The room had stopped spinning at last, and Isarel was sitting on the floor along with the other three, his back against the brick wall. Jude was still standing at the centre. Position of authority, thought Isarel. I bet it’s deliberate, as well. Good for him; I don’t think I could stand up if my life depended on it.
There was still a strong feeling of distortion and he could not get a proper grasp on reality. He could pin down individual thoughts: important things like escaping and Moira and Ahasuerus – God yes, where is Ahasuerus? – but he could not make them link up in his mind.
He could only think that here in front of him was the legend. He didn’t die, thought Isarel. All those years, all those stories . . . I can’t take my eyes off him; I don’t think any of us can. He glanced at Moira and saw that she was curled up in one corner, her chin resting on her bent knees, her hair tumbling about her shoulders. But she was not looking at Jude, she was looking at Isarel and this brought a faint, far-off comfort. In a minute his thoughts would start to mesh properly again.
For what seemed to be a very long time no one spoke, and when the silence was finally broken, Isarel heard with a shock that it was his own voice.
‘You’re alive,’ he said. ‘You didn’t die at Nuremberg.’ And thought, Well, at least I can string a cogent sentence together.
‘The Nuremberg Trial was a fake,’ said Jude. ‘I was never there.’
‘You’ve been here all along? All these years—’
‘Yes.’
‘Vogel’s prisoner,’ said Isarel, and there was a long pause before Jude answered.
But he said, ‘Yes. I have been Vogel’s prisoner – the first Vogel, Karl, then later his son and now his grandson, Conrad. I have been their prisoner ever since the Nazis found out what I was doing.’ He stopped, and Isarel thought: his voice is like no voice I ever heard. It’s like deep blue midnight. Like vintage red wine or a cat’s fur.
He asked, ‘What you were doing . . .?’ and Jude said,
‘I wasn’t working for the Nazis. I was working against them.’
It was as vivid as if it had been yesterday. All those years, all the decades inside Eisenach, a solitary castle prisoner, rather as Rudolf Hess had been a solitary prisoner inside Spandau. Karl Vogel and his family had allowed Jude to work and to compose, because they had never ceased to covet the Chant, and although the captivity had been absolute, it had been a silken one.
But it was still too easy to look back across the loop of time, to see the years melt and blur, until he might have been in Auschwitz with the sounds of mass murder echoing about the bare wooden concert hut.
When he had stopped being sick in the washbasin in the corner of his room in the officers’ quarters, he lay on the narrow bed, drinking neat whiskey from the bottle. The fiery spirit burned his throat and scalded his stomach but it did not erase the nightmare images printed on his brain.
It was nearly midnight when Otto Burkhardt knocked on the door and by then Jude was so drunk that he could hardly stand up.
‘What do you want?’
Burkhardt opened the door and stood just inside the door, looking down. Jude’s hair was tumbling over his forehead, he had discarded his evening tie and his shirt was unbuttoned at the neck. He stayed where he was, supine on the bed, the whiskey bottle held loosely in one hand. It was the height of discourtesy, but he was too drunk to care about being courteous to this animal.
Burkhardt regarded him with the insinuating smile that Jude found so repulsive. ‘I have come to convey to you the thanks of my masters, Herr Weissman,’ he said. ‘Your music made for a smoother operation than usual. A total of eight hundred—’
Eight hundred lambs to the slaughter. Suffocated and then shovelled into ovens and burned to charred anonymity.
‘I have brought for you a gesture of our appreciation,’ said Burkhardt and stepped back, so that Jude could see the young female Nazi officer who stood at his side. ‘A token of gratitude from my masters for your performance.’
‘Performance?’ The word came out slurred but not as slurred as it might have been.
The smile deepened. ‘The music,’ said Burkhardt softly. ‘We are immensely grateful to you, Herr Weissman.’ He glanced at the girl. ‘I find,’ he said in a different tone, ‘that executions often have an aphrodisiacal effect. And so—’
Jude looked at the girl and felt a sudden crude lust, born not of desire or simple sexual hunger, but of anger and hatred. He set down the half-empty whiskey bottle, and sat up, looking at the girl. A Nazi. It would be a small revenge, but—
He nodded dismissal to Burkhardt and pulled the girl inside, locking the door. She was thin and blonde, and she had cold, greedy eyes. She stood before him, her eyes raking his body, and then said softly, ‘Anything you wish, Herr Weissman. I will do anything you wish.’
Jude, his lips set in a hard cold line, said, ‘Will you indeed, my dear?’
A thin grey dawn was breaking outside when the girl finally stumbled from his bed. Jude, torn between fierce exultation and bitter self-disgust, waited until she had gone and then slid from under the sheets, and pulled on trousers and a thick dark sweater. He dashed cold water on to his face, and padded cautiously outside, scanning the camp for sentries.
A sprinkling of coarse ash covered the roof of the death houses, and a heavy, fat-laden scent clung to the air. Jude glanced at the narrow brick chimneys.
It was easier than he had expected to dodge the guards, and at this hour there were only a couple of token patrols. They marched exactly in step, and Jude, keeping in the shadows of the serried rows of barracks, timed the steps absently. If you were writing music to reflect this, it would be thin and metallic. Lots of tympani, maybe even one of those small hand drums called a timbrel. Very, very staccato. Concentrate, Jude. He crossed the deserted compound to the nearest of the prisoners’ huts.
He had not dared to hope he would be able to get inside, but he saw at once that several of the huts had doors that rolled down from the roof and secured into the ground with bolts, rather like a huge roll-top desk. He crossed swiftly to the nearest, and bent to lift the bolts, cautiously pushing the steel shutter up until a band of blackness showed at the bottom. Enough to squeeze through but not enough to be noticed.
He crawled underneath, making as little sound as possible, and once on the other side, stood up, trying to get his bearings. The first thing to assail his senses was the smell: human sweat and unwashed human flesh and hair, and above it all, so strong that it was like a solid wall, the warm, fetid stench of human excrement. He stayed absolutely still, aware that there were dozens of people in here, but unable to see them and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the light.
And then out of the blackness in front of him, a voice said, ‘There’s somebody in here with us.’
It was unexpectedly eerie to hear that whispery voice coming out of the dark, but Jude stayed where he was, waiting and listening, trying to assess what was in here. After a moment, a second voice said, ‘You’re right. Somebody’s crept in. Somebody’s crept in from outside and is hiding in here listening to us.’
‘A spy,’ said another voice. ‘A spy standing inside the door listening to us.’
Jude, trying to make out the direction of the voices, still trying to penetrate the dimness, said clearly, ‘I’m not a spy. I want to talk to you. If you have any way of making a light, please will you do so.’ There was a pause, and then the scrape of a tinder box. Three or four tiny candle flames burned up. Half a dozen or so faces swam through the darkness, lit from below to hollow disembodied life.
‘It’s the composer,’ hissed the voice who had spoken first of all. ‘The one who played earlier today.’
‘The one who helped to send a batch of prisoners to the chambers.’
‘He’s one of Burkhardt’s jackals.’
‘Or one of Vogel’s.’
‘I’m not a spy,’ said Jude again. ‘Won’t you believe that?’
‘You’re with the Gestapo.’
‘We know all about you.’
Their voices were harsh with anger and bitterness and Jude took a grip on his senses. Speaking clearly and firmly, he said, ‘Listen to me, please. I’m a Jew, like all of you.’
‘If you’re a Jew, you’re a traitor,’ said the one who had called for the candle to be lit. ‘You’re a renegade.’
‘Here to spy out our secrets and go running to the Gestapo.’
‘We know about spies and traitors in here.’
Jude said very clearly, ‘Shema Y’Isroel, Adonai Elohaynu, Adonai Echod—’
There was an abrupt silence, and then, the one who seemed to be the leader said, ‘Traitors have quoted the Holy Word before. It means nothing.’
‘I’m not a traitor,’ said Jude. ‘And I’m not here to spy on you. I’m here to help you escape.’
The flickering candlelight burned up more brightly then, showing the inside of the long hut, and Jude felt his senses reel because this was the worst thing yet.
Directly in front of him, perhaps two feet away from the roll-down corrugated doors, was a wall of steel and mesh extending out of the concrete floor and stretching up into the iron roof above. Thick bars were interleaved with spiked wire, and at the centre a tiny door had been cut, barely three feet in height, barely two feet across. It was impossible to avoid the impression of a cage with a hinged flap for a door.
But it’s a cage for humans, thought Jude, appalled. The flap is for them to crawl in and out.
The prisoners were clustered at the bars, watching him, and at first sight there seemed to be dozens: thin, ravaged-eyed creatures, scantily clad in tattered shirts and trousers. There were no seats although a few bundles of rags had been arranged near the wall.
At the far end was a circular, wooden-sided barrel, about three feet high. A lid had been drawn across it, but even at this distance the stench of urine and faeces was overwhelming, and even in the wavering light of the thin dripping candles, it was possible to see where runnels of fluid trickled out between the seams.
At the other side of the hut, as far from the dreadful wooden barrel as possible, was a squat iron stove: a metal cup stood on it as if some liquid was being warmed, and several of the prisoners were huddled round it, their skeletal hands held out to it. Jude, trying to take everything in, had the fleeting impression of some kind of organised grouping, as if turns were taken to stand at the stove for a few minutes of warmth or a sip of the fluid.
A slow, deep anger began to burn, and he went as near to the terrible cage as he could, and said, ‘I’m going to free you.’
‘All of us?’ said the leader jeeringly.
‘No. But as many of you as I can.’
They stared at him, and without warning, the painful light of hope began to dawn in their eyes.
The spark of anger that had been lit in the makeshift concert hall at Auschwitz – the anger that was to stay with him through the years ahead – burned up into a steady strong flame.
He thought, afterwards, that at times it was only that pure clear flame of anger that kept him going. Certainly it spurred him on.
He had traded on the reputation he had already earned with the Piper suite, and it had stood him in good stead in those early days in Poland and Eastern Germany.
He maintained a cold arrogance towards Vogel and Burkhardt, and at intervals he made imperious demands. My orchestra has lost two violinists, a cellist; if you want me to go on playing for you, you must let me replace them with people of my choosing. I know of a very good violinist incarcerated inside Dachau . . . or Buchenwald . . . Once brought out, the musicians could be provided with papers and sent to safety in Switzerland or England and Canada. It was not a ploy that could be used many times, but it worked for a while.
Each time he went into the camps he had found a way to take or deliver notes between huts, even once to smuggle in small radio parts for the secret listening posts in the camps. There were knives for digging crude tunnels beneath the camp latrines, there were the locations of small partisan groups outside who could provide fake papers and false identities or simply shelter for a few nights. Every scrap of information was absorbed into the network, and Jude seldom knew how effective his contributions were. The network itself was pitifully ragged; the cobweb strands of plots often tangled with other cobweb strands, rendering weeks or months of dangerous intrigue worthless. How it did not unravel altogether Jude never knew, but incredibly it did not. Incredibly, between prayer and determination and courage of an extraordinary degree, it struggled on, even though its people had to move in extreme secrecy; even though to be caught meant death and, before death, brutal questioning. Reveal the names of your collaborators or we will tighten the thumbscrews, we will winch the pinions of the rack, we will operate the device that will mangle your hands and feet . . .
All of these or any single part of them were enough to stamp out the frail shoots of rebellion, but they did not. Insofar as the Jewish rebels could risk a rallying cry, they risked one: ‘Dahm Y’Israel Nokeam’ – ‘The blood of Israel will take vengeance.’ Later the slogan was abbreviated, using the first letter of each word, the Hebrew letters: daled, yod, nun, which spelled out another Hebrew word: DIN, meaning judgement.
The careful underground planning went on, and Jude, peddling his music, entering the camps wearing the falsest of all false guises went on with it. To most people by now he was a Nazi collaborator, one of Himmler’s jackals, to be hated and feared. It was not unknown for his recitals to be greeted with sullen silence, or with jeers and cries of ‘Traitor’.
He never quite despaired; he thought he never would despair because the music would always save him – Angelika von Drumm had not been so very wide of the mark when she had said if he had a god, that god was music – but at times despair came agonisingly close and at times he almost gave up. So easy to leave them to it; so easy to argue that it was not his fight and it was not his war, and the few prisoners he was smuggling out and the thin scraps of information he was carrying to and fro were so infinitesimal that they could scarcely count. So seductively easy to go back to Mallow where the pouring dusk was smudged with violet and indigo, and where the air was scented with woodsmoke. And where Lucy would be waiting, seated in the jutting bow window perhaps with the child, perhaps just reading or sewing, her hair turned to the colour of new-run honey by the glow from the lamps burning in the windows . . .
But he never did go back, and eventually, after the years of struggle and danger and intrigue, it was too late.