The Secret of Lions (10 page)

Musty air filled his nostrils. He forced his
eyes open; they were red. He looked around. The hall was empty, so
he let out his anger.

“The hell with you!” he shouted, aiming his
voice back down the hall to the warden’s office. “She is my
wife!”

Heinrik’s eyebrows furrowed with anger. He
and Gracy had lived pretending that anti-Semitism wasn’t real. They
thought that it was a phase that the entire country was going
through. They thought that it would pass. But it hadn’t. They tried
to fit in. Most of the time, they ignored everyone else around
them. Their biggest problems occurred whenever they went out
together. Eating meals, grocery shopping, going to the park, and
even going to Heinrik’s church on Sundays meant that they would be
confronted with gawking looks, judgmental smirks, and severe
mistreatment.

Sometimes the smirks and mistreatment got to
be so unbearable that they had to relocate to a new church. Heinrik
was Catholic, but they had already gone through every Catholic and
Protestant church they could find. So they were forced to join a
nondenominational church in order to have a church to attend.

Heinrik felt a blistering sting in the back
of his throat. He swallowed, but the sting was still there. He’d
worked in this prison for a long time. He did want to leave, but at
the same time it was the only work he had known since the war.

It was not the right time to be out of a
job. The streets were flooded with men starving, trying to find
work to feed their families. Germany was in an economic depression.
Heinrik's dream for him and Gracy would not die just because she
didn't like his job.

31

Lanterns hung from the ceilings. They
populated Landsberg prison’s numerous gothic corridors. The lamps
faintly lit the long and short corridors that snaked through the
entire complex. Even with the artificial light emitting from the
lamps, darkness consumed nearly everything. It was hard for Heinrik
to see more than fifteen meters in front of him.

He walked the halls every night until the
end of his rounds.

Heinrik spent most of his time walking the
blood mile, a long stretch of dark corridors that housed the
prison’s most horrendous and terrifying killers.

The cells located on the blood mile were
solitary confinement only. Each prisoner had his own space and his
own world in which he presided. No two convicts were the same. They
rarely spoke among themselves. That made them even more
frightening. They were like animals.

Heinrik feared that each of them plotted
against him. He feared that one might be waiting for the perfect
moment to strike out against him as he passed. He feared that a
prisoner might be waiting in his cell just behind the door, lying
silently in the shadows, waiting for him to follow the commonly
traveled footpath in front of the cell. The doors were old, some
even frail. Heinrik feared that a prisoner might have successfully
busted one out. He might be waiting for him in the darkness, coiled
in the corner behind the cell door with a shiv clenched tightly in
his hand, ready to spring out.

The prison was old and had limited funds for
new guards, much less to replace these doors with new ones. So
instead the repairmen would come and take down the old, brittle
doors and replace them with sturdier ones from other rooms in the
prison. That was the reason why so many faculty rooms and offices
were missing doors. Sometimes the warden would even recommend doors
be replaced with the broken ones. As a result, many of the guard
towers had old, broken cell doors serving as their entrance
portals.

The sound of dripping water echoed somewhere
in the darkness, penetrating the deepest regions of the halls, as
well as the deep crevices of Heinrik’s ears. Attempting to ignore
the sound, he tried to think about Gracy. Instead his thoughts were
flooded with images of Adolf. In particular, he thought about that
night when he had first seen Adolf in his cell. He’d masturbated to
a picture of someone.

Who was Adolf looking at? Who was he
masturbating over?
Heinrik asked himself on more than one
occasion. The very thought of what he had seen disgusted him to his
very core. Adolf was by far the strangest prisoner, if not person,
he’d ever met.

Some days Adolf spent talking to himself in
the yard. It was a peculiar sight to see. His behavior wasn’t like
a man in self-reflection. He wasn’t just talking to himself.

Adolf was giving speeches to invisible
audiences. He was scheming. It was as if he were practicing for
some unforeseen time when he would be speaking in front of enormous
crowds of listeners. Adolf rehearsed for something.

Heinrik was afraid of what he planned.

The warden confided in Heinrik that Adolf
was a political prisoner and prominent member of the Nazi party.
Heinrik did not follow politics fanatically like others did, but he
knew the Nazi party was steadily gaining momentum in Germany.

They gave suggestions and answers to many of
Germany’s economic problems. Of course, many of their solutions
referred to the Jewish problem. They intended to unite Germany in
this racial, hate-motivated belief that the Jews were solely
responsible for the misery and poverty that stretched from one end
of Germany to the other.

Adolf was a Nazi—a very, powerful Nazi.
Gracy was scared of him and she was scared of Heinrik being around
him.

What if Adolf’s views of Jewish people
become Germany’s views of Jewish people? What if Adolf’s views of
Jewish people become Heinrik’s?
she thought.

Evan broke away from reading the journal for
a moment. He was quiet. He just stared at the pages. Then he
continued.

My father loved her. She told me he loved
her more than she dared imagine. He would have never betrayed her.
But it was a time of deep depression, and for most people the Nazis
were an attractive alternative. She was right to fear Adolf. I wish
my father had trusted her instinct. I wish he had listened to
her.

Suddenly, a shadow moved down the hall from
Heinrik. He looked up. He could not make out what had moved, but it
was definitely something.

Wind blew out the hanging lanterns. Almost
in an eerie rhythm, each lantern waved back and forth, one after
the other like a long sequence of pendulums illuminating the sandy
floor. Heinrik rose to his feet, his eyes squinting to make out a
figure standing at the end of the hall. Heinrik could hear the
sound of dripping water becoming louder.

He reached for his rifle. It hung on a sling
around his back. Quickly, he pulled the bolt action on it,
chambering a bullet. He watched the figure begin to sway at the
other end of the hall in unison to the swarms of swaying lanterns.
He slowly walked toward the intruder.

“Who are you?” he called out. The intruder
did not answer.

Passing by each cell, Heinrik studied the
doors of each and made sure they were tightly secured. He did not
want to fall prey to a trap.

Startlingly, the lanterns that hung between
Heinrik and the figure began to burst and shatter, frightening
him.

Glass broke off into hundreds of tiny
pieces. The lantern closest to him was the first one to go out,
followed by the second. He drew closer and closer to the figure.
The face was blurry, but it seemed familiar. It was Gracy.

“Gracy?” Heinrik said.

She turned and sprinted swiftly down the
hall. He chased after her. The dripping sound was louder now.
Heinrik stopped in the middle of an intersection of hallways. He
looked down the left corridor and saw her turning the corner.

“Gracy!” he yelled. Heinrik chased after
her. His rifle snagged on a loose door hinge and he let it drop to
the ground. “Gracy, stop!” he screamed.

Heinrik turned the last corner and stopped.
She was standing in the open doorway of Adolf’s cell. Dust filled
the air around her.

“Gracy? What are you doing?”

She did not answer. She glanced back at him
once, and then with no warning she leapt into the darkness of
Adolf’s cell. The opening resembled the open pit of a dark mouth.
The pitch-blackness of the cell swallowed her up, making a slurping
sound afterward.

She dove into the darkest bowels of the
prison.

“Wait!” Heinrik yelled.

He ran toward the cell, but the door slammed
shut behind his wife. He grabbed the bars in the small portal to
the cell and shook them violently. He could not open the door, no
matter how much he struggled with it.

Heinrik paused from his struggling and
peered into the darkness, hoping to discover what was happening. It
was to no avail; he could not see anything. After an excruciating
moment of waiting, a moment that filled Heinrik with a gruesome
agony that swelled up in the pits of his soul, he could hear
breathing. Each breath sounded heavy at first and then intensified
with each lingering second. He squinted and tried to make out the
shapes in cell thirteen.

He could see shadows moving in such a way it
appeared cadenced, violent, and even sensual. He squinted harder
until he could see exactly what was happening.

Gracy and Adolf thrust repeatedly. It was
the most terrifying moment of Heinrik’s life. Heinrik loomed in
horror as Adolf thrust in and out of his wife.

“Oh, Heinrik,” she moaned.

“NO!” he shouted. “Gracy, that’s Adolf
Hitler! Not me! It’s Hitler! STOP!”

But his protests were useless. It was not
that she could not hear him. The Gracy he saw before him turned and
looked directly at him. She could hear him perfectly. She just did
not care about his protests. She belonged to Hitler now. Heinrik
trembled at the sight before him. His powerlessness consumed him in
an instant. All he could do was watch.

Candlelight flickered behind Hitler. Heinrik
could see him perfectly now. His white body straddled and thrashed
against hers.

Suddenly, the sight of the two bodies
encircled in each other enraged Heinrik. His mind became
overwhelmed. He clenched his hands around the cold steel bars in
the window of the door to cell thirteen. He jerked them violently.
He jerked them until he lost all of his strength. He jerked them
until blood ran from his fingernails.

The sudden feeling of falling jerked Heinrik
back to life.”

“Hold it a second,” Barbara interrupted the
story.

She said, “How do you know what your father
was dreaming and thinking?”

“Like I said, some things are from my
imagination. It’s the whole story the very best that I can tell
it,” he said.

She nodded.

“No more interrupting,” he said. He leaned
in and kissed her.

Then he kept going.

Heinrik awoke still sitting in his chair,
alone in the gloomy darkness of the blood mile. He had fallen
asleep and he had never been so glad to be awake.

32

Gracy lay in his arms, oblivious to the
dreams that plagued her husband. Heinrik watched, finding great
solace in her restful sleep. He did not want to worry her with the
horrible dreams that he’d been having, so he said nothing.
Heinrik’s arm fell asleep under the weight of Gracy’s body, but he
did not want to move her in order to free it. He decided that it
was best to let her sleep. She looked far too peaceful, far too
beautiful. She was completely unaware of the evil that had befallen
him. They were completely unaware of the evil that had befallen
them both.

As if it were meant to happen, she woke up
on her own. Gracy could sense that he was awake and she turned to
him.

“Darling, what’s the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he lied while forming a deceptive
smile, a smile that she had learned to see through; even still she
never questioned his authenticity or his genuine love for her. But
that smile gave him away. Instead of prying, she changed the
subject.

“Darling, there is something I wanted to
tell you. Something is going on.” She squirmed in his arms and
readjusted herself so that she was at eye level with him. Her long,
black hair fell across her neck and down her back. It snaked like a
river flowing around the contours of her body.

“What is it?” he asked.

She paused for a long moment. Her eyes
focused on his, leaping from one to the other. She felt this was
the moment, a perfect moment to tell him the truth.

“I’ve been keeping a secret from you,” she
said.

“Secret? What secret?” he asked,
nervously.

“I'm pregnant.”

Heinrik took a deep breath and let it out.
Stunned, he was swept away by her words.

“Heinrik?”

“That’s great. It’s wonderful,” he smiled at
her. She could tell this smile was a true smile, filled with all of
the happiness and pride of a new father. His child was coming.

They had waited for this moment for a long
time. It felt right—creating a new life. It was what they had
always wanted, a child of their own to rear in a world of peace, a
world where the child could grow up knowing everything was safe for
him.

Heinrik couldn’t help but be filled with
both joy and fear simultaneously.

After thinking about a new child, Heinrik
began to think of the realities of that venture. A sense of sheer
terror came over him. Suddenly, it was clear that politics did
matter.

33

5:00 a.m.

The morning smelled of gasoline and
cigarettes. Delivery trucks passed in and out of the prison. They
started their daily drop-offs of supplies. The truck drivers
shifted in their seats.

The prison’s different crews changed shifts.
Graveyard became day shift. Guards approached the entrance to the
prison. They wore fresh clothes and walked in with full bellies.
The sun was out, but it was barely visible through the thick fog.
Heinrik walked in front of the prison’s oversized gates. The prison
guards staggered along the tops of the high walls. A single guard
patrolled the westernmost wall. A sniper rifle rested under his
arm.