The Trial of Fallen Angels (14 page)

In this nightmare, my little brother, Helmut, and I (Amina) are playing near the sandbox constructed by our father out of colored bricks behind our large house on our property at the edge of the forest outside Kamenz in eastern Germany. Papa’s company employed many skilled masons, and he had them arrange the bricks on three sides of the box into patterns of ducks and flowers and extend the backside into a wide brick patio area, the opposite side of which had a large brick barbecue. Beds of roses, carnations, and begonias surrounded the two opposite ends of the sandbox, and our lush green lawn spread across the front.

Despite the obsessive state of tidiness in which our father maintains our patio and lawn, the sand in the box is excreting a putrid odor and I do not want to play in it. I tell Helmut he should stay away too, but he plunges in without concern. Soon his legs, hips, and torso are swallowed up, as if he is sinking in quicksand.

“Help, Amina! Help me!” he cries.

I reach in to grab him, but as I peer over the edge into the box I realize there is no sand. Instead, the arms of thousands of cadavers, tangled, blackened, and rotting, are swarming around like snakes inside the box, clutching at Helmut, pulling him down into an immense grave that extends deep into the earth, as if the box is situated over a portal into hell itself. I call out to Papa for help and pull as hard as I can to free Helmut, but I cannot overcome the strength of all these thousands of arms.

And then the nightmare ended. I awakened to find myself no longer on my grandfather’s sailboat or the ship in the Caribbean. I was lying on the grass outside my Nana’s house in Delaware, looking up at her and Tim Shelly, who were kneeling beside me.

“Brek, are you okay?” Nana asked.

I tried to comprehend what had happened. “I think so,” I said.

Nana smiled and stroked my shoulder. “You remember your name. That’s a good sign.”

I sat up and looked around. “I just had the most terrifying dream,” I said.

Nana comforted me. “You’re safe now, child,” she said. She turned to Tim. “Thank you for bringing her to me. I’ll take care of her.”

Tim stood up to leave. “No problem,” he said. He stared down at me with a chilling expression on his face, on the verge of being heartless and cruel. I had the same uneasy feeling as when I first met him. I knew him from somewhere, but I couldn’t remember where. “Thanks, Tim,” I said.

He walked off through the trees toward the train station.

Nana sensed my apprehension. “Does he make you uncomfortable?” she asked.

I sat up and brushed the grass from my skirt. “Yes,” I said. “I feel like I know him but he’s pretending to be somebody else. I just can’t remember who he is.”

“It will come back to you when you’re ready,” Nana said. She helped me to my feet. “There is a reason you meet every postulant and every presenter in Shemaya. You must discover why you have been introduced to Toby Bowles, Amina Rabun, and Tim Shelly. The sooner you do this, the sooner you will adjust. And the sooner you will have an opportunity to leave.”

16

A
mina Rabun’s brother, Helmut, died at the age of seven years and three months, but not in a sandbox. A five-hundred-pound bomb punched through the roof of the gymnasium at his school, killing everyone inside. The old men who had no children in school and could, therefore, examine the scene objectively, the way men do in their fascination with destruction, remarked how the debris was driven outward in a ring around the blast zone. This was not questioned by the hysterical mothers and fathers or the city elders and townspeople. We had all heard the bombers circling overhead and the crack of the antiaircraft guns. Helmut liked the pommel horse and the trampoline.

The bomb that hit the Dresdner Schule für Jungen at 0932 hours on 22 April 1943 instantly dissected and immolated the thirty-two little boys playing beneath it, scattering many times that number of arms, legs, and other body parts hundreds of yards from where they had last been assembled. The Nazi officials who took control of the scene collected these remains and divided them into roughly equal sheet-draped mounds, one for each family believed to have had a son in gym class that day. With solemn voices during the invocation, they proclaimed that the children had made the supreme sacrifice for
das Vaterland
, and we should all be very proud. Despite the dark hairs that curled around the edges of our little sheet, we cried and prayed over it as if it were our own little blond-headed Helmut. Mama swooned and had to be carried from the street and sedated for a week.

—

MY NOSE ITCHES.
I reach to scratch it with my right hand, miss, reach again, and miss again, as if I am swatting a fly rather than part of my own anatomy. There is a throbbing, penetrating numbness in my arm. This is the phantom pain. The ghost of my forearm haunts me each night, deceiving me during sleep by reattaching itself to my body and performing the functions a forearm performs, like scratching itchy noses and swatting flies. Having set me up this way, it exacts its revenge for my carelessness around the manure spreader by vanishing just as my eyes open in the morning, so that I am forced to reexperience the terror of seeing a bandaged stump quivering above me like a broken tollgate on a windy day. The stump points indiscriminately at the eighty-seven squares of ceiling tile in my hospital room. I have counted them often and am certain of the number. The morning nurse, Nurse Debbie, comes in and eases the stump back down to my side, sending bolts of pain shrieking to my brain and from there to my vocal cords. She apologizes.

“Time for breakfast and more morphine,” she says, calling me sweetie and fussing over me.

Luas and Nana are sitting at the foot of my bed. I do not know what they are doing here. Their mouths move, but I cannot hear them, so I ignore them. Globs of gray oatmeal dribble down my chin from a spoon held by fingers not yet accustomed to holding spoons. Nurse Debbie serves the narcotic after breakfast, injecting it directly into the intravenous tube that still replenishes the fluids I drained onto my grandfather’s pickup-truck seats and the emergency room floor. The poppies submerge me into a warm, perfect, opiated sleep from which I always regret returning.

—

AT THE SUGGESTION
of Pater Muschlitz, the parents of all the little boys killed at the school in Dresden agreed to bury their gruesome parcels in a mass grave as a sign of communal loss. All except my Papa.

“My son will have his own grave!” he raged, in denial of the fact that only God Himself could determine which sheet or sheets concealed Helmut. “He will not be buried like an animal! Like a common Jew! He will be buried in the family plot outside Kamenz!”

Papa ordered his staff to design a monument appropriate for the son of a wealthy industrialist, constructed, he insisted, of the gymnasium’s broken concrete and twisted rods of steel so no one would forget the cowardice of his murderers.

“It must be bigger by threefold than all other monuments in the cemetery! It must be completed immediately!”

He permitted himself only two days to bury Helmut and grieve. Then he returned to Poland with the explanation that the war effort there had intensified despite our having conquered the country years earlier. “The Third Reich urgently requires the expert services of Jos. A. Rabun & Sons to assist in various matters of national security that cannot be discussed,” he said. Papa had stopped smiling after his first trip to Poland. His eyes had turned darker and narrower, as if he were being haunted by someone or something.

In the half century since Großvater Rabun opened the doors of his small masonry shop near Kamenz, Jos. A. Rabun & Sons had swelled into the mighty
Körperschaft
that trenched modern Dresden’s sewers, paved its streets, and erected its buildings. Our little family business became the premier civil-engineering and construction firm in all of Saxony province, providing for our needs very well. Because of this, its demands were never resented by the family. We had far more than most—ample food, beautiful clothes, sufficient funds with which to enjoy dining out, the opera, and even wartime travel abroad. We lived comfortably on my grandfather’s estate with its large chalet-style house, riding stables, and gardens reflecting his love of the Alps. Other, less fortunate citizens of Deutschland had sacrificed so much more.

After Papa left for Poland, I met my best friend, Katerine Schrieberg, at our secret place on the estate—a hollow in the woods surrounded by a dense grove of pine trees and guarded by a thicket of briars and vines. She was nervous and pale as always, her fingers incessantly rubbing all the blessings that could possibly be extracted from the golden cross I had given her to present if she was ever stopped by the Nazis in the woods. I could see that my failure to appear during our last three scheduled meetings had made her very concerned. When I told her the sad news about Helmut, she cried as if it had been one of her own brothers, so much so that I found myself comforting her instead of she comforting me. Of course, she was fond of Helmut and felt sorry for me. But she wept also for herself and her family—for if the mighty Rabuns of Kamenz were no longer safe, where did that leave the weakened Schriebergs of Dresden? She asked if I would come back with her to her house, and I eagerly accepted the invitation, welcoming the opportunity to escape, for even a moment, the pall that had descended onto my life with the Allies’ five-hundred-pound bomb.

The house in which the Schriebergs lived was not really a house at all. It was an abandoned hunting cabin built by my grandfather deep in the immense tract of forest that stretches from Kamenz all the way to the Czech border. Before taking up residence there, the Schriebergs lived in a beautiful townhouse in the finest section of Dresden and owned several theaters, two of which, in fact, had been constructed by Jos. A. Rabun & Sons. Katerine and I were very close. We had taken dance and violin lessons together since grade school, and her parents and mine held seats on the boards of many of the same civic and charitable organizations until the Nazis banned Jews from such positions.

But then, in 1942, the Schriebergs abruptly booked passage to Denmark after accepting the then generous but nevertheless insulting offer to sell their theaters, home, and belongings to my uncle Otto for 35,000 Reichsmarks in total, rather than allow the government to seize the properties for nothing. They had family in Denmark who had agreed to house them, but when news spread of Nazis rounding up fleeing Jews at the train stations and loading them onto boxcars headed for Poland, they changed their plans and decided to take their chances by staying and hiding. Katerine made contact with me and asked about the hunting cabin.

She and I had sometimes slept in the cabin on warm summer nights and talked about the boys we would marry. It had not been used by my family since the start of the war, so I agreed to allow the family to stay there, and soon began these discreet visits to our meeting place with baskets and sometimes small wagons loaded with food and supplies, always honoring their constant pleas not to tell anyone of their existence—not my mother, not Helmut, and most important, not my father or Uncle Otto. No one.

Katerine’s father, Jared Schrieberg, and her younger brothers, Seth and Jacob, were industrious and immediately set to excavating a tunnel beneath the cabin through which to escape if anyone should approach. She told me they practiced their flight twice daily regardless of the weather and could silently vanish beneath the carefully reinstalled floorboards within thirty seconds exactly. They came and left from this tunnel, did most of their cooking at night to avoid attracting attention to the smoke from their fires, and relieved themselves far away from the cabin to avoid even the scent of habitation. It was a miserable and demeaning existence. I felt sorry for them, but their precautions proved unnecessary. The very boldness of hiding on the property of an officer of the Waffen-SS (the organization into which my uncle Otto accepted a commission) made life there secure for them in the way that life for certain tropical fish is made safe by living among lethal sea anemone.

When Katerine told her parents the news about Helmut, tears filled their eyes and they said they would sit shivah for him, which they explained to me was the Jewish mourning ritual. In my youth and ignorance, I panicked. I did not want them confusing God with their Jewish prayers into mistakenly sending Helmut to the Jews’ heaven. As politely as I could, I begged them not to do this. When they insisted, I grew furious. I had helped them at great personal risk and would not tolerate their interference in such matters. My grief for my brother and my hatred of his unseen murderers found an outlet in the Schriebergs, and I yelled at them in a voice more than loud enough to remind them upon whom they depended for their survival:
“Sagen Sie nicht jüdische Gebete für meinen Bruder!”

The room fell silent. Katerine stared down at the floor, biting her lip as Frau Schrieberg dug her fingernails into Katerine’s arm. Seth and Jacob looked to their father in horror, expecting him to punish my impertinence as he had so often done to them. But Herr Schrieberg only smiled coldly at me, revealing a flash of gold through his graying beard and mustache, unwittingly contorting his long, bulbous nose into the very caricature of a Jew mocked regularly in German newspapers of the day. As if surrendering a concealed weapon, he cautiously pulled the black yarmulke from the balding crown of his head and placed its flaccid shape before me on the battered plank table that served the family as dining area, desk, and altar. The Schriebergs would not offer prayers for my brother’s soul. I glared back at the old man and thanked him with a healthy dose of teenage impudence, having for the first time cowed an adult. He had no option. I left without another word and ran quickly through the woods, regretting my resort to such tactics but intoxicated by exerting my will so forcefully and effectively against my elders. The Schriebergs’ submission to my demands made me feel powerful and, for a moment, in control of the uncontrollable world around me. At least I didn’t have to live like them, like animals.

—

THE SKIN HAS
miraculously knitted itself over the amputation and the bandages have been removed, but even so, I refuse to touch or even look at the stump of my right arm. It terrifies me. Dr. Farris, the psychologist assigned to all amputees at Children’s Hospital, assures me this is perfectly normal.

“I’ve counseled many children in your situation, Brek,” he says. “Victims of firecrackers, car accidents, farm kids like you too. Most react the same way. They think that what remains of their arms and legs are monsters poised to take what’s left of their bodies, but you must remember that this is the same arm you were born with. It’s been terribly injured and it needs your love and compassion. You’re all it’s got. Can you do that?”

“I’ll try, but it isn’t fair,” I cry.

Dr. Farris looks at his watch. “Oops, time’s up for today. I’ll see you next week, okay? I think you’re doing great.”

I find my mother reading a fashion magazine in the waiting room.

“Done?” she asks.

“Yep.”

Luas is standing in the hallway outside Dr. Farris’s office. My mother doesn’t see him. He smiles and extends his left hand without first extending his right, pulling me with the gesture back into Nana’s living room in Shemaya.

“Thank God you’re back,” Luas says. “Sophia and I were beginning to wonder whether you would ever return.”

I look around the room, dazed and confused by the flood of images, emotions, and personalities rushing through me. Nana brings me a cup of tea, and I sit down on the sofa.

“You’ve been spending a lot of time with Ms. Rabun,” Luas says. “She led an interesting life.”

I slide my hand into the right sleeve of my bathrobe and trace the familiar contours of my arm: the shrunken, atrophied bundle of biceps; the rough, calcified tip of humerus jutting like coral beneath a puffy layer of flesh capping the bone.

“Yes, yes she did,” I say.

“The Schriebergs lied, you know,” Luas says.

“About what?”

“They sat shivah for Helmut.”