alsatian guard dogs snapped and barked. Stephen was bitten by one of the snarling dogs. A woman beside him was being kicked by soldiers. And they were all being methodically herded past a high barbed-wire fence. Beside the fence was a wall.

  Stephen looked around for an escape route, but he was surrounded by other prisoners, who were pressing against him. Soldiers were shooting indiscriminately into the crowd, shooting women and children alike.

  The man who had shouted to his wife was shot.

  “Sholom, help me, help me,” screamed a scrawny young woman whose skin was as yellow and pimpled as chicken flesh.

  And Stephen understood that he was Sholom. He was a Jew in this burning, stinking world, and this woman, somehow, meant something to him. He felt the yellow star sewn on the breast of his filthy jacket. He grimaced uncontrollably. The strangest thoughts were passing through his mind, remembrances of another childhood: morning prayers with his father and rich uncle, large breakfasts on Saturdays, the sounds of his mother and father quietly making love in the next room, yortseit candles burning in the living room, his brother reciting the “four questions” at the Passover table.

  He touched the star again and remembered the Nazis’ facetious euphemism for it: Pour le Sémite.

  He wanted to strike out, to kill the Nazis, to fight and die. But he found himself marching with the others, as if he had no will of his own. He felt that he was cut in half. He had two selves now; one watched the other. One self wanted to fight. The other was numbed; it cared only for itself. It was determined to survive.

  Stephen looked around for the woman who had called out to him. She was nowhere to be seen.

  Behind him were railroad tracks, electrified wire, and the conical tower and main gate of the camp. Ahead was a pitted road littered with corpses and their belongings. Rifles were being fired, and a heavy, sickly-sweet odor was everywhere. Stephen gagged, others vomited. It was the overwhelming stench of death, of rotting and burning flesh. Black clouds hung above the camp, and flames spurted from the tall chimneys of ugly buildings, as if from infernal machines.

  Stephen walked onward: he was numb, unable to fight or even talk. Everything that happened around him was impossible, the stuff of dreams.

  The prisoners were ordered to halt, and the soldiers began to separate those who would be burned from those who would be worked to death. Old men and women and young children were pulled out of the crowd. Some were beaten and killed immediately, while the others looked on in disbelief. Stephen looked on, as if it was of no concern to him. Everything was unreal, dreamlike. He did not belong here.

  The new prisoners looked like Musselmanner, the walking dead. Those who became ill, or were beaten or starved before they could “wake up” to the reality of the camps, became Musselmanner. Musselmanner could not think or feel. They shuffled around, already dead in spirit, until a guard or disease or cold or starvation killed them.

  “Keep marching,” shouted a guard as Stephen stopped before an emaciated old man crawling on the ground. “You’ll look like him soon enough.”

  Suddenly, as if waking from one dream and finding himself in another, St
ephen remembered that the chicken-skinned girl was his wife. He remembered their life together, their children and crowded flat. He remembered the birthmark on her leg, her scent, her hungry lovemaking. He had once fought another boy over her.

  His glands opened up with fear and shame; he had ignored her screams for help.

  He stopped and turned, faced the other group. “Fruma,” he shouted, then started to run.

  A guard struck him in the chest with the butt of his rifle, and Stephen fell into darkness.

  He spills the ice water again and awakens with a scream.

  “It’s my fault,” Josie says as she peels back the sheets. “I should have taken the bowl away from you. But you fight me.”

  Stephen lives with the pain again. He imagines that a tiny fire is burning in his abdomen, slowly consuming him. He stares at the television high on the wall and watches Soupy Sales.

  As Josie changes the plastic sac containing his intravenous saline solution, an orderly pushes a cart into the room and asks Stephen if he wants a print for his wall.

  “Would you like me to choose something for you?” Josie asks.

  Stephen shakes his head and asks the orderly to show him all the prints. Most of them are familiar still lifes and pastorals, but one catches his attention. It is a painting of a wheat field. Although the sky looks ominously dark, the wheat is brightly rendered in great, broad strokes. A path cuts through the field and crows fly overhead.

  “That one,” Stephen says. “Put that one up.”

  After the orderly hangs the print and leaves, Josie asks Stephen why he chose that particular painting.

  “I like Van Gogh,” he says dreamily as he tries to detect a rhythm in the surges of abdominal pain. But he is not nauseated, just gaseous.

  “Any particular reason why you like Van Gogh?” asks Josie. “He’s my favorite artist too.”

  “I didn’t say he was my favorite,” Stephen says, and Josie pouts, an expression that does not fit her prematurely lined face. Stephen closes his eyes, glimpses the cold country, and says, “I like the painting because it’s so bright that it’s almost frightening. And the road going through the field”—he opens his eyes—“doesn’t go anywhere. It just ends in the field. And the crows are flying around like vultures.”

  “Most people see it as just a pretty picture,” Josie says.

  “What’s it called?”

  “Wheat Field with Blackbirds.”

  “Sensible. My stomach hurts, Josie. Help me turn over on my side.” Josie helps him onto his left side, plumps up his pillows, and inserts a short tube into his rectum to relieve the gas. “I also like the painting with the large stars that all look out of focus,” Stephen says. “What’s it called?”

  “Starry Night.”

  “That’s scary too,” Stephen says. Josie takes his blood pressure, makes a notation on his chart, then sits down beside him and holds his hand. “I remember something,” he says. “Something just—” He jumps as he remembers, and pain shoots through his distended stomach. Josie shushes him, checks the intravenous needle, and asks him what he remembers.

  But the memory of the dream recedes as the pain grows sharper. “I hurt all the fucking time, Josie,” he says, changing position. Josie removes the rectal tube before he is on his back.

  “Don’t use such language, I don’t like to hear it. I know you have a lot of pain,” she says, her voice softening.

  “Time for a shot.”

  “No, honey, not for some time. You’ll just have to bear it.”

  Stephen remembers his dream again. He is afraid of it. His breath is short and his heart feels as if it is beating in his throat, but he recounts the entire dream to Josie.

  He does not notice that her face has lost its color.

  “It is only a dream, Stephen. Probably something you studied in history.”

  “But it was so real, not like a dream at all.”

  “That’s enough!” Josie says.

  “I’m sorry I upset you. Don’t be angry.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, fighting the pain, squeezing Josie’s hand tightly. “Didn’t you tell me that you were in the Second World War?”

  Josie is composed once again. “Yes, I did, but I’m surprised you remembered. You were very sick. I was a nurse overseas, spent most of the war in England. But I was one of the first women to go into any of the concentration camps.”

  Stephen drifts with the pain; he appears to be asleep.

  “You must have studied very hard,” Josie whispers to him. Her hand is shaking just a bit.

  It is twelve o’clock and his room is death-quiet. The sharp shadows seem to be the hardest objects in the room. The fluorescents burn steadily in the hall outside.

  Stephen looks out into the hallway, but he can see only the far white wall. He waits for his night nurse to appear: it is time for his injection. A young nurse passes by his doorway. Stephen imagines that she is a cardboard ship sailing through the corridors.

  He presses his buzzer, which is attached by a clip to his pillow. The night nurse will take her time, he tells himself. He remembers arguing with her. Angrily, he presses the buzzer again.

  Across the hall, a man begins to scream, and there is a shuffle of nurses into his room. The screaming turns into begging and whining. Although Stephen has never seen the man in the opposite room, he has come to hate him. Like Stephen, he has something wrong with his stomach; but he cannot suffer well. He can only beg and cry, try to make deals with the nurses, doctors, God, and angels. Stephen cannot muster any pity for this man.

  The night nurse finally comes into the room, says, “You have to try to get along without this,” and gives him an injection of Demerol.

  “Why does the man across the hall scream so?” Stephen asks, but the nurse is already edging out of the room.

  “Because he’s in pain.”

  “So am I,” Stephen says in a loud voice. “But I can keep it to myself.”

  “Then, stop buzzing me constantly for an injection. That man across the hall has had half of his stomach removed. He’s got something to scream about.”

  So have I, Stephen thinks; but the nurse disappears before he can tell her. He tries to imagine what the man across the hall looks like. He thinks of him as being bald and small, an ancient baby. Stephen tries to feel sorry for the man, but his incessant whining disgusts him.

  The drug takes effect; the screams recede as he hurtles through the dark corridors of a dream. The cold country is dark, for Stephen cannot persuade his night nurse to bring him some ice. Once again, he sees two entrances. As the world melts behind him, he steps into the coalblack doorway.

  In the darkness he hears an alarm, a bone-jarring clangor.

  He could smell the combined stink of men pressed closely together. They were all lying upon two badly constructed wooden shelves. The floor was dirt; the smell of urine never left the barrack.

  “Wake up,” said a man Stephen knew as Viktor. “If the guard finds you in bed, you’ll be beaten again.”

  Stephen moaned, still wrapped in dreams. “Wake up, wake up,” he mumbled to himself. He would have a few more minutes before the guard arrived with the dogs. At the very thought of dogs, Stephen felt revulsion. He had once been bitten in the face by a large dog.

  He opened his eyes, yet he was still half asleep, exhausted. You are in a death camp, he said to himself. You must wake up. You must fight by waking up. Or you will die in your sleep. Shaking uncontrollably, he said, “Do you want to end up in the oven, perhaps you will be lucky today and live.”

  As he lowered his legs to the floor, he felt the sores open on the soles of his feet. He wondered who would die today and shrugged. It was his third week in the camp. Impossibly, against all odds, he had survived. Most of those he had known in the train had either died or become Musselmanner. If it were not for Viktor, he, too, would have become a Musselmann. He had a breakdown and wanted to die. He babbled in English. But Viktor ta
lked him out of death, shared his portion of food with him, and taught him the new rules of life.

  “Like everyone else who survives, I count myself first, second, and third—then I try to do what I can for someone else,” Viktor had said.

  “I will survive,” Stephen repeated to himself as the guards opened the door, stepped into the room, and began to shout. Their dogs growled and snapped, but heeled beside them. The guards looked sleepy; one did not wear a cap, and his red hair was tousled.

  Perhaps he spent the night with one of the whores, Stephen thought. Perhaps today would not be so bad….

  And so begins the morning ritual: Josie enters Stephen’s room at a quarter to eight, fusses with the chart attached to the footboard of his bed, pads about aimlessly, and finally goes to the bathroom. She returns, her stiff uniform making swishing sounds. Stephen can feel her standing over the bed and staring at him. But he does not open his eyes. He waits a beat.

  She turns away, then drops the bedpan. Yesterday it was the metal ashtray; day before that, she bumped into the bedstand.

  “Good morning, darling, it’s a beautiful day,” she says, then walks across the room to the windows. She parts the faded orange drapes and opens the blinds. “How do you feel today?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  Josie takes his pulse and asks, “Did Mr. Gregory stop in to say hello last night?”

  “Yes,” Stephen says. “He’s teaching me how to play gin rummy. What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s very sick.”

  “I can see that; has he got cancer?”

  “I don’t know,” says Josie as she tidies up his night table.

  “You’re lying again,” Stephen says, but she ignores him. After a time, he says, “His girlfriend was in to see me last night, I bet his wife will be in today.”

  “Shut your mouth about that,” Josie says. “Let’s get you out of that bed, so I can change the sheets.”

  Stephen sits in the chair all morning. He is getting well but is still very weak. Just before lunchtime, the orderly wheels his cart into the room and asks Stephen if he would like to replace the print hanging on the wall.