Roots of Evil(105)

‘I wish you had known her. She was a bit like you – I don’t mean to look at. But when she talked – she could make you remember that there might be really good things waiting in life ahead of you. She could make you forget the bad things in life.’

‘That’s a very good quality to have,’ said Alice at once. ‘I think she’s passed it on to you.’

‘Do you? She hadn’t got it full-pelt, turbo-charged, like you have. But it was there.’ A pause. ‘D’you suppose that’s why he married her?’

‘Because she reminded him of me?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s possible. I’m sorry he made her so unhappy, though. I’m sorry she died like that – and I’m more sorry you had to be there when it all happened.’

‘She hated him in the end. I hated him as well. The brutality—’

Speaking very slowly, almost as if she might be fighting some inner battle, Alice said, ‘But you should try to forgive some of what he did, Michael. He was not entirely to blame.’





CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE




The cruel promise of spring was stirring beyond Auschwitz’s grim gates, and somehow Alraune had survived those first few months.

But it was as if there was a sullen core of smouldering hatred inside him, and there were times during those months after his birth when the dark eyes seemed to rest on Alice with unchildlike anger. And were they Leo Dreyer’s eyes? Or were they perhaps the eyes of the young officer who had made that faint gesture of apology? There would be a faint far-off comfort to be derived if the young officer could be his father, but could that blue-eyed Saxon have sired this black-visaged scrap of humanity? Please God, don’t let him be Dreyer’s son; please don’t let him grow up to resemble the man I loathe and fear most in all the world!

Alraune lived and slept in the hut with the women, and his playground was the recreation yard, where the prisoners could exercise at set times each evening, and where the roll-call took place each morning. His clothes were whatever the women could fashion for him out of odds and ends of their own, and his toys were made from fragments of wood – carved figures or blocks which they stained in different colours with the dregs of the tasteless coffee they drank.

When the Polish women in one of the other huts received food parcels, they smuggled little gifts of food out for him. ‘A tin of meat for the baby,’ they said. ‘And a jar of meat essence – a spoonful to be dissolved in hot water – very nourishing.’ Very occasionally there would be a heart-breakingly tiny pot of jam. ‘Sweet,’ they said, nodding and smiling. ‘The little ones like to eat the sweet.’

One of the younger girls who had been brought to Auschwitz shortly after Alice was mourning the loss of a baby brother who had died in the Kristallnacht massacres. Her brother would have been the same age as Alraune, she said, and she liked to spend time with him, singing to him the songs she would never now sing to her brother, and telling him the stories her brother would never now hear. Alice could have wept over the pity of that, except…

‘Every time I look at him,’ she said to Ilena, ‘I see the faces of the men who raped me that night. Most of all I see Leo Dreyer’s face.’

‘But Alraune is half yours, no matter who the father was,’ said Ilena. ‘He has half your qualities – perhaps more than half. You’ll feel differently when he’s older – when you’ve grown away from what they did to you that night.’

Alice did not think she would ever feel differently and she was not sure if she would ever grow away from that night, but she did not say so.

The seasons wheeled round once more – and then twice more. The war was still going on somewhere beyond the bleak confines of Auschwitz – occasionally there was news of it, although it was impossible to know how accurate that news was. But certainly battles were fought in the skies over Germany and over England, and certainly ships were destroyed in the oceans, and houses and cities were blown up and men and women made homeless. In Auschwitz the inmates watched the greasy pall of smoke issuing from the tall brick chimneys of the crematoria block, and prayed to their various gods not to be selected for the gas chambers.

But even in such a dark hopeless place there were occasional patches of light. Music was one of these patches. Incredibly, there was music in the camp – small, infrequent concerts given by a group of musicians, most of them members of a Polish radio orchestra, arrested while actually performing and pressed into bizarre service by the camp commandants.

Alice was usually among the prisoners allowed to attend the ramshackle concerts, and it brought a deep twisting agony to hear music that Conrad had once played. But after the third or fourth time, she managed to speak to one of the musicians – a violinist. The music community had always been a tightly-knit one, and it was just possible that she might pick up news of Conrad. She complimented the violinist on his performance, and asked if orchestras such as this one were being formed in the other camps. In Dachau for instance?

The violinist was sympathetic but not very knowledgeable. Certainly there were other small orchestras, he said; this was generally known, and there might well be just such a one in Dachau – who knew? The Nazis liked to be thought of as people of culture, people who enjoyed such things as good music. This was said as if the words were poison which must be spat out as quickly as possible.