The Savior (2 page)

“Have you come to heal us?” he asked.

Some of the other patients snickered, but Keller didn't know whether the question was meant to be sarcastic. It was impossible to tell, since there was barely room for the man to move his jaw, and the words came out low and muffled from behind all those layers of bandage.

“Can you make us whole again?”

Keller wasn't sure how to answer him. He wondered what the authorities would expect him to say in a situation like this. But he knew he had to find his own words, had to respond as truthfully as possible without sounding hopeless.

“Music has been known to have a therapeutic effect,” he said after a long hesitation. “That's why I'm here. I'm going to play the Chaconne by Bach for you. There is great power in this music—a spiritual power that…”

“But is there
magical
power in it?” asked the mask.

“Magical?” Keller repeated.

“You know what I mean. Can it bring back the dead?”

A
week had passed since the last performance. It was very early in the morning, and he was still groggy from yet another night of uneasy sleep; he had dreamt about the man in the mask, who was pestering him with questions he could barely hear. The man's words became less and less intelligible as Keller approached him, and he tottered, arms outstretched, then fell backward before Keller could grab his hand.

He had no appetite for breakfast, but gulped down some coffee before he picked up the violin and headed out the door of his apartment. On the way downstairs, just before he reached the ground floor, he noticed that the sidewalk in front of the building was lit up.

Headlights.

A car? Here, at this hour?

He heard the hum of an engine idling; then, as the inner door shut behind him, he peered through the glass panel in the door to the street.

It was an open car, like the jeeps used by the Wehrmacht to take him to the makeshift hospitals near the front. But they never came to his house. He always picked up his assignments at Headquarters and was sent out directly from there; with the condition of most of the roads these days, there was no time to lose circling back through the one-way streets of the town.

The driver cocked his head when he saw him hesitating in the doorway, and gestured with his thumb toward the back seat. It was too late for Keller to pretend he hadn't noticed him, too late to withdraw into the shadows of the stairwell. Reluctantly, he pushed open the door.

“Get in.”

The driver was square-jawed, solidly built. His overcoat was unbuttoned, despite the intense cold, and in the pale light from a nearby street lamp, Keller could see the crisp black uniform: SS, not Wehrmacht.

He stepped gingerly around an ice-rimmed puddle, holding the violin case against his body, cradling it with both arms. “I was on my way to Headquarters, to pick up my next assignment.”

“I just came from there. They sent me to fetch you.”

My diary. Have they gotten their hands on it?

Or could he thank Herr Maier for this?

He looked up and down the street, wondering if anyone was watching. A scrawny gray cat darted across the cobblestones. Before disappearing into an alleyway opposite his house, it locked eyes with him for a moment.

The storefronts were dark, and all the windows shuttered, as if the winding row of narrow, gabled houses had retreated into itself in an effort to shut out the winter chill. It seemed to Keller that the entire street had closed its eyes to the disappearance of a neighbor.

The driver was staring at him, tapping the gloved fingers of his right hand on the steering wheel. Keller tried to clear his head and think decisively. If this was just another variation on the theme of his pointless performances for the soldiers—if everything was still all right—then any attempt to argue his way out would only make the driver suspicious. It was probably a mistake even to hesitate.

“May I ask where we are going?”

The driver handed him a dispatch from Headquarters as he settled himself in the back of the car, carefully placing his instrument on the seat next to him. He pulled off his gloves. It took some effort to keep his hands steady as he opened the envelope. Inside was a typewritten sheet embossed with the Wehrmacht letterhead. He read the message several times, trying to understand what was happening.

There were no details, no explanations. He recognized the signature of the lieutenant who usually authorized his transport.

He looked up at the driver. “Are you taking me…to a camp?”

The driver turned to face him, his lips curling into a smile. “Our Kommandant is a great music-lover.”

It must be the one by the chemical factory, near the bend in the river
. A place he had always avoided thinking about. It was fifteen kilometers from the town, off the main road, so he had never been driven very close to it on his trips to play for the soldiers. But he'd heard about that camp from time to time. There was a village not far away, and people talked. Someone had seen a long line of emaciated prisoners leaving the factory one night. No one he knew, though, had heard much about the camp itself.

“If I'm supposed to be there for the next four days, I'll need to bring some things along. Unless you're planning to drive me back and forth each day.”

“All your needs will be taken care of. You'll be quite comfortable there.” The driver looked at Keller's right hand, which was gripping the door handle, as if he was daring him to pull on it. Keller let go of the handle, leaned back and put his gloves on again.

He had no idea why they were sending him there, but if he were being arrested, the driver probably wouldn't have come by himself. There would have been a couple of armed guards to make sure he couldn't get away. This thought, rational as it was, didn't set his mind at ease, and he was seized with longing for the drab familiarity of his home—the old overstuffed armchair in which he often fell asleep while reading or studying scores late at night, the large bay windows through which he'd stare at the rooftops across the street while he practiced, even the cramped, poorly equipped kitchen alcove where he would open ration tins and attempt to cook something palatable. He looked back at the house as the car pulled away from the curb, trying not to be too obvious while gazing up at those fourth-floor windows.

As they turned into the next street, he noticed that his left hand was stroking the violin case. He stopped himself as he saw the driver looking at him through the rearview mirror. For a few moments he couldn't decide what to do with his hands. Finally he folded them in his lap.

It had rained during the night, and then the rain had turned to sleet and hail, which had ricocheted off the skylight in his bedroom while he tried to sleep. By daybreak the sky was clearing: as they drove past a few clusters of dreary little houses on the outskirts of town, the mist overhead thinned out, a shroud of gray yielding to pale blue fringed with pink near the horizon. But the weak winter sun gave off little warmth. Keller pulled up his coat collar and tightened his scarf; he could feel his shoulders hunching up. His eyes were watering, and his cheeks stung when the wind slapped his face.

Stretches of the road were icy. Though the driver navigated around the ruts and snowdrifts skillfully enough, Keller started to feel nauseous from all the swerving and bouncing. Suddenly the car lurched, then rocked backward. With his left hand he grabbed for the violin and managed to hold it in its place, but he was thrown against the front seat.

“Scheisse,” muttered the driver, opening his door and looking back at the left rear wheel, which was stuck in a thick bed of mud. “We'll have to get out and push.”

Glad for the delay and for the respite from that ride, Keller clambered out of the car. His chest hurt where it had slammed into the front seat. He rubbed the sore spot gingerly, glancing up and down the road. There was no traffic moving in either direction. Next to them was a huge field covered with ice, dotted here and there with gnarled trees whose branches groped toward the sky.

Like misshapen fingers, he thought. If he'd been wandering out there alone, he would have found a bleak, desolate beauty in the landscape.

With the driver at his side, he strained at first to force the car out of its rut, throwing all his weight against the back fender. But after a few minutes he stopped concentrating on what they were doing, felt his arms slacken. He stared into the field, trying to imagine what torments were in store for him today, lowering his head beneath his shoulders whenever there was a gust of wind.

The huge fellow next to him was having no trouble, or at least didn't want to show it. No gasps of effort from him. He kept readjusting his grip on the fender, planting his feet further and further apart. Occasionally he lunged and stabbed at the icy mud with a shovel, then ran up to the driver's seat and pumped the accelerator, but the engine shrilled and the wheels spun in place while Keller breathed in a blast of exhaust. After several futile attempts at the steering wheel, the driver stayed at Keller's side, pushing, backing away a few steps and ramming the fender with all his might. The jeep rocked back and forth. Their heads were so close together that the condensation from their breath mingled into one gray cloud of mist, constantly renewed, contrasting with the brutal clarity of the thin, dry air. Finally, after he had kicked and shoveled the sludge away from both rear wheels, the driver managed to free the car from its muddy prison.

“It's about time,” he said. “Now I'll have to step on it. The Kommandant doesn't like to be kept waiting.”

Keller hadn't dressed warmly enough. Climbing into the back seat again, he began to shiver. He picked up his violin case and clutched it to his chest, as if that could keep out the cold.

Ever since he'd started playing for the Wehrmacht, he thought he had nothing to worry about. But why were they sending him
there
? So far he had played only for soldiers, never for prisoners. His performances were supposed to soothe and comfort people. He almost always failed in the attempt, of course. But that was the idea, anyway: a humane gesture.

He didn't know exactly who was being held at that camp—Jews, he supposed, or Russian prisoners of war. Or Germany's homegrown Communists, if there were any left. Yet one thing was clear to him: toward prisoners there would be no humane gestures.

“Excuse me, but could you tell me something about this camp? Until now I've played only in hospitals.”

He could see the driver eyeing him through the rearview mirror. “There isn't much to say about it. You'll see it soon enough.”

“If I'm supposed to play, it would help me to get some idea of…of my listeners, so I can plan a program.”

The driver slowed down, turned around—though the car was still moving—and gave Keller a long look. His cold gray eyes pinned the violinist to the back of his seat.

Maybe they
…But he hadn't said or done anything that would attract attention. He always did as he was told. What more did they want from him?

Had he misjudged that doctor last week? But who could argue with what he had said about the man who'd swathed himself in all those bandages? It was a simple fact: these days madmen were better off than anyone who had to look reality in the face.

There was his diary, yes. He always kept it in a locked drawer of his desk, knowing that the lock could be pried open if someone was really looking for something. But he'd never thought he was important enough for that kind of scrutiny.

He had written with disgust about the hospital concerts, but more often than not it was disgust with himself, with his level of playing. In one entry he had questioned the point of playing for soldiers who were apathetic or hostile. He remembered now that he had called it a meaningless exercise. But could that be held against him? Was it enough to send him on this ride?

He'd been careful not to write anything disrespectful about the officers and doctors he met. Once he had even taken the precaution of making an entry full of praise for the Wehrmacht and the SS. Afterward, whenever he leafed through the diary and glanced at that page, he laughed. But then he would shudder slightly: the insincerity might be as obvious to prying eyes as it was to his own. They weren't fools, and the more he thought about it now, on the way to the camp, the more his exaggerations of their heroism seemed laced with sarcasm. He wished he had torn the page out.

Trying to calm down, Keller reminded himself that there had never been any signs of tampering in his apartment. Everything was always as he had left it, thank God. So if it wasn't the diary, then…Ernst, or Marietta. A Jewish friend and a Jewish girlfriend. But he'd known both of them years earlier, before the Nuremberg laws were passed. He'd had no contact with either one since 1935. Surely the authorities had more important matters to deal with.

Had someone in the building been spying on him?

Herr Maier, his downstairs neighbor, might have heard the music he sometimes practiced when he couldn't get past his problems in Bach and Paganini. The jagged edges of Hindemith, Bartók and Berg soothed him, allowing him to bypass his usual frustrations on the instrument. He felt like he was really getting something done, because there were new, clear-cut challenges to deal with—passages to learn, fingerings and bowings to work out. There was also a kind of titillation, a furtive thrill as he closed all the windows and doors in his apartment, put on a heavy practice mute and tackled “degenerate” music that had been banned from the concert stage. He did it only after all his neighbors had left for work, but the previous week he'd heard that Herr Maier, who lived directly below his apartment, was laid up for a couple of days with the flu. He had almost finished learning a Romanian Rhapsody by Bartók, and simply couldn't wait for Maier's fever to go down before he got his hands on those wonderful quirky patterns and once again felt the bounce of those lopsided rhythms. Folk music of the Untermenschen, from the lands they'd conquered in the East.

But he doubted that jowly, thick-featured Maier, who worked in some sort of factory on the fringes of town, would be able to tell the difference between Bartók and Beethoven. So, if he was tone-deaf, and if Ernst and Marietta were too long ago to matter, what was there to worry about?