Children of the Dusk (10 page)

"Eating the leftovers of the wolfhound, which he seems to prefer to this," the cook said.

He obviously bore no fondness for Hempel, Erich thought, before the meaning of the words took shape.

"He
ate
Boris? Are you saying the man
ate
his dog? If this is a joke--" He remembered Hempel emerging from the Zana-Malata's hut chewing, recalled the cartilage he had pulled from his mouth. Erich had assumed it was lemur, or some other local animal.

"As you say, it was
his
dog...
sir
," one of the guards said.

Without a further word, Erich strode out of the tent toward the Zana-Malata's hut. He found Hempel seated alone at an open fire. Probably the same spot where he roasted his wolfhound on a spit, Erich thought, with a feeling of sick disbelief. He wondered at which point in his grief the major had conceived of the idea to consume the animal.

Grief?

Erich thought about Taurus and the sympathetic pain that seized him whenever he visited her.

The campfire sputtered, sending sparks among the stars, then another figure appeared. At first he thought it was Misha or Pleshdimer, but with a sense of nervous anger, he realized it was the Zana-Malata. The major continued sitting with his head down.

Staying out of sight, Erich observed the black man. Tertiary stage syphilis, he guessed. Bruqah as usual had been enigmatic when mined for information, with that infuriating habit of speaking in riddles and losing his syntax as it pleased him. However, a picture had emerged of the Zana-Malata tribe, if one could call it that. Mulatto outcasts, ostracized because of the congenital syphilis nearly all of them carried. The disease was a legacy from their European-pirate forefathers, William Kidd among them, who had made Northern Madagascar a base of operations.

The gnawed mouth with its pink, frilly flesh; the rheumy eyes; the black skin taut over cheekbones or so loose it hung like fruit-bat flesh from toothpick arms...the effect made Erich's skin crawl. How could lovemaking lead to such horror?

Hempel's knife glinted and he handed the Malagasy a strip of meat.

Erich felt his breath catch in his throat. He knew that something more than a dining scrap was being passed between the two silhouettes, something that demanded more than courtesy or congeniality. Given to a subhuman, no less...Erich fought the urge to wrench a Mauser from one of the guards and put a bullet in each of the figures before the fire.

Time enough for that, he decided. When and if matters were set right, or perhaps went very wrong, he would not hesitate to kill. Especially someone like Hempel.

"Herr Sturmbannführer," he called out.

Hempel looked up.

"The following is not a request. It is an order. I have instructed your men to give the Jews mosquito netting at once. I have also ordered the cook to split the leftover zebu meat between the Jews and the dogs--"

"You ordered
my
men--" Hempel rose to his feet. "How dare you.
I
control them.
I
--"

Erich turned and stalked back to the HQ tent. He chased the young fool Johann away from the radio for the night, pulled a bottle of schnapps from the crate in the corner, and sat down.

Drunks like his father disgusted Erich. He himself could handle alcohol, and at that moment he needed a drink. Just a shot, to settle his nerves. Maybe two.

"H
eave!" Pleshdimer bellowed.

Sol drove his shoulder into the narrow, green-barked log he was using as a lever. Just a few more centimeters, he thought, as the generator moved, almost into place.

Helping to maneuver it up the road from the ocean had been like toting his own prison up the hill. Everyone sweating and swearing--insects bombarding them in the barely breathable air beneath the forest canopy. The tank had done the pulling at that point, Sol and the other men on the detail scurrying to keep thin logs under the generator as it moved. Pleshdimer, like a minor god Hempel had deified, was up on the back of the tank cajoling, complaining, threatening.

Now that they were so close to finishing, the tank had been removed and they had only the strong backs of himself and his fellow Jews to emplace the machine.

"Again!" Pleshdimer bellowed. "Push, you scum!"

Half a dozen men grunted and metal groaned, and at last the generator stood square. The Kapo came forward, brushing dirt from his hands. He was grinning. "We hook her up tonight!"

Electricity was essential, Sol thought. Erich had said so.

Of course, he had no plans to electrify the fence around the Jewish sleeping area. He had assured Miriam of that, and she in turn had told Sol.

He eyed the fences with angry resignation. It was as though reality had been born with the rise of the moon, and the barbed wire coils on the fence seemed thick and formidable.

There were too many other uses for the power. In the morning, the
Altmark
would sail, and communications would need to be established with German operatives in Italian-held Ethiopia, who would relay messages to and from Berlin. Water had to be pumped from the spring into the encampment's water tank. The camp would need lights--particularly searchlights. But the fences would only be electrified if it became necessary to keep out intruders.

"Or to keep us in," Sol said under his breath.

"What'd you say?" Pleshdimer growled.

"Not a thing, mein Kapo."

Sol stepped from beneath the tarp and waited in the shadows cast by the tent for one of the guards to escort him to the supply tent for a toolbox. He found the ritual of getting needed supplies to be one of the compound's more interesting ironies. The guards rarely retrieved things themselves, even if they were the ones who intended to use them. Since no Jew could be trusted with tools, getting something as simple as a screwdriver required at least two men--one with a finger on a trigger.

"Can't you work without making a racket!" Erich slapped the inside corner of the tent.

Pleshdimer saluted the canvas. "Heil Hitler!"

"The hell with that! Just keep it quiet!"

"But we're..." the confused Kapo looked at the guards, who were smirking, and lowered his arm, "providing power, Herr Oberst."

"What you're providing me with is one hell of a headache. Who's out there, anyway?"

"Pleshdimer, mein Oberst." He added, a pride-filled smile breaking across his face, "Rottenführer Pleshdimer!"

Solomon noted with surly amusement how the Kapo had adopted the rank Hempel had given him even though no pay or uniform or induction had been effected. A corporal in the SS menagerie? Hah!

"You take your garble, Rottenführer, and drown it."

"Ja, mein Oberst," the Kapo quietly replied.

"
Now!"

With a morose flip of his hand, Pleshdimer dismissed the men. Solomon walked to the sleeping area with a triumphant jounce to his step. After saluting the guard at the gate and being frisked, he sprawled across the matted grass and listened to the birds and lemurs, his face washed with sun. He did not even mind when a cobalt-blue haze enveloped him----

----
As if in a fog, he sees Miriam lying naked and in labor, legs spread and knees up, on what appears to be a stone slab with carefully hollowed depressions for shoulders, buttocks, heels.

Candlelight reveals cobwebs above her. Beyond her feet, a skeleton in an army officer's uniform slumps in an oval wicker chair suspended from a chain.

The candles gutter. A breeze from beyond a rough-hewn doorway swirls the fog within the stone chamber. She squints against the candlelight, trying to raise up off the stone and prevented from doing so by the straps at her ankles and wrists.

He can see through the doorway, now. Beyond lies a gentle, grassy slope bordered by thicket. At its top, tall stones seem to be reaching for the moon. There are posts among them, carved totems topped with what look like buffalo horns.

Papa? Help me, Papa!

A girl is tied, naked and struggling, to one of the totems. He can see the face clearly, etched with anguish, her hair hanging in tangles down past her nose. She blows at the hair and renews her struggle with her bonds.

Three figures, man-shaped but hunched, wearing animal skins, stalk laterally across the slope, knives at the ready, moving toward the girl.

Papa!
----

As swiftly as it had come, the cobalt-blue haze dissipated. Refusing to dwell on the prophetic meanings of the vision, Sol closed his eyes and strove to keep his mind blank but for the trill of the rain forest. With Bruqah's help, he had learned to distinguish the calls of the white-headed
Tretreky
--a vanga--from the warbling
Poretika
and the omnipresent starlings, but there was no way to pin down the birds' German names without begging Erich for books, something he was loathe to do. Bruqah's facility with German did not extend to winged creatures.

Except for
Spatz
.

In Berlin, the Malagasy had seen people feed the sparrows and had been amused that food would be wasted on an animal that people did not eat. His amusement was compounded by learning that Sol had fed them so regularly that Erich had--much to Sol's dismay--nicknamed him
Spatz
.

As if awakened by birdsong, a nocturnal lemur, not yet settled after its night of roaming, took up the melody of the rain forest. Its voice sounded shrill and lonely--though Sol was sure his perception was colored by Bruqah's explanation that nocturnal lemurs tended to be solitary animals, while those that prowled by daylight were social and sounded quite different from their night brothers.

Far to the left, another lemur answered, its caw piercing the drone of the cicadas. There followed the tinkle of a music box playing "Glowworm."

"
Glühwürmchen, Glühwürmchen, Glimmre, Glimmre
," Sol sang quietly. No matter what else happened in his life, he would never be able to hear that music without replaying the first time he had seen Miriam. The first time Erich had seen her. The night they had both fallen in love with the beautiful and charming fifteen-year-old niece of Walther Rathenau as she performed at KAVERNE, the nightclub her wealthy, socialite grandmother opened next door to the Freund-Weisser tobacco shop.

How extraordinarily beautiful she had been, Sol thought. Not that she was any less beautiful now, just older, wearier.
  

He blinked open his eyes and sat up to find the canvas-covered area around him filled with activity. He realized his reverie had been deeper and longer than he'd supposed. Squinting in the direction of the music, he saw Bruqah,
valiha
in hand, seated cross-legged in the path that ran between the Jewish sleeping area and the main fence.

The Malagasy listened intently to the music box, then plucked out a reasonable rendition.

"Must you?" someone asked.

"Maybe some of us enjoy the music," a different voice said. "Close your ears if you do not wish to hear it."

The
valiha
and music box lifted Sol on a wave of sentiment and set him down, like a castaway, in a Berlin separated from the real world. He lay for a moment beneath his eiderdown, in the bedroom whose ceiling with its three cedar beams hovered in the haze of life without his glasses. He'd been young, then. At least he saw himself that way. He tried to manipulate the memory--to cast himself a dozen years later, Miriam beside him, but to no avail. Dread and doubt ticked loudly in his mind, and he found himself eyeing the Malagasy suspiciously.

What motive, he wondered, lay behind Bruqah's apparent devotion to Miriam and, to a somewhat lesser extent, to Sol? The voyage--a free ticket home--that much was understandable. But Miriam had said that the Malagasy had refused all offers of money, and not only from Erich, but from her as well. So what did he want?
 
After all, the instant Erich stepped on Nosy Mangabéy, he was invading Bruqah's country, unless Bruqah was truly a collaborator intent on some future, greater reward.

In which case, befriending Jews made no sense at all.

Sol scrutinized the
valiha
player. Bruqah was so engrossed in his attempt to imitate the music that he scarcely looked up from the strings except to stare disconcertedly at the box and try another chord. After a dozen measures, he frowned and shut the box lid. He reached beneath his
lamba
, removed a small ring-tailed lemur from next to his stomach, and tucked the box in its place. Squinting toward the dogs, who were pacing and yapping nervously, he patted the lemur on its rump to shoo it toward the fence. It went hesitantly, constantly looking back, like a raccoon loathe to give up food found at a campsite. At the fence it lifted its tail and, as if aware that the shepherds were chained, sauntered with a diffident air between the wires.

"I awoke him too early. He is social, that one."

"Like you?" Solomon asked.

Bruqah laughed lightly as he placed the
valiha
across his knees. "
This
Bruqah neither alone nor part of a pack. I be traveler's tree."

"You refresh whoever needs help," Solomon said rhetorically. He knew the traveler's tree legend. Symbol of all Madagascar, it provided water and sustenance to those who might otherwise perish.