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COMMITMENT...a recurring nightmare
By the contemplative recluse monk Sotapanna Jhanananda (Jeffrey S, Brooks)
(copyright 1999 all rights reserved)
I slept against several men on a cold cement bench day after day. We were crowded into one small cement cell with no window, only a steel door and no light.
I filled my mind with only three words, the most important thing for me to remember. "...tell no one, tell no one, tell no one..."
The door grated open, letting in the blinding glare from a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling of the corridor.
"Wake up, you filthy swine!" the sergeant growled. "I want Schmidt!"
I was barely conscious and leaning on the shoulder of the person next to me. We huddled together for warmth and comfort, waiting, sometimes interminably, for our interrogation by the commandant.
Large hands grabbed me by my shoulders, dragged me out of the cell, and threw me roughly to the ground just outside the door. A boot kicked my feet away from the swinging door as it clanked shut.
Gentle hands lifted me up and put me into the wheelbarrow that I had become so familiar with. He whispered into my ear, "My friend, you must tell the commandant everything or he'll kill you."
I mumbled my reply, "He'll kill me anyway."
I curled up on the cold steel bottom of the wheelbarrow and enjoyed its gentle swaying and occasional bumps for what seemed like days. Bare light bulbs in cages passed by overhead like successive sunrises and sunsets. I heard the growling of raging voices, whining, and grunts of pain, and remembered my father's jaw muscles twitching under three-day-stubble, and his single, massive, workman's fist.
He was shaking the stump of what had been his left hand in my face and saying, "I worked for those Jewish bastards for twenty years and the only thing I got was this fucking stump."
The wheelbarrow stopped and another steel door grated opened. The wheelbarrow turned, glided through the doorway, and I was unceremoniously dumped on the cold cement floor.
"Don't treat our honored guest so roughly," the commandant said. There was a pause while the commandant probably examined me. "Well, Heir Schmidt, you are not looking good. I don't think your pretty wife is going to recognize you." He laughed and gently lifted my jaw with his hand and tried to look into my closed eyes. "Look at me when I speak to you!" He smashed his fist into my face. The impact produced a dull thud; my ears buzzed and the light overhead spun around.
I saw my father yelling at me again, "I'm sick of you always lazing about, you worthless piece of shit!" For a moment I was twelve again and my father was beating me.
"Papa, I'm just doing my homework. Don't hit me anymore," I pleaded.
"Am I your papa again?" The commandant paused for a moment, then said in as friendly a voice as he could, "Tell me about your best friends, the ones you blow up bridges with. I'd really like to meet them. Maybe they'd let me blow up bridges too?"
Lying on the floor, barely conscious, I realized I wasn't talking to my father. There was a yellow glow to this room, and long dark shadows. I didn't know what was real any more. Had it been weeks in that prison of no sleep and many beatings? I couldn't tell anyone anything of my friends. I mumbled, "Tell no one, tell no one, tell no one..."
"Tell no one?" the commandant yelled and kicked me in the stomach.
I felt another dull thud, this time against my back. I barely felt the kicks and punches anymore. It was interesting how the pain hardly bothered me. Tell no one, tell no one, tell no one... I began repeating to myself these important instructions, tell no one. I didn't want to forget that I must never reveal the location of my best friend, Tom, whom I grew up with, and my wife, Susan.
I met her in my first year of Engineering School. I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I found out later, after I fell in love with her, that she was Jewish. We were in the cafe on the strassa and she didn't look happy.
"What is it, my love? Why does your face approach the table?" I wanted to make her laugh.
She gripped her mug with both hands and said, "Honey, I've been asked to leave school."
I was aghast. She was one of the best students in the class. "What on Earth for? What have you done? Have you been talking to those revolutionaries again?"
Throwing her head back to get away the hair that had fallen in her face and looking directly into my eyes, she said, "I've done nothing. I'm Jewish. They've asked me to leave because I'm Jewish."
"You're what?" I asked, stunned. I was more surprised at my surprise than at finding out she was Jewish.
We never talked about the religions of our families because we were all atheists. It was a time when most of us were either fascist or communist. The one thing we all agreed on, was religions were part of the problem of social injustice, so we left them behind. Most of my friends were communists, like Susan. I was somewhat unusual among my friends. I had an interest in Eastern philosophy that I was introduced to through an earlier interest in the psychology of Freud and Young. My friends considered all religions, even Eastern, to be part of the problem, so I pretty much kept it to myself...
The soothing voice and touch of a woman brought me out of my blessed memories. "Honey, are you all right?"
"I'll be OK, momma," I mumbled through swollen lips and a broken jaw.
"Just tell papa what he wants to know and everything will be all right."
"Momma, I can't tell anyone." I was so weak from starvation and beatings that I couldn't even attempt to return her grasp with my broken fingers.
She whispered into my ear while she stroked my hair, "You can tell me, dear. I won't tell anyone. It'll be our little secret."
"No momma. I can't even tell you. They'll hurt you."
"You stupid bitch!" The commandant back-handed the woman across her face, then dragged her by the collar of her coveralls to the other side of the room, where he beat her.
She cried out and sobbed, "I'm sorry, sir, I'll do better. Please give me another chance!"
"Momma, don't let papa beat you anymore; run away." I called out weakly.
"I'm going to kill this bitch if you don't tell me where your friends are." The commandant pulled a luger from his holster and pointed it at her head.
"I can't tell you," I replied.
"I'm sick of playing your fucking games!" The commandant pulled the trigger; the gunfire was so loud my ears rang and the woman yelped and fell limp to the floor with a blank stare in her eyes. A hole in her shaved head drained thick, dark-red blood into a pool on the floor. Her perfect white teeth showed from her partially open mouth.
The commandant stomped over to me, grabbed me by the collar of my coveralls, and screamed into my face, "If you don't tell me, I'll kill you!"
I hung limply from his grasp. A laugh that I was helpless to stop came from inside of me, and I said with complete resignation, "You'll kill me anyway."
"You're fucking right!" He screamed. "And I'm going to love every moment of it, you goddamned fucking, Jew-loving traitor!" He kicked me around his room like a rag doll. I lost consciousness fairly quickly. A calmness settled on me and a golden glow warmed and welcomed me.
I heard buzzing. The glow dissipated and I heard the kind guard saying to the commandant, "You've killed him, sir."
The commandant did not reply right away. I heard him wash his hands at a small sink that hung from the wall in a corner of the room and very carefully dry them on a towel then he used the towel to wipe the blood off of his boots. He picked up his jacket that hung on the back of his chair and put it on. I heard him walk back to the sink where I guess he looked into the mirror, then he left the room. The souls of his shiny black boots were sticky with blood against the cement floor and he called back, "Good, then take out the fucking garbage."
A quiet settled on me, and I felt no more pain. The glow came back and soothed me. I heard dripping and realized it was my body fluids trickling down the floor drain near my head. The glow and the buzzing began to take me away with them. I felt warm and glad it was over. I had won. I had kept my secret.
The buzzing returned again, and I heard a baby crying. The buzzing got louder, drowning out the crying, and I felt relieved again from the pain and cold. The buzzing faded again into the crying. I felt cold and weak. Pain clawed at every part of my body. Something heavy was on top of me. I opened my eyes and found I was lying beneath a stiff, blue-skinned corpse. I squirmed and struggled until I pulled myself free and tumbled to the muddy ground. Looking around, I found piles of bodies in a large pit, apparently waiting for mass burial. A light dusting of new snow covered everything like sugar frosting.
I hobbled on my broken feet through the muck of half-frozen mud and blood to the source of the muffled cries. It came from another pile of bodies. I climbed to the top of the heap and nudged with my elbows and pulled with my teeth until I unburied the baby. I had a great deal of difficulty because my hands had been smashed and swollen into paws. The child was wrapped in rags and crying weakly. I removed clothing from some of the dead to cover myself. I tied shirt sleeves around my bare, swollen feet and wrapped the child in more rags. To keep it warm, I stuffed its tiny body inside the many layers of shirts I wore.
I looked up at the gray horizon, estimated the position of the setting sun and started walking slowly and painfully toward where I thought Switzerland must be. I hobbled across a large empty field with light snow flurries falling against my face. From the considerable amount of soil disturbance I guessed there were many mass graves. The child squirmed from time to time and hungrily rooted against my ribs, which caused me additional pain, but I hardly cared about little more.
We moved slowly across the field and through several barbed-wire fences. There were no guards to be seen. They were probably somewhere warm and dry. We made it to the cover of a woods, which I walked through most of the night. By sunrise I was shuffling through about six inches of snow toward a farm house. I didn't knock on the door. I simply stood shivering outside the kitchen window hoping someone would bring us something warm to eat and not bring the Gestapo.
After a while, smoke came from the chimney, and a little later a woman's face appeared in the yellow glow of the window. She looked out, startled at first to see us, then urgently motioned that we should go to the barn. I lay down in the straw, grateful for its soft dryness, and even though the barn wasn't warm, it was not as cold as outside. I rested there for several hours until she came and milked one of the cows. She poured some of the warm milk into a bowl, which she handed to me along with a fresh, still-warm loaf of bread. She held her lantern up to look in my face, and quickly looked away in apparent horror and disgust. I opened my shirt to feed the baby milk. She was shocked I had an infant, but made no attempt to take it away from me. I had a great deal of difficulty feeding the hungry baby from the bowl. I dipped chunks of the bread in the warm milk and the baby sucked on it hungrily. I put some of the soaked bread into the infant's mouth but it choked. She left us without a word to finish our meal, and perhaps, to get back to her chores.
We spent the day in the barn with no other visitors. We slept, exhausted, curled up in the straw. Snow continued to fall periodically throughout the day. By evening I bundled us up again and set out in the snow. I followed the edge of the fields and streams, using the trees and bushes along their banks for cover. At first the going was slow because of the tremendous pain in my crushed feet but they soon became numb in the cold.
We walked all night. Fortunately, the snow stopped, but the temperature fell. As dawn approached we headed for another barn and milked a little of one of the cows by sucking, our mouths on different nipples, before the farmer came to do his morning chores. I buried us in the back of the barn under straw, hoping the child wouldn't make noise and the farmer wouldn't notice. The child slept most of the morning, and when he stirred, I let him suck on my pinkie. The sucking on my smashed finger hurt so much I thought I was going to scream, but at least it kept him quiet. At dusk we milked the cow again and then bundled us up. I found a small tarp to wrap around us to keep us dry and break the wind. We set out again in dark snow flurries. The farmer unwittingly supplied me with a large pair of rubber boots as well to kept my feet dry.
We progressed slowly over many days toward Switzerland. Sometimes dogs barked, but we just kept walking. Once or maybe twice dogs came up to us growling and showing their teeth. I just ignored them and kept walking. One dog nipped my calf, but I hardly felt it. Usually the dogs tired of barking and following our slow shuffle, and after a while, left us alone. Climbing into the mountains was difficult because sometimes I needed my hands to scramble up a slope, and the cold was bitter. During the day, we slept huddled against the trunks of trees. Their thick branches captured the snow and made good, almost warm, wind breaks, like an igloo. The farm houses got fewer and we ate less. Eventually, I found the trail that, I knew, would take us to freedom. It was the same trail we, in the underground, took to cross the border without being detected. We walked it for three days higher into the cold mountains, closer to freedom. Finally, shortly after sunrise, I saw the little Swiss village we headed for. It gleamed in the valley with warm smoke rising from its chimneys. It was the village our underground group used as a base camp. I hobbled to town. The first person that saw us glanced at us, then scurried away. Two men saw us and came up to see who we were. They bent down and looked up into my face. I tried to straighten up, but I couldn't.
I just smiled at them and tried to say, "Hello. Help us." But it just came out unintelligibly.
They looked away in disgust, and one of them said, "Oh, my God. Did you see his face."
I let one of them take my right arm. My left, I wouldn't let them have. I had to hold onto the baby. They took us to the small hospital, and one of them left to wake up the doctor.
It was warm there. While I waited for the doctor, the warmth seemed to almost suffocate me into sleep. It was good I couldn't stay awake, because the heat seemed to make me hurt more.
I woke up when the doctor came in stamping snow off his boots, "What a stink! Where did you find this ragamuffin?" he said.
One of the men pointed up the mountain, "We were going up the road to gather wood, when we saw him coming down the road. We saw that he's been hurt, so we brought him here."
The doctor looked down into my face and pulled back the tarp and layers of clothes and said, "Jesus Christ! What happened to you?"
I tried to reply but I just mumbled. I was too weak to care.
The doctor turned to the men and said, "You two help me get his clothes off."
They started to peel away the layers and one of them said, "What a swine."
He spoke German and it reminded me of the guards in the camp. I winced and started to shiver.
When they saw the prison-camp coveralls the doctor said, "Look, he's been in the camps."
One of the men said, "I wonder how he got out?"
The other man said, "What the hell is this?" He pried my left arm from its tight grip on the child and opened the bundle. He said, "Oh my God." He paused to look closely at the baby, "Oh God! It's dead."
I began to cry. My little companion didn't make it.
The Doctor shook his head and said, "I bet if this man will ever be able to speak again, he'll have one hell of a story to tell."
The doctor did his best to treat me for my injuries, but that meant after a few months of his care I hobbled around on broken feet with the aid of a crutch and my hands were not much more than claws. He said my jaw was irreparable, but eventually I was able to chew soft food with the three teeth I had left. My nights were filled with nightmares of the beatings, or of the Gestapo doing to my wife what they told me they would do if they found her, and me watching powerlessly nearby. He gave me jobs to do around his clinic to earn my keep, but I felt like a prisoner to my ugly brokeness and his, generous but controlling ways.
The dreams and memories haunted me, not only in my sleep but throughout my days. Often I forgot where I was, and erupted into grunts of rage. One afternoon, I was taking out the garbage, and thinking how demeaning it was for a degreed civil engineer to be nothing more than a servant. I stumbled on the high steps leading outside, the garbage went all over the place, and I jammed my knee against a stone. It hurt like hell. My frustration with my situation had been building up to this point. I exploded into a fit and threw the bucket against the wall and kicked the garbage all over the yard. I yelled every obscenity I knew, but it just came out a guttural roar.
When I finished raging, the doctor came outside and said, "I want you to leave today. I can't have this kind of thing around here."
I was still angry and just mumbled "Fuck you." and left the garbage where it was. I hobbled down the road to the center of town, where there was a small hotel and cafe and a general store. And there they were, my friend and my wife. She was as beautiful as I remembered her, sitting in the warm morning sunlight. I started to hobble quickly across the street, forgetting for a moment my ugliness. I saw that he was sitting next to her with his arm around her, consoling her for something. I stopped half way across the street, suddenly self conscious of my disfigured face and quickly hobbled back across the street and away.
I mumbled furiously, "Don't hurt me anymore. Tell no one, tell no one, tell no one." I cried, "Don't hurt me any more." and fell on the side of the road clutching fists of dirt and weeping until I was drooling into the dirt.
###
They sat at a small round white table, in the sun, on the outdoor patio of a cafe, in a little Swiss town, not far from the German border. Trying to figure out what to do.
"Look, I know I was only sent back to marry Franz, to keep him in the service of the underground. He was a valuable man, but I loved him before I joined the underground and I still love him."
Tom reached out to her hand to give her a reassuring squeeze, "I wish there was something we could do, but there isn't. Word has it, he's in one of the camps being interrogated probably right now. And he'll most likely break."
Susan abruptly sat back in her chair, and held her coffee mug in both hands as if it was a shield to protect her and said, "What makes you think he'll tell them anything?"
He held his hands up to appease her, he said, "Susan, I'm sorry, I didn't mean anything, except he wasn't trained for this work and he doesn't have the same commitment we do. You know he only came in because of you."
Susan stared down as though she was watching scenes from the past, and said, "He was too absorbed in his studies to pay any attention to politics. If he had, he would have come on his own, but he wouldn't have been as valuable to us, because he wouldn't have gotten the training he did."
He shook his head, "Yes, but you don't know what they do to people there. Only the most disciplined mind can resist their interrogation. They won't give up until they have what they want, and I'm sorry to say, he won't survive. No one does. He's as good as dead."
Susan winced with the painful memory of the terrible stories she had heard of the beatings. She bowed her head and tears came. She reached out to her friend and comrade-in-arms for comfort. He took her hand and put his other on her shoulder. Susan's attention was suddenly drawn to the street where she heard something. She turned and saw a bent man in baggy old workman's clothes hobbling toward her mumbling something unintelligible. His grotesque face horrified her. Then he abruptly turned and hobbled quickly down the road, raving.
"Did you see that poor man?" Susan craned her neck to see where he had gone.
Tom said, "Don't worry about him. He's probably just some bum begging for drinking money." Then, brushing his hair back with his free hand, he said, "I haven't told you, but we've dismantled our network."
She gripped the edge of the table, "You've done what? We worked for years to put into place one of the best networks the underground has, with the highest trained and placed people."
He held his hands up defensively, "Look, we haven't disassembled everything. Just the links Franz knew about. The others have gone quiet until we know it's safe to reactivate them. You and I can't go back without a new set of papers. Our identities are definitely known."
She leaned back in her chair as far as she could get from him, and said, "What do you mean? Do you think Franz could have talked?"
"I don't know. It was only about a week after they caught him, before they ransacked your apartment and seized everything. They most certainly have figured out who he is, and that means they know who you are, and what you were up to."
She put her hands to her breast, "Oh my God. I'm glad we have all the negatives Franz took safe here. We were pretty careful to destroy any pictures of ourselves around the house."
"Yeah, that's for sure, but they have all of the published prints. Enough to know Franz had a significant interest in bridges, and unfortunately you were in many of those pictures."
She shook her head defensively, "I didn't show up more than a speck on a bicycle in most of them."
"I enlarged some of them, and you come out recognizably."
"Well, I am his wife. It won't take too much for them to put two and two together. Besides, his thesis was on a comparison of bridge engineering throughout the Rhine, and that's available at the University library."
"Well, any way, the operations are over. Franz is gone and with him the skill of explosive placement."
She gripped her mug, "That's not true. I was a civil engineering student also, before they expelled me for my parent's religion. Besides, Franz and I did all the field work together on our summer holidays. We photographed every bridge on the Rhine, together, on our bicycles."
"But what about explosive placement? He knew exactly where to place the smallest charge for the greatest effect."
She put her hands on her hips, and stared him down, "Who do you think helped him write his thesis? Who do you think helped him calculate explosive placement? I did the research on explosives. We did everything together." She picked up her mug and drained it. then looked at it and ran her thumb nail over the lip and repeated almost inaudibly, "together."
###
The summers are short and winter comes on quickly in the Alps. I spent the summer following Susan and Tom around. I kept myself hidden because I couldn't bare her seeing me the way I was. I dug through the garbage behind the cafe for food. The best pickings were early in the morning, after the night cleanup. I slept behind the garbage cans in the alley, in back of their hotel. It was a place no one was likely to see me. What I have come to. All those years of academic training and I had become a bum.
I followed their morning ritual. Every morning they went to the little cafe and read the newspaper and sometimes met people, probably from the underground. They had coffee and croissants and fruit. I watched them get closer. Every time Tom touched her hand, I felt a fist crashing into my face. After breakfast, they went on hikes in the mountains, and returned late afternoon for a snack before a nap in their rooms.
It was mid-September and the first light snow fell in the late afternoon from flat gray skies. I was cold, so I crawled under a tarp I kept near the trash cans. As night fell the snow came down heavier. I just kept my head under the tarp. The weight of the snow pressed down on me. The cold bit harshly into my fingers and toes. Fortunately, I finally got drowsy then the buzzing came back, like the time I was in the heap of bodies in the camp. I didn't feel the cold anymore. I felt warm and fluid without the chronic stiff pain I always felt since the beatings. I felt comfortable, as if I were home. A comfortable home I hadn't known, or maybe had just forgotten.
May you become enlightened in this very lifetime,
Jhanananda (Jeffrey S. Brooks)
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