The Savior (15 page)

“‘No, it's a nightmare,' I said to myself. Then I saw some of the other prisoners looking at my mother and me. I pushed her hands away and jumped out of bed. I leaned over the top of the bunk, pulled off the soaked blanket and looked at my father's face—ashen skin, yellow lips, glassy eyes staring at the ceiling.

“I'm still not sure how he got ahold of that razor. He must have swiped it when his head was shaved soon after we arrived, when he still had enough presence of mind to be able to plan something. And somehow he'd managed to keep it hidden.”

Grete reached for the coffee cup, which was on the little table next to Gottfried's bed, and took a few gulps; her mouth must have been terribly dry. Her hands shook as she put the cup down. She folded her arms and pressed them against her belly, her shoulders hunched over slightly, her head bowed. After a few moments she began again.

“I stood there stroking his cheek, struggling to breathe. My mother was still screaming, and there was a lot of noise as the others tried to make her stop. They didn't want trouble with the guards—they had to shout at her to get her to listen. Of course, the guards heard the commotion and came in. Suddenly everyone was quiet. I'll never forget that silence: it roared in my head like an ocean. Their leader looked at everyone standing near my father's bunk. In a few seconds he figured out what was going on. He turned to my mother and asked, ‘Was this your husband?' His voice was
sympathetic.
She burst into tears again and nodded her head.

“My mother was a fool. She shouldn't have admitted anything. I suppose they could have looked it up in their records, but by then the bastard's whim might have passed. He clicked his tongue and said, ‘It would be too cruel to let you outlive him in such grief.' Then he pulled out his gun and shot her.”

Grete stared at the opposite wall of the room for a few moments.

“She was thrown backward onto the floor. I can still see the expression that was on her face for the few seconds before it went stiff. I tried to ignore the dark blotch that was spreading across her forehead, tried to look only at her eyes. She seemed…surprised. The guards laughed, and her murderer looked around and asked, ‘Are there any other relatives of this man in the room?' I was so afraid that someone would give me away with a word or a glance. He stared at me for a long time. I was sure he knew, sure it was all over for me. I must have been white with fear, but somehow I kept quiet. Slowly, reluctantly, he put his gun away and left with the others. It was our job to drag my parents' bodies out for burial.”

She swallowed with effort, her eyes squinting as she struggled to finish the story. Gottfried grabbed her hand. She sighed.

“I said my mother was a fool—she didn't know how to survive. My sister is probably dead, too. The only survivor in my family is me, why or how I don't know. I survived the horrible train ride, with hundreds of us crammed into freight cars for three days in the summer heat. The windows were boarded up. Once or twice, after hours without moving, we started up again in the opposite direction, as if they couldn't decide where to send us. All around me people collapsed from lack of water or starved to death. The smell…I can't describe it. Then the doors were pulled open the night we arrived here, floodlights in our eyes, guards shouting, dogs barking. I survived that first selection on the platform, too. And I've survived here until now. But maybe…maybe I'm the biggest fool of all.”

Grete turned toward him, her eyes fierce blue beacons of pain. She was staring through him, through the wall behind him. Her jaw was quivering. When at last she was able to focus her eyes, she seemed to notice the look of horror that was frozen on his face, and broke down.

He put his arms around her, rocked her gently. Her tears soaked his collar. She released her grief in long, shuddering wails that were muffled by the pressure of her face against his chest. Between her sobs she gasped for breath.

He tried to say something to comfort her, but the movement of his lips produced no sound. Even if he had found his voice, what could he have said? He stroked her head, and suddenly ached to know what she had looked like before they did this to her.

Her hair—he wanted to run his fingers through the curls they had cut off.

Looking at the spare, gray-clad body pressed against him, he suddenly imagined the rosy tips of her breasts and a brush of coarse reddish hair between her legs.

Her father had killed himself, she had seen his bloody arm dangling from the bunk, and then her mother had been murdered in front of her. Her people were being gassed and incinerated. She had entrusted him with her story, he had listened in horror and sympathy, but now he couldn't banish the thought of her without clothes on.

How would that frail body react to a lover's caresses?

Then an idea passed through his mind—it seemed to come direct from the hellish world she had been describing. If he wanted to have her, he could. It didn't matter how she felt. If she didn't want him to take her clothes off or lie on top of her,
that wouldn't have to stop him.
She was too weak to resist. Who would know the difference? To whom could she complain? The Kommandant? Her fellow inmates, and admit that she had come to his room?

He looked down at the chapped, reddened hands that were resting in his. They felt bony, brittle. He eased his hands out from under them. The skin of her forearms was drawn tight; the elbows were sticking out. So were the bones of her face and the back of her neck.

The same odor of decay he'd noticed in the concert hall had permeated her clothes and skin. Her breath was fetid after so much talking and crying.

No, on second thought, she wasn't very desirable. Not in this condition. It even seemed strange that this creature was still alive, after all she had been through. And suddenly it
offended
him that she was still alive, that her skeletal frame had clung to life so desperately, that what was in front of him could still be called a human being. With feelings, with rights. He was seized by restlessness, especially in his hands—a need to move them, to grab something.

He was afraid of what his hands might do.

Her weeping had begun to subside. He got up, shoved his hands into his pockets and walked to the window. When he looked back, she was watching him.

“What's the matter?” she asked weakly.

He didn't answer for a few moments, struggling to keep his hands in his pockets.

“What's wrong?”

“I get dizzy sometimes,” he said in a monotone, looking out the window. “There's no fresh air in here.” He tried to open the window, but it was stuck.

“Maybe we should go outside.”

He turned around, surprised.

She used the sleeve of her shroudlike garment to wipe away the last of her tears. “Sometimes you can walk a little, when you make sure there are no guards within a few hundred feet. All those nights when I couldn't sleep, I'd look out the window next to my bunk. I watched the guards patrol. I know where they walk, at least near our barracks; I know their rhythms. We'd have to listen for footsteps and stay within the shadows of the buildings.”

He was still hesitating. “What one person can do alone may not be safe for two.”

She looked at him for a few seconds, waiting to see whether he would change his mind. “Of course, I don't have much to lose. For you it's different, so maybe we should just…”

“No, no, you're right. Let's get out of here.” He didn't want to be reminded of that difference between them.

He put on his overcoat and helped her bundle up in a couple of blankets before they left the room. As soon as they got outside, he was grateful. The cold air and biting wind were refreshing; the feeling of being boxed in began to give way. This was the first time since his arrival that the lingering smell from the chimneys seemed to have dissipated. Though it made him nervous to be walking with a prisoner, he tried to assume that his safety was guaranteed by the Kommandant—at least as long as he was useful to him. Maybe his presence could protect Grete as well.

He thanked God he was no longer caged in that room with her, struggling against impulses he could barely fathom. Whatever might happen to her in that camp, he knew she was no longer in any danger from him. For a moment he saw the two of them as if from a distance: a man and a woman clinging to each other as they groped their way through the darkness. They were figures in a nightmare landscape, each trapped in a different way.

The minute after this vision passed, though, it seemed like an excuse he had concocted. Sure, blame everything on the camp. Under normal circumstances he was pure, decent.

What about that walk along the river in Frankfurt?

Suddenly she tugged at his sleeve and pointed to the main gate, which was still a fair distance from them. It was open—that was clear enough in the moonlight—and there didn't seem to be any guards around. The big searchlights had been turned off; the darkened watchtower looked empty. The camp was deathly still.

The moonlight, filtered through a passing cloud, lent a silvery shimmer to the iron archway. Beyond the open gate, glistening snow-covered fields and a pine forest beckoned.

I'll instruct the guards to open the gate for you immediately.
A bluff. And then he had protected his precious experiment with threats about the Gestapo. But in the meantime Gottfried had played two more concerts, had pulled the prisoners more than halfway “back to life from this living death.” The Kommandant could afford to let go of him now. He must be testing him to see how serious he was about leaving.

The Kommandant knew that Grete was with him; Gottfried was certain of that. She was right—nothing here happened by chance, or out of the goodness of their hearts. Everything was part of the experiment: They were rats in the maze he had designed. He had let her come to Gottfried's room, believing she was acting on her own impulse, and now he wanted to see if she was “truly alive” enough to venture through that gate.

Gottfried tried to explain all this to her. She looked at him doubtfully.

“We just have to walk through,” he whispered.

“Those will be the last steps we ever take if it's a trap,” she said, clutching his shoulder. “I know their ways better than you.”

“But that's the risk we have to run, don't you see? And it might be more of a trap for you if we stay inside. He believes in the survival of the fittest, in Darwin's theory of evolution applied here and now to human beings. Only those willing to walk through the gate to freedom, with all its risks, deserve to be free—that's the way his mind works. Walking through might be your only chance to get out alive.”

“You haven't lived this nightmare long enough. God knows what's really going on here. But even if you're right, I can't walk out alone. The others have to be told.”

He couldn't believe she would even consider that. “Two might slip through, if it serves a purpose for the Kommandant. But thirty? He'd never take that kind of risk.”

“Remember, we have nothing to lose. Anyone who might accept your explanation of this open gate is entitled to know about it. Most of them wouldn't attempt it, anyway. I'm sure of that. If you're worried about being part of a group, you can go through by yourself.”

He was holding her thin arms just above the elbows, unwilling to relax his grip. He didn't want to be left alone, didn't want to decide on his own whether or not to take that chance.

“You can hide in those woods across the road until I find you. There's a small clearing about two hundred feet west of the gate—I used to pass it every day when they marched us to the factory. If I don't come within half an hour, forget about me and leave.”

“Why do you have to go back to them?” The bitterness in his voice surprised him. “You said you never even talk to each other about anything important. What do you owe those people?”

She glared at him. He had taken her too literally, had dared to question a bond between them that he couldn't begin to understand. He let go of her; his arms dropped to his sides.

She turned and walked away briskly. For a moment he stayed there, angry at her, and thought of going through the gate by himself and
not
waiting for her in the woods across the road. It probably wouldn't be safe to wait.

But it was impossible to leave without his violin, anyway. How could he have forgotten the instrument that those wealthy patrons—some of them Jews—had helped him purchase back in 1935? You don't leave behind a priceless Guarnerius. Not when there's a choice. He hurried back to his room to get it.

Within five minutes he was making his way toward the gate again, violin in hand, but slowed down when he realized that without Grete he had no reason to take such a risk. Where could he go if he walked through that gate without express permission from the Kommandant? Surely not home. If he stayed just one more day and played the final concert, they'd drive him home and life would continue as before. Unless…

You have seen this place.

He turned a corner, only to see the beam of the searchlight sweeping across his path. Before the light could trap him in its pitiless glare, he hid behind the same warehouse he'd found the previous day, with its obscene cache of shoes. He tried to catch his breath.