Sleeping in Flame

The Swiss are horrible people, but they're smart. They take no sides and have no friends, but what do they care? They make it through wars untouched, with their banks full of money and their fat stomachs full. In France we heard they turned away Jews from their borders even when they knew what would happen by sending them back. Sometimes I thought about the French Jews we'd put on trucks. Sometimes, no, a lot of the time I thought about those French children who . . . flew out of that schoolhouse.

They wouldn't let us off the train in Zurich but that didn't matter. All we wanted from them was their food, and between us we had just enough money to buy it. When I ate a chocolate bar for the first time there, I almost got sick to my stomach from the pure beautiful sweetness of it. They had coffee with real milk and sandwiches on dark bread so fresh and warm it kissed the inside of your mouth. There's a fu

Naturally that made me think of Elisabeth. Would she be at the station to meet me? I'd written from France, but who knew what happened to letters sent from another country during a war? I kept thinking the post office there took prisoners' letters and threw them away first chance they got. But every once in a while I'd heard from her or my father. His letters were always the same: boring – how great things were going to be when I got back, the newest deal he'd pulled off and how much profit he'd made . . . But her letters were killers. They never talked about the weather or how hard the war was on them in Vie

Gьnter got off at Bregenz. As we hugged good-bye, both of us started crying like fools. We were home, for better or worse, and we were glad of it. The last I saw of him, he was standing on the platform with a scared look in his eye. There were people swarming all around, but none of them went up to him. I knew exactly how he felt, so I pushed the window down and yelled at him, "Come to Vie

He waved at me. "Okay, but I'll be all right. You take care, pal."

It was another two days before I got home. Across the whole country, foreign troops were everywhere. English, Russians, Americans in Jeeps and tanks, walking by the side of the road . . . A group of them even waved to the train as we went past. A year before we would have been shooting at each other.

From what we heard, Austria had been divided up among different countries. Each Bundesland was controlled by someone else. In the train we learned Vie

The last stop we made before we got there was Linz, which, from the look of things, had been hit hard. What I remember most, though, were two freight cars off on a siding with large Jewish stars painted sloppily on their sides. Below the stars was the word "Mauthausen." In France, I didn't believe the stories until that day I saw the kids fly, the day our lieutenant told us to round them up and put them in the trucks. After that I believed every story I heard about the death camps. But what was I supposed to do? What could anyone do when one word against it would have meant the firing squad, or worse. The lieutenant had been right that day – our job was to get our asses home in one piece, no matter what the orders were.

That was one of the few things I wanted to talk to my father about. He was a survivor. If you were his size, you had to find a way to survive in this world. I wanted to hear what he had to say about what the Nazis had done and why. Much of my life he'd been able to make sense of things that had only confused me. Maybe there was a good reason for killing all those Jews but I just didn't know it.

When the train pulled into Vie

When we reached each other he pulled me down and kissed my cheeks. "My boy! Moritz! You're home. You're here."

He used the Papa language, the secret words he'd taught me when I was a boy but which I'd always disliked.

"Hello, Papa. Talk to me in German. I want to hear my own language now." I was crying again. I picked him up and hugged him, but over his shoulder I was looking at Elisabeth, so far down the way. Papa was Papa, but Elisabeth was home.

"Dave? Walker Easterling."

"Hey! What time is it? Christ, what's so important at eight in the morning that it can't wait?"

"Dave, I want you to do some more research for me."

"Right now? Can I brush my teeth first? What happened, did you find another skeleton in your family closet?"

"No, this time it's something more in your direction. I want you to find out all you can about the history of the fairy tale 'Rumpelstiltskin.' I know it comes from the Brothers Grimm, but I want you to really dig into this and find out everything you can."

After checking with the doctor on duty and hearing that Maris was still sleeping, I went home for a shower and a change of clothes. Orlando was indignant that I'd left him alone for the whole night, so I first had to play with him for some minutes before he walked away with his tail in the air, satisfied for the time being.

I was tired and stiff and worried about Maris, but once I was back in my apartment, the other phone call from the night before came back and hit me full force. Everything that had happened since then had clouded over some of what he had said, but enough of it returned and gave me a full dose of the creeps. Not to mention the dream I'd had in the hospital waiting room which, along with the other dreams I'd had over the last weeks, was begi

After I showered, changed, and put the coffee on, I went to my desk and looked for a pencil and paper. While searching around, I happened to notice the computer in the corner and thought that would work just as well. Turning it on, I put in and pulled out the various disks, commands, blah-blah that needs to be done before you can have your conversation with the television screen. While it was thinking, I fiddled with the mouse and thought about the names Kaspar, Balthazar, and Melchior. When the word-processing program came up, I created a new file and typed those names at the top. Remembering that somewhere in Maris's load of books was a copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales, I got up to look for it. Unbelievably, it was the second book I pulled out of a big box. "Rumpelstiltskin," page 209.