Nocturnes (13 page)

He paused again, swallowed hard on his now-warm beer, and called for two more. When they arrived and he had drained half of the fresh one, he went
on.

“I could bore you with stories like that for a month…a lifetime. Time and again I have watched as a handful of men and women from their respective generations have labored against the narrow visions and expectations of their societies, only to be disillusioned and cast down by mass conformity. The unique is abhorred. And the sickness that your world perpetuates is treated, not with healing and compassion, but with punishment. Your prisons overflow with your refuse, just like your streets with your homeless. You strap living human beings into monstrous contraptions of voltage and anguish and you call it justice. But the melting eyes and the burning flesh smell more like revenge. It is an ancient odor. I have inhaled that stench the world
over.”

He paused and looked deeply into the old man’s eyes…to the very edge of Isaac’s
soul.

“In fact, I detect traces of it right
now.”

Now Julian was whispering, and Isaac found himself leaning involuntarily forward in his seat.

“You want revenge, Isaac. This is your curse, just as I have mine. You want revenge so badly that the craving for it sustains you like food. And you want it of God
Himself.”

Isaac jerked back into his seat and stared with wide eyes at the vampire’s remarks. But Julian wasn’t finished with him
yet.

“You think of yourself as faithful, with your pious hypocrisy. You are so typical. There is but one shred of greatness left in you, and one only. Your love for your wife is your truth. But it is not enough to save you because your hatred is too
strong.”

“No!” Isaac had found his tongue again. He was answered once more with harsh stares from the other patrons. “You know nothing of my love, or of my hate. You grasp at straws of cliched human weakness to give credibility to your own delusions. It is you who is unsaveable. You have made truths from your lies, but they persuade only
yourself.”

Julian was unruffled. “Then enlighten me. Tell me YOUR story, Isaac…from your own lips. And we shall learn the truth together. I suspect that the truth is a grave you have been throwing dirt over for many long
years.”

The vampire had commanded, and Isaac was now compelled to reveal the most intimate aspects of his life.

Chapter Fourteen

“
Julian, you know that what you are demanding is difficult for me. If I must speak these things, then let us leave this
place.”

“Yes, alright. We will take the streetcar to Audubon Park, and we will talk there.
Come.”

He rose and the laid cash on the table. They walked to St. Charles Avenue and caught the car, then jumped off near Loyola University and walked into the shadowed interior of the park.

Isaac noticed the scarcity of vagrants, and Julian
explained.

“Most of them gather in City Park, or stay on the roam in the Quarter before retiring under the wharves along the river. This park is too close to the tourist sites and is swept by the police at regular intervals. It wouldn’t do to have the tourists tripping over those who have no place to go but who have to go somewhere. As you must have discovered, I don’t prey on the homeless in this city. There is an old wisdom that cautions not to build your outhouse next to your pantry,” he commented without humor.

When they had walked as far into the park as they could without beginning to walk out again, Julian stopped at a bench and motioned for Isaac to sit down. Time assumed a fullness, and each minute of silence weighed on Isaac’s narrow shoulders like a stone. Finally he could postpone it no longer and the words began to take the shape of Isaac’s shattered
life.

“My story. Perhaps it is one of faith…or the lack of it. From childhood, even when my uncle would talk about the dangers that faced European Jews, I would allow my thoughts to wander to happier places. My uncle was political. Not involved in Polish politics, but well aware of how they affected him, his family, and his people. He was constantly warning and reminding all of us to be alert, to keep our noses to the wind. But I could never imagine the things he warned of, even though so much was already historical fact. These things had not touched me personally. So I was able to maintain a foolish belief in a worldly sort of good nature. I was an apathetic human
being.

“Early on in my life, my story becomes the story of Lessa. It is a thing that I have considered from infinite angles. Lessa was so perfect for me, so complementary of my flaws and strengths. At first I thought of myself as the stronger of us. That was wrong. I was wrong about many
things.

“Lessa understood me better than I knew. My ‘strength’ was really nothing more than a kind of self-delusion about the reality of things. It is easy to be strong and brave when you cannot see the hammer swinging at you from behind. And Lessa’s ‘fear,’ which I spent a great deal of time trying to console, was actually wisdom. Here is the irony. When the matter finally played itself out and the Nazis came to Warsaw to prime our people for the ‘Final Solution,’ Lessa’s fear evaporated and was replaced by a resolve that one could only acknowledge with awe. My ‘strength,’ on the other hand, eroded quickly into a hopeless, pitiful
despair.

“Lessa and I had grown up together. For all those years, I had listened to her poems and lullabies….so lyrical and sweet…and terrified of the night. Midnight, dark storms, lullabies, and nocturnes. These were the canvas of her intuitive dreams. I had come to look at Lessa as one might attend to a frightened bird. I showered her with attention and affection, thinking that these would comfort her misgivings. But all she ever needed was my acknowledgment of the truth. She wasn’t afraid of the Nazis. She was terrified of my indifference.

“It wasn’t the Nazis who inspired Lessa’s courage. It was what happened just before they came into our lives. It was our marriage. That bonding in love was the final piece of life’s complex puzzle for her. With the discovery of true love she came into a season of renewed faith. That faith in the enduring power of love over fear liberated my wife. While fear bound me in layers of chains, Lessa’s faith in love allowed her to soar above all the mortal madness.

“It was a faith that, try as I might, I could not connect with. When the Germans came to Poland, I began to struggle with incredible guilt. Lessa had asked me, begged me, only a year before to flee from Poland with her. Once again, my denial, to use your word, kept me from seeing the true danger. I was able to convince her of the folly of her ideas. But then one morning we all awoke in the ghetto and premonitions of catastrophe began to mock my every waking hour. I withdrew deeply into myself, into a disgusting little world of self-loathing and self-pity. I was unworthy of my new bride. I had failed her. And more…I had doomed
her.

“I would close my eyes at night and pray for the mercy of sleep. Instead, I was tortured by Bosch-like visions of those filthy beasts with their eyes and their hands groping eagerly at my Lessa’s beauty. We were so unarguably at their disposal that they commanded life and death, comfort and pain. If their whim was a bullet in the brain of a child or the brutal rape of a young wife, it was done.

“Here is where my madness began. The ghetto was a staging area. We all knew it. Just as we knew that the random terror of violence wasn’t really quite so random. The Nazis systematically weeded out the very young, the elderly, and the sick. So it became conducive to pass oneself off as healthy, robust, and in the prime of life. Old men who had walked half-erect for years struggled to right themselves, to conceal the limp of an ailing wife or an infirm mother. Terror raged like a great fire around our people. You could have argued that the world had become too grim to support the laughing dreams of life. But here they were, contorting themselves, going to extreme lengths so that they might pass the Nazis’ tests for a brief reprieve…for their very survival.

“I could not reconcile any of what I was seeing. It was obvious to me that God had turned his back on His faithful followers. How, then, was anything to save us? We were on our
own.

“But Lessa tried. Dear God, she believed. And she almost reached me on one rain-threatened afternoon, in a field outside the city. It was a lover’s field. We had been picnicking. One of those last days before the ghetto roundup began. Lessa was, once again, speaking words of comfort and reassurance to my deafness. She was so patient, Julian. The storm finally broke as we lay there, and I began to gather our things to flee the deluge. But she reached out and took my hand…and pulled me back down to the blanket to make love in the rain. I suppose that she sought to reconnect me to the wild wonder of life and love. And she whispered something, words that vibrated and echoed through the years of sorrow. I didn’t understand them then, and I ponder their meaning to this day. ‘Eden was never
tame…’”

Isaac paused, as if hearing the words for the first time. He peered off across the dark expanses of the park, imagining a pair of trusting lovers there. Lost as he was in his reverie, he did not notice the raw currents of electricity that surged through the suddenly-jolted vampire. Julian made a conscious effort to calm the breath that had suddenly expanded in his lungs.

“In any case,” he continued, “a few weeks later the Nazis gathered all Jews into the ghetto. All of my fears seemed justified. If I had known then that there was an even darker night before us, I would have worked harder to find my way back to her…to make the time that was left to us more special. As it happened, I very nearly went completely insane when they herded us like livestock onto two narrow rails bound for the ultimate despair…Auschwitz.

“We were separated immediately upon arrival. For the next seven months, I survived without any particular will or desire to do so. But word finally reached me that Lessa had also survived the processing. I wish that I could explain in some sort of new, startling language how such information can work upon the mind. It wasn’t an altogether welcome revelation. For now, I began to worry about her all over again.

“I had brought Lessa to that place. Subsequent fallout from that frame of mind was my unhealthy desire to secure her safety at any cost. I ingratiated myself with the guards. I was willing to perform any task, any unholy act that might work in Lessa’s favor. You have to understand. I was a weak, lice-ridden Jew, the lowest of the low to our captors. Somehow, I needed to get their attention and, hopefully, their sympathy.

“I volunteered as a sonderkommando…that is, I removed the bodies of my people from the gas chambers.”

Isaac swallowed hard, his hands trembling uncontrollably, and Julian could see that the old man had reached a place where old, incriminating memories had been buried for a long time. Isaac was venturing back into
Hell.

Chapter Fifteen

“
In the hierarchy of the death camp there is nothing lower than the sonderkommando. The work we did was so foul, so repulsive, that we were shunned by our own people. Even the Nazis could barely stand the sight of us. And of course they would despise us. While many were forced into the role, there were just as many others who, like myself, volunteered in the hopes of currying favor…mostly the favor of life.

“When the new trains arrived and the lines formed to shuffle off to the ‘showers,’ we, the untouchables, would take our place just outside the doors, as the doomed filed past us. We dared not look at their faces, for fear that we would cause them undue anxiety. If they could believe that they were being deloused, as they were told, they wouldn’t suffer as much. Then we would close the iron doors behind them. For the next several agonizing minutes, as the gas hissed and filled the chamber, I would die with those voices that reached us from the other side…the children crying out for their mothers…until the last muffled cries were stilled. And our terrible work would
begin.

“I did this work. And I accepted the consequences…the contempt that was spit at me, the random beatings in the barracks, and the total isolation from my fellow Jews. The autumn of 1944 was a harsh one. The camp was running at peak capacity, fed by the trains that converged from much of Europe. The gassings and the ovens, day and night. I would stand beside the window at night as the barracks slept, and watch as the tongues of flame rose up from the tall, black stacks, licking at the dark, hungry lips of a night that seemed to have settled over the entire world. The ashes would sting my eyes and settle upon my tongue. My people. But I could no longer allow myself to care. I had made my choice. I had offered up the sacrifice of my conscience, had burned out all human feeling, for the slimmest of chances that doing so might somehow benefit my
wife.”

Isaac fidgeted in his seat. His feet tapped at the ground like his fingers on his knees. He knew that he had no choice about whether to tell the next part of the story…the part that would reveal his utter unworthiness to be called a human being. But the telling of it was still an act of inner violence. He hadn’t even spoken these words to Father Connor. Finally, like something being spat out into a clogged and overflowing toilet, he brought the words up from the deepest, darkest part of
himself.

“This work…that wasn’t the worst of it. After removing the bodies of those women and children, of our elders, I had to take them all to a tiny, claustrophobic room where a guard stood over me as I removed any gold fillings from their mouths. I would stand there, the corpses shoulder-high around me, dragging them all in their turn onto the table…and then. Oh, God. And then…I had to search the cavities of their bodies for any hidden valuables…the little babies, still clutched in the arms of a stranger because their young mothers would have been spared as workers…and…and they made me search them, too. The bastards thought our people so hideous that we would hide our jewelry in the rectums of our children….Ahhhhh! It was worse than death. My shame should have caused my body to seize up, and fall dead among the withered sacks of bones around me. Or, at the very least, the disgust of the guards as I did these things should have compelled them to place the barrels of their Lugers against my shaved skull and send me directly to Hell. But my body refused to die. Long after my soul had fled, I continued this work, as numb as a winter pond. Saying this now, I still want to die from my shame. How had I strayed so far from that lover in the field, in such harmony with his beloved, to become this sub-human so despicable that he could rob the fillings from his people’s gaping mouths? How can I ever justify it? You must relieve me of this life right now! Lessa’s love made her an angel! And my fear turned me into a horrible, terrible monster! Kill me, Julian!
Please!!!”

Bright, heavy tears filled the lines of Isaac’s weary face. Julian had to turn away. This was more than even he had witnessed. After six hundred years he was no longer surprised by man’s callous brutality, but he was also not jaded to personal tragedy. The story was ripping the very heart from both of them. But Julian knew now, beyond any doubt, that it had to be purged from the old man. As difficult as it was for Isaac, the vampire could now see how it all fit so perfectly together. Someday, Isaac would as well. He touched him gently on the shoulder.

“Not yet, Isaac. Not yet. You must continue. This must be
done.”

Isaac wiped the tears from his face. After several minutes, he gathered himself, nodded, and drew a deep, ragged breath.

“Another four or five months passed and we began to hear whispered, tenuous rumors that the Russian army was advancing toward Auschwitz…and that we might be liberated any day. But now I came into a new world. One with a landscape that was nearly as terrible as Auschwitz.
Hope.”

He looked up at Julian, who nodded in understanding, then
continued.

“I had never struggled with hope before because I had no faith in things working out. This went all the way back to the apathy of my youth. Now I needed faith and there was little to be had. So, in my fashion, I set about to find it. I knew that I, personally, didn’t deserve anything. But Lessa did. So I grabbed hold of faith in her name. And I was determined that I would see it justified. Since there was nowhere else to plead my case, I knelt down into that most awkward of positions for a man of no faith, and I attempted prayer. I prayed with intensity and with sincerity. I prayed incessantly. Walking, standing and kneeling. I prayed over the gassed bodies and I prayed when sleep betrayed me. I prayed until my throat was raw and my lips were dry and cracked. The days passed. As the war drew to its grizzly climax, the Nazis somehow managed to increase their slaughter even more. Each day that I waded through the suffocated bodies, searching for that familiar angelic face, I held my breath.

“But my fragile, embryonic hope had learned to walk. I actually began to make plans for our future. A family. I had heard other rumors as well. Palestine…it would be our sanctuary from all the ugly savagery of the world. Lessa and I would be pioneers. Zionists. The future was coming, and Lessa had been right. Auschwitz held no power over love. Of course! Love was a power that worked through, and beyond, mortal circumstances. I was beginning to see the truth of Lessa’s
faith.

“Now I jumped through every hoop the Nazis could devise. I had convinced myself that it was me, my actions and my prayers, that were saving Lessa from those lethal vapors…and from the blazing ovens that had already made ashes of so many other dreams.

“Then, on a cold, bright afternoon, just after the New Year of 1945, the guards called for volunteers to turn the fields outside the village. My hand went up, as always. I remember the unease that seemed to penetrate me like the cold…” He looked up again into Julian’s face. “Have you ever had that peculiar feeling? When everything is too quiet…like the whole world is holding its breath because something significant is about to happen? Like the very clocks don’t want to budge, for fear of rushing into something that can never be
undone?

“The sky that day was as blue and fragile as a robin’s egg. I stooped to retie a bootlace when I noticed a large crow glide low over the field and land ten feet from me. It stood there, peering off at the forest bordering the clearing. I followed its gaze to the trees, then looked back to the bird. A hot, fluid anguish rose suddenly in my throat, just as eight gunshots rang out in succession. The crow beat its wings heavily against the sound, and I watched it rise into the air until it became just a black punctuation mark, a period against the sentence of the blue sky. I was still staring up into the heavens when the guard came and took my arm, and returned me to the
camp.”

He paused again and swallowed against the spools of wire in his throat. There was a drought forming on his lips, and he longed for a drink.

“That night, Patrik came and sat beside my bunk. He didn’t speak. But he had brought the old man, Viktor, with him. Viktor had been spared from the ovens because of his rare gifts with the violin. All through that terrible night, Viktor played the Nocturnes of Chopin while Patrik held my hand. It was Lessa’s favorite
music…”

Isaac stopped and looked at Julian, but Julian was looking away once more. And for a long while the two of them sat still, heads turned in different directions as their hearts recalled the same tune.

“Lessa had nearly made it. She had come so very close to being vindicated in her unwavering faith. Where had that faith wound up? Was it in a trench, a shallow grave in the woods outside the camp? Was her faith soaring up there with the crows, looking down from the heights, from a place where everything on earth was small and patched together without seams…without madness? Where was she? Where was her faith that seemed to mock all the violent hatred, that placed all that human cruelty in the margins of a greater message? Where was that undying resolve that I so desperately needed now…now that I had sold my very soul?

“When the Russians arrived, just two weeks later, I was all but dead myself. A corpse that wouldn’t lie down. I had eaten only what Patrik could force into me of his own meager rations. I weighed ninety-seven pounds, and could barely raise my hands to shield my eyes when the big, Russian trucks with their blazing lights entered the gates to signal our freedom.

“I was numb with loss. Patrick wanted to find the nearest refugee camp and eventually make our way to Palestine. I didn’t care one way or another at first, but I had to return to Warsaw before anything else. Lessa and I had buried our wedding rings near the wall, and I wanted to retrieve them if at all possible. I could not have accomplished it without Patrik’s help. He never once turned his back on me…even knowing what I had done, and how I had shunned him for the amusement of those butchers. It had all come to nothing. But Patrik was
true.

“So I returned to what was left of Warsaw, and that ghetto…for one miserable day. The Germans had flattened the place to crush our gallant and futile uprising. But I was able to find the rings that we had exchanged in some other world, in some other time. Then I left Warsaw without looking back.

“Patrik and I went our separate ways. I had decided to scour the refugee camps that were spread our across Eastern Europe, just in case Lessa had survived. Patrick could only shake his head. ‘Isaac, you will never let go of your fantasies, will you, old friend?’ We embraced and he set out for the Promised Land. He died three years later in Israel’s War for Independence. He died a free man, fighting for his own
homeland.”

Isaac slumped back against the bench and blew a long, exhausted whistle from his lips. Another lengthy silence enveloped them. Then Julian rose and began to pace back and forth in front of the bench, considering.

“There is more,” the vampire whispered. He stopped and peered down at Isaac, who was trying his best to shrink into the bench. “You have revealed much. But nothing more than one would tell a doctor, or a priest. Now I am commanding you. Tell me exactly what you felt when your wife was
murdered.”

Isaac could hardly breathe. His eyes darted about like a trapped animal. There was no escape.

“Damn you…” he muttered between clenched teeth. “I have told you how I love my wife. I was reduced to nothing when she was killed. Don’t you understand? The bond between us was such that, though I didn’t actually see her die, I felt it as if it were my own death. Doesn’t that tell you how I
felt?”

“Let me be more blunt then, Isaac. Who do you blame for her
death?”

Now Isaac was visibly agitated. He clenched his teeth together, unwilling to utter the words that he knew must surely damn him. Julian rose above him like an angry master commanding a stray. “Speak,
Isaac!”

“Me! I blame myself! Please, stop this! I am responsible for her suffering. And I had no right to hope after my mistakes had led her to that place. I had no
right…”

“Everyone has a right to hope!” Julian interrupted him with an angry waving of his arm. “Man is nothing without it. There is nothing noble in hopelessness. You hoped as any man would. But your hope
was…”

“Betrayed!!” Isaac cried out the word with fifty years of anguish. “Yes! He kept her for all that time…forced her to endure nearly two years of that horror…only to take her at the very last moment before our rescue. He is no loving God! He mocks us, toys with our hearts. We are inferior little creatures for His perverse amusement. I prayed. I made promises. Was it so crucial to His plans to take her as He did? Was it too much to ask that love might actually triumph over that God-forsaken evil? What does God know of love? Lessa could have given lessons to His
angels!”

Isaac was standing now, shaking with the rage that he had suppressed for decades. He counted to ten, and then to ten again, trying to regain some composure…enough to keep from shouting.

“Is that what you wanted to hear, Julian? Did you need to hear my angry words directed at God, when you know that He is the only hope I have of seeing my wife again? Yes, I have been betrayed. And I live with an uncomfortable situation. I am forced to depend on the same God who has already denied my prayers when I needed Him most. Does this prove your superiority over this pathetic little species? Can you go out tonight with a clear conscience and feed on another wretched old woman? Yes, I have my hate. And it may well keep me from the dream that I have guarded for fifty years. But how close are you to fulfillment? Do you even have any dreams left,
Julian?”

Now it was Julian’s turn to sit down. He hadn’t expected Isaac’s words to sting like they did. He knew that Isaac was wrong. Mostly wrong, anyway. But he also knew that Isaac’s last question would haunt him for some time.

Isaac was breathing a little easier. As some measure of calm returned, it brought with it just the slightest remorse for what he had said. He wanted to try another tack.