Read Online Cabin Fever by Diane Awerbuck - Free Book Online Page B

there were other people in the room who would care. ‘Just go, if you want,’ she said, and her face gave him up. ‘It will take forever. Come back and tell me all about where you have been.’ Her hand was a hot bracelet on his flesh. He remembered being eight years old; Miryam, smiling, her black ringlets springing from her head, asking, ‘Do you want a Chinese Bangle?’
    He stood next to her bed and he lightly said, ‘Who needs to go all the way to the other side of the world when they have everything right here?’ He knew that he was part of a generation of people who were afraid of nothing – except to go travelling: not because they did not know what they would see, but because they did. There were a hundred civilian reasons to stay at home.
    Miryam replied, ‘Don’t worry. Please, go. Let someone else feed Israel.’
    Night after night she asked whether he had made arrangements. She was no better; she was no worse. The two of them waited for a death that did not come.
    And so it was that he would travel alone through Europe again, to find the old places in the hope that they had changed. He had known them by their other names, but he still hoped to arrive there: ordinary towns in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, translated by historical account. He would pass through them and they would give up their ghosts, their pancakes and plagues, their imperial eagles, impalers. On each train he held his journal on his lap like an infant. The covers were threadbare, the naked white corners nudging at his palms. The two regarded each other.
    They were almost there. Heber made himself think about his here and now, this tiny mining town that for centuries had had its silver sprung from the resting underworld, its nuggets like teeth, like spectacles. Kotna Hora had been long since stripped: the tiny town was famous now only for its ossuary, the collected bones of forty thousand victims of disease, the medieval people who paid for their proximity.
    Thomas the Twin would pay his respects to their skeletons resting in the bone church. He would look at death without turning away, and then go back and describe its appearance to Miryam. The plague, whispered Thomas the Twin to himself. The Black Death. The ossuary would have the feel of the charnel house – of all the places people have been slaughtered and dissected in ways both savage and precise. It would murmur the history of scalpel and socket, expose the bony processes of illness and madness and suffering. It was every cave and every crypt, the last hidey-hole of the Maccabees, the cellar and archive and oven, cool with ancient root systems or warm with animal breath – but always, always white, all the way back to the eye sockets.
    The old soldier sat with one hand pressed against the skin of his face. The optic nerves hummed with memory, and the eyeballs moved, dreaming, under his lids. There are some things in the world that are burned onto the retinas. Like looking at the sun, afterwards you are blind to the trivial. All the same, Thomas thought, you must feel your way back to the world of small things. The past is the past. Its story, its horror, must become just one part of your life. He thumbed the disintegrating weave of the journal.
    When the concentration camps were forced open in 1945, the Allied soldiers saw simple skeletons that fell as they turned to their liberators. The soldiers, weeping, gave new soap to the inmates. The women crouched jealously over the bars, washing themselves among the remains of the children that floated near them in the water. The soldiers gave half-loaves to the men, who still ate worms as they clutched the bread because they had had to eat worms to live and now could not tell the difference.
    Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Adam Heber, DSO , had given his men orders to marshall the German prisoners of war so that they could begin the clean-up. He saw that the real work needed was the digging of mass graves, and the Germans were the