A Feather on the Water(73)

“This is it.” The tires crunched frozen snow as Father Josef pulled onto the grass verge. “We’d better leave the car here.”

As they walked toward the fence, Delphine could hear voices from inside the camp: a shouted command in what sounded like German, a snatch of conversation in American-accented English. She couldn’t see anyone beyond the low-roofed buildings that fringed the perimeter of the camp. She remembered what Father Josef had said about the place being used as a prison for SS officers awaiting trial. A bitter irony, she thought, especially for those who had been the masters of Dachau during the war. Did it help to know that the men who had murdered Claude and Philippe were likely facing a death sentence themselves? It should have. But strangely, the thought of it left her numb.

In her hand she carried a wreath that Wolf and his friends had made for her. There were no flowers to be had at this time of year, so he had gone into the woods and picked holly, bright with berries, and gathered cones lying on the carpet of pine needles. It was as good as any creation she might have bought from the florist on the Avenue Foch—the sort of thing she would have hung on the door of the apartment for the Christmases between the wars.

“Will it be okay to tie it to the fence?” She glanced at the wire, wondering if it was electrified.

Father Josef nodded. “Would you like me to help you?”

“No—thank you. I can manage.” Her fingers trembled as she looped the string through the wire. A holly leaf pricked her thumb as she tightened the knot. A bead of blood oozed out. She sucked it. A tang of metal on her tongue. It was as if just touching this place made bad things happen, that the tentacles of evil snaked out through the gaps in the fence.

“You’ve hurt yourself.” Father Josef offered her his handkerchief.

“It’s nothing.” She waved it away. The sight of it made her suddenly, inexplicably angry, as if he were responsible for what had happened here. Or—more precisely—that the supreme being he represented had failed to prevent it from happening. “Tell me, Father,” she said. “Why did God ignore the cries of the people who died in this place?”

She saw his breath, a cloud of white in the frosty air. “I used to ask myself that question,” he said. “Every day there would be one more terrible act in the litany of cruelty. There was one particular morning, when we were all standing outside for roll call. It always took hours, and we were all weak with hunger. But you had to stand there until it was over. On this morning, a couple of men keeled over, and the guards beat them with the butts of their rifles. These men were being killed in front of my eyes, and there was nothing I could do to save them.” He glanced up at the razor wire running along the top of the fence. “When the screaming stopped, I was aware of another sound. It was like music: a beautiful, piping melody, somewhere above the camp. I looked up and realized it was skylarks, flying overhead. In that moment I sensed that God was there, above it all—crying for the wickedness that he was looking down on—and that he would always be there, and nothing the Nazis did could ever change that.”

“So, why didn’t he intervene? Why didn’t he save those men?”

“That I can’t answer. Except to say that when we suffer, he suffers with us. He didn’t create the evil that was done here. He gave us free will—the choice to love and nurture or to hate and destroy one another. Mankind has been getting it wrong since the dawn of time.”

“There must have been times when there were no skylarks,” Delphine murmured. “Did you never come to a point when you thought faith was just an illusion?”

“Of course.” He lowered his head, his eyes on hers. “To exist in a place like this is like one long dark night of the soul. But always, at my lowest ebb, something would nudge me back from the brink of despair. Sometimes it was a small act of kindness from a fellow prisoner—like the time I found a scrap of bread hidden in my bedding after I’d been starved for one of the medical experiments. Other times, like the birdsong, it was nature that spoke to me. Once I caught a glimpse of a ghostly moon in a blue sky and thought of the stars that were up there, too, day and night, even though I wouldn’t see them until it got dark. It felt like God saying, ‘I’m here, I’m always here—even when you think I’m not.’”

Delphine held his gaze. “You told me before that you felt guilty for having survived when so many others died. But don’t you ever feel angry? If you could get past this fence and come face-to-face with one of those SS men, wouldn’t you want to kill him? I would.”

He nodded. “I understand that. Becoming a priest didn’t take away those instinctive emotions. But my faith forbids me from acting on them.”

“You would forgive them?”

“I would.”

“How? Why?”

“Because if I didn’t, I would be the worst kind of hypocrite. I believe in a God who, twice a day, washes all the sands on all the shores of all the world. He makes every mark disappear—from the gaping hole dug by a spade to the footprints left by a gull.”

“You’re saying that you’re as bad as them?” Delphine frowned, tilting her head toward the fence.

“What I’m saying is we all need forgiveness.”

“How can I forgive someone who stole my husband and my son from me? They might as well have ripped my heart out of my chest.”