Children of the Dusk (27 page)

From...the...
valavato
, he told himself.

The bowls were no longer empty. One contained dry-cooked rice; one, greasy morsels of what looked like uncooked chicken skin; one, a tiny, neat pile of brown-and-white gratings. The fourth, a calabash, held water. Solomon emerged from the smoke, picked up the third bowl, and said softly, "The grating's from two of the tanghin pits."

Puzzled, Erich wiped a bead of sweat from the end of his nose and stared dully into the fire. "How do you know?"

"Bruqah told me."

"Oh. I see."

Except he did not see. Smoke choked his mind; Solomon's voice sounded as distant and disjointed as an echo in an abandoned sewer. The world around Erich seemed as wrong as a hailstorm in Paradise, wrong as a zebu stretching its black-and-white neck to feast on the weeping willow beside which he had carried out Hitler's order to shoot Achilles.

Solomon was bent over the mahogany plank, putting pinches from the first three bowls into the calabash. Turning, he offered Erich the concoction. "You must drink this."

"What is it?" Erich drew back.

"Justice," Hempel said as he pushed past the tanhide and entered the hut. "The tanghin tree's spirit will either kill you or protect you from the witchcraft the Zana-Malata must use to save Taurus." Apparently sensing Erich's confusion, he added, "The Malagasy assured me it's necessary. He tells me everything."

Malagasy? Erich wondered. Which Malagasy! The Zana-Malata spoke no German, Hempel no French; and he doubted that Bruqah would speak to Hempel at all. Was there some other language that Hempel and the hermit understood?

Placing the bowl in Erich's hands, Sol cupped Erich's fingers around it to make sure he would not spill the contents. "The Malagasy call the tanghin the 'ordeal tree.'" Solomon said.

"I suppose the Malagasy told you that," Erich muttered, fighting for his bearings, unable even to stand.

Solomon did not reply.

"Swallow it if you want to save the dog," Hempel insisted.

Shaking, Erich peered down at the bowl, stepping backwards with a cry of surprise as Solomon thrust one of the blackened cooking pans at him. Within it was what looked like gruel.

"Flour paste." Solomon scooped up some with a finger and held it, dripping and steaming, in front of Erich's nose. "Try to concentrate," he whispered. "I'm going to stuff this down your throat after the poison takes effect. Don't resist me. If you vomit, chances are you'll survive."

"You would save...me?" Try as he might, Erich was unable to speak without mumbling. A fog enveloped his will. He wondered why Solomon and Hempel, both of whom had reason to want him dead, would poison him and immediately administer an antidote. Then logic slipped away from him; he found himself mirrored in the ceramic bowl, and grinning.

"Bruqah says to tell you that to save an animal, you must be willing to sacrifice your humanness," Solomon explained.

Erich looked at Taurus. Beneath the Zana-Malata's knife the dog looked pitiful and hideous. Thighs parted and bloodied; a syphilitic surgeon; an operating room suffused with oil of eucalyptus. Erich wanted to howl at the absurdity.

Instead he took a deep breath to steel his resolve and brought the bowl to his lips. He gagged on the hot, thick mixture, but managed to swallow.

For a moment there was no sensation. He expected to feel pain or to be gripped by a seizure, but there was nothing. He seemed to be apart from himself in a world without feeling or sound, save for the booming of his own heartbeat in his ears. Then, clutching his belly, he sagged to his knees as his brain exploded in a shower of sparks. He was trembling so violently that he seemed to set the buffalo skull spinning, its swastika pinwheeling like fireworks above Berlin's Luna Park. The hut's pans rattled and the thatch riffled. Fire pierced his belly and bowels and arrowed through his limbs, his skull a burning coal.

"Help me!" he begged. "Feed me the gruel!"

He clamped one arm around Solomon's ankles and with his free hand gripped Hempel's boot, but when he peered up to implore, their faces were lost behind a smokescreen that pulsed with laughter. He was going to die; Solomon and Hempel had, after all, conspired to kill him. Taurus' so-called operation was a ruse for Jew and jailer to trick him into taking poison.

Air. He needed air. If only he could crawl to the door, all would be well, but he could not get his knees under himself. The hut pitched and yawed, and Solomon's and Hempel's legs blocked the way. Bamboo legs.

He reached between the bars.

"
Miriam
!"

Taurus, not Miriam, emerged through the fog to face him. She poked an enormous head between the bars, dark eyes drinking him in. Thankfully he reached for her, knowing her warmth and compassion would quiet the pain....

She backed away.

Taurus
?

Rolling onto her back and lifting her forepaws, she panted happily as the syphilitic sliced between her thighs.

"All those dog shows, Erich," he heard Solomon say. "All the Strongheart films. Rin Tin Tin a dozen times. Why do you spend so much time at the Marmorhaus?"

And echoing around the hut:

"
Chi...en...beau. Chi...en...beau
."

Erich covered his ears and put his forehead against the floor, but the words kept thrumming inside his skull. Sensing a presence before him, he looked up to find himself staring at the syphilitic's gleaming eyes. Smoke poured from the face-hole, smothering him in the stink of eucalyptus.

Stop
! Erich shouted, but no sound came. He was a mute pleading for help in a world of the blind and the deaf. Only the fossas heard. They ambled forward curiously, garnet eyes shining in the firelight. Next to them, Achilles, dead three years, lay watching him while Taurus opened her jaws.

With the apathy of one about to be executed, Erich lowered his head and waited for her teeth to fasten around his neck.

I'm sorry
, he wanted to say.
Forgive me
.

The blackened pan of gruel was shoved before him. He did not resist when hands forced down his head. As if the bitter paste were a last meal, he slurped and lapped. Taurus snarled and turned her muzzle sideways to bite, and darkness engulfed him....

"How do you feel?" Solomon asked.

Leaning against an outside wall of the shack, Erich retched. When the vomiting was over and he had stopped shaking, he watched the splay of searchlights sweeping across the camp and tried to remember what had happened inside the hut. The only thing he could clearly recall was holding a chloroform-soaked cloth over Taurus' nose. The rest was blurred and dim, as if
he
--instead of Taurus--had been anesthetized.

"She's all right?" he asked anxiously, trying to wave away a spotlight that zeroed in on them. In a low breath he swore at the effort it took to push himself from the shack's support.

"Seems to be fine," Solomon answered. "He was suturing her when I went in and brought you out here."

"You shouldn't have left her!" Erich started to move through grass, but winced as pain pierced his hip. Limping, he re-entered the shack.

And stopped.

The fossas were gone. Lounging on the far side of the smoldering brazier were two puny, bald Kalanaro, asleep with their heads pillowed against the Zana-Malata's legs.

Taurus, too, was sleeping peacefully.

The syphilitic's eyes smiled. He rubbed each man's head as if for luck. They continued to snore softly as he shifted out from beneath them and checked Taurus' hind legs. They were bandaged with palm fronds covered with mud and smelled of overripe bananas.

Erich clung to the door frame for support as a wave of intense pain attacked his hip and ran down the length of his legs, tearing at his nerves and muscles.

The syphilitic's eyes brightened. "
Chien...beau
," he said, this time pointing at Erich.

"Bruqah says to tell you that to save an animal, you must be willing to sacrifice your humanness."

The words came back to Erich on a renewed wave of pain. He gritted his teeth, waited for it to pass, and limped toward the outdoors.

In the morning, after a bottle of brandy, he would examine the price he had paid for Taurus' life.

M
ost of the time, Miriam was grateful for the mosquito netting that was draped around her cot. At this moment, it felt like a shroud. If this is spring, she thought, just how bad is the full heat of summer going to be. She could tell by the movement of the netting that there was a breeze, but the same fabric that kept out small bugs also kept most of what little breeze there was from getting to her. This was compounded by the fact that there was little, if any, ventilation. Light shone through the tent opening, enhancing the contrast between the milky netting and the grasshoppers, moths, and crickets that perched on the outside of the gauzy fabric. There was even a stray butterfly, black with brilliant gold striations and four times as big as any she had seen in Berlin.

She remembered once, when she was a little girl, saying that she wished she had been born a butterfly. Now she wished for simpler things. Like a bath, or a good cup of coffee.

Or even just knowing if it was day or night.

Almost in self-defense, she drifted back into a drugged sleep. She dreamed of the Kalanaro, fourteen or fifteen of them, gyrating outside the ghetto fence. One man squatted and, cupping his hands, grinned with red-ochered lips and darkly painted eyes, his body whitewashed and glowing. The others ran at him one at a time and placed a foot in his hands. He lifted them, tossing them into a somersault. The landings were bone-jarring, onto buttocks or backs, but the Kalanaro squealed with delight and staggered to their feet again, to run full tilt toward the tosser.

A troop of ring-tailed lemurs wandered, tails lifted, into the frame of her dream. They padded along the fence's perimeter and sat down between the Kalanaro and the fence, watching the pygmies with benign curiosity. The Kalanaro drew away into a tighter semi-circle, the smiles gone from their eyes. One or two, without taking their angry gazes from the lemurs, knelt and took hold of their spears.

The dream changed.

In Miriam's womb, hairless puppies writhed, then burst squirming in agony from the rumble seat of the burning convertible that held the charred bodies of her parents, her uncle, her dog who gave birth as it burned to a profusion of flaming, twisted creatures.

She twisted from side to side in her dream torment, awake enough to know that she was dreaming, asleep enough to experience the nightmare. Hands pressed against her belly mound, her mind roared with the names of men whose faces eluded her.
Help me, Solomon
, she cried out.
Come to me.
She heard a glass break, crunching as if underfoot. She saw a parade of faceless lovers--a pale mask named Solomon, a rumpled uniform with an Abwehr insignia, the Grecian features of a dancer with the Stuttgart who had loved her first, often and well, only to slap her and call her Jew when she said good-bye. She saw a loose-skinned black man stinking of eucalyptus, who took her only in her nightmares, mouth-hole pressing down over her lips so that she could struggle but not scream.

Miriam awoke again.

The haze created by the mosquito netting was clear compared with the murkiness in her mind. How many times, she wondered, had Pleshdimer been beside her in the past several days, forcing upon her the liquid that filled her throat with fire and brought the chaos of nightmare? She lay in a tent; of that she was reasonably certain. That, at least, was an improvement. Sometimes she awoke thinking that she was in her Swiss home, or at her uncle's estate in the Grünewald, or in a chittering jungle, or swathed in cloud.

There was one thing of which she was completely sure: she was within days, if not hours, of giving birth. She put her hand on her stomach, willing the child to kick and let her know that it was still alive, for in her stupor she could not recall recently having felt any movement.

"God help me," she said out loud.

"He will."

"Franz!" Miriam tried to sit up. "I thought I was alone. Very alone."

"Easy, Frau Alois." She saw a movement in the netting and felt the corpsman's warm, comforting hands on her shoulders. "Concentrate on keeping yourself mentally and physically prepared for the delivery."

"Maybe the child is dead. I can't feel it kicking."

"Don't you remember, Dr. Tyrolt said it would be quiet before the birth? Preparing itself for life, he said."

Miriam nodded, though she did not remember. She shook herself free of his grasp, reluctant to lie down again in the damp indentation in the cot. "It's so hot," she said, pushing her hair away from her face. "Always so hot." She parted the netting and angled her face in the direction of the breeze. "You cannot know how I long for the ice and snow of a Berlin winter." Come to me Solomon, she thought. I need you here with me. Erich's orders had been explicit on that point. Sol was free to see her, until the birth.

"Where is my...my
husband
!"

"He'll be here soon enough, Frau Alois. Please, you must relax--"