Lineage (2 page)

His mother squeezed his hand again. She had been doing this ever since the dark men had come and forced them from their corral. She would blink her tired eyes and try to smile at him, though the curve of her mouth never did seem happy. Then she would clutch his hand, as if they were on the lip of a much deeper precipice and he was too close to the edge. His father held his mother’s other hand, and he too was smiling down at him, his small, round glasses perched on his long nose.

“What are we doing, Mama?”

The boy’s mother swallowed painfully, and her stomach growled beneath her woolen shawls. She glanced at her husband and pursed her thin, waxy lips together into a tight line. When she looked down at the small white face of her son, her resolve almost broke. She had to resist the urge to grab him up in her arms and run as fast as she could away from the ditch in front of them.
Away from the men with guns.
Away from the smell in the air that never truly dissipated. And when she thought about what that smell was, what she was breathing into her lungs, it was almost too much to bear.

Instead she smiled her painful smile and blinked her still-beautiful eyes. They were brown, like her son’s, and even with all they had witnessed, they still held a glint of life and nearly forgotten dignity. “We’re going away, my baby.”

The boy seemed to consider this. The camp was all he had ever known. His very first memories were of the fences that surrounded it, the cold that never seemed to abate, and the uniforms the dark men wore.

“Away where?”

His mother again looked to his father imploringly. After a moment he nodded and turned toward his son before speaking.

“It’s a beautiful place. The sun shines each day, and there is so much food to eat, we’ll never be hungry again.” His father smiled once more and reached out to caress his son’s face, but his movements made several of the soldiers yell and pull up their weapons, training them on his back. With his brow pulled together and the smile still on his face, his father dropped his hand to his side and stepped back to face the ditch.

The boy knew better than to run to his father’s side; he had seen what the soldiers did to those who disobeyed them. So instead, he was content to hold his mother’s bony hand in his own and imagine the place that his father had described. It was nearly beyond his comprehension, but after a time he was able to see a valley bathed in golden light with tables, long and low, filled with food. It wasn’t the food that he ate here, not the gruel, strained through screens of boiled bones from animals he didn’t know. It was the food his mother had told him of, food he only knew existed by his faith in her words. Fresh bread and cheese, milk in tall glasses, and cookies, mounds and mounds of cookies. He had had a cookie only once; his father had bribed it from one of the soldiers after a meager dinner. It had been cold and hard, but it was the most wonderful thing he had ever eaten. He was still imagining the taste of it when he heard boot steps approaching through the snow and mud from behind the line of people.

The officer with the silver SS on his collar stopped a few yards from the ditch and the people that lined it, and then stood looking at their backs. He glanced to his left and nodded a quick approval to his
Blockwart
, who in turn dipped his head and stepped back several steps.

The officer’s heart was beginning to pump at a quickened pace, as it always did. It had been some time since he had allowed himself release. Only so much could be tolerated from a commanding officer, even in a place such as this. If too many rumors were to reach the wrong ears, the solidity of his command would be questioned.
But now that the end was this close, why not?
He could hear the storm that would soon sweep through the camp to the west, and when it did, none of this would matter. It was a deeper stain within an already-bloody wound.

He looked to his right and left, making eye contact with the soldiers standing there. He made sure they understood why they were positioned where they were, and then approached the first figure in the long line. It was a man with fairly wide shoulders and an upright posture. He stood with purpose, with
dignity
. The officer nodded to himself and looked down at the white snow beneath his feet, unblemished and pure.

The officer stopped several feet behind the first man and waited. He could tell the man had heard him approach. He knew the prisoner wasn’t one of the already-broken by the way the man’s hands were balled into fists. The officer’s eyes narrowed and his breathing slowed as the man before him turned his head slightly. The prisoner’s shoulders slumped somewhat and the officer heard him exhale.
Good,
the officer thought as his hands rested on the black handles at his
waist,
at least we’re on the same page.

In a clumsy swinging motion, the man at the head of the line turned and lunged at the officer behind him. His gaunt face was drawn tight in a grimace of hate, and the anticipated blow, either from a fist or a bullet. The officer took one step back, and there was a flash of silver in the winter light. The man who had rushed him stopped as if he had hit a wall and straightened, his hands flying suddenly to his throat in a gesture of surprise. The prisoner licked his lips and his eyebrows drew down in a scowl of concentration. He pulled one hand away from his neck, and then the other. He blinked several times, but when he licked his lips again, there was blood on them.

A gash abruptly opened beneath the prisoner’s jaw like a red smile. Skin, esophagus, and muscle had been slit wide, and the gap continued to open, seeming that it would not stop. Blood gushed from the wound and flowed over the man’s hands in front of his eyes. Gallons seemed to escape from his throat in an elegant stream, as if poured from a pitcher. His fingers cut the flow into cascades, and he weakly began to cup the life that surged from within him.

The prisoner blinked one last time and then stumbled backward as his senses tried to maintain balance. He fell in a heap at the base of the trench behind him. His legs twitched twice as his final stores of blood escaped and ran with the grade of the earth through the wet snow.

The officer’s face split in a maniacal grin, his teeth clenched together and his blue eyes open wide to the scene before him. The lush redness of the blood on the stark white of the snow held his gaze, and he realized he could have stared for hours into the almost-black pool near his feet. A long-bladed knife that ended in a thick, chopping point extended from his right hand, and a small line of blood slid off its tip in short drops. 

The people in line recoiled reflexively, as if they were made of a solid spring and a shock echoed down through their ranks. Some were screaming, while others began to cry but refused to look at the corpse in the ditch, their eyes squeezed shut, letting only tears escape. The soldiers at either end of the ditch began yelling instructions, telling them to stay where they were. The people fearfully eyed the officer, and then the muzzles of the guns that were trained on them, almost as if they were measuring each up to see which might be a better choice.

The boy’s view of the carnage had been blocked as the adults before him shifted, and thus he hadn’t seen what had transpired. Only now did he see that a man had fallen into the ditch and he seemed to be hurt.

At the far end of the line, the officer slowly came to his senses and became aware of the movement in the line of people. Without a word, he nodded again to the soldiers as he began to stalk to the next man in the line.

The officer pulled another, thinner, blade out from a sheath on his left as he strode up to a man who was in his late sixties. The man held his hands up in a defensive gesture, his long white hair flying wildly in the air, and began to plead with the officer as he approached. Without hesitation, the officer lunged forward and slid the long, thin blade up to the handle into the old man’s right eye. The eye punctured with a soft puff and deflated on the blade as the man’s body went rigid and then collapsed to the ground.

The officer marveled at how little blood escaped the man’s wound, as he stepped over the corpse and began to bear down on a woman who had fallen to her knees in the snow. In the recesses of his mind that weren’t filled with the sound of his own heart’s hammering, he began to hear gunfire.

The boy at the end of the line weaved back and forth as he tried to make out what the confusion was and why people were yelling. His mother had turned and was looking in the direction he was, with one hand clamped tightly over her mouth, as if she were about to be sick and could hold it at bay if she pushed hard enough at her face. His father was also staring at the other end of the line, and hadn’t moved a muscle until the gunshots began to cut the air with their short barks of sound. Several people tried to run out of the line, and the soldiers shot them. Their bodies fell in the snow and red began to creep outward through the white
in a bright corona.

Fear began to invade the boy’s body, as his legs locked tight and he gripped his mother’s hand. She squeezed back without taking her eyes off the spectacle in front of her.

The officer wove his way down through the line in a blur of motion. His arms
pinwheeled
crazily at times, and snapped in short strikes at others. Blood flew in arcs and began to coat his dark uniform in splattered gore. As he cut one woman’s face from jaw to opposite eyebrow, he noticed there were many bodies falling not only in the ditch but also to the level ground on which he stood. The soldiers around him were doing well. Only the people who ran or tried to fight were shot, but most were too shocked or frightened to react. He cut these people down like wheat before a scythe.

As the officer approached a man who appeared completely dazed—his slight form hunched over and his eyes staring blankly at the ditch in front of him—the man suddenly turned with a ragged scream and began to flee. His rag-swaddled feet pounded large footprints in the snow as he ran from the pit. A soldier to the officer’s right paused as he watched the emaciated man run away, seemingly entranced by the speed at which the prisoner was escaping.

“Shoot him!” the officer screamed into the young soldier’s ear. The soldier flinched but brought the machine gun to bear on the running man’s back. Bullets sprayed from the barrel of the gun, and the escaped man pitched forward into the snow, with his arm hanging off his body at a strange angle. From where the officer stood, it looked as though only a few inches of meat attached the limb to the starved body that now lay twitching on the ground.

The officer spun in a tight turn and slit the throat of another prisoner who stood a few feet to his left. The blood that flew from the wound sprayed into a fine haze that settled in the chilled air like a mist descending over a cold field. The
officer watched the blood spray fall to the ground and paint
the snow a faint pink among the deeper reds. It was simply art. There was no other way to describe it. The way the substance ran from the skin when cut. How it soaked into the ground, how it pooled so black. He knew his own veins were pumping the same liquid.

Without pausing as he bore down on the next person in line, he slit his right wrist just enough to allow a small stream to escape, to fall among the rest and mix into the abstract masterpiece he was painting on the ground.

The boy’s mother and father began to back up. Something was very wrong, the boy knew. People still screamed and fell down. He looked up imploringly at his mother, but her face was turned toward his father, who stared intently into her eyes. His father’s mouth was drawn straight across his narrow face like a pale gash. His eyes were wide behind his glasses, and he now held his wife’s other hand in both of his own. Something was passing between them, the boy knew. His mother and father weren’t talking, but things were being said. After another moment like this, his father nodded and looked down into his face. The boy felt a pang of panic that rose sharply above all the other fears that barraged his senses. It was like a spike of electricity running through his mind that cut off all other thought. His father smiled, and the boy reached out to him. It was a desperate act, the reaction of someone falling from the deck of a ship into roiling waters. His father squeezed his hand for one beat, two, then released it, at the same time letting go of the connection with his wife.

A soldier stood several yards to the father’s right, toward the center of the camp, the same direction the fleeing prisoner had tried to escape. The soldier’s face was drawn up in a grimace of disgust, his eyes narrowed into slits, as arc after arc of blood flew into the air farther down the line. The boy’s father stepped calmly toward the soldier, his hands held by his sides. When the soldier didn’t turn or notice him, the boy’s father leapt in his direction and grasped the rounded edges of the other man’s machine gun. A moment too late, the soldier realized what was happening and tried to pull the gun back from the boy’s father. With a swift movement that seemed uncorrelated with his physical state, the boy’s father slammed the gun up and into the soldier’s nose, breaking it and knocking him to the ground. The two men fell heavily, the soldier onto his back and the boy’s father on top of him. The soldier’s eyes fluttered for a moment as blood began to pour from his broken nose, and the boy’s father used the momentary lull to pull the gun’s sling up and over the supine man’s head.