Chapter Text
“Die ich rief, die Geister,
Werd ich nun nicht los.”
Der Zauberlehrling, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It was the middle of the night when Abraham awoke to a trembling, four-fingered hand on his shoulder and an urgent whisper in his ear. “Abe. Abe...!”
The high-pitched voice belonged to Joe and it shook more than the hand on Abraham’s shoulder. “Hamish’s cousin weren’t wrong.”
The rail worker’s foreman opened his eyes to the dimly lit bunk house. Even though they’d taken the blackout material off the windows, they still looked onto pitch past the thin panes. Before Abraham could ask Joe what he was talking about, he heard it.
Then he felt it.
A low, deep note shook the house, not unlike the aftermath of a lightning strike or a bomb’s detonation. It was a penetrating thrum they could feel in their bones and in the fillings in their teeth. Even in the jaundiced light from the lantern Abraham could see the glass in the window panes responding to the bone-deep call.
“Holy Mother,” Joe whispered and made the sign of the cross over his chest, “it’s the spook.”
Abraham was up in a moment, despite forty-five years of hard work, he was still spry and ready to go. He snatched up his coveralls and pulled them on over his night clothes. “Have somebody ready to ring up the station, Joe, and no spook talk. I’m taking a lantern out there. Anyone else up?”
Joe nodded. A quick, hard sigh through his teeth indicated his obvious relief that he wouldn’t be required to go outside. “Believe it or not, Hamish’s gone out to the rails with a torch.”
Abraham raised an eyebrow but scoffed in the next instant. “That’s no spook out there. It’s either something natural or manmade.”
He shoved his feet in his boots, knotted the laces, and headed out with lantern and crow bar. The night was dark with heavy cloud cover and thick humidity. The lantern threw out as much light as it could, but the wick was low to conserve oil, and only penetrated a few meters into the surrounding fog.
Down the slope toward the rails, he saw the illumination of Hamish’s torch. Careful not to slip on the dew-covered grass, Abraham began to trot down the hill toward the Scotsman. As he went, the deep note grew louder until it felt not unlike it had found an unwelcome home in his heart. In one hand the crowbar called out a whisper of reply, in the other the lantern shook.
“Adoshem,” he whispered, then called out for Hamish. Hamish did not reply.
Abraham made his way to the torch’s indistinct light with no pretense of stealth; the noise and the fog were more cover than he needed. The closer he strode, the more the lantern began to sway, the more the crowbar began to vibrate.
Ahead he heard a sharp curse, then Hamish’s torch’s beam began to head east, down the rails. Muttering about the Scotsman going off by himself, Abraham picked up his pace and ran after at an angle to intercept the man as he moved along the rails. With the hill’s incline helping his pace, Abraham made good speed.
Until a dark shape came hurtling through the fog and hit him at waist height.
Abraham fell back, boots slipping uncontrollably on the wet grass. He did his best to turn as he fell so his assailant would take the brunt of the blow. Fortunately, the assailant was more interested in grabbing his wrists than wrestling. Unfortunately, Abraham couldn’t swivel his body fast enough: the two hit the ground with equal gasp-inducing force.
Abraham was the quicker to recover. He let go of the lantern in favor of grabbing his wiry attacker and to hit him soundly with the fist holding the crowbar. He broke free of the man’s grip, grabbed a handful of his hair, and went for the punch. Disadvantaged and fouled as it was with the ground limiting his elbow’s clearance, the extra weight from the bar would have to take up the lack of leverage.
His fist shot out in a short jab and collided with something hard. It felt like he pinched his knuckles between the heavy bar and a cheek bone. Under the force of his strike, the assailant fell away with a garbled curse.
In that brief moment, the man’s face was momentarily angled toward the lantern’s dying glow.
“Hamish,” Abraham huffed in surprise. Only then did he feel the nervous pounding of his heart in his chest, the stronger vibration of the crowbar and ache in his gnarled knuckles.
“Grab the bloody lantern!” Distracted, Hamish scrabbled unsteadily forward on hands and knees to catch at the lantern. “Give it back here you bleedin’ bastard!”
Abraham squinted in confusion as he watched the Scotsman. Was it a trick of the fog or was the lantern moving toward the track without rolling? The flame died before he could answer that question with a closer look and threw them into deeper murkiness.
Voice pitched to carry over the continuing metallic thrum, Abraham asked, “Who’s got your torch, Hamish?”
The clatter of callused hands and blunt fingernails over metal and glass announced Hamish’s victory over his quarry. “Bloody spook took the torch and it almost got the lantern.”
With a look, Abraham confirmed the torch was still moving, but it was further away now. Slowly, he took to his feet. There was something strange about the torch’s movement and light. The angle of the beam suggested it was pointed the opposite direction as it was traveling. “Your spook walks backward?”
“It’s dragging it, it is.” Hamish replied. “I told you, Abe, my cousin wouldn’t lie. There’s a spook headed for London.”
Abraham shook his head. He’d heard stories of course, of dybbuk, ibbur, and poltergeists, but he’d never seen evidence such things existed. Not for the first time, he wished he went to temple more often. If such things existed they were not to be tampered with without the guidance of a rabbi.
A wailing cry went up through the fog. The noise immediately set the hair on Abraham’s neck and arms on end. It sounded like the desperate voice of a child or animal. The vibration of the rails hit a crescendo; spikes began to shoot from the wooden ties. The rails creaked and shook like metal roots trying to rip themselves free of the ground. In the near distance, the torchlight winked out.
The two men stood, looking at the rails with fear and incredulity. Abraham thought it would take an amazing amount of energy to do such a thing. Surely it was a Nazi or Japanese secret weapon, maybe even Russian; all the ghost stories he’d ever heard were never on so grand a scale. Hamish made the sign of the cross with the lantern still in his hand. The metal and glass implement pivoted on its ring until it was parallel to the ground, visibly yearning to travel down the tracks.
“Mama!” It was a child’s broken cry and it came from the direction of whatever thing was calling to the rails, ties, and lantern.
The cry was a catalyst: without thought, he began to run toward the voice. Behind him Hamish cursed and called him a fool. “It’s a trick, Abe! A trick!”
If it wasn’t a trick, though, Abraham could not live with himself if a child were harmed by the railway debris. Not if he could help. How could he face his wife if he didn’t try?
Then, another desperately fearful and agonized cry pierced the fog and the crowbar in his hand shot out of his grip. The rails trembled and creaked and the crescendo of before was followed by another, this yet stronger, this one determined. The buttons of his coveralls pulled out before him, tugging him by the fabric, his footing became precarious as something pulled at the steel caps within his boots.
Unexpectedly, everything stopped for a moment of chill silence, made more eerie for the noise and tumult of before. It made the sudden clatter of metal raining down on wet grass, wooden ties, rail gravel, and the rails themselves all the more shocking.
Spurred by a new fear, that he was too late to aid a child it was within his power to help, Abraham called on reserves of strength he’d rarely known. Boots grinding the heavy gravel together, Abraham pushed hard. He only paused, skidding along the uncertain footing, when he saw the twisted remains of Hamish’s torch. Fearful, but undaunted, he ran on.
When he came to the crowbar he only intended to stop long enough to pick it up again. However, as he raised his head and body from the crouch, he saw a shape in the moon-lit fog. It seemed small, but perhaps just diminutive for the distance, and human. It was bent over, like him, though it had a shuffle to its step.
Even without the vibration of the rails, Abraham’s heart, though housed in a tall body with broad shoulders, knew a combination of dread and hope that was all too familiar. He was transfixed, unmoving but for his heartbeat and the rise and fall of his breath, the rhythmic push of his chest against his nightshirt.
Abraham saw the shape straighten up and slowly, a bit at a time as each veil of fog fell away, resolve into a more distinct human shape. Not a tall one, but thin, gangly, and awkward. The tension and strange atmosphere of the tableau did not, at first, allow Abraham to see the thing for what it was. He gripped the crow bar tight and let the shape come on until it was close enough that the fog could no longer obfuscate the life within its grip.
From the fog’s depths stepped a boy.
In the fog and gloom it was hard to determine the boy’s age only that he was stretched thin and walked with an unsteady, sleepwalker’s gait. His clothes were dirty and his feet either large, or his shoes too big. His face was filthy, but for clean lines radiating from his eyes where tears had born away dirt. Such murky eyes, too, remained half-lidded. More than anything Abraham was struck by how weary he looked, as if he’d been fighting sleep for years.
The moment Abraham straightened the boy stopped. The boy’s eyes drew up and down Abraham’s tall form and then past, perhaps looking for others. Then the gaze came back and fastened to the crowbar in Abraham’s hand.
“Easy, lad.” Abraham wished he’d left the tool on the track. “I’ve no intention of hurting you. There’s just been a bit of strange business on these tracks tonight. Are you…? Lad, are you hurt?”
The boy did not move nor speak, he only stared at the iron bar in Abraham’s hand as if the mute piece of metal held more answers than a human being might. Thinking the boy had seen and therefore expected some kind of violence, Abraham tried again.
“I’m going to put this crow bar down,” Abraham said, and began to bend down to do so. He held the bar loosely in his fingers despite its weight.
“Nein!” the boy cried, eyes opening more, showing wide and wild in the dark. “No, do not!”
Thinking that surely the boy thought he was going to use the crowbar on him, Abraham opened his hand and let the bar fall. It hit the gravel with only the force and weight of its short drop.
The boy began stumbling backwards and away, waving his hands in front of his chest in short bursts of denial. “No! Hold the bar! Es wird sie benutzen!”
Perplexed, Abraham paused, still bent over the discarded crow bar. “You want me to pick it up?”
The boy nodded vigorously and without slowing his retreat. With his eyes fastened on the bar he didn’t see the raised tie behind him; his heel hit the edge of the solid wood and stopped. With one foot pushing back and the other suddenly arrested, the boy twisted, overbalanced, and fell to one side.
Forgetting the bar completely, Abraham raced forward again. The boy’s body hit the rail dross and tie, but his head impacted against one of the rails. He didn’t get back up.
Gently, Abraham crouched over the boy and tried to rouse him with light prodding at one hollow shoulder. He found the boy in such a state of malnutrition that he worried that he could too easily hurt him by shaking him or slapping his face. Instead, he carefully scooped the boy up in a motion comfortable and nostalgic. It was a memory his muscles could never forget.
Walking along the rails, Abraham headed back toward the bunk house, leaving his crow bar and the remains of their torch behind. Not far on his way, he saw the warm glow of a lantern. “Oi there, that you I hear Abe?”
“Hamish,” Abraham said, voice raised. “Get yourself and that lamp over here. I found something.”
The light bobbled a bit in the fog, but with it he heard not one, but two sets of running feet. Abraham was not surprised to see Joe with the lamp and Hamish with a rifle. By contrast, both of the other men’s faces composed varying looks of shock the moment they came close enough to see the too-light bundle of skin and bones Abraham was cradling to his chest.
“What you got, Abe?” Joe asked, slightly bewildered. He looked even less put together than he had back at the bunkhouse.
“What’s a kid doing out on the bloody rails at night?” Hamish demanded. “In the middle of the arse end of nowhere!”
“No idea.” Abraham shrugged with the shoulder that the boy’s head wasn’t tucked against. He had no intention of telling them the boy spoke German; there was still too much hatred, especially since news of the death camps got out. They’d know, however, when they heard his English. “He’s been out in the elements a bit.”
“Probably an orphan,” Joe suggested. “Scads of ‘em since the war ate so many of their daddies up. Sometimes they end up in bad places, orphans do.”
Hamish snorted. “Yeah, them that don’t have a da to cut off their trigger finger.”
“Dammit, Hamish! It weren’t like that!”
“Both of you shut your traps,” Abraham rumbled before the bickering devolved into a fist fight. “Let’s get him back to the bunkhouse. He fell and hit his head on a rail; for all I know, his skull might be fractured.”
“Yeah, okay Abe,” Joe said sullenly, “but Hamish owes my dad an apology.”
Abraham didn’t think Hamish owed Joe’s father anything, but said nothing as such as they walked. Hamish made no comeback, content in Abraham’s silence and in casting a sneer at Joe’s back.
The walk back didn’t take long, it certainly wasn’t long enough for Abraham to sort out the strange goings on along the rails. As strange as it seemed, he supposed the disturbance could have been magnetic in nature: as far as he could tell, all the things that moved were metal. Perhaps it could have even been a seismic event.
The question remained: was the disturbance natural or manufactured? Did the boy have some knowledge of it? He had, after all, wanted Abraham to keep the crow bar in his hand. The problem, as he saw it, was suggesting the disturbance was manmade while he had a German child on his hands. Children were all too often tools as much as they were victims of war.
The whole work crew was up and about when they arrived. The bunk house windows, bare of their blackout material, were a welcome warmth in the predawn hours. A few of the workmen were waiting outside, smoking cigarettes and swapping ghost stories. They were the first to see the returning men.
Cries of ‘Abe’s back!’ went around the house. Through the windows, Abraham saw people standing up to push through the door or move to peer through the square panes.
Stepping forward, Hamish gestured vaguely with his rifle. “Get out of the bleeding way, you pigs! Abe found a kid out on the tracks.”
With his greater height and broad shoulders, Abraham easily pushed past the men, those straining to catch a glimpse of the boy and those looking to Hamish for answers or gossip. After pulling the sheets and thin wool blanket up, he set the boy down and immediately discovered the boy’s nose had been bleeding profusely.
“Somebody fetch me a wash basin,” Abraham barked. “Any news come over the line while I was gone?”
As he waited for the water, Abraham adjusted his pillow in order to tilt the boy’s head back in case his nose was still bleeding. Then he took the boy’s shoes off; they were definitely too big and padded out with two pairs of decrepit socks. He checked the boy’s head and found a bump where his head had hit the rail. Under the dirt his skin was suntanned and hot with fever.
A basin of water and a cloth were soon brought, but there was no word of interest from either of the stations east or west of them. They had not seen, heard, nor felt anything out of the ordinary.
Before washing the boy up, Abraham carefully pulled up his eyelids to check his pupils. Then, just to be thorough, he decided to check the boy’s pulse. It was when he picked up the boy’s left arm and pushed back his tattered sleeve that he saw it. Or, rather, he saw them: a hand-written scrawl of malevolent numbers.
“214782?” Hovering over his shoulder, the man that brought the basin swore colorfully. “What is that Abe? Is that a tattoo?”
Swift and unbidden, tears squeezed out his eyes and down the crags of his face. A prayer fell from his lips as he grasped the boy’s hand and pressed it between his. In Yiddish he said, “How you have suffered, child.”
The men nearby didn’t know Yiddish, but they didn’t need to in order to understand. Not knowing what else to do, they gave Abraham and the boy a wide berth.
It was warm, dark red beneath his eyelids. There was the telltale scratch of wool against his cheek and under his fingertips, the sound of water boiling, and the scent of bread cooking. Somehow… somehow it smelled and felt like sunlight on iron.
It was a good dream. Like the one he sometimes had about the warm tabby kitten before Poland; he’d had far too few good dreams. And like the dream about the soft tabby kitten, with its rough pink tongue, dry purr, and white whiskers, he knew opening his eyes would only bring about the loss of his fantasy.
Unfortunately, in his dream his subconscious hadn’t forgotten hunger. If only it had forgotten the smell of toasted bread, he could forgive it. A small battle versus hunger and warmth was conducted. As it always did, though, hunger laid him low; his gut spoke words of desperation.
“You awake, lad?”
It ceased to be a fantasy the moment his eyelashes brushed wool. He was somewhere warm, somewhere he could smell food, and he was not dreaming.
“I’ve got some bread and an egg if you think you can eat it.”
Paralyzed with fear and confusion, he tried to piece together where he could be. Warm wool blanket, soft bed, food, a man with an English accent: neither Hell nor the displaced people camps in Poland, then. No, not even in those camps would he have woken without his clothes on: his shoes, trousers, and socks were gone.
Recognizing the blanket was not much of a shield, he slowly pulled it from his face and propped himself up. Moving his torso upright felt like a mistake; the higher it went the worse pain ricocheted along the inside of his cranium. He squinted through the piercing light coming through a window near an open door and saw a tall, broad-shouldered man at an old iron stove.
The man was well-fed. It had been a long time since he’d seen a man in his years with such a healthy look about him. No, he reminded himself, it had only been a bit more than six months since Doktor Schmidt. Doktor Schmidt had eaten very well.
The pain grew stronger; one of the endless headaches that had started in the wake of Kristallnacht and grown in intensity ever since Schmidt and it came into his life.
“Water, please?”
The tall man nodded and turned from the stove with a plate holding two thick slices of toast and a boiled egg. “We’ve a bit of margarine and some honey, if you fancy that with the toast.”
The big man didn’t hand him the plate; instead he set it on the bed near the boy’s feet. He turned away again to fill a tin cup with water from a canteen. The cup he held out toward him. “Which is it?”
One didn’t survive long on half measures; Erik decided to try his luck. “Both, please.” He took the cup of water, careful to do so with fingers that did not tremble with want or fear. Hunger, though, it was hard not to sacrifice dignity to hunger. Watching the man over the cup’s lip, he drank it all and felt it run a cool trail from his mouth down to his stomach.
The man did not stop to watch him for the duration of the water; true to his offer, he retrieved a dish of margarine and a jar of honey. “Name’s Abraham. And you?”
For a moment the boy considered lying or pretending he didn’t understand the question. But a name like Abraham? He was undecided for another instant; in the many hells of Poland, he had learned that even other Jews weren’t immune to treachery. However, in the end, a name was a name and his wasn’t indicative of anything.
“Erik,” he said and then pressed his mouth into a thin line. He stared at the tin cup. He imagined he could still taste the metal that had previously been pressed against his lips. Imagined it, because if he really had tasted it, it would be the obscene kiss of the unnatural.
Abraham held his right hand out to Erik and the boy gave back the tin cup. With his left, Abraham took back the plate of egg and toast.
Erik’s eyes narrowed in anger, but he bit his tongue rather than protest the loss of food. Asking for margarine and honey might have been too cheeky, but why then had the man retrieved the margarine and honey at all? The headache reappeared and suddenly he could feel the honey jar’s metal lid in phantom fingers.
The feeling fled the moment the man began spreading the margarine over the toast. “There’ll be more honey than margarine. Honey’s from one of the men’s wives who keeps bees, but butter and margarine are rationed. More water?”
Erik’s stomach gurgled loudly before he could answer. “Yes, please.”
He even managed a thank you when the plate was placed beside him once more. Hunger made an animal of him; he attempted to shove the first piece of toast entirely in his mouth. Thick as the bread was, he nearly suffocated himself. Erik was glad Abraham’s back was turned to refill the tin cup: he had to bite and spit half the brown bread out of his mouth and back onto the plate.
“Washed your clothes; they’re outside drying,” Abraham continued. “Couldn’t get all the stains out. We’ve a sewing kit if you’ve a mind to mend the tears.”
Jaw hard at work on the bread, Erik still managed to look at the shirt he was wearing. It was clean, well-worn, and far too big on him. A different shirt meant the man had seen his tattoo. He wondered if people outside Poland knew what the number meant. Curious, he plucked the collar wide and peeked down his torso to his underpants. Those were his. Why hadn’t they gone into the wash with everything else? Though the gesture was strange to him, he found he appreciated it.
Instead of replying to Abraham’s conversation, Erik only opened his mouth to shove more toast within. The food and warmth of the moment parted the stabbing headache and pressed it back to the periphery of his mind. No color, he thought, could be brighter than the taste of sweet honey and rich margarine on his tongue. He closed his eyes to better experience the feel of his teeth sinking into the crust, the chewy texture as he worked his jaws, the scratch on his throat as he swallowed too quickly. It was nothing like all the hard, raw vegetables and occasional fruits and berries he’d taken from the fields that butted up against the railroad tracks.
When he opened his eyes once more, the tin cup was back before him. He took it and drained it just as quickly. Then he frowned; the water washed away the crumbs and sweetness from his mouth sooner than he liked.
“What were you doing out there?” Abraham asked. He took the cup back again.
“I’m going to London for work,” Erik admitted. “I have no money for a train so I’m walking.”
The man turned to fill the cup a third time. Erik was glad for the reprieve; he could lick the crumbs and honey off the plate with none the wiser. With the bread in his stomach, his fingers didn’t shake as much when he began peeling the egg.
He hadn’t had a whole egg to himself for months; the DP camps always stocked powdered eggs. The powdered ones were still good, but a real egg was something else entirely. Powdered eggs could never fill his mouth with the richness of a soft-boiled, gooey yolk.
When the egg was gone and he spied no bread crumbs in the gathers of the wool blanket, he turned his attention to the interior of the bunkhouse he was housed within.
The bunks reminded him painfully of all the temporary lodgings he’d inhabited in too-recent history. These were far nicer. Even if the blanket over his folded legs was a little moth-eaten in places, it was still better than the torn and threadbare ones in any of the German or Allies-run camps in Poland.
The house had a stove not unlike the small one they used in the Sonderkommando barracks. It felt friendly; a heavy iron thing with a warm belly that probably radiated heat even an hour after the fire went out. It was nothing like the huge, demonic kilns where they’d burned bodies day and night.
“Don’t you have family back in Germany, Erik?”
Erik raised his eyes to stare somberly at Abraham’s calm visage. He’d been asked the same question hundreds of times and it always inspired the same set of concerns. Admitting his orphaned status was a proposition that would be fraught with peril until he looked at least half as old as he felt.
Abraham seemed like the sort of man that wouldn’t sell him out. He gave him water, a real egg, toast with margarine and honey, and he even offered to let him use a sewing kit to mend his torn clothes. It was likely even his shirt Erik found himself within. Still, kindness meant nothing. Herr Schmidt had smiled, laughed, and even clapped delightedly when shoving needles between Erik’s teeth had summoned it.
“No.”
Erik watched Abraham’s face keenly for his reaction to the word. Though he was a somber man, Erik thought he would surely learn something from his admission. It came as a surprise when Abraham’s jaw tightened and he swallowed. “I can say the same. The number on your arm, only the Auschwitz prisoners got those, didn’t they?”
Numbness bubbled up from Erik’s torso and spread through his extremities. He’d done this before and already knew what Abraham would ask next. He skipped ahead in the fruitless conversation: “You can tell me their names, if you want.”
“They’re dead, but perhaps you met them,” Abraham said, his voice tight. It was hard to see a grown man on the verge of crying, but Erik had seen and provoked far worse. He didn’t tell Abraham that, he also didn’t tell him he never learned any names or faces if he could help it; it was safer for everyone around him that way.
Abraham reached into one of his pockets and retrieved a photo that was so dog-eared and worn it looked as if it would easily delaminate. “My daughter, Marlene Rosenthal, her husband Ariel, and two little ones; Benjamin and Ruth.”
There weren’t many children released from the camps; all the children the White Angel hadn’t had plans for were sent straight to the gas chambers. Most of the ones that went into the horrific man’s laboratory wished they had, too. Erik was no different for all he was Schmidt’s rather than Mengele’s.
Leaning forward to look at the photo, but not to touch, Erik glanced at the young couple and their children. Erik always gave an automatic negative when asked about missing relatives or friends; in his line of concentration camp work, he only met Nazis, Sonderkommandos, and corpses. Corpses like his father and—
“Ruth was my sister’s name.” Likely Ruth Rosenthal had a far swifter end than Ruth Lehnsherr. He tried not to think about that. “None of them look familiar. I’m sorry.”
Abraham recovered visibly, though he retained a sadness to his expression that Erik supposed would remain on his face forever. Quiet returned to the bunkhouse as Abraham spent a moment in mournful contemplation.
Erik swung his skinny legs out from under the blanket and gathered the chipped plate and the tin cup. Though tall for his age, the shirt still hung all the way down to his knees; Abraham was a tall, broad man. He asked quietly where to do the washing up and was directed outside to a hand pump. Erik was relieved to leave Abraham to his mourning within the wooden structure; he had enough of his own.
It was lovely outside. The sun was shining for once, even if the grass beneath his bare feet was still cold and damp. No other workmen were in sight, but that was more of a relief than a concern. Erik liked being alone; it was both safer and much quieter. Though he sometimes missed listening to music on whatever radio was handy, he wouldn’t trade it for silence.
There were two sets of wooden picnic benches outside that looked as though they had weathered a few generations of Britain’s inclement climate. The paint had worn off the tops of the benches and in patches along the tabletops. The sides of each table and bench were a labyrinth of split and peeling paint. As he looked them over, Erik noticed a small wasp emerge from a small mud nest constructed along the underside of one of the tables.
He smiled at the wasp and wandered past to the hand pump. A metal trough and washboard sat on the concrete square beneath the spigot. There was enough water leftover from washing his clothes to wash the dishes without trouble. Erik crouched down and slipped the plate and tin cup beneath the cold water.
In the midst of rolling up the long shirt sleeves, the wasp flew over the trough and, after circling once, lightly touched down. Erik had seen wasps float on the surface of water before; it was a feat that never failed to impress him.
After he and the other Jewish children in Düsseldorf had lost their right to public education, he’d had lessons in a house crowded with others like him. He always remembered the science lessons and there had been one about liquid and surface tension. He’d enjoyed the way science could explain something without lessening the magic of it. In contrast, the lessons he’d received in science from Herr Schmidt were tainted with pain and mistrust.
In a rare moment of levity, Erik carefully sank his hands under the water and began to wash the plate while watching the wasp. The insect stood delicately on the water, each of its six tiny feet pushing indentations into the water’s surface the way Erik’s would if he were to stand on a bed, and bent its head to drink.
At first, Erik concentrated closely on keeping the surface of the water from rippling due to the turbulence his washing created. Then his focus turned to the wasp’s tiny shadow on his submerged hands. He stared absently as his fingers rubbed at the porcelain plate and the wasp’s shadow was folded and stretched across his hands with the movements.
Erik did not notice the oncoming train at first. The not-so-distant blare of the engine’s horn alerted and reminded him: Auschwitz was the largest of the death camps, serviced directly as it was by rail. The trains arrived regularly with cargo comprised of food, necessities, soldiers, or warm bodies destined for cold earth. Erik had heard and viewed the trains with mixed emotions; he had an undeniable attraction to the massive iron machines despite the death knell the horns came to represent. It also seemed that it preferred the rolling titans.
Realization stilled Erik’s hands in the water: Abraham had found him on the rails in the midst of one of its nightmare-spawned attacks. What if it had damaged the rails? He remembered trembling rails and numerous rail spikes shooting out of the wooden ties. What if the train, full of passengers headed for London, went off the tracks and crashed? People would die.
“Nein,” he whispered, staring to the east where the woods swallowed up the rails. “Bitte, nein.”
But it didn’t even stir. After all, it only did him extremely random, vengeance-based favors. It was a violent and malevolent thing that fed on his pain and delivered on his anger.
Isolated within his helplessness, Erik remained still, frozen with his hands in the cold water as the train came steadily closer. The horn only sounded at roads and he had seen very few the evening before, but he could feel it coming closer, could feel the earth tremble as it neared. He lost track of time as he waited for the sound and feel of tons of iron plowing into rain-softened earth. He did not so much as twitch until suddenly it cleared the trees and came into view.
Erik stared, transfixed by the engine as it surged along the tracks. When it was nearly abreast of his position, the engineer leaned out the window to give a wave at Erik and the bunkhouse. The boy turned his head, tracking the movement of the train in both fear and longing. It was so steady and full of purpose.
Then the engineer ducked back in and reached up for something. The horn. Erik didn’t expect the blaring, sudden scream of the claxon. He screamed in shock and stumbled backwards, throwing his arms out and up to protect his face. Off-balance, his rear hit the ground with a spine-jarring thump. The metal washbasin turned over, sending water flooding away and into the dew-wet grass.
His heart thundered in his chest, loud and constant where the train’s engine faded with its departure. His ears were ringing and his headache had returned with a vengeance. He didn’t lower his arms until he remembered the wasp floating in the basin. Heart beating in time with the spikes of pain driving through his skull, Erik rocked forward onto his hands and feet.
There was no evidence of the wasp’s tiny body among the grass or on the bare patches of ground. With trepidation, Erik righted the trough. The wasp was not within nor crushed beneath; it was more a relief than seeing Abraham’s unbroken plate.
Thus bent over the basin, Erik saw a single drop of bright red splatter against the basin’s galvanized sheet metal. Brow furrowed in thought, he leaned forward to stare at the color. It was promptly joined by a second and third that diluted swiftly in water. Reaching up slowly, he touched his nose; his fingers came away dripping red. The sharp tang of blood was thick in his nose and on the back of his tongue. It was beginning to drip steadily on the clean white cotton of his borrowed shirt.
Quickly, Erik stood and pulled the shirt off over his head and threw it in the basin. It was muddy in the back where he’d fallen in surprise at the train’s horn. His underpants were also wet from the fall.
Crestfallen and angry with himself he pulled off the underpants and wiped his face with them. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been naked in far worse places. The blood soaked easily into the threadbare cloth. Sodden and bloody, he threw them into the basin, too. Cursing darkly under his breath, Erik reached across for the hand pump, intending to fill the basin and wash the shirt and his underwear.
Though his hand reached the pump instinctually, his brain was slow to catch up with the reality of the pump’s new deformity. His fingers rested on the apex of the pipe’s new forty-five degree angle. The spigot was horizontal, the hand pump’s lever spearing dirt softened by rain and dew.
He stared at the spigot in horror, but just as quickly the anger came and he glared around, naked and bloody-faced. “Ich hast dich.”
Inside the bunk house Abe had already wrapped up the brown bread and put away the honey and margarine. He paused at the stove and stared at his photo. As always, he turned it over and stared again at the faded sepia ink. The names and ages thereon were all constructed in Ariel’s formal script.
When the boy mentioned lack of funds for the train, Abe had said nothing. Even without funds there was a time when Kindertransport would have taken him. Kindertransport would have taken Ruth and Benjamin, too.
If the boy really wanted to go to North America or even Palestine there were many organizations that would see him through. There was something holding the boy back. Perhaps it had something to do with the shaking rails.
The others had deemed it a haunting, but Abraham still wasn’t sure he could believe such a wild story. He’d never seen evidence of dybbuk or golems and though there were plenty of unexplained phenomena along the tracks, he wasn’t ready to let something supernatural explain the shaking rails, flying spikes, and pull of lantern and torch. He had to ask the boy about the strange goings on in the night.
With a sigh, Abe took the butter knife and went outside under the pretext of cleaning it off. The scene beyond the door was a trial to sort through.
The blood on the boy’s face and chest caught his eyes first, but seeing his emaciated body naked and straining to pull the handpump spigot upright from its unnatural angle struck a flash of alarm through Abraham’s chest.
“Boy,” he said, crossing the distance easily in his long-legged gait. “Lad. Erik. You’ll give yourself a hernia. Stop.”
The boy stopped pulling, but his cold-looking hands still slapped against the spigot and pipe in percussive, albeit impotent, anger. “Ich hast dich!”
Slow and quiet, Abe approached the disturbing scene. With careful movements, he plucked his handkerchief from his coveralls and presented it to the angrily distraught youth.
Tired and frustrated, the boy let his body slump against the pump’s new curvature. In a manner reminiscent of accepting a white flag, he stretched out a long-fingered hand and took the handkerchief to press against his bleeding nose. “I should leave.”
“You’re thinking of working for the money to go to America or Palestine, aren’t you?”
Erik shrugged. “Maybe. Mainly, I wanted out of the DP camps in Poland. The British and American soldiers had us housed with the very people that killed us in the camps.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Abe said with his gaze firmly fixed on the boy’s face. “Why don’t you stay with me and my wife for a bit? London’s going to be a mess from all the bombing for a long time. Should be easy to find work and you can save your money faster if you don’t have to pay rent. I’d consider it rent enough if you kept my wife company while I’m away at work.”
Erik stilled and leveled a somber look on Abraham. Slowly, as if pulling against an unseen weight, he straightened and stared across the crumpled cotton and his raw-boned knuckles. Even without his expression half-obscured by his hand and the handkerchief, the look was unreadable.
“Shouldn’t you be asking me about the pipe?”
Abe nodded. “That was coming after you got dressed. You want to answer that question first?”
The boy lowered the handkerchief and stared at it. There wasn’t too much blood; his nose had probably stopped bleeding right away. Abraham watched as Erik stared at the letters AR in faded blue embroidery half within the field of red. Was he remembering a similarly monogrammed handkerchief?
Abraham and his wife had lost their children to the war and had a home full of reminders to show for it. Erik was a child that had lost his parents and had no reminders of them at all.
“My wife,” Abraham tried again, “she gets lonely when I’m out here.”
The boy’s chest inflated dramatically to accommodate his sigh. At first he looked away at the strangely deformed handpump, then he closed his eyes momentarily.
“Mr. Abraham,” he said once his eyes were open again. He fixed Abraham with a serious look that far belied his form. “The pipe, the rails; it’s because of me. If I stay in your home, your wife will not want for company.”
The boy paused, perhaps trying to find the best way to continue. “She won’t want for company,” his gaze dropped back down to the blood-stained embroidery, “because I’m haunted by a poltergeist.”