Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

“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.