K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

He crawled beneath the cot’s blankets. There had been enough mysteries twining around each other for one night. Answers might come with the day – he closed his eyes and wished for sleep.

Daylight brought nothing but more whispers and the grim silence surrounding them. The guards knew what was up, but were no more likely to tell him than he was to ask. In Ritter’s absence, the Lazarene men and women were left in their separate dormitories, to speculate among themselves as to what had happened. And what would happen next.

Pavli remained undisturbed, even forgotten by the guards and the others, in the retreat of the darkroom. In another night’s darkness, he raised his head from the rolled-up jacket he used as a pillow. The faint sounds from the end of the corridor outside had woken him from the sleep into which he had fallen.

Light slipped beneath the door to Herr Doktor Ritter’s office and laboratory. Pavli hesitated, coming close to drawing back inside the darkroom and the safety of the cot… but only for a moment. He stepped out into the corridor, his bare feet making no sound upon the floor.

“Ah. There is my trusted assistant.” Ritter had his boots up on the desktop as he leaned back in his chair. A bottle and a half-empty glass sat close at hand. “Don’t be afraid.” He made a welcoming gesture to the face that had peered around the door. “Come in. Join me.”

“Pardon me, sir…” Pavli froze with his hand on the doorknob. “I didn’t mean to disturb you… I just wanted to make sure everything was all right…”

“Yes, yes; of course you did.” A note of impatience entered Ritter’s voice. “Of course you weren’t snooping around – why should you?” He picked up the glass and tossed back its contents. “But I’m not asking you to come in here; I’m ordering you to. There, does that make you feel better?” A loose smile raised a corner of Ritter’s mouth.

As he stepped closer to the desk and the circle of light thrown by its lamp, Pavli could see that Ritter still had on his trench coat, the belt unfastened so that the garment was cast back from his uniform jacket beneath, the dark leather draped over the chair’s arm like wings. His high collar was undone, showing more of the unshaven stubble of his neck and chin. Alcohol and fatigue had reddened the rims of his eyes.

“Sit down, Iosefni. Here, you should be drinking, too.” Ritter reached back and fetched another glass off the shelf behind him. “We have a victory to celebrate.” He poured, then pushed the glass across the desk.

Perched at the chair’s edge, Pavli sipped something that tasted like fire on his tongue. It burned all the way down his throat.

Ritter held his own glass up to admire the inch of clear liquid. “You’ve made quite a favorite of yourself among my men. With your little photography studio… very admirable.”

“I meant no harm -”

“Oh, stop trembling like that. Your constant attitude of fear offends me.” Ritter filled his glass again. “What cause have I ever given for you to mistrust my assurances of your safety? I value the work you do for me. Even these portraits you do for the guards – they show a good eye. You Lazarenes are a clever race; much like the Jews in that regard. This shows the principle of selective breeding in action, I suppose. The more attempts are made to exterminate such so-called ‘lesser breeds,’ the surer it will be that the ones who are left are even cleverer and more given to survival. You see -” Ritter broke off, smiling ruefully at the sound of his own lecturing voice. “I shouldn’t tire you with my pet theories. Let us just say that I have some differences with those colleagues of mine who see murder as the only possible response to the challenge presented by the non-Aryan races. You have no idea of the struggle I went through to have your odd tribe rounded up and brought here, rather than sent to… another place. You should thank me, Iosefni; I have kept the lives of you and your brethren safe in the palms of my hands.”

Pavli nodded slowly. He knew that much was true.

“So you will have to forgive me if I deal harshly with those who endanger my research.” Ritter tilted his glass, swirling its contents around. “One of your customers will not be coming back for another portrait sitting. Jurgen – you remember him, the very stocky one? – I’ve had him transferred to the Eastern Front. I don’t imagine he’ll return from there. But that is the consequence of his having disobeyed my express orders. The unpleasant encounter you suffered, the woman bewailing the loss of her twin babies… Jurgen was responsible for that.”

“What -” Pavli looked up from his glass. “What happened to them?”

“The babies?” Ritter’s face darkened with anger. “Waste. Idiocy.” He knocked back the dregs in his glass and slammed it down upon the desktop. “Here, I’ll show you something you might find… instructive.” He reached down beside his chair, into an open satchel of black leather, the kind that ordinary doctors carried. From it he took a heavy glass jar, sealed with a stopper and a smear of wax around the edge. A fluid clear as alcohol but thicker sloshed inside.

For a moment, Pavli thought he saw a pair of goldfish swimming languidly in the jar, the fancy kind with a long trailing tail at the end of their bulbous forms. But they weren’t quite the right shape, and he could tell, even as unlit silhouettes, that they weren’t alive.

Ritter turned the lamp so it shone straight upon the jar sitting in the middle of the desk. “Don’t be afraid,” he said softly. “Look more closely.”

Pavli leaned toward the jar. The thickness of the glass distorted the two objects floating inside. He saw a milky-white sphere streaked with red, then, as it turned, a circle of jewel-like blue. The other drifted toward him, its red tail twisting behind, exactly the same but that it bore a circle of golden-brown, a dot of black at the center…

Then he knew what had happened to the woman’s babies. Or to at least one of them.

“Those fools,” murmured Ritter, as he laid his hand on the side of the jar, contemplating the pair of eyes suspended in preserving fluid. “This is the use they make of my lovely children…”

This is a dream, thought Pavli. I’m still asleep. I didn’t wake up. I never woke up, I just went on sleeping and dreaming, not even in this bed here… I’m not here, I’m in my bed with my brother Matthi sleeping next to me. The eyes – a child’s, smaller in diameter than an adult’s – gazed back at him, as though he were part of the dead child’s dreaming. And I’ll wake up, and I’ll get dressed and walk out onto a little narrow street in Berlin. And that will be real… not like this…

“He had already dissected this one.” Ritter’s voice sounded far away. “The other child had already been given its injection and was dead, but hadn’t had the knife taken to it yet.”

Not a dream. Pavli drew back from the jar, feeling dizzy and nauseous. “Who… who did this…”

Ritter’s expression turned to disgust. “That idiot Mengele. At the camp in Auschwitz -”

Pavli had heard the name before. Not the man’s name, but the word that was the German for the Slovenian village – Oswiecim – from which the false gypsy had returned with all his whispered stories. “It was in Block Ten,” said Pavli. “Wasn’t it?”

“Yes, of course.” Ritter nodded. “That is where my esteemed colleague Mengele performs what he likes to think of as his experiments. It’s all just butchery. I’m appalled to think that the man actually has a medical degree, that he studied with Mollinson and von Verschuer. When I heard some of his crackpot notions…” Ritter tilted his head back to gaze up at the ceiling. “I knew of the man’s obsessions with twins – he sorts them out himself, as each new trainload is brought in. The little ones call him Onkel, he treats them so well, with bits of candy in his pockets for them. Pets and fusses over them, right up until the moment he takes them into the dissection room…” A shrug. “He fancies himself an expert on the matter of human eye coloration – he has some notion that he can change brown eyes to blue, by injecting coal tar dyes directly into the pupils. Perhaps he thinks he can turn dark-eyed Jews into Aryans that way. That’s the level of his scientific thinking. Of course, he just winds up blinding the poor little bastards with his needle.”