The Savior (18 page)

They shot him just as he reached the fence.

After ten more minutes, some of the prisoners were begging to be killed. Finally the Oberscharführer announced, “All right. It's time for your hot showers now,” and opened the door of the building. The Jews rushed inside. Several guards went in with them. The door was closed.

The other guards went their separate ways, leaving Keller alone outside the death factory. He stepped back a few feet and threw himself at the entrance, but he knew there was nothing more that could be done for her. Exhausted, he sank to his knees, leaning against the wall. He thought he heard cries coming from within, but the stone walls were so thick that it was probably just his imagination.

When the door swung open a few minutes later, it hit him in the chest and face. He fell over, blubbering into the snow. The murderers came out, conversing in a normal tone of voice. He couldn't understand their words.

He was left alone. His throat ached, and the inside of his face burned terribly. In the emergency after the recital, he hadn't put on his overcoat; now his shirt and trousers were soaked through with snow. His right hand was a bloody mess.

He lay there for at least an hour. What had happened—the camp, the futility of it all—began to fade from his mind. He gathered some snow to numb the pain in his hand, tried to soothe the burning in his eyes by rubbing them with snow-covered fingers. He remembered that as a child he'd hated being left alone in the dark, and would hug his pillow as if it were a stuffed animal, or an imaginary friend. The smell of the clean sheets, his mother's good-night kiss, the sound of the door closing as she left—it all came back to him so vividly. He remembered how he used to go sled-riding, how one day he fell off his sled and tumbled down a hill, coming to a stop only at the bottom, too frozen to feel his bruises. He remembered the neutral, watery taste of the snow.

Suddenly there was a boot a few inches from his face. Looking up, he could make out the wire-rimmed glasses, the sharp nose and chin, the hair brushed back from that face he had come to hate so much. The snow on the ground gave off a white glow that seemed to prolong the twilight, and the roving searchlight lent an intermittent distinctness to the shadowy forms of nearby buildings.

The Kommandant was holding something. He extended it toward him, saying, “Here's your violin. You didn't put it away very carefully, so I took the liberty of covering it with the cloth and closing the case.”

Keller sat up, took the instrument without a word and held it against his chest, slowly rocking back and forth. He wondered how he could make him pay. But there was nothing he could do to him, no price he could exact for what had been done. All he could hope for was somehow to understand.

“Why did you do it?” His voice sounded strange to him, disembodied, as if someone else were speaking.

The Kommandant just stared at him.

“I thought you would let them go.”

“What made you think such a thing?”

“The experiment had to have some purpose. To atone for all the others.”

The Kommandant laughed quietly for a moment. “I'm afraid you've confused me with yourself. You see, I feel no guilt for what is done here. You can't seem to believe that the experiment was conducted out of sheer scientific curiosity.”

“Scientific curiosity…” Keller repeated, shaking his head.

“What good would it have done to keep them alive? Do you think it's proper procedure to reuse laboratory animals once an experiment is completed? We're not cheap, you know. There's an almost unlimited supply.”

He saw himself lunge upward and grab him by the throat. He pushed him down, fell on top of him and knocked his head against the ground. His thumbs found that goddamn Adam's apple, almost as hard as a bone, and pressed into it deeper and deeper. The Kommandant's hands struggled frantically to push Keller's away, and the broken glasses danced on the bridge of his nose as his head thrashed from side to side.

But in reality he sat there immobilized and muttered in a voice half-choked with hate, “You called them human beings before.”

“Well, maybe you're right,” the Kommandant said lightly, as if he hadn't heard the words Keller had just spoken. “Maybe there was another motive besides curiosity. I don't see any reason not to tell you, now that you're involved more deeply than you ever thought possible.”

“I don't know what you mean,” Keller whispered.

“You know, you get tired of having power over people—that is, the same old power to kill them, day after day. I'll admit there's a thrill to it at first, but after a while the routine starts to take its toll. The monthly quota becomes something of a burden. You get satiated, bored—especially when they don't resist, when they no longer seem to
feel
what you're doing to them. Of course, there are physical methods of evoking a response. But that's too direct, too crude for my taste. I prefer a subtler approach. If you can find a way to raise their hopes, they'll be at your mercy again. All you have to do is reawaken their nerve endings, and the pain you inflict will really hurt them.”

There was a hushed excitement in his voice, and his eyes seemed unusually bright in that eerie half-light.

“But you promised me,” Keller said, standing up with great effort. He was shaking from the cold. “You promised you would do everything in your power to save them.”

“Do you really expect a man like me to keep his promises?” asked the Kommandant in a low voice. “But in this case I actually did. I said nothing about saving them; I only promised I would do everything in my power to fulfill your wishes.”

Keller turned his back to him.

“I have done so.”

A chill rushed up Keller's spine. “What in hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you wished them dead.”

“No.” Keller began to walk away from him, very slowly. He had some trouble keeping his balance; it felt like he was swaying from side to side with every step he took.

“Yes,” said the Kommandant with greedy satisfaction, following him. “Don't try to run away from the truth.”

“I wanted you to let them live.”

“So you said this morning, but I saw through it right away. It was clever of you to titillate yourself with the notion that you'd risk your life for a humanitarian gesture. And my life, too, while you were at it. How noble you must have felt! And how free of responsibility as you watched them die.”

“I had no part in this,” Keller murmured without turning around or stopping.

“You could have left earlier, could have washed your hands of the whole thing. But no, you wanted to stay on to watch the executions and get a thrill.”

“No! No, damn you!” He quickened his pace and covered his ears in an attempt to shut out the Kommandant's words.

“You're incapable of walking out of hell, even when the gate is opened for you.”

“You would have shot us if we had walked through that gate.”

“You can say that to yourself; it's a good excuse. But the fact is, you could have walked out as easily as I could.”

“You're lying. You were just playing games with us.”

“You'll never know for sure.” There was a touch of gloating in his voice, and Keller could feel the Kommandant's eyes drilling through the back of his head.

Could they have gotten out? Was there a way he could have saved Grete, or at least avoided being a witness to her murder?

“Why, you carry hell around inside you, and the violin is your instrument of torture. I know: I've read your diaries.”

He froze. How the hell had they gotten their hands on his diaries?

The Gestapo.

Finally he understood: they'd chosen him for this experiment because they knew about everything—not only his disgust with the wounded soldiers and their coarseness. It went way beyond what was in his diaries. They must have known about Ernst, and Marietta, and his fake Jewish credentials—and how he felt about music after he walked out of her life.

There was no limit to what they knew.

“You don't forgive your audience so easily for being a witness to your ordeal.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Do I really have to spell it out for you? All right, then. You're not good enough to conquer them with your talent, so you want to kill them. And whom do you hate most of all?”

“You!” Keller yelled, wheeling around to face him.

“Yes, of course.” He smiled: the violinist's hatred seemed to give him pleasure. “But from the first moment, I knew you'd never lift a finger against me. No, you were too polite to do that. You were ready to obey orders no matter what you thought. A good pawn, the kind of citizen the Reich needs.”

Keller started to walk away from him again. The Kommandant was still following him, but seemed to be moving more slowly than before: his voice grew fainter as the distance between them increased.

“You'd never kill anybody—not all by yourself. Oh, no, you're too pure for that. And the morality you cling to is much too precious. So you leave the killing to us.”

“And what about you?” Keller called back to him.

“Me? I swim with the current. I don't try to justify my behavior, or excuse it by saying I'm just following orders. You consider me a monster, but how different are we from each other?”

Keller was forced to piece together the fragments of speech that came to him between the howls of the wind.

“The only real difference is, I don't hide from what I am.”

“Then why did
you
leave the killing to the guards?” Keller shot back. “You weren't even there.”

There was no immediate response to this. Looking back as he walked, the violinist could hardly see him because the snow was falling so thick and fast. But near the main gate he thought he heard these words: “You know, I could have you killed. They say you tried to interfere.”

One last time he stopped to listen.

“But I'll let you go. You really present no threat to the Third Reich. In your heart…you're an accomplice.”

The last words were almost inaudible; it took him a few moments to sort out their meaning. Though the Kommandant's voice was so distant and faint, it seemed as if he had been standing next to Keller, whispering—or as if the end of the sentence had welled up from the depths of his own soul.

A
ccomplice. He staggered forward under the weight of that word. The guards opened the gate and he passed through, wondering if the trap he had avoided the night before would close on him now. The Kommandant hadn't offered any guarantee of his safety; there was no way to be sure they weren't lifting their guns to their shoulders and taking aim that very moment, waiting until he was just at the limit of their range. Letting him build up hope: by now he knew how much they enjoyed that sort of game.

Keller didn't look back, trying to get away from the lights of the camp as quickly as he could without running. When he reached the end of the short road that led away from the gate, he came to the rail loading platform and turned right. He wasn't sure of the way home, but decided that if he followed the tracks, at least he would be starting out in the right direction.

There had been a full moon the night before; the sky had been radiant with stars that would have lit his way home had he ventured through the open gate. Tonight, though, he was afraid he'd lose his way in the dark, but the whiteness of the snow on the ground and in the air seemed to reflect some moonlight. He decided to avoid the main road, walking parallel to it on the other side of the tracks. Even the road, which must have been plowed that day—he'd seen Wehrmacht trucks moving on it as he walked to the “concert hall” for his final performance—was already blanketed with snow. At the edge of the field where he was trudging along, the drifts were so deep that he sank up to his calves with every step, and stumbled again and again.

After fifteen minutes he came to a fork in the road, which he didn't remember from the day he was driven to the camp. He thought of the warehouse full of stolen shoes, the inmates hauling sacks and crates onto the train: the rail line must lead to Frankfurt or Berlin, or some major depot, not to a small town like his. So he chose the fork that led away from the tracks, still careful to walk near the road but not on it, so as to avoid any vehicles that might be moving toward or away from the camp.

He didn't dare think about the next day or beyond. He was heading home, but could no longer imagine himself living there. How could he get out of bed every morning and look at himself in the mirror? How could he ever bear to pick up the violin and practice? He kept picturing the hollow, staring eyes, the poor bodies shaking, turning blue in the wind. And that pile of rotting corpses in the pit. He was feverish already, on the verge of getting the chills, but it was rage that shook him and dogged his footsteps.

Rage and shame: he remembered Grete breaking down after she told him how her family had been wiped out, could still feel her tears soaking his collar. He recalled the serenity with which she faced her tormentors moments before she died, and he knew that those guards—and he himself—would never be capable of such dignity in the face of death.

Walking had become such a struggle that he finally made up his mind to get back onto the road after all, because he'd never make it home like this. But by now the snow was falling so fast, the wind driving it into his eyes with such fury, that he couldn't find the pavement. He'd lost his bearings, could no longer tell if his steps, as he gritted his teeth and pulled his legs up, were carrying him forward, sideways, or even back toward the camp.

Having fallen for the hundredth time, he couldn't find the strength or will to pick himself up again. The wind seemed to have died down somewhat, at least for the moment. He lay there a few minutes, looking at a row of trees not far away, wondering if there might be a house nestled among them, or a barn in one of those fields, or a hut—any place where he could seek some shelter.

Soon the wind shifted, blowing snow in his face once again. He bowed his head, then felt a layer of moist flakes gathering on his hair, nose and eyelashes. Burying his face in his hands, he realized that this was the only shelter he could find right now—to stay down, not to get up and struggle against the wind. He would wait until he'd regained some strength, until the snow stopped coming down.

Why do I have to get home tonight at all?

It would be easier to find his way in the daylight, he reasoned. He relaxed his grip on the handle of his violin case, yielding to a sense of relief.

He knew what happened to people who fell asleep in a snowstorm. But he was so exhausted that he no longer cared. And in his growing numbness he began to ask himself why he should live when they had died.

It occurred to him that his violin, which he'd always protected as if it were his child, would be buried along with him, that a great instrument would be lost forever because he had used it in a perverted experiment. He tried to picture the warm red glow of its varnish and the gorgeous flames radiating outward from the seam that ran down the two-piece back. But here everything was cold and grayish-white. There was no color left in his world, nothing but layer upon layer of white on the ground, driving, swirling lines of white in the air, gray streaks against the surrounding darkness. He looked at the case, already half submerged, yearning for the warmth of those colors. His fingers were already fumbling at the lock when he changed his mind: whatever might happen to the violin after he perished, he was not going to open that case in a blizzard and ruin a Guarnerius simply in order to gaze at it one last time.

He closed his eyes. The deepening hush of the snowfall was punctuated only by the shrieks of occasional wind gusts. Fragments of music began to pass through his head, motivic shards that gradually took on the pulse of a slow triple meter and coalesced into shadows of recognizable patterns. What was this music, so infinitely quiet, filtering into his mind from so far away? The near-frozen fingers of his left hand aligned themselves with the continuous flow of melody, pressing gently against the top of his violin case in imaginary chords and double-stops. It was the
Chaconne
!—so pure, so beautiful, and now so…untouchable. It was just a few hours ago that he had played it, before his world had irreparably darkened. He lay there and listened to the magisterial unfolding of the sublime variations in D major, felt himself pulled gently upward, as if he was floating along the giant arc of their ascent from tranquil reflection to fervent affirmation and then rapture.

But there was an abrupt shift, the resignation of the return to D minor, which now spelled desolation: he knew he'd never play this music again. He couldn't bear to hear it any longer, couldn't face what was coming in a few lines—that pedal tone on the open A string, the other voice descending stepwise, becoming chromatic but always drawn back into the resonance of that A, a distant knell gathering strength, drawing nearer.

It took a spasm of will to pull himself out of his reverie. He had to concentrate on the here and now, not on the music of a world that no longer existed. He couldn't stay there all night; he'd never survive. He'd get up in a few minutes. Just a few more minutes to rest, he told himself. It didn't matter that he might not make it anyway, or that he had nothing left to look forward to. He had to try. He owed it—to
them.
The war would be over soon, and someone would have to bear witness.

The first thing he had to do was avoid being mesmerized by those final variations, by that bell tolling from afar.

But he found, as had often happened in the past, that it was not so easy to dislodge a piece of music from his mind, and if he wanted to stop it from going forward, it would simply double back on itself, on the part he had already heard, in an endless loop. The only way to get rid of it was to yield to a substitute obsession—another tune.

“Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder” sprang into service, its bouncy, rollicking theme and showy little scales and arpeggios forming an absurd contrast to the solemnity of the Chaconne and the desolation that surrounded him, to the wet and cold that were seeping into his bones. The last thing he wanted to think about now was the clink of those silver pieces on the Temple floor, and the hand that had thrown them.

My God, do I have to die with this cheerful tune running through my mind?

He tore at his hair, pounded his forehead with the flat of both hands in an attempt to achieve silence.

 

A low rumble. Continuous, getting louder. Was it the noise in his head, the hiss that plagued him at night and robbed him of sleep, worse than usual because this barren snowscape had sucked away all the normal sounds of the world? Was this the only silence he could aspire to?

But no, it wasn't in his head.

He looked up. Aircraft? Finally coming to bomb that Godforsaken camp? He couldn't see more than a few feet up, and besides, the noise was coming from his right. It was the rumble of a car engine. Two beams of light projected onto the field not far from where he lay; he hadn't strayed far from the road after all. With his last ounce of strength he staggered to his feet and pulled the violin up from its bed of snow, not knowing whether he should move toward or away from the car. Had they come to save him, or…

“Get in!” The thin, reedy voice was raised, but not in a tone of command. Not a bark. “Come on, get in,” he heard as he moved a few steps closer. It sounded as if there was a note of pleading in the repetition, not impatience. Finally, beyond the glare of the headlights, through the haze of white, he could make out the driver's face. It was Rudi at the wheel, half turned toward him, his lips slightly parted, his brow creased.

“You…you came by yourself.” Gottfried was surprised by the sound of relief in his own voice.

Rudi nodded.

“He sent you to finish the job?”

“No.”

“To get rid of an inconvenience. Close the books on an experiment.”

“You're wrong. He could have let you flounder around and freeze to death. And if he'd wanted to be sure and get rid of you, he would have sent someone else.”

Gottfried took a few more steps toward the car, almost believing him. As he grabbed the door handle, though, it struck him that the Kommandant might have sent Rudi on this mission as a final test of loyalty. After all, it would be much harder for him to kill a musician he admired than to kill a nameless Jew. But his colleagues would have had no trouble with it.

“For Christ's sake, what are you waiting for? I've come to take you home.”

He saw no weapon in the car, and the urge to collapse into the back seat was too strong to resist.

 

Rudi shifted gears and the car began to move. For a few minutes neither of them spoke. Gottfried remembered the first time they'd met, barely two days before, and the surprise he had felt to discover a fellow music-lover in that camp. He could only recall the earnestness of their debate about the
St. Matthew Passion
as if it had taken place on the other side of a great divide, in an earlier epoch of his life, an age of innocence. True, he had already figured out that terrible things were happening in the camp, but he was unaware of Rudi's role in them. And his own hands had still felt clean.

Irretrievable. The past.

“I was in the back of the room. You didn't see me, did you?”

“When?”

“Today, while you were playing the Bach. I had slipped in just before you started—while you were tuning your violin—and you didn't notice I was there. I didn't want the Jews to see me either, but they never seemed to notice much, anyway.”

“Why did you come?”

“It was your last performance at the camp. I thought you might play the Chaconne—maybe because we had talked about it—and I didn't want to miss that. I wasn't sure I'd ever get to hear it again.”

“Well, I hope it was worthwhile,” Gottfried muttered.

“It was so beautiful. I was sitting on the floor, in the corner, with tears dripping down my cheeks.”

“Oh, come on! You expect me to believe that, when you were about to shoot a man in the head?”

Rudi turned and looked at him for a moment, long enough for Gottfried to see the hurt in his face. The car swerved, but he turned around in time to correct his steering. Gottfried heard him sigh. When he finally spoke, his voice was drained of energy, colorless.

“You don't have to believe it if you don't want to, but it's true.”

“I suppose you were already mourning the Jews you and your friends were about to kill.”

“It wasn't the Jews I was crying for. And the others—they're not my friends. No, I don't claim to be able to cry for the Jews anymore. You can think I'm a monster if that makes you feel any better.”

His words echoed the Kommandant's, both implying that beneath the surface, Gottfried was like them.

“I don't think you're a monster,” he said wearily. What was the use of trying to hold Rudi accountable? He found himself beginning to soften, to feel sorry for him.

But why should he feel any sympathy for Rudi when it was the Jews who had died?

“I just don't want to hear any sentimental lies. Not after what happened today.”

“Don't worry, I'll tell you the truth. No whitewash, no excuses. I don't pretend to be what you'd call a civilized person anymore, even if I do love music. I've been at the camp too long. About the Jews: I know it's not their fault, but I'm tired of reminding myself that they're human beings. At first I was horrified at the way they were treated, but now I'm used to it. All I can feel now is disgust. Disgust at the way they look and smell, even the way they move.”