Weavers (14 page)

CHAPTER 29

1945

While the world around us crumbles, Katarina and I train.
The only shame of it is that we are forced to train only in the camp. Katarina is a powerful woman, and the guards respect and fear her, but I don’t think even the
Führer
would be allowed to leave Dachau with a prisoner. Since the little joke I played on the two guards with my imaginary Sherman tank and American soldiers, the camp has been on edge, and the commandant has doubled the practice drills that the soldiers run through daily. All the guards do now is worry about the Americans, about what will happen when they come, and about what will happen to them after the war is over. Of course, I have come by these musings by being a bandit of their minds. No guard at Dachau would ever talk about his fears in front of a Jew.

Still, despite being confined to these walls, we train. Mostly, we work on my own map of Dachau. Like Katarina told me it would be, it is sparse compared to hers, the details are few, and what is there remains muddled. To me it looks like the world drawn by someone who has never seen it, and of course that is exactly the case. Yet I can see the world through my map, and slowly I fill the details in as I explore the camp. The only areas I avoid are the showers and the ovens, and this is at Katarina’s request. “I know what is there and so do you,” she says, “but to see it will only make you sick.” I’m not sure if she’s right. I think I could see it and it would have no effect. After all, I can still see the selections being made.

Because of their fear of the impending arrival of the Americans, the guards are working at an even faster pace than normal to eliminate the walking and talking evidence that stands before them in Dachau. The most recent selection took ten women from each barracks, all seemingly at random, and then they were gone. I know how they end up, of course—as smoke flowing from the chimney at the ovens, and ashes being scooped out with a shovel—but that just makes things worse. I don’t weave with these condemned women, for there would be no point. I already know how they feel, and there is no reason to live it with them.

Sorrow is the emotion in my head as Katarina and I hover over the camp and stare at my map. Katarina can tell something is bothering me and has given me space, but as the whistle blows to summon the women to the area before the barracks and selection, I reveal what is upsetting me.
/ Another selection? / Why? / There was just one yesterday /

Katarina nods at me, and I know what she wants—for me to dive into the mind of a guard and get my answer. The Americans could be here any day—my little stunt in the guard tower has taught them this—and the men are paranoid. They know that there will be no short internment for those who worked at the camps. There will be a hangman’s noose and a short drop, then a shallow grave. They mean to kill all of us and then make up their excuses later.

Staring at the line of women, I see so many familiar faces as the selection begins, but one leaps out at me. I have not seen Edna Greenburg since the day I first met Katarina, but now she is standing in the line. She is doomed.

What happens next is an accident. I do not mean to go to her the way that I went to the guards, but I do, racing toward her, dancing in the blackness of the threads over her, and then I see through her eyes. Her memories are mine in an instant—her children, her husband, everything. This didn’t happen with the guards, perhaps because the guards’ hearts hadn’t been racing in their chests. It hits me like a shovel to the head: Edna’s life is flashing back to her, and I’ve got a front-row seat for the show. This is worse than sharing a toilet with a thousand other women, worse than sharing a bed with total strangers. I am a thief, no better than a Nazi.

As Edna shuffles along, I see her Bat Mitzvah. I see her wedding night, I see stolen kisses from a man who is not her husband, and I see her looking down upon her smiling daughters. Edna has never spoken of her children
—
this thought strikes me like a slap, as does the reason. Her children are dead, just like so many other Jewish children, and she has never been the same since. Her children already stolen from her, she packs, gets dragged from her apartment by her husband, and then I watch with her
—
through her
—
as she sees a soldier pick up a little boy she has never seen before by the feet and smash him headfirst into a brick wall.
This is all she sees when she thinks of her daughters: Nazis holding them by their ankles and swinging the girls like sacks of flour.
Her babies—our babies now that I have stolen into her memories like the spy that I am. Though she is not sure of their deaths, she knows in her heart. A mother knows.

As the selection finishes, Edna and the rest of the doomed are marched across the camp’s grounds toward the showers. At one time the guards acted as though all of this actually was just to end up in a shower, but they no longer bother. We know where we’re going—all of us do. Finally, we march inside, where we are ordered to strip. I feel as though I’m watching a nightmare, but I’m loath to stop. This was my mother’s fate, my grandmother’s, and that of so many others. My father and brother could have died in this way, too—I don’t even know if they’re dead—but there are many other methods. Not that it matters: the end result is always the same. Just another dead Jew.

Next, Edna and the rest of these shaking, miserable women are led to the killing floor, a room that actually does look a great deal like a shower at a gymnasium. The difference here, of course, is that no one is getting clean. The sound of prayer fills the air, as though it matters. If there is a God, he is not in places like this. Once we are packed in too tightly to turn, I hear the giant door close behind us. Latches are shut, and the sound of prayer gets even louder. The amazing thing is that people are still hoping for a miracle, still hoping the Nazis will let them out. The gas comes next.

“Are you all right?” Katarina asks me, and I nod, though I am not sure if the answer is 100 percent correct. I can breathe—my lungs are not being destroyed by gas—but I am not all right, either. “Good, stay here.”

I do as she says, listening to her boots on the wood floor as she leaves my side, and not for the first time I wish I had true sight. At least if I could really see I could purge my eyes of the last vision of Edna Greenburg and those other poor women dying. Instead, that is all I can see.

Katarina’s boots are clicking on the floor again, then she stops near me, kneels down, and hands me a cup of water. I sip from it gratefully.

“Thank you.”

“Do you understand now?”

“Understand?” I ask. “Who could ever understand the madness of this place?”

“Not about Dachau,” says Katarina. “I know that you are educated when it comes to this place, educated far beyond your years. I mean about death. Did you understand that there was nothing you could do to help that woman?”

I could not answer.

“What could you have done?” Katarina persists, and I just shrug. “You could have tried to make her fight back, but the guards would have won. If you were a more skilled weaver, you could have made many of them attack the guards, but the end result would have been the same, or perhaps worse. A reprisal might have driven them to simply machine-gun the barracks. The guards are already on edge.”

“So we do nothing.”

“When we leave here, that is exactly what we are going to need to do,” says Katarina. “There will be roads piled with the dead—Nazi, Jew, and American alike. We will see more dead than this camp could hold if the bodies were stacked like cordwood to the tops of the fences instead of burned, more dead in one war than this world has ever seen. But it is the dying we must fear.”

“Why?”

“Because for the dead the pain is over,” Katarina explains. “They cannot beg you for water or a kiss or a bullet. They just lie there, and no matter how ugly their condition, they can’t harm you. The wounded, the ruined but still breathing, are different. You take a half-hanged man from a noose and hand him a sword and he’ll hack his way to freedom, or die trying. You deny a gutshot man water and he’ll shoot you in the back if he has half a chance. Now, imagine if they knew the gifts that you or I could give them. We could make them walk, like a puppet, to safety, take their pain away, and then see them off on their journey. But we cannot do any of these things. We have to let them die.”

“That’s cruel,” I say. I know my mother’s thoughts as the gas poured from the showerheads, just as I know Edna Greenberg’s. Those were bad deaths—evil and unnecessary deaths—lives stolen from women who were years and years from meeting a natural end. All I can think of is the things I cannot see but yet I know are there. Katarina’s uniform, with all of its ugliness. The smoke from the ovens, just as sooty, black, and thick as I’d always imagined. The sound of those women praying.
The noise of a thousand death rattles occurring at the same time.
Mrs. Greenberg’s memory of the little boy being held by his feet and his skull being crushed like an egg against the bricks. /
How can I ever ignore such things? / How can I walk away from pain? /

“You do what you must to survive,” says Katarina. “Do you think I like my uniform? Do you think I like what my country has become? Do you think I like any of this? You know what I can feel, what I can see. I am trying to survive, and I’m doing my damndest to help you survive as well, child. Listen to me. If this race is to survive—our very small, precious race, yours and mine—we need to be selfish. I have been a demon to get in this position, a sinner who pretended to love my baths in blood, but it has all been for one reason: to find you. To find people like us. My mission has been largely a failure, I can admit that, but I did find you.”

“So all that matters is that we live?” I ask her. I have never been a selfish person—never—but I understand that sometimes selfishness is all that can keep you alive.

“Child, the Nazis know what I am and what I can do, on a very small scale,” says Katarina, “but they keep their secrets close. The Americans will steal everything they can from Germany, but they can never steal us. The Nazis will ensure this, as they will kill the only men who know we exist. In order to survive, we must make our own way. Does that make sense?”

/
It does /

CHAPTER 30

1999

Darryl and Terry left Des Moines a week after they’d arrived.
There had been no new leads on the web, and Darryl was frustrated by that, but a quick peek into Terry’s mind the night before had told him everything he needed to know to make his decision to blow town. Terry was hungry, and Darryl didn’t think there was going to be anything at Denny’s that was going to sate him, at least nothing that was on the menu. Best to keep him on the move, where if the worst came to pass and he did break loose, they’d already be set up to leave the carnage behind them.

Darryl watched Terry staring at every gas station and late-night restaurant they passed while they traveled east, feeling like he was watching a lion sizing up his prey. Terry wasn’t begging him to set him loose, but he didn’t need to. It was in his eyes, in the air between them in the truck, and pouring from the top of his head.

Finally, Darryl had enough. Even though she was a good number of years older than what he normally went for, Terry was all but drooling at the cashier reading alone in the Texaco gas station while Darryl was gassing up.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, go,” said Darryl, and Terry did, steaming on into the gas station like he’d been holding a piss too long.

Darryl turned his back on the store and finished filling the tank, and when he was done and turned back to look at the store, there was a flailing arm smacking the window and Terry above it, looking like he was trying to tear something loose from the wall.

Then everything went wrong.

Darryl caught the light out of the corner of his eyes and turned to see the Iowa State Patrol car.
Please just pass us
,
thought Darryl, but it wasn’t to be. The car slowed, the driver flipping on the blinker, and then it pulled into the lot behind them. Darryl already knew he had only seconds to react when the woman inside the gas station shrieked. The cop must’ve had his window open, because there was no question he heard her. He was out of his car with his gun in his hand, covering the ground in front of him and ignoring Darryl, when Darryl jumped in his head.

The cop reacted as if he’d been smacked with a board. He flew off of his feet, landing on his back with a groan ten feet from the door, and Darryl dove back into his head as the woman began to scream again. Darryl wanted the cop to just shoot himself, to make all of this end, but he couldn’t do it. Making an adult off himself was a lot different than forcing a kid to do it, and if the man had a happy family at home, it could be nearly impossible.
You’ve been wasting too much time on drunks and teenagers
,
said a hateful little voice in his head to Darryl.

The woman would
not
stop screaming inside the gas station, Terry was still ecstatically working her over, and the cop was trying to sit up. Darryl sent another blast at the cop, the sort that would maim rather than bend him, and the state trooper dropped back to the ground to do his fish dance. Darryl walked to the prone cop, grabbed his gun off the ground, and shot him in the chest. The connection Darryl had with him faded and went dark, the threads between their heads falling to nightshade and then dropping to the ground like dead snakes. Just as abruptly, the woman in the gas station went silent, and maybe another minute later Terry came waddling out as he buttoned his pants.

“Shit, the cops showed up?” Terry asked.

Darryl thought he would be too angry to speak, but he managed. “Yeah, and you can bet this is all on about seven video cameras around this station, so now it’s time to go.”

There were no sirens in the night, no brigades of uniformed police flooding their position, but both men knew this was bad—and not just because of the bloodbath itself, which was bad enough. Closed-circuit footage here was sure to get matched with film of the fiasco in Mexico. They were leaving a bloody video trail a mile wide.

Darryl drove the car until the tank was nearly dry, then fueled up again and kept moving. The sun was breaking the horizon when he finally pulled off at a small roadside hotel and got out to get them a room.

“Help you?” said the clerk as Darryl walked in, but Darryl already had the bend in him and knew everything. There were three other guests, and the man working the desk was a recovering drunk with five months on the wagon.

“Get a drink,” said Darryl as he walked out of the office with a pair of key rings on his finger, leaving the man shivering behind him. All that the clerk was going to remember was that Room 12, on the far end, had been rented out by a single female, and that he was very, very thirsty.

Darryl got back in the truck, pulled down to 12 without a word, and then walked into the room with Terry at his heels.

“What now?” Terry asked.

Darryl could tell Terry needed a level of compassion that he just wasn’t going to be able to muster without some help.
You may just have really broken him this time
, thought Darryl as he set blasts of yellow light into his friend.

“Now we sleep,” said Darryl, “and in a day or two we’re going to hit the road again.”

Terry nodded and lay down on the bed, his body only taking a few moments to shut down. Darryl was tempted to turn on the TV so he could see for himself just how fucked they were, but he decided to follow Terry’s lead and catch some winks.

The dead cop wouldn’t let him do it, though.
Distractions like the day care made for a cool parlor trick, but do you really see the cops backing down from this?

Darryl knew the truth. While the day care had taken public eyes off of them, the law had never stopped looking for them. And now they were going to be looking for two cop killers who looked just like them, in a truck that had been caught by half a dozen video camera eyes back at that gas station.

“We’ll sit here for a few days, and then we’re getting the hell out of this state, and then out of this country,” said Darryl to no one at all.

We’re fucked, and you know it. Kill Terry and duck out of here right now, you still have a chance.
Darryl put the thought to bed, then closed his eyes and lay back.
Do you really think that you can just get away with this?
There had been a time where Darryl would have believed exactly that, but a lot of years had passed since then. He was stuck in the middle of Iowa with a maniac, and the pair of them had a few murders under the belt, and now they’d given the cops a special motivation to come after them. What they needed was a miracle, but Darryl didn’t think there was much chance of that with what they’d been up to. The deck was stacked against them, and he didn’t even feel like he and Darryl had any cards at all, aside from the ability to go out in a spree of violence.

We just need some space
,
thought Darryl, but he couldn’t think of a single way for them to get it. Daryl and Terry were stuck between Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, and unless Darryl came up with something big, that was going to be the end of the line.