Текст книги "The Master Sniper"

Автор книги: Stephen Hunter

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

21

“What are you doing here?” was all he could think to say.

“I work here. I’m with the field hospital.”

“Oh, God, Susan. Then you’ve seen it, seen it all.”

“You forget: I knew it all.”

“We never believed.”

“Now of course it’s too late.”

“I suppose. How did you end up here?”

“A punishment. I made waves. I made real waves. I got publicly identified with the Zionists. Then Fischelson died and the Center died and the British made a stink, and they sent me to a field unit in a DP camp. British influence. It was said I didn’t appreciate London. And when I heard about Belsen, I tried to get there. But it was in the British zone and they wouldn’t have me. Then came Dachau, American. And my doc at the DP camp did think highly of me, and he knew how important it was to me. So he got me the orders. See? Easy, if you have the right connections.”

“It’s very bad, isn’t it.”

“Bad. That’s not a terribly eloquent word. But, yes, it is bad. And Dachau is nothing compared to Belsen. And Belsen is nothing compared to Sobibór. And Sobibór is nothing compared to Treblinka. And Treblinka is nothing compared to Auschwitz.”

They were strange names to Leets.

“Haven’t heard of them. Haven’t been reading the papers, I guess.”

“I guess not.”

“Did you see Shmuel? He’s with us. He’s still fine. I told you he’d be fine.”

“I heard. An OSS detachment. With a Jew in an American uniform. That’s how I knew.”

“We’re still after him. After that German. That’s what we’re here for.”

“One German?”

“Yeah. A special guy. With a special—”

“Jim, there were thousands of them. Thousands. What’s one more or less?”

“No, this one’s different.”

“No. They’re all the same.”

But Tony was not filing a report to JAATIC. He was writing a letter to his older brother, in response to a letter that had finally caught up with him earlier.

“Dear Randolph,” he wrote.

It was of course splendid to hear from you. I am glad Lisbon is interesting and that Priscilla is well.

Please do not believe any of the rumors, and do not let them upset you. I realize my behavior has been difficult to fathom of late and that it must be the subject of much discussion in certain circles. I have not surrendered to the Americans. I do not flee my own kind. I do not think myself Robert Graves. I am not insane, though that was not a question in your note; I still sensed it beneath your Foreign Office diction.

I am quite well off. I am totally recovered. No, I do not see women. Perhaps I should, but I do not. I do not see old friends either. They are rather too kind for my somewhat peculiar tastes. I am among Americans by choice: because, fools all of them, they talk only of themselves. Children: they prattle incessantly about self and city, country, past, future, manufacturing noise from every orifice. They have no curiosity beyond their own skin. I do not have to make explanations. I do not get long, sad stares of sympathy. No one inquires solicitously how I’m getting along In The Aftermath….

Dearest Randolph, others lost children and wives in the bombings. Jennifer and Tim are quite gone now; I’ve accepted it and hardly think of it. I do not, as you suggest, still blame myself. Things are quite chipper here. We are hunting down a dreadful Jerry. It’s great fun, most fun I’ve had in the war….

But Tony stopped writing. He felt himself about to begin to cry again. He crushed the document up into a ball, and hurled it across the room. He sat back, and pinched the bridge of his nose. The pain would not go away. He doubted if it would, ever. He wished he had a nip of something. But he didn’t. He thought he might try and get some sleep. Where was Leets? Should he head back to the office, where the two Jews were? He had to do something, he knew that for sure.

* * *

The old man slept. Shmuel watched him. He lay on the cot, stirring now and again—the jab of an interior pain. His breath came shallow and dry, a rattle, and a bubble of drool inflated in one corner of his slack mouth. His skin was milky and loose and spotted, shot with a network of subtle blue veins. He’d pulled the blanket around him like a prayer shawl, though in doing so a foot fell free and it dangled off the cot. Somehow this old creature had survived, another freak like Shmuel, a meaningless exception whose only function was to provide a scale for the larger numbers of extinction.

Why couldn’t the Americans have captured some nice plump SS officer? An eager collaborator, a cynic, a traitor? Or why couldn’t they have arrived just a day earlier, before the warehouses had been looted? No—again, this Repp had been lucky. He’d left nothing behind, leaving them to hunt through the pale, pained memories of Eisner the tailor.

“Remember: the records,” Leets had said.

But instead he remembered his own first interrogation with Leets and Outhwaithe: two hard, glossy Gentiles, eyes blank, faces impassive. Men in uniforms: was there a difference? Hard men, with guns and jobs to do, no time to let human feelings get in the way. The whole world was wearing a uniform, except for the Jews. No, the Jews had a uniform too: blue and white stripes, a jagged, dirty star clipped over the heart. That was old Eisner’s uniform, that was the uniform Shmuel preferred, not this—

Startled, he looked at his own clothes. He was wearing American boots, field pants and a wool OD shirt. To old Eisner he was an American, the language made no difference.

Eisner the tailor still slept fitfully on the cot as Shmuel slipped out. He did not have far to go. Of the warehouses there were two kinds: badly looted and heavily guarded. Soldiers marked the latter, smashed doors and a litter of debris the former. Shmuel immediately found the single exception to this rule, a brick building that was not guarded, and had not been looted.

He stepped inside. It smelled musty and the darkness clamped down on him. He stood, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Small chinks of light glittered in the roof, almost like stars, and slowly in the darkness shapes appeared. Pile and pile, rank on rank, neatly arranged after the Teutonic fashion, were blue-and-white prison uniforms.

“No. This guy is different. I don’t know why, but he is. He’s a curious combination of valor and evil. He’s very brave. He’s enormously brave. He’s much braver than I am. But he’s—” He paused, groping.

She would not help him.

“I can’t figure out how they turned out such men,” Leets said. “You see, we always expect them to be cowards. Or perverts. Or nuts, of some sort. What if they were just like us? What if some of them were better even? Braver? Tougher? What if some were heroes. Unbelievable heroes?”

“You melodramatize. I’ve seen their work. They were grim, seedy little killers, that’s all. Nothing glamorous in it at all. They killed in the millions. Men, women. The children, especially. At Auschwitz, at the end, they threw children living into the ovens.”

“I asked Tony about all this. He’s a very brilliant man, you realize. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘Don’t get too philosophical, chum. We’re merely here to kill the swine.’ But that’s not enough, don’t you see?”

“You’re obsessed with this guy, that’s all I see. And he’s nothing, he’s no concept, no symbol. He’s just a pig with a gun. It’s the gun that makes him special.”

Shmuel, back in the office, slipped quickly into the uniform. He felt nothing; it was only cloth, with a faintly musty smell, from long storage.

He smoked another cigarette while he waited for Eisner to awake or for Leets or Outhwaithe to return. He knew better than to jerk the tailor out of his sleep. Now where were Leets and Outhwaithe? Though perhaps it was best they were away for so long, it might give him a chance to finally make contact here.

As he waited, a curious thing began to happen. It occurred to him that there would in fact be a future. For the first time in years he allowed himself to think of it. In the camps as an article of faith one kept one’s hopes limited to the next day, not the next year. Yet in his sudden new leisure, Shmuel began to think of a new way of life. Certainly he wouldn’t stay in Europe. The Christians had tried to kill him; there was nothing for Jews in Europe now. You’d never know who’d been a Nazi; they’d all say it had been others, but each time you heard a German voice or saw a certain hard set of the eyes or a train of boxcars or even a cloud of smoke, the sensation would be discomfort. The Zionists were always talking about Palestine. He’d never listened. Enough to concentrate on without dreams of a desert somewhere, Arabs, fig trees, whatever. It seemed absurd. But now—well, it was there, or America.

The old man stirred.

“You are feeling all right, Mr. Eisner, now?”

“Not so bad,” said Eisner. “It’s been worse.” Then he saw Shmuel. “A uniform? And whose is that?”

“Mine, believe it or not. I had one like it anyway. At the camp in the East. Called Auschwitz.”

“A terrible place, so I’ve heard. Still, it’s a surprise.”

“It’s true.”

“I thought you were with the Gentiles.”

“With, yes. Part of, no. But these fellows are decent, not like the Germans.”

“All Gentiles frighten me.”

“That’s why I’m here alone.”

“Still after the records? I should remember records, all I’ve been through. Listen, I’ll tell you, I know nothing of records. The civilian, Kohl, he kept the records. A German.”

“Kohl?” said Shmuel, writing it.

“Ferdinand Kohl. I’ll spell it if you like. It makes no difference though. He’s dead. Not a bad man, but that’s how it goes. The inmates caught him on liberation day and beat him to death. But there’s too many other sorrows in here”—heart—“to make room for him.”

“Mine’s crowded as well,” Shmuel said.

“But coats I remember. Battle coats. For the forest. Very fancy. We made them in the thousands.”

“When?”

“Over the years. For four years; then last year we changed the pattern. First, a kind of smock, a tunic. Then a real true coat.”

“A special demand? For a group. Say, a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five. Do you remember?”

“I just sewed the buttons on, that’s all. A hundred and fifty coats a day, on went the buttons, that’s all. Any fool could have sewn on buttons.”

“But no special demands?”

“No. Only—No, nothing.”

“Only what?” He paused. “Please. Who knows?”

“Kohl in early April I remember complaining about big shots and their special privileges. A German hero had his men here for special antitank training and demanded they be refitted with the coats as theirs had worn thin.”

“Hero. His name?”

“If I had it then, it’s gone now. So many things I forget. My boy was named David, my two girls Shuli and Rebecca. Them I remember. David had blond hair, can you believe it? I know the girls and their mother are gone. Everybody who went East is gone. But maybe the Germans spared him because his hair was their color. We thought it was a curse, his blondness, that they would take him from us. But maybe a blessing, no? Who could tell such things? A learned rabbi could maybe expl—”

“Mr. Eisner. The coats. The hero.”

“Yes, yes, forgive me. Thinking, all the time thinking. Hard to remember details.”

“Kohl. Mr. Kohl. He didn’t want to give up the coats.”

“Kohl. Yes, old Kohl. Not a bad sort, notions of fairness. He tried to say No. The boys at the front need the jackets. Not rear-echelon bastards. But the hero got his way. He had papers from the highest authority. Herr Kohl thought this ridiculous. From an opera. I heard him tell Sergeant Luntz that. Heroes from an opera a monkey wrench throwing into his shop. It was no good. My David, he’ll grow up to be strong. On a farm somewhere, in the country. He was only three. He hadn’t had any instruction. He won’t know he was a Jew. Maybe it’s better. Maybe that’s the best way to be a Jew in this world, not to know. He’s six now, David, a fine healthy boy on a farm somewhere in the country.”

Shmuel patiently let him lapse into silence. When he was done, Shmuel saw tears star the old man’s eyes and at the same time noticed that the old man wasn’t so old: he was just a man, a father, who hadn’t been able to do anything for his children. Better maybe that he’d died so he wouldn’t have to live with their accusing ghosts in his head. The Germans: they made you hate yourself for being too weak to fight them, too civilized to demand revenge.

“Opera?” Shmuel finally said. “I missed that.”

“What the fellow called it, the hero fellow. His plan. They name everything, the Gentiles. They have to name things. This from an opera, by Wagner. Herr Kohl hated Wagner. It made his behind doze, I heard him tell Luntz.”

“What was the name?” Shmuel asked, very carefully.

“Operation Nibelungen,” the old man who was not so old replied.

Shmuel wrote it down.

* * *

“It’s funny. Us. In this place,” he said.

She’d lit a cigarette. It had gotten dark now, and in the long still room with the mirrors and the hanging uniforms, he could see the orange glow.

“Why?” he asked. “Why did you come looking for me? You didn’t come for my theories on German evil surely.”

“No. I just wanted to tell you something.”

“Okay. So shoot. Tell me anything.”

“I’m divorcing Phil.”

“No kidding?”

“I wrote him. I said I wanted to go to the Middle East. He wrote back. ‘What, are you crazy, you think I spent all this time on a goddamned tin can to go live in some desert?’ So, that was it. I won’t see him again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Fischelson’s dead, I told you?”

“Yes?”

“And the money’s gone. It was all set up by this guy, this Hirsczowicz. A millionaire. But the money ran out. What little there was, most of it was lost somehow, in the early days of the war. So there’s nothing in London anymore. And there’s nothing back in the States. Not a goddamned thing but people talking about how they suffered without the meat.”

“I’m sorry you’re so bitter.”

“I’m not bitter at all. I’m going to go to Palestine. Nothing but Jews there, Jim. It’s the only place in the world where the Jews will be welcomed. That’s where I’m going.”

“Susan.”

“That’s where we’ll all have to go,” she said.

Her cigarette had gone out. Now, in the room, total darkness had arrived. He could hear her voice, disembodied.

“I’ll talk to him. To the Jew. Shmuel. Do you know he had quite a reputation as a writer in Warsaw? I’ll talk to him. He’ll go too. He has nowhere else to go.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes. I suppose I wanted to tell you I don’t hate you. I don’t want you to die. I never did. I remove the curse. I hope you get your man. The German.”

“I will,” he said. “Or he’ll get me.”

The old man was tired now. Shmuel wanted him to sleep in the room but he refused.

“A nap, not so bad. But the night? I have nightmares, you see, I wake up. It helps to know where I am. Besides, the barracks aren’t so bad now. They’ve moved the sick ones out. It’s what I know.”

“All right. It’s all right with me. You can walk?”

“Not so fast, but I end up where I’m going.”

He got the man up, and pulled the blanket around his thin shoulders against the cold. They walked in the twilight down the street to the Lager, the prison compound. It was warm, really too warm for the blanket, yet the old man clutched it around him with blue-veined fists. He leaned on Shmuel, shuffling along on frail legs. Shmuel felt the heart pulsing behind the thin bones of his chest.

A Jew, thought Shmuel. A living European Jew: the first he’d spoken to in months. It came as a shock. He’d been so long among the Gentiles. Not Germans, but still Gentiles. They didn’t know; they couldn’t share. Earnest, apologetic, efficient men: decent. Intelligent even, but it was as if a different kind of brain filled their skulls. They worshiped a man skewered by his hands on a lumber cross: pain and blood at the very center of it. Shmuel preferred this eternal sufferer, pathetic yet dignified, who leaned on him as they neared the guardhouse, the entrance to the compound.

When they reached it, a flashlight from an American sentry beamed onto them. It seemed to halt at their prison stripes as if those said enough and then blinked out.

“Go on,” said a voice.

They walked on through the familiar geography, across the roll-call plaza, down the street between the barracks.

“It’s over there,” said the old man, pointing.

“I know,” said Shmuel.

Shmuel helped him to the building.

“You needn’t come inside.”

“No, you helped, now I help you. That’s how it should be.”

“You, a Jew, a yeshiva boy, you are helping them fight the Germans?”

“A little. There’s not much I can do. They’ve got machines and guns. They really don’t need me. But I can do little things.”

“Good. We should have fought. But who knew?”

“Nobody knew. Nobody could have guessed.”

“Maybe so,” said the old man. “Maybe so.”

They went into the building. Faces peered down from the tiers of bunks and voices hummed. The smell was almost blinding; Shmuel remembered through the tears that welled into his eyes. There was room for the old man near the stove. He took him over and helped him lie down. He was light and dry and fell quiet quickly. But his hand groped out once, snatching at Shmuel’s wrist.

Shmuel drew back as the man’s breathing deepened into regularity. He was aware that a dozen gaunt faces stared down at him, death masks, and he didn’t care for the sensation. An undertang of DDT, from a recent de-lousing, hung heavy and powdery in the close air, causing his nostrils to flare.

Shmuel stepped to the door and out. Cool air flooded him, smooth and sweet. Above, an abundance of stars rose in their tiers, like the eyes of the men in the bunks.

There: a metaphor, drawn from the camps. “Like the eyes of the men in the bunks.” Only a Jew would see stars blurry and infinite in bands from horizon to horizon and think of the white eyes of men at the point of death. Would he continue to draw on the camps for metaphors, was that how deep they’d been driven into him? Did the Germans own his imagination, a final, subtler purchase, one that would seal him off from human company, the metaphorical Mussulman, forever?

Yet as he in despair realized the answer was Yes, he realized also that the problem was as much literary as psychological. And from that there followed immediately the recognition that he was, for the first time in many long years, thinking of literature again. He thought he ought to write about the camps, and that sometime, perhaps in a year or so, when one would not confuse zeal with excellence, passion with brilliance, he might in fact, if only as a private exercise.

As he walked down the street, between the mute rows of barracks, he realized what an awesome task he’d so slightly just evoked; perhaps even an impossible one. It was enormous in a thousand ways: had any man the right to try and spin stories from a tragedy so huge? What of people of ill spirit who would read such accounts purely for the extreme sensations they caused, which of course was not the point at all? What was the artist’s responsibility to the gone, the lost, the unheard, the forgotten? And he saw also that in a certain way the imagination had been forever altered. The boundary of evil had been pushed back beyond the horizon on the one hand, but on the other, the capacity of the individual to withstand and triumph over the murderous intentions of the State had also been pushed back. A new form would have to be found, something that would encompass these new boundaries and at the same time convey the immensities of the act of Murder: a new esthetic for the post-atrocity world. Again, the problem of metaphor thrust itself upon him. In the camps, metaphor was everywhere: life was a metaphor, death was a metaphor. How could art be spun from a reality already so charged with elemental symbolism, the vision of hell the Germans had labored so mightily to construct on this earth: satanic sparks, the flames, the awful stench, the dogs straining on their leashes, fangs glistening? Perhaps it was beyond the reach of the artist.

You’d have to concentrate on something small: a parable; panoramas were incomprehensible. Concentrate on one man: how he lived, with as much dignity as the times permitted, and how he died, senseless perhaps, one more sliver of ash in a whirlwind dank with clouds of ash, but convinced somehow that his life had had some meaning.

No, he thought, I could never write that. I simply am not good enough. Face it, as a writer you weren’t much, a few pitiful essays in long-forgotten Yiddish journals in a city that no longer existed. What positions had he attacked, what had he defended? He could not even remember.

Had he been a Marxist, a poet, a historian, a novelist, a philosopher, a Zionist? No, not a Zionist, not even in the last days before the war had come, that hot August of ’39 when Zionism flared like a contagion through the Quarter, and even the richest of them, the most assimilated, had been consumed in its vision. But that had been dreams, absurd, out of scale, the problems so immense. Next year in Jerusalem! Insane! The British, the Arabs, thousands of miles to travel. He hadn’t bought it then—just more dreamy Jews getting on with their own destruction.

But now he saw the dream wasn’t so outsized. It was prosaic, a necessity. For where else was there to go? Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. Home of the Jews. Now that would be something, wouldn’t it? That would be worth—

An immense pleasure spread through him. Look at me, he thought, I am thinking again.

He did not see them until they were quite close and then he had not time to display surprise. They seemed to materialize from nowhere, though in a splinter of a second he realized he hadn’t been able to make them out against the looming bulk of the guardhouse. And yet there was a familiarity about them, as though old fears had taken on a familiar guise, and so he absurdly was not frightened and if there was to be any mercy in the next several seconds it was that one: that Shmuel was not frightened as the rushing forms closed on him and held him down.

“SS shit,” he heard in Polish, “SS shit.”

“I—” Shmuel started and then something enormous crashed into his skull. He felt his head inflate in pain and it seemed the abundance of stars had come down to crush him and they hit him again and again and again.