A Man Lies Dreaming (22 page)

Wolf’s Diary, 9th November 1939 –
contd
.

It was an ordinary basement flat, sparsely furnished with heavy Victorian high-backed chairs and two tables joined together in the middle of the room, for all that their heights didn’t entirely match. A flower-patterned cloth covered the tables. Sitting in the chairs were five men and, entering the room, was the plain-faced Jewess. Bitker trailed behind her.

I’d not seen such an assembly of reprobates since the camp. They were a shifty lot, swarthy and hairy like the
untermenschen
Jews that they were. They sat with no decorum, in their white undershirts, and hairy arms on the table, all but one, and all but one smoking. The ashtrays were filled to overflowing with what the English call ‘fags’. I was glad I was outside in the cold clean air. The beasts had not even opened a window. It must have been like an oven in there. Of the five men one was a skinny lad with smooth cheeks and a face like a hooked fish and he wore an oversized shirt with sleeves that covered his wrists. He reminded me of someone but I couldn’t think of whom.

The men were talking animatedly but stopped abruptly when Bitker entered. They all stood up and shook his hand and one or two of them slapped him on the back

I heard his name, Bitker, once or twice but could not hear the discussion, which took place in low voices. The Jewess disappeared and reappeared later with a large tray of tea things. I became convinced this was, indeed, a Palestinian terror group, but could they be the ones behind the assassination attempts on Mosley? I pressed closer to the window, trying to hear, when I felt more than saw a dark shape drop down from the windowsill of the flat above. It meowed at me and, startled, I banged my head against the window.

The voices inside ceased at once. A moment later the lights went out. I pushed the cat away and it hissed at me. I kicked it, feeling a savage satisfaction even as I could hear running feet and the door to the conspirators’ flat crashing open.

I ran.

They moved like professionals. They didn’t shout, didn’t curse as they chased me. They ran quietly and swiftly and with violent determination. My lungs burned and my leg throbbed with old pain and I fled for my life, down narrow alleyways, trying to lose them, my traitor leg hurting and my chest heaving until I thought I would be sick, and as I ran I caught sight of a sign and realised I was on Old Jewry. For a moment I thought I’d lost them.

The God damned cat tripped me up.

It came out of nowhere, streaked between my feet like a spirit of animal vengeance, screeching hideously. I tripped and fell, hard, catching myself with the palms of my hands. I felt skin tear and my knee crack, sending a shudder of fresh pain up my body and I cried out: I could not help it.

In moments they were on me and I could smell the bloodlust on their unwashed bodies. I curled into a ball, trying to protect my head and my genitals as they kicked me.

I think they were shouting questions at me, and the foreigner, Bitker, was ordering them to stop but they had lost discipline. I almost prayed, remembering the old words, my mother’s and the priest’s. To die like this! Ignobly in the Old Jewry at the hands of the selfsame Jews who once before were evicted out of England. It was too much to bear.

The sound of a whistle cut through the night and my pain. The kicking, miraculously, stopped. I heard running feet and saw the bouncing light of several torch beams. ‘Jews! They’re Jews!’ came the cry.

I opened my eyes. I saw a group of young Blackshirts rushing towards the Palestinian terrorists. ‘Fascist pigs!’ someone yelled. I saw the blade of a knife gleam but who held it I wasn’t, afterwards, sure. In the uncertain light of the torches I saw the face of the smooth-cheeked youth in profile and for a moment I almost laughed, for it was no man at all, it was a woman!

‘Hello, Judith,’ I whispered, softly.

Then all hell, as they say, broke loose. The two groups, the Jews and the Blackshirts, went at each other. I heard punching, grunting, saw a Jew raise a brick and smash it into a Blackshirt’s head, caving in his skull. I saw a Blackshirt choking a Jew by the throat, his thumbs driving into the other man’s windpipe. I saw the God damned cat standing a foot to my left, looking at me with a smirk on its dumb animal face. I crawled away, though every movement hurt. In moments they were behind me. In the darkness and the fight no one saw me go but the cat.

I straightened up, eventually. I stood and then walked, away from that awful place. I caught a bus and sat on the upper deck. On my swollen lips, I tasted blood.

‘Why are you all on your own, a good-looking boy like you?’

The fat whore leered at him. She was rouged with cheap make-up over a too-pale face. Her jowls shook with her smile. Her teeth were small and uneven. Her tongue was red and she stuck it out at the watcher in the dark. ‘You want to fuck old Gerta?’ she said. ‘You want old Gerta to suck your baby cock?’

Her bosoms were immense. She grabbed her breasts from below and shook them at him, and the pale white flesh wobbled like waves on a sea. The other whores were busy. The street was quiet. The watcher in the dark was ready. His hand closed on the hilt of the knife, the shiny, shiny knife. ‘Come here,’ Gerta said. She pulled him by the hand and forced his head between the twin mounds of her breasts. ‘Give Aunty a kiss!’

She was strong; stronger than he had guessed. She released him and he could breathe again. Her hand tested him down below and she leered again, knowingly. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

She did not lead him to the alleyway where he had done the other. The girls did not use it any more. She led him somewhere else, past the dirty bookstore and a florist and a haberdashery and a cafe run by émigré Italians, all shut now, and pushed him against the wall near the rubbish bins where no one could see them. His heart beat fast and wild. She raised up her voluminous skirts, revealing pink fleshy thighs and a dark unruly bush of pubic hair. ‘No, what are you doing,’ he tried to say, ‘no, not like that,’ and he tried to struggle with her, then, but she was having none of it, she held his neck in a hug that was all but a chokehold, and with her other hand she pulled down his pants and took his stiff cock in her hand and before he even knew what was happening she had guided him inside her, squeezing his buttocks roughly as she pulled him in.

She seemed oblivious to him then. Her eyes were half closed and her lips parted and she made strange animalistic sounds, grinding him against her, over and over. The watcher had never done it before and he felt sick, sick being inside of this grotesque old creature, and only the thought of the knife kept him going until at last Gerta gave a shuddering little laugh and abruptly released him, pushing him off her. She looked down at his now-flaccid member, flopping there in the dark, and gave a little laugh again, contemptuously.

He pulled up his trousers quickly. She was still looking at him but then her eyes changed: when she saw the knife.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing—’ she said, or began to. He lashed out at her with the knife but she raised her arm and the knife grazed her but he had obviously missed his target. ‘You little fuck hole!’ she said. She sounded outraged more than scared.

‘You disgusting whore!’ He stabbed with the knife, again. They were so close to each other, it was as if they were making love, still. She grabbed him, pulled him close and then the knife was sticking out of the right side of her chest and she stared at him in surprise, or shock, clutching him to her, her blood staining the front of the watcher’s shirt.

‘Just
die
!’ the watcher pleaded.

Instead, Gerta kneed him in the balls.

The watcher collapsed. He was still holding the knife. It pulled out of Gerta’s chest and it emerged with a sickening,
sucking
sound. Gerta gasped, clutching her hands to the wound. There was very little blood.

‘You little
worm
!’ Gerta said.

The watcher had never felt such agony before; his body seemed on fire. He backed away from her. Gerta advanced on him like a figment of the watcher’s nightmares, gigantic and terrifying. ‘You little …’

At that moment he could hear footsteps coming rapidly down the street and a voice say, in foreign accented English, ‘What is going on here, please?’

*    *    *

‘What is going on here, damn it,’ Wolf repeated. He had been nearly at his door when he heard the sounds of a scuffle. He did not want to get involved. Only fools got involved.

He saw, by the rubbish bins, the fat whore Gerta and a man, but he only knew Gerta from her profile, and he did not know the man. The man turned and ran. Wolf didn’t give chase. He went to Gerta. Her face resolved when he came closer. It looked like a ghastly clown’s mask. ‘Wolfie,’ she said. ‘Is it really you, dear boy?’

‘What happened, Gerta? Gerta?’

She had pulled down her dress and her pale bosoms swung free, and there was a knife wound on the right side of her chest. It was frothing weirdly.

‘I’ll call a doctor,’ Wolf said, alarmed. He didn’t want to get involved. He was repulsed by the prostitute’s appearance. ‘He looked so … harmless,’ Gerta said. She was breathing heavily. ‘It’s always … the quiet ones.’ She tried to leer at Wolf, but just looked pained, and old, and beaten.

Wolf shouted, ‘Help! Help!’ He was too tired to run any more. Too tired to walk. He just kept shouting until the other prostitutes showed up and, after them, the police. He was sitting next to Gerta by then, both of them coated in blood, their backs to the rubbish bins. He only just remembered to stash the forged Jewish identity document in a crack between the stones before the policemen finally came and arrested him.

*    *    *

The watcher was panicked, his breath caught in his throat. He tasted bile. Police whistles tore up the night. In Soho Square he found the bag he had hidden earlier that day. Quickly he stripped off his blood-soaked clothes and changed, the air freezing on his exposed skin. He shoved the clothes into the same bag and continued at a slower pace. On Oxford Street he caught a bus home.

How could it have happened? How could he fail? His mission was a holy one. He
could not
fail. At home Father was asleep in his armchair by the unlit fire. The wireless was on, playing a Chopin étude. The watcher stroked his father’s thinning white hair, gently, and the old man shifted but did not wake. The watcher went up to his room and stripped again. His penis throbbed as though it was infected. Naked, he walked into the bathroom and washed. The water was lukewarm and he was shivering. He scrubbed himself and scrubbed himself, scrubbed at the whore’s smell on him, her cunny juice on his penis. As much as he scrubbed he couldn’t get it off. He sat in the bath and hugged himself, rocking in the dirty water. The blood coloured the water pink.

She … she raped him.

The taste of bile was in his mouth still. He couldn’t afford to fail again. He had been sloppy. Next time there would be no mistakes. No more mistakes! He got out at last, shivering, and wrapped a towel around himself and brushed his teeth, over and over, until his gums bled and his spit was red. Later he lay in the cold bed and shivered and that smell clung to him still, that disease-ridden old hag’s awful smell. Everything had gone so wrong. What if he had caught something? Whores were nasty creatures, they had crabs and the clap and God alone knew what other terrible diseases. He held his penis in his hand, like a child, trying to comfort himself. He was so cold. The knife was in the bedside drawer. The knife was whispering to him, calling him names. He’d cleaned the knife from the whore’s diseased blood, he’d cleaned and cleaned and cleaned until it shone. When they’d beat him as a boy he would hide under the covers, later, clutching his penis. Why are childhoods so awful, the watcher wondered, and he remembered suddenly and with aching clarity Mr Woodford, the neighbour, a jolly chap always popular with the ladies of the neighbourhood, he was friends with Father, too, always nice to the kids: and he took him in, once, after a beating, and offered him candy and then took out a gross fleshy thing and asked the watcher to touch it. It was warm and it changed shape as the boy touched it, and Mr Woodford made strange sounds and spurted a milky viscous liquid that covered the boy’s hand. But he always gave him sweets, after. Sweets and affection.

For a long time, the watcher blamed himself. It was their secret, his and Mr Woodford’s. And you don’t tell secrets. You never tell. Mr Woodford had fought in the war; he was a hero. The watcher closed his eyes but in the darkness he could still hear the footsteps approaching, and the rank hot breath of the prostitute, strangely similar to Mr Woodford’s.

He couldn’t sleep. He took the knife out from the drawer and ran the tip of his finger down the blade, drawing blood. There was comfort in that, a way of asserting control. He cut himself slowly, with great deliberation, running the blade down his ribs, littered with old scars. The blood stained the bedsheets. At last he could sleep.

*    *    *

In another time and place Shomer lies restlessly awake. There is nothing to do in the infirmary, no work, nothing to do but think of all that had been and is no more. Outside, the camp goes on its inexorable daily routine, and to the place where the tracks terminate the trains keep coming, carrying Jews. Every day more come to this Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, so vital for the interests of the war, from all across Europe they come, Poles and Czechs, Slovaks and Greeks, Italians and Hungarians, but all Jews, marked with the yellow star, all bound to be processed, quickly and efficiently, children and women and men, and the black smoke rises from the ovens, day and night the black smoke of Jews rises, so many Jews: who would have thought there were so many Jews still left in the world?