darkness he sensed rather than saw the steep rise that began on the clearing’s far side. At the top of that rise was Patin, its low cement buildings and yards surrounded by barbed wire and electrified wire, its sentry towers standing like Martian dreadnoughts straight out of War of the Worlds. And in the middle, huge stacks billowed smoke against the sky, and below these brick columns were the furnaces, stoked and ready to go, glowing in the night like th» eyes of fierce demons. They had told the inhabitants of the area that the Patin inmates made clothes and candles, and of course the locals had believed that no more than the locals around Auschwitz had believed that the camp was a sausage factory. It didn’t matter.
Looking back over his shoulder in the dream, he would at last see them coming out of hiding, the restless dead, the Juden, shambling towards him with blue numbers glaring from the livid flesh of their outstretched arms, their hands hooked into talons, their faces no longer expressionless but animated with hate, lively with vengeance, vivacious with murder. Toddlers ran beside their mothers and grandfathers were borne up by their middle-aged children. And the dominant expression on all their faces was desperation.
Desperation? Yes. Because in the dreams he knew (and so did they) that if he could climb the hill, he would be safe. Down here in these wet and swampy lowlands, in this jungle where the night-flowering plants extruded blood instead of sap, he was a hunted animal… prey. But up there, he was in command. If this was a jungle, then the camp at the top of the hill was a zoo, all the wild animals safely in cages, he the head keeper whose job it was to decide which would be fed, which would live, which would be handed over to the vivisectionists, which would be taken to the knacker’s in the remover’s van.
He would begin to run up the hill, running in all the slowness of nightmare. He would feel the first skeletal hands close about his neck, feel their cold and stinking breath, smell their decay, hear their birdlike cries of triumph as they pulled him down with salvation not only in sight but almost at hand’Kitty-kitty,’ Dussander called. ‘Milk. Nice milk.’
The cat came at last. It crossed half of the back yard and then sat again, but lightly, its tail twitching with worry. It didn’t trust him; no. But Dussander knew the cat could smell the milk and so he was sanguine. Sooner or later it would come.
At Patin there had never been a contraband problem. Some of the prisoners came in with their valuables poked far up their asses in small chamois bags (and how often their valuables turned out not to be valuable at all — photographs, locks of hair, fake jewellery), often pushed up with sticks until they were past the point where even the long fingers of the trusty they had called Stinky-Thumbs could reach. One woman, he remembered, had had a small diamond, flawed, it turned out, really not valuable at all — but it had been in her family for six generations, passed from mother to eldest daughter (or so she said, but of course she was a Jew and all of them lied). She swallowed it before entering Patin. When it came out in her waste, she swallowed it again. She kept doing this, although eventually the diamond began to cut her insides and she bled.
There had been other ruses, although most only involved petty items such as a hoard of tobacco or a hair- ribbon or two. It didn’t matter. In the room Dussander used for prisoner interrogations there was a hotplate and a homely kitchen table covered with a red checked cloth much like the one in his own kitchen. There was always a pot of lamb stew bubbling mellowly away on that hotplate. When contraband was suspected (and when was it not…) a member of the suspected clique would be brought to that room. Dussander would stand them by the hotplate, where the rich fumes from the stew wafted. Gently, he would ask them Who. Who is hiding gold? Who is hiding jewellery? Who has tobacco? Who gave the Givenet woman the pill for her baby? Who? The stew was never specifically promised; but always the aroma eventually loosened their tongues. Of course, a truncheon would have done the same, or a gun-barrel jammed into their filthy crotches, but the stew was… was elegant. Yes.
‘Kitty-kitty,’ Dussander called. The cat’s ears cocked forward. It half-rose, than half-remembered some long- ago kick, or perhaps a match that had burned its whiskers, and it settled back on its haunches. But soon it would move.
He had found a way of propitiating his nightmare. It was, in a way, no more than wearing the SS uniform… but raised to a greater power. Dussander was pleased with himself, only sorry that he had never thought of it before. He supposed he had the boy to thank for this new method of quieting himself, for showing him that the key to the past’s terrors was not in rejection but in contemplation and even something like a friend’s embrace. It was true that before the boy’s unexpected arrival last summer he hadn’t had any bad dreams for a long time, but he believed now that he had come to a coward’s terms with his past. He had been forced to give up a part of himself. Now he had reclaimed it.
‘Kitty-kitty,’ called Dussander, and a smile broke on his face, a kindly smile, a reassuring smile, the smile of all old men who have somehow come through the cruel courses of life to a safe place, still relatively intact, and with at least some wisdom.
The torn rose from its haunches, hesitated only a moment, longer, and then trotted across the remainder of the back yard with lithe grace. It mounted the steps, gave Dussander a final mistrustful look, laving back its chewed and scabby ears; then it began to drink the milk.
‘Nice milk,’ Dussander said, pulling on the Playtex rubber gloves that had lain in his lap all the while. ‘Nice milk for a nice kitty.’ He had bought these gloves in the supermarket. He had stood in the express lane, and older women had looked at him approvingly, even speculatively. The gloves were advertised on TV. They had cuffs. They were so flexible you could pick up a dime while you were wearing them.
He stroked the cat’s back with one green finger and talked to it soothingly. Its back began to arch with the rhythm of his strokes.
Just before the bowl was empty, he seized the cat It came electrically alive in his clenching hands, twisting and jerking, clawing at the rubber. Its body lashed limberly back and forth, and Dussander had no doubt that if its teeth or claws got into him, it would come off the winner. It was an old campaigner. It takes one to know one, Dussander thought, grinning.
Holding the cat prudently away from his body, the painful grin stamped on his face, Dussander pushed the back door open with his foot and went into the kitchen. The cat yowled and twisted and ripped at the rubber gloves. Its feral, triangular head flashed down and fastened on one green thumb.
‘Nasty kitty,’ Dussander said reproachfully.
The oven door stood open. Dussander threw the cat inside. Its claws made a ripping, prickly sound as they disengaged from the gloves. Dussander slammed the oven door shut with one knee, provoking a painful twinge from his arthritis. Yet he continued to grin. Breathing hard, nearly panting, he propped himself against the stove for a moment, his head hanging down. It was a gas stove. He rarely used it for anything fancier than TV dinners, and now, killing stray cats.
Faintly, rising up through the gas burners, he could hear the cat scratching and yowling to be let out.
Dussander twisted the oven dial over to 500°. There was an audible pop! as the oven pilot light lit two double rows of hissing gas. The cat stopped yowling and began to scream. It sounded… yes… almost like a young boy. A young boy in terrible pain. The thought made Dussander smile even more broadly. His heart thundered in his chest. The cat scratched and whirled madly in the oven, still screaming. Soon, a hot, furry, burning smell began to seep out of the oven and into the room.
He scraped the remains of the cat out of the oven half an hour later, using a barbecue fork he had acquired for two dollars and ninety-eight cents at the Grant’s in the shopping centre a mile away.
The cat’s roasted carcass went into an empty flour sack. He took the sack down to the cellar. The cellar floor had never been cemented. Shortly, Dussander came back up. He sprayed the kitchen with Glade until it reeked of artificial pine scent. He opened all the windows. He washed the barbecue fork and hung it up on the pegboard. Then he sat down to wait and see if the boy would come. He smiled and smiled.
Todd did come, about five minutes after Dussander had given up on him for the afternoon. He was wearing a warmup jacket with his school colours on it; he was also wearing a San Diego Padres baseball cap. He carried his schoolbooks under his arm.
‘Yucka-ducka,’ he said, coming into the kitchen and wrinkling his nose. ‘What’s that smell? It’s awful.’
‘I tried the oven,’ Dussander said, lighting a cigarette. ‘I’m afraid I burned my supper. I had to throw it out.’
One day late in the month the boy came much earlier than usual, long before school usually let out. Dussander was sitting in the kitchen, drinking Ancient Age bourbon from a chipped and discoloured cup that had the words HERE’S YER CAWFEE MAW, HAW! HAW! HAW! written around the rim. He had his rocker out in the kitchen now and he was just drinking and rocking, rocking and drinking, bumping his slippers on the faded linoleum. He was
