Children of the Dusk (16 page)

Solomon blinked and saw someone crawling rapidly toward him through the grass. As he neared, Sol could see that it was Max, a man in his early twenties. He looked over his shoulder to assure he was not seen.

"I'm alive," Sol whispered hoarsely. He thrust a hand between the cage bars to wave Max away. "Get back to the others. The Nazis'll shoot you if they catch you roaming about."

Max drew near and stopped, panting fiercely. "No one's paying attention to us. Even the sentries aren't watching." He stabbed an index finger toward the nearest tower. "The rest are all down at the east end, with their rifles ready. Look! See them?" He pointed toward the far edge of the perimeter, beyond which stood the Zana-Malata's hut. "And there, just outside the jungle. Do you see them?"

"The Kalanaro?" Sol asked.

Max nodded.

At the east end, someone fired a shot in the air, and Sol watched in disgust as the Nazis hooted and jumped about in triumph when the Kalanaro disappeared into the bush.

"It's this place." Max looked around timidly at the jungle. "This Africa. It isn't real."

"I think there are probably some pretty strange things in Africa," Sol said. "Things no Whites will ever understand. But this...." He too looked around, though more in anger than fear. "This isn't Africa. This is Europe--transplanted."

Yet his mind wasn't on his words. He was mulling over what Max had said. Where among the camp shadows, he wondered, did reality end and illusion begin? And was that the demarcation--if one existed--between his dreams and his wakefulness?

"Why do the Nazis hate Jews?" Max asked abruptly. He turned onto his side and watched the spectacle at the far end of the camp as though he were lazing on a village green, listening to a summer ensemble. "I've been thinking about that a lot, lately.
 
They can't all think we were responsible for the death of their Christ. They've officially renounced Christianity anyway. They know we fought alongside them in the Great War, and surely they all can't be so blind as really to believe that 'subhuman' business. Look at what we've done, Rabbi! The schools we've founded, the Nobel Prizes we've won, the courts...." The ease left him, and his face squinched with incomprehension.

He stared at the sky, apparently too saddened to express himself in words any longer.

"They don't hate the Jews," Sol said.

"
What
?" Max eyed him with suspicion. "And to think I called you 'rabbi'!"

"This time the persecution's no purge or pogrom. Those days died out with the Christian kings, who wanted to kill us only if they couldn't convert us. In their minds, our religion posed a threat to the world's salvation. What Beadle Treichzat termed a 'rational' hate. Like hating an enemy."

Squinting, Sol could see the white-splotched faces of the Kalanaro slowly emerge from the foliage. "With the birth of modern dictators, we've become the focus of an
irrational
hatred. Like being afraid of the dark. The Nazis don't hate us--they fear us. They don't want to convert us to National Socialism, they want to exterminate us. We represent reason and scholarship and justice, the very things the Fascists and Communists must burn from the globe if their ideologies are to survive. We're the finger-pointers...those who remind the world's conscience that 'Thou Shalt Not.'"

"Moral law," Max said, eyes brightening with admiration as he picked up the thread of Sol's logic, "versus the law of the jungle." He squeezed Sol's hand and smiled. "I shall find the Oberst and request your release," he said. "If they want someone in there, let them take me. You are needed here."

He smiled one more time and, turning, crawled away on his belly like a guerrilla.

B
ruqah maneuvered the growling tank along the track that now pierced the rain forest and ran up to the gravesite. Erich looked out over the foliage into a sun that appeared to have been dipped in Miriam's rouge and hung in a sky colored by her blue eye shadow. Directly above him, cirrus clouds the color of beaten copper feathered the sky. Watching as the glow dulled and the deep, aquamarine bay took on a crinkled sheen, he asked himself why he had never noticed such things until Miriam came to live with him.

Came to live with him?

Hardly the right words--but he had put his bitterness behind him, he was sure of that. The days when he worried about her emotional outlook toward him--and did demeaning things to win her approval--were part of a world gone mad. Love took many forms, myriad faces; what she felt toward him would change when he showed her how high he was capable of rising above the Nazi miasma.

The tank reached the bottom of the saddle between the two hills and angled up the second slope, the forest once again enclosing the machine as though in a tunnel. Sunlight filtered between fronds, dappling the machine and making the leaves spangle. Branches scraped along the sides or swooped low as if to decapitate him. The tank growled and jolted as its blade shoved aside felled trees and brush. He supposed he should exult in how rapidly and efficiently the Jews were opening up the forest, but he found himself surprisingly saddened by the neat roadways and new clearings the axes and blast cord created. The rain forest gave him the boyish delight of secret places, secret things, mysteries begging to remain unsolved. Perhaps his decision to have the Jews broaden the larger of the two paths that led from the hut to the
valavato
had been unwise, even if it had made military sense. He would have preferred to keep the hill more remote. His place except when it was needed to defend against attack.

Abruptly, the tank stopped.

"Look there, Mister Germantownman."

Bruqah's voice sounded icy. Ducking a branch, Erich looked down to see the Malagasy, eyes rigid with fury, pointing into the thick of the forest. Ahead, behind layers of greenery bursting with orchids and snaked through with lianas, Erich could discern the shapes of the Jews, working amid the undergrowth. The
thuk thuk thuk
of machetes and axes rose above the idling of the engine. Though he could make out a guard standing with his gun across an arm, he could hear no voices, no shouted commands or other harassment. He felt gladdened that the guards seemed to be obeying his orders regarding the Jews.
You do not train a dog by beating it
, he had reminded Hempel's men.

"Looks fine to me," Erich said.

Bruqah lowered his hand, but his angry mien did not change.

Startled--the Malagasy usually was so easy-going--Erich followed Bruqah's gaze into the brush. His eyes were directed toward something much more immediate than men clearing the jungle. He tried to figure out what it was, but flowers and ferns kept drawing his attention, softening his resolve as if their colors were infusing him with their beauty. "Tell me!" he ordered at last, exasperated.

The Malagasy shook his head as though in disbelief, climbed from the driver's seat, and dropped to the ground. He walked into the foliage, moving with the grace of a lemur.

Erich swore under his breath and went after him, pulling apart brush the Malagasy had passed through seemingly without effort. Veils of moss brushed against his face with the mockery of a woman's hand. A liana's large inflorescences scraped like grotesque fingers across his shoulders.

In a grotto of undergrowth swarming with mosquitoes and so suffocatingly hot that sweat burst from beneath his hairline in itchy rivulets, Erich caught up to Bruqah, huddled, head down, before a totem no thicker than a woman's wrist. It was broken off at an angle about a meter above the ground. The Malagasy had his eyes pinched shut and his face was drawn with emotion.

"You promised, Germantownman," he said in a sad voice. "You said island's past would be persevered."

"Pre
served
," Erich corrected testily, rummaging among the shattered branches and forest duff for the rest of the totem. To Bruqah, each mention of the past seemed inviolate. No sense arguing with the Malagasy over the loss of an artifact; he
had
made the statement, which was meant to be taken in a broader context. The hill abounded with hidden markers radiating in an indecipherable pattern from the taller ones surrounding the limestone crypt site at the hilltop. Destroying a few was unavoidable as the necessary paths and clearings were cut.

"Here it is." Erich held up the length of totem he had found. The broken end had sheered off strangely. The lily-wood totem was cleanly broken, as though it were shale. It looked as if percussion, instead of the blast itself, had severed the stick. He guessed that the forest--capable of intensifying blast waves as well as blocking them--had caused the break: an effect similar to that of an opera singer shattering crystal.

The totem otherwise was not damaged. Its arabesque of curling leaves reminded Erich of the intricate, petal-like candles so popular at Easter. A more representational series of carvings--lemurs balanced atop one another's backs and looking at him with huge, whorled eyes--formed the middle. A set of miniature zebu horns, common on other totems he'd seen, adorned the top.

"You want me to have it put back together?" Erich asked. "Some of the Jews are excellent craftsmen."

"The damage is done."

Best to let the matter drop, Erich decided. If Bruqah did not want the totem repaired, it would make a good walking stick. Erich tried it out for size as he pushed back toward the tank. Just the right height and heft. It gave him a feeling of balance and power. No wonder, it occurred to him, the members of Germany's Old Order had relished such things.

From behind him came a screech and Bruqah emerged onto the track, a ring-tailed lemur riding merrily on his back, its arms around his neck. He was climbing back onto the tank when Pleshdimer came waddling toward them, waving his arms as he stumbled over cut-but-uncleared brush and tree trunks. "Herr Oberst, come quickly. Time for the uncovering!" the Kapo said breathlessly.

"Surely all the surrounding brush hasn't been pushed aside already!" With an irritable gesture toward the downed trees among which they were standing, Erich added, "Look at this!
"

Pleshdimer hunkered down his head, like a turtle retreating into its shell, and gazed greedily from the tops of his eyes. "Good enough, the others say, mein Oberst. Plenty of time for clearing after the uncovering's done."

The protuberant eyes, the oily lips, the neck's rolls of fat filled Erich with disgust. He followed slowly.

Increasingly narrow and confined, the path enclosed them. Soft, spiky stamen of crimson browneas dusted Erich with pollen as he ducked through the last of the foliage and into the sunlit gravesite.

He had expected to see the two guards sitting and smoking on the crypt's grass-covered mound while around them the Jews carried away the brush and saplings they had delimbed. With its towering, delicate totems of mahogany and lily wood, this was no place that the tank could plow through after the initial clearing was done. Work here had to be slow and methodical--no blast cord, no mistakes.

Instead, the guards were digging as madly as the Jews, looking not in the least resentful.

A great scallop had been dug out along the front of the grave, exposing the stone entrance. Erich intended the crypt to be a pillbox--his west-end protection. It would have a good view of the bay and an excellent field of fire toward the crescent-shaped lagoon below, where the Storch was parked.

Pleshdimer waved a finger toward the digging. "The jungle told me we'll find gold and treasures inside," he said.

"The jungle," Erich repeated. "What next--voices from a burning bush?"

"He thinks he heard the wind whisper," Bruqah said softly, coming up behind Erich. The Malagasy's eyes glittered impishly. "Ravalona's resting place has been so long forgotten, my patience grew weak-willed."

Erich grinned. Seeing the guards shoveling frantically gave him perverse pleasure. According to Bruqah, the grave was empty--of bones, not just gold--a fact Erich had emphasized before any of this had begun.

"This only crypt on Mangabéy," Bruqah said. "Many more over there." He pointed toward the mainland. "Fancy. One has big airplane," he stretched his arms wide, "like dead man ride in life."

The crypt they were about to open was unadorned except for the surrounding totems and a shroud of mossy grass that did not seem indigenous to Mangabéy. It was built, Bruqah had said, as Ravalona would have wanted it; she was said to have appreciated simplicity above all else. Perhaps that much was myth, Erich thought, an outgrowth of the sadder part of real history: a native princess captured, along with her maidservant, during the slave trade and shipped to the island of Mauritius. What had perhaps begun as a kidnap-and-ransom attempt had ended in tragedy, for the young woman had died of a fever and never returned home. Her body had gone unclaimed, despite Benyowsky's efforts to rescue her alive and, that having failed, to retrieve the corpse.

The guards had apparently not heard Erich's words regarding the tomb; or, at least, were not heeding them--a small slight, but one of many. Whispered innuendoes, eyes that went blank during salutes, personnel switches on his posted duty rosters because
Hempel
had approved the change, or claimed to.

Let them dig, he thought. Maybe it'll teach them to listen.

Shovels scraped limestone. The chiseled, discolored blocks emitted a fine yellow dust that sprinkled across the upturned red soil each time a guard brought a blade down the side of the crypt to dislodge dirt. The guards spoke in rapid whispers, their eyes avoiding Erich's; they swore and shooed away Goldman when he asked if the white rocks at the bases of the totems were to be kept or cleared. With a small smile and a nod Erich indicated that the rocks were to remain, and Goldman resumed his work.