Galerie Read online

  Revealing her body to me was not something that came easily to Vanesa. It was not a simple thing for her to reveal anything to me, or likely to anyone—ever. Every revelation was a partial, guarded step forward, followed by an inevitable retreat. This emotional trench warfare between us became, over time, a war of attrition—a war in which her forces, the most deeply entrenched by far, ultimately prevailed.

  She sat by the firelight that second summer, a beguiling flower of softness and gentle scent. The challenge of unfolding her petals felt new and engaging. We smoked the joint, and as I turned to the serious business of getting as far as I could with her, she watched the stars and talked, her monologue punctuated only by my occasional arduous forays to her mouth, which tasted of honey and marijuana.

  She loved the stars, claiming they were her most reliable companions. She even had what she considered a personal relationship with one constellation, Orion.

  “He was the first man in my life,” she purred.

  I stopped kissing her nipple for a moment, looked up, and smiled mischievously. “You’re just one person among billions who’ve shared the stars since the beginning of time. How close a relationship can you have with a constellation?” I teased.

  She responded with a silence far deeper than words. She told me without ever opening her mouth of her solitude, her loneliness. She told me that people could not touch her. She told me that people were inherently bad. People betrayed you, she said wordlessly, as they had betrayed her parents, as they had betrayed Uncle Tomas, as they had betrayed the Jews of Prague, Kladno, and ten thousand other communities that were no more.

  She told me.

  If only I had known how to listen.

  Orion, however remote and cold, would—could—never hurt Vanesa. Orion would never love her so desperately as to be unable to approach her, unable even to touch her. Orion would never hide things, terrible things, things that couldn’t be shared anyway because they were so deep. Orion had no secrets, never cried for hours in a locked bathroom, never slapped her if she was so careless as to get hurt. Orion was just there, night after night, listening to a young woman’s confessed fears—immutable, unperturbed, accepting.

  Prague, December 1991

  Marek made apologies to the waiter, to the patrons behind him, and to his colleague Eva. He led Vanesa and Jakobovits out of the restaurant and into the ominously grey Prague afternoon. The temperature had dropped, and the heavy sky had begun to cough up bits of snow mixed with rain, making the cobblestones slick and mucosal.

  They hurried around the corner to the museum, and soon entered Marek’s cramped but warm third-floor office. He gestured for Vanesa and Jonas to sit on the two folding chairs in front of his desk. While they were removing their coats, Marek picked up the phone on his desk and ordered tea for all. He sat down heavily in his own rickety wooden office chair, which appeared standard issue for museum researchers. The chair buckled under his bulk, but held.

  Vanesa remained silent, expectant and eager, but slightly hesitant—as if about to learn something she was not entirely sure she wanted to know.

  Without further comment, Marek reached under the desk and removed a battered cardboard box. He placed it on his cluttered desk, pushing several bound sheaves of paper aside to make room on the small wooden table. He removed the worn cover, and a burnt smell escaped. It filled the room with the odor of a campfire pit after a rain.

  Vanesa glanced past Marek’s right shoulder to the grimy windowpanes. Outside, the day’s first snowflakes silently snaked their way to oblivion on the wet street.

  “These were found in an incinerator in the basement of a building near the Hlavni Nadrazi, the central train station here in Prague,” Marek began.

  A knock sounded on the door, and he accepted the tea tray with thanks from the grey-smocked woman, who glared with politely subtle malevolence as she handed it to him. He closed the door, turned, and proffered the tray. They each took a glass cup. He put the tray on the bureau behind his desk and took the last remaining cup for himself. For a long moment he blew on the tea to cool it, the steam fogging his glasses. Finally, he set the cup down and began to deliberately remove plastic-encased items from the box.

  The first item was the crumbling remnants of a grey-green SS uniform shirt, burnt from the waist up, with only the shoulders intact. The right collar bore the standard SS double sig rune insignia, but the left side bore a tarnished silver version of Michael’s symbol. Next emerged a blackened lapel pin—or perhaps a tie tack—in the same shape. Following this, Marek produced a wooden-handled stamp of the type used by bureaucrats to stamp papers. The charred wooden handle had a heat-warped rubber pad, on which the symbol could still be discerned. More and more items came out of the box in quick succession: a piece of a metal comb, a twisted wristwatch with flaps of a charred leather strap still attached, a silver letter opener, a broken glass paperweight, the delicate remnants of cream-colored stationery—all embossed with the symbol.

  Marek looked at the items spread out on his desk with the mixture of mundane familiarity and wonder usually reserved for parents watching their children. He must have seen these things a thousand times, yet still seemed to marvel at them, to puzzle over where they might lead him. He looked at Vanesa intently, his small blue eyes seeking hers with eagerness.

  She met his gaze, but could offer no answers, only more questions.

  His disappointment evident, Marek took a calm sip of tea, winced as the hot liquid burned his tongue, and began to speak.

  The friendly collegial tone from the restaurant had vanished, the incredulity of the discovery of Vanesa’s version of the symbol along with it. Marek lapsed instead into that pedagogical tone that academics adopt in lectures, meetings, or any encounter whatsoever when they feel the imperative of demonstrating the knowledge they’ve accrued.

  “Dr. Neuman, I have a BA and Masters from Charles University here in Prague, and I did my Ph.D. and post-doctoral work at Oxford, specializing in the history of the Nazi period. I wrote my doctorate on the Nazi handling of Jewish artifacts looted from Bohemia and Moravia. As I told you, my grandfather was an active member of the Nazi party. I make no secret of this, nor am I proud of it. It’s simply a fact that I’ve learned to live with. I have devoted my entire life—literally, since I was old enough to understand—to learning about the Nazi movement, its leaders, its symbols, the logic and meaning behind its terrible deeds. I have visited most major Nazi-era sites, from concentration camps across Europe, through Nazi headquarters in most capitals, and most recently bunkers in former East Germany.”

  He paused and leaned forward across his desk, interlocking the fingers of both hands, his gaze intense. “I have encountered this symbol only three times in all my years of research, the third time being today in the restaurant with you. And, I’m sorry to tell you, I am no closer today to understanding its meaning than I was when the items you see here were presented to me some ten years ago by the janitor of the building in which they were found.”

  Vanesa nodded gravely. She felt neither crushed, defeated, nor even disappointed. Rather, she sat on the edge of her seat practically afire. Here was her first taste of validation, the trailhead of the path that would, she had no doubt, lead her to the answers she sought. True, it remained only a nibble, but she was hungry for more.

  She looked eagerly to Marek, and he continued.

  “So, let me tell you what I do know about this symbol. First off, it is clearly runic in origin. As you know, the runic alphabet was used to write Germanic languages prior to the wide scale adoption of the Latin alphabet by around 1100 CE. The Nazis held the runic alphabet in a mystical awe, if you will, and many key Nazi symbols were comprised of various combinations or versions of runes. Henrich Himmler, the head of the Schutzstaffel, the SS, from 1925 to the end of the war, was a self-proclaimed runic scholar and quite passionate about Germanic mysticism. He actively promoted the adoption of Armanen runes for the SS—most notably, of course, being the double sig
rune which became the symbol of the organization itself. This symbol was so prevalent that it was actually added to typewriters during the heyday of the Nazi movement.”

  He took another sip of tea, and settled back into his chair, visibly enjoying Vanesa’s rapt attention. He again interlaced his pudgy fingers thoughtfully, the neatly-manicured and buffed nails momentarily catching the hazy light from the window, and continued.

  “Our mystery symbol, as you’ve no doubt ascertained, clearly has one sig rune. This rune, according to Guido von List’s interpretation, which the Nazis adopted, stands simply for victory. The other part is either a leben rune, which stands for life, or a tod rune, which stands for death. It’s difficult to tell, since the presentation of both the leben and tod runes, which are mirror images of each other, is generally vertical, whereas ours appears horizontally. The fact that the sig rune is connected to the leben or tod rune in our symbol is also significant, but only in the absence of other examples. Runes were truly believed to carry mystical power, and although they appeared in combination on various SS decorations, like Himmler’s famous Ehrenrings—‘award rings’—they were not generally touching or connected. There’s really no precedent for this type of usage, at least not one that I’ve found, and I can only wonder at the significance.”

  Marek paused again to sip his now lukewarm tea. He leaned forward, elbows coming to rest lightly on the desk, and nodded towards Vanesa’s and Jonas’s tea, which they had barely touched.

  Jonas took an apologetic sip of his tea, cleared his throat, and spoke. “What about the combination of the rune meanings, and their relation to the physical position of their appearance. For example, runes were read left to right, correct? So our symbol could be taken to mean victory from death, no?”

  Marek nodded. “Yes, I’ve considered this, but it might be a bit of a stretch. It could just as easily mean victory from life, could it not? Or maybe both, victory from life and death. We can’t know. The key problem is that we don’t know the exact context of the symbol’s usage.”

  As he continued, a hint of optimism crept into his voice. “What I can say, with some degree of certainty, is that this symbol represented an organizational unit, most likely in the SS. Just take a look at the diversity of the artifacts the janitor recovered. The Nazis loved their trinkets, and took pride in displaying their group affiliation. Even if the actual nature of the group they belonged to wasn’t clear to outsiders, the very fact of their belonging to it would have been enough to motivate this display of symbols. They would only create ‘toys’ like tie tacks and letter openers, not to mention stationery and stamps, if they represented some sort of operational group. However, if this was the case, then we’re talking about a unit that was either very secret, was dissolved very quickly after its creation, or was very, very small. There’s no record of it in any of the archives I’ve visited, including the Berlin Document Center.”

  The room fell into a ponderous silence.

  Vanesa stood, as she often did when about to fire off a barrage of questions, and paced the office like a murder detective interrogating a prime suspect. She walked behind Marek’s desk and placed her empty tea cup on the tray. “What about the proportional size of the symbol, in its various applications? Is the sig rune always the same relative distance from the tod or leben rune, independent of the size of the symbol? And….” She stopped pacing and turned abruptly to face Marek. “What about the third instance you mentioned, the other time you encountered the symbol in use?”

  Marek also stood, their figures together taking up over half of the available floor space in the cramped office. He nodded vigorously. “Yes, I’ve examined the size issue quite thoroughly, and this is an interesting point: the figure is exactly proportionate in all its applications. The connecting line is always exactly the same length relative to the figure’s overall size. However….” He sat back down. “I have yet to understand the relevance of this in discovering the meaning of the symbol.”

  Vanesa frowned. “And the third instance you found?”

  He removed his glasses, untucked a shirt tail, and began polishing them fastidiously. Satisfied, he turned toward the light from the window to check for smudges, and mumbled half to himself, “Oh yes, of course, the third instance. I found it while conducting a survey of an abandoned ghetto dormitory—purely by chance, really. It was the oddest luck. It had been carved into the supporting beam of a triple-decker bunk, in a dormitory that had housed men and older boys. These bunks, it turns out, were only built in the autumn of 1942, so it was obviously not carved before this date.”

  “But where did you find it?” Vanesa grew impatient, and moved to stand over Marek, who retreated somewhat from the intensity of her questioning.

  “In what ghetto?” Vanesa insisted.

  He cleared his throat, “Ah, terribly sorry. I found it in the Hanover Barracks, in Terezin—Thereisenstadt, that is, only about an hour from this very office.”

  Prague, December 1991

  The eyes that watched Vanesa and Marek through the heavy snow falling from the slate-grey Prague sky were, by contrast, starkly blue.

  The eyes scowled below the homeless man’s snow-topped knitted hat as Vanesa and Marek bought their tickets at Prague’s Nadrazi Holesovice terminus. The slouching body in which the eyes resided trudged out of the station, leaving slushy footsteps in the snow, half-walking, half-staggering toward the double row of open-air bus stops on the station’s west side. He watched the two of them as they huddled under a flimsy corrugated roof—scarves drawn, collars upturned, waiting for the 8:40 a.m. bus to Litomerice, with a stop in Terezin.

  The homeless man glanced up and took in what he could see of Nadrazi Holesovice through the lacy snow curtain. Opened with Orwellian irony in 1984, when Ronald Reagan had just begun referring to the Soviet Union as “the evil empire,” the station was a monument to the monolithic Soviet architecture that still scarred much of Prague. From afar the structure made a bid for stern, if humble, elegance. Its black-glassed office façade disdainfully assessed the mundane tools of human mobility from above. From up close, however, the impression dissipated. Low ceilings, dark waiting areas, worn wooden benches, overflowing trash cans, the omnipresent odor of urine—all gave mute yet undeniable testimony to the building’s true, seedy character.

  As the travelers shook the snow off their coats and boarded the grey bus, the watcher turned away, seeking and finding a payphone.

  He dialed with chilled fingers, and finally glanced cautiously from side to side as he reported, “They’re on their way,” then hung up.

  As they settled back into the worn seats of the aging but comfortably-heated bus, Vanesa puzzled at the man sitting next to her. He’d hardly spoken in the slippery, thankfully short taxi ride from the Jewish Museum, a fact she’d attributed to simple morning fogginess. Yet Marek had continued providing polite, curt but empathetic answers to her enquiries throughout their trek through the filthy bus terminal, as they waited for the bus, and now, in their warm seats.

  She began to see that the true source of Marek’s silence was discomfort.

  As the landscape turned slowly from asphalt-bound urban to white-cloaked, clay-fielded rural, the driver turned the radio up, and a serious voice talked of heavy accumulations and a ground travel advisory.

  She turned to Marek. “Do I make you uncomfortable in some way?” Her Israeli directness was calculated to so overwhelm the European stolidity behind which Marek was hiding as to elicit an actual, sincere answer.

  The look of a hunted soldier watching lines of enemy troops approach his trench momentarily crossed Marek’s face. Then he smiled, the assault repelled, and took a deep breath as he turned to her.

  “Yes, in a way, but it’s not your fault. I just… know what you’re in store for today.” His voice was grave, but his eyes remained compassionate. “You… lost family in Terezin, correct? And you’ve never visited before? Nor any other Holocaust-era sites?”

  At Vanesa’s puzzl
ed nod, he continued, his tone softening, his voice low and familiar. “You work in academia, Dr. Neuman, so you are familiar with our colleagues who shun field studies in favor of ‘scholarly’ textual research. To my taste, these scholars do their audience a disservice, because they relate their subject matter based solely on other peoples’ experiences. I believe that there is no substitute for actually touching evidence, viewing artifacts, visiting a site. Things that carry deep significance, personal or professional, should be experienced in person. However, I have also learned that no academic preparation is sufficient to mitigate the power of one’s emotional response to such experiences. I have visited many such places…. I remind you of the past issues that I, too, face. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  She nodded, her eyes momentarily moistening at his warning that a visit to Terezin would be difficult for her. She had, of course, thought of this. Terezin, where her mother had starved for much of the war. Terezin, from whence her father had disappeared off the face of the earth, or at least off the face of Nazi records, between 1943 and the end of the war. Terezin, where her grandmother and uncle had died, alone and feverish, cared for by the overloaded hands of strangers. Terezin, from whence two of her grandparents had been shipped off in freezing cattle cars to be murdered.

  Terezin. She had a sudden impulse to scream at the driver to stop the bus, to turn around, to go away from Terezin, not toward it.

  Her stomach lurched as the bus slid, scrabbling for control on the snow-slick freeway onramp. She stared out the window for many long minutes, until the whitening landscape was abruptly broken by Mount Rip, the rounded volcanic mountain where, according to legend, Praotec Cech, the first Czech, had looked over the rich heart of the Bohemian flatlands—a spot of seminal significance, the symbolic birthplace of the Czech people in their homeland.