The Savior (17 page)

“Geiger!”
An Oberscharführer started to walk slowly toward Keller, his right hand resting on his holster.

Keller's heartbeat pounded like a drum in his head. “Are you sure…” he began, but his voice came out as a whisper.

“Yes?” The bully stopped, cocking his head. “Come on, speak up, I couldn't hear you.” He started to pull his gun out.

There was no turning back now. Keller forced the words out because he had no other choice. “Are you sure the Kommandant would approve of this?”

The man's eyes widened, his features froze. Keller was sure he was about to be killed, could almost feel the bullet ripping through his head. But the Oberscharführer's hand seemed to hesitate, his gun suspended halfway out of its holster, as if he was calculating how far he could act on his own, just how far the violinist's immunity extended. Then his jowls began to quiver, his eyes lit up and he broke out in a loud laugh. His hand dropped to his side and the gun slid back into its holster.

As the other guards joined him in his ugly laughter, Keller began to breathe again. Maybe he would get out alive. But he couldn't forget why he was standing there. He swallowed, tried to steady his voice.

“I mean, he has gone to great lengths to make this experiment work, to see if he could change…”

“You have obviously misunderstood the experiment, Herr Geiger.”

The smile disappeared from his face. He looked for a moment at the other guards, who quickly stopped laughing. Then he turned to the hunchback. “Come on, Karlchen. Ignore him, he's a fool.”

Karlchen just stood there, squinting, visibly thrown off balance by Keller's intrusion. Maybe there was still a way to stop this. But Keller was sure that if he said any more, it would push the Oberscharführer's patience to the limit.

“Get out of the way,” the big man said quietly, and there was more menace in those softly spoken words than there had been in his swagger and sarcasm.

Keller stood there a moment longer, knowing that the time to act was passing, had probably already passed. A guard had begun to move slowly toward him.

Suddenly there was a sound of running footsteps. He turned halfway around. One of the Jews was trying to get away.

The hunchback was faster than the guards; he fired without even pausing to take aim. The man fell, writhing and clawing the ground for a few seconds. Then he was still. The executioner lowered his gun and leaned on the butt with satisfaction.

“And now,” he said to Keller, echoing the Oberscharführer, “will you get out of my way?”

The guard who had been inching toward them suddenly jumped and knocked Keller to the ground. The violinist struggled to free himself from the man's weight, tried to roll over and get up, but the guard was too strong for him.

He heard a burst of noise like the sputtering of a car engine that won't turn over, only much louder. It lasted little more than a second.

Seven corpses lay against the wall.

The hunchback lowered his gun with a flourish, and the guards congratulated him on his performance with genuine enthusiasm. Then he limped away, leaving the rest of Keller's audience huddled in the space between that wall and the next barracks.

The guard who had jumped on Keller pushed him out from under him and stood up, muttering “Jew-lover.”

Staggering to his feet, Keller tried for a moment to hope that the other twenty would be spared. Or at least Grete, if he could get to the Kommandant before it was too late. But in his heart he knew that the killing was not yet over just because the crooked man had left.

“Now it's time for a visit to the cemetery,” said the Oberscharführer, tapping his thigh with his truncheon. “We have to pay our respects.”

The remaining prisoners were forced to drag the bodies down the long row of barracks, away from the “concert hall” and the main gate. The guards walked alongside them, beating them when they slackened their pace, laughing at their cries. Keller followed hesitantly, not knowing what to do, then quickened his pace and tried to get near Grete.

She was looking straight ahead as she marched. Tears streaked her face. She took no notice of him, didn't seem to hear when he called her name. The guards wouldn't let him get close enough to her.

He stood still for a few seconds while the others trudged forward. He wished he could grab her, pull her away. He had to speak to her, at least, couldn't just let her disappear from his life without another word exchanged.

As he rushed toward them, a guard saw him coming and shoved his gun butt into Keller's ribs. He dropped to his knees, gasping. Another guard ran over and kicked him in the groin. Waves of pain shot through him as he fell backward. Writhing on the ground, he saw the gleam of triumph in the man's eyes.

Suddenly Rudi's face hovered above him. “You fool,” he whispered. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” He grabbed Keller's shoulders with surprising strength to stop his thrashing around. “Don't try to save them. Nobody can.”

But the pain in his belly made Keller too angry to care what might happen. He wriggled free of Rudi's grip, pushed himself up off the ground and went limping after them.

He caught up by the time they reached the burial ground. Approaching the edge of the yawning pit, he stopped and groped in his pocket for a handkerchief to cover his nose and mouth. Then he took a few steps forward.

If it hadn't been for the stench, he wouldn't have believed his eyes. Thickets of limbs protruded from piles of shriveled corpses. Eyes open, staring. Mouths agape, twisted, frozen in a chorus of silent screams.

No, this can't be real, it must be a nightmare.

But that was what Grete had said when she saw her father's body.

Please, God, let it be a nightmare, this whole thing, let me wake up and have it all be gone, even if…even if Grete doesn't exist.

The Jews threw the bodies in after stripping them. Then the guards ordered one of the prisoners to take off his clothes and jump into the pit. At first Keller didn't understand what they wanted of the man, but then it became hideously clear: he was expected to have sex with a female corpse.

They were pointing at the one with large breasts, bloody from the wound in her throat. The other Jews drew back from the edge of the hole, but the guards forced them to watch. The man looked up at the guards, the purest hatred on his face as he spread her legs apart.

Is he going to give them what they want? Why even go through the motions when he must know they'll kill him anyway?

“Come on, Jew,” said the Oberscharführer. “We haven't got all day.”

But the man in the pit shook his head slowly and refused to get on top of the corpse after all. Once again the Oberscharführer pulled his gun halfway out of its holster, then seemed to decide on a change of tactics.

“Your life will be spared.” But the lying promise was too blatant. The Jew continued to shake his head.

“What's the matter, Judenschwein?” sneered a guard from the other side of the pit. “Are you a faggot?”

The Jew turned calmly to face him and spat at his boots.

Keller spun around and ran toward the Kommandant's office, stumbling past barracks, avoiding clusters of guards who turned and looked but didn't try to stop him. The pain in his ribs and belly and the throbbing in his head slowed him down; he had to stop near the concert hall to gulp some freezing air.

When he reached the office, the guard posted there wouldn't let him in. Keller hesitated, wondering if he should attempt to argue with him. Instead he hurried around the corner of the building and came to a window through which he could see the Kommandant writing at his desk. He rapped at the window, but the Kommandant didn't look up. Keller rapped louder and louder until his fist smashed through the glass.

Now the Kommandant looked at him, with the same bored expectation Keller had noticed on his face the other day.

“How can you let them do this?” Keller said, his voice too soft, devoid of emphasis as he struggled to catch his breath.

Smiling, the Kommandant leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs and laughed. Yes, laughed: he found it amusing. His thin frame began to shake, and he pulled a silk handkerchief out of his pocket to dab his eyes. After a few seconds he leaned over the desk and started writing again.

Keller couldn't keep himself from smashing another windowpane. Blood spurted onto the sill. The Kommandant looked up again, sharply this time, his lips drawn into a razor-thin line. In his flinty eyes there was no trace of the hilarity that had convulsed him a moment earlier. Keller backed away. The Kommandant stared at him until he turned around and ran back toward the other end of the camp.

The guards and prisoners were returning. They stopped in front of the building with the chimneys and the condemned were ordered to strip. Some of them refused, but the guards tore off their clothes.

Twenty skeletal bodies shivered in the biting wind. The guards poked their gun butts into ribs and genitals, and pinched the women's buttocks. Then they stepped back. They're going to shoot them now, Keller thought. But nothing happened. Within a few seconds he understood the game they were playing: their victims would have to stand there for a while, freezing.

The minutes passed. The snowfall was thickening; everything was silent except the howling of the wind. Those poor emaciated bodies were turning blue.

“Grete!” he yelled, almost choking on the name.

A guard turned to him and barked, “Shut up!”

The girl looked at him as if from far away, from the other end of the universe. There was no fear in her eyes, yet her gaze wasn't dull. She seemed to understand what was happening, but she was beyond all of it. The tears on her cheeks had dried.

Some of the others were covering their genitals with their hands. Their moaning combined with the whining wind in a bleak dialogue Keller would never forget. But Grete was silent, and her hands remained at her sides.

Suddenly a prisoner pointed a finger at him and shouted, “It's your fault!”

A gust of wind slapped him in the face. “What? Why?”

“Your beautiful music was a dirty trick.”

“But I didn't know it would come to this. Oh, God. Grete, tell them I didn't know!”

She looked at him again and said nothing. Wherever she was, wherever her spirit was traveling, it didn't matter whether or not he was guilty. He tried to look only at her face, but from time to time his eyes dropped. Her breasts hung like deflated balloons over the craggy protuberance of her rib cage. His gaze followed the contour of her swollen belly toward the darkness of the groin. It seemed wrong to look at her like that. But he wasn't watching her as the guards were, with an intent to humiliate; he was just trying to remember what it had been like to hold that frail body in his arms.

It was beginning to get dark. The sound of chattering teeth against the cries of the wind grew unbearable. How long were those pigs going to torture them?

And what will happen to me now that I've witnessed this?

Keller gagged as he swallowed a chunk of congealed saliva. He turned away and opened his mouth wide, trying to focus his eyes on the elaborate patterns made by the swirling snowflakes. Suddenly he heard a choked cry, then a high-pitched gasping for air. A man in the line of victims was swaying, tottering, one hand clutching at his throat. After a few seconds his knees buckled and he fell forward.

“Get up!” snapped a guard. The man didn't move. The guard and a couple of his cronies turned to Rudi, who was also facing the prisoners but was standing slightly apart from the line of torturers, hands thrust deep into his pockets, eyes trained on the ground as if he were fascinated by the whiteness of the snow accumulating there. He had been on the fringes of the grim procession to and from the burial pit, but so far he hadn't done anything.

He stiffened when he sensed that they were looking at him. Without words they seemed to be saying, “It's your turn now.” Rudi walked over to the man on the ground, slowly pulled out his service revolver and fired a bullet into the man's head. The body jerked once from the impact, and the snow around the head began to turn crimson.

As he rejoined the line of guards, his eyes met Gottfried's for a moment, but he quickly looked away.

Five minutes later a man standing next to the corpse yelled, “Enough, you animals! What are you waiting for?” Some of the guards laughed quietly. Muttering curses, the man started to walk slowly toward the fence.

They let him walk at least half a minute. Finally he began to run.

Keller wanted so much for him to make it, even though he knew the man would be skewered on the barbed wire. In those last few seconds it was somehow obvious from the
way
he ran, the way his matchstick arms pumped the air as his spindly legs carried him forward, that he had begun to hope. He must have known better, of course, but at that last moment a mindless survival mechanism seemed to propel him.