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“I am neither a sadist nor a thief,” Schramm insists. “I only wanted— I wanted to make things better.” He stops, and swallows. “I killed no one at the front,” he says firmly, “but there were 632 children in the state hospital, and 220 in the hunger research. I was stationed at Auschwitz for 26 days, and had depot duty for eight days of that time. The average throughput was 9,000 a day. I signed off on 91,015 head. This totals 91,867.”
Osvaldo looks at Schramm, at the goat, at the diamond-studded sea sparkling in the distance. Mind racing, he tries to imagine what he can possibly say to this… this demon. His mouth opens. No words emerge. He lifts his hands, drops them, and begins to walk away.
“Wait!” Schramm calls. “You must— What is my penance?”
Osvaldo turn and stares. “Mein Gott, Schramm, what did you expect? Rosaries?” Bending suddenly, leaning hard on hands that clutch his knees, Osvaldo chokes back vomit. Trembling, he lifts his eyes. “Shoot yourself.”
“What?”
“You wanted a penance.”
“You’re mad! That’s crazy—”
Osvaldo straightens, advances, finger pointed like a gun. “You call yourself a Catholic? You are a disgrace to your faith! Nothing less than executing yourself can possibly atone for what you have done! Commit suicide and condemn yourself to hell. I am your confessor! Obey me, you miserable coward!”
Schramm backs away, looking for someone to whom he can appeal. “You— you’re a priest! Suicide is a sin! You have no right—”
“Ah,” Osvaldo breathes. “So you are capable of disobeying an order when you know it to be wrong.” He shakes his head. “God forgive you. I can’t.”
“What are you saying? You can’t—”
“For absolution, there must be sincere contrition!” Osvaldo cries. “If you’d come to me after three, or even four murders—” Again, the strange laughter of disbelief and shock escapes him. “But to kill, and go on killing? To kill 91,867! Why now, Schramm? Why confess now?”
The German will not meet his eyes, and in the silence Osvaldo Tomitz makes sense at last of the flushed cheeks, the terrible thi
“But— what should I do?”
The priest walks away without a backward glance.
“Please!” Schramm shouts, his voice cracking. “Someone has to tell me what—”
The hemorrhage is sudden, but not unexpected. The revolting sensation of fluid rising to fill the pharynx comes first. The taste of iron and acid. Schramm sinks to his knees, leans forward, gagging. Salt tears form tiny momentary lakes in the bloody dust. Hot wind rushes past his ears, roaring like a tide, but he does not drown. This time.
RABBINICAL RESIDENCE
PORTO SANT’ANDREA
“You promise?” Angelo Soncini asks as his mother tucks him in. “A brother this time?”
“I can’t promise, but— yes, I think it’s going to be a boy.” Sitting on the edge of his bed, Mirella takes her son’s hand, which is reasonably clean for a change, and rests it on her belly. “Wait… Did you feel that? This baby is just like you were! All knees and fists and feet, kicking to get out!”
Angelo looks up slyly. “I know a kid who says babies come out the mamma’s mouth.”
Mirella has prepared herself to be honest, if indirect. “No, my treasure. There’s a special opening between a lady’s legs that God has made for just such a purpose. When the baby’s ready, he comes out down there.” Judging from the look she gets, this is a far worse solution to the puzzle than anything Angelo and his young consultants have discussed.
Angelo shakes his head. “That can’t be right. Babies are too big for that. Unless—” His eyes bulge. “Do ladies’ legs come off?”
“It might be convenient if they did,” she admits. “The important thing is, the babies are born, and everyone welcomes them into the family. Especially big brothers! No more questions! Say your prayers!”
Her own prayers are simpler than the Hebrew ones her son rattles through. No raids tonight, please, God! Let my child sleep soundly. Let him dream of baby brothers, and not Altira’s death.
So different was her second pregnancy from her first, Mirella Soncini worried almost from the start that something was wrong. If Angelo was like a boxer within her, the new child was like a butterfly, like a breeze on lace curtains. Fluttering, shivering, humming. “The baby almost never kicks,” Mirella said, but everyone told her not to fret.
Born at dawn, her daughter quickly flushed as rosy as the light that greeted her, and settled into Mirella’s arms like a nestling. That was when everyone else began to worry. Mirella didn’t care. In defiance of tradition, she named her daughter Altira, Hebrew for fear not!
“All she does is cry and make smells,” Angelo complained. “She’s almost two and she still can’t do anything! Why do you like her better than me?”
“I love you both the same,” Mirella insisted. “And you should love your little sister, too! Altira can’t do as much as you because she’s so little.”
But Altira could cuddle. Altira could gaze at her mother with measureless love. She could smile shyly, almost coyly, and throw her face onto Mirella’s breast with a surfeit of affection, patting soft flesh with hands like small pink starfish. So sweet… But this will be another son, Mirella thinks. A boy, all energy and push.
She makes her ponderous way to Iacopo’s office and emits a quiet growl of exasperation at the stacks of paperwork piled on the dining table after a late meeting with the congregation officers. Hoping to reform Iacopo when they first married, Mirella proudly provided her new husband with a nice, big filing cabinet. Iacopo dutifully filled it with correspondence and scribbled notes, but the organization remained more geological than alphabetical. Several arguments later, he declared, “There are two kinds of people, cara mia: pilers and filers. Ours is a mixed marriage.”
“Angelo’s in bed,” she says, standing at the threshold of his study. “Shall I wait up?”
Slowly, visibly, Iacopo’s mind shifts from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, from Renaissance Hebrew to modern Italian. Mirella waits patiently, breathing in the dust and leathery scent of five thousand volumes. They are her husband’s tools and his colleagues, these books. Three mille
When at last Iacopo’s eyes focus on his wife, they warm, and in the resonant, melodic baritone that won her, he recites, “ ‘His heart, aroast upon the spit of longing, turns. He burns! O gaze, gazelle, down from your window, where the tender passion of your gallant yearns—’ ”
Mirella laughs. “Pardon me, a gazelle with a window?”
“I’m just the translator, not the poet! You can come in, you know. It’s only my office, not the holy of holies.”
“And take a chance on moving some crucial scrap of paper from one heap to another?” She shakes her head.
“You look tired. Beautiful,” he adds, “but tired. Go to bed, cara mia. I want to finish this stanza, but you should get some rest.”
“In a few minutes. First, I need to clear away a mess someone left in the dining room.”
The office door clicks closed. Iacopo Soncini stares a few moments at the rich figuring of its wood. Then it’s back to old Pappus, the lovesick i