The Color of Light (69 page)

Expelling a long sigh, Tessa willed herself to open the letter again, smoothed out the folds, and began to read.

14

E
verything I told you is true. Except this. I did not return from Krakow after seeing Rudi that evening. I went to the Hotel Europa where Anastasia was waiting for me, soaked myself in scented bath water, luxuriated in clean sheets on soft mattresses, took advantage of the carnal comforts always lurking behind her sly smile. I slept through the next day, departing the following evening on the train for Wlodawa. Upon my return, I found her street empty and bereft, just as I described.

When I reached the train plaza that night, I found an enormous crowd of people packed in a tight circle in front of the platform. Villagers clutching suitcases and children’s hands, being pushed, whipped, beaten, and cursed at by SS men in greatcoats holding semiautomatic rifles, in the service of jamming them into slatted wooden train cars. I remember noticing how snow lay in the open spaces between the slats.

I forged my way through the melee, frantically calling out in English. To my immense relief, I heard a voice call back.

There she was, crushed between a family of eight and an elderly couple. She was holding tightly onto Isaiah with one hand, and a brown valise with the other.

Her old caution was gone. She threw her arms around me. I kissed her, stroked her hair. “When did this happen?”

“The day after you left, there was a knock on the door. Dogs found the bodies of two missing SS men in the sewers. Mangled beyond recognition, they said…I had twenty minutes to pack a bag. We have been sitting here since yesterday. This morning, there were corpses. An old couple, sitting
against a wall…a baby…” Now she pulled away. “What are you doing here? They don’t want you. You can still get away.”

“My place,” I said to her, “is here, with you.” I hefted up Isaiah, held him in the crook of my arm. “Look,” I said, taking his toy car out of my pocket. “You left this.”

He smiled in delight, patted my face with his small hand. “Going on a train!” he said.

“Where are we headed?” I asked, as Isaiah drove the car over my shoulders, the crown of my hat.

“Resettlement,” said Sofia. There was a struggle going on in her tense face. She could barely make the words leave her stiff lips.

Finally, it was our turn. We were lucky; we were among the first to be herded onto an empty train car. Shocked and dismayed, I hesitated at the entrance; there were no seats. It was bare, unlit, unheated, the walls slatted to let in the cold air. A voice behind me barked,
“Schnell, schnell!”
strong arms encouraging me along with several enthusiastic applications of a truncheon to my back and shoulders.

After depositing Sofia’s suitcase against the wall, we turned to face the door. When no more bodies could be levered into our car, the door slid closed with a sickening metallic shriek, bolted from the outside. There was shouting in German. We could hear the sounds of more doors as they were slammed and secured. From outside our car, from the cars beside us, and all down the line, soldiers called to one another. The train shuddered and jerked. With a high-pitched metallic whine, we began to move.

I looked down at Sofia. Her eyes sparkled in the darkness, her face incandescent in an errant beam of light that found its way between the slats.

“We’ll get through this,” I whispered encouragement. “As long as we’re together,”

Her eyes fastened on me as if I were the giver of life, the answer to all her prayers. “Yes, yes,” she repeated. “As long as we’re together.”

It was brutally cold. I fashioned a bed for Isaiah with my overcoat. Sofia protested when I tucked the fine fabric around him. I assured her that it would take more than a little cold to kill me.

There was wailing, and snatches of prayer. The complaints of children, cold, tired, hungry, afraid of the dark. A bearded man in a rusty black coat sustained a mournful chant. Sofia rested her dark head on my chest and closed her eyes. After a moment, I dared to lean my head on hers, my heart bursting with love for her, for Isaiah, for us.

“We are headed west,” she said.

“Yes,” I agreed, stroking the hair out of her eyes.

“Raphael,” she spoke in a low, hurried voice. “I’m sorry about…you know, back in Paris…”

I laid my gloved fingers over her lips. “No, my love,” I replied softly. “I was wrong. I have been paying for it, every day, ever since.”

The train went clickety clack, clickety clack, clickety clack. I remembered I had cigarettes. I took them out, lit one for her. Even in these circumstances, I thrilled to the sight of her profile illuminated by strike of the match. In the dim orange glow from the cigarette, I could see the curve of her breast, I could see her breath rise.

Suddenly, she turned her face up to me, lips parted and trembling, red, red, red in the darkness of the cattle car. She reached for me then, her hands sliding under my jacket, over my chest, tugging at my shirt, pulling it free of my trousers. My arms went swiftly around her, and I bent my head to meet her eager mouth.

Hand over hand, I hiked up fistfuls of her skirt. She made small catlike noises as I pinned her against the wall, pressing my lips to her mouth, her eyes, her throat, the cleft between her breasts.

Kissing. What an inadequate word. Savoring. Sanctifying. Worshiping. Exalting. These begin to describe the actions I took with my mouth, and the emotions they encompassed.

Her lips, everywhere, as if I were a continent she wanted to explore all at once. The hiss of her breath, rising through the air in white plumes. The neat curve of her waist. My fingers, sinking into the flesh of her hips.

Hurriedly, I unbuckled my trousers while she undid my buttons with shaky hands; and then I hoisted her up against the rough wooden wall, and with a single culminating thrust, we two, separated for so long and for so many reasons, became one.

Sofia was innocent when I met her, and though she had known one man and delivered his child, she was innocent to me still, and this was our wedding night, and the cattle car our marriage bed. I took my cues from the gentle rocking rhythm of the train, slowing as it took a curve, then speeding up to a headlong gallop on an unobstructed straightaway across the frozen Polish plain.

I could not hold out for long. I came inside of her with the pent-up force of a hundred lifetimes, and as I came, so did she, with a single escaped cry of rapture, or maybe it was something else.

We whispered our love for one another, and that was when she slipped the wedding band from her left hand and pushed it onto my little finger. When I attempted to return it, she said simply, “It has always belonged to you, anyway.”

We held onto each other all through that long cold night.

By the first frozen light of dawn, we could see that some of our companions had perished overnight, too young, too old, too sick, too fragile to resist the frigid temperatures. Sofia gave Isaiah the last of the bread and told him tales of a town called Chelm where all the inhabitants were fools. I put him on my knee and told him every nursery rhyme I could remember. He rode a rock horse to Banbury Cross, he went to market, to market, to buy a fat pig; he twinkle, twinkled like a star.

Night returned, and with it, the frigid temperatures. A punishing wind blew down from the Soviet steppes and battened its way through the chinks in the car. Someone to my left drew harsh, rattling breaths. By midnight, the sound had ceased.

Suddenly, the train slowed into a turn, jerked, stopped. Harsh lights thrust through the spaces between the slats. There was a clanking sound, shouting in German, and then the doors slid open.

It was snowing. There was a long building with an arch in it big enough for the train to pass through, and a sign that read
Auschwitz-Birkenau
in big black letters. Uniformed officers paced back and forth beside the steaming engine. Soldiers with machine guns and barking dogs rousted us out onto the frozen landscape. Spectral figures dressed in outsized striped uniforms that flapped in the wind were dragging bodies out of our car.

You’ve seen the pictures. You know where we were.

I took in the barbed wire fences, the wooden guard towers, floodlights. A strange, indefinable smell permeated everything. We were herded towards a line of people waiting to register at a table near the tracks. A long wide trench was burning to the left of us, flames climbing high into the night.

I saw your drawing come to life. Sofia, frozen with fear. Her hand covering Isaiah’s eyes. The flames leaping and dancing in her terrified eyes.

The trench was full of burning bodies.

“Don’t worry,” I said firmly, capturing her gaze, but my voice was unsteady. “Everything will be all right.”

We came before a young soldier with a large ledger, backed up by an officer holding a baton. The officer wore a black uniform, and had shiny black hair that came down in a widow’s peak. He looked at Sofia and smiled, clearly taken by her beauty. Then, with a flick of his stick, he directed her towards the left; with another flick of his stick, he sent me to the right.

Damned if I was going to let anyone take Sofia from me now. I left my line to join hers. A guard lifted his weapon, but I glowered at him with all the thrall in my power. His eyes glazed, and I slipped over to my little family.

When I took Isaiah from her, he smiled at me, holding fast to his toy car. With that marvelous ability children have, he settled into my arms and fell asleep, a small rebellion. I teased the car from his hand, tucked it into his pocket.

Ahead of us stood an ordinary yellow brick building, rather long, with a gabled roof. The only thing that set it apart was a tall chimney, a smokestack, really, embedded in the stars. The smoke belching out of the top was red against the moonless black sky.

Sofia was pale and frightened. She turned round and round, muttering to herself rapidly in Yiddish, her breath coming in great gusts of vapor. Finally she nodded, as if she were confirming something she had always known.

She whipped around to face me. “I know what you are,” she said.

“What?” I stuttered. “What do you mean?”

The words poured out of her. The day after her wedding, she’d had a call from Colby. As gently as he could, he’d broken the news to her that I was dead. So when I showed up at her door on that cold January night, she already knew that I was not among the living. At the time, she didn’t know whether I was to be a punishment or a gift. Whichever it was, she had embraced me, taken me by the hands, welcomed me in.

The night I killed those two Nazis, the night she cared for me as I lingered between worlds, she had been fully aware that these were injuries that no human being survives. She cringed as, in my delirium, I shouted out terrible, unbelievable things. Sofia had known all along.

“Raphael, Raphael,” she said now. “My Angel of Healing. You have watched over me, even after death. There is something more I must ask of you.” She trained her gaze on me, then Isaiah. “You could not love him more if he was your own son,” she said, in a voice that called down all the sorrow in the world. “I know. It is because of this, that I ask you to take him.”

“Take him?” I said stupidly. “Take him where?”

“Far away from here. To a place only you have been.”

I pulled away from her, croaked, “What?”

She took my arm then, a grip like steel. A year ago, the Germans had selected a group of a hundred men for a special project near a town called Sobibor. Three months later, two of them had showed up at her father’s house in the middle of the night, stark naked, and proceeded to tell him about what they’d been working on, so deep in the forest. A factory for killing, they said. A building with rooms large enough to fit a thousand people at a time.

No one believed them, of course. It was impossible. Ridiculous! Her father had given them clothing, told them to stop scaring people.

This line we were waiting on ended in a cloakroom. First, we would undress. Then, we would be herded into a long, bare room with cement walls. The lights would go out. The gas would hiss. People would begin to scream. The biggest and strongest would fight the hardest, scratching and clawing their way to the top, where they might steal a last few lungfuls of air. The small and weak would end up at the bottom of the pile, terrified, in the dark, crushed under a mountain of bodies.

Is that how I wanted Isaiah to spend his last moments on earth.

She’d lost her mind. This could not be true. None of this could be true. “No,” I sputtered ferociously. “It’s a lie. I won’t do it. There’s got to be a way out of here.”

Desperately, I scanned our surroundings for an escape route. I would use my thrall; there had to be a weakness somewhere. But the Germans were thorough and well prepared; there was a row of soldiers with dogs, double fences of electrified barbed wire, bright lights, and in the many guard towers, men with machine guns. Though bullets might have no effect on me, they would surely cut down anyone I was trying to protect.

I’d been lying to myself. It was completely hopeless.

She put her arms around me, rested her head on my shoulder. Reflected in her eyes, I could see the chimney, the smoke, the stars.

Holding his precious little body close, dressed in the warm coat I had bought him, I fell out of line.

I pressed my face to his. His soft round cheek, so warm against mine. And then I did the unspeakable thing Sofia asked of me.

When it was done; when he had grown heavy in my arms, the soft, downy cheek grown cool; I carried him to the great, flaming pit and set him down inside, unmindful of the fire licking at my face, as gently as if I were putting him to bed.

For just a moment, he looked as though he were sleeping. And then he was surrounded by light, like the sun.

I returned to Sofia where she stood in line. When she saw me with my arms empty, a terrible choking sound escaped her. Her eyes, those wild and tragic eyes I had fallen in love with the very first time I gazed into them, spilled over with tears. I wanted to say I was sorry, but the words stuck in my throat. I had placed myself beyond the pale of humanity. Something inside me cracked, then broke.