Because now she would never get away.
“You will have to tell me everything you
know, Esther. You must tell me the truth if I am to keep you alive
and unhurt. I have to know where von Goltz hid the formula, and you
are the key. I shall get the truth out of you one way or the
other.”
“I don’t know anything. The General never
told me anything. I tell you I don’t know about any formula!”
And he had merely smiled. He was looking
forward to hurting her. He knew all about how to hurt her.
And then he had left her in this cold
room.
At Chelmno, sometimes, when someone in the
women’s barracks had had enough, she would find a way to kill
herself. She would make a run for the fence and the guards would
shoot her or she would die on the electrified wires. It had
happened almost regularly. Once the girl who had slept next to
Esther had stuffed strips of her dress down her throat until she
had strangled. They had found her in the morning, cold and stiff.
She hadn’t uttered so much as a sound.
The means of death were everywhere. She
couldn’t stuff pieces of cloth down her throat—she hadn’t the
courage for that; a person had to be half mad with despair to do a
thing like that—but she could find something.
All she had to do was to get up and look for
it. Was she such a coward that she couldn’t even get off the floor
to find the means of saving herself? No, she was not such a coward
as that.
It was a bare room. There was a fireplace,
blackened and cold, as if it hadn’t been used in years. There was
the bed. She opened a closet and discovered that it was empty.
Nothing else. Why was the bed there? Surely no one could have slept
in this room. She looked out one of the windows and saw that she
was on the second story. Hagemann must have brought her up a flight
of stairs. Why couldn’t she remember that?
There was nothing. She couldn’t help feeling
a certain shamefaced sense of relief, as if she had been reprieved
at the last second. And then she remembered the glass in the
windows.
Suddenly there was no air in her lungs. Her
hands were sweating, and the pounding of her heart seemed to course
through her whole body like a throb of pain.
She didn’t want to die. She was a coward,
but she didn’t care—it was too much to think of. She didn’t want to
lie there in a sticky little pool of her own blood, her eyes still
open, staring out at nothing, feeling nothing, something to be
cleaned away and buried in a hole. To be nothing—it was awful.
Still, she would do it. The windows were
barred on the outside, but that wouldn’t prevent her from escaping.
She would put her fist through one of the panes—what did she care
if she cut herself; wasn’t that precisely the point?—and she would
pull loose a piece with a sharp enough edge. . . She had heard once
that you should cut vertically along the wrist if you meant it—one
deep slash and it would all be over.
It shouldn’t he painful. After the first
shock, why should there be any pain? It couldn’t take very long to
bleed to death. In an hour, or two, they would find her. . .
She walked over to the window and looked
outside again. A man with a rifle over his shoulder was passing by
on the lawn outside. He would be the last human being she ever saw.
She doubled up her fist, wondering how hard she would have to hit
the glass before it would break.
No—this wasn’t the way. She would never have
the nerve to do a thing like that twice. Better to save every last
little scrap of courage until she really needed it. There were some
old fireplace implements lying around the empty grate; she went
back and got an ash shovel. She would use the knobby handle—it
would do very well.
As soon as she struck it against the pane,
and the glass splintered, an alarm bell went off, so loud and so
suddenly that she almost screamed.
There was no time now. Pulling with her
fingers, feverish to have it done with before anyone could come to
stop her, she worked a thin, slightly curved piece loose from the
window frame. It looked as if it had been waiting just for this
moment.
She got down on her knees—somehow it was too
much to do the thing standing up—bunched the skirt of her dress up
around her waist, and used the hem to wrap one end of the long
sliver of glass. She pressed her left forearm down on her thigh so
that the back of her hand was against the knee and raised the glass
to strike. One deep cut—she was ready. She. . .
At first it was only the shock—no pain, no
sound, nothing more definite than the sense of having been
violently transformed. Was this what it was like to begin
dying?
No. She glanced down at her arm, and there
was no blood. Something else had happened. She didn’t know what it
was.
And then she felt it. First the pain—in her
head, a sense of being crushed, a throb of suffering—and then the
white flash of light that made everything seem sharp and hard, and
then the weakness. Her hand let go of the sliver of glass. She
didn’t have any choice about it; the hand simply opened and the
glass fell into her lap. And then she felt herself falling forward.
The floor was coming up at her. It would strike her in the face,
and she found herself hoping that it wouldn’t hurt too much.
It didn’t. It never happened. The floor
simply dissolved, turning first red and then black and then
disappearing into oblivion.
. . . . .
When she woke up she didn’t know where she
was. Her face hurt—that was the one certainty. With her eyes still
closed she tried to turn her head, but the pain was so bad it made
her feel as if she would have to vomit. She lay still for a moment
and the sensation passed away.
And then she opened her eyes and saw
Hagemann. He was sitting beside her. She was lying on the bed in
the room with the tiled floor, and now she remembered
everything.
The feeling of shame was
even worse than the aching in her head.
You stupid, cowardly, worthless little
slut
, she thought to herself.
You couldn’t even succeed in cutting open your
veins.
Hagemann was watching her in an odd,
speculative way. It was almost as if he had only just discovered
her existence. She didn’t like it—it filled her with unfocused
dread. She had thought she would always know what to expect from
him, but she had never seen that expression on his face before.
“You set off the alarm,” he said, and then
his lips shaped themselves into a thin smile. “All the windows in
this house have been wired. The guard thought you were trying to
escape—that was why he hit you.”
“He hit me?”
“Yes, with the butt of his rifle. I expect
it hurts.”
Yes, of course it hurt, but she didn’t care
to say so. She turned her face away from him and discovered, after
she had done it; that she could move her head without feeling sick.
So she would recover after all.
“But you weren’t trying to escape, were
you—at least, not in the sense my guard imagined. I would have
thought you were the last. . .”
There was something in his voice, something
almost like uncertainty, as if suddenly he found himself no longer
quite the master. Yes, she would look at him now. Yes, it was
there—whatever it was.
“Would you really have killed yourself,
Esther?”
“I don’t know.” It was the truth. Now,
having spoken it, she would never know.
“It wouldn’t have worked. It takes a long
time to bleed to death through a slashed vein. Hours, in fact. You
were wasting your effort.”
But even if he was right, it didn’t matter.
Anyone could have seen that in his face. Somehow, she had won
something from him.
“Esther,” he said, reaching out and, with
the tips of his fingers, delicately brushing a strand of hair out
of her face, “Esther, it won’t be like Waldenburg this time. I’ve
changed—everything has changed. You needn’t be frightened. You
won’t try to harm yourself again, will you?”
“I don’t know. Yes, if I can find the
courage.”
“Then you’ve changed as well. It used to be
that nothing was more important to you than staying alive, but not
anymore, it would seem.”
“I guess not.”
“Then we must make very certain that you
never have another opportunity,” he said, the thin artificial smile
disappearing. “I cannot allow you to throw yourself away, Esther.
There is much more involved here than merely your one wretched
little life, precious as that is to me. I shall have to take steps
to see that you behave yourself.”
“What is it that you want from me, Colonel?
What is it?”
“My dear, do you really mean to tell me that
you don’t know?”
Suddenly she was tired beyond bearing. She
wanted nothing more than to be left alone—to die if that was
possible, but if not, merely to sleep. Hagemann’s voice was just a
buzzing in her ears, something that kept her awake. What was it all
about? No one had told her. She had never wanted to know. She
didn’t want to know now.
“Shall I tell you then?”
“No. Don’t.”
“Yes, I rather think I ought to tell you.”
He smiled again. He was the old Hagemann once more, and nothing had
changed since Waldenburg. “I shall need you now. Perhaps you have
the answer without knowing it. At any rate, I don’t suppose you’ll
be of any use at all if you don’t understand at least in a general
way what I want you to tell me.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled
something out, holding it up between first finger and thumb for her
to look at. It was a little circle of thin gold chain, a loop
hardly big enough to go round his thumb. And from the chain dangled
a key.
“There’s a box, Esther. A safe-deposit box
in a bank somewhere. This is one key, and you’re the other. Von
Goltz had this sent to me after he was arrested, along with a
cryptic little note about you. You see, he knew they were going to
hang him. He didn’t care anymore how the world would go on without
him—he wasn’t choosing sides. He didn’t care about anything except
his little joke.”
He put the key back into his pocket. He was
so sure of himself. He was so convinced he had won.
“Do you see my situation now?” he asked,
shrugging his shoulders, as if he couldn’t understand how such a
thing could happen to a man like himself. “I had only the one key
before, but now I have both. I don’t know the name of the bank—I
don’t even know where it is. But you do. Somehow, in some way I’ll
come to understand, von Goltz made you the vehicle of that
information. And you’re going to give it to me.”
He seemed for a moment to be looking at
nothing, and then Esther realized that he was looking at her arm,
her right arm, where the scar was still fresh from when the doctor
in Vienna had removed her tattoo.
He took her by the hand, as if for a closer
inspection, and then let it drop back down to her side.
“What is that, another suicide attempt?”
“No—they rescued me from a Russian prison in
Vienna. I was wounded.”
It was only at that moment that she realized
why Herr Leivick had insisted that the number be removed. Yes, of
course. It was the second key.
She could feel her heart pounding. Could
Hagemann see anything in her face? Did he know now? Oh, God. .
.
It seemed not. His eyes darkened for an
instant, but not with recognition.
“Good. I should hate to think. . . Well, it
doesn’t matter. Your life will be quite safe with me, Esther.
“You see, in addition to everything else,
the safe-deposit box, wherever it is, is in your name. You shall
have to be the one to open it for me.”
“What’s in it?”
“You wouldn’t want to know.”
He smiled again, the old smile that said it
was something more terrible than she could imagine.
“Then you will never have it. You will never
persuade me to open that box for you—never, no matter what you
do.”
“Never, my dear? Oh, I think so.”
. . . . .
He had left her alone again. He had even
given her something to help her headache.
“It’s very good,” he said, picking up a
half-full bottle of brandy from where it had been resting on the
floor beside the bed, “very old and smooth as cream, and there’s
nothing in it except brandy, so you needn’t worry. A little will
settle your stomach and ease your head. More will help you to see
your situation with greater clarity. You need to relax, Esther.
Don’t be afraid of anything. We’ll talk again later.”
He laid the bottle on its side, cradled
between her arm and her body, and got up to go.
After a while she sat up and, when she
remembered it was there, picked up the bottle, read the label, and
pulled the cork. She had hardly tasted the stuff in three years,
not since Waldenburg.
The General had been a brandy drinker.
Perhaps Hagemann had acquired the taste from him, or perhaps it was
simply that more men drank brandy than Esther had realized. Did
Inar? She hoped not. No—it was unimaginable.
She raised the bottle to her lips and tipped
it up, swallowing as fast as she could so that the liquor ran down
her throat like water. It burned, and when she stopped she had to
cough several times. She hated it, but that didn’t matter. Hagemann
was right—she needed something to bring her back to herself. If
Hagemann wouldn’t allow her to die, then she would stay more than
just alive. She couldn’t run on nothing but nervous energy
forever.
So she would drink brandy, and stay calm,
and think.
She took two more short swallows and set the
bottle down on the floor beside the bed. It was hardly any time at
all before her headache had almost disappeared. She could still
feel the lump on her scalp where the rifle butt had hit her—it felt
as if someone had burned it with a hot iron—but that was nothing.
It didn’t prevent her mind from functioning.