Читать книгу The Fall - Чак Хоган, Гильермо дель Торо, Chuck Hogan - Страница 18

THE OX-DRIVEN CART BUMPED OVER DIRT AND MATTED grass, rolling stubbornly through the countryside. The oxen were agreeable beasts, as are most castrated draught animals, their thin, braided tails swaying in sync like pendulum rods.

The driver’s hands were leathered where he gripped the driving rope. The man seated next to the driver, his passenger, wore a long black gown over black pants. Around his neck hung the long holy beads of a Polish priest.

Yet this young man dressed in holy vestments was not a priest. He was not even Catholic.

He was a Jew in disguise.

An automobile approached from behind. It drew even with them on the rutted road, a military vehicle transporting Russian soldiers, then passed them on the left. The driver did not wave or even turn his head in acknowledgment, using his long stick to prod the slowed oxen as they pushed through the smoky exhaust of the diesel engine. “Doesn’t matter how fast you travel,” he said, once the fumes cleared. “In the end we all arrive at the same destination, eh, Father?”

Abraham Setrakian did not answer. Because he wasn’t certain anymore that what the man said was true.

The thick bandage Setrakian wore around his neck was a ruse. He had learned to understand much of the Polish language, but he could not speak it well enough to pass.

“They beat you, Father,” said the oxcart driver. “Broke your hands.”

Setrakian regarded his young, mangled hands. The smashed knuckles had healed improperly during his time on the run. A local surgeon took pity on him and re-broke and reset the middle joints, which relieved some of the bone-on-bone grinding. He had some mobility in them now, more so than he might have hoped. The surgeon told him his joints would get progressively worse as he aged. Setrakian flexed them throughout the day, up to and then well past the point of pain, in an effort to increase their flexibility. The war cast a dark shadow over any man’s hope for a long and productive life, but Setrakian had decided that, however much time he had left, he would never be considered a cripple.

He did not recognize this part of the countryside upon his return—but then how would he? He had arrived to this locale inside a closed, windowless train. He had never left camp until the uprising, and then—on the run, deep into the woods. He looked now for the train tracks, but, apparently, they had been pulled up. The train’s path remained, however, its telltale scar running through the farmland. One year’s time was not long enough for nature to reclaim that trail of infamy.

Setrakian climbed down off the cart near the final turn, with a blessing for the peasant driver. “Do not stay here long, Father,” said the driver, before whipping his oxen into action. “There’s a pall over this place.”

Setrakian watched his beasts amble off, then walked up the beaten path. He came to a modest brick farmhouse set alongside an overgrown field tended to by a few workers. The extermination camp known as Treblinka was constructed to be impermanent. It was conceived as a temporary human slaughterhouse, constructed for maximum efficiency and intended to disappear completely once its purpose had been served. No tattooed arms as at Auschwitz; very little paperwork whatsoever. The camp was disguised as a train station complete with a false ticket window, a false station name (“Obermajdan”), and a fictitious list of connecting stations. The architects of the Operation Reinhard death camps had planned the perfect crime on a genocidal scale.

Soon after the prisoner uprising, Treblinka was indeed dismantled, torn down in the fall of 1943. The land was ploughed over, and a farm was erected on the site, with the intention of discouraging locals from trespassing and scavenging. The farmhouse was constructed using bricks recovered from the old gas chambers, and a former Ukrainian guard named Strebel and his family were installed as its occupants. The Ukrainian camp workers were former Soviet prisoners of war conscripted into service. The work of the camp—mass murder—affected one and all. Setrakian had seen for himself how these former prisoners themselves—especially the Ukrainians of German extraction, who were given greater responsibilities, such as commanding platoons or squads—succumbed to the corruption of the death camp and its opportunities for sadism as well as personal enrichment.

This man, Strebel, Setrakian could not conjure his face by name alone, but he remembered well the Ukrainians’ black uniforms, as well as their carbines—and their cruelty. Word had reached Setrakian that Strebel and his family had only recently abandoned this farmland, fleeing ahead of the advancing Red Army. But Setrakian, in his position as country priest some sixty miles away, also was privy to tales describing a plague of evil that had settled over the region surrounding the former death camp. It was whispered that the Strebel family had disappeared one night without a word, without taking any possessions with them.

It was this last tale that intrigued Setrakian the most.

He had come to suspect he had gone at least partly, if not fully, insane inside the death camp. Had he seen what he thought he’d seen? Or was this great vampire feasting on Jewish prisoners some figment of his imagination, a coping mechanism, a golem to stand for the Nazi atrocities his mind could not bear to accept?

Only now did he feel strong enough to seek an answer. He went out past the brick house, walking among the workers tilling the field—only to discover that they were not laborers at all, but locals bearing digging tools from home, turning over soil in search of Jewish gold and jewelry lost in the massacre. Yet all they kept unearthing were barbed wire and the occasional chunk of bone.

They looked upon him with suspicion, as though there was a distinct code of conduct for looters, never mind vaguely defined areas of claim. Even his vestments did not slow their digging or melt their resolve. A few may have slowed and looked down—not in shame exactly, but in the manner of those who know better—and then waited for him to continue on before resuming their grave-robbing.

Setrakian walked on from the old camp site, leaving its outline and retracing his old escape route into the forest. After many wrong turns, he arrived at the old Roman ruin, which looked unchanged to his eye. He entered the cave where he had faced and destroyed the Nazi Zimmer, broken hands and all—hauling the being into the light of day and watching it cook in the sun.

As he looked around inside, he realized something. The scores on the floor, the worn path inside the entrance: the cave showed signs of recent habitation.

Setrakian exited quickly and felt his chest constrict as he stood outside the foul ruin. He did sense evil in the area. The sun was dipping low in the west, darkness soon to take the region.

Setrakian closed his eyes in the manner of a priest in prayer. But he was not appealing to a higher being. He was centering himself, pushing down his fear and accepting the task that had presented itself to him.

By the time he had returned to the farmhouse, the locals had all gone home, the fields as still and gray as the graveyard they were.

Setrakian entered the farmhouse. He poked about a bit, just enough to make sure that he was indeed alone there. In the parlor, he received a fright. On the small reading table next to the best chair in the room, a finely carved wooden smoking pipe lay on its side. Setrakian reached for the pipe, taking it into his crooked fingers—and knew instantly.

The handiwork was indeed his. He had crafted four of these, carved at the order of a Ukrainian captain at Christmastime 1942, to be given away as gifts.

The pipe trembled in Setrakian’s hand as he imagined the guard Strebel sitting in this very room with his family, surrounded by the bricks of the death house, enjoying his tobacco and the fine ribbon of smoke trailing toward the ceiling—on the very site where the fire pits roared and the stench of human immolation rose like screams to the unhearing heavens.

Setrakian broke the pipe in his hands, snapping it in two, then dropping it to the floor and further crushing it with his heel, shivering with a fury he had not experienced in many months.

And then, as suddenly as it came—the mania passed. He was calm again.

He returned to the modest kitchen. He lit a single candle and placed it in the window facing the woods. And then he sat at the table.

Alone in the home, flexing his broken hands while he waited, he recalled the day he came upon the village church. He went seeking food, a man on the run, and discovered the religious house empty. All the Catholic priests had been rounded up and taken away. Setrakian discovered warm vestments in the small rectory adjacent to the church, and more out of necessity than any sort of plan—his clothes were tattered beyond repair, marking him as a refugee of some stripe, and the nights were very cold—he pulled them on. He came upon the ruse of the bandage, which no one questioned in a time of war. Even in silence, and perhaps out of a hunger for religion in that dark year, the villagers took to him, airing their confessions to this young man in holy garb who could only offer them a blessing with his mangled hands.

Setrakian was not the rabbi his family had intended him to become. He was something much different, and yet so oddly similar.

It was there, in that abandoned church, that he wrestled with what he had seen, at times wondering how any of it—from the sadism of the Nazis to the grotesquery of the great Vampire—could have been real. He had only his broken hands as proof. By then, the camp, as he had been told by other refugees to whom he offered “his” church as sanctuary—peasants on the run from the Armia Krajowa, deserters from the Wehrmacht or the Gestapo—had been wiped off the face of the earth.

After dusk, when full night had claimed the countryside, an eerie silence settled over the farm. The countryside is anything but quiet at night, and yet the zone surrounding the former death camp was hushed and solemn. It was as though the night were holding its breath.

A visitor arrived soon enough. He appeared in the window, his worm-white face illuminated by the candle flame flickering against the thin, imperfect glass. Setrakian had left the door unlocked, and the visitor walked inside, moving stiffly as though recovering from some great, debilitating disease.

Setrakian turned to face the man with trembling disbelief. SS-Sturmscharführer Hauptmann, his former taskmaster inside the camp. The man responsible for the carpentry shop, and all of the so-called “court Jews” who supplied skilled personal services to the SS and the Ukrainian staff. His familiar, all-black Schutzstaffel uniform—always pristine—was now in tatters, the hanging shreds revealing twin SS tattoos on his now-hairless forearms. His polished buttons were missing, as were his belt and black cap. The death-head insignia of the SS-Totenkopfverbände remained on his worn black collar. His black leather boots, always buffed to a high sheen, were now cracked and caked with grime. His hands, mouth, and neck were stained with the dried black blood of former victims, and a halo of flies clouded the air around his head.

He carried burlap sacks in his long hands. For what reason, wondered Setrakian, had this former ranking officer of the Schutzstaffel come to collect earth from the site of the former Treblinka camp? This loam fertilized with the gas and ash of genocide?

The vampire looked down upon him with rusty red eyes, its gaze remote.

Abraham Setrakian.

The voice came from somewhere, not the vampire’s mouth. Its bloodied lips never moved.

You escaped the pit.

The voice within Setrakian was deep and broad, reverberating in him as though his spine were a tuning fork. That same, many-tongued voice.

The great vampire. The very one he had encountered inside the camp—speaking through Hauptmann.

“Sardu,” said Setrakian, addressing him by the name of the human form he had taken, the noble giant of legend, Jusef Sardu.

I see you are dressed as a holy man. You once spoke of your God. Do you believe He delivered you from the burning pit?

Setrakian said, “No.”

Do you still wish to destroy me?

Setrakian did not speak. But the answer was yes.

It seemed to read his thought, its voice burbling with what could only be described as pleasure.

You are resilient, Abraham Setrakian. Like the leaf that refuses to fall.

“What is this now? Why are you still here?”

You mean Hauptmann. He was made to facilitate my involvement in the camp. In the end, I turned him. And he then fed upon the young officers he once favored. He had a taste for pure Aryan blood.

“Then—there are others.”

The chief administrator. And the camp doctor.

Eichhorst, thought Setrakian. And Dr. Dreverhaven. Yes indeed. Setrakian remembered them both well.

“And Strebel and his family?”

Strebel interested me not at all, except as a meal. Those bodies we destroy after feeding, before they begin to turn. You see, food here has become scarce. Your war is a nuisance. Why create more mouths to feed?

“Then—what do you want here?”

Hauptmann’s head tilted unnaturally, his full throat clucking once, like a frog’s.

Why don’t we call it nostalgia. I miss the efficiencies of the camp. I have become spoiled by the convenience of a human buffet. And now—I am tired of answering your questions.