The Savior (3 page)

Keller thought of the atonal piece he'd dared to write for solo violin. Though it had no roots in the folk music of the East, it would have been branded as degenerate just the same. But he'd never tried to get it published, and for the past few months he hadn't practiced a note of it; the manuscript was always locked in the same drawer as his diary.

He got along well enough with most of his neighbors, yet there was no love lost between him and Herr Maier. Could Maier be the one, after all? Even if he didn't know what Keller was practicing? He tended to look at the violinist suspiciously whenever they met at the front door or on the landing outside his apartment. He would screw up his beady eyes as he glanced at the violin case, and hardly responded to Keller's observations about the weather as he turned his fleshy back to him and put his key in the door. Of course, Keller knew better than to talk to him even casually about the latest war news. He assumed Maier was wondering why he wasn't off at the front, fighting for the Fatherland. The older man seemed to view the violin as the embodiment of a bohemian lifestyle that was alien to his notions of order. But Keller knew there was no way to be sure of what was going through his mind, and usually had no trouble forgetting about him when their paths didn't cross.

The car went into a skid and he was jolted from his thoughts. The driver managed to regain control without slowing down. After they rounded a curve in the road, Keller could make out a cluster of squat buildings in the distance. At first their outlines were indistinct, as if veiled in mist—a strange sight on that cold, clear day. When they got a bit closer, he noticed one larger structure with several chimneys belching dark smoke. There was an acrid odor that intensified as they approached.

He had passed through industrial zones before and during the war, had smelled his share of noxious fumes. Recently, on the way to a hospital performance, he had been driven past a munitions plant struck only a few hours earlier by Allied bombs. Flames were still smoldering in every part of the ruined complex; plumes of black and gray smoke billowed up into the sky. The driver and Keller had both had to cover their faces with handkerchiefs as they crawled through the haze.

But here—this smell, this smoke—there were no signs of disruption, no ambulances or fire engines racing toward the camp. The SS driver proceeded at a normal speed and didn't even seem to notice what Keller was staring at. This smoke was not the result of a bombing. It appeared to be part of everyday life, probably the by-product of some new chemical process.

This time he couldn't find a handkerchief in his pocket. He cupped a hand tightly around his nose and mouth, and closed his eyes until the sting subsided. The eruptions from the chimneys stopped after a few minutes, but the smoke hovered over the camp a while longer, an opaque cloud that gradually thinned into streaks and wisps of gray floating upward into the blueness of the sky.

The final approach ran parallel to some railroad tracks on the right, which seemed to end at a platform surrounded by a cluster of warehouses. On the left, through a double fence of barbed wire, he could see row after row of identical barracks. They looked as if they had been thrown together in a hurry with cheap wooden planks, providing the barest minimum of shelter. In the middle of the camp there was a large empty space, almost the size of an athletic field.

They drove alongside the fence for several minutes before they reached a massive iron gate with a watchtower looming above. The driver identified himself, and two sentries opened the gate. As they drove in, Keller noticed a broad ditch between the fences, which stretched to the left and right as far as he could see.

T
he antique bookcase seemed out of place, didn't fit in with the purely functional desk and chairs. Behind its wood-latticed glass doors a set of leather-bound books occupied three shelves: the collected works of Goethe, whose name was engraved on the spine of each with gold letters. On other shelves stood less ornate but equally massive volumes.

“Why do you think you are here?”

The question caught him off guard. “I had assumed you'd like me to play.”

The Kommandant nodded, waiting for more. He was tall, lean, probably in his early fifties, with steel-gray hair brushed back rather severely from his high forehead. He was wearing the black uniform of the Allgemeine SS. The silver oak leaf on each side of his collar showed his rank: Standartenführer.

“For the inmates…” Keller ventured, half question, half answer. Then, after a few more seconds: “I have to admit I was asking myself the same thing.”

“So why didn't you ask me directly? As soon as you came in?”

“I didn't think it was my place, Herr Kommandant. I never question orders.”

A smile flashed across the Kommandant's face as he leaned forward, folding his hands on top of the desk. He wasn't as stiff as most of the officers Keller had met. His manner seemed relaxed, almost casual. “Technically that's correct, since you're working for the Wehrmacht. But as an artist, you can hardly be expected to do your best if you're simply following orders.”

Keller had been ready to receive instructions, orders, to be shuttled back and forth like a pawn to do their bidding, but he hadn't expected anyone to tell him how he should think and feel
as an artist.

“And I will need for you to do your best,” he continued. “You see, you've been asked to come here for the final stage of an experiment. But before I tell you about it, let me ask you another question. The audience you're going to play for—the inmates here—what do you know about them? Who do you think they are?”

Better not to seem to know too much.

“Jews?” Keller offered, after a few moments' hesitation. That much was safe. After all, how could anyone fail to notice that all the Jews had disappeared?

The Kommandant's brow furrowed slightly as his eyes probed Keller's.

“I haven't heard much about this place, sir. I mean, I knew there was a…a labor camp not far from the city, but I didn't know where it was, or how it was run. Or exactly who was here.”

The Kommandant let out a little sigh. “You should understand at least this much about the whole system of camps, here and in the East: the aim is to separate Jews and other Untermenschen, like Gypsies, from our pure German stock, to end the racial and moral contamination that has corrupted us for centuries.”

His eyes had taken on a slightly glazed look, as if he wasn't listening to his own words because he had said and heard the same thing too many times. Was he testing him? Keller was careful not to react; only polite attention could be read in his face. He wondered, though, just how much of an act he would have to put on. Did he have to show how zealous he could be, performing the tasks the Kommandant was going to set?

“It's true that we need the labor provided by the camp populations. At the factory nearby, we help manufacture shells and spare parts for tanks. Within the camp itself, we've set up a plant where rubber is synthesized through a special new process. You probably noticed the smoke as you drove up. Yes, that's the only drawback—the smell. It gets in your clothes, your hair, even flavors the food you eat.” He smiled and shook his head slightly. “The price one has to pay for progress.”

Through the window of the office, beyond several rows of wooden barracks, Keller could make out the long, flat-roofed building with the chimneys. It was made of stone and had no windows, at least none that he could see.

“By the way, don't expect to see a normal workforce—conditions here are pretty rough. We take as many sanitary precautions as possible, so there haven't been any outbreaks of typhus. But rations are extremely low. You're going to see a lot of very thin people in a state of exhaustion. Don't let it distract you when you perform.”

Keller was grateful that neither Ernst nor Marietta had ended up in a place like this. But he wondered what had happened to the other Jews he'd known: stand partners in various orchestras he had worked in, a couple of theory and music history professors during his first two years at the Hochschule. Good people, as German as the rest of us, he thought. Could any of them be here? And the Jewish children he'd seen in the years just before the war started, even during the first few months of the war—neighbors' kids in the stairwells of buildings where he had lived, solemn-faced youngsters on their way to school, the yellow star sewn onto their jackets. What had become of all the children?

“Cigarette?”

“No thank you, Herr Kommandant.”

He reached into the desk drawer and took out a silver cigarette case, watching Keller all the while. With precise movements his long, bony fingers found the clasp, opened the cover and drew a cigarette to his lips. From a jacket pocket he brought out a gold lighter, and took his time lighting up.

“The scientific possibilities offered by camps like this are what interest me the most.” He inhaled deeply, his gaze drifting toward the window. Then he looked back at his guest and added quickly, sotto voce through a haze of smoke, “Imagine how outmoded animal experimentation seems now.”

A shadow of disgust passed across Keller's face; a moment of satisfaction was evident in the Kommandant's. The thin mouth puckered slightly, tugging upward at the corners. Behind the wire-rimmed glasses, his gray eyes narrowed like those of a purring cat.

“The authorities have recruited people from the medical and scientific communities to conduct research in some of the camps. I had the good fortune to be chosen for this sort of work.”

There seemed to be a touch of pride in this statement, as if he was anxious to distinguish himself from the soldiers and officers Keller had been spending most of his time with recently. Keller tried to look impressed.

“This camp is relatively small,” added the Kommandant. “Of course, there are quotas to fill, production demands to be met, but the inspectors from Oranienburg don't get here too often. So I can be flexible and pursue my interests.”

He got up, walked across the room and back, then sat down on the corner of the mahogany desk. Supporting his weight with one hand, his legs extended to a spot on the floor a few feet away, he took a long, voluptuous drag on his cigarette.

“By its very nature, a camp like this is an experiment in endurance. Try to imagine it. When you're crowded together with so many others, everything changes in your outlook. There's no privacy. Personal possessions take on an entirely different meaning: what few things you manage to hold on to—a cup, a spoon—may become your sole means of making it from one day to the next. You're hungry all the time, you have to work past the point of exhaustion, and the guards…well, we can't control them every instant, you know.”

Keller didn't want to imagine the living conditions or the people the Kommandant was describing. All he wanted was to go home. A few hours earlier he'd been lying in bed, listening to the raindrops beating against the skylight. It took an effort to keep his eyes from welling up at the thought.

Why can't he just tell me what he needs me to do? Then I could figure out how to do it and get out of here.

“All these factors sap not only one's strength but also the will to survive. That's what I've been studying for the past three years, that's what fascinates me in these people—the survival instinct, with all its different strategies and variations in strength. Winners and losers are sorted out pretty quickly here.”

He smiled, looked out the window for a few moments, then fastened his eyes on Keller again. “The camp is a de facto human laboratory, constantly demonstrating Darwin's great theory. You know the one I mean, don't you? The survival of the fittest, or in this case, of those who adapt the best to a radically changed environment.”

There was a sink in one corner, its white porcelain immaculate and gleaming. Staring at it, Keller imagined splotches of red on the rim, in the basin, on the wall behind it. Suddenly he could see the faucet being turned on by bloody hands, the stains disappearing in a whirlpool of brownish liquid.

“Have there been many deaths, Herr Kommandant?” The answer was obvious from what he had already been told, but he felt obligated to respond once in a while.

“Unfortunately.” The Kommandant's face assumed a mournful expression, in contrast to the animation with which he spoke. “Conditions here are so abnormal, so…beyond the pale of what we think of as human life in society, that even those who are surviving can't be described as truly alive. The question is, can they ever be brought back to life from this living death?”

It was strange that he was referring to the Jews and whoever else was here with terms like
human
and
society
instead of the usual vilifications.

Keller remembered a Party rally he had forced himself to attend just before the war started, because he wanted to understand better what was happening in his country. The rally had taken place in a huge oval-shaped
Sportplatz
on the outskirts of the city. The speakers' voices were grotesquely over-amplified; as they intensified their rhetoric against the Jews and Gypsies and Communists, they started to shout into the microphone. The thunderous voices echoed throughout the stadium, punctuated by even more thunderous applause and shouting from the thousands of Party faithful gathered there.

The public address system groaned and screeched under the burden of those decibels. All around him, people would leap to their feet in unison whenever a speaker grew vehement in his denunciation of the enemies of the Reich. After a while Keller felt their eyes on him when he stayed in his seat, so he began to yank himself up along with them, though he couldn't bring himself to join in their full-throated hysteria. Of course, he had already understood what was happening to Germany, but now he
felt
it as his body was bombarded by relentless waves of sound.

The speakers drove home their points, slicing the air with exaggerated jabs of their forefingers and sidewise swipes of their fists. Even from a great distance, he could see them going red in the face, their voices rising in pitch as well as volume as the words
Jew, pig, curse, bloodsucker
bounced around the stadium. But the orators and their gestures seemed small against the backdrop of two giant flags emblazoned with swastikas.

After an hour he could no longer concentrate on the speeches; the loudspeakers at the far end of the field fed their words back to his section of the bleachers a second or two after they were spoken, distorting the sense of newer words spewed out by the nearest loudspeaker. He tried to remember all the Jews he'd ever known. Ernst, and Marietta, of course, but other Jews as well—neighbors, acquaintances, colleagues. Not one bore any resemblance to the devils the speakers were describing. But if one of them had been noticed anywhere in the stadium that day, he or she would have been torn apart.

Keller looked to the right and left, down the bleachers and, turning around, up at the rows behind him. He had never seen so many people in this state before. Brown-shirted SA in seats of honor near the field:
their
shouting and fist-shaking came as no surprise. For a few minutes he stared at the backs of their close-cropped heads, their thick, muscular necks. Closer to his seat was a contingent of factory workers from the nearby steel and munitions works, their faces contorted with anger as the speakers spit out
Juden, Zigeuner, Schweine
like clots of phlegm. In the bleachers above him sat a group of Hitler Youth—rosy cheeks, shining eyes, their cherubic faces fired by idealism as the heroic goals of the Reich were enumerated, then flushed and bloated with fury as the names of the enemies who would block those goals were pounded into their brains for the thousandth time.

So here was this Kommandant, an important part of the machine that had been created to deal with the Jews, talking about an attempt to bring them back to life. Maybe he's trying to trap me into saying something unwise, thought Keller. Did the Kommandant know anything about his past? About his friendship with Ernst? But Ernst had left for England in the summer of '33. Or Marietta? But that was a long time ago, too, he reminded himself once again, and it was so brief. Of course, he'd never written a word about her in his diaries. And there hadn't been any other Jewish girls. He had never made any trouble, never said anything that could he held against him.

“Two months ago,” continued the Kommandant while Keller was still shuddering at the memory of that rally, “I picked the weakest inmates in the camp—both men and women, about thirty of them. They were fed as normally as possible, housed separately from the other inmates, clothed differently. We encouraged them to move around more freely within their area of the camp, and we let them bathe twice a week.”

His eyebrows rose, as if he was impressed by his own generosity.