He wanted to believe in Johnny Carrick’s loyalty, but had agreed to one last hurdle being put in the man’s path.
Reuven Weissberg checked his room a last time, then the anteroom, closed the outer door after him and went down the corridor to the lift. He craved to be able to place trust in a man’s loyalty. He had been to the funerals of many men who had put their safety in the hands of bodyguards; men who had ordered before death three-metre-high gravestones of malachite or serpentine, dead men on whose corpses vodka would be poured and banknotes scattered to see them comfortable in the ‘afterlife’, decaying men whose waxen cheeks had been kissed by living rivals. He didn’t know of an avoritet, alive or dead, who could swear on the loyalty of a bodyguard.
His grandmother had schooled him in suspicion, but he knew her story of the one man in whom she had laid trust, knew it well.
It bloomed. It had no right to be there but it was. In the grimness of that place, in its awfulness, it grew.
How could it have been nurtured there, love? I mean love, not the coupling of dogs when a bitch has her season. I mean tenderness, gentleness, shyness. We thought it was love.
I didn’t know how long love could last. My father and mother had loved and would have believed it would endure until death took them in old age; they wouldn’t have believed that they would be separated and pushed naked down the Himmelstrasse by men who didn’t acknowledge love. Myself, I didn’t believe in the possibility of love until chance threw me close to Samuel. For us, love was stolen moments. Moments in the food queues that were kept apart by the Ukrainian guards when our eyes met. It might have been when I worked in the sewing room at a bench beside the window and he was taken out on a work party that went by our hut. He would look at the window, and his face would light. It might be when we stood near to each other in the exercise yard before we were sent to our barracks for the night and we would simply look at each other and have nothing to say. It might have been when we touched hands, his fingers rough and calloused from the forest work and mine bruised black from using needles at the sewing bench.
Once he brought me a flower. He said that it was an orchid and grew wild in the forest. It was small, delicate, with violet petals. He had carried it from the forest inside the front of his tunic. When he gave it me in the evening it was already without life, but I could imagine it when it grew and flourished. I could have killed him if I had kissed his cheek in gratitude for the orchid. Physical contact between prisoners, male and female, was forbidden. Had I kissed him and been seen from the central watchtower or by the Ukrainians at the gate of Camp 1, he might have been shot, and I might have been … I took the flower into our barracks hut and laid it between the planks of my bunk and the straw palliasse that was my mattress.
We lived beside death, we walked with death. Our love might survive that day, or next week, we didn’t know. It was clear to us that the old role of the camp was ending, and the transports of those destined for extermination were rarer. None of us believed that we would survive the camp’s closure. It might have been at any hour of any day of any week that we would be taken from our huts, whipped to the Himmelstrasse, terrified, screaming, stripping, then be running down the last stretch of the path to where the doors were open and waiting for us; at the last we would sing, us women, the anthem and demand of God why He had forsaken us.
Because of my love for Samuel, I was not given more strength. Now I had another to care about, which weakened me.
I gave trust. By doing so I lost a little precious strength. I hated to do it, give trust. It was dragged from me.
It was 13 October. I walked one way in the compound and Samuel walked the other. I had seen men slip away from one of the male barracks huts, and among them had been Pechersky, the Russian officer, and Leon Feldhendler … and he told me what I should do the next day. He walked north to south and east to west, and I did circuits that were south to north and west to east, and when we passed he told me a little more.
I should try to find thick, warm clothes and wear them the next day, 14 October.
The next day was the first day of Succos, which follows Yom Kippur, the time of Atonement. I was not good in my faith, but in the camp it didn’t matter to me.
I should beg or steal the heaviest, strongest boots I could find and wear them the next afternoon.
The holy days of Succos celebrate God’s protection of the Jews who had escaped from captivity in Egypt and wandered for forty days in the desert before coming to the land of Israel.
The next day, in the afternoon, I should watch for him. I should try to stay close to him. I should follow where he led. Whatever happened, whatever, I should stay near him.
He broke away. He had done three circuits. I realized the enormity of what he had done, had given me complete trust.
I made one more circuit. I seemed crushed by the weight of the lights above the fence. It had begun to rain. The drops bounced and glistened in the power of the lights, and some of the drips came from the barbs on the wire at the top of the fence. There was a fence I could see, beyond it was a ditch — which I had not seen — and past the ditch a minefield. Beyond the minefield was the forest. He had sensed that I returned his love, and had trusted me as I had him. He did not know for certain that I wouldn’t go to a capo, one of those who thought collaboration with the barbarian would extend a lifespan, to a Ukrainian or to one of the SS officers. Some would have.
I was prepared to trust him, him alone.
To wear extra clothing for warmth, and stronger boots, to watch for him and follow him on the first day of the festival of Succos meant an attempt to escape. I wasn’t an idiot. Idiots didn’t survive at the camp. Was it possible that we — starved and exhausted — could defeat the power of the ‘master race’?
I didn’t sleep that night. Who would have? I alone in the women’s barracks knew, and I alone had the broken, faded beauty of a flattened and lifeless orchid under my palliasse. The next day, in the afternoon, I would learn what was possible and what was not — and would learn where trust took me.
The two cars had gone in convoy. Carrick was with Reuven Weissberg, and the man who had polished the bodywork had driven. They had been dropped by a shallow mound of dead winter grass, and the signs said they were on the junction of Ul. Mila and Ul. Zamenhofa.
The cars pulled away fast, but Carrick had seen the look, keen and hating, of Mikhail, and that of Josef Goldmann, which was expressionless, as if in denial. He couldn’t answer the question bouncing in his mind: why had he been taken into the city to walk with Reuven Weissberg?
Not for him to talk. For a full minute Reuven Weissberg stood by the mound in silence. Carrick searched for the explanation, but it didn’t come.
Then Weissberg turned to him. ‘You are not a Jew, Johnny?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Do you have a prejudice against Jews, Johnny?’
‘I don’t think so, sir. I hope not.’