Spark of Life (26 page)

Two of the prisoners slammed the heavy doors to, but one of them flew open again. Berger could see the woman arch herself as though waking up. For a moment the burning hair surrounded her head like a wild yellow-white halo, then the door, on whose corner a small piece of bone had been caught, slammed to for the second and last time.

“What was that?” asked one of the prisoners, frightened. Up to now he had only stripped corpses. “Was she still alive?”

“No. That was the heat,” answered Berger, choking. The hot wind had dried out his throat. Even his eyes seemed to be burned. “They always move.”

“Sometimes they dance,” said a powerful man who belonged to the cremation gang and was passing by. “What are you doing up here, you cellar ghosts?”

“We were sent up.”

The man laughed. “What for? To be put in the furnace, too?”

“There are some new people downstairs,” said Berger.

The man stopped laughing. “What? New ones? What for?”

“I don’t know. Six new ones.”

The man stared at Berger. His eyes shone very white in the black face. “That can’t be! We’ve only been here two months. They can’t relieve us yet. They’ve no right to! Is it really true?”

“Yes. They said so themselves.”

“Find out! Can’t you find out for certain?”

“I’ll try,” said Berger. “Have you a piece of bread? Or anything else to eat? I’ll let you know.”

The man took a piece of bread from his pocket and broke it in two. He gave the smaller piece to Berger. “Here. But find out. We must know!”

“Yes.” Berger stepped back. Someone tapped him on the shoulder from behind. It was the green kapo who had led Mosse, Brede and the four others to the crematorium. “Are you the tooth-plumber?”

“Yes.”

“There’s one more tooth to be pulled downstairs. You’re to come down.”

The kapo was very pale. He sweated and leaned against the wall. Berger glanced at the man who had given him the bread, and winked. The man followed him to the exit. “It’s already solved,” said Berger. “They weren’t the relief. They’re dead. I must go down.”

“Sure?”

“Yes. Otherwise I wouldn’t have to go down.”

“Thank God.” The man breathed with relief. “Give me back that bread,” he said then.

“No.” Berger stuck his hand in his pocket and held onto the bread.

“Fathead! I only wanted to give you the bigger piece instead! The thing is well worth it.”

They exchanged the bread and Berger went back into the cellar. Steinbrenner and Weber had gone. Only Schulte and Dreyer were still there. From the four hooks on the wall four men were hanging. One of them was Mosse. He had been hanged wearing his spectacles. Brede and the last one of the six were already lying on the ground.

“Take that one down,” said Schulte calmly. “He has a gold crown in front.”

Berger tried to lift the man. He couldn’t do it. Only when Dreyer helped him did he manage, and the man fell to the ground like a doll filled with sawdust. “Is he the one?” asked Schulte.

“Yes.”

The dead man had a gold canine tooth. Berger pulled it out and put it in the box. Dreyer made a note of it.

“Have any of the others got anything?” asked Schulte.

Berger examined the two dead men on the floor. The kapo switched on his flashlight. “These here have nothing. One of them has a cement and silver amalgam filling.”

“We can’t use that. How about those still hanging?”

Berger tried in vain to lift Mosse. “Stop that!” declared Schulte impatiently. “It’s easier to see it while they’re hanging.”

Berger pushed aside the swollen tongue in the wide-open mouth. The one protruding eye behind the spectacle glass was right in front of him. Through the strong lens it seemed even bigger and more distorted. The lid over the empty eye-socket stood half open. Some fluid had oozed out. The cheek was moist from it. The kapo stood beside Berger; Schulte immediately behind him. Berger felt Schulte’s breath on his neck. It smelt of peppermint drops. “Nothing,” said Schulte. “Next one.”

The next one was easier to examine; he had no front teeth. They had been knocked out. Two useless silver amalgam fillings in the right jaw. Schulte’s breath was again on Berger’s neck. The breath of an eager Nazi innocently doing his duty, surrendering himself to the task of finding gold fillings, indifferent to the accusation of a mouth murdered just a minute ago. Berger suddenly realized he wouldn’t be able to stand the feel of this panting boyish breath much longer. As though he were searching for bird’s eggs in a nest, he thought.

“All right, nothing,” said Schulte, disappointed. He seized the lists and the boxes of gold and pointed at the six dead.

“Have them carried up and the room thoroughly scrubbed.”

Upright and young, he walked out. Berger started to strip Brede. It was simple. He could do it alone. These dead were still soft. Brede wore a net shirt and civilian pants. Dreyer lit a cigarette. He knew Schulte wouldn’t come back again.

“He forgot the spectacles,” said Berger.

“What?”

Berger pointed at Mosse. Dreyer came close. Berger took the spectacles off the dead face. Steinbrenner had considered it a joke to hang Mosse with his spectacles on.

“The one lens is still intact,” said the kapo. “But what can a single lens be used for? At most as a burning glass for children.”

“The spectacle frame is good.”

Dreyer bent further forward. “Nickel,” he said contemptuously. “Cheap nickel.”

“No,” said Berger. “White gold.”

“What?”

“White gold.”

The kapo took the spectacles. “White gold? Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. The frame is dirty. When it’s washed with soap, you’ll see for yourself.”

Dreyer weighed Mosse’s spectacles on the flat of his palm. “That’s worth something.”

“Yes.”

“We must enter it.”

“The lists are gone,” said Berger and looked at the kapo. “Squad Leader Schulte has taken them away.”

“Yes,” said Berger, and went on looking at Dreyer. “Squad Leader Schulte didn’t notice the spectacles. Or maybe he thought
they had no value. Maybe they haven’t. I could be wrong; maybe they’re nickel after all.”

Dreyer looked up. “They could have been thrown away,” said Berger. “With those useless things over there. A pair of broken nickel spectacles.”

Dreyer laid the frame on the table. “Just clear up here first.”

“I can’t do that alone. The bodies are too heavy.”

“Then go and get a couple of men from upstairs.”

Berger left and returned with two prisoners. They took Mosse down. The dammed-up air escaped with a rattling sound from the lungs as the noose round the neck was loosened. The hooks on the walls were just high enough to prevent the hanged men from reaching the ground with their feet. Dying this way took considerably more time. On a normal gallows the neck was usually broken by the fall. This the Thousand Year Reich had changed. The gallows were arranged for slow suffocation. The aim was not simply to kill, but to kill slowly and very painfully. One of the first cultural achievements of the Nazis had been to abolish the guillotine and reintroduce the hatchet instead. As a result, condemned men often jumped around the execution yard with heads half chopped off, when the hangman had failed to do his job properly.

Mosse now lay naked on the ground. His fingernails were broken off. White chalk dust stuck under them. In his fight for breath he had clawed them into the wall. Hundreds of hanged men before him had scratched holes there.

Berger laid Mosse’s clothes and shoes on the separate heaps. He glanced at Dreyer’s table. The spectacles were no longer there. Neither were they on the little heap of paper, dirty letters and useless rags which had been taken from the pockets of the dead.

Dreyer was busying himself round the table. He didn’t look up.

“What’s that?” asked Ruth Holland.

Bucher listened. “A bird singing. It must be a thrush.”

“A thrush?”

“Yes. No other bird sings so early in the year. It’s a thrush. I remember it from the old days.”

They were crouching on either side of the barbed-wire fence that separated the women’s barracks from the Small camp. They weren’t conspicuous. By now the Small camp was so crowded that people were lying and sitting about all over the place. The guards, moreover, had left the watchtowers because their time was up. They hadn’t waited to be relieved. Nowadays this happened sometimes in the Small camp. It was forbidden, but discipline was no longer what it used to be.

The sun was setting. Its reflection hung red in the windows of the town. A whole street which had not been destroyed glittered as though there were fire in the houses. The river reflected the unquiet sky.

“Where is it singing?”

“Over there. Where the trees are.”

Ruth Holland stared out through the barbed wire at what lay over there: a meadow, fields, a few trees, a farmhouse with a thatched roof, and further away on a hill, a low white house and garden.

Bucher looked at her. The sun made her emaciated face appear more gentle. He took a crust of bread from his pocket. “Here, Ruth—Berger gave it to me for you. He got it today. An extra piece for us.”

He threw the crust adroitly through the barbed wire. Her face twitched. The crust lay beside her. For a while she didn’t answer. “It’s yours,” she said finally with an effort.

“No. I’ve already had a piece.”

She swallowed. “You’re just saying that.”

“No, I swear I’m not.” He watched her fingers close quickly over the crust. “Eat it slowly,” he said. “Then you get more out of it.”

She nodded and was already chewing. “I’ve got to eat it slowly. I’ve just lost one more tooth. They simply fall out. It doesn’t hurt. That’s six now.”

“So long as it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t matter. We had someone here whose whole jaw had festered. He groaned until he died.”

“I soon won’t have any teeth left.”

“You can get false ones put in. Lebenthal has a denture.”

“I don’t want a denture.”

“Why not? Lots of people have them. It really doesn’t matter, Ruth.”

“They won’t give me a denture.”

“Not here. But later you can have one made. There are wonderful dentures. Much better ones than Lebenthal’s. His is an old one. He’s had it twenty years. Now there are new ones, he says, which one doesn’t notice in the least. They fit tight and are far more beautiful than real teeth.”

Ruth had eaten her piece of bread. She turned her dim eyes toward Bucher. “Josef, do you really believe we’ll ever get out of here?”

“I’m sure. Absolutely sure. 509 believes it, too. We all believe it now.”

“And then what?”

“Then—” Bucher had not yet thought far beyond it. “Then we are free,” he said, without quite being able to imagine it.

“We’ll have to hide again. They’ll hunt us again. As they have hunted us before.

“They won’t hunt us any more.”

She looked at him for a long time. “And you believe that?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “Maybe they’ll leave us in peace for a while. But then they’ll hunt us again. They don’t know any better.”

The thrush began to sing anew. It sounded clear and very sweet and unbearable.

“They won’t hunt us any more,” said Bucher. “We’ll be together. We will walk out of the camp. The barbed wire will be torn down. We will walk across that road there. No one will fire at us. No one will send us back. We will walk across the fields, into a house, like the white house over there, and sit down on chairs.”

“Chairs—”

“Yes. Real chairs. There will be a table and china plates and an open fire.”

“And people to chase us out.”

“They won’t chase us out. There will be a bed with blankets and clean sheets. And bread and milk and meat.”

Bucher watched her face grow distorted. “You must believe it, Ruth,” he said, helplessly.

She sobbed without tears. The sobbing was only in her eyes. They veiled over as something indefinable welled up in them. “It’s so hard to believe, Josef.”

“You must believe it,” he repeated. “Lewinsky has brought more news. The Americans and British are already far across the Rhine. They’re coming. They’re going to liberate us. Soon.”

The evening light suddenly changed. The sun had reached the mountain line. The town fell into a blue darkness. The windows grew dim. The river became still. Everything became still. The thrush, too, had ceased to sing. Only the sky began now to glow. The clouds turned into ships of mother-of-pearl, broad beams struck them like winds of light and they sailed into the red gate of the evening. The last glow fell full on the white house on the hill,
and while the rest of the land grew dim it was the last that still shimmered and it seemed closer and further away than ever before.

They saw the bird only when it had come quite close. They saw a small black ball with wings. They saw it outlined against the mighty sky, it flew high and then suddenly dived down, they saw it and both of them meant to do something and didn’t do it; one moment, just before it approached the ground, the whole silhouette was there, the small head with the yellow beak, the outspread wings and the round breast with the melodies, and then came the slight crackling and the spark from the electrically charged wire, very small and pale and fatal against the sunset, and nothing was left but the charred remains with a tiny claw hanging down on the lowest wire and a scrap of wing which had touched the ground and beckoned death toward it.