Borderlands 5 (7 page)

At night, as we lay in the barracks, we talked and learned about each other. I told him about movies, baseball and jazz, Rita and Betty, DiMaggio and Sir Duke. He listened to me politely and shook his head at the flashy, Godless
goyishe
world. But then he told me tales from the Zohar, the Book of Radiance. He told me of
Shekinah
, the female side of God, and how we are all part of the mending of the worlds, the drawing forth of the divine. He told me how God created the world from the Hebrew alphabet and the ten
sefirot—
the sacred words. Night after night, he held me spellbound, like a rabbinical Scheherazade.

But there was always about him a sadness, unspoken, yet it clung to him like a fine gray mist.

One night I asked him the question I’d wanted to ask since I’d first seen him.

“Why did you enlist, Moze?”

He looked at me, his brown eyes wide with pain. Then he closed his eyes and sighed. Quickly I added, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. It’s okay if you don’t…”

“No, Ben. It’s just that I … well, it’s the dreams.”

“Dreams?”

“Yes. Horrible dreams. Every night I see them … these prisoners, at least I think they are prisoners. They are being beaten by men with guns. They are crouching naked and defenseless like animals, in their own filth. They are being poisoned and burned. They turn and hold their arms out to me. Burned flesh hanging in black strips from their bodies. Their sightless eyes roll back in their shaven heads. Worst of all are the children …” Moze’s voice trailed off, and he sighed again, deeply.

“I know that I must go and fight in this war. These dreams have something to do with our people, Ben.”

I knew he wasn’t talking about our fellow Americans. “Go on,” I said.

“I told my father and my rabbi, I must do something about this. They said no. Vengeance is the Lord’s, not mine. My father forbade me to fight. But I could not sleep at night. I had to go. Finally, I enlisted—remember, that day I met you,” he said. “When I came home and told my family, my father wrapped himself in his
tallit
and began reciting
shiva
, mourning for me as if I were already dead. My mother kissed my eyes, my face, with tears running down her cheeks …” His voice shook, and he stopped for a moment. I heard him swallow hard in the darkness. Then, with new strength, he said, “But I am alive, and I will find a way to fight.”

I remembered saying farewell to my parents in the swirling hubbub of Penn Station. My father had smiled through his tears as he punched my shoulder.

“Go get ’em, Benjamin,” he said. Then he pulled me into a bear hug.

My mother pressed a bag of homemade cookies into my hand. “Write, son. Write me every day. Promise me …”

“All right already, Ma. Geez,” but I hugged her, too. And then I had turned and ran onto the train as if I were afraid they would pull me back to them—or that I might let them.

Lying next to Moze in the dark, I wiped my suddenly wet eyes on my arm.

“Do you still have dreams of them? The … people?” I asked. He shuddered and pressed his hands against his eyes.

“Oh yes. Last night I saw a place, a terrible place where men like skeletons lined up, ten and twelve rows deep, behind a barbed wire fence. They were naked, weak and filthy, and covered with lice. Their fingers, more bone than flesh, curled around the rusted wire fence. Their eyes were just empty sockets in their sunken gray faces. Towering flames rose up behind them, licking the night sky. They stood motionless as the flames moved closer and closer. I screamed at them to move, to get away from the fire, but they stared past me into the blackness behind me. Then, as the fire overtook them, they opened their mouths and cried ‘Arbeit macht frei’ as one.” He blew his breath out in a long sigh.

My mouth was dry. “Do you know what that means?” I whispered.

I knew no German words that did not refer to food.

“Work will make you free,” he replied with a heavy sigh. “I don’t understand it either.”

M
oze tried hard, but he never seemed to get the hang of being a soldier. The first time he fired his rifle, he dropped it because he was shaking so hard. When we practiced bayonet charges on the straw dummies, he would hesitate. Then Sarge would yell at him, and he would stab half-heartedly and apologize. To a dummy, no less. Grenades, howitzers and ack-ack guns made him shrink into himself like a kicked around stray mutt. Yet it wasn’t like he was scared. For himself he had no fear, and he kept up with the rest of us in every way. It was just that if he was doing something that could kill someone, he could barely bring himself to do it.

“Moze, it’s only Krauts and Nips, and you know damn well they’d kill you as soon as look at you,” I said.

“Don’t you see, Ben? That’s the problem. To us they’re only Krauts and Nips. To them we’re just kikes and Yids.”

“And Yankee bastards,” I said.

“There is a part of me that wants to kill, but I know that will not help. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth just doesn’t make it all right anymore. I think that evil does not stop evil, it just creates more and more. And killing is evil, Ben, no matter who does it.”

“But what about the dreams, Moze? You’re here because of them. You wanted to come and fight.”

“The dreams still come every night, and every morning I wake up crying with the desire to help them. I wish that the Lord would create a Joshua to blow down the walls, or an army of Golem to crush them all.”

“A Golem?”

“A
Doppelganger
, a superhuman man. There are stories about them in the mystical texts. You shape them from clay as the Lord did Adam. I have read the secret prayers in the
Kabbalah
and the
Zohar
that can bring it to life.”

“Moze, that’s pretty hard to believe—don’t you think?” He looked at me sorrowfully.

“I know it makes no sense, that it’s
meshugganah
talk. But I can’t help it. I have to believe it, or my soul is forfeit.”

A
fter boot camp, we were given a short leave before going overseas. We all went home except for Moze. I told him to come home with me, that my parents wouldn’t mind, but he wanted to stay on base. I went home to Rosedale, and my family acted like I was a hero even though all I’d done was survive Basic. It was probably better that Moze didn’t come home with me—I was visited by all of all my aunts and uncles and cousins, my
bubbe
and
zaydeh
, to see how handsome I looked in my uniform and how brave I was.
Oy vey
, all the questions, the conversations, the noise, the hugs and kisses—and the tears—made me feel funny inside. And they were
my
family.

I was to be posted to the Pacific. So much for my triumphant march on Berlin. Now the enemy was Tojo and his suicide-crazed soldiers and pilots. Moze was shipped off to Europe. In an unusually intelligent move by the Army, Moze was not assigned to the front but worked behind the front lines, in supply and logistics. Me, I was not so lucky.

We wrote back and forth for a while, but as the fighting in Europe got more intense, his letters stopped. I decided it had to be a problem with the mail. I couldn’t let myself think about the other reasons why I hadn’t heard. But I thought of him often, especially on Shabbat and at night, in the tents and the foxholes, when I longed for a good story to take me away from the heat and the bugs and the fear.

Late in ’44, as the Allies tightened the noose around Germany, the existence of the Nazi death camps was finally and dreadfully confirmed. Horrible stories were told of emaciated bodies stacked like so much cordwood by the rows of crematories. Gold extracted from teeth and melted down for jewelry. Hair used to stuff mattresses. Skin tanned to make lampshades. And the gruesome, inhuman experiments on the children. I was sick with anger and revulsion. And I remembered Moze and his dreams.

When I read of how the Soviets liberated Auschwitz and the slogan on the gate—
Arbeit Macht Frei—
I wrote to Moze again, begging him to answer. While I waited for a reply, V-E Day came to Europe. I didn’t pay much attention because my war was still on. A couple of weeks later, just before I shipped out to Okinawa, Moze himself arrived in Leyte.

He was changed. He seemed taller and thinner than I remembered, bent as he was under the weight of his pack. There was no more babyroundness to his face, which was etched with pain. His skin was grey, and his dark eyes were flat and empty. I gasped when I saw how he looked now—and the eyes, the look in them, sent a shudder along my spine. But I was very glad to see my old friend. I was not so glad a few minutes later, when I found out that he was going to the front with me. I was worried about what Moze might do in the face of the Nips’ resistance. He already looked shell-shocked, a haunted man.

That night, we talked as we had back in boot camp. “So, it was all true then?  The dreams?”

“Yes, Benjamin. All true and worse. Much worse. Entire
shtetls
, whole villages, just wiped out. Families gone. Worlds gone. My unit was sent to a small camp in Germany, to help feed and clothe the survivors. It was nothing like Auschwitz, but … oh, the stench of the place. It got onto your clothes and skin, in your hair and lungs. The smell of shit and puke and death, Ben. The survivors were men and women, more dead than alive. Zombies. They told us that when the SS knew that the Americans were coming, that they would be found, they had all prisoners dig a big hole in the ground. Then they lined them up with the children, all around the edge, and shot them and threw them into the pit. Then they set the bodies afire before they ran like dogs. The handful still alive were only those who ran and hid, or were too starved and sick to work.”

I trembled in the dark, knowing there was worse yet to hear.

“I stood at the edge and looked down into the pit. I looked at the bodies, the burned flesh, the arms and legs twisted and black. Then I ran from the camp, down into the village nearby. I grabbed the first man I saw. A fat German grocer who smelled of sauerkraut. It didn’t matter if he was a member of the Nazi party or not. I punched his ugly face. Broke his nose. I screamed ‘Didn’t you know? Didn’t you know that they were murdering people up there? Couldn’t you see it? Couldn’t you
smell
it?’ Ben, the town was less than a mile from the camp. They smelled the ovens and heard the screams even if they were afraid to come and look. But he shrugged and he said it was none of his business what they were doing at the camp.” Moze was silent for a few moments. Then he spoke, softly.

“I shot him. Right between his eyes.” I could not speak.

“My C.O. could have had me court-martialed. Instead, he sent me here. Maybe it was because I told him my only friend was in the Tenth Army, and I needed to be with you. Because you understand.”

“Understand what?”  I asked, my voice thick with tears.

“When we got here and I saw with my own eyes the hate and the horror of what had been done to these wretched souls, whose only crime was to have been born Jew or Romany, I screamed and cried and called God every vile name I could think of. ‘You have forsaken me and my people after I devoted my life to you! You let this happen! You are not God!’ I wept for the dead—for the piles of starved bodies tossed away like so much garbage or just lying where the SS had shot and them before they ran. And I wept for myself, for all the hours spent reading Torah and Kabbalah, for the family I gave up, and for the faith I had so blindly followed.”

Moze’s voice was almost flat, his eyes cold in the moonlight.

“But I believe, still. I have to have faith, or I am no better than the soulless creatures who wreaked this terrible evil on the world. Ben, you have faith too. That is how you understand. That’s why I am here.” His words, said so matter-of-factly, made me angry. By this time I   had pretty much given up on God unless I was pinned down by fire, or watching a
kamikaze
plane heading right for one of our ships. I didn’t believe in anything but dumb luck anymore, and counted on nothing but myself.

“Faith, schmaith.” I said. “I don’t believe God gives a damn about us or this war or anything. The age of miracles is long gone.”

Moze stared at me. His unblinking eyes held mine until finally I had to look down.

“You’ll see,” he said coldly.

He rolled himself up in his bedroll and turned his back to me.

P
laces have rhythms, a music of their own. In the synagogue, it’s the guttural chant of the Hebrew prayers. In a city like New York, it’s the sound of the El, the honk of the cabbies, the click and scuff of feet on the sidewalks, the grinding roar of the buses. Down the shore in Jersey, you have the rolling crash of the surf, the fragmented melodies of a hundred radios tuned to different stations, the screams of the little kids playing in the water, the cries of the gulls.