Weep For The Gravest Of Our Misfortunes: The Hard Evidence (524 hits)
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Submitted by Zampano (View user info) at 2007-04-16 09:23:21 EDT
Act I - I Find The Pretty Girl - http://www.ubersite.com/m/100589
Act II of IV
The Hard Evidence
What happens to the village I learn later, and only after I've had the benefit of a few years to properly harden my heart.
The Germans return shortly after noon with the intention of avenging their slain storm commander, the Sturmbannfuhrer Kleimpf. His toes dangle in the dust, pointing inward, and his noose ropes creak from his bulk. He was not a light man, but the breeze tries to push him anyway. So few survive what follows, and no one is quite sure what prompted the villagers, my neighbors, to hang up the German in the first place. About a week after the Kennedy assassination, I meet a man in Chicago who happened to live down the street from me when I was a child. I treat him to a night of drinking, and he tells me everything I didn't care to know, and his theories to the "gravest of our misfortunes." It was a mixture of overconfidence from Allied bombings only thirty miles away, and a misinterpreted message from the Maquis and other resistance forces. Troops were supposed to cut through the village in two days' time; they went in the completely opposite direction, but how were we supposed to know?
How are we supposed to know?
The Germans come in on the road the Americans and Brits are supposed to use, and the round-up of the townsfolk is done quickly, joyously. The dark-eyed men, they laugh when they prod the elderly with the ends of their guns into the streets. A side splits for sure at the sight of a child, still naked and wet out of his bath, falling into a deep slick of mud between two loose cobblestones.
Our village men are the intended targets, but their brand of justice comes first. It comes the easiest. There are six farmhouses in the fields, into which the villagers watch two hundred of their husbands, their fathers, their brothers and secret loves and best friends, their criers of young jubilance, their propagators of future generations...the village people, they watch two hundred men shepherded into the farmhouses. What happens is simple: a soldier shoots wildly into the gathered men, into their reek of fear-sweat, fear-piss, fear-shit. The soldier does not aim above the waist, and two hundred men fall onto their faces. It's all right to cry. Fear-blood? No, just blood.
Wild-eyed, shaking, the men soak the hay around them. The hay acts like a sponge and drinks up their liquid rust. The Germans, they need it dry. The fun stops. A rain cloud has settled in over the picnic. Soldiers grumble. They are discontent children set about on unpopular chores. It's too early to gather the hay up, to break vials of oil over them, to throw matches atop them and run. The sun is still up and already their hands are stained with blood and soot.
So, as the spark-filled screams begin to fade, they improvise. The soldiers weed out a group of the elderly but fit and march them into the fields. For an hour, a dozen villagers dig a pit into the dust. Grime sticks to wet backs. The soldiers, they play with cards and drink lemonade taken from a nearby house. When the pit is finished, they order all but one man in. The remainder, he must fill up the hole once more. He labors at this task until the sun is hidden behind the hills, and the forest is dusk-gilt. The men are in to their necks and clustered into a knot. A circle of coconuts and melons, perhaps. Weepy melons.
Carefully, oh so carefully, the Germans place a mine into the dirt between the heads. It's small and wooden, and handled like a sleeping infant. They pack up their cards and retreat many paces before turning their guns onto the pit digger. They motion towards the mine and the heads gibbering in French.
"Non! Non!"
A single burst of gunfire. The man drops, and a soldier returns to town to grab another trigger. It is the naked child with muddy ankles. The Germans, they tell the small boy to walk into the ring of heads. He doesn't understand their guttural words, but the blackhole barrels gesturing between him and the filled pit leave little room for interpretation. The child nods and shakes from sobbing so hard. He can't know the specific nature of his crying, only that the men in the dirt are pleading with him, but he can't stop. He won't stop. Not with twenty of those blackhole barrels pointing as his back.
There is little fire in the explosion. Just limbs, mostly. The Germans are businesslike, and only one man finds humor in the little hand that flops smoking into the grass. This man is glared at by his superiors and fellow soldiers.
They do not permit the dead to be buried, nor for the dead to by wailed over. The village square is unsettling quiet. Sniffles, mostly. The women and the children are ordered into the cathedral, but there is not enough room for them all. Everyone is moved into the library across the way. The air of light-heartedness returns to the dark-eyed men. The cards came back out of pockets for soldiers who stand idly by. Outrageous bets are made on pathetic calls, and everyone calls the bluff. They throw bags of stolen francs at their feet and turn up their cards. Winners gather up the coins and start throwing them around, showering themselves in cash. Some roll into the gutter, get stuck in the mortar cracks between bricks. Play money.
While the villagers are herded by moonlight into the library, a woman doubled over in her years approaches the soldiers. With one hand she holds what must be her grandson; with the other, she offers a roll of money. Reichsmarks. German money. It is a question of where she got it, but some questions are never properly asked. She begs only that she can deliver the infant to the next village.
"Juden?"
"Non, je ne suis pas..."
Muzzlefire and tragedy. Nobody knows what happens to the baby. It just disappears when it rolls from fallen arms. A soldier takes the bills out of the dead (dying? crying? trying?) woman's hand and tosses it onto his pile of coins. The others won't call his bluff.
Four survivors watch four hundred shunted into a building. The fear-sweat smell is a lot less severe, but a cloying scent of shit—infant, elderly, middle-aged, cancerous, clean—turns it into a stable. Animals have hurt eyes, even when they don't understand the cruelty of the whips of masters against their flanks. Four hundred village folk are not stupid. Standing on a railway in the dark, they might not be able to see every detail of the 3:15 from Marne to Avignon, but goddammed if they don't know what the merciless light and sounds of chugging pistons mean. The horror, the worst horror, is coming. The gravest of misfortunes. They don't know what it might be, but they see the carrion birds approaching, and feel the drops of fire in their veins. The molten lead in their stomachs. The ebbing of the soldiers' jokes.
Four hundred are packed in. Sister Lily is in there. Mother, but not father. He's been committed to the soil already. How much ash in the air is his? How much will be mother's? Lily's? School boys I played with in the summer? School girls who carried little slivers of my heart in winter? Librarians and bakers, teachers I hated, teachers who I wanted to educate me into old age, the poet who lived in the apartment above the bookstore, the family of Moslems who owned the bookstore, the woman who kissed any man and sometimes any woman? Because they're burning, they're all burning, like the pages in the books scattered at their ankles. The library is burning, and the train station is burning, the 3:15 from Marne to Avignon is derailed and conductors are burning, and me, me, I'm running through fields of wheat that are trying to burn, and there's a pretty girl who is supposed to be in my hand, but she is burning too, I think, and the lace is burning and I spit on it, and when they find me at the train station in Marne three days after the slaughter of an entire village, my God, their eyes are burning, and the words of comfort they try to give me are burning too. They want to wash me, because I am black like coal, and the water is cold but rolls off my skin as steam, me, who's burning most of all, and the names of streets and memories of neighbor's faces are burning, and when I've gone through university and leave this all behind me for America, the sails of merchant ships are burning, the shipmates are burning, the harbor is burning. From Times Square I can see the twilight pillar of smoke, always rising, a plume that connects the stars to charred timbers, the rib-like remains of what was once a library.
There are other inflammations later in life, many venereal in nature. The groin-burn from a promiscuous, intoxicated year in Boston, smoldering obsessions for a lonely mademoiselle who curls up against me in the darkness of her bedroom and has a weakness for my stories. "We weren't even Jewish," I explain as though it matters, and she cries enough for the both of us. When she's sniffled her last, she turns over onto her side for another go. She calls me brave. She trembles when I nibble on her ear, and it is only then that she can forget faces she's never seen in the windows of a library while sparks drop into their hair. I smoke when we're done for the night, but she asks that I put it out.
There is guesswork involved. All this, this narrative of six hundred silenced, is only the hard evidence as I learn it years after the fact, and mostly from the man in Chicago. We swapped addresses outside the bar, and I wrote him a lengthy letter, in which I tried to skirt around the nature of our association, but eventually, in a clusterfuck mess of thoughts at the end of the last paragraph, asked how it was he survived and where were the other three who escaped. A week later, I found the letter in my mailbox with a stamp across the front telling me that no such post-office box exists.
It's just as well.
User Reviews
Submitted by sicosemen (user info) at 2008-01-29 15:19:49 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Thank you for your compliment.
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2007-09-19 15:13:20 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2007-04-23 15:22:55 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I like your writing style. It is a very nice departure from the "usual".
Submitted by supadupapupa (user info) at 2007-04-17 00:27:45 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
you know, I love that book House of Leaves. It seriously kept me awake at night sometimes...
Submitted by Zampano (user info) at 2007-04-16 18:38:38 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by czwij
Ranking: 0
ugh!
i cant even read this.
its not bad, well written in fact, just tooo depressing.
does anyone have any stories on how the germans were treated after the russians marched into Poland or the Czech Republic?
_____________
Sorry. If I'd known so many genocidal WWII stories (and by so many, I mean Ax's "The Story of My Invasion") were going to fall on Yom HaShoa, I would have waited a little while, or posted something else in its place. The latter two acts are very different from these first two, if that is any consolation.
And as to writing about Lidice, I didn't want to portray any one actual event. I would have been terrified about trying to get the truth absolutely right, because I know I wouldn't. I'd fuck it up, and, with it, the chance to give a voice to the slain. This is more of an approximation of several village exterminations, based more on one than the others, but still fictional in its telling.
Thanks though for those who have reviewed. It's help with the editing of the other acts.
Submitted by ih8u2man (user info) at 2007-04-16 15:11:19 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Excellent. I like your writing. More please.
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2007-04-16 12:53:47 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Shoula have done this about Lidice, instead.
Submitted by orph (user info) at 2007-04-16 10:18:57 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
very good.
Submitted by rorrim (user info) at 2007-04-16 10:15:40 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Uber is burning my skin lately. Maybe is should scale down on my poisoning...
And, aahhh, this wasn't just great...
Submitted by MEGACITO (user info) at 2007-04-16 09:55:36 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
ummm ok
Submitted by ChaosJester (user info) at 2007-04-16 09:53:28 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Whew!
Intense. You are a fantastic writer. Extremely powerful imagery and almost seamless transition.
Excelent!
Submitted by Beano312003 (user info) at 2007-04-16 09:43:14 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Submitted by czwij (user info) at 2007-04-16 09:34:44 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
ugh!
i cant even read this.
its not bad, well written in fact, just tooo depressing.
does anyone have any stories on how the germans were treated after the russians marched into Poland or the Czech Republic?
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Yes thank you. Lots.
Submitted by Merlina (user info) at 2007-04-16 09:37:00 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by czwij (user info) at 2007-04-16 09:34:44 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
ugh!
i cant even read this.
its not bad, well written in fact, just tooo depressing.
does anyone have any stories on how the germans were treated after the russians marched into Poland or the Czech Republic?