A Song Called Youth (98 page)

“What was Le Pen? You killed Le Pen—or did I dream that?”

“He was a commander in chief,” Torrence snapped. “Not a civilian.”

Steinfeld said, “There are better examples you could use, Lina. This Mengele of theirs, so to speak, this Dr. Cooper—he’s a civilian. I would gladly kill him if I could. We tried to kill Crandall. He was a civilian. But those are false civilians. They are worse than collaborators. We know the difference most of the time. People killed at random in a crowd, now . . . even people cheering for the enemy—I mean, after all, who knows how they were pressured into being part of that crowd . . . ” His voice trailed off, his eyes roamed some dark inner landscape.

There was a moral weight in this work, Torrence knew, a weight you had to carry; a weight that grew. And Steinfeld was feeling it. Torrence felt it too.

It would be easy to become like Lina Pasolini and never feel uncertainty. It would be a relief.

“I think we should take Pasolini here off of armed duty,” Torrence said, looking at Steinfeld, taking the tone of one administrator to another.

She stiffened, just a little. It was good to get some kind of reaction from her. “I got you people back into Paris,” she said softly. “Me.”

“The Mossad got us in,” Torrence shot back.

“That is shit. I was on the inside, I led the team that cleared the tunnels, I organized it. They were postmen for the move only. And you need
soldiers,
not people to sew uniforms.” She smiled vaguely at Torrence. “You are a very tired man. You do this because you needed something to do, and because you like to fight, and maybe you are one of those people who simply like the feeling that comes in a fight. Something to chase away the depression, no? And you are here to find a reason for it. A . . . justification. Me, I am not tired. I do not fight because I don’t know what to do with myself. I fight because I’m angry. This anger never sleeps.”

Torrence felt his face go hot. “You—” He couldn’t finish it. He turned to Steinfeld, swallowed the cold stone that had risen in his throat, and said, “You know your people. If I’m not motivated, if I don’t believe in this thing, then get me a fucking ticket home. Send me back through Israel. Which is it?”

Steinfeld made a fly-shooing gesture. “I have no doubts about you at all.” He hesitated, then nodded slowly. “She’s right about one thing, I can’t take her out of combat. We’re too short.”

He turned to Pasolini. “But Captain Torrence is also right. We do things one way. We distinguish between civilians and the enemy, and when there are exceptions,
I
make them. Not you.”

She stood up, abruptly, so that Torrence flinched a little in his chair. She smiled at that. “I’m on watch.”

“Not yet,” Steinfeld said. “Take a meal.”

“Our stomachs are too delicate here for eating. I’m going on early.”

She drifted from the room, closed the door very gently behind her.

Torrence said, “Steinfeld, you ever wonder about the kind of people this kind of thing attracts?”

Steinfeld shrugged. “That’s what she said about
you.
”

Processing Center 12, a few miles north of the city limits of Paris, France.

“It’s not so different, this place now, than it was before the war,” Gabrielle was saying. She was a black French woman, with a dirty blue scarf on her bald head—the SA shaved them all to make the lice manageable. Or to make them into human ciphers. She wore the dull-orange pajamalike detainee’s uniforms they all wore, and sandals made of tire rubber. Roseland wore the same.

Roseland was an American Jew, had been working on a kibbutz in Israel. He’d volunteered to help on an unauthorized airlift to take food to Jewish refugees in France, the airlift had been shot down, and he was one of two who survived the crash outside Paris. The other one, a woman named Luda, had been murdered by the SA thugs for screaming when they dragged her out of the wreckage, the bone splinters driving her mad with pain . . . So they shot her and left her body there.

And now Abe Roseland, a pale, gangly boy of twenty-one with slender feet and hands and a faint look of weary amazement, kept his mouth shut and survived to sit here in the “exercise yard” of Processing Center 12. Roseland had been a performance-art critic and programmer in the States for an interactive digital-TV channel. A life that seemed as far away as the planet Pluto now. He’d been a cynic politically, essentially apolitical, but interested in his cultural roots, feeling an itch to do some sort of Judaic walkabout. Which led to the kibbutz, which led to the airlift, which led here: looking out at the Philips LHD 11377 microwave fence. The gray metal posts beaded moisture in the misting rain, the boxlike transmitter/receivers quivered with strangely symmetrical patterns as water beads rearranged to electric fields. A thin precipitation did a little shimmy as it passed the microwave beams, as if running over warped window glass. You could almost hear the fence humming. The metal posts had been recently cemented into the street, and Roseland wondered, with all the dampness, if maybe they hadn’t really set very well. Maybe they could be pushed over if you—

No use trying. Any interference with the posts and the guns went off overhead, one spraying the area indiscriminately, the other computer-aimed. He had seen it happen.

Some part of Roseland’s mind was thinking about this. The rest was thinking about food and trying not to think about food. Rations had been reduced again.

Don’t think about the protein package in the old sofa.

He hugged himself, rubbed his upper arms in the cold, and moved a little closer to Gabrielle on the steps. The cold got to him more lately. Maybe it was anemia.

The exercise area was a sort of courtyard between two high-rises. They were low-income housing, chiefly for Algerian and Arab and Persian immigrants, before the war. Badly built and under-maintained and vandalized, in some sense sabotaged by the disappointment and despair of the prior inhabitants, the high-rises had become crumbling eyesores, cracked and rust-streaked and smirched with graffiti. The SA hadn’t cleaned the concrete apartment buildings before making them into Processing Centers 12 and 13. Around the outside of the foundations was a collection of trash and debris, furniture thrown from the gutted apartments, garbage of all kinds: “Like the filthy panties of a whore down around ’er ankles,” one of the Brit SA guards had said. “And these wogs are the crab-lice ’appy to live in it.”

There were two thousand detainees upstairs, crammed into the windowless rooms; some of the walls had been knocked down between apartments, but there wasn’t space for everyone to lie down. That had to be done in shifts. They had stopped allowing them baths, and the open sewage tubs were rarely emptied, so the stench was unspeakable and lately there was cholera. They had no medical treatment, and sometimes the dead lay in the rooms with the living for days before they were allowed to carry them out. Roseland’s stomach lurched, remembering the guards holding a detainee’s head under the sewage, dunking him again and again as punishment for prying a breathing hole in the blocked-over windows.

Roseland took a deep, grateful breath of the open air. Only forty detainees were allowed outdoors at any one time, twice a week. It was Gabrielle and Roseland’s turn, with thirty-eight other “processing detainees” on the front steps or poking listlessly about the eighty-foot-wide compound.

He looked across the courtyard compound at PC 13, the almost identical high-rise, with another almost-identical group of detainees on its steps, huddled inside their own microwave fence perimeter.

(How remarkably alike they all became, at least to look at, after they were here for a while, Roseland thought. The same expressions, and the uniform imprint of hunger and sickness on their faces . . . And now he himself was beginning to perceive them all as alike as white mice or cockroaches. That was the triumph of the ones who had put them here: they were molding his own perceptions of himself, and the others.)

Roseland shivered, and coughed, and looked back at the microwave fence.

The microwave beams weren’t strong enough to hurt a trespasser on their own; they were triggers and orientation devices for the dual system of the Chubb CCTV surveillance cameras fixed on the sides of the two high-rises, and the contiguous Saab-Scania Datascan microprocessor system that controlled the aiming and firing of the four FN 7.62 mm sharpshooter’s machine guns, two on each building, mounted on 180-degree turrets . . . 

There were SA guards too, three in an office on the second floor, usually playing cards or cursing the bad reception on their little satellite TV; wearing their armor but not their mirrored helmets. Sometimes taking one of the women in, sharing her around. Beating the ones who complained, beating the prisoners who protested.

There were two more guards supposed to be in the instabunker across the street, as often called out on scavenging errands, hustling wine and cheese to supplement the rations of the officers housed in the old pensione down the way. Just about half the time the bunker was empty.

But the Philips/Chubb/Saab-Scania security troika was never turned off, never took a break, never looked away—and it never made mistakes, as far as Roseland knew. It was smart enough to distinguish between SA and prisoners. An Iranian whose name Roseland had never known had tried to cut the power cables to the camera/gun turret. But the camera had stored power in it, and kept working, and the microchip-controlled gun across the street tracked over and shot the Iranian fifty times, as well as a woman who happened to look out a window nearby.

“You think there’s going to be another transport today?” Gabrielle asked. She’d learned English at the Université de Lyon and in America before the war. Her family had owned a string of
patisseries,
which had been seized by Le Pen’s people as “stolen property”: her parents, the SPOES government said, had “stolen business opportunities from native Frenchmen.” She had watched as her mother and father were taken away in the trainlike semi-trucks; a huge tractor-truck pulling six separate trailers, each with its microprocessor-controlled steering keeping it on a computer-imagined train track.

“Yes,” Roseland said, “they’ll be by again for more. They’ll take me next time, I think.”

“Do they take people to gas chambers?” She asked it lifelessly, as if asking whether there was a toll booth on a bridge ahead. After the guards had used her the vibrancy had gone out of her voice.

“No,” he said, “I don’t think there are gas chambers this time. I think they take you to work.” They’d taken her parents, so he didn’t tell her the rest: that they worked you to death. Literally to death, like a bar of soap (that inescapable irony) used to scrub—to scrub what? A prize pig?—used till it dissolved into nothing, was washed away and gone. And he didn’t tell her that some were taken for medical experiments; that all died, eventually, one way or another. That by now her parents were surely dead.

“Maybe the work—it’s better than here.” She didn’t sound as if she cared if it were better or not.

He thought about that. Maybe he should pretend to her that it was better. So she’d feel all right about her parents. But maybe not: then she’d try to get on the trucks and go, and she’d soon be dead.

“It can’t be better,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I think it’s death.”

“
Ma mama et môn papa,
they are dead, I know, but maybe it is better than here.”

He hated the flatness in her voice. Like one of those old computer toys that talked to you when you pressed its buttons.

He swallowed. It was wet and clammy out, but his throat was so dry.

As a teenager, he had read about the Holocaust. The horror had been difficult to bear, so he hadn’t read widely in the subject, and he hadn’t tried to remember the details. To remember the event, the historical fullness of it, that was enough, he decided. That would not be forgotten.

But later he had read something else: that there were people claiming the Holocaust had never happened, claiming the exterminations had never happened, the monumental brutality had never happened. And there were people stupid enough—or politically opportunistic enough—to believe it, or pretend to believe it. And he had learned that the young in most countries, even those countries involved in the Second World War, were learning almost nothing of the Holocaust, and many didn’t believe it had happened at all . . . 

The enormity of this stupidity, the insufferable amorality of this abdication of responsibility, this abandonment of history, had left the young Abe Roseland breathless.

He had gone back to the library and delved into the details of the Holocaust, so that he, at least, would remember.

He had read about the camps, and wondered what a great many others had wondered: why had there been so few rebellions?

The Nazi guns? Yes. But so few guns, relatively, and so many prisoners. Why not rush them, en masse, when you found out you were all going to die anyway, otherwise?

Now he knew the answer.
Hunger.

Hunger became weakness and weakness was passivity. It was hard to think things out, hard to work in unison with others when you couldn’t think. Hard to make a decision and hard to find the strength to carry it out. Hunger was more effective than a thousand guards.

And the degradation, too, the shaving and the uniforms and the cattlelike herding and the random punishments. Techniques that worked on men and women like coring tools on apples. They cut the pith out of you.

They left you with nothing, or at best with a ghostly hope that something would break down, the Americans would get wind of it, Israel would come, the NR would come, or the Second Alliance and SPOES would realize it had gone too far and it would stop, or perhaps you could finesse your way into a servant’s job somewhere if you waited one more day, just one more day . . . Better to wait . . . better than rushing their guns . . . 

It wasn’t better.

He said it aloud. “It’s not better.”

He stood up and said it again. “It’s not better.” And he said something else. “Not this time. Not again.”