K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

They had made him help carry the bodies to the pit. Those who had once been his brethren. That was why he had gone to the dormitory of the Lazarene men. He had wanted to see his brother, to talk with Matthi, but he had known that the stink of the burning was still upon him, the mark of the black angel’s hand, the angel that had mounted across the forest’s tangled sky like a shroud. That stink, and the smell of the blood and chemicals from the surgery. The men had been surprised by his coming among them; the guards had let him past and he had closed the door behind himself. In the darkness, the first part of the night, he had felt their eyes turn toward him, the gaze of the few scattered among now so many empty beds. Then the men had fallen upon him, as his brother had shouted and tried to reach him, to stop them from killing him in their wrath. And he had said nothing, he had accepted their blows and kicks. There had been no words in his mouth, no accusation against them. He had known, as he had tumbled into unconsciousness, that this was the absolution he had come to the dormitory to find.

Matthi had come to him before dawn. As Pavli had lain on the cot in the darkroom, he had heard his name whispered. He had opened his eyes as best he could – the left one was swollen nearly shut from the beating – then winced when Matthi had touched his brow. “I’m sorry,” Matthi had said. “I couldn’t stop them.”

It didn’t matter. Pavli had wondered if he were dreaming – how had his brother gotten out of the Lazarene dormitory? Then he had seen, through the darkroom’s open doorway, one of the guards nervously keeping watch down the corridor. Several of the SS men had begun doing such little services for their captives, currying favor with those who might soon be their accusers.

“You’ll be all right.” Kneeling beside the cot, Matthi had drawn the thin blanket under Pavli’s chin. “Just rest.” He had leaned closer, his voice soft and urgent. “Listen. It won’t be much longer. It can’t be. Things are happening, great things – out there.” He hand nodded toward the corridor’s window. The hard, cold moonlight of winter slipped through the bars. “Then it will be all over.”

Pavli sat close to the edge of Ritter’s desk, his hand upon an empty glass, and remembered what his brother had whispered to him in that night. How strange, that his brother still believed that time could move again. That it had not been killed, taken apart by the doctor’s scalpel, the same as those who had slept in the now-empty beds.

His brother’s voice had touched his ear. “You must hold out just a little while longer. The Americans or the British or the Russians – one of those will reach here soon, and then the war will be over for us. We’ll be free.”

Silly Matthi – Pavli smiled to himself. Matthi believed the things that happened in that world beyond the barbed-wire fence – the armies whose advance was noted on the guards’ hidden radio – all that could somehow come inside this little world. How could they? Those things happened in time, and here there was no time.

“We must survive…” His brother’s whisper, even softer in his memory. “Soon… any day now… it’ll be all over. And we’ll still be alive. Pavli…” A hand had prodded the shoulder beneath the blankets. “Do you hear me?”

Yes… He hunched forward in the chair by Ritter’s desk, listening. “Yes…” He had turned his bloodied head upon the cot, his cheek against his brother’s palm.

“You must do whatever it takes,” had said Matthi. “To survive. You understand that, don’t you? The others… they’ll understand someday. There’s so few of us left now…”

Perhaps there would be only the two of them left, at the end. After all the others, the Lazarene men, the women and the children, after they all had been brought, one by one, up to the surgery. And after what was left of them had been taken away. After the red things in the forest pit had been set alight and the black smoke had spread across the sky. Ritter knew that Pavli and Matthi were brothers, the closest possible blood; he knew all things like that, they were written down in another one of his black-bound notebooks. Perhaps that would be Pavli’s reward for his faithful service to Ritter, for his working with the cameras in the surgery and later with the film in the darkroom. Ritter would spare Pavli’s brother, and the two of them, he and Matthi, would walk out the gate of the fences topped with barbed wire. That would be in the spring that would follow this endless winter. When time stepped across the land again…

“There is no time.”

The remembrance of Pavli’s brother whispering to him in the night now slipped away, the same as Matthi stepping back into the darkness and returning to the Lazarene dormitory. Pavli raised his head and gazed at the man on the other side of the desk. The doctor had drunk too much and it hadn’t helped.

“No time,” mumbled Ritter again. His face seemed even older and more leaden. “No time to waste… if we are going to find out… everything…”

You poor fool, thought Pavli. The doctor still didn’t understand, didn’t realize how mired in non-time he was. Months ago – or had it been years? – Pavli had pried open the last crate that had been delivered to the darkroom and had found, not cartons and reels of blank film, ready to be used, but rubble and bricks wrapped in crumpled newspapers. He’d examined the crate more closely and had seen the marks of where it had been opened and re-nailed, the contents looted somewhere between the Agfa factory and the asylum. The black market in the cities devoured everything. That had presented Pavli with a dilemma: what use would Ritter have for a photographer with an empty camera?

“No time…”

For the last two months, long after his stock of film had been exhausted, Pavli had gone on recording the sessions in the surgical laboratory – or pretending to; first with no film for the stills, then none in the chattering cine camera. Pavli had offered up for Ritter’s inspection prints made from old negatives, segments of film that had been made at the beginning of the doctor’s research. The dissection of one corpse looked much like another; Pavli varied the old photographs and reels of film he showed to the doctor, being careful to match the pictures of a previous male subject to the latest one, and female to female, one child to another of roughly the same age. Ritter had suspected nothing – by now his obsessions had locked around him. He gave only a cursory glance to Pavli’s work, late at night in this office, then returned to the collection of skins, each with the Lazarene tattoos at the wrists and along the larger thoracic sections. The empty human forms floated in their basins of preserving chemicals or, the process completed, lay folded like strange, pale banners in the surgery’s neatly labelled cabinets. Only Ritter’s loving touch gave them any life, as he lifted the thin tissues closer to his gaze.

He didn’t know; Pavli felt sorry for him. Time and its ghosts had escaped from the doctor. Leaving him with the dead, that could not be brought to life again. No Christ would reach his hand down into the burning grave. Ritter would cut, the scalpel lifting the skin on its narrow blade, and it would be the same corpse before him, over and over, this world without end…

“Yes…” Pavli nodded slowly, feeling how old and tired he himself had become. A thread of dawn light had appeared at the window, like an incision. “Yes, you’re right, Herr Doktor.” Ritter had fallen asleep at last, the lecture over, except perhaps in his muddled dreaming; he’d lain his head on his arm upon the desk.

“You’re right…” Pavli reached down and picked up the empty bottle, setting it where Ritter wouldn’t trip over it when he awoke. “There is no time.”