All Esther could do was to lie quiet, trying
not to take a deep breath. Her pain left her no time to think, or
even to feel afraid. It occupied her attention completely, becoming
the frame of reference for everything else. She dreaded the moment
when they would begin to carry her to the ambulance because the
slightest movement would make the pain move too, stabbing into her,
twisting.
Let them keep talking
, she thought;
let me lie
still here.
She was afraid of the nurse and of Filatov.
They might touch her. They might do anything. She watched them,
waiting, dreading.
Finally the man in the white jacket took the
upper end of the stretcher, letting Filatov take the foot, and they
began the slow, careful process of moving her. They lifted her up,
trying to keep her level, and then the attendant backed her through
the open doors of his ambulance. They set her down, fixing the legs
into slots, and Filatov jumped inside and closed the doors. It
seemed a long time before they began to move.
The inside of the cabin was cramped; no one,
not even Esther, who was small, could have stood up. Filatov sat
crowded into a rear corner, bracing himself against the walls with
his arms, watching with evident suspicion as the attendant, who was
kneeling beside the stretcher, sorted through the contents of a
small, flat black bag no larger than a woman’s purse. Perhaps he
simply didn’t like leaving the security of Mühlfeld Prison.
“You mustn’t be frightened.” the attendant
said, in German. It was not very good German. Esther realized with
a slight shock that the man could not possibly be an Austrian, but
she was unable to carry the idea any further because the
ambulance’s side-to-side movement as they made their slow progress
over the cobblestones of the prison courtyard was a torment. She
opened her mouth, but it was only to moisten her lips with the tip
of her tongue.
“I’m going to give you an injection. In a few
minutes, you will feel much better.”
He had a nice face, with kind eyes. The eyes
of a married man who still loves his wife, Esther thought. She
wanted, more than anything, to believe in this man’s kindness.
The man with the kind eyes brought a
hypodermic needle out of his bag. It had been prepared in
advance—the tip was buried in a ball of cotton about the size of a
cherry. It was very large; she couldn’t remember ever having seen a
needle so long. The liquid inside the glass shaft was a smoky
yellow. He tied a piece of rubber tubing around the upper part of
her arm and dug the needle into a vein on the inside of her elbow.
She could feel something coursing up her arm, cold and burning at
the same moment. It reached her armpit and then poured into her
body. It made the inside of her mouth feel pasty and dry, but the
pain was beginning, very slowly, to die away.
Filatov didn’t like it. He shouted something
in Russian, loud enough in that narrow space to be actively
painful, and made a gesture with his arm as if warning the
attendant away from her. Even though he was sitting behind her,
Esther could still see the arc his hand made through the air. They
were all close enough to touch each other.
“Calm down, you bastard,” the attendant
murmured, again in the German which he must have guessed Filatov
would not understand. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and
wiped the haze from the ambulance’s rear window, peering outside.
“We haven’t reached Tabor Strasse yet.”
What was he talking about? As her mind
cleared, Esther began to remember about the rescue—that was why she
was so sick, wasn’t it?
“Just let things take their natural
course,”
the woman with the burning eyes had said.
“By
tomorrow morning you’ll be out of this place.”
All right,
Esther would stick by her bargain. She would simply lie back and
let everything happen. After all, she was outside the prison walls,
wasn’t she? She didn’t care what the man with the kind eyes meant,
if he meant anything.
The ambulance turned a corner—she could feel
the swaying of her own body, and Filatov pressed the tips of his
fingers against the wall just above her head to balance himself.
The attendant pushed himself back from the rear window and Esther
saw his hand slide guiltily into the pocket of his coat. He twisted
around a few degrees, looking back over his left shoulder at
Filatov. It was impossible to read his face.
“
Eedeletyeh syoodah,”
he said, looking
at Filatov. His hand came out of his pocket, but there didn’t seem
to be anything in it.
“Skawruh!”
Filatov’s eyes widened, as if he felt he
wasn’t being shown proper respect. For an instant he didn’t seem to
know what he should do—he might have been getting ready to say
something—but then he began to rise up to a half crouch. He was
frowning, he seemed to feel it was all a great imposition. But the
fool was still too completely wrapped up in his prison guard’s
sense of invulnerability even to begin to be afraid.
Didn’t he see? Wasn’t it obvious? Esther
could almost smell the menace in that tiny enclosure. It was like a
fourth person in the compartment with them, sitting there between
the two men. turning his eyes from one to the other, smiling like
an idiot.
The attendant reached out and took Filatov by
the lapel of his heavy double-breasted overcoat, as if to help him
up. The right hand went back a few inches and, yes, there was
something in it. With an ugly snap, like the sound of a hammer
glancing off rock, a bright tapering blade, only a little longer
than a man’s finger, shot out from the attendant’s clenched fist.
Filatov seemed to fall forward to meet the thrust, and the blade
disappeared into his chest, cutting through the overcoat just
inside the left-hand row of shiny metal buttons.
It was over in a moment. The attendant pulled
his knife free and stabbed again, in almost the same spot, but he
was only making sure. Filatov stared at him helplessly, his arms
hanging limp. He seemed not so much surprised as ashamed and a
little insulted—he hadn’t expected anything like this. He must have
died in that instant, his lips seeming to form some sound of
reproach.
He sank down to his knees and then collapsed
forward, brushing the attendant’s shoulder as he fell. The
expression on his face never changed. He lay there, his head just
to one side; he seemed to be staring at her. Even now, even in
death. . . Suddenly Esther felt she was about to scream.
But the attendant clamped his hand over her
mouth. There was blood on his fingers; she could smell it. She
began to struggle, trying to push his arms away from her, when all
at once she realized what she was doing and that the pain was gone.
She wouldn’t scream now. She would be very calm.
“Are you all right now?” he said to her,
holding her hands together above her lap. “No—don’t look at him.
Are you all right?”
She nodded slowly, trying to remember when
she had sat up, wondering if it was true. Yes, she seemed to be
fine. No, she wouldn’t look at Filatov. Why did she feel sorry for
him? She didn’t know.
“We’ll stop in a minute. When we do, I’ll
open the back of the ambulance and help you down. Then I’m going to
point a direction, and you’re going to run. Run as if your life
depends on it, because it does.”
He let go of her hands—tentatively, surprised
perhaps when she didn’t fall over—and then he looked at her feet
and his eyes tightened.
“You can’t run anywhere in those. Kick them
off.”
Her wooden clogs fell to the floor, one, two,
and then she remembered the chain around her leg. It pulled tight
with a rattle.
“We’ll get you out of that,” he said, and his
hand disappeared into Filatov’s overcoat pocket. In a second the
chain was coiled up on the stretcher like a snake.
“That stuff I gave you won’t last forever.
You’ll have about five more minutes before it quits on you. Get as
far away as you can.”
As he spoke, the ambulance glided to a stop.
He picked Filatov up by the lapels and dumped him back away from
the doors, face down. And then be pushed open the doors and
everything turned dark, cold, and silent. Before she knew she had
done it, she was down and standing beside him in the street. There
was no traffic—why had she expected there would be? The pavement
felt wet under her bare feet.
“Are you one of the Jews?” she asked. It
sounded such a stupid way to phrase it.
“No questions now. You see that?”
He raised his arm and pointed to what looked
like a vast emptiness. It took a second or two before she realized
it was a park and the blackness was threaded through with the
trunks of leafless trees. There was nothing else there. Just an
empty park in the middle of the cold night.
“Yes.”
“Good, then run. Run!”
She didn’t wait, she ran. Across the pavement
and into the darkness, feeling the air sweeping around her legs,
not caring about anything except that she was free. She was really
free! If she died in the next moment, it would have been worth it.
Nothing could hold her. She ran as fast as she could, her foot
splashing into a puddle of water she hadn’t seen, free as air.
And then she stopped—she didn’t know why.
Perhaps she had heard something. She looked back over her shoulder;
she saw the ambulance.
And then, an instant later, it wasn’t there.
It was gone, lost inside a smear of smoky orange light. A flash
like the end of everything. Nothing moved.
Her chest tightened as she braced against the
concussion, but there was no shock. The air seemed to die around
her. It was the sound, the angry, strangely hollow rumble that did
it. She felt the hem of her dress whipping around her legs, and her
own scream was lost in the roar of the explosion.
Waldenburg. That last night, with the Russian
artillery banging around them. It was back. They. . .
This time there was no joy in her flight. Her
lungs ached with panic as she ran into the darkness. She saw the
line of trees in front of her, crooked silver lines cutting through
the black, and they filled her mind. Escape—she couldn’t even think
it. There were no words, there was only the jolt of her feet
striking the ground and the inferno behind her.
As she passed, the naked branch of a tree cut
at her face. She knew it had happened, knew precisely what it was,
but felt nothing. There was no room.
And suddenly she stopped—or something had
stopped her. Her legs gave way beneath her. She could feel the
thing that had hit her all along her chest, but she didn’t fall.
She hung there suspended. It wouldn’t let her fall.
It was an arm. She could feel the fingers
clutching at her rib cage, digging into the flesh. A great black
arm.
A gloved hand came around and clamped over
her mouth, and she twisted her head to see. His face was almost
white in the moonlight, and his eyes glittered hard and blue. He
was huge—she kicked her legs and found she wasn’t even touching the
ground. He picked her up as if she were no more than a child’s
doll. He didn’t speak at first; his face was like a cruel mask.
“Quiet,” he said. “Not a word.”
There was nothing left. Fear had pushed out
everything else. She couldn’t even try to fight him. She let the
cold darkness close in on her brain.
10
Vienna, Austria: March 5, 1948
It was daylight. Motes of dust floated on the
sunshine that came slanting in through the curtained window. There
was a carpet on the floor, with spots where the pattern had been
almost worn away, and the air carried the smells of cigarette smoke
and cooking. Esther was lying in a bed. It had sheets and a down
comforter and she felt buried in it.
She turned her head a few degrees and counted
the people in the room. There were two of them: a woman, sitting on
the edge of the bed, cradling a coffee cup in her hands—Esther
could feel the pressure of her body pulling on the blankets—and a
man. The man was standing in the doorway. His arms were crossed
over his chest and he looked angry. He was the same man who had
caught her running through the trees.
“You want something to drink,
Liebling
?” the woman asked, putting a hand behind Esther’s
head and bringing the cup to her lips. “You had us worried there
for a few hours.”
Esther drank the coffee, which had grown
quite cold, and tried to remember . There wasn’t much, just a few
vague impressions—the inside of a car, part of a stairway, almost
nothing else. She remembered being carried some of the way, and
telling herself not to struggle, that to struggle was to invite
death. She looked at the man in the doorway again and, curiously,
discovered that she was no longer afraid of him, not the way she
had been afraid of Filatov. He was not vicious. She just knew that;
she couldn’t have said how. The coffee made her feel better. It
cleared her mind, and she no longer felt so strangled.
The woman took the cup away and set it on a
small table beside the bed. Esther had the impression she had seen
her somewhere before. The woman smiled, as if she could read her
thoughts.
“I saw you a couple of times in the yard,”
she said. “You were Filatov’s little bird, somebody told me. I’ll
bet right now he’s—”
“He’s dead.”
Esther’s voice sounded raspy with disuse. She
was surprised it worked at all.
“I’m glad to hear it. He’ll be no loss to the
world.”
“Why don’t you take a walk, Sonya. See if
we’ve attracted any police.”
The man’s voice was deep and quiet and gave
the impression he meant to have his way. He uncrossed his arms and
buried his hands in the pockets of an old pair of blue wool
trousers. He was waiting.
Sonya, who was so kind and who knew all about
the life inside Mühlfeld, rose from the bed without turning to look
behind her. Her expression, as she glanced down at Esther, seemed
to counsel submission:
Learn from my example to do as he says,
and everything will turn out all right. We both know what men are
like.