Читать книгу The Economy of Light - Jack Dann - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

LET THERE BE LIGHT

I stood by the side of the grave, along with the other reporters, photographers, doctors, police officials, and bystanders, and watched three gravediggers working with pick and shovel to exhume Josef Mengele’s remains. We were in the Embu Cemetery, about twenty-five miles outside of São Paulo. The workers, dark cafuzos of black and Indian blood, had been digging for almost an hour. The sweat ran from their arms and faces, and the heat seemed to radiate from them in clouds. I was reminded of cars overheating in the humid mid-afternoon air.

I had arrived late, having taken the wrong exit on the eight-lane highway that leads out of São Paulo, and I felt nauseated. My stomach ached, a dull pain that had started when I had finally gotten out of my rented Saab. Before I left my hotel in São Paulo to drive here, I had wolfed down a poorly prepared feijoada; the beef and sausages had seemed a bit too sour. I could only hope that it wasn’t too badly tainted. But it was more than the food or the weather. I was uncomfortable here because of the cold-sweat memories of childhood that intruded on this circus-like gathering.

As I looked down into the grave at the white-shirted cafuzos mugging for the television cameras as they chopped and dug and burrowed about four feet into the damp-smelling earth, I could almost smell the sickeningly sweet stink of Auschwitz; and I remembered being pushed out of the train and separated from my mother and brother by soldiers with snarling, snapping guard dogs. I was screaming for my mother and David, my brother, but they had both been swallowed into the frightened crowd that the soldiers were dividing into two groups. I was too short to see over the milling adults. I tried to move, but screaming people were pushing against me from all directions, as if everyone needed to stay as close together as possible, as if that was the only way to survive.

I remember looking up toward the sky and seeing a huge red brick chimney that narrowed toward the top. Thick black smoke billowed out of it, and flames rose between its lightning rods, as if conjured up from sorcerer’s wands. Although I didn’t recognize the smell that permeated the air, it was burning flesh and hair. I put my hands over my mouth and pinched my nose to block out the smells of death and fear and looked down intently at the dry, parched ground, which was like the surface of the moon. I repeated the Shema Yisroel, over and over and over. I thought that if I could narrow my focus of attention and pray with my entire being, I might be able to make the terrible noise and smell of that place disappear.... I might be able to make the camp disappear.

I was only ten years old, but I had been in a slaughterhouse before. I knew what this place was.

And that’s when I saw Mengele.

I saw his boots first. They were black and polished, although covered with dust. He held my chin and raised my face upward, and he looked as large as the chimney I had seen an instant ago. He was handsome in his well-tailored SS uniform; he had an angular face, shaved clean. I noticed that there was a gap between his front teeth and he had a mole on his left cheek. He wore white gloves and, unlike everyone else, he didn’t seem to be sweating. His breath smelled of cigarettes as he said, “Zwillinge, Zwillinge?” Was I a twin? he had asked, but I was so frightened that I could only look at him and blink. I seemed to see with a sort of tunnel vision. I noticed that there was a dull spot and a long scratch on the polished cane he held in his left hand.

“Yes,” someone else said, “he’s a twin. His mother and brother are in the other line.”

That had saved my life. They took my brother and me to a hospital for experimentation and gassed my mother. May she rest in peace.

Then there was a shout, for the gravediggers had located the coffin, and I was jolted back to the present. I found myself whispering the Shema, as if from old habit, although I am not a religious Jew. The cafuzos dug the dirt away from the plain pine coffin, but couldn’t get the top open. The police chief of São Paulo, a heavy-set man with a greased mustache, ordered them to break it open. I’d had a nodding acquaintance with this man when I worked for Mossad, the Israeli secret service. He had built up his political base of fear and power through the Brazilian intelligence bureau and was responsible for capturing Gustav Wagner, the deputy commandant of the Sobibor camp who had gassed two hundred and fifty thousand people with carbon monoxide fumes from a captured Russian tank.

One of the gravediggers smashed through the lid with his pick, and they pried it off. Inside the coffin I could see rotting shreds of clothes and a skeleton with its arms placed at its sides instead of over the chest, which was the customary manner of Brazilian burial. But The SS always buried their dead with arms at the sides, as if one should spend eternity at attention.

Several men climbed down into the grave. One of them, the São Paulo assistant coroner, a man of about sixty with short-cropped white hair, lifted up the skull and held it high for the reporters, who were feverishly snapping pictures. He turned around slowly, holding it in his outstretched hand, and when he held it toward me, I felt a wave of nausea wash over me, and the pain in my stomach became excruciating. The eye sockets and nose cavity seemed dark as tar, even in the blazing sunlight. Everything seemed to waver around me as I looked into that vertiginous darkness, and I saw the barracks when I’d lived in Camp B2f in Auschwitz. They called it the Zoo, and we called Mengele ‘Uncle Pepi.’ He would bring us chocolate and clothes one day and experiment on us the next. As I looked into those eye sockets, I remembered the experiments on my brother and myself—the transfusions of blood, mine to his, and vice versa; the injections every day that made us sick and feverish; and the electrical experiments, which put David into a coma. He had taken David away to the laboratory where he injected chloroform into his heart to kill him. I was to be next...for comparison. But the allies disrupted his plans by liberating us.

I could feel myself falling backward, as if the darkness was time itself and Mengele was still God, taking and giving life. His breath was the crematorium, his touch was the needle and the knife, and his voice was the last lullaby we heard. He used to sing while he worked on us. He loved Verdi and Strauss, the sonovabitch.

He had taken my family.

And I cursed him every moment for choosing my brother first.

* * * *

When I regained consciousness, I found an old acquaintance, Filip Hausner, bending over me. We had worked together years ago in Paraguay and had almost caught Mengele in 1962 right here in São Paulo, but Ben-Gurion had been pressured to call off the operation because of a religious kidnapping that had threatened Israel with a civil war. Hausner and I were called back to Israel. Filip was in his sixties, a camp internee who had left Poland to settle in Israel. He made an unlikely ghoul, for he had been a rabbi, and a brilliant one, from what I had heard. But hatred had changed the course of his life, too. He was bald and jowly, his face spotted with age marks. His eyes were clear and blue, and he still had no need for glasses.

I tried to get up. My back was against a gravestone; the smell of the well-tended grass seemed to revive me.

“Just relax, you still look pale,” Filip said. “You created quite a noise there, trying to grandstand the coroner.” He smiled. “What happened to you?”

“Something I ate, I think. The heat. Old age.”

“I’ve got ten years on you.” He turned to look back at the grave site. The party was over; most everyone had left. “They took the bones to a laboratory,” Filip said. “It looks like this is it.”

“You think that was really Mengele?” I asked.

“It depends on what the forensic doctors have to say, but for my part, I think it’s him. Once the Germans got hold of Mengele’s letters, it was all over. Did you see the couple standing beside the police chief? Wolf and Liselotte Bossert. They took care of Mengele; he was at their beach house when he died. The police found his letters and personal objects at their home in the city, along with a book he’d written.”

I knew most of this. “The Germans really gave you a screwing, didn’t they?”

“Both us and the Americans; this was supposed to be a joint venture. But the Germans conveniently forgot to notify any of us. They just dispatched some of their LKA people down here and flushed it all out. We heard about it when you did, probably; after it was leaked, so the Germans would get the right publicity. But what can you expect from Germans?” Although he was joking, there was a harshness in his voice. He meant it. “Are you feeling better now?”

I stood up, testing. “I feel fine,” I said, although my stomach still hurt. We walked back to the exhumed grave. They had taken everything, every bit of wood from the casket. The gravediggers were standing about, as if admiring the hole they had dug, and then, reluctantly, they began to shovel back the dirt.

“I understand you’re living in America,” Filip said.

I nodded.

“And teaching at university. Why did you leave Israel?”

“I guess I became tired of it all,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I wanted to leave the war behind, I wanted to forget.”

“But you’re here.”

I sighed and looked out over the cemetery at the hundreds of odd angled and weathered headstones, which were like concrete sentences punctuated with the marble and stone crypts and mausoleums of the wealthy. The grass was cut so short it might be used as turf for a golf course, and the sun bleached the gravestones white as bones in a desert. But Mengele’s bones...they were brown, as brown as the water of the Amazon, as brown as the cafuzos who had dug them up. Mengele wouldn’t like that, for surely his bones should be Aryan white. Or so it would seem.

“You said that Mengele had written a book. Have you seen it?” I asked.

“No,” Filip said. “But I understand it was an autobiography. He called it Fiat Lux...Let There Be Light.”