Stephen feels the cool touch of Josie’s hand, and he opens his eyes to see the doctor standing beside him. The doctor has a gaunt, long face and thinning brown hair; he is dressed in a wrinkled green suit.
“Now we’ll check the dressing, Stephen,” he says as he tears away a gauze bandage on Stephen’s abdomen.
Stephen feels the pain, but he is removed from it. His only wish is to return to the blue dreamlands. He watches the doctor peel off the neat crosshatching of gauze. A terrible stink fills the room.
Josie stands well away from the bed.
“Now we’ll check your drains.” The doctor pulls a long drainage tube out of Stephen’s abdomen, irrigates and disinfects the wound, inserts a new drain, and repeats the process by pulling out another tube just below the rib cage.
Stephen imagines that he is swimming out of the room. He tries to cross the hazy border into cooler regions, but it is difficult to concentrate. He has only a half hour at most before the Demerol will wear off. Already, the pain is coming closer, and he will not be due for another injection until the night nurse comes on duty. But the night nurse will not give him an injection without an argument. She will tell him to fight the pain.
But he cannot fight without a shot.
“Tomorrow we’ll take that oxygen tube out of your nose,” the doctor says, but his voice seems far away and Stephen wonders what he is talking about.
He reaches for the bowl of ice, but cannot find it.
“Josie, you’ve taken my ice.”
“I took the ice away when the doctor came. Why don’t you try to watch a bit of television with me; Soupy Sales is on.”
“Just bring me some ice,” Stephen says. “I want to rest a bit.” He can feel the sharp edges of pain breaking through the gauzy wraps of Demerol.
“I love you, Josie,” he says sleepily as she places a fresh bowl of ice on his tray.
As Stephen wanders through his ice-blue dreamworld, he sees a rectangle of blinding white light. It looks like a doorway into an adjoining world of brightness. He has glimpsed it before, on previous Demerol highs. A coal-dark doorway stands beside the bright one.
He walks toward the portals, passes through white-blue conefields.
Time is growing short. The drug cannot stretch it much longer. Stephen knows that he has to choose either the bright doorway or the dark, one or the other. He does not even consider turning around, for he has dreamed that the ice and glass and cold blue gemstones have melted behind him.
It makes no difference to Stephen which doorway he chooses. On impulse he steps into blazing, searing whiteness.
Suddenly he is in a cramped world of people and sound.
The boxcar’s doors were flung open. Stephen was being pushed out of the cramped boxcar, which stank of sweat, feces, and urine. Several people had died in the car and added their stink of death to the already fetid air.
“Carla, stay close to me,” shouted a man beside Stephen. He had been separated from his wife by a young woman who pushed between them as she tried to return to the dark safety of the boxcar.
SS men in black, dirty uniforms were everywhere. They kicked and pommeled everyone within reach. Alsatian guard dogs snapped and barked. Stephen was bitten by one of the snarling dogs. A woman beside him was being kicked by soldiers. And they were all being methodically herded past a high barbed-wire fence. Beside the fence was a wall.
Stephen looked around for an escape route, but he was surrounded by other prisoners, who were pressing against him. Soldiers were shooting indiscriminately into the crowd, shooting women and children alike.
The man who had shouted to his wife was shot.
“Sholom, help me, help me,” screamed a scrawny young woman whose skin was as yellow and pimpled as chicken flesh.
And Stephen understood that he was Sholom. He was a Jew in this burning, stinking world, and this woman, somehow, meant something to him. He felt the yellow star sewn on the breast of his filthy jacket. He grimaced uncontrollably. The strangest thoughts were passing through his mind, remembrances of another childhood: morning prayers with his father and rich uncle, large breakfasts on Saturdays, the sounds of his mother and father quietly making love in the next room, yortseit candles burning in the living room, his brother reciting the “four questions” at the Passover table.
He touched the star again and remembered the Nazis’ facetious euphemism for it: Pour le Sémite.
He wanted to strike out, to kill the Nazis, to fight and die. But he found himself marching with the others, as if he had no will of his own. He felt that he was cut in half. He had two selves now; one watched the other. One self wanted to fight. The other was numbed; it cared only for itself. It was determined to survive.
Stephen looked around for the woman who had called out to him. She was nowhere to be seen.
Behind him were railroad tracks, electrified wire, and the conical tower and main gate of the camp. Ahead was a pitted road littered with corpses and their belongings. Rifles were being fired, and a heavy, sickly-sweet odor was everywhere. Stephen gagged, others vomited. It was the overwhelming stench of death, of rotting and burning flesh. Black clouds hung above the camp, and flames spurted from the tall chimneys of ugly buildings, as if from infernal machines.
Stephen walked onward: he was numb, unable to fight or even talk. Everything that happened around him was impossible, the stuff of dreams.
The prisoners were ordered to halt, and the soldiers began to separate those who would be burned from those who would be worked to death. Old men and women and young children were pulled out of the crowd. Some were beaten and killed immediately, while the others looked on in disbelief. Stephen looked on, as if it was of no concern to him. Everything was unreal, dreamlike. He did not belong here.
The new prisoners looked like Musselmanner, the walking dead. Those who became ill, or were beaten or starved before they could “wake up” to the reality of the camps, became Musselmanner. Musselmanner could not think or feel. They shuffled around, already dead in spirit, until a guard or disease or cold or starvation killed them.
“Keep marching,” shouted a guard as Stephen stopped before an emaciated old man crawling on the ground. “You’ll look like him soon enough.”
Suddenly, as if waking from one dream and finding himself in another, Stephen remembered that the chicken-skinned girl was his wife. He remembered their life together, their children and crowded flat. He remembered the birthmark on her leg, her scent, her hungry lovemaking. He had once fought another boy over her.
His glands opened up with fear and shame; he had ignored her screams for help.
He stopped and turned, faced the other group. “Fruma,” he shouted, then started to run.
A guard struck him in the chest with the butt of his rifle, and Stephen fell into darkness.
He spills the ice water again and awakens with a scream.
“It’s my fault,” Josie says as she peels back the sheets. “I should have taken the bowl away from you. But you fight me.”
Stephen lives with the pain again. He imagines that a tiny fire is burning in his abdomen, slowly consuming him. He stares at the television high on the wall and watches Soupy Sales.
As Josie changes the plastic sac containing his intravenous saline solution, an orderly pushes a cart into the room and asks Stephen if he wants a print for his wall.
“Would you like me to choose something for you?” Josie asks.
Stephen shakes his head and asks the orderly to show him all the prints. Most of them are familiar still lifes and pastorals, but one catches his attention. It is a painting of a wheat field. Although the sky looks ominously dark, the wheat is brightly rendered in great, broad strokes. A path cuts through the field and crows fly overhead.