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Dancing Men

Glen Hirshberg

Dancing Men

* * *

Glen Hirshberg lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife and children. He is the author of a novel, The Snowman’s Children, and a collection of ghost stories, The Two Sams, both published by Carroll & Graf in the United States.

His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Dark Terrors 6, Trampoline: An Anthology and The Dark: New Ghost Stories, where “Dancing Men” made its original appearance. Both this story and The Two Sams received International Horror Guild Awards in 2004. He is currently completing a new novel and a second set of ghost stories.

“It’s gratifying and a relief to see ‘Dancing Men’ finding some sort of home for itself,” admits the author. “It took dozens of drafts and most of a year to complete, and remains an uncomfortable piece for me. I think I was so concerned with honouring the subject matter that I kept strangling the fiction.

“In terms of people lost, the Holocaust touched my family far less directly than it did so many millions of others. But it has been impossible not to notice the scars that event has left in people I love, the ongoing effects it has had on the way nations interact, the jagged holes it has ripped in language and cultural perspective and our mutual sense of what we can expect from each other.”

* * *

“These are the last days of our lives so we give a signal maybe there still will be relatives or acquaintances of these persons. They were tortured and burnt goodbye …”

— Testimonial found at Chelmno

* * *

I

We’d been all afternoon in the Old Jewish Cemetery, where green light filters through the trees and lies atop the tumbled tombstones like algae. Mostly I think the kids were tired. The two-week Legacy of the Holocaust tour I had organized had taken us to Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg, where downed electrical wires slither through the brittle grass, and Bebelplatz in East Berlin, where ghost-shadows of burned books flutter in their chamber in the ground like white wings. We’d spent our nights not sleeping on sleeper trains east to Auschwitz and Birkenau and our days on public transport, traipsing through the fields of dead and the monuments to them, and all seven high-school juniors in my care had had enough.

From my spot on a bench alongside the roped-off stone path that meandered through the grounds and back out to the streets of Josefov, I watched six of my seven charges giggling and chattering around the final resting place of Rabbi Loew. I’d told them the story of the Rabbi, and the clay man he’d supposedly created and then animated, and now they were running their hands over his tombstone, tracing Hebrew letters they couldn’t read, chanting “Amet”, the word I’d taught them, in low voices and laughing. As of yet, nothing had risen from the dirt. The Tribe, they’d taken to calling themselves, after I told them that the Wandering Jews didn’t really work, historically, since the essential characteristic of the Wanderer himself was his solitude.

There are teachers, I suppose, who would have been considered members of the Tribe by the Tribe, particularly on a summer trip, far from home and school and television and familiar language. But I had never been that sort of teacher.

Nor was I the only excluded member of our traveling party. Lurking not far from me, I spotted Penny Berry, the quietest member of our group and the only Goy, staring over the graves into the trees with her expressionless eyes half closed and her lipstickless lips curled into the barest hint of a smile. Her auburn hair sat cocked on the back of her head in a tight, precise ponytail. When she saw me watching, she wandered over, and I swallowed a sigh. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Penny, exactly. But she asked uncomfortable questions, and she knew how to wait for answers, and she made me nervous for no reason I could explain.

“Hey, Mr Gadeuszki,” she said, her enunciation studied, perfect. She’d made me teach her how to say it right, grind the s and z and k together into that single Slavic snarl of sound. “What’s with the stones?”

She gestured at the tiny grey pebbles placed across the tops of several nearby tombstones. Those on the slab nearest us glinted in the warm, green light like little eyes. “In memory,” I said. I thought about sliding over on the bench to make room for her, then thought that would only make both of us even more awkward.

“Why not flowers?” Penny said.

I sat still, listening to the clamor of new-millennium Prague just beyond the stone wall that enclosed the cemetery. “Jews bring stones.”

A few minutes later, when she realized I wasn’t going to say anything else, Penny moved off in the general direction of the Tribe. I watched her go and allowed myself a few more peaceful seconds. Probably, I thought, it was time to move us along. We had the Astronomical Clock left to see today, puppet-theatre tickets for tonight, the plane home to Cleveland in the morning. And just because the kids were tired didn’t mean they would tolerate loitering here much longer. For seven summers in a row, I had taken students on some sort of exploring trip. “Because you’ve got nothing better to do,” one member of the Tribe cheerfully informed me one night the preceding week. Then he’d said, “Oh my God, I was just kidding, Mr G.”

And I’d had to reassure him that I knew he was, I always looked like that.

“That’s true. You do,” he’d said, and returned to his tripmates.

Now, I rubbed my hand over the stubble on my shaven scalp, stood, and blinked as my family name — in its original Polish spelling — flashed behind my eyelids again, looking just the way it had this morning amongst all the other names etched into the Pinkas Synagogue wall. The ground went slippery underneath me, the tombstones slid sideways in the grass, and I teetered and sat down hard.

When I lifted my head and opened my eyes, the Tribe had swarmed around me, a whirl of backwards baseball caps and tanned legs and Nike symbols. “I’m fine,” I said quickly, stood up, and to my relief found I did feel fine. I had no idea what had just happened. “Slipped.”

“Kind of,” said Penny Berry from the edges of the group, and I avoided looking her way.

“Time to go, gang. Lots more to see.”

It has always surprised me when they do what I say, because mostly, they do. It’s not me, really. The social contract between teachers and students may be the oldest mutually accepted enacted ritual on this earth, and its power is stronger than most people imagine.

We passed between the last of the graves and through a low stone opening. The dizziness or whatever it had been was gone, and I felt only a faint tingling in my fingertips as I drew my last breath of that too-heavy air, thick with loam and grass springing from bodies stacked a dozen deep in the ground.

The side street beside the Old-New synagogue was crammed with tourists, their purses and backpacks open like the mouths of grotesquely overgrown chicks. Into those open mouths went wooden puppets and embroidered kepot and Chamsa hands from the rows of stalls that lined the sidewalk; the walls, I thought, of an all-new, much more ingenious sort of ghetto. In a way, this place had become exactly what Hitler had meant for it to be: the Museum of a Dead Race, only the paying customers were descendants of the Race, and they spent money in amounts he could never have dreamed. The ground had begun to roll under me again, and I closed my eyes. When I opened them, the tourists had cleared in front of me, and I saw the stall, a lopsided wooden hulk on bulky brass wheels. It tilted toward me, the puppets nailed to its side leering and chattering while the gypsy leaned out from between them, nose studded with a silver star, grinning.

He touched the toy nearest him, set it rocking on its terrible, thin wire. “Loh-ootkawve divahd-law,” he said, and then I was down, flat on my face in the street.

I don’t know how I wound up on my back. Somehow, somebody had rolled me over. I couldn’t breathe. My stomach felt squashed, as though there was something squatting on it, wooden and heavy, and I jerked, gagged, opened my eyes, and the light blinded me.

“I didn’t,” I said, blinking, brain flailing. I wasn’t even sure I’d been all the way unconscious, couldn’t have been out more than a few seconds. But the way the light affected my eyes, it was as though I’d been buried for a month.

“Dobry den, dobry den,” said a voice over me, and I squinted, teared up, blinked into the gypsy’s face, the one from the stall, and almost screamed. Then he touched my forehead, and he was just a man, red Manchester United cap on his head, black eyes kind as they hovered around mine. The cool hand he laid against my brow had a wedding ring on it, and the silver star in his nose caught the afternoon light.

I meant to say I was okay, but what came out was “I didn’t” again.

The gypsy said something else to me. The language could have been Czech or Slovakian or neither. I didn’t know enough to tell the difference, and my ears weren’t working right. In them I could feel a painful, persistent pressure.

The gypsy stood, and I saw my students clustered behind him like a knot I’d drawn taut. When they saw me looking, they burst out babbling, and I shook my head, tried to calm them, and then I felt their hands on mine, pulling me to a sitting position. The world didn’t spin. The ground stayed still. The puppet stall I would not look at kept its distance.

“Mr G, are you all right?” one of them asked, her voice shrill, slipping toward panic.

Then Penny Berry knelt beside me and looked straight into me, and I could see her formidable brain churning behind those placid grey-green eyes, the color of Lake Erie when it’s frozen.

“Didn’t what?” she asked.

And I answered, because I had no choice. “Kill my grandfather.”

II

They propped me at my desk in our pension not far from the Charles Bridge and brought me a glass of “nice water”, which was one of our traveling jokes. It was what the too-thin waitress at Terezin — the “town presented to the Jews by the Nazis,” as the old propaganda film we saw at the museum proclaimed — thought we were saying when we asked for ice.

For a while, The Tribe sat on my bed and talked quietly to each other and refilled my glass for me. But after thirty minutes or so, when I hadn’t keeled over again and wasn’t babbling and seemed my usual sullen, solid, bald self, they started shuffling around, playing with my curtains, ignoring me. One of them threw a pencil at another. For a short while, I almost forgot about the nausea churning in my stomach, the trembling in my wrists, the puppets bobbing on their wires in my head.

“Hey,” I said. I had to say it twice more to get their attention. I usually do.

Finally, Penny noticed and said, “Mr Gadeuszki’s trying to say something,” and they slowly quieted down.

I put my quivering hands on my lap under the desk and left them there. “Why don’t you kids get back on the metro and go see the Clock?”

The Tribe members looked at each other uncertainly. “Really,” I told them. “I’m fine. When’s the next time you’re going to be in Prague?”

They were good kids, and they looked unsure for a few seconds longer. In the end, though, they started trickling toward the door, and I thought I’d gotten them out until Penny Berry stepped in front of me.

“You killed your grandfather,” she said.

“Didn’t,” I snarled, and Penny blinked, and everyone whirled to stare at me. I took a breath, almost got control of my voice. “I said I didn’t kill him.”

“Oh,” Penny said. She was on this trip not because of any familial or cultural heritage but because this was the most interesting experience she could find to devour this month. She was pressing me now because she suspected I had something more startling to share than Prague did at the moment. And she was always hungry.

Or maybe she was just lonely, confused about the kid she had never quite been and the world she didn’t quite feel part of. Which would make her more than a little like me, and might explain why she had always annoyed me as much as she did.

“It’s stupid,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

Penny didn’t move. In my memory, the little wooden man on his wire quivered, twitched, and began to rock, side to side.

“I need to write it down,” I said, trying to sound gentle. Then I lied. “Maybe I’ll show you when I’m done.”

Five minutes later, I was alone in my room with a fresh glass of nice water and a stack of unlined blank white paper I had scavenged from the computer printer downstairs. I picked up my black pen, and in an instant, there was sand on my tongue and desert sun on my neck and that horrid, gasping breathing like snake-rattle in my ears, and for the first time in many, many years, I was home.

III

In June 1978, on the day after school let out, I was sitting in my bedroom in Albuquerque, New Mexico, thinking about absolutely nothing when my dad came in and sat down on my bed and said, “I want you to do something for me.”

In my nine years of life, my father had almost never asked me to do anything for him. As far as I could tell, he had very few things that he wanted. He worked at an insurance firm and came home at exactly 5:30 every night and played an hour of catch with me before dinner or, sometimes, walked me to the ice-cream shop. After dinner, he sat on the black couch in the den reading paperback mystery novels until 9:30. The paperbacks were all old with bright yellow or red covers featuring men in trench coats and women with black dresses sliding down the curves in their bodies like tar. It made me nervous, sometimes, just watching my father’s hands on the covers. I asked him once why he liked those kinds of books, and he just shook his head. “All those people,” he said, sounding, as usual, like he was speaking to me through a tin can from a great distance. “Doing all those things.” At exactly 9:30, every single night I can remember, my father clicked off the lamp next to the couch and touched me on the head if I was up and went to bed.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked that June morning, though I didn’t much care. This was the first weekend of summer vacation, and I had months of free time in front of me, and I never knew quite what to do with it anyway.

“What I tell you, okay?” my father said.

Without even thinking, I said, “Sure.”

And he said, “Good. I’ll tell Grandpa you’re coming.” Then he left me gaping on the bed while he went into the kitchen to use the phone.

My grandfather lived seventeen miles from Albuquerque in a red adobe hut in the middle of the desert. The only sign of humanity anywhere around him was the ruins of a small pueblo maybe half a mile away. Even now, what I remember most about my grandfather’s house is the desert rolling up to and through it in an endless red tide that never receded. From the back steps, I could see the pueblo, honeycombed with caves like a giant beehive tipped on its side, empty of bees but buzzing as the wind whipped through it.

Four years before, my grandfather had told my parents to knock off the token visits. Then he’d had his phone shut off. As far as I knew, none of us had seen him since.

All my life, he’d been dying. He had emphysema and some kind of weird allergic condition that turned swatches of his skin pink. The last time I’d been with him, he’d just sat in a chair in a tank top, breathing through a tube. He’d looked like a piece of petrified wood.

The next morning, a Sunday, my father packed my green camp duffel bag with a box of new, unopened wax packs of baseball cards and the transistor radio my mother had given me for my birthday the year before, then loaded it and me into the grimy green Datsun he always meant to wash and didn’t. “Time to go,” he told me in his mechanical voice, and I was still too baffled by what was happening to protest as he led me outside. Moments before, a morning thunderstorm had rocked the whole house, but now the sun was up, searing the whole sky orange. Our street smelled like creosote and green chili and adobe mud and salamander skin.

“I don’t want to go,” I said to my father.

“I wouldn’t either, if I were you,” he told me, and started the car.

“You don’t even like him,” I said.

My father just looked at me, and for an astonishing second I thought he was going to hug me. But he looked away instead, dropped the car into gear, and drove us out of town.

All the way to my grandfather’s house, we followed the thunderstorm. It must have been traveling at exactly our speed, because we never got any closer, and it never got further away. It just retreated before us, a big black wall of nothing, like a shadow the whole world cast, and every now and then streaks of lightning flew up the clouds like signal flares but illuminated only the sand and mountains and rain.

“Why are we doing this?” I asked when my dad started slowing, studying the sand on his side of the car for the dirt track that lead to my grandfather’s.

“Want to drive?” he answered, gesturing to me to slide across the seat into his lap.

Again, I was surprised. My dad always seemed willing enough to play catch with me. But he rarely generated ideas for things we could do together on his own. And the thought of sitting in his lap with his arms around me was too alien to fathom. I waited too long, and the moment passed. My father didn’t ask again. Through the windshield, I watched the thunderstorm retreating, the wet road already drying in patches in the sun. The whole day felt distant, like someone else’s dream.

“You know he was in the war, right?” my father said, and despite our crawling speed he had to jam on the brakes to avoid passing the turnoff. No one, it seemed to me, could possibly have intended this to be a road. It wasn’t dug or flattened or marked, just a rumple in the earth.

“Yeah,” I said.

That he’d been in the war was pretty much the only thing I knew about my grandfather. Actually, he’d been in the camps. After the war, he’d been in other camps in Israel for almost five years while Red Cross workers searched for living relatives and found none and finally turned him loose to make his way as best he could.

As soon as we were off the highway, sand ghosts rose around the car, ticking against the trunk and hood as we passed. Thanks to the thunderstorm, they left a wet, red residue like bug smear on the hood and windshield.

“You know, now that I think about it,” my father said, his voice flat as ever but the words clearer, somehow, and I found myself leaning closer to him to make sure I heard him over the churning wheels. “He was even less of a grandfather to you than a father to me.” He rubbed a hand over the bald spot just beginning to spread over the top of his head like an egg yolk being squashed. I’d never seen him do that before. It made him look old.

My grandfather’s house rose out of the desert like a Druid mound. There was no shape to it. It had exactly one window, and that couldn’t be seen from the street. No mailbox. Never in my life, I realized abruptly, had I had to sleep in there.

“Dad, please don’t make me stay,” I said as he stopped the car fifteen feet or so from the front door.

He looked at me, and his mouth turned down a little, and his shoulders tensed. Then he sighed. “Three days,” he said, and got out.

“You stay,” I said, but I got out, too.

When I was standing beside him, looking past the house at the distant pueblo, he said, “Your grandfather didn’t ask for me, he asked for you. He won’t hurt you. And he doesn’t ask for much from us, or from anyone.”

“Neither do you,” I said.

After a while, and very slowly, as though remembering how, my father smiled. “And neither do you, Seth.”

Neither the smile nor the statement reassured me.

“Just remember this, son. Your grandfather has had a very hard life, and not just because of the camps. He worked two jobs for twenty-five years to provide for my mother and me. He never called in sick. He never took vacations. And he was ecstatic when you were born.”

That surprised me. “Really? How do you know?”

For the first time I could remember, my father blushed, and I thought maybe I’d caught him lying, and then I wasn’t sure. He kept looking at me. “Well, he came to town, for one thing. Twice.”

For a little longer, we stood together while the wind rolled over the rocks and sand. I couldn’t smell the rain anymore, but I thought I could taste it, a little. Tall, leaning cacti prowled the waste around us like stick figures who’d escaped from one of my doodles. I was always doodling, then, trying to get the shapes of things.

Finally, the thin, wooden door to the adobe clicked open, and out stepped Lucy, and my father straightened and put his hand on his bald spot again and put it back down.

She didn’t live there, as far as I knew. But I’d never been to my grandfather’s house when she wasn’t in it. I knew she worked for some foundation that provided care to Holocaust victims, though she was Navajo, not Jewish, and that she’d been coming out here all my life to make my grandfather’s meals, bathe him, keep him company. I rarely saw them speak to each other. When I was little and my grandmother was still alive and we were still welcome, Lucy used to take me to the pueblo after she’d finished with my grandfather and watch me climb around on the stones and peer into the empty caves and listen to the wind chase thousand-year-old echoes out of the walls.

There were grey streaks now in the black hair that poured down Lucy’s shoulders, and I could see semi-circular lines like tree rings in her dark, weathered cheeks. But I was uncomfortably aware, this time, of the way her breasts pushed her plain white denim shirt out of the top of her jeans while her eyes settled on mine, black and still.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, as if I’d had a choice. When I didn’t answer, she looked at my father. “Thank you for bringing him. We’re set up out back.”

I threw one last questioning glance at my father as Lucy started away, but he just looked bewildered or bored or whatever he generally was. And that made me angry. “Bye,” I told him, and moved toward the house.

“Goodbye,” I heard him say, and something in his tone unsettled me; it was too sad. I shivered, turned around, and my father said, “He want to see me?”

He looked thin, I thought, just another spindly cactus, holding my duffel bag out from his side. If he’d been speaking to me, I might have run to him. I wanted to. But he was watching Lucy, who had stopped at the edge of the square of patio cement outside the front door.

“I don’t think so,” she said, and came over to me and took my hand.

Without another word, my father tossed my duffel bag onto the miniature patio and climbed back in his car. For a moment, his gaze caught mine through the windshield, and I said, “Wait,” but my father didn’t hear me. I said it louder, and Lucy put her hand on my shoulder.

“This has to be done, Seth,” she said.

“What does?”

“This way.” She gestured toward the other side of the house, and I followed her there and stopped when I saw the hogan.

It sat next to the squat grey cactus I’d always considered the edge of my grandfather’s yard. It looked surprisingly solid, its mud walls dry and grey and hard, its pocked, stumpy wooden pillars firm in the ground, almost as if they were real trees that had somehow taken root there.

“You live here now?” I blurted, and Lucy stared at me.

“Oh, yes, Seth. Me sleep-um ground. How.” She pulled aside the hide curtain at the front of the hogan and ducked inside, and I followed.

I thought it would be cooler in there, but it wasn’t. The wood and mud trapped the heat but blocked the light. I didn’t like it. It reminded me of an oven, of Hansel and Gretel. And it reeked of the desert: burnt sand, hot wind, nothingness.

“This is where you’ll sleep,” Lucy said. “It’s also where we’ll work.” She knelt and lit a beeswax candle and placed it in the center of the dirt floor in a scratched glass drugstore candlestick. “We need to begin right now.”

“Begin what?” I asked, fighting down another shudder as the candlelight played over the room. Against the far wall, tucked under a miniature canopy constructed of metal poles and a tarpaulin, were a sleeping bag and a pillow. My bed, I assumed. Beside it sat a low, rolling table, and on the table were another candlestick, a cracked ceramic bowl, some matches, and the Dancing Man.

In my room in this pension in the Czech Republic, five thousand miles and twenty years removed from that place, I put my pen down and swallowed the entire glass of lukewarm water my students had left me. Then I got up and went to the window, staring out at the trees and the street. I was hoping to see my kids returning like ducks to a familiar pond, flapping their arms and jostling each other and squawking and laughing. Instead, I saw my own face, faint and featureless, too white in the window glass. I went back to the desk and picked up the pen.

The Dancing Man’s eyes were all pupil, carved in two perfect ovals in the knottiest wood I had ever seen. The nose was just a notch, but the mouth was enormous, a giant “O”, like the opening of a cave. I was terrified of the thing even before I noticed that it was moving.

Moving, I suppose, is too grand a description. It. leaned. First one way, then the other, on a wire that ran straight through its belly. In a fit of panic, after a nightmare, I described it to my college roommate, a physics major, and he shrugged and said something about perfect balance and pendulums and gravity and the rotation of the earth. Except that the Dancing Man didn’t just move side to side. It also wiggled down its wire, very slowly, until it reached the end. And then the wire tilted up, and it began to wiggle back. Slowly. Until it reached the other end. Back and forth. Side to side. Forever.

“Take the drum,” Lucy said behind me, and I ripped my stare away from the Dancing Man.

“What?” I said.

She gestured at the table, and I realized she meant the ceramic bowl. I didn’t understand, and I didn’t want to go over there. But I didn’t know what else to do, and I felt ridiculous under Lucy’s stare.

The Dancing Man was at the far end of its wire, leaning, mouth open. Trying to be casual, I snatched the bowl from underneath it and retreated to where Lucy knelt. The water inside the bowl made a sloshing sound but didn’t splash out, and I held it away from my chest in surprise and noticed the covering stitched over the top. It was hide of some kind, moist when I touched it.

“Like this,” said Lucy, and she leaned close and tapped on the skin of the drum. The sound was deep and tuneful, like a voice. I sat down next to Lucy. She tapped again, in a slow, repeating pattern. I put my hands where hers had been, and when she nodded at me, I began to play.

“Okay?” I said.

“Harder,” Lucy said, and she reached into her pocket and pulled out a long wooden stick. The candlelight flickered across it, and I saw the carvings there. A pine tree, and underneath, roots that bulged along the stick’s base like long, black veins.

“What is that?” I asked.

“A rattle stick. My grandmother made it. I’m going to rattle it while you play. So if you would. Like I showed you.”

I beat on the drum, and the sound came out dead in that airless space.

“For God’s sake,” Lucy snapped. “Harder.” She had never been exceptionally friendly to me. But she’d been friendlier than this.

I slammed my hands down harder, and after a few beats Lucy leaned back and nodded and watched. Not long after, she lifted her hand, stared at me as though daring me to stop her, and shook the stick. The sound it made was less rattle than buzz, as though it had wasps inside it. Lucy shook it a few more times, always at the same half-pause in my rhythm. Then her eyes rolled back in her head, and her spine arched. My hand froze over the drum, and Lucy snarled, “Don’t stop.”

After that, she began to chant. There was no tune to it, but a pattern, the pitch sliding up a little, down some, up a little more. When Lucy reached the top note, the ground under my crossed legs seemed to tingle, as though there were scorpions sliding out of the sand, but I didn’t look down. I thought of the wooden figure on its wire behind me, but I didn’t turn around. I played the drum, and I watched Lucy, and I kept my mouth shut.

We went on for a long, long time. After that first flush of fear, I was concentrating too hard to think. My bones were tingling, too, and the air in the hogan was heavy. I couldn’t get enough of it in my lungs. Tiny tide-pools of sweat had formed in the hollow of Lucy’s neck and under her ears and at the throat of her shirt. Under my palms, the drum was sweating, too, and the skin got slippery and warm. Not until Lucy stopped singing did I realize that I was rocking side to side. Leaning.

“Want lunch?” Lucy said, standing and brushing the earth off her jeans.

I put my hands out perpendicular, felt the skin prickle and realized my wrists had gone to sleep even as they pounded out the rhythm that Lucy had taught me. When I stood, the floor of the hogan seemed unstable, like the bottom of one of those balloon tents my classmates sometimes had at birthday parties. I didn’t want to look behind me, and then I did. The Dancing Man rocked slowly in no wind.

I turned around again, but Lucy had left the hogan. I didn’t want to be alone in there, so I leapt through the hide curtain and winced against the sudden blast of sunlight and saw my grandfather.

He was propped on his wheelchair, positioned dead center between the hogan and the back of his house. He must have been there the whole time, I thought, and somehow I’d managed not to notice him when I came in, because unless he’d gotten a whole lot better in the years since I’d seen him last, he couldn’t have wheeled himself out. And he looked worse.

For one thing, his skin was falling off. At every exposed place on him, I saw flappy folds of yellow-pink. What was underneath was uglier still, not red or bleeding, just not skin. Too dry. Too colorless. He looked like a cornhusk. An empty one.

Next to him, propped on a rusty blue dolly, was a cylindrical silver oxygen tank. A clear tube ran from the nozzle at the top of the tank to the blue mask over my grandfather’s nose and mouth. Above the mask, my grandfather’s heavy-lidded eyes watched me, though they didn’t seem capable of movement, either. Leave him out here, I thought, and those eyes would simply fill up with sand.

“Come in, Seth,” Lucy told me, without any word to my grandfather or acknowledgement that he was there.

I had my hand on the screen door, was halfway into the house when I realized I’d heard him speak. I stopped. It had to have been him, I thought, and couldn’t have been. I turned around and saw the back of his head tilting toward the top of the chair. Retracing my steps — I’d given him a wide berth — I returned to face him. The eyes stayed still, and the oxygen tank was silent. But the mask fogged, and I heard the whisper again.

“Ruach,” he said. It was what he always called me, when he called me anything.

In spite of the heat, I felt goosebumps spring from my skin, all along my legs and arms. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t answer. I should say hello, I thought. Say something.

I waited instead. A few seconds later, the oxygen mask fogged again. “Trees”, said the whisper-voice. “Screaming. In the trees.” One of my grandfather’s hands raised an inch or so off the arm of the chair and fell back into place.

“Patience,” Lucy said from the doorway. “Come on, Seth.” This time, my grandfather said nothing as I slipped past him into the house.

Lucy slid a bologna sandwich, a bag of Fritos and a plastic glass of apple juice in front of me. I lifted the sandwich, found that I couldn’t imagine putting it in my mouth, and dropped it on the plate.

“Better eat,” Lucy said. “We have a long day yet.”

I ate a little. Eventually, Lucy sat down across from me, but she didn’t say anything else. She just gnawed a celery stick and watched the sand outside change color as the sun edged west. The house was silent, the countertops and walls bare.

“Can I ask you something?” I finally asked.

Lucy was washing my plate in the sink. She didn’t turn around, but she didn’t say no.

“What are we doing? Out there, I mean.”

No answer. Through the kitchen doorway, I could see my grandfather’s living room, the stained wood floor and the single brown armchair lodged against a wall, across from the TV. My grandfather had spent every waking minute of his life in this place for fifteen years or more, and there was no trace of him in it.

“It’s a Way, isn’t it?” I said, and Lucy shut the water off.

When she turned, her expression was the same as it had been all day: a little mocking, a little angry. She took a step toward the table.

“We learned about them at school,” I said.

“Did you,” she said.

“We’re studying lots of Indian things.”

The smile that spread over Lucy’s face was ugly, cruel. Or maybe just tired. “Good for you,” she said. “Come on. We don’t have much time.”

“Is this to make my grandfather better?”

“Nothing’s going to make your grandfather better.” Without waiting for me, she pushed through the screen door into the heat.

This time, I made myself stop beside my grandfather’s chair. I could just hear the hiss of the oxygen tank, like steam escaping from the boiling ground. When no fog appeared in the blue mask and no words emerged from the hiss, I followed Lucy into the hogan and let the hide curtain fall shut.

All afternoon and into the evening, I played the water drum while Lucy sang. By the time the air began to cool outside, the whole hogan was vibrating, and the ground, too. Whatever we were doing, I could feel the power in it. I was the beating heart of a living thing, and Lucy was its voice. Once, I found myself wondering just what we were setting loose or summoning, and I stopped for a single beat. But the silence was worse. The silence was like being dead. And I thought I could hear the Dancing Man behind me. If I inclined my head, stopped drumming, I almost believed that I’d hear him whispering.

When Lucy finally rocked to her feet and walked out again without speaking to me, it was evening, and the desert was alive. I sat shaking as the rhythm spilled out of me and the sand soaked it up. Then I stood, and that unsteady feeling came over me again, stronger this time, and the air was too thin, as though some of the atmosphere had evaporated. When I emerged from the hogan, I saw black beetles on the wall of my grandfather’s house, and I heard wind and rabbits and the first coyotes yipping somewhere to the west. My grandfather sat slumped in the same position he had been in hours and hours ago, which meant he had been baking out here all afternoon. Lucy was on the patio, watching the sun melt into the horizon’s open mouth. Her skin was slick, and her hair was wet where it touched her ear and neck.

“Your grandfather’s going to tell you a story,” she said, sounding exhausted. “And you’re going to listen.”

My grandfather’s head rolled upright, and I wished we were back in the hogan, doing whatever it was we’d been doing. At least there I was moving, pounding hard enough to drown out Mounds. Sounds that weren’t us, and weren’t supposed to be there. The screen door slapped shut, and my grandfather looked at me. Mis eyes were deep, deep brown, almost black, and horribly familiar. Did my eyes look like that?

“Ruach,” he whispered, and I wasn’t sure, but his whisper seemed stronger than it had before. The oxygen mask fogged and stayed fogged. The whisper kept coming, as though Lucy had spun a spigot and left it open. “You will know. Now. Then the world. won’t be yours. anymore.” My grandfather shifted like some sort of giant, bloated sand-spider in the center of its web, and I heard his ruined skin rustle. Overhead, the whole sky went red.

“At war’s end. .” my grandfather hissed. “Do you. understand?” I nodded, transfixed. I could hear his breathing now, the ribs rising, parting, collapsing. The tank machinery had gone strangely silent. Was he breathing on his own, I wondered? Could he, still?

“A few days. Do you understand? Before the Red Army came, . ” He coughed. Even his cough sounded stronger. “The Nazis look. me. And the Gypsies. From. our camp. To Chelmno.”

I’d never heard the word before. I’ve almost never heard it since. But as my grandfather said it, another cough roared out of his throat, and when it was gone, the tank was hissing again. Still, my grandfather continued to whisper.

“To die. Do you understand}” Gasp. Hiss. Silence. “To die. But not yet. Not. right away.” Gasp. “We came. by train, but open train. Not cattle car. “Wasteland. Farmland. Nothing. And then trees.” Under the mask, the lips twitched, and above it, the eyes closed completely. “That first time. Ruach. All those. giant. green. trees. Unimaginable. To think anything. on the Earth we knew . could live that long.”

His voice continued to fade, faster than the daylight. A few minutes more, I thought, and he’d be silent again, just machine and breath, and I could sit here in the yard and let the evening wind roll over me.

“When they took. us off the train” my grandfather said, “for one moment … J swear I smelled. leaves. Fat, green leaves. the new green. in them. Then the old smell. The only smell. Blood in dirt. The stink. of us. Piss. Shit. Open. sores. Skin on fire. Hnnn.”

His voice trailed away, hardly-there air over barely moving mouth, and still he kept talking. “Prayed for. some people. to die. They smelled. better. Dead. That was one prayer . always answered.

“They took us. into the woods. Not to barracks. So few of them. Ten. Maybe twenty. Faces like. possums. Stupid. Blank. No thoughts. We came to. ditches. Deep. Like wells. Half full already. They told us ‘Stand still’. ‘Breathe in’.”

At first, I thought the ensuing silence was for effect. He was letting me smell it. And I did, the earth and the dead people, and there were German soldiers all around, floating up out of the sand with black uniforms and white, blank faces. Then my grandfather crumpled forward, and I screamed for Lucy.

She came fast but not running and put a hand on my grandfather’s back and another on his neck. After a few seconds, she straightened. “He’s asleep,” she told me. “Stay here.” She wheeled my grandfather into the house. She was gone a long time.

Sliding to a sitting position, I closed my eyes and tried not to hear my grandfather’s voice. After a while I thought I could hear bugs and snakes and something larger padding out beyond the cacti. I could feel the moonlight, too, white and cool on my skin. The screen door banged, and I opened my eyes to find Lucy moving toward me, past me, carrying a picnic basket into the hogan.

“I want to eat out here,” I said quickly, and Lucy turned with the hide curtain in her hand.

“Why don’t we go in?” she said, and the note of coaxing in her voice made me nervous. So did the way she glanced over her shoulder into the hogan, as though something in there had spoken.

I stayed where I was, and eventually Lucy shrugged and let the curtain fall and dropped the basket at my feet. From the way she was acting, I thought she might leave me alone out there, but she tat down instead and looked at the sand and the cacti and the stars.

Inside the basket I found warmed canned chili in a tupperware container and fry bread with cinnamon sugar and two cellophane-wrapped broccoli stalks that reminded me of uprooted miniature trees. In my ears, my grandfather’s voice murmured. To drown out the sound more than anything else, I began to eat.

As soon as I was finished, Lucy began to pack up the basket, but she stopped when I spoke. “Please,” I said. “Just talk to me a little.”

She gave me the same look she’d given me all day. As though we’d never even met. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow. well, let’s just say tomorrow’s a big day.”

“For who?”

Lucy pursed her lips, and all at once, inexplicably, she seemed on the verge of tears. “Go to sleep.”

“I’m not sleeping in the hogan,” I told her.

“Suit yourself.”

She was standing, her back to me now. I said, “Just tell me what kind of Way we’re doing.”

“An Enemy Way.”

“What does it do?”

“It’s nothing, Seth. Jesus Christ. It’s silly. Your grandfather thinks it will help him talk. He thinks it will sustain him while he tells you what he needs to tell you. Don’t worry about the goddamn Way. Worry about your grandfather, for once.”

My mouth flew open, and my skin stung as though she’d whipped me. I started to protest, then found I couldn’t, and didn’t want to. All my life, I’d built my grandfather into a figure of fear, a gasping, grotesque monster in a wheelchair. And my father had let me. I started to cry.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t apologize to me.” Lucy walked to the screen door.

“Isn’t it a little late?” I called after her, furious at myself, at my father, at Lucy. Sad for my grandfather. Scared and sad.

One more time, Lucy turned around, and the moonlight poured down the white streaks in her hair like wax through a mold. Soon, I thought, she’d be made of it.

“I mean, to hurt my grandfather’s enemies,” I said. “The Way can’t really do anything to them. Right?”

“His enemies are inside him,” Lucy said, and left me.

For hours, it seemed, I sat in the sand, watching constellations explode out of the blackness like firecrackers. In the ground, I heard night-things stirring. I thought about the tube in my grandfather’s mouth and the unspeakable hurt in his eyes — because that’s what it was, I thought now, not boredom, not hatred — and the enemies inside him. And then, slowly, exhaustion overtook me. The taste of fry bread lingered in my mouth, and the starlight got brighter still. I leaned back on my elbows. And finally, at God knows what hour, I crawled into the hogan, under the tarpaulin-canopy Lucy had made me, and fell asleep.

When I awoke, the Dancing Man was sliding down its wire toward me, and I knew, all at once, where I’d seen eyes like my grandfather’s, and the old fear exploded through me all over again. How had he done it, I wondered? The carving on the wooden man’s face was basic, the features crude. But the eyes were his. They had the same singular, almost oval shape, with identical little notches right near the tear ducts. The same too-heavy lids. Same expression, or lack of any.

I was transfixed, and I stopped breathing. All I could see were those eyes dancing toward me. Halfway down the wire, they seemed to stop momentarily, as though studying me, and I remembered something my dad had told me about wolves. “They’re not trial-and-error animals,” he’d said. “They wait and watch, wait and watch, until they’re sure they know how the thing is done. And then they do it.”

The Dancing Man began to weave again. First to one side, then the other, then back. If it reached the bottom of the wire, I thought — I knew — I would die. Or I would change. That was why Lucy was ignoring me. She had lied to me about what we were doing here. That was the reason they hadn’t let my father stay. Leaping to my feet, I grabbed the Dancing Man around its clunky wooden base, and it came off the table with the faintest little suck, as though I’d yanked a weed out of the ground. I wanted to throw it, but I didn’t dare. Instead, bent double, not looking at my clenched fist, I crab-walked to the entrance of the hogan, brushed back the hide curtain, slammed the Dancing Man down in the sand outside, and flung the curtain closed again. Then I squatted in the shadows, panting. Listening.

I crouched there a long time, watching the bottom of the curtain, expecting to see the Dancing Man slithering beneath it. But the hide stayed motionless, the hogan shadowy but still. I let myself sit back, and eventually I slid into my sleeping bag again. I didn’t expect to sleep anymore, but I did.

The smell of fresh fry bread woke me, and when I opened my eyes Lucy was laying a tray of bread and sausage and juice on a red, woven blanket on the floor of the hogan. My lips tasted sandy, and I could feel grit in my clothes and between my teeth and under my eyelids, as though I’d been buried overnight and dug up again.

“Hurry,” Lucy told me, in the same chilly voice as yesterday.

I threw back the sleeping bag and started to sit up and saw the Dancing Man gliding back along its wire, watching me. My whole body clenched, and I glared at Lucy and shouted, “How did that get back here?” Even as I said it, I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to ask. More than how, I needed to know when. Exactly how long had it been hovering over me without my knowing?

Without raising an eyebrow or even looking in my direction, Lucy shrugged and sat back. “Your grandfather wants you to have it,” she said.

“I don’t want it.”

“Grow up.”

Edging as far from the nightstand as possible, I shed the sleeping bag and sat down on the blanket and ate. Everything tasted sweet and sandy. My skin prickled with the intensifying heat. I still had a piece of fry bread and half a sausage left when I put my plastic fork down and looked at Lucy, who was arranging a new candle, settling the water drum near me, tying her hair back with a red rubber-band.

“Where did it come from?” I asked.

That got Lucy to look at me, at least, and this time, there really were tears in her eyes. “I don’t understand your family,” she said.

I shook my head. “Neither do I.”

“Your grandfather’s been saving that for you, Seth.”

“Since when?”

“Since before you were born. Before your father was born. Before he ever imagined there could be a you.”

This time, when the guilt came for me, it mixed with my fear rather than chasing it away, and I broke out sweating. I thought I might be sick.

“You have to eat. Damn you,” said Lucy.

I picked up my fork and squashed a piece of sausage into the fry bread and put it in my mouth. My stomach convulsed, but it accepted the food.

As soon as I’d finished, Lucy shoved the drum onto my lap. I played while she chanted, and the sides of the hogan seemed to breathe in and out, very slowly. I felt drugged. Then I wondered if I had been. Had they sprinkled something over the bread? Was that the next step? And toward what? Erasing me, I thought, almost chanted. Erasing me, and my hands flew off the drum and Lucy stopped.

“All right,” she said. “That’s probably enough.” Then, to my surprise, she actually reached out and tucked some of my hair behind my ear, touched my face for a second as she took the drum from me. “It’s time for your Journey,” she said.

I stared at her. The walls, I noticed, had stilled. I didn’t feel any less strange, but a little more awake. “Journey where?”

“You’ll need water. And I’ve packed you a lunch.” She slipped through the hide curtain, and I followed, dazed, and almost walked into my grandfather, parked right outside the hogan with a black towel on his head, so that his eyes and splitting skin were in shadow. On his peeling hands, he wore black leather gloves. His hands, I thought, must be on fire.

Right at the moment I noticed that Lucy was no longer with us, the hiss from the oxygen tank sharpened, and my grandfather’s lips moved beneath the mask. Ruach.” This morning, the nickname sounded almost affectionate.

I waited, unable to look away. But the oxygen hiss settled again, like leaves after a gust of wind, and my grandfather said nothing more. A few seconds later, Lucy came back carrying a red backpack, which she handed to me.

“Follow the signs,” she said, and turned me around until I was facing straight out from the road into the empty desert.

Struggling to life, I shook her hand off my shoulder. “Signs of what? What am I supposed to be doing?”

“Finding. Bringing back.”

“I won’t go,” I said.

“You’ll go,” said Lucy coldly. “The signs will be easily recognizable and easy to locate. I have been assured of that. All you have to do is pay attention.”

“Assured by who?”

“The first sign, I am told, will be left by the tall flowering cactus.”

She pointed, which was unnecessary. A hundred yards or so from my grandfather’s house, a spiky green cactus poked out of the rock and sand, supported on either side by two miniature versions of itself. A little cactus family staggering in out of the waste.

I glanced at my grandfather under his mock cowl, then at Lucy with her ferocious black eyes trained on me. Tomorrow, I thought, my father would come for me, and with any luck I would never have to come here again.

Suddenly, I felt ridiculous and sad and guilty once more. Without even realizing what I was doing, I stuck my hand out and touched my grandfather’s arm. The skin under his thin cotton shirt depressed beneath my fingers like the squishy center of a misshapen pillow. It wasn’t hot. It didn’t feel alive at all. I yanked my hand back, and Lucy glared at me. Tears sprang to my eyes.

“Get out of here,” she said, and I stumbled away into the sand.

I don’t really think the heat intensified as soon as I stepped away from my grandfather’s house. But it seemed to. Along my bare arms and legs, I could feel the little hairs curling as though singed. The sun had scorched the sky white, and the only place to look that didn’t hurt my eyes was down. Usually when I walked in the desert, I was terrified of scorpions, but not that day. It was impossible to imagine anything scuttling or stinging or even breathing out there. Except me.

I don’t know what I expected to find. Footprints, maybe, or animal scat, or something dead. Instead, stuck to the stem by a cactus needle, I found a yellow stick-’em note. It said Pueblo.

Gently, avoiding the rest of the spiny needles, I removed the note. The writing was black and blocky. I glanced toward my grandfather’s house, but he and Lucy were gone. The ceremonial hogan looked silly from this distance, like a little kid’s pup tent.

Unlike the pueblo, I thought. I didn’t even want to look that way, let alone go there. Already I could hear it calling for me in a whisper that sounded way too much like my grandfather’s. I could head for the road, I thought. Start toward town instead of the pueblo and wait for a passing truck to carry me home. There would have to be a truck, sooner or later.

I did go to the road. But when I got there, I turned in the direction of the pueblo. I don’t know why. I didn’t feel as if I had a choice.

The walk, if anything, was too short. No cars passed. No road signs sprang from the dirt to point the way back to town and the world I knew. I watched the asphalt rise out of itself and roll in the heat like the surface of the sea, and I thought of my grandfather in the woods of Chelmno, digging graves in long, green shadows. Lucy had put ice in the thermos she gave me, and the cubes clicked against my teeth when I drank.

I walked, and I watched the desert, trying to spot a bird or a lizard. Even a scorpion would have been welcome. What I saw was sand, distant, colorless mountains, white sky, a world as empty of life and its echoes as the surface of Mars, and just as red.

Even the lone road sign pointing to the pueblo was rusted through, crusted with sand, the letters so scratched away that the name of the place was no longer legible. I’d never seen a tourist trailer here, or another living soul. Even calling it a pueblo seemed grandiose.

It was two sets of caves dug into the side of a cliff-face, the top one longer than the bottom, so that together they formed a sort of gigantic cracked harmonica for the desert wind to play. The roof and walls of the top set of caves had fallen in. The whole structure seemed more monument than ruin, a marker of a people who no longer existed rather than a place where they had lived.

The bottom stretch of caves was largely intact, and as I stumbled toward them along the cracking macadam I could feel their pull in my ankles. They seemed to be sucking the desert inside them, bit by bit. I stopped in front and listened.

I couldn’t hear anything. I looked at the cracked, nearly square window openings, the doorless entryways leading into what had once been living spaces, the low, shadowed caves of dirt and rock. The whole pueblo just squatted there, inhaling sand through its dozens of dead mouths in a mockery of breath. I waited a while longer, but the open air didn’t feel any safer, just hotter. If my grandfather’s enemies were inside him, I suddenly wondered, and if we were calling them out, then where were they going? Finally, I ducked through the nearest entryway and stood in the gloom.

After a few seconds, my eyes adjusted. But there was nothing to see. Along the window openings, blown sand lay in waves and mounds, like miniature relief maps of the desert outside. At my feet lay tiny stones — too small to hide scorpions — and a few animal bones, none of them larger than my pinky, distinguishable primarily by the curve of them, their stubborn whiteness.

Then, as though my entry had triggered some sort of mechanical magic show, sound coursed into my ears. In the. walls, tiny feet and bellies slithered and scuttled. Nothing rattled a warning. Nothing hissed. And the footsteps came so softly that at first I mistook them for sand shifting along the sills and the cool clay floor.

I didn’t scream, but I staggered backwards, lost my footing, slipped down, and I had the thermos raised and ready to swing when my father stepped out of the shadows and sat down cross-legged across the room from me.

“What…” I said, tears flying down my face, heart thudding.

My father said nothing. From the pocket of his plain yellow button-up shirt, he pulled a packet of cigarette paper and a pouch of tobacco, then rolled a cigarette in a series of quick, expert motions.

“You don’t smoke,” I said, and my father lit the cigarette and dragged air down his lungs with a rasp.

“Far as you know,” he answered. The red-orange light looked like an open sore on his lips. Around us, the pueblo lifted, settled.

“Why does Grandpa call me ruach?” I snapped. And still my father only sat and smoked. The smell tickled unpleasantly in my nostrils. “God, Dad. What’s going on? What are you doing here, and—”

“Do you know what ruach means?” he said.

I shook my head.

“It’s a Hebrew word. It means ghost.”

Hearing that was like being slammed to the ground. I couldn’t get my lungs to work.

My father went on. “Sometimes that’s what it means. It depends what you use it with, you see? Sometimes it means spirit, as in the spirit of God. Spirit of life. What God gave to his creations.” He stubbed his cigarette in the sand, and the orange light winked out like an eye blinking shut. “And sometimes it just means wind.”

By my sides, I could feel my hands clutch sand as breath returned to my body. The sand felt cool, soft. “You don’t know Hebrew, either,” I said.

“I made a point of knowing that word.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what he called me, too,” my father said. He rolled a second cigarette but didn’t light it. For a while we sat. Then my father said, “Lucy called me two weeks ago. She told me it was time, and she said she needed a partner for your. ceremony. Someone to hide this, then help you find it. She said it was essential to the ritual.” Reaching behind him, he produced a brown paper grocery bag with the top rolled down and tossed it to me. “I didn’t kill it,” he said.

I stared at him, and more tears stung my eyes. Sand licked along the skin of my legs and arms and crawled up my shorts and sleeves as though seeking pores, points of entry. Nothing about my father’s presence here was reassuring. Nothing about him had ever been reassuring, or anything else, I thought furiously, and the fury felt good. It helped me move. I yanked the bag to me.

The first thing I saw when I ripped it open was an eye. It was yellow-going-grey, almost dry. Not quite, though. Then I saw the folded black, ridged wings. A furry, broken body twisted into a “J”. Except for the smell and the eye, it could have been a Halloween decoration.

“Is that a bat?” I whispered. Then I shoved the bag away and gagged.

My father glanced around the walls, back at me. He made no move toward me. He’s part of it, I thought wildly. He knows what they’re doing. I pushed the thought away. It couldn’t be true. “Dad, I don’t understand,” I pleaded.

“I know you’re young,” my father said. “He didn’t do this to me until I left for college. But there’s no more time, is there? You’ve seen him.”

“Why do I have to do this at all?”

My father’s gaze swung down on me. He cocked his head and pursed his lips, as though I’d asked something completely incomprehensible. “It’s your birthright,” he said, and stood up.

We drove back to my grandfather’s adobe in silence. The trip lasted less than five minutes. I couldn’t even figure out what else to ask, let alone what I might do. I kept glancing at my father. I wanted to scream at him, pound on him until he told me why he was acting this way.

Except that I wasn’t sure he was acting anything but normal, for him. He didn’t speak when we played catch or when he walked me to the ice-cream shop, either. When we arrived at the adobe, he leaned across me to push my door open, and I grabbed his hand.

“Dad. At least tell me what the bat is for.”

My father straightened, moved the air-conditioning lever right, then hard back to the left, as though he could surprise it into working. He always did this. It never worked. My father and his routines. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s a symbol.”

“For what?”

“Lucy will tell you.”

“But you know.” I was almost snarling at him now.

“It stands for the skin at the tip of the tongue. It’s the Talking God. Or part of it, I think. I don’t know, exactly. I’m sorry.”

Gently, hand on my shoulder, he eased me out of the car before it occurred to me to wonder what he was apologizing for. But he surprised me by calling after me. “I promise you this, Seth,” he said. “This is the last time in your life that you’ll have to come here. Shut the door.”

Too stunned and confused and scared to do anything else, I did as he told me, then watched as my father’s car disintegrated into the first far-off shadows of twilight. Already, too soon, I felt the change in the air, the night chill seeping through the gauze-dry day like blood through a bandage.

My grandfather and Lucy were waiting on the patio. She had her hand on his shoulder, her long hair gathered on her head, and without its dark frame her face looked much older. And his — fully exposed now, without its protective shawl — looked like a rubber mask on a hook, with no bones inside to support it.

Slowly, my grandfather’s wheelchair squeaked over the patio onto the hard sand as Lucy propelled it. I could do nothing but watch. The wheelchair stopped, and my grandfather studied me.

“Ruach,” he said. There was still no tone in his voice. But there were no holes in it either, no gaps where last night his breath had failed him. “Bring it to me.”

It was my imagination, surely, or the first hint of breeze, that made the paper bag seem to squirm in my hands. This would be the last time, my father had said. I stumbled forward and dropped the bag in my grandfather’s lap.

Faster than I’d ever seen him move, but still not fast, my grandfather crushed the bag against his chest. His head tilted forward, and I had the insane idea that he was about to sing to the dead bat as if it were a baby. But all he did was close his eyes and clutch the bag.

“All right, that’s enough,” Lucy said, and took the bag from him. She touched him gently on the back but didn’t look at me.

“What did he just do?” I asked, challenging her. “What did the bat do?”

Once more, Lucy smiled her slow, nasty smile. “Wait and see.”

Then she was gone, and my grandfather and I were alone in the yard. The dark came drifting down the distant mountainsides like a fog bank, but faster. When it reached us, I closed my eyes and felt nothing except an instantaneous chill. I opened my eyes to find my grandfather still watching me, head cocked a little on his neck. A wolf, indeed.

“Digging,” he said. “All we did, at first. Making pits deeper. The dirt so black. So soft. Like sticking your hands. inside an animal. All those trees leaning over us. Pines. Great white birches. Bark as smooth as baby skin. The Nazis gave us nothing to drink. Nothing to eat. But they paid us no attention, either. I sat next to the gypsy I had slept beside all through the war. On a single slab of rotted wood. We had shared body heat. Blood from each other’s cuts and wounds. Infections. Lice.

“I never. even knew his name. Four years six inches from each other. never knew it. Couldn’t understand each other. Never really tried. He’d saved—” A cough rattled my grandfather’s entire body, and his eyes got wilder, began to bulge, and I thought he wasn’t breathing and almost yelled for Lucy again, but he gathered himself and went on. “Buttons,” he said. “You understand? From somewhere. Rubbed their edges on rocks. Posts. Anything handy. Until they were. . sharp. Not to kill. Not as a weapon.” More coughing. “As a tool. To whittle.”

“Whittle,” I said automatically, as though talking in my sleep.

“When he was starving. When he woke up screaming. When we had to watch children’s. bodies dangling from gallows. until the first crows came for their eyes. When it was snowing, and. we had to march. barefoot. or stand outside all night. The gypsy whittled.”

Again, my grandfather’s eyes ballooned in their sockets as though they would burst. Again came the cough, shaking him so hard that he almost fell from the chair. Again, he fought his body to stillness.

“Wait,” he gasped. “You will wait. You must.”

I waited. What else could I do?

A long while later, he said, “Two little girls.” I stared at him. His words wrapped me like strands of a cocoon. “What?”

“Listen. Two girls. The same ones, over and over. That’s what. the gypsy. whittled.”

Dimly, in the part of my brain that still felt alert, I wondered how anyone could tell if two figures carved in God knows what with the sharpened edge of a button were the same girls.

But my grandfather just nodded. “Even at the end. Even at Chelmno. In the woods. In the rare moments. when we weren’t digging, and the rest of us. sat. He went straight for the trees. Put his hands on them like they were warm. Wept. First time, all war. Despite everything we saw, everything we knew. no tears from him, until then. When he came back, he had. strips of pine bark in his hands. And while everyone else slept. or froze. or died. he worked. All night. Under the trees.

“Every few hours. shipments came. Of people, you understand? Jews. We heard trains. Then, later, we saw creatures. between tree trunks. Thin. Awful. Tike dead saplings walking. When the Nazis. began shooting. they fell with no sound. Pop-pop-pop from the guns. Then silence. Things lying in leaves. In the wet.

“The killing wasn’t. enough fun. for the Nazis, of course. They made us roll bodies. into the pits, with our hands. Then bury them. With our hands. Or our mouths. Sometimes our mouths. Dirt and blood. Bits of person in your teeth. A few of us lay down. Died on the ground. The Nazis didn’t have … to tell us. What to do with them. We just. pushed anything dead. into the nearest pit. No prayers. No last look to see who it was. It was no one. Do you see? No one. Burying. Or buried. No difference.

“And still, all night, the gypsy whittled.

“For the dawn. shipment. the Nazis tried. something new. Stripped the newcomers. then lined them up… on the lip of a pit. twenty, thirty at a time. Then they played. perforation games. Shoot up the body. down it. see if you could get it. to flap apart. before it fell. Open up, like a flower.

“All through the next day. All the next night. Digging. Waiting. Whittling. Killing. Burying. Over and over. Sometime. late second day, maybe. I got angry. Not at the Nazis. For what? Being angry at human beings. for killing. for cruelty. like being mad at ice, for freezing. It’s just. what to expect. So I got angry. at the trees. For standing there. For being green, and alive. For not falling when bullets hit them.

“I started. screaming. Trying to. In Hebrew. In Polish. The Nazis looked up, and I thought they would shoot me. They laughed instead. One began to clap. A rhythm. See?”

Somehow, my grandfather lifted his limp hands from the arms of the wheelchair and brought them together. They met with a sort of crackle, like dry twigs crunching.

“The gypsy. just watched. Still weeping. But also. after a while. nodding.”

All this time, my grandfather’s eyes had seemed to swell, as though there were too much air being pumped into his body. But now, the air went out of him in a rush, and the eyes went dark, and the lids came down. I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep again, the way he had last night. But I still couldn’t move. Dimly, I realized that the sweat from my long day’s walking had cooled on my skin, and that I was freezing.

My grandfather’s lids opened, just a little. He seemed to be peering at me from inside a trunk, or a coffin.

“I don’t know how the gypsy knew. that it was ending. That it was time. Maybe just because. it had been hours. half a day. between shipments. The world had gone. quiet. Us. Nazis. Trees. Corpses. There had been worse places. 1 thought. to stop living. Despite the smell.

“Probably, I was sleeping. I must have been, because the gypsy shook me. by the shoulder. Then held out. what he’d made. He had it. balanced. on a stick he’d bent. So the carving moved. Back and forth. Up and down.”

My mouth opened and then hung there. I was rock, sand, and the air moved through me and left me nothing.

“Life,’ the gypsy said to me, in Polish. Only Polish I ever heard him speak. ‘Life. You see?’

“I shook. my head. He said it again. ‘Life.’ And then. I don’t know how. but 1 did. see.

“I asked him. ‘Why not you?’ He took. from his pocket. one of his old carvings. The two girls. Holding hands. I hadn’t noticed. the hands before. And I understood.

“‘My girls,’ he said. ‘Smoke. No more. Five years ago.’ I understood that, too.

“I took the carving from him. We waited. We slept, side by side. One last time. Then the Nazis came.

“They made us stand. Hardly any of them, now. The rest gone. Fifteen of us. Maybe less. They said something. German. None of us knew German. But to me. at least. the word meant. run.

“The gypsy. just stood there. Died where he was. Under the trees. The rest. I don’t know. The Nazi who caught me. laughing. a boy. Not much. older than you. Laughing. Awkward with his gun. Too big for him. I looked at my hand. Holding. the carving. The wooden man. ‘Life,’ I found myself chanting. instead of Shma. ‘Life.’ Then the Nazi shot me in the head. Bang.”

And with that single word, my grandfather clicked off, as though a switch had been thrown. He slumped in his chair. My paralysis lasted a few more seconds, and then I started waving my hands in front of me, as if I could ward off what he’d told me, and I was so busy doing that that I didn’t notice, at first, the way my grandfather’s torso heaved and rattled. Whimpering, I lowered my hands, but by then, my grandfather wasn’t heaving anymore, and he’d slumped forward further, and nothing on him was moving.

“Lucy!” I screamed, but she was already out of the house wrestling my grandfather out of his chair to the ground. Her head dove down on my grandfather’s as she shoved the mask up his face, but before their mouths even met, my grandfather coughed, and Lucy fell back, sobbing, tugging the mask back into place.

My grandfather lay where he’d been thrown, a scatter of bones in the dirt. He didn’t open his eyes. The oxygen tank hissed, and the blue tube stretching to his mask filled with wet mist.

“How?” I whispered

Lucy swept tears from her eyes. “What?”

“He said he got shot in the head.” And even as I said that, I felt it for the first time, that cold slithering up my intestines into my stomach, then my throat.

“Stop it,” I said. But Lucy slid forward so that her knees were under my grandfather’s head and ignored me. Overhead, I saw the moon half-embedded in the ridged black of the sky like the lidded eye of a Gila monster. I stumbled around the side of the house and, without thinking about it, slipped into the hogan.

Once inside, I jerked the curtain down to block out the sight of Lucy and my grandfather and that moon, then drew my knees tight against my chest to pin that freezing feeling where it was. I stayed that way a long while, but whenever I closed my eyes, I saw people splitting open like peeled bananas, limbs strewn across bare, black ground like tree branches after a lightning storm, pits full of naked dead people.

I’d wished him dead, I realized. At the moment he tumbled forward in his chair, I’d hoped he was dead. And for what, exactly? For being in the camps? For telling me about it? For getting sick, and making me confront it?

But with astonishing, disturbing speed, the guilt over those thoughts passed. And when it was gone, I realized that the cold had seeped down my legs and up to my neck. It clogged my ears, coated my tongue like a paste, sealing the world out. All I could hear was my grandfather’s voice like blown sand against the inside of my skull. Life. He was inside me, I thought. He had erased me, taken my place. He was becoming me.

I threw my hands over my ears, which had no effect. My thoughts flashed through the last two days: the drumming and chanting; the dead bat in the paper bag; my father’s goodbye. All the while, that voice beat in my ears, attaching itself to my pulse. Life. And finally, I realized that I’d trapped myself. I was alone in the hogan in the dark. When I turned around, I would see the Dancing Man. It would be wiggling toward me with its mouth wide open. And it would be over, too late. It might already be.

Flinging my hands behind me, I grabbed the Dancing Man around its thin black neck. I could feel it bob on its wire, and I half-expected it to squirm as I fought to my feet. It didn’t, but its wooden skin gave where 1 pressed it like real skin. Inside my head, the new voice kept beating.

At my feet lay the matches that Lucy had used to light her ceremonial candles. I snatched up the matchbook, then threw the carved thing to the ground, where it smacked on its base and tipped over, face up, staring at me. I broke a match against the matchbox, then another. The third match lit.

For one moment, I held the flame over the Dancing Man. The heat felt wonderful crawling toward my fingers, a blazing, living thing chasing back the cold inside me. I dropped the match, and the Dancing Man disintegrated in a spasm of white-orange flame.

And then, abruptly, there was nothing to be done. The hogan was a dirt and wood shelter, the night outside the plain old desert night, the Dancing Man a puddle of red and black ash that I scattered with my foot. Still cold but mostly tired, I staggered outside, sat down hard against the side of the hogan and closed my eyes.

Footsteps woke me, and I sat up and found, to my amazement, that it was daylight. I waited, tense, afraid to look up, and then I did.

My father was kneeling beside me on the ground.

“You’re here already?” I asked.

“Your grandpa died, Seth,” he said, in his zombie-Dad voice, though he touched my hand the way a real father would. “I’ve come to take you home.”

IV

The familiar commotion in the hallway of the pension alerted me that my students had returned. One of them, but only one, stopped outside my door. I waited, holding my breath, wishing I’d snapped out the light. But Penny didn’t knock, and after a few seconds, I heard her careful, precise footfall continuing toward her room. And so I was alone with my puppets and my memories and my horrible suspicions, the way I always have been.

I remember rousing myself out of the malaise I couldn’t quite seem to shake — have never, for one instant, shaken since — during that last ride home from my grandfather’s. “I killed him,” I told my father, and when he glanced at me, expressionless, I told him all of it, the Dancing Man and the ceremony and the thoughts I’d had.

My father didn’t laugh. He also didn’t touch me. All he said was, “That’s silly, Seth” And, for a while, I thought it was.

But today I am thinking of Rabbi Loew and his golem, the creature he infected with a sort of life. A creature that walked, talked, thought, saw, but couldn’t taste. Couldn’t feel. I’m thinking of my father, the way he always was. If I’m right, then of course it had been done to him, too. And I’m thinking of the way I only seem all the way real, even to me, when I see myself in the vividly reflective faces of my students.

It’s possible, I realize, that nothing happened to me those last few days. It could have happened years before I was born. The gypsy had offered what he offered, and my grandfather had accepted, and as a result become what he was. Might have been. If that’s true, then my father and I are unexceptional in a way. Natural progeny. We simply inherited our natures and our limitations, the way all earthly creatures do.

But I can’t help thinking about the graves I saw on this summer’s trip, and the millions of people in them, and the millions more without graves. The ones who are smoke.

And I find that I can feel it, at last. Or that I’ve always felt it, without knowing what it was: the Holocaust, roaring down the generations like a wave of radiation, eradicating, in everyone it touches, the ability to trust people, experience joy, fall in love, believe in love when you see it in others. And I wonder what difference it makes, in the end, whether it really was my grandfather, or the approximation of him that the gypsy made, who finally crawled out of the woods of Chelmno.

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Хиршберг Глен Dancing Men

Glen Hirshberg Dancing Men