The Holocaust Opera (12 page)

“He is the father of darkness,” Aaron said. “The Angel of Death.”

“In him we all have a father,” Eva added.

“No,” Jeremiah said, backing away. “This isn’t right. You’re not my parents. Let’s get out of here, Roxanne. This is bullshit.”

We turned away from the Gideons with their Botox smiles and headed back toward the archway. The executioner rose slowly from the piano stool. The music had stopped, but in its wake other sounds were coming into play: weeping children, the roaring of immense furnaces, gruff orders barked in German, barking dogs, the distant sound of a high-pitched train whistle. Before we could take more than two steps, the light from the single candle behind us brightened, throwing our shadows forward onto the archway opening as if it were now a movie screen and we were to be the night’s entertainment. I soon realized, however, that there was no screen there. The archway had become a swirl of black ink and the kitchen beyond had completely disappeared. There were no walls. There was no floor with its colorful linoleum, no cupboards to rifle through or windows to look out of. There was only a swirling blackness that seemed to be shaping our shadows into images of death and despair. The archway had become a doorway into the past—blackened smokestacks delivered the ashes of the cremated into an eerie alien sky. There were rows of wooden barracks with lines of the colorfully-clad condemned, shivering with cold, the terror at the realization of their fates plainly visible on their faces. There was a train station with a rag-tag band playing a discordant melody as a man that could only be Josef Mengele perused a line of prisoners, separating them with his riding crop: death to the left, life to the right. Foamy-mouthed German Shepherd dogs with wild red yes pulled against their leads as handlers struggled to hold them back.

The floor beneath my feet suddenly seemed insubstantial. I had stopped, as had Jeremiah, to witness the atrocities through the doorway beyond, but the floor seemed to be tipping us toward the archway, wanting to deliver us into that terrible place and time.

“You must finish the opera,” Mengele said to Jeremiah. He was standing between us and the piano, gesturing for Jeremiah to sit down and play. “Come. It shouldn’t take long.”

“No! Never!” Jeremiah said. “I will
not
do your dirty work for you.”

“You must. You are the only one left with the talent. It is the reason you were brought upon this world.”

“Then if I die, there will be no one left,” said Jeremiah, and I could hear the revelation in his voice. I wanted to scream, for I suspected what Jeremiah was about to do. I was helpless to aid him. I was sliding toward that improbable opening into Hell. Although Jeremiah stood on the tilting floor with me, he didn’t seem to be affected by its actions. I reached out and tried to grab hold of him, but it was too late, I was going down and he was moving in the opposite direction, toward the piano. I did scream then, loud and long.

My feet went out from under me and I landed on my back, cutting off the scream and knocking the wind from my lungs. My fingers scratched for purchase, I dug my heels in, trying to hold myself back. Beyond the doorway, the scene had changed. Now, it was similar to the images in Jeremiah’s story; half-human creatures combusted and writhed; there were grinning Nazis with distorted features, ropes of steaming intestines looped around their bodies. The heads of children hung from the rafters of a vast wood-frame building, their milky eyes staring in shock.

“Enough!” Jeremiah screamed and the shifting floor halted and tilted slightly back. “I will give you what you want. Just leave her alone.”

“Very well,” the executioner said.

I was scratching like mad at the elevated floor, trying desperately not to slip into the nightmare world beyond the archway.

“No, Jeremiah,” I screamed. “Don’t give that bastard anything. He thinks he’s a god, but he’s nothing but a piece of shit.”

Mengele’s head snapped around unnaturally and his eyes, now red and glowing, drilled through me. Horns began growing from his frontal lobes. “Look,” he said, pointing at the screen, smiling his dreadful yellow smile. “Tell me if you like what you see.”

The image beyond the door had changed for a third time. I saw the woman who had been haunting my dreams of late, beaten, lacerated, and cowering in a corner, her arms outstretched in supplication. Then I saw a room with an iron bed. I saw the woman strapped spread-eagled to that bed, naked, so terribly vulnerable. She was beautiful, but familiar somehow. Beneath her beauty, something dreadful lurked, some morbid knowledge or resignation.

Oh, my God, I’m dreaming this, I thought, as a small blossom of suspicion began to open in my mind.

“I can make that real for you,” Mengele said to me, pointing at the woman beyond. “Go if you like! She’s been waiting for your return.” He turned back toward Jeremiah. “Do you want to save her?” he said. “You can, you know. Just sit down and play.”

Jeremiah looked from me to the anguished woman beyond the doorway, then back at me, and I saw grim enlightenment come over his face. “Who is she?” he said, his voice full of suspicion.

“Look closer. You’ll see.”

Jeremiah squinted at the screen and I saw his face collapse into recognition. “No,” he said. “It can’t be.”

“Ah, but it is,” Mengele said. “You don’t really think she came into your life by accident, do you? Come, my boy. If you do, you’re more naïve than I thought. I sent her to you. Don’t you see? She was once mine, a plaything. I resurrected her and
sent
her to you. Your enthusiasm was flagging. I thought you needed someone to spur you on. It worked. She has become your greatest champion.
Now play!
” he commanded. “Or so help me God she will be forever lost beyond the doorway.”

I began to feel all hot and panicky as the executioner’s words echoed in my head.
She was once mine, a plaything. I resurrected her and sent her to you.
Was he speaking of me? He couldn’t be. Images that were not my own began shaping themselves in my psyche, and I realized that I knew the atrocities of the holocaust on a more intimate level than I had ever wanted to admit to myself. Yes, I’d gone time and time again to the library in search of answers and had convinced myself that it was out of some morbid curiosity; an attempt to understand what had happened there in hopes of using my knowledge to help Jeremiah get beyond his pain. Now I could see that it was my own pain that needed to be rescinded.

Finally, I began to understand everything. The anguished souls beyond the door existed within the executioner. They were all ghosts of the creatures he’d devoured. They lived in some kind of no-man’s-land, a purgatory between flesh and death, suffering eternally, begging to be released. As long as the executioner lived, they would forever be condemned to that place of lost souls.

Was I one of the devoured? Was I one of the executioner’s lost souls? If so, then what of the memories of my family, my upbringing in Iowa, my church choir, my band? Was it all a fiction, a sham? I realized in that moment that I hadn’t called my family once since coming to New York. Nor had they been in touch with me. Why not? Were we that insensitive? Did they even exist?

I looked back through the doorway, at the spread-eagled woman on the bed.
She was once mine, a plaything. I resurrected her and sent her to you.

The truth struck me like a lance. Oh, God, it
was
me. I was the woman in the corner, the ghost in my dreams, the presence that haunted my sleeping and waking hours.

As I gazed at the woman’s anguished features, I realized that I was there in that room looking through her eyes. The executioner moved towards me, at first just a ghost, a shadow, his features solidifying as he approached. I was in the corner cowering from his abuses. He grabbed my arm, yanking me to my feet and threw me onto the bed, binding my limbs roughly to the posts with abrasive cord. “Josef, please,” I begged in a voice I did not recognize, in a language I did not know. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because it has been written by a force far greater than us all. It is something you cannot understand. Now you must die.”

I was suddenly lost between two worlds, no longer in apartment #2, nor was I totally immersed in the world of horrors beyond the door. My wrists and ankles were invisibly bound to the elevated floor. I could not move. From across the chasm of time, I saw a legion of the devoured moving sluggishly toward the doorway, their eyes beacons, all of them bright with bloodlust. I twisted around and saw Jeremiah’s parents moving toward me in the opposite direction.
Now
they were dead, there was no question about it. Their milky eyes stared, knitting needles protruded from their ears. They, too, were of Mengele’s flock; the devoured, the undead? There was no question about it. Their arms reached toward him in supplication;
please,
they were saying
, let us go. Give us peace.

My head snapped around and I gazed down at my body in horror, realizing I was naked and spread-eagled. I
was
the woman beyond the doorway, the maven of my darkest dreams. The executioner stood over me with his back to the doorway, grinning down at my vulnerability, the ram’s horns fully formed now, his face a glistening lantern, a serrated-edged hunting knife fisted tightly between both hands.

“Who is she?” I demanded. “Who am
I?”

“Brawne,” the executioner said simply. “Your name was Brawne. I ended your life when it was clear that you could not give me what I wanted.”

“I gave you everything,” I told Mengele, as someone else’s memories again flooded through me like ice water. I tried to cast them out, but it was no use, they would not go. I was slipping further and further into that world of nightmares beyond the door.

“Everything but what I needed,” Mengele replied. He pointed toward Jeremiah, who was now just a misty fiction at the very fringes of my vision. “You see, I needed a prodigy, an heir. You were an obedient mistress, true, but that was all you were. When I met Eva...well, everything changed. I knew then that she would be the one who would usher in the promise. I should have died at Auschwitz, but I managed to escape, living a tortured existence away from my purpose, my true destiny. It was a mistake, but I knew that someday Aaron would come. When he did, he made a tragic error, you see, he tried to deafen me to the muse.” Mengele threw his massive horn-studded head back and howled with insane laughter. “He only strengthened my resolve. When he ended my mortality, that is when I began to
live,
and it is when Jeremiah began to grow inside of Eva. He was to be the perfect prodigy, but as he grew, he became disobedient. When one of his professors got nosy and began to suspect, well, that is when I brought you back and sent you to him.”

“What about my family in Iowa? My band? My
life?
Was it all a lie?”

The executioner grinned and the skin of his face now seemed stretched to capacity against his skull bones, so luminescent that it glistened brightly above me like a fluorescent lamp, the red lanterns of his eyes nearly scalding me. “Alas, yes,” he said. “This is not about you and your nothing life. This is about Jeremiah and a promise that must be kept.”

I struggled with my invisible bonds, screaming in frustration. “Can’t you see that the dream is dead, you pathetic creature! It’s over!”

“No, you are wrong,” Mengele whispered, shaping his dreadful, yellow smile “It is just beginning. Your life here in New York. It has been good, has it not?”

“I want more of it!” I screamed. “I want to be with Jeremiah.”

“You shall have your wish,” the executioner said. “Jeremiah only has to make it real.”

“Leave her alone!” Jeremiah screamed.

“I will not harm her, boy,” Mengele said. “Just do as you’re told.”

I twisted my head around and looked at Jeremiah. Now, he seemed much more substantive than he had just moments ago. I felt that something had happened; perhaps some delicate balance had tipped slightly back in our favor. Then I realized what it was. It was Jeremiah’s anger at being called boy. His face had gone crimson with rage. The visions beyond the door were strengthening, as well. The legions of the devoured were marching toward the gateway, toward Mengele’s back, the bloodlust vivid in their eyes. They somehow sensed that their executioner was close at hand. The gateway was opening, and if it closed before they could make it through, perhaps it would stay forever closed, thus ending their only chance to exact revenge for his sins and to rest finally in the everlasting.

Jeremiah was sitting down at the piano, his jaw set grimly.

“There you are, boy,” Mengele said with relish. “Do what you were sent here to do. Finish the opera.”

“Fuck you,” Jeremiah said, and without further ado his fingers came down violently onto the piano keys. From the very first chord, I instinctively knew what he was about to do. I knew what
I
had to do. Jeremiah’s resolve to write something good and meaningful, other than what he had been compelled to do by the forces of evil had been strong in him and had won out long ago, but he had kept it a secret, afraid that the executioner would find his way into his mind and destroy the inspiration. But
I
knew. God, I recognized it immediately. It was the song he’d been playing the night I’d gazed through the window and had seen him encased in that awful fleshy sac. Somehow, the lyrics had gone into me and had been hiding there ever since, waiting for this moment to spring forth.