K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

“That would seem unsurprising. For him to be in your thoughts.” Von Behren rubbed his eyes; he had probably been asleep as well. “What was he doing?”

“That was what was so strange.” Marte slowly shook her head. “He was just standing there. In that little house, the one he gave to me. Only everything… everything all around him… it was all in ruins. Everything was smashed and broken… in bits…”

“Hmph.” Her director was unimpressed. “Perhaps it wasn’t a dream.” A finger tapped the corner of his brow. “Perhaps you saw him, as he is. It happens. When you are, shall we say, close to someone. However far away.”

She hoped that wasn’t true. Because there had been more to the dream, that she hadn’t told. When she closed her eyes again, she could see, from memory this time. The image seemed so real that she wanted to reach out to touch David, lay her hand upon his shoulder and draw him around to face her. But she knew she couldn’t. All she could do was watch him as he stood in the middle of the little house’s ruins, the palm of his hand slashed by the shards of a crystal vase. The trickle of red spattered drop by drop upon the polished floor, as he gazed numbly down at the wavering reflection of his own face…

What does it matter? Marte pressed her face into the angle of her shoulder, trying to block out even the faint stars outside the airplane. It seemed so stupid now, so false and childish, to ever have dreamed of anything. She squeezed her eyes shut and hoped for sleep, letting the world below ebb toward wherever it might take her.

The guards pulled back the canvas flaps, and sunlight flooded the rear of the truck. Pavli blinked and squinted at the figures outside, gesturing with their rifles.

“ Heraus -” The lead guard’s voice sounded bored. “You’ve arrived, time to get out. Come on, move along.”

“Watch your head,” whispered the young man who sat next to Pavli on the truck’s splintery plank bench. “Don’t let them slug you with a rifle butt. And if they do, don’t fall down, no matter what. They’ll kick you in the spine until it snaps.”

Pavli didn’t think any of that was going to happen. Only a handful of guards; two of them had slung their rifles back over their shoulders and now stood by the fence topped with barbed wire, idly smoking and talking to each other. The third one made little marks on a tally sheet as the Lazarene men and women began clambering off the back of the truck. The mothers handed the infants and smaller children to the fathers.

“Don’t let them fool you.” The fellow sitting next to Pavli kept his head lowered, eyes darting quickly to follow everything that happened. He had grabbed Pavli’s arm, holding him back as the others had jostled their way out. “They act nice to you, so they can trick you into doing something stupid. Then they work you over until you’re all blood and bruises.”

The warning, and all the others before, confused Pavli. “Why would they do that?”

“Because they like to. They don’t need any more reason than that.” He jumped to his feet, jerking Pavli upright by his jacket collar. “Hurry – it’s best not to be the last ones out, either.” He shoved his way past the knot of elders awkwardly dismounting from the truck.

Outside, in the middle of the fenced compound, Pavli kept close to his new adviser, the better to hear whatever came out of the corner of the fellow’s mouth. They worked themselves into the center of their crowded brethren, as far as possible from the lackadaisical scrutiny of the guards.

“This is a new camp -” The fellow raised himself on tiptoe, to see past the others. “They’ve never brought anyone here before.”

“How can you tell?” Pavli tried to keep his voice as low as possible, but still caught an angry glare from the other.

“Idiot – can’t you smell it? The wood, the fenceposts. It’s all fresh stuff.”

Pavli filled his lungs, and he caught the raw scent of new-cut lumber, like the odors that had spilled from the doorways of the carpenters’ shops back in Berlin. He hadn’t even noticed it before; he wondered how many other clues he missed, that his nervous, twitching companion seized on. Past the legs of the surrounding Lazarenes, he could see sawdust scattered around the fenceposts, that hadn’t yet been trod into the mud.

“Is that good?” He lowered his whisper to hardly more than an exhalation.

“I don’t know -” Pieces of the other’s face jerked, as though they had been snagged by fishhooks under the skin. “I don’t know, it all depends. If they brought the guards here from the other camps, or if they’re new as well… I don’t know, I don’t know -” His voice had risen, until the man standing in front had looked over a shoulder at him. He’d clamped his mouth shut, biting off the rush of words, and shrinking into himself where he stood, his dirty jacket swallowing him like a turtle’s shell. Pavli tried to ask another question, but the fellow just shook his head, a quick snap to either side as he anxiously watched the loitering guards.

Pavli concentrated on keeping himself upright on his weakening legs. The long ride in the truck had tired him as much as the small children who leaned against their mothers’ skirts. He would have fallen asleep on the way, despite the jouncing of the truck as it had traveled over the rutted dirt roads, if it hadn’t been for the other’s string of murmured warnings and bits of advice. He’d latched onto Pavli even before they’d gotten onto the truck, back in the widest street of the Bayerisches Viertel, where the SS troops had rounded up the Lazarenes, turning them out of their beds into the grey morning light. The other had bumped into Pavli’s side as the uniformed men had squeezed the cluster of people tighter.

“That won’t do any good,” the other had muttered, gazing scornfully at the few women who’d started crying. “They’ll just think it’s funny.” A nod of his head had indicated the hard faces of the soldiers.

It had taken Pavli a few seconds to recognize the fellow, he’d changed so much. Der falsch Zigeuner. A Lazarene such as himself – the eyes of two colors told that – but one who’d always slipped away to spend days and weeks and even months with gypsies in the camps at the city’s wooded edges. With his darker skin, he’d even looked as though he’d had a tinge of those other tribes’s blood. That had been his misfortune, when the gypsies had been rounded up and sent southward in locked boxcars; he’d been caught with them. Only when his shirtsleeve had been ripped open, so that a number could be tattooed in the crook of his arm, had the error been realized. A doctor had seen the Lazarene tattoos, the blue markings of Christ’s stigmata, at the young man’s wrists, and had arranged for his release from the camp. But it had taken months for the order to work its way through the maze of paper between Berlin and the camp in Silesia, a camp near a little village that the Poles who lived there called Oswiecim. And in those months, the fellow had seen things, terrible things that he could darkly hint at, or that could be read in his haunted eyes or deciphered from the shouts with which he woke, struggling or cowering from invisible blows, while his one relation, a spinster aunt, wept and tried to soothe him, telling him that it was all right, he wasn’t behind the barbed wire any more…

One time, a few days after the false gypsy had come home to the Lazarenes, the family in the flat next to his aunt had stupidly left a flame beneath a skillet with a scrap of fatty pork in it, and the smoke and stench of something burning, something that had once been alive, had rolled through the hallway. The fellow had run screaming into the street.