The Holocaust Opera (9 page)

The next day, Mengele had Aaron’s father, Abraham, hauled out into the yard, and while Aaron and Eva, as well as most of the camp looked on, Mengele produced a powerful-looking knife with a jagged-edged blade. He swung the fisted weapon high above his head, spun around so that everyone could get a good look at it and said, “Let this be a lesson to those who would dare subvert my authority!”

The arm containing the knife descended in a vicious arc, the reflective blade glittering like a dark jewel in the mid-morning sun. Aaron screamed, “Nooo!” and tried to break free of his captors, only to be beaten to the ground by a ferocious rain of cudgel blows. Mengele drove the blade into Abraham’s abdomen just below the navel, brought his arm powerfully up, and split the man open like a gutted fish. Abraham’s innards spilled out onto the ground at his feet. His eyes, open wide in shock, stared at his murderer. Mengele yanked the knife out and backed away. The two guards holding the older man let go of him. Abraham fell to his knees, still staring at Mengele with his shocked expression, before keeling forward and landing face first in a pile of his own steaming intestines.

Now

Jeremiah’s voiced choked to a halt as copious tears coursed down his cheeks. He lifted his hand to his face, his fingers lightly and absently caressing the scar there, and I was keenly aware of the fact that he believed the weapon that had cut him was the same one that had disemboweled his grandfather all those years ago.

I was horrified, barely able to breathe. I had never heard such a barbaric story. It wasn’t the end. God, no. Far from it. I would soon discover that the worst part was yet to be told. I remained silent, staring at Jeremiah. The truth is, I was incapable of speech. I only wanted him to continue on with his dark tale. I needed to know how it ended. I suddenly felt that I was connected to it in some incomprehensible way; as though I, too, had been there, and had lived it, and had suffered the same cruelties and indignations. Perhaps my soul had somehow intersected with another, I reasoned, for it contained ambiguities that baffled me, and might be made clearer by the story’s outcome. Jeremiah began to talk again, and I sat listening, totally in his thrall.

Then

In the next few weeks, Germany fell to the allies. Leadership was in chaos. With news of the end, German troops were abandoning their posts all over Europe. Most of the guards laid down their arms and went home to their families. That left the remaining prisoners without much supervision. Some of the officers, not particularly loyal to the Third Reich, just disappeared. Other, more loyal ones, stayed behind in hopes of keeping order and continuing the genocide. Mengele was among this latter group. It was soon apparent that there would be no rekindling of the status quo. The war
was
over, and the Nazis had been soundly defeated. While the Russians were in the process of liberating the camps, Mengele made hasty preparations to flee. Aaron was keenly aware of his intentions, vowing to stop him if he could. Eva warned him, however, begging him to let it go, but he would not listen. By then, Mengele had abandoned Eva and had sent her back to her husband. He’d abandoned the muse, the dream of world domination, and told Aaron that no harm would come to him, that he was free to go.

Aaron had other ideas. In the days that followed, he assembled a small band of willing men and together they rose up against the remaining officers and men. There wasn’t much fight left in them, and the ones who were not killed, ran away. The fracas alerted Mengele, however, and he cleanly made his escape. When Aaron and his men reached Mengele’s quarters, they made a gruesome discovery. Lying on her back in Mengele’s bed, strapped spread-eagled and naked, was Brawne. It appeared that she had been dead for quite some time, for her body had already begun to decompose. The marks of torture were still evident on her body, however. There was no doubt as to how she’d died. Aaron and his men took her to a small field beside the compound, dug a hole, and put her in the ground.

Afterward, Aaron returned to Mengele’s quarters and took everything the monster left behind—personal items, mementoes, musical instruments, every scrap that he could lay his hands on—and he burned it all in one of the furnaces. The one thing he did not find a trace of, however, was the body of work, the music itself, that which he had been forced to compose beneath the brutal hand of The Angel of Death. He understood that it had probably been the only thing Mengele had managed to salvage in his haste to escape the very fate he had perpetrated on so many.

The killing had finally come to an end, and Aaron and Eva were free. Aaron vowed that it would forever be the end of the evil muse, as well. Eva could not share his sense of closure. She knew Mengele on a deeper and more profound level than did Aaron. She, after all, had been the beneficiary of a dark promise, that although was still thirty years from fruition, would always haunt her darkest dreams.

After the war, the Gideons were liberated and moved to New York. Once establishing themselves, Aaron joined an organization of Nazi-hunters who were all holocaust survivors, and he vowed to track Mengele to the ends of the earth. There was a tremendous effort amongst these survivors immediately following the war to bring the criminals to justice. A worldwide communication system was set up and many of them did get their due. Years passed, and there was no word of Mengele or his whereabouts. It was as if he had dropped off the ends of the earth. Even so, Aaron never stopped dreaming of the ways he would kill the monster if he ever got the chance. He wanted his own kind of justice.

Eva felt Mengele’s presence in ways no other human being ever could. Sometimes, in the dead of night, she would open her eyes and he would be there, his smile a frozen grimace on his face, his insistent body pressed against hers, his rancid breath on her cheek, his dark promise a cold and supernatural whisper on his arctic lips. She would bolt upright in bed with a stifled scream locked inside her, fearful of waking Aaron, and that he would...
know.
For the rest of the night, she would sit whimpering and hugging herself, praying that dawn would hasten its entry upon the world so that she might once again feel safe, that she might once again feel
clean.

Aaron
did
know. He was no stranger to the despair that haunted his wife’s darkest hours, and those terrible times only strengthened his resolve.

In the meantime, Aaron continued to compose, trying as best he could to put the terrible memories of Auschwitz behind him. And, in time, he managed to get some of his music published.

They carved out a niche for themselves in New York society, entertaining at parties and upscale clubs. Aaron played and Eva sang. And, for the first time in their lives, the Gideons had found some semblance of happiness.

Then one day, more than three decades after the horrors of Auschwitz, their lives again began to unravel. Aaron received a communication that Mengele was alive and hiding out on a farm in Brazil. In spite of Eva’s insistent pleadings to let sleeping dogs lie, Aaron prepared to leave. He was gone for more than three weeks and there was no communication from him. Eva was nearly frantic with worry. Twenty-three days later, Aaron returned, drawn and haggard, his eyes haunted, and despite Eva’s pleadings to confide in her, he would not.

“For thirty years you have been the keeper of secrets,” he told his wife, with more than a touch of resentment in his voice. “Now, it is my turn.”

“It has been for our own good,” Eva said.

“For
our
own good?” Aaron railed. “Or for
yours?
Trust me, Eva, you do not want to know what happened in Brazil. You do not want to know what I did to the evil bastard who ruined our lives.”

Yes, Aaron now had his own secrets to keep, and Eva reluctantly resigned herself to his right to them even as she felt the dreaded promise growing inside her with a renewed sense of ambition.

One night, not more than three weeks after his return from Brazil, Aaron was awakened by the sound of music; beautiful melodies, haunting chord structures, and harmonics. He came awake in a sweat and went to the piano to write it down lest he forget it. He was instantly captivated, thoroughly enchanted. It was as if his mind was conjuring the music from the depths of some previously unknown creative fountain. He was grateful for the inspiration. Eva admonished him, however, cautioning him to be on guard.

“Nonsense!” Aaron chided. “Mengele is gone and I promise you, he will never again wield influence over our lives.” He smiled and took Eva in his arms; but Eva did not smile back, for she knew that Aaron’s promise was as empty as the cold void that haunted her darkest hours. She, after all, had her own promise to keep, and as she stood in the embrace of her husband’s arms and in the midst of his good intentions, she felt the dark flower of that promise blossoming at the very center of her being.

So, while Aaron worked tirelessly on the muse, writing it down, sorting it out, organizing it, Eva did her best to avoid him. He was too caught up in himself and his newfound fountain of creativity to see anything beyond his narrow focus. He’d discovered a renewed sense of life and his purpose in it. The joy in the compositions came from the knowledge that he was doing something good for those who had lost their way in the camps, that through this body of music—his music—their legacy would be indelibly fixed in the collective mind of man, never to be forgotten. That in the end, Azrael, the Angel of Death, could not erase their names from his book of death. They would live on in this glorious body of music that Aaron had entitled,
The Holocaust Opera.
He never suspected...no, that’s not entirely correct. He refused to
believe
that anything sinister could be at work, until it was far too late.

Now

“It was him, wasn’t it?” I said breathlessly. “Mengele? Somehow he’d come back through the music? Isn’t that right, Jeremiah?”

Jeremiah stared straight through me, as though I were made of gauze. He did not answer me, instead he simply continued on with the story.

Then

By the time Aaron suspected the truth, his obsession had become so powerful that he was nearly insane with it. When he finally came to his senses and realized that he’d been duped, that Eva had been right all along, he tried to abandon the project. He discovered that to end it all would have been to die. The music had captured his soul, but more than that, it had become his heroin and the only way to appease the reaper was to strap the band around his arm and stick the needle in the vein.

Now

“Jesus, Jeremiah,” I said. “That’s what’s wrong with
me,
isn’t it? It’s what’s wrong with
you.
The music is infected with something evil. That’s why we’re sick.”

Jeremiah nodded absently, and even after all that had happened, all that he
knew,
I could see the sick longing in his eyes. It was in my heart, too. God, I knew I was right. I could feel those dark melodies pulling at me in that moment in an almost physical way, stirring in my gut like an edgy whirlwind, wanting to consume me, wanting to hurl me into the fire. I licked my lips, feeling the dread settle over me like a shroud as the final chapter of Jeremiah’s extraordinary tale began to unfold.

Then

One night, Aaron was startled awake by a sound. He had been dreaming dreadful dreams, of course, even after thirty years they were still with him, and would be, he supposed, for the rest of his life. That was not what woke him. That night, it seemed the nightmares were not confined to his head. They were there, in the bedroom with him.

Eva was not in bed beside him. She was kneeling over by the window, her head bowed, her eyes closed, and there was some sort of fleshy sac surrounding her; she was totally encased in it, like a transparent bladder filled with viscous fluid. Neither the bladder, nor the fluid within, distorted Eva’s features, however, for Aaron could see her nakedness clearly through its transparency. Her hands rested atop a large and distended belly, that of a pregnant woman, and, using both hands, she was pushing down on the belly as if attempting to expel something from within it. This is when Aaron realized without a shadow of a doubt that Josef Mengele
was
the architect of their lives. He had been wielding influence over them since Auschwitz. He had done something to Eva all those years ago, some magic or spell that Eva had never been able to speak of, perhaps because she had had no real knowledge of its particularities, and now, since Mengele’s death, the magic was hastening toward fruition.

Aaron sat up and called Eva’s name, but she made no sign that she’d heard him; she was in some sort of sleep-trance inside the fluid-filled sac, bent only on expelling the object that had distended her abdomen so dramatically.

Getting up out of bed, Aaron crossed the room toward her. He had to stop abruptly, for below Eva, the floor began to iris open like the lens of a camera. Eva and the fleshy cocoon that shrouded her did not fall through the opening, however; instead they were suspended above it in some incomprehensible way. Shadows began to move across the sac, though there wasn’t sufficient enough light in the room to cast them. Inside the iris, beneath her, the darkness was so pervasive that the mere word made a mockery of its own definition.

The source of the shadows became evident, for out of that infernal night a parade of atrocities began to unfurl. Aaron stood spellbound as emaciated souls writhed in flames and incinerated like doomed moths before his eyes. There were laughing men with grossly distorted features, their swastika-banded arms looped with human intestines; a child’s severed head hung from the rafters of some vast building, its milky eyes staring accusingly up at him.