Dante's Equation Part 35

Tevach, the little mouse, was actually strong as an ox and blessed with a rare abundant family, most of them kept from starvation by Tevach's wages. He was timid but bright and had shown a penchant for learning that was impressive. But even with all this, he was still a Fiore and there was an unbreachable gulf between them.

"You are upset by the divine messenger, My Lord," Tevach said, with nervous fawning. "I hope he has not brought bad news?"

My Lord sighed. How could he answer? He shut his eyes as the carriage jolted toward the marketplace.

What would he do with the Jew? In the heat of the moment, he had called him a messenger from Mahava, and no one would expect a messenger to hang around for long. Argeh had seized on Handalman's unexpected appearance in the a.s.sembly:Many years ago we had two such creatures arrive on Fiori; now there is one more. Is this anotherenvoy from the heavens? And My Lord could think of nothing to say except that the stranger had come to deliver a message for him. Argeh had asked,But is not My Lord in contact with Mahava at all times ? Naturally, My Lord answered, he knew Mahava'sthoughts as soon as Mahava thought them. Butphysical objects could not be relayed so easily. (The human brain of Kobinski still offered My Lord some advantage, even if his joints were worthless.) It had been extreme good fortune that the Jew had papers on him, and such a nice, convincing sheaf of them, too. But good fortune of any kind should never be relied upon on Fiori. Still, the a.s.sembly had been impressed-it seemed to improve his shaky position with them. Argeh, on the other hand, had not believed a word.

My Lord had struggled with Argeh for thirty years, since he'd first seen that flattened face in his cell, standing behind the old one's-Ehlah's-shoulder. Ehlah had declared My Lord an envoy from Mahava, not because he believed it but because the Fiore had been in one of their typical points of crisis and needed a diversion. My Lord had been set up as that diversion, a new hope-in reality, a puppet icon. Argeh eventually replaced Ehlah as high priest, and he'd been seeking to both use and discredit My Lord ever since. Argeh played the game ruthlessly.

The carriage stopped. Tevach helped him down, taking My Lord's full weight on his rounded shoulders. My Lord was wracked with pain at every step, but he walked into the House of Cleansing upright. Before him the Fiore groveled; behind him they kissed the stones his feet had touched. He moved past the attendants and those waiting in line for a purgative beating, hiding his limp as best he could.

Down long corridors, down flights of stone stairs, and the pain in his knees was the reason he did not come very often anymore. Screams and wracking sobs greeted his ears, bounced off the stone, also the sounds of whipping, the dull thud of stones and wood on flesh, even-there-the sound of breaking bone. It took a great deal to break Fiore bones, hard as iron rods, condensed by gravity. But the priests were quite skilled and they were artisans besides. Torture was one of the few creative outlets on Gehenna.

Outside the door of the special cell waited Gehvis, the physician.

"What do you want?" My Lord snapped, impatient in his pain.

"Apologies for my unworthiness, My Lord, but I fear . . ."

"Hurry and speak."

"We have sustained the evil one for many years, but the end is coming soon." Gehvis was bowing so low, he looked like he was staring at My Lord's knees. My Lord had an urge to kick him.

"I have heard you. Now let me past."

Inside the cell, the attendants hastened to turn up the lamps and back from the room. My Lord turned to the body lying on the table. Tevach helped him lower himself into the single chair. He stared for a long time, sighing deeply.

"And how are we feeling today, Wallick?"he asked softly, in German.

There was a wet sound as the figure made an attempt to lick its lips.

"Water, Tevach."

Tevach fetched a cup and poured a little into Wallick's mouth. It seemed to revive him.

My Lord had come for rea.s.surance, but now that he was here he could see it was a mistake.Why had he stayed, Handalman had asked. This was why. He was chained here by the odious ma.s.s on the table, by a force even stronger than Fiorian gravity-hatred. But there was something new in his perception of the bruised, broken, and partially skinned carca.s.s in front of him. It felt as though he were looking at it through someone else's eyes, the bearded Jew's no doubt. The sight did not rea.s.sure him at all.

He closed his eyes.For my son, Wallick. For all the others, too, but mostly for my Isaac.

The Fiore excelled at few things. If you were in a universe where, for example, higher technology existed and beings could shop from planet to planet (which was not the thirty-seventy universe, to be sure), there would be little you would care to export from Fiori. The planet produced few precious metals or gems beyond dribs and drabs of gold. It had no great works of art, only truly hideous religious artifacts. There were no appetizing native dishes. Its inhabitants had never developed enviable learning or skills, and even though they were physically strong, they had so short a life expectancy as to make their value as slave labor questionable. But the Fiore were masters of mutilation. It was intertwined with the very foundation of their culture, their entire cosmological system. Their sacred book told the tale through words and morbid pictures.

There were two forces in the universe: G.o.d the good, calledMahava , and the evil demon,Charvah . Mahava was busy creating wonders, such as the sun and the heavens, but Charvah, a less powerful ent.i.ty, was spiteful and jealous, so he regularly spit out impurities, sullying Mahava's creation. Mahava's wife, Magehna, had the task of going around sucking up all these impurities, which she would then s.h.i.+t out in a specific corner of the universe where they could be isolated and repurified.

That cesspool was Fiori.

Since nothing divine, no bit of creation, could ever be destroyed, these impurities, these feces that were the Fiore, had to work to repurify themselves and thus be fit to reenter the glorious part of creation when they died. Purification came through fire, pain, humility, mortification.

It was amazing to witness the fact that on a planet where life was already 70 percent evil (that had been Kobinski's estimate shortly after his arrival, based on his gravitational calculations), the inhabitants had built up a culture in which they inflicted further evil upon themselves. Yet what other example did they have? Life beat them down at every opportunity; therefore, it must be divine will that theybe beaten down. Kobinski had once hypothesized that their propensity for mortification was part of that 70 percent evil. Ma.s.sive depression, suicidal self-loathing, these were problems reserved for the unfortunate on Earth. Here they were the norm.

Not every Fiori bought into this scheme. There were the rare few, like Tevach, who secretly loathed the torture. But there were also the ones, and they were not so few, who relished it. As for the starving ma.s.ses, they simply did what they were told, as Catholics fasted. The Fiore were very tough. Wallick was tough also. He had lasted thirty years.

My Lord rubbed his lips with a finger as he looked at his enemy.

That portly, pious little Jew, what did he know about suffering? Yosef Kobinski, he understood, he alone, who had known the greatest goodness, the greatest sweetness, and lost it; who had experienced firsthand the depredations and mockery of life that was the n.a.z.i regime; who had then come to know intimatelythish.e.l.l that G.o.d created for His beloved creatures. He'd understood G.o.d as deeply as perhaps any man had ever understood Him, had seen His face more clearly and more horribly, too, in the kabbalistic way: the black head and the white, the long black locks of hair and the white, evil and good, two heads on one body, destruction and creation. Two faces-and he'd shaken his fist in both of them.

His old companion licked his lips and tried to speak. My Lord leaned forward, waiting, watching the painful struggle.

"Bitte,"Wallick said, after much effort.Please.

My Lord sat back drolly. Wallick never had been very original.

"Leave me, Tevach," My Lord said.

After Tevach shuffled out, My Lord began to recite Wallick's crimes. The German tongue was an appropriate language for the recitation, appropriately harsh and literal. He spoke softly and calmly, as he always did:This is what you did to my son.

ISAAC'SSTORY.

In 1941, the villagers had come to him, and they'd said, "The old rebbe is dead; it's up to you now. Tell us what to do about these Germans? What should we think? Should we run away or stay put?"

And from the vast wisdom of his learning Kobinski had answered, "Things only get so bad before they get better," and, "The pendulum always swings the other way."

A year later, Anna, queen of his soul, was lying in the ghetto with pneumonia, weakened by her second pregnancy, by the cold, by too little food. She and the fetus died. And still Kobinski put the shawl over his head and saidkaddish, pouring his mourning out to G.o.d and feeling that G.o.d shared his bottomless sorrow.

Even in Auschwitz he didn't lose his faith that G.o.d knew what He was doing, even there.

There are things.

Who can measure a man's love for his son? Who can define that tenderest moment of the human soul, when it looks on promising youth, youth of one's own face and frame, still dewy with its newness on the earth? Who can fathom the protectiveness a child engenders?

The Christians have this myth:For G.o.d so loved the world that He sent His only begotten son.

Did G.o.d love the world? My Lord wasn't so sure, but at least the Christians had the a.n.a.logy right, the turnkey idea of it-giving up one's son. There couldn't be a greater sacrifice. And he had been tortured, too, this Jesus, and G.o.d had sat through it all, barring maybe a little vitriolic thunder and lightning. Yes, the Christians had tapped into something there. What could be more difficult? And there was G.o.d, big enough to allow it to happen, just to show how much He loved the world.

Yosef Kobinski wasn't that big.

When had Wallick gotten the idea? My Lord had asked himself that a thousand times. What hadhe done, what had been the fatal sin in his demeanor, that had provoked such a plan? Should he have lain down on his belly earlier? Should he have whimpered and groveled and begged like the others? Would that have kept Isaac alive? Yes. Maybe.

So then you had to ask: how much of his refusal to submit to the horrors of Auschwitz had been true religious faith . . . and how much arrogant pride, a mystic's show-offmans.h.i.+p? These were the sins Kobinski's soul carried, and they were only the start.

Yosef Kobinski had gone on detail one day, marching out of camp with other inmates to unload building materials off a train, heavy boards, rough in the freezing rain. Still, it was light duty compared to what he was usually sentenced to: cleaning latrines. He even said a prayer of grat.i.tude for the reprieve, didn't wonder at it at all-not until that evening when he returned to the barrack to learn that Wallick had taken his son.

Thathad gotten to him, pierced him through. He'd been shaken, disturbed, unable to pray, unable to write. He wanted to go find the boy, needed it like he needed air, but it was futile. The officers' quarters were in a different part of the camp; he couldn't get close.

The next morning during roll call, Isaac was nowhere to be seen. Afterward, Kobinski dared approach Wallick.What have you done with my son?

Wallick studied his face, slyly pleased, reading the measure of the fear there.I'm taking good care of him, he said,very good care.

That next night Kobinski was sick from worry, feeling, finally, what it meant to be powerless, when Wallick sent for him, brought him into his own little house, sat him in a corner. Made Kobinski watch while he raped his son.

"You raped my son,"My Lord whispered to the ma.s.s on the table.

The mouth worked, but nothing came out. Years ago, Wallick had accepted that he was in h.e.l.l. It fit that older, Germanic mythos, or perhaps the Bavarian Catholic one. When they'd arrived Kobinski had the advantage of foreknowledge; he'd landed on his feet. Wallick had been merely hysterical. So when Kobinski figured out enough of the language to proclaim himself divine, he'd proclaimed Wallick a demon at the same time. Wallick had not even understood what was happening; much less could he defend himself. He believed that he had died that night in the woods and had accepted that he was in the afterlife, being punished, that Kobinski was his tormentor. He used to plead to G.o.d for mercy, but he seemed to have given up hope of that.

There are things.

"Except . . . it doesn't even approach the truth to say 'you raped my son.' Does it?"

Wallick's chin tiled down a little. It probably wasn't a nod, but it could be taken as such and My Lord did. Even without Wallick's voice, My Lord knew his lines. They'd had this dialogue many times before, in better days.

"A crime is not a single act. It is a series of indignations to living souls. And you can'tsee the crime, you can't possibly punish it, unless you comprehend each wound at its birth."

I did not . . . I was only acting . . . They told us . . .

"Be quiet now," My Lord said softly, "and feel it: There I was, a man, a father, sitting in a chair. You remember the chair? It was heavy, carved mahogany, an old dining room chair with an upholstered seat. And that first night you made me sit there and you tied my wrists to the arms-the chair had curved arms, remember? And my ankles were tied to the legs. The chair itself you had fastened to the floor earlier with nails.

"It goes hard for you that you nailed down the chair, Wallick. It shows that you understood far more than you admit. You understood that a father would thrash, that he would propel his own body into the path of whatever it was that threatened his son, that no coercion could keep him from doing so. And that first time you tied me I knew then that it would be bad, and I wanted to know what you were doing and where was Isaac. Do you remember what you told me?"

Wallick blinked. His eyes did not look at all well. The left was swollen and red, nearly shut. Curious. One of the advantages of torture on Fiori was the relative lack of microbes. Even they did not flourish here. Be that as it may, there was something in that eye. The other was not swollen, but it ran constantly with mucusy tears.

"You told me that if I didn't cooperate, you'd kill my son. And at that time I didn't know there could be worse things."

Wallick began to gasp, choking. There was some fuss while the attendants were called in. My Lord waited patiently. He did not lose his place in the narrative. As soon as they were alone again, he picked up the hideous thread.

"And then, when I was tied down, you brought him out. That first night, Wallick, how clever you were! That first night, he was still an innocent, still my Isaac. Why, I could see that you'd even been kind, given him food. He was wary, but he had a look on his serious little face, as if to rea.s.sure me that things were all right. He was still trying to be strong; can you imagine it? Still trying to be strong for me."

My Lord sighed. People thought it was easy to sin; that was a myth. Handalman, what did he know about sin? It was the hardest thing My Lord had ever done to sit here and go through it, relive it over and over. How blessed it would be to forget! To lay it aside! But if he allowed himself respite, Wallick would also have respite, and that could never be.

"You didn't gag me-another thing against you. You would like me to believe that you were some dumb ruffian, a brute, cruel only by instinct, not by deliberation. But you were cleverer than that. Not gagging me: I have thought it over many times. In the first place, no one would think it so very odd to hear screams coming from your house. True, there was a danger that I might shout something embarra.s.sing, might name the act you were committing, but you knew I wouldn't, didn't you? Youknew . Because whatever came out of my mouth for your n.a.z.i neighbors to hear, Isaac, my son, would also hear!"

Another sigh. These memories, suckled like demonic children, clawed at his throat and chest. The saner parts of him begged him to put them away. No. It took great will to sin greatly.

"At first Idid speak, that first night. When you grasped his two wrists in your left hand and forced him over the table . . ."

My Lord described the events of that night with the polish of long practice. This was the way it was when you accused: you had to spell it out. The crime had to be brought into the light, in all its sickening detail, because criminals lived in the dark, believing no one could see. Shame came with the light. But even he was only half listening. His eyes lingered down Wallick's left arm where the flesh had been drawn away in strips. His fingertips were raw and nailless. It made My Lord sick and yet also satisfied, especially when he saw again those muscled white arms stretching Isaac's thin, frail ones up and over the table.

"I said, 'Take me.' I told you to do anything you wanted with me-torture me, rape me, kill me. I would lick your boots; I would clean your messes; I would take any humiliation. But you only smiled."

On the table, Wallick was apparently crying. His chest rode up and down. That mucus in one eye became more watery, and the other eye, red and swollen, spilled burning drops as well. It had been years since Wallick had cried. There was an exhaustion in it, an utter letting go. My Lord recalled what the physician had said.No, he thought,not yet .

"But that was not the worst thing, what you did to his body. What was worse was what you did to his heart, to his soul. He washumiliated , you see. And that's why I couldn't speak, even though you didn't gag me. Because I knew that the only thing that could make it a little better for him was to forget that I was there, to pretend I wasn't watching. So I became silent as the grave. But I remembered. It was thirty days in all that you did this tomy only son , and I remember every single one. I recorded every move you made."

My Lord sat still for a long time. He was tired and freezing. His own cooling sweat made him s.h.i.+ver. He wanted to go to bed. But he wasn't done yet. He had the worst mile still to go.

"Those thirty nights you are paying for now, Wallick. And the last, the thirty-first, will take you another eternity after this punishment is through. On the thirty-first night you must have thought my pain was dulling or maybe you had just grown tired of your little game. Because when you were done with him that night you took his life.Took it, like it were a piece of fruit you could pluck from a tree and discard with a flick of your wrist."

This was the worst of it, the very worst: the last two minutes or so of Isaac Kobinski's life. It had lasted so long, an eternity. Wallick, his large hand covering the boy's nose and mouth, and Isaac . . . he had hardly struggled at all. His beautiful, angelic, magnificent boy, his own David-to die in such a way,in such a way ! G.o.d had spared Abraham. An angel had stopped the raised knife. Who could believe such fairy tales when there had been no mercy for Isaac Kobinski?

"I have tried to imagine a punishment fit for your crimes, Wallick, but even the greatest of the artisans here, eventhey could not come up with anything to match them. I cried then, didn't I? I screamed and begged."

My Lord stopped. There was silence for a time.

"If you think back on it, Wallick, perhaps you can hear again Kobinski's cries. I know I was only a Jew to you, and you had heard so many Jews cry. But it was personal between us, wasn't it? Because when you were finished, you turned to look at me and there was triumph on your face. You knew you had beaten me."

Yes, I knew.Wallick had said it many times over the years. My Lord said it for him now.

"Yes, you knew. And I'll tell you something: I know you did many horrendous things during the war, many things. But what you did to my Isaac-that was what has d.a.m.ned you forever and ever, Wallick.Forever and ever and ever. "

Wallick was crying again, and My Lord was so tired. His knees were killing him in this cold, from the stiffness of sitting. He called loudly for Tevach.

The doctrine of Karma is one in which the whole phenomenal universe as perceived by us is understood to be an effect, corresponding to previous thoughts, speeches, and physical actions of the individual and of all living beings, which are the cause.

-Ashvaghosah,Buddhacarita, first centuryC .E.

16.1. Forty-Sixty Calder Farris

Thick gray clouds covered the sky from horizon to horizon as Pol left the dorm. This morning they were the color of pearls, which meant there might be snow. There had been air-raid sirens in the night and Pol had slept badly. In his dreams he was trying to find a certain file in the Archives that had to do with his mission-the important mission that he couldn't remember. Upon waking, he could almost grasp it, but it slipped away again, leaving him frustrated and angry. At the Department of Monitors, Gyde was already in. His face was ruddy from his morning trip to the gymnasium. They'd found nothing of significance in the Archives, and Gyde had been resentful about it. If there was one thing you didn't do to an old warrior like Gyde, it was slow him down, not when there were merits to be won.

"Good day to serve the state," Gyde greeted him coolly.

"Good day to serve the state."

Pol turned to his desk and saw a white envelope with the official state seal propped up in the center

of it like a birthday present. "That came for you this morning." Pol took the envelope and tossed it aside, his fingers cold. He sat down, pulling the case files toward him.

Gyde eased onto the edge of Pol's desk and picked up the envelope. "Department of Health. That would be notification of your annual physical." Pol kept his face impa.s.sive. Gyde smiled. "How old are you, thirty-eight? Wait till you hit forty. Then theyreallystart probing.

They expect your bowels to be as fit as your biceps, and may you rest on your trophies if they're not."

Pol changed the subject, "Anything new on the case?"

"Well, we're not going to the scarping Archives."

"No," Pol said lightly. "Sorry about that."

Gyde rubbed his hand against the gray-blond curls of his hair, a glint in his eye. "Someone scared off our friend last night."