Another guard swiped the back of his fist across the fellow’s mouth, silencing him in a spatter of blood. He crumpled to the tiled floor when he was let go.
Pavli was almost knocked from his feet as the crowd of Lazarene men surged toward the doorway. Their voices had risen into shouts, deafening in the enclosed space. The guards scrambled for their rifles, raising them chest high and bracing themselves.
“What is the meaning of this?”
The voice of Herr Doktor Ritter struck the men like a whiplash across their faces. The SS officer pushed his way past the guards, confronting the milling crowd of Lazarenes.
As they clustered tighter against each other, their voices falling to silence, the Scharfuhrer drew Ritter to one side. The guards kept the false gypsy on his knees as the officer listened to the Scharfuhrer ’s whispered explanation. Ritter nodded, glancing at the individual in question.
“So.” Ritter strode before the Lazarene men. “I see that my assurances to you are doubted. You would rather listen to the slanderous rumors spread by cowards and lunatics such as this.” His voice boomed in the tiled hollows. “To doubt the honor of an officer of the SS – that is an un-German thing.” He shook his head, contemplating the grievous insult. “You bring shame upon yourselves, upon the name of your people, by doing so.”
A spattering rain-like noise followed the quick gesture Ritter made to the Scharfuhrer. Clear liquid streamed from one of the washroom’s metal fixtures. Ritter leaned forward, holding his hand beneath the pipes, the sleeve of his uniform darkening in the spray. He drew his arm back, studying his own wet hand for a moment, then touching a finger to his lips.
“This is water, is it not?” He smiled, his voice calm and measured. The water ran down his wrist as he thrust his palm before the nearest of the Lazarene men. “It is not heated, I grant you – the boilers have not yet been returned to service – but surely you can endure that slight discomfort, that small sacrifice for the benefit of all Germany? It’s not too much to ask, is it? And this -” He bent down and picked up a thick grey lump from just inside the raised edge of the shower area; he held it to his nose and sniffed. “It seems to be soap. Not of the finest quality… but your homeland is at war.” The smile disappeared from his face as he squeezed the rough block in his fist; the soap crumbled between his fingers, bits falling to the damp floor. He wiped the mess off with his handkerchief.
Ritter had spoken softly. The sudden change in his voice snapped the Lazarenes awake again.
“I promised that no harm would come to you.” The anger spoke in the officer’s booted stride as well. “But then, that depends upon you, does it not? Upon your cooperation, upon your following orders, upon your trust.” Ritter’s voice dropped to a whisper once more. “You do not know, from what dangers I have already saved you. And this is how you repay me…”
His steps took him to the guards and their kneeling prisoner. Pavli could see the cringing fear in the eyes set in the blood-spattered face.
“There are none of you so valuable,” said Ritter, “that I can tolerate the spreading of falsehoods.” He didn’t turn to address the crowd of Lazarenes. He nodded to the guards, who yanked their prisoner to his feet. “You should learn from this one’s example.”
Herr Doktor Ritter strode out of the room. The guards dragged between them the false gypsy, no longer struggling, another thing of rags.
The Lazarene men didn’t speak among themselves as they stripped off their clothes. They listened even as they lowered their heads beneath the icy sting of the showers.
Pavli heard the distant rifle shot, as did the other men, from out in the forest, beyond the walls of the building. A sound that Ritter and the guards had wanted them to hear.
The cold water trickled into the corners of Pavli’s mouth. When he closed his eyes, he could see the startled birds wheeling up from the tops of the trees and vanishing into the sky.
FIFTEEN
Pavli stood among his Lazarene brethren, with the wet smell of the showers and the cloying, sickly odor of the delousing compound drifting between their bodies. They had all submitted to their genitals being swabbed with a fluid the bright orange color of iodine, a bored-looking male nurse dipping a rag on a stick into the bucket beside his wooden stool. No resistance or jokes had been made, not even by the younger men; the echo of the rifle shot from out in the woods, faded except from memory, still oppressed the group.
His brother Matthi had taken advantage of the milling about that had followed the men’s emergence from the tiled washroom, to come close to him and lay a hand on his bare shoulder. “Are you all right?” Matthi whispered close to his ear.
Pavli nodded. “I’m fine. There’s nothing to worry about…” He was trying to be comforting in turn. He craned his neck, trying to look past Matthi and the other Lazarene men, back to where they had left the little mounds of their folded clothes near the entrance to the showers. Something did indeed worry him: a secret treasure tucked inside the lining of his boots, a precious thing of paper curved against the worn leather. Perhaps all the boots and shoes, and the good coats and other bits of clothing, were to be gathered up and shipped off as part of the Winterhilfe, the charity for poor deserving Germans, the real ones. Or one of the Lazarenes might steal Pavli’s boots, leaving behind a shabbier pair, without a treasure hidden inside. The thief might never even discover what he had taken, the only thing of value that Pavli had left to him.
Would one of his own kind, his brethren, do that? Steal from him? He didn’t want to think so, but he couldn’t be sure; there was an empty place near his heart, where there once had been the sure knowledge of being one of them, of being Lazarene. That had leaked away, a hidden wound of his own, when his brother and the elders had determined not to initiate him into the faith upon his coming of age. Matthi had explained it all to him, that these were bad times, the worst since the Catholics in France had washed the streets with the blood of those they called heretics; to be marked with Christ’s stigmata was to draw the wolves upon oneself through the dark corridors of the forest…
Pavli got a grim satisfaction out of the failure of his brother’s plan. All the elders and Matthi had conspired to cheat him of his rightful heritage, and for what result? Here he stood with the other Lazarene men, stripped naked under the hard eyes of the SS guards, their skin turned to gooseflesh by the winds that sifted through the cracked and dusty windows high above the walls’ green tiles. Rounded up with the others and brought here, the eyes in his face enough of a mark to claim his place among them. With the young men, some only a year or so older than him, the muscles of their legs and arms grown lean and taut on the meager diet their ration cards had allowed them; and the true elders, the greybeards, wisps of white hair across brown-spotted skulls, sunken chests and spindly legs bowed by the weight of years. The old men folded their gnarled, large-knuckled hands over their shriveled privates, bearing the shame of their nakedness with silent endurance.
“Silence!” The Scharfuhrer shouted, unnecessarily; his voice slapped against the damp walls. “You, the first ten – step forward.”
Using the muzzles of their rifles, two of the guards separated a small group out from the rest of the Lazarene men; both Pavli and his brother Matthi were part of the chosen number. He glanced over his shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of his belongings left piled against a far wall, to see if the treasure hidden inside one of his boots was still safe. The broad chest and scowling face of the nearest guard blocked his view.