“I suppose it’s because we don’t have those teeth that we started hitting things with sticks, and then throwing rocks at things, and then making spears and bows and arrows and…and like that,” Bill said vaguely. He glanced over toward the camouflaged revetment that held the B-29 McCutcheon and he flew. “If we’d kept our teeth, we wouldn’t be dropping bombs on each other right this minute.”
“No-we’d be a bunch of lousy, flea-bitten monkeys on the prowl for whatever we could scrounge,” McCutcheon said.
Bill grinned a crooked grin. “And this would make us different from the way we are how exactly?”
“Hey, we aren’t lousy and flea-bitten,” McCutcheon said. “DDT takes care of that. We make the stuff that goes boom, but we make the stuff that lets life be worth living, too.”
“Mm…maybe. Can I scrounge a butt off you, Major Monkey, sir?”
“Ook,” McCutcheon said, and handed him a pack.
–
Marian had never seen Daniel Philip Jaspers after he tried to rob her car. She knew that was his name because a camp policeman pulled the would-be burglar’s wallet out of his pocket while he was still groggy. Marian and Fayvl Tabakman and a couple of other people all told the cop what he’d been up to.
Glorying in his own self-importance, the policeman took Daniel Philip Jaspers away, poking him in the ribs with a billy club whenever he staggered. He staggered quite a bit. Marian was sure she would have, too. The rock Fayvl got him with hadn’t been small, and he’d thrown it hard.
She didn’t know exactly what happened to camp criminals. If you put them in a jail, would they notice? The whole camp was too much like a jail. Maybe they went into labor gangs, clearing wreckage on the fringes of the blast area. Wreckage like what had been the house where she and Linda lived, for instance. Those labor gangs had plenty of work. They were about the only kind of workers in these parts that did.
When Marian remembered, she did keep an eye out for Daniel Philip Jaspers. He might want to get even for not being able to steal from her. She peered every which way the first few days. After that, he began to move into the background of her worries.
Two big questions stayed in the foreground. Would Bill come back from the fighting in one piece? And, what the devil would she and Linda do till he did? She couldn’t do anything about the first one but pray, and she wasn’t much good at praying. The other…
She could drive out of the camp. The trouble was, she didn’t know what she’d do then. The bombs that hit Seattle and Portland shot the whole Pacific Northwest’s economy right behind the ear. She could type; she’d been a clerk-typist at Boeing during the war. That was about the only kind of job this side of waiting tables or sweeping floors she could do. She’d been glad to walk away from it when Bill got his ruptured duck. Linda came along shortly afterwards.
If she drove away, she might find a job, not that there were many around to find. If she did, who would take care of Linda while she worked, though? Where would she stay while she looked for work? Her bank account had gone up in smoke with her bank.
All of those questions felt like more than she could handle. And so she drifted from day to day in what seemed both a no-place and a no-time. She was just kind of going along.
She wasn’t the only one at the camp who felt that way. Some people accepted it and joked about it. Nobody ever found out who first tagged the place Camp Nowhere, but the name spread like wildfire as soon as someone came up with it. Seattle-Everett Refugee Encampment Number Three, the camp’s official handle, couldn’t compete. Jokes helped, a little.
They helped some people, anyhow. More and more victims of radiation sickness went into the graveyard alongside the camp. It got bigger and bigger.
More and more inmates who killed themselves found final resting places there, too. Guns, nooses, and poison ran a close, if ghoulish, race for most popular method. There were no tall buildings to jump off, or that would have been another favored choice.
When you were stuck in limbo like this, were you really living? The ones who took the long road out evidently thought not. Marian wondered herself. But wonder was all she did, or aimed to do. Whatever happened to her, she also had Linda to worry about. She wasn’t selfish enough to leave a little girl all alone in the world.
The suicides bewildered Fayvl and his friends. “I seen plenty worse places than this,” Yitzkhak said. “Hardly anybody kill himself in those. They die, yeah-they die like flies. They get killed. They don’t kill themselves. Is crazy.”
“You saw,” Moishe told him. “You didn’t seen. You saw.”
“Afen yam,” Yitzkhak said without heat. When Marian asked him what that meant, he pretended not to hear.
“People give up,” Fayvl said, puzzlement in his voice. “I don’t understand it. In the other camps, the Nazi camps, people didn’t give up. They tried to keep going as long as they could.”
“Not the Mussulmen,” Moishe said. To Marian, he explained, “This is what we called the goners, the ones who would die soon and knew it and didn’t care.”
“But they were goners,” Tabakman said. “They were starving, they were sick, they were beat up like you wouldn’t believe, like you hope you never see. If somebody with radiation sickness, he wants out of his pain, that I understand. But we got plenty food. We don’t got guards with Schmeissers and whips. Don’t gotta work sixteen hours a day. Don’t gotta work at all. So what’s to do yourself in for?”
“Americans is soft,” Yitzkhak said.
“Americans are soft,” Moishe said. Having corrected the phrase, he tasted it in his mouth and nodded. “Americans are soft. They never have to go through the things we went through. They don’t know what it’s like.”
“Hitler’s soldiers didn’t think they were soft,” Marian said.
Fayvl Tabakman lit a cigarette. “I watched Americans shoot SS guards,” he said after a puff or two. “I watched them herd Germans from the town next door through my camp so they couldn’t say they never knew what Hitler did. You’re right, Mrs. Staley. That was not soft.” Another puff. “I weighed forty-one kilos then.”
Whatever Marian had learned of the metric system in school, she’d long since forgotten. “How much is that in pounds?” she asked.
The three middle-aged Jews went back and forth, fingers flashing as they worked it out. Finally Tabakman said, “Ninety-about ninety, anyways. And I was one of the healthy ones.”
He wasn’t a big man. He probably didn’t weigh more than a hundred fifty pounds now. At ninety, though…She’d seen photos from the liberated concentration camps. Who hadn’t? Men with fingers like pencils, arms and legs like broomsticks, necks too thin and weak to hold up the heads with skin stretched drumhead tight over skulls. Women so starved you couldn’t tell them from men. You didn’t want to believe photos like that. You didn’t want to think people could do that to other people. You didn’t want to-but there were the pictures.
Marian glanced over at Linda, who was happily chomping on a cracker from her ration pack while the grownups talked grownup talk she didn’t care about. Marian asked the question she’d wondered about as long as she’d known the cobbler: “Did you have a family…before the war?”
“My wife and me, we had a boy and a girl,” he said, looking down at the table. “We were partisans in the woods for a while after the fighting started. When we got caught, the Germans sent us to Auschwitz. We got there, the SS doctor, he told them to go one way and me the other. And that was the last I saw of them.”
It was the last anybody saw of them, he meant. They would have gone to the gas chambers. Some German engineer would have designed false showerheads that didn’t do anything but lull the people herded into those rooms. Some German chemical firm would have sold the SS the poison gas. Some German funeral-supply company would have sold the crematoria, to deal with what the gas chambers turned out. How could you contemplate any of that without going mad?