Gratitude (44 page)

Simon stepped boldly out. There were bits of the man everywhere, bits of flesh, some seared by the blast, some fresh and scarlet. And there before Simon lay a hand, a whole hand, intact. At first Simon recoiled, thinking it alive. It was the same hand that had formed a fist and gripped him as the two men went up the stairs. The hand might even have twitched now. He got down on his knees to study it. There were no marks on the hand. It had been torn clean off at the wrist, sheared from the bundle of nerves that told it to go this way and that. It was a pale hand with long fingers and no ring. Had the other hand worn a ring? Simon held up his own hand to judge whether it was a left hand or right. It was left. Graceful. With long fingers that might have played piano, the lower notes, the rhythm passages, or held out a full fan of playing cards in a game of skat or bridge. Piano hands. Piano fingers. Every German family owed one of its members to music. Was it another to philosophy? Another to engineering? A last—if there were any left—to the priesthood? This was the hand that had held the grenade while, with the other, he’d pulled the pin.

Simon touched the hand, lay his own on top of it, measured his own against it. It was still warm, warmer than his own. But Simon’s hand was dark against its pale friend, dark with black hairs and an olive tint. Simon squatted down on the red-stained roof with the hand in front of him, the tangle of red human wires pouring out of the wrist.

It was only then that he saw it, hanging bravely in the wind, flapping like the flags. The soldier’s jacket was suspended from a nail on the outside of the door. It was imbued with a power all its own. Charcoal with starry epaulettes, and at its collar two bolts of lightning that had shaped themselves into
S
s. The man had hung the jacket up before his suicide, hung it there for Simon to see. One could blow up one’s own flesh to escape defeat, one could fly like the Walkyries, but the jacket of the Reich must stand defiant, bolder than any flag, more powerful, more terrible. Even without its owner, the jacket made Simon shudder, its proud buttons and stars proclaiming that Germans had mounted their steeds to assume their place at the head of the world, to become the world. We are Empire. We are Earth. If we are not God Himself, we are the Ones minted in His name.

Simon approached the jacket as if he were creeping up on a Titan, a preoccupied Cyclops, Cerberus himself, guarding the portals of Hades. He took it from the nail on which it hung, on the very door Simon had come through. He held it out by its shoulders, ran his thumb over the Electric
S
-Sisters, then tried on the coat, just like that, pulled it on, then turned toward the blood and morning sun for just one second to gaze out at the roofs of his city, puffing himself out to fill the jacket. Just one moment, just one glorious moment in the arms of the great Father, when all of the delicious killing was free and possible. Imagine. Imagine, if you will. The power to take life equal to the power that made it. He closed his eyes for a moment, smelled the Danube, imagined the Rhine.

A crow cawed on the chimney, and Simon crumpled to the stones. He was wearing a Nazi jacket. If he’d been spotted by a Russian, he’d have been shot as an SS officer taking his last stand. How would
that
have looked? How would that have seemed to his family when they discovered him, shrouded in infamy, his impure blood flowing out to dye the Vestment of Empire? He could sacrifice himself now and become the subject of a story repeated for a hundred years—how Simon Beck had tried on the coat of the last dead Nazi and taken a fatal bullet for the brief pleasure. The picture of his face would be clipped for German school children straight out of Goebbels’s textbook of the Hebrew face, with its sinister dark features and ample nose, and pasted into a new book:
Idiots of the Twentieth Century
.

He pulled the jacket off quickly, crawled on hands and knees toward the hand, and solemnly looked at it one last time. He said, “
Alova Shalom
. Rest in peace,” over the hand and covered it with the jacket before scuttling back toward the door and into the darkness.

Twenty-Nine

Zebrzydowice, Poland – November 11, 1944

OUTSIDE OSWIECIM
,
Marta accepted a ride from a retired municipal worker who lived in Pszczyna and was going that far. She managed to make it by foot across the rest of the countryside southwest of Oswiecim for a day and a half at a good pace and with brief rests until the evening of the second day came and she encountered an exchange of gunfire in the open fields and on the roads. She imagined they were the rampaging Russians confronting the rampaging Germans that Alfred Paderewski had warned her about, but she couldn’t be sure. What she could be fairly sure of, though, was that the Poles were not involved.

She hid in a shed outside the town of Zebrzydowice, not far from the Czech border. The little place held the discarded handles of saws, hammers and a wood plane. The steel must have been traded some time back for provisions, and then the tool shed, too, probably fell into disuse, except by small rodents and, by the looks of it, young couples looking for an hour or two to themselves. There was a little hay bed made up in the corner and even a greying pillow. Marta was happy to make use of the lovers’ bower. It was best for her to stay put until morning. Other than fearing for her life, even she could see the irony of surviving the camp, being sheltered by a kind but lonely Polish nobleman and then dying of a wound from a stray bullet. She wanted to live to tell the tale.

She awoke to a warm and inviting fall day. She could hear the birds chirping, saw the sun beaming through the wooden boards of the shed and felt surprisingly rested and at peace. She saw a cobweb with its creator, a fat spider, in the centre presenting its work with a flourish like a magician with eight hands, the whole apparatus glistening in the light. She found a dingy blue hair ribbon beside her bed and wondered how long ago, in what circumstance and in what gust of passion it had tumbled from its owner’s head. She felt more comfortable in this place than she had at the Polish nobleman’s mansion. The shed brought her closer to home than she’d felt in some time. Certainly it more closely resembled her home in size and simplicity. Marta looked again at the ribbon. All the little place was missing was the lovers.

Then she heard a sound she couldn’t identify. She couldn’t say whether the sound was even a human one. She stayed still and waited. The noise came again, a dragging, whooshing sound, like the sound of a sail caught by wind. She didn’t want to attract attention to herself, but neither did she want to sit by and wait for her end. She heard the noise again and had to know where it came from.

She got out of the hay bed as quietly as she could, edged toward one of the bigger cracks in the wall and peeked out. She thought she’d seen everything that was possible to see in these past few months, enough to fill a lifetime, but if she’d had to predict what today’s experience would be, she wouldn’t have guessed it would involve a balloonist in an open field, trying to fire up his rainbow-coloured balloon. He was wearing an aviator helmet, a leather bomber jacket and a royal-blue scarf that flapped in the sunny wind. He seemed frustrated, was looking around to see who might help him, but persevering nonetheless.

Marta found herself smiling. Was she in Oz at last? Were there sparkling ruby slippers hidden in the shed somewhere? If she waited long enough, would the shed be dislodged by a tornado and carried back home? “There’s no place like home,” she wanted to chant. “There’s no place like home.”

If this was indeed a balloonist, how many miracles was one woman permitted to experience in a lifetime, let alone a week? Or was it some kind of hoax? Where did it begin and where would it end? Was Marta shuttling to heaven still holding Libuse’s hand, travelling together with her all along, sighted now equally, the two of them, breathing in the same glorious light?

If she was not hallucinating, then the man outside was going somewhere. Otherwise, he had gone to a great deal of trouble with his aviator outfit and his outrageous balloon just to squat in a field and make whooshing noises. Marta pulled on her trench coat, drew herself together and boldly exited the shed.

The balloon looked like a colourful but wilted musk melon. Marta said, “Hello,” in cautious Polish.

The man responded in German. “Can you help me?” he seemed to be saying.

She said, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going across the frontier.”

“That’s where I want to go.”

“If you want to get across the border,” the man said, “you have to fly with me, but you have to help me first.”

The man looked ridiculous. His leather helmet seemed far too tight and appeared to be compressing his skull. “I want to go across,” she heard herself saying. She reasoned she would be better off in what used to be Czechoslovakia than she was in Poland, with the Germans being pushed back, and she would be closer to home. “I want to get over to Opava on the other side. I need to get to Prague, then to Hungary.”

“The winds are favourable today,” the man said. “But we have to get up high enough to go straight over the woods. The Germans on the frontier have not been very receptive to visitors.” He paused to look at Marta. “Especially to you, possibly, most likely.”

Marta put her hand on her scalp and nodded. “I’ll go with you. I’ll help you.”

“It’s not dangerous,” he said. “Less dangerous than that.” He pointed ahead to the border. “I’m experienced. But I need your help to get launched. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Is there no one else around here who can help us?”

She was putting her faith in a man with a hot air balloon and a child’s aviator helmet, but sometimes putting your faith in someone else was as powerful as trusting science. She looked up at the sky, which was Prussian blue on this day, and took a deep breath.

The man told her his name was Hugo. He explained that they had to pull the balloon’s envelope out full-length after setting the basket on its side. He grunted as he toppled the basket. She was at the envelope’s crown, and he joined her, smoothing out the silk like a colourful great bedsheet. Hugo checked to see that the valve at the crown was sealed and then held the crown, pulling vigorously to stabilize the balloon. He rushed down to the balloon’s mouth, leaving Marta at the crown, and then opened it up to catch the breeze. The balloon began to come to life. It threatened to stand upright.

“As soon as we’re ready,” Hugo said, “I’ll ignite the burner and fill the balloon. But then we have to jump in here.” He indicated the basket.

“How do you know the balloon will float to Opava?”

“I don’t.”

She let go of the crown and sent a ripple down, expelling air from the mouth. “Hold up your end,” he shouted.

She took hold of it again. “Then how do we know we won’t float back the other way into Poland?”

He licked his finger and held it up to the wind. “Because the wind isn’t blowing into Poland,” he said and smiled proudly. “It’s blowing out.”

“How do we know we won’t be blown out of the basket by the wind?” she asked.

“Because we travel
with
the wind.”

Just then a gust bucked the envelope, throwing her off her feet. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know if I can control this thing until you light the burner.”

“I can help,” someone said.

It was a young man, speaking Polish. He was rustic looking with scruffy red hair, a suede vest and old-fashioned breeches that looked soiled and dingy. He had a heavyset girl with him who stayed back by the bushes and put her hand to her mouth when Marta noticed her. Were these the young people of the shed? Was the ribbon hers?

Without waiting for an answer, the boy threw his considerable muscle into the enterprise. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said to Marta. Marta looked at the girl to get her permission, but she seemed content to cheer on her boyfriend. She was now looking at Marta’s coat and dress. The boy heaved the envelope farther outward as Hugo held open the mouth, and immediately it caught more air.

Hugo said in Polish, “What a helpful lad you are. Maybe I’ll take you up for a ride sometime.”

“I’d be glad,” the young man said, “if you take my woman, too.”

“Of course,” Hugo said. He lit the gas burner. “Hurry, into the basket,” he called to Marta. “I don’t have the balloon tethered to anything. The heat will soon make it rise.”

Hugo set the basket upright again, and the young Polish man pulled the envelope’s mouth toward the heat so that the balloon would catch the warm air.

The balloon filled in just a few minutes, more quickly than even Hugo had expected. He was in the basket already, but Marta was only half-in, still not fully believing in the contraption. The rustic saw her dilemma and rushed forward to help. He got her leg in just as the basket left the ground, but he held on too long and now he was clinging to the side of the basket and flying up with the other two.

“No,” the heavyset girl screamed. She came rushing at the balloon. “No,” she screamed again. She managed to grab her boyfriend’s shoe but pulled it straight off his foot and fell back. The balloon was above the trees in a minute with the girl running after it, pleading with it to release her boyfriend.

The basket wobbled and tilted, like a boat about to capsize. “Get in here,” Hugo yelled. He was trying to get hold of the boy’s hands, but his grip on the side of the basket was too tight. Marta took hold of one of his elbows, but the basket tipped, the heat was misdirected, and the balloon threatened to plummet. They could hear her still in the distance, the rustic’s girlfriend. “No. Oh, no.” She was sobbing and then screaming some more.

The basket righted itself and the heat sent the balloon soaring, just as one of the boy’s hands lost its grip and he cried out. They were too far up to do anything for the boy, and the wind was brisk, carrying the balloon southwest as it rode up into the air.

Hugo was fighting to steady the wobbly balloon while Marta nearly fell out herself as she attempted to get a hold of the boy’s free hand. “Give it to me,” she was trying to tell him in Polish. The hand flopped at his side, as if the boy were lame. She said it in German, in Czech, but the hand didn’t understand or obey. The basket began to tip again, the balloon took a short, swift dive and whipped the boy loose. Marta watched as he landed with a thud in the field below and then bounced once before coming to rest against an old tree stump.

Marta called out to the boy. She couldn’t see the girlfriend anymore. She pleaded with Hugo to take the balloon down, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t. She was sobbing, leaning too far out of the basket, straining to keep the motionless boy in her sight. Hugo pulled her back in. “Fate,” he said. “Too bad. Fate.”

“What do you mean?” Marta asked.

“I mean there’s nothing to be done.”

Marta looked back to see if she could spot the girl. The balloon soared ever higher into the blue air. Hugo didn’t even turn to look.

“He got his ride sooner than he bargained for,” Hugo said, and then tried to straighten his helmet, which wouldn’t budge on his head.