Different Seasons (20 page)

“If I hadn’t followed orders, I would have been dead.” Dussander was breathing hard, his upper body rocking back and forth in the chair, making the springs squeak. A little cloud of liquor-smell hung around him. “There was always the Russian front,
nicht wahr?
Our leaders were madmen, granted, but does one argue with madmen... especially when the maddest of them all has the luck of Satan. He escaped a brilliant assassination attempt by inches. Those who conspired were strangled with piano-wire, strangled slowly. Their death-agonies were filmed for the edification of the elite—”

“Yeah! Neat!” Todd cried impulsively. “Did you see that movie?”

“Yes. I saw. We all saw what happened to those unwilling or unable to run before the wind and wait for the storm to end. What we did then was the right thing. For that time and that place, it was the right thing. I would do it again. But . . .”

His eyes dropped to his glass. It was empty.

“... but I don’t wish to speak of it, or even think of it. What we did was motivated only by survival, and nothing about survival is pretty. I had dreams . . .” He slowly took a cigarette from the box on the TV. “Yes. For years I had them. Blackness, and sounds in the blackness. Tractor engines. Bulldozer engines. Gunbutts thudding against what might have been frozen earth, or human skulls. Whistles, sirens, pistol-shots, screams. The doors of cattle-cars rumbling open on cold winter afternoons.

“Then, in my dreams, all sounds would stop—and eyes would open in the dark, gleaming like the eyes of animals in a rainforest. For many years I lived on the edge of the jungle, and I suppose that is why it is always the jungle I smelled and felt in those dreams. When I woke from them I would be drenched with sweat, my heart thundering in my chest, my hand stuffed into my mouth to stifle the screams. And I would think:
The dream is the truth.
Brazil, Paraguay, Cuba... those places are the dream. In the reality I am still at Patin. The Russians are closer today than yesterday. Some of them are remembering that in 1943 they had to eat frozen German corpses to stay alive. Now they long to drink hot German blood. There were rumors, boy, that some of them did just that when they crossed into Germany: cut the t’roats of some prisoners and drank their blood out of a boot. I would wake up and think:
The work must go on, if only so there is no evidence of what we did here, or so little that the world, which doesn’t want to believe it, won’t have to.
I would think:
The work must go on if we are to survive.”

Todd listened to this with close attention and great interest. This was pretty good, but he was sure there would be better stuff in the days ahead. All Dussander needed was a little prodding. Heck, he was lucky. Lots of men his age were senile.

Dussander dragged deeply on his cigarette. “Later, after the dreams went away, there were days when I would think I had seen someone from Patin. Never guards or fellow officers, always inmates. I remember one afternoon in West Germany, ten years ago. There was an accident on the Autobahn. Traffic was frozen in every lane. I sat in my Morris, listening to the radio, waiting for the traffic to move. I looked to my right. There was a very old Simca in the next lane, and the man behind the wheel was looking at me. He was perhaps fifty, and he looked ill. There was a scar on his cheek. His hair was white, short, cut badly. I looked away. The minutes passed and still the traffic didn’t move. I began snatching glances at the man in the Simca. Every time I did, he was looking at me, his face as still as death, his eyes sunken in their sockets. I became convinced he had been at Patin. He had been there and he had recognized me.”

Dussander wiped a hand across his eyes.

“It was winter. The man was wearing an overcoat. But I was convinced that if I got out of my car and went to him, made him take off his coat and push up his shirtsleeves, I would see the number on his arm.

“At last the traffic began to move again. I pulled away from the Simca. If the jam had lasted another ten minutes, I believe I would have gotten out of my car and pulled the old man out of his. I would have beaten him, number or no number. I would have beaten him for looking at me that way.

“Shortly after that, I left Germany forever.”

“Lucky for you,” Todd said.

Dussander shrugged. “It was the same everywhere. Havana, Mexico City, Rome. I was in Rome for three years, you know. I would see a man looking at me over his
cappucino
in a café ... a woman in a hotel lobby who seemed more interested in me than in her magazine... a waiter in a restaurant who would keep glancing at me no matter whom he was serving. I would become convinced that these people were studying me, and that night the dream would come—the sounds, the jungle, the eyes.

“But when I came to America I put it out of my mind. I go to movies. I eat out once a week, always at one of those fast-food places that are so clean and so well-lighted by fluorescent bars. Here at my house I do jigsaw puzzles and I read novels—most of them bad ones—and watch TV. At night I drink until I’m sleepy. The dreams don’t come anymore. When I see someone looking at me in the supermarket or the library or the tobacconist’s, I think it must be because I look like their grandfather... or an old teacher... or a neighbor in a town they left some years ago.” He shook his head at Todd. “Whatever happened at Patin, it happened to another man. Not to me.”

“Great!” Todd said. “I want to hear all about it.”

Dussander’s eyes squeezed closed, and then opened slowly. “You don’t understand. I do not wish to speak of it.”

“You will, though. If you don’t, I’ll tell everyone who you are.”

Dussander stared at him, gray-faced. “I knew,” he said, “that I would find the extortion sooner or later.”

“Today I want to hear about the gas ovens,” Todd said. “How you baked them after they were dead.” His smile beamed out, rich and radiant. “But put your teeth in before you start. You look better with your teeth in.”

Dussander did as he was told. He talked to Todd about the gas ovens until Todd had to go home for lunch. Every time he tried to slip over into generalities, Todd would frown severely and ask him specific questions to get him back on the track. Dussander drank a great deal as he talked. He didn’t smile. Todd smiled. Todd smiled enough for both of them.

August, 1974.

They sat on Dussander’s back porch under a cloudless, smiling sky. Todd was wearing jeans, Keds, and his Little League shirt. Dussander was wearing a baggy gray shirt and shapeless khaki pants held up with suspenders—wino-pants, Todd thought with private contempt; they looked like they had come straight from a box in the back of the Salvation Army store downtown. He was really going to have to do something about the way Dussander dressed when he was at home. It spoiled some of the fun.

The two of them were eating Big Macs that Todd had brought in his bike-basket, pedaling fast so they wouldn’t get cold. Todd was sipping a Coke through a plastic straw. Dussander had a glass of bourbon.

His old man’s voice rose and fell, papery, hesitant, sometimes nearly inaudible. His faded blue eyes, threaded with the usual snaps of red, were never still. An observer might have thought them grandfather and grandson, the latter perhaps attending some rite of passage, a handing down.

“And that’s all I remember,” Dussander finished presently, and took a large bite of his sandwich. McDonald’s Secret Sauce dribbled down his chin.

“You can do better than that,” Todd said softly.

Dussander took a large swallow from his glass. “The uniforms were made of paper,” he said finally, almost snarling.

“When one inmate died, the uniform was passed on if it could still be worn. Sometimes one paper uniform could dress as many as forty inmates. I received high marks for my frugality.”

“From Gluecks?”

“From Himmler.”

“But there was a clothing factory in Patin. You told me that just last week. Why didn’t you have the uniforms made there? The inmates themselves could have made them.”

“The job of the factory in Patin was to make uniforms for German soldiers. And as for us ...” Dussander’s voice faltered for a moment, and then he forced himself to go on. “We were not in the business of rehabilitation,” he finished.

Todd smiled his broad smile.

“Enough for today? Please? My throat is sore.”

“You shouldn’t smoke so much, then,” Todd said, continuing to smile. “Tell me some more about the uniforms.”

“Which? Inmate or SS?” Dussander’s voice was resigned.

Smiling, Todd said: “Both.”

September, 1974.

Todd was in the kitchen of his house, making himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You got to the kitchen by going up half a dozen redwood steps to a raised area that gleamed with chrome and stainless steel. His mother’s electric typewriter had been going steadily ever since Todd had gotten home from school. She was typing a master’s thesis for a grad student. The grad student had short hair, wore thick glasses, and looked like a creature from outer space, in Todd’s humble opinion. The thesis was on the effect of fruit-flies in the Salinas Valley after World War II, or some good shit like that. Now her typewriter stopped and she came out of her office.

“Todd-baby,” she greeted him.

“Monica-baby,” he hailed back, amiably enough.

His mother wasn’t a bad-looking chick for thirty-six, Todd thought; blonde hair that was streaked ash in a couple of places, tall, shapely, now dressed in dark red shorts and a sheer blouse of a warm whiskey color—the blouse was casually knotted below her breasts, putting her flat, unlined midriff on show. A typewriter eraser was tucked into her hair, which had been pinned carelessly back with a turquoise clip.

“So how’s school?” she asked him, coming up the steps into the kitchen. She brushed his lips casually with hers and then slid onto one of the stools in front of the breakfast counter.

“School’s cool.”

“Going to be on the honor roll again?”

“Sure.” Actually, he thought his grades might slip a notch this first quarter. He had been spending a lot of time with Dussander, and when he wasn’t actually with the old kraut, he was thinking about the things Dussander had told him. Once or twice he had dreamed about the things Dussander had told him. But it was nothing he couldn’t handle.

“Apt pupil,” she said, ruffling his shaggy blonde hair. “How’s that sandwich?”

“Good,” he said.

“Would you make me one and bring it into my office?”

“Can’t,” he said, getting up. “I promised Mr. Denker I’d come over and read to him for an hour or so.”

“Are you still on
Robinson Crusoe?”

“Nope.” He showed her the spine of a thick book he had bought in a junkshop for twenty cents.
“Tom Jones
.”

“Ye gods and little fishes! It’ll take you the whole school-year to get through that, Toddy-baby. Couldn’t you at least find an abridged edition, like with
Crusoe?”

“Probably, but he wanted to hear all of this one. He said so.”

“Oh.” She looked at him for a moment, then hugged him. It was rare for her to be so demonstrative, and it made Todd a little uneasy. “You’re a peach to be taking so much of your spare time to read to him. Your father and I think it’s just . . . just exceptional.”

Todd cast his eyes down modestly.

“And to not want to tell anybody,” she said. “Hiding your light under a bushel.”

“Oh, the kids I hang around with—they’d probably think I was some kind of weirdo,” Todd said, smiling modestly down at the floor. “All that good shit.”

“Don’t say that,” she admonished absently. Then: “Do you think Mr. Denker would like to come over and have dinner with us some night?”

“Maybe,” Todd said vaguely. “Listen, I gotta put an egg in my shoe and beat it.”

“Okay. Supper at six-thirty. Don’t forget.”

“I won’t.”

“Your father’s got to work late so it’ll just be me and thee again, okay?”

“Crazy, baby.”

She watched him go with a fond smile, hoping there was nothing in
Tom Jones
he shouldn’t be reading; he was only thirteen. She didn’t suppose there was. He was growing up in a society where magazines like
Penthouse
were available to anyone with a dollar and a quarter, or to any kid who could reach up to the top shelf of the magazine rack and grab a quick peek before the clerk could shout for him to put that up and get lost. In a society that seemed to believe most of all in the creed of hump thy neighbor, she didn’t think there could be much in a book two hundred years old to screw up Todd’s head—although she supposed the old man might get off on it a little. And as Richard liked to say, for a kid the whole world’s a laboratory. You have to let them poke around in it. And if the kid in question has a healthy home life and loving parents, he’ll be all the stronger for having knocked around a few strange corners.

And there went the healthiest kid she knew, pedaling up the street on his Schwinn. We
did okay by the lad,
she thought, turning to make her sandwich.
Damned if we didn’t do okay.

October, 1974.

Dussander had lost weight. They sat in the kitchen, the shopworn copy of
Tom Jones
between them on the oilcloth-covered table (Todd, who tried never to miss a trick, had purchased the Cliff’s Notes on the book with part of his allowance and had carefully read the entire summary against the possibility that his mother or father might ask him questions about the plot). Todd was eating a Ring Ding he had bought at the market. He had bought one for Dussander, but Dussander hadn’t touched it. He only looked at it morosely from time to time as he drank his bourbon. Todd hated to see anything as tasty as Ring Dings go to waste. If he didn’t eat it pretty quick, Todd was going to ask him if he could have it.

“So how did the stuff get to Patin?” he asked Dussander.