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GERDA WAS ASLEEP when he came in.
She lay on her side, her face pillowed on one hand, the other lying slack across the curve of her hip. Her hair was a dark cascade against the white sheets. Her skin was like warm marble. Her lips were smiling softly, like the lips of an innocent child. He turned up the lamp and stood looking down at her. She stirred faintly, then settled again, still smiling. It was as if she mocked him, even from the frontiers of sleep.
She had been with Lansing. He knew that. She had been as warm to him as she was cold to her legal partner. She had been tender and passionate and wanton—to a straw man, limp with his own self-pity. She had put horns on her husband in his own house and there was nothing he could do about it—yet. He could strike her and she would laugh in his face. He could kill her—as soon he would kill Lansing—but her death would bring him loss instead of profit. So he must wear the horns and endure the dreaming mockery night after night, until his triumph was perfected and she was delivered once more into his hands, as she had been that winter’s day, twelve years ago … when Sturmbannführer Gottfried Reinach stood in the compound at Rehmsdorf and slapped his cane against his polished jackboots and looked over the new batch of women from Poland.
There were more than fifty of them, old and young and in-between. They were dirty and in rags. Their faces were pinched with hunger, their eyes glazed with fear. Their feet were bound with rags and old newspapers, and their skin was blotched with cold. They stood ankle-deep in the slushy snow, humble under the professional scrutiny of Gottfried Reinach.
He was an important fellow, the Sturmbannführer, ambitious, too, and careful of his career. He held medical degrees from two universities. His brief civilian practice had given him the name of a brilliant pathologist. His repugnance to Army service and his desire for rapid advancement had turned his thoughts to politics. He had joined the Party. He had made good connections—right to the door of Himmler himself—and now he was established comfortably, almost spectacularly, as Chief Research Officer, with the rank of Sturmbannführer in Rehmsdorf concentration camp. Here he directed the researches of a group of junior men on typhus vaccines, using as his subjects the decaying wrecks who were the camp inmates. He had other duties, too: the choice of subjects for the gas chambers and for the Sonderbau, the sterilization of young women of inferior race, lest childbearing interfere with their duties or increase the percentage of helots among the master men.
He had little taste for the work or for his associates, but he was a calculating fellow and, having chosen his road, he walked it resolutely—and circumspectly. His files were carefully kept. His success was minuted to the highest authorities. His failures were stifled as soon as they were born.
So, on this winter’s morning, he walked down the line of women like a buyer in a cattle yard, pointing with his little stick, sorting them into categories—this for the work commandos, that for the brothel, this other for the Officers’ Mess, these for the scrap heap. …
Until he came to the end of the line and saw Gerda Rudenko.
She was tattered and travel-stained like the others and the same fear was in her eyes, but her beauty was like a banner and her youth was still unravaged. She was a student, according to his lists. Her crime was consorting with suspected persons. She was nineteen years old.
To Sonderfeld she was a percentage profit. He had her sterilized like the others. He had her examined with more than usual care for venereal and other diseases. Then he took her into his service—clerk by day, bed and body servant by night. She was diligent because she was afraid of him and of his power to consign her to the crematorium. Because he was kind to her sometimes and not too often cruel, she was grateful, tender when he permitted it, passionate when, more and more rarely, he touched the deep spring of desire in her young body. There were even moments when fear and need brought her almost to belief in him; but as the years of her servitude spun out and she came to know him more intimately, belief became impossible. She served him still, but only with fear and with a deep and hidden hate.
Then came the last wild madness of defeat, the frenzy of murder, when the bodies piled up in the compounds and the gas chambers were choked, and the furnaces could not keep pace with the fuel that was fed to them. For the first time in his life, Gottfried Reinach was afraid—afraid of the haggard beasts in their wire pen, afraid of the vengeance that rolled in with the tanks and the gun limbers and the troop carriers.
So he struck his bargain with Gerda Rudenko.
He would take her out of the camp, save her from the final holocaust. He would marry her—not as Gottfried Reinach, but as Kurt Sonderfeld, Doctor of Medicine, bachelor, dead long since and burnt in the fire; but Sonderfeld’s records lay, complete and carefully preserved, in the steel filing cabinet.
When the final collapse came, they would merge themselves in the tide of stateless wanderers and claim protection from the liberating armies. And, lest she be tempted to accept now and betray him later, he pointed out that she, too, was compromised by her long association with Gottfried Reinach. She had enjoyed the protection of the defeated; she might well share their punishment.
She was trapped, and she knew it. She made the bargain. Three days before Rehmsdorf was taken, they left the camp. Reinach was now Sonderfeld. The dead man’s number was tattooed on his forearm; the list of his works and days was etched in his memory. He wore the filthy rags of a camp inmate, starved himself for a week and had Gerda shave his skull to complete the change of identity.
The plan worked. Slowly they sifted through the inadequate machinery of relief organizations and reestablishment camps. They answered questions and filled in papers and lived in daily fear of recognition, until one day their names were posted on the camp notice board as migrants acceptable to the Commonwealth of Australia.
A new life was opening to Kurt Sonderfeld and his wife, Gerda. A new horizon challenged his cold ambition. This time he would follow no banners; he would walk alone.
They were a week out from Genoa when Gerda had her first affair with a fellow migrant. When he taxed her with it, she smiled. When he threatened her, she laughed in his face. When he struck her, she told him, gently and without anger:
“If you ever do that to me again, Kurt, I will tell everything I know. No matter what happens to me, I will tell. Remember that. We are bound together. We cannot escape each other. But from this moment I do not wish to sleep with you, to kiss you, even to touch you ever again.”
At first he thought of divorcing her as soon as he could. Then he realized he would never sleep in peace so long as she was free and able to tell his secret. He toyed with the idea of killing her, but before he could frame a plan, she had forestalled him. They had not been two months in Australia when she told him that she had lodged papers with a bank—papers that would incriminate him if she should die before him.
No, it was he who was trapped, bound to a body he had maimed, denied its pleasures, shamed by its defiant wantonness.
As for Gerda herself, she was a woman without illusions. Cheated of love, cheated of children, she had made a bargain that guaranteed her security and comfort—and the bitter sweets of a protracted revenge. On this rickety foundation she and Kurt had built for themselves a kind of permanence, even a kind of peace. They were polite to each other. They cooperated on projects of mutual benefit. If they made love in other beds, they did so with reasonable discretion. In the new land bustling and bursting with vitality they were accepted even if they were not loved.
One of the conditions of their entry into Australia was that they should serve, each of them, for two years in any employment to which they were directed. Sonderfeld worked as a tally clerk on a dam construction project, Gerda as a waitress in the men’s canteen. Strangely, the big man was not irked by the humble work. He was learning the language, adapting himself to a new, rugged environment. Every scrap of information was scanned and filed away for future reference. He had made one mistake in his life; he was not going to risk another. Sometime, somewhere, in this young, thrusting country, a door would be opened to him and he must be ready to enter into his new estate.
Then one day he read a notice in a Government Gazette. Migrant doctors who could produce evidence of medical qualifications in Europe would be permitted to practice in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea without renewing their courses.
This was his chance. He grasped it with both hands. Within a month he and Gerda were in Lae. Within three years he had built a practice, a bank balance and a reputation. He was offered a permanent appointment under the Administration. He refused, smiling. Kurt Sonderfeld had served long enough. Now he was ready to rule.
The rich Highland valleys were being opened up. Land was being leased to settlers of energy and good character. His application was approved—the more quickly because he was ready to push out over the mountains, where even the old hands were not prepared to risk their money.
So he had come to the valley, trekking over the mountains with Gerda and the cargo boys. He had made friends with the tribes. He had earned the goodwill of the District Commissioner by his gratuitous care of their health. Within a year his ground was cleared, his house was built, his coffee was planted under the shade trees—and his dream of wealth and empire was near to fulfillment.
The first step was the domination of the tribes through Kumo and the lesser sorcerers. The next was the exaction of tribute: labour, pigs, gold washed from the Highland streams, lumber from the rich stands in the tribal territories, a tithe of every man’s garden patch, basket- and cane-ware, cinchona bark and galip nuts, to sell as the Missions did on the coast. Territory law compelled him to feed and clothe and pay his boy labour, but these payments would be returned to him less a nominal deduction by the sorcerers for their sumptuary service. It was a grandiose project, but simple and feasible in practice. So long as he could keep peace among the tribes. Before the Administration caught up with him—if they ever did—he would be ready to quit. And this would be the final stage, the return of the freebooter, rich and acceptable, to the luxury of life in Europe.
Yet wealth alone was too low a peak for his leaping pride. He must stretch out farther to the pinnacles of power. Power was an obsession with him—a brooding, secret lust that blinded him to the lessons of his personal and national history and showed him only the sweet illusions of attainment.
In the isolation the high valleys where authority was represented by puling boys like Lee Curtis, the prospect of imperial rule seemed dangerously possible.
There was no garrison strength in the Territory, only the small, scattered force of native police. Airfields were few and fit only for small aircraft. Communications were sketchy and unreliable.
There were thousands of square miles of unexplored country peopled by tribes who had never seen a white skin. For a bold man, a shrewd man, leagued with the sorcerers, there seemed no limit to the extension and exercise of god-like authority.
All this, and more, would flow, like wealth from Fortunatus’ purse, out of the small bamboo tube whose glossy surface shone dully in the lamplight.
Gerda stirred and murmured uneasily. He thrust the tube back into his pocket and began preparing himself for bed. Tonight he would rest well. Tomorrow was the beginning of a new chapter in the saga of Kurt Sonderfeld.
Five minutes later he, too, was asleep, smiling, like Gerda, in his golden dream.
It was two in the morning before Père Louis reached his mission station, a small, poor village sprawling along a narrow defile between Sonderfeld’s property and the Lahgi Valley. To reach it, he had walked six miles along the flanks and the ridges of the mountains, through stretches of rain forest and occasional patches of kunai grass taller than himself. As he walked, he prayed, fingering the worn beads of his rosary, and as he prayed, he pondered … on what he had heard in Sonderfeld’s house, on what he knew of the trouble simmering among the tribes.
Much of it was secret to himself. It came to him in whispers when his converts shuffled into the tiny chapel to make their confessions. This one had been threatened by the sorcerers and needed reassurance. Another had bought herbs to procure an abortion and begged absolution.
A boy had taken his girl into the bushes after the kunande and the carry-leg. His catechist demanded to know whether to take part in the pig festival was an act of idolatry or a harmless enjoyment of a village feast. But all the whispers were fragments of one story, the story of a wavering minority, clinging desperately to a new faith, afraid of the mockery of the old believers, more afraid of the dark powers of which they had daily, terrifying experience.
Père Louis himself was afraid. Not of the legends, not of the childish superstitions and the primitive spells, but of the ancient evil working in them and through them. He believed in the human soul. He believed in sin. He believed in God. He believed in the Devil who walked the valleys, not roaring like a lion of Saint Paul, but muttering and chanting, threatening and bribing, through the sorcerers.
Some of them were charlatans, as Sonderteld had said. These he could ignore or discredit. But there were others, the powerful few like Kumo, intelligent, proud, dedicated to evil and the Prince of Evil. If, as he now believed, Sonderfeld had joined forces with them, the stirring in the valleys might grow to a whirlwind.
The big man puzzled him. He was not, like others, a wencher, chasing the village girls, a tippler, a ragged adventurer chasing gold or oil like folly-fires through the valleys. Sonderfeld was intelligent, cultivated, controlled. If he were to take a risk, it would be a calculated risk, and the reward would be calculated with greater care. The man was devoured by a cold pride and a ruthless ambition—but for what? Money, perhaps. But money was too low a goal for such a man. Power?
Père Louis shivered, though he was hot and sweating from the walk. Power was the greed of Lucifer. The lust for power was the sin against nature and the Holy Ghost, the sin beyond mercy.
In the tiny, rustling chapel, lit by a guttering taper that floated in a bowl of oil, the priest lay prostrate in supplication before his God. The god of the tribes was a Great Pig and beyond the Great Pig was the Red Spirit. The God of Père Louis was the Crucified, who lay on the crude altar in the form of a white wafer of bread. The old man’s lips framed the familiar cadence of the Office of Compline. …
“Scuto circumdabit te veritas eius. … His truth shall compass thee with a shield. Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror of the night.”
“A sagitta volante in die, a negotio perambulante in tenebris. … From the arrow that flieth in the day, from the plague that walketh in darkness, and from the noonday devil. …”
In the high secret valleys the sorcerers cast their spells; Kurt Sonderfeld slept in his white bed and dreamed of dominion and power; but Père Louis prayed in his bamboo church until the stars waned and the sun crept up on the ridges and his catechist found him lying face down, exhausted, on the altar step.