Child of the Light (5 page)

He lay in a tumbled heap at the bottom of the stairs. There was pain coming from somewhere; he could feel it, yet it was distanced from him as if it belonged to somebody else. He could not understand why he was lying there, when he felt so strong. He tried to get up but the energy was trapped in his body--

"Erich?" Solomon bent over him.

"A moon," Erich whispered. "I saw a moon...melting like a candle. And trees...everywhere."
 
He tried to reach for Sol. "I was scared--"

Sol pressed his wrist against Erich's. "Blood brothers," he said, sobbing.

As if he had momentarily forgotten that Erich's father was standing right there, Jacob Freund took the boy in his arms and rocked him. For a moment, Erich appeared to relax. Then he arched his back again, and shuddered convulsively. His eyes were wide open, his pupils so small that Sol expected them to disappear altogether. Instead, his eyes rolled upward. All Sol could see were the whites before they closed and Erich passed out.

Still Herr Weisser stood by, doing nothing.

"Either get help, or hold your boy and
I
will get help," Sol's father said. "Your son is in shock. He must be taken to the hospital."

"Is he going to be all right, Papa?" Solomon asked.

His father nodded. "I told you already, Solomon. He is going to be fine. Fine."

"May I go to the hospital with him?"

"You not only may," his father said, "you must." He laid Erich down on the floor and headed up the stairs. "I'll find help," he called down. "The two of you bring Erich up here. Keep him covered until I get back."

Sol and Herr Weisser labored up the stairs with their inert burden. They placed him on the floor with one jacket over him and another under his head like a pillow. After a few minutes of pacing, Erich's father grew impatient.

"You stupid boys," he said. To Sol's horror, he appeared to be working himself up into one of his tempers. "You have no sense, either of you." He paused for a second, then went on, voice rising as it grew louder. "You watch Erich. I'm going downstairs. I'll make sure this never happens again, you can be certain of that."

He stomped downstairs. Sol heard the yelping of the puppy, punctuated by the scraping of a large crates being moved, until, what seemed like hours later, his father returned to the shop. He was followed inside by two burly men. One was shouldering a stretcher, the other carried two blankets and a medical bag.

"There was a shooting near the Reichstag, so there was no ambulance available. No taxis either when you need one." Jacob clutched the door jamb for support while he struggled to catch his breath. "We had run halfway back from the hospital before--" He stopped and looked around, frowning as if he had just noticed that Friedrich was nowhere to be seen. "Where's Herr Weisser?"

"Down there," Sol said, pointing toward the cellar steps. "He...he's sealing up the sewer."

His father sighed loudly and shook his head. Marching to the top of the stairs, he yelled down to his partner to come upstairs at once.

Face red from whatever physical effort he had been making, Herr Weisser appeared at the top of the stairs. "Well, Freund, you certainly took your time," he said ungraciously.

Jacob's own face reddened, and he opened his mouth as if to make an angry retort, but apparently thought better of it. "There were no taxis or ambulances available," he said quietly. "Herr Wohmann kindly stopped and brought us here on his wagon. He is waiting to take us to the hospital."

Sol looked up. Through the open doorway, he saw horses pawing uneasily. The closer nag had her head turned back, trying to look around her blinders at the leather-vested vegetable dealer on the back of the wagon, rearranging baskets, apparently making room for them.

"A
hamster
wagon!" Friedrich Weisser sounded outraged. His eyes had narrowed in a look of compressed fury. "I'm not going anywhere on a damn
hamster
wagon." He glanced toward the cellar curtain. "You take him, Jacob. I'll tend to...matters...here."

"For God's sake, Friedrich!" Jacob Freund stared at his partner with stunned incomprehension as the men took the boy from his father and laid him on the stretcher. With Jacob's help from below and Wohmann's from above, they hoisted it and themselves onto the wagon. They had reached down to pull Sol up when a taxi rounded the corner.

"Taxi!" Jacob called out. It came to a screeching halt behind the vegetable wagon.

Dangling halfway between the ground and the top of the wagon, Sol felt suddenly lightheaded. It was as if the reality of Erich's injury were only now taking hold of him. The hands holding him let go and he dropped to the ground, landing unsteadily on his feet.

"A taxi will be faster," Jacob said to the attendants. "Do you think it will harm the boy to move him again?"

"It won't help him," the burly one said. But he nodded at the other man and, together, they reversed the process and settled Erich, sans stretcher, onto the back seat. When they had folded the stretcher and placed it somehow in the trunk of the taxi, Solomon and one of the men squeezed in beside the boy, leaving the other medic and Jacob to maneuver themselves into the front seat beside the driver. Friedrich Weisser was nowhere to be seen.

"What about the father?" one of the medics asked.

"We have waited too long already," Sol's father said. His features looked strained. "Let's go."

Obediently but none too smoothly, the taxi driver pulled the car away from the curb. Jolted by the abrupt movement, Erich opened his eyes. Though he was wrapped in a blanket, he was shaking and seemed to be chilled. There was not enough light in the taxi for Sol to see if his pupils were still tiny pinpoints or if they had returned to normal.

The shaking worsened.

"Hope it's not another convulsion. Could affect the brain, too many convulsions," the attendant next to Sol said, almost absently. His white jacket rubbed against Sol; it smelled of disinfectant and ether. "Has he ever had anything like this before today, Herr Freund?"

"The boy has epilepsy."

"Aha!"

"Not 'Aha,'" Jacob said, "He has small seizures. Not even seizures, really. Small episodes. I'm told the doctor calls them lightning seizures. He never passes out or anything. Just kind of shudders and then gets really sleepy."

The medic had wrapped Erich's fingers in cotton and gauze which was rapidly reddening. Sol watched, fascinated but queasy. The blood was seeping through and spreading like red ink on a blotter. He felt dizzy, as if everything hung at the edge of his consciousness. The voices around him sounded hollow, and his own thoughts felt apart from him.
Don't faint,
he told himself.
Don't look at the blood.

He forced himself to look straight ahead. He could see the reflection of his father's eyes in the windshield. They looked old and tired. He took a deep breath and looked outside, as though needing to get away, at least until his mind and stomach settled.

They were on a side street, headed toward Unter den Linden. People and traffic moved past as if in a world he no longer inhabited. He wanted to put his head between his legs. Or worse, vomit. He was supposed to be helping his friend, but instead felt sick. What a baby he was, a baby sparrow, like Erich said; too helpless to fly.

He removed his glasses, put his head against the seat-back and tried to keep from passing out. His skin felt cold and clammy, and the world outside seemed to be composed of dots, like the French pointillist painting in the book his mother had shown him during one of the "culture sessions" she insisted upon. His heart was racing. He thought he saw people lined up for a block behind a milk cart, empty bottles in their hands waiting to be refilled.

He could not look away, and suddenly he was no longer in the taxi. He was in the queue. "Last week I waited for six hours," the elderly man behind him in line grumbled, talking to no one in particular. Sol turned around. The gray of the man's woolen beret seemed to bring out the deeply etched lines in his face. "Should have sent one of my grandchildren," he said, putting a beefy hand on Sol's shoulder. "Damn
goyim
," he muttered, watching the policeman near the cart screen the people in line and pull some out to the back of the line.

"Careful," the man behind him warned. "They hear you, we may never get milk. My daughter has children to feed."

There was heavy activity in front as people made a social event of their milk purchases and Jews were rerouted to the back of the line to make room for
real
Germans. Sol looked down at the strange canvas shoes he was wearing and began moving in place, faster and faster, like someone trying to stay warm or treading water. The sidewalk seemed to slip beneath him, like a conveyor belt. He was running in place when several boys in lederhosen trotted by, a familiar face among them.

"Erich!" Sol called out.

His friend halted. "We're off to Luna Park," he said. "They've added a new hall of mirrors to the Panoptikum. Come with us."

Sol shook his head. His feet kept moving. "I have to buy milk," he said, puffing with the effort.

"No problem," Erich said. "Give me the money. I'll get it for you."

Sol gave Erich the two bottles and a fistful of marks.

Erich and the other boys disappeared, to return in what seemed to be an instant, Erich holding a filled bottle in each hand. He held them just out of Sol's reach. "Here they are. Now let's go to Luna Park."

"Can't," Sol said, stretching for the bottles. "Mama--"

"Ma-ma, Ma-ma," Erich mimicked in a baby voice. He swung one of the bottles menacingly over the curb. "You coming with us, or are you going home with
one?"

"I told you, I--"

Glass and milk splattered. Sol jerked backward to avoid both...and found himself pressing hard against the seat of the taxi, which was slowing as it neared the hospital. Light filtered through the car's window, foggy with the breath of its occupants.

"Moon...melting moon," Erich whispered, eyes open wide and staring upward. "Jungle..." Fur glistening wetly, two black-and-white long-muzzled monkeys hunched over him.

Sol blinked hard and put on his glasses. Quickly, the image vanished. No monkeys...only the attendants.
A dream,
he told himself.
Only a bad dream.

But then, why was he still frightened?

May l922

Solomon kicked off his shoes and stretched out on top of his eiderdown. He was so tired--and shaken. A few minutes of sleep and he would start studying again, he promised himself. In less than two months it would be his bar mitzvah. He had studying for that and schoolwork and--

His eyes closed.

"Studying dreams, again,
Spatz?"

"Wha--who--oh, it's you." Sol could feel sweat running down the back of his neck. He shifted his position slightly and glanced at the bed to make sure there were no damp patches. Erich knew nothing about the bedwetting; Sol wanted to keep it that way.

"Still having nightmares?" Erich narrowed his eyes and stared at Sol.

Sol nodded. "What about you?"

"The Bull dream," Erich said. "If it's the last thing I do, I'll pay my father back--"

It had been three and a half years since the accident and, though they were less frequent, the nightmares had not stopped. The day after the accident, groggy with painkillers, Erich swore he could hear Bull gurgling as Herr Weisser drowned him in the canal. He had been dreaming about it ever since. Sol's nightmares were also always the same: Erich screaming; Erich hanging limply from the grate, blood curling down his arm; the woman begging God to let her die; and the monkeys--always the monkeys. Superimposed over all of it, swollen and bloody and bruised, Erich's three crushed fingers--

He looked at Erich's hand, at the pale flesh and the scars, red and raised, like symbiotic vines that had wound themselves around his fingers and taken root. Eventually the scars would turn white, the doctor said. Whiter than the flesh--

"Want to go for a walk--feed the birds--make trouble?" Erich asked.

"Have to study."

Erich perched on the edge of the bed. "Look,
Spatz,
I have an idea. Remember when Karl almost drowned at the swimming meet? Remember how he was terrified of water after that, until they
made
him go swimming again?"

"What's that got to do with me?"

"Saturday, you and your papa went to synagogue and I was helping in the shop. I got into the furrier's sub-basement--"

"How?"

"I have my ways." He took a key chain from his hip pocket. Attached to the chain was a small book-shaped leather pouch which Sol knew contained Erich's lock picks. "There's a padlocked sewer-entrance down there--"

"You went inside!"

"I went looking for that woman you told me about." He raised his voice and mimicked a woman's voice.
"Oh God, let me die. I did not know...I did not know."

A thin shiver ran down Sol's spine--the kind his mama said meant a goose had walked on his grave. The nightmares, the fear--how foolish he had been! Maybe there had never been a woman's voice! He should have thought of this before, after the accident and Erich's grand mal seizure, when the doctor told them about some of the strange things that happened to people who had seizures. Sometimes they could not remember anything about what had happened before and after the seizure, and sometimes--during the seizure--they spoke in tongues. Erich's seizure must have been coming on when he was hanging from the grating. He could have mimicked a woman, like now, Sol thought. The sound could easily have been distorted by the sewer's weird acoustics.