Chapter 10
Cold blue gleams of lightning flared across the night: prongs of fire in an ebony sky. Thunder rolled and muttered and clapped. There came the crashing of uprooted trees in the jungle.
The lightning glare penetrated the forest ceiling only as a faint wash of blueness. But the thunder burst like an irregular cannonade through the avenues of tree trunks. Rain water ran off every leaf in curving torrents.
David crouched between two upsloping roots of a thick tree. He held the little twenty-two revolver straight out in front of him with a rigid fearfulness. Each shock of thunder sent an involuntary trembling through his muscles. He wanted to give himself up to sobbing terror, but part of his mind said: “That would be stupid thing to do.”
Far off through the trees there came the tearing, crashing sound of a tree falling.
He bit at his lower lip, willing himself to feel only this pain, but the thought of pain brought a dull throbbing to the stump of his finger.
Gettler heard the tree fall as though it were directly on top of him. The sodden earth shook at the impact, and mud spattered him.
Close! Christ, I should’ve brought the flashlight!
Before darkness sealed off the jungle, he had seen David’s footprints move toward higher ground. There had been an aimless wavering to the boy’s tracks: a sure sign that he was lost.
The brief blue wash of lightning flitted across the jungle floor, revealed the fallen tree on his left. An immediate clap of thunder and smell of ozone told of the nearness of the bolt.
Gettler stumbled forward through the muddy darkness, slipping, falling. He knew it was useless to move when he could see nothing, but there was in him a need to do.
Again, lightning fixed the forest floor.
And David saw a crouching shape off through the trees where there had been no shape in the previous flash. In a paroxysm of terror, he squeezed the trigger of the twenty-two. The shot cracked loudly, and a yellow-orange flame gouted from the muzzle.
David’s ears rang. He trembled.
Gettler heard the shot, saw the spurt of flame about a hundred feet to his left. The bullet spatted into a tree beyond him. He picked himself up from the mud, shouted: “David! It’s Gettler … I’m here! Where are you?”
David heard the voice in the night, and his careful hoarding of calmness broke. He began to sob, and called out: “I’m here! Over here! I’m here! Oh, please hurry!”
Gettler blundered through the slippery mud, stumbled into the tree where David crouched, brushed against the boy, gathered him into an enfolding hug.
“I got lost,” sobbed David. “I was scared.” He buried his face against Gettler’s rough jacket, and cried.
“It’s all right,” whispered Gettler.
He felt the gun in David’s hand, took it, set the safety, pushed it into a pocket.
“It got dark,” said David. “And I was afraid you’d go on without me.”
“No!” growled Gettler. “We’d never do that!”
He pulled the boy down between the roots, sheltered him under part of the jacket.
Now, all the fear and rage and protest that had driven Gettler settled into a small throbbing within his temples. Lightning flashed, and thunder shook the air. Rain drenched him. And he felt that he was withdrawing from his body: acutely aware of David and every sound in the darkness. It was as though the essential core of himself existed in a curious vacuum: one step removed from his senses, experiencing everything as through the body of a stranger. The world of the night, its danger and terror, did not seem to apply to himself except in a mathematical way—like the function of a complex formula.
Gettler closed his eyes, and experienced a vision in brilliant clarity. It came with the flare of lightning against his closed lids, set off by the shock of thunder. He saw an endless network of interlinked rooms, and sensed himself in each room with nothing hidden. An open door drew him, and he followed the vision with rapt concentration. In the room his father whipped the child Franz, and followed the whipping with a lecture on morality.
The words dripped from the father’s mouth, red and splashing.
And Gettler remembered.
He floated through a series of rooms, above each door a glittering sign: “Thou Shalt Not!”
In each room the puppets acted, every action and detail perfect.
And Gettler remembered.
Quite suddenly, Gerda stood beside him in the middle chapel of their parish church. Father Braun, the kindly old one, intoned the marriage litany. And it was no longer a matter of puppets: Gettler re-experienced the scene with a draining sense of sweetness.
And when the scene was an empty husk, he moved on to a new experience out of his past. There came over him the slow realization that each memory thus seen became a room, and the rooms collapsed behind him like dusty shells destroyed by his passage. He saw the good times and the bad times in a swift kaleidoscope of images.
A moment came when he felt that he could thus examine the day of infinite horror, drain it dry in the same way. The puppets moved: his own figure came up the stone walk past the rose arbor—under his arm the paper-wrapped telescope: the gift for Peter. And now he realized that an emotional veil—the wonderful anticipatory lift of homecoming—had hidden from him the unnatural stillness of the house.
There came the remembered pause, the curious swaying sense of something wrong, an emptiness. Gettler abandoned the jungle night, flowed into the puppet figure of his memory, opened his front door, walked down the silent hall and into the demolished universe of his own living room.
It was a tableau: the gouts of blood, the twisted naked figures of Gerda and Peter, and over them the vacancy of death. The grinning S.S. officers, stripped to the waist, watched him with eager eyes. And for the first time Gettler saw the sadistic torturers as sufferers.
They looked for an answer to themselves in my pain! By their power over me they tried to force me to betray the secret of life. They wanted words to free them from their prison of words! Power? That dies in its instant of use. And cowardice never lives.
Again he felt the rage that grief-shock had suppressed. Now he permitted it, felt it spill out of him. After that, the rooms were easier to enter: even the one where he killed Bannon. He came to know that the horror of that homecoming had shattered him, strewing lost pieces everywhere. But now he saw where all the threads went, and he gathered them in.
Gradually, the world of the night re-established itself. He felt David against his side, realized that the boy slept in the exhausted reaction to terror. Like the remembered glare of lightning, Gettler saw the lost dreams he had projected onto this boy, saw the destruction that madness had worked.
David must live! No matter what, David must live!
The boy stirred in the throes of a dream.
Gettler’s arm tightened with convulsive protectiveness around David’s shoulder. A clarity of mind like the aftermath of fever filled Gettler. But he knew it for a tenuous thing with hungry chaos waiting all around.
David slept in the shelter of Gettler’s arm.
The nervous voice of the forest sank to a waiting hush, and daylight crept through the rain pall.
Gettler awoke the boy, headed downhill toward the river. Rain had obliterated their tracks, but he had an instinct for the jungle.