A long, gray cloud covered the sun, then passed, drawing shadows across gutted hills.
On impulse, Stephen dragged the Musselmann into a gully behind several chalky rocks. Why am I doing this? he asked himself. If I’m caught, I’ll be ash in the ovens too. He remembered what Viktor had told him: “You must think of yourself all the time or you’ll be no help to anyone else.”
The Musselmann groaned, then raised his arm. His face was gray with dust and his eyes were glazed.
“You must lie still,” Stephen whispered. “Do not make a sound. I’ve hidden you from the guards, but if they hear you, we’ll all be punished. One sound from you and you’re dead. You must fight to live; you’re in a death camp; you must fight so you can tell of this later.”
“I have no family, they’re all—”
Stephen clapped his hand over the man’s mouth and whispered, “Fight, don’t talk. Wake up; you cannot survive the death camp by sleeping.”
The man nodded, and Stephen climbed out of the gully. He helped two men carry a large stone to a nearby cart.
“What are you doing?” shouted a guard.
“I left my place to help these men with this stone; now I’ll go back where I was.”
“What the hell are you trying to do?” Viktor asked.
Stephen felt as if he was burning up with fever. He wiped the sweat from his eyes, but everything was still blurry.
“You’re sick, too. You’ll be lucky if you last the day.”
“I’ll last,” Stephen said, “but I want you to help me get him back to the camp.”
“I won’t risk it, not for a Musselmann. He’s already dead; leave him.”
“Like you left me?”
Before the guards could take notice, they began to work. Although Viktor was older than Stephen, he was stronger. He worked hard every day and never caught the diseases that daily reduced the barrack’s numbers. Stephen had a touch of death, as Viktor called it, and was often sick.
They worked until dusk, when the sun’s oblique rays caught the dust from the quarries and turned it into veils and scrims. Even the guards sensed that this was a quiet time, for they would congregate together and talk in hushed voices.
“Come, now, help me,” Stephen whispered to Viktor.
“I’ve been doing that all day,” Viktor said. “I’ll have enough trouble getting you back to the camp, much less carry this Musselmann.”
“We can’t leave him.”
“Why are you so preoccupied with this Musselmann? Even if we can get him back to the camp, his chances are nothing. I know—I’ve seen enough—I know who has a chance to survive.”
“You’re wrong this time,” Stephen said. He was dizzy and it was difficult to stand. The odds are I won’t last the night, and Viktor knows it, he told himself. “I had a dream that if this man dies, I’ll die too. I just feel it.”
“Here we learn to trust our dreams,” Viktor said. “They make as much sense as this….” He made the gesture of rising smoke and gazed toward the ovens, which were spewing fire and black ash.
The western portion of the sky was yellow, but over the ovens it was red and purple and dark blue. Although it horrified Stephen to consider it, there was a macabre beauty here. If he survived, he would never forget these sense impressions, which were stronger than anything he had ever experienced before. Being so close to death, he was, perhaps for the first time, really living. In the camp, one did not even consider suicide. One grasped for every moment, sucked at life like an infant, lived as if there were no future.
The guards shouted at the prisoners to form a column; it was time to march back to the barracks.
While the others milled about, Stephen and Viktor lifted the Musselmann out of the gully. Everyone nearby tried to distract the guards. When the march began, Stephen and Viktor held the Musselmann between them, for he could barely stand.
“Come on, dead one, carry your weight,” Viktor said. “Are you so dead that you cannot hear me? Are you as dead as the rest of your family?” The Musselmann groaned and dragged his legs. Viktor kicked him. “You’ll walk or we’ll leave you here for the guards to find.”
“Let him be,” Stephen said.
“Are you dead or do you have a name?” Viktor continued.
“Berek,” croaked the Musselmann. “I am not dead.”
“Then, we have a fine bunk for you,” Viktor said. “You can smell the stink of the sick for another night before the guards make a selection.” Viktor made the gesture of smoke rising.
Stephen stared at the barracks ahead. They seemed to waver as the heat rose from the ground. He counted every step. He would drop soon; he could not go on, could not carry the Musselmann.
He began to mumble in English.
“So you’re speaking American again,” Viktor said.
Stephen shook himself awake, placed one foot before the other.
“Dreaming of an American lover?”
“I don’t know English and I have no American lover.”
“Then, who is this Josie you keep talking about in your sleep…?”
“Why were you screaming?” Josie asks as she washes his face with a cold washcloth.
“I don’t remember screaming,” Stephen says. He discovers a fever blister on his lip. Expecting to find an intravenous needle in his wrist, he raises his arm.
“You don’t need an I.V.,” Josie says. “You just have a bit of a fever. Dr. Volk has prescribed some new medication for it.”
“What time is it?” Stephen stares at the whorls in the ceiling.
“Almost 3 P.M. I’ll be going off soon.”
“Then I’ve slept most of the day away,” Stephen says, feeling something crawling inside him. He worries that his dreams still have a hold on him. “Am I having another relapse?”
“You’ll do fine,” Josie says.
“I should be fine now; I don’t want to dream anymore.”
“Did you dream again, do you remember anything?”
“I dreamed that I saved the Musselmann,” Stephen says.
“What was his name?” asks Josie.
“Berek, I think. Is that the man you knew?”
Josie nods and Stephen smiles at her. “Maybe that’s the end of the dreams,” he says; but she does not respond. He asks to see the photograph again.
“Not just now,” Josie says.
“But I have to see it. I want to see if I can recognize myself….”
Stephen dreamed he was dead, but it was only the fever. Viktor sat beside him on the floor and watched the others. The sick were moaning and crying; they slept on the cramped platform, as if proximity to one another could ensure a few more hours of life. Wan moonlight seemed to fill the barrack.
Stephen awakened, feverish. “I’m burning up,” he whispered to Viktor.
“Well,” Viktor said, “you’ve got your Musselmann. If he lives, you live. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”
“I don’t remember; I just knew that I couldn’t let him die.”
“You’d better go back to sleep; you’ll need your strength. Or we may have to carry you, tomorrow.”
Stephen tried to sleep, but the fever was making lights and spots before his eyes. When he finally fell asleep, he dreamed of a dark country filled with gemstones and great quarries of ice and glass.
“What?” Stephen asked, as he sat up suddenly, awakened from dampblack dreams. He looked around and saw that everyone was watching Berek, who was sitting under the window at the far end of the room.
Berek was singing the Kol Nidre very softly. It was the Yom Kippur prayer, sung on the most holy of days. He repeated the prayer three times, and then once again in a louder voice. The others responded, intoned the prayer as a recitative. Viktor was crying quietly, and Stephen imagined that the holy spirit animated Berek. Surely, he told himself, that face and those pale, unseeing eyes were those of a dead man. He remembered the story of the golem, shuddered, found himself singing and pulsing with fever.