Alexander Altmann A10567 (19 page)

Alexander exhaled. If he wanted to calm the horse, he had to stop his own heart hammering. He wiped the frost from Midnight’s flanks and pressed his body close to the horse’s, making his breath as slow and even as he could. Midnight shifted uneasily and took a small step sideways.

“Please.” Alexander pressed his cheek to Midnight’s neck.

He walked towards the commander and Midnight followed, stopping in front of the commander when Alexander raised his hand. “Good boy.” Alexander spoke softly, reaching over to pat the horse.

“That’ll be all!” the commander said, warning Alexander away with his crop.

Midnight stiffened and took a step back.
It’s okay
, Alexander thought, looking into the horse’s dark eyes, willing him to understand.
Just let him up onto your back and we’ll both be okay.

He backed away from the horse. He could hardly bear to watch. The commander snatched the reins, pulled a black boot from the snow and slid it into a stirrup. Alexander thought about praying, but if he couldn’t trust God to keep his little sister safe, what chance did he have with a horse? “Let him behave,” Alexander begged the clouds, the sky and the trees instead. “Don’t let him end up like Serafin.” A knot formed in the back of his throat. He hadn’t protected Serafin. Nor had he grieved for him.
I should’ve been kinder
, Alexander thought.

Commander Ziegler sprung off his left foot, swung his leg over Midnight’s broad back and settled into the saddle, his face relaxing into a smile. He couldn’t see Midnight’s nostrils flare as he landed on his back, but Alexander did. He saw the horse’s eyes bug out and his ears twitch. It reminded him of his dog, Spitz, waiting for Alexander to throw him the ball when they played catch, his neck straining, his small body coiled tight as a spring.

“Be back here in two hours,” the commander called to Alexander as he took up the reins and swung the horse towards the gate.

Two hours!
Alexander closed the stall door and fell back against the hard wood.
Midnight had taken off at a trot without being asked, but would he take instruction? And what if the commander whipped him?
He grabbed a rake. Maybe if he mucked out the stall, the sound in his head would stop – the pounding of Midnight’s hooves on the snow as he slid into a canter and disappeared into the fog.

Alexander changed the straw and prepared a tub of corn for Midnight’s return. “He’ll come back,” he said to himself, “and he’ll be tired and cold.”

He pulled a blanket from the shelf and lugged it outside, the snow swirling around him. It settled on his shoulders and slid down his neck. It turned his fingers blue and his breath white. The kapo hadn’t sent him out to wait for the commander but he couldn’t stay inside the suffocating stall a moment longer. He tucked his hands under his armpits and waited.

He heard Midnight before he saw him, the muffled thud of hooves on snow, the thumping three-beat gait, then a black smudge against the bright white and finally, Midnight, shiny-eyed and panting, his black coat glistening, his breath steaming in front of him.

The kapo joined Alexander as Midnight slowed to a stop.

“Now
that’s
a horse!” the commander trumpeted, his face full of admiration. “Up to a gallop within seconds. Didn’t even have to pull out the whip. I’ve called him Blitz. It seemed fitting.” The commander slid off the horse and dropped the reins. “Have him ready tomorrow at two and shorten the stirrups. I’m going to take him jumping.”

Alexander scooped up the reins, threw the blanket over Midnight’s soaked back and returned him to the stall.
Blitz!
The German word for lightning, the
one
thing that terrified Midnight and made him want to bolt.

“He can call you whatever he wants,” Alexander whispered into Midnight’s ear, “but your name is Midnight.” He looked down at the number etched into his skin. “And mine is Alexander,” he said, realising the horse might never have heard his name. “Alexander Altmann.” He stared into the horse’s dark eyes.
How am I supposed to teach you to jump when I can’t climb onto your back?
Either the commander is a fool, or he wants us to fail.

Alexander lifted the blanket from Midnight’s back. The horse was breathing hard but he was fine. He hadn’t been whipped and – he ran his hands over the horse’s back, belly and legs – Alexander didn’t have any scratches or bumps. “You had me scared today,” he said, touching his forehead to Midnight’s muzzle. Midnight nickered and brought his face close to Alexander’s, close enough to rub his pink sandpaper tongue across Alexander’s cheek. Like a kiss. Alexander touched his fingers to his wet cheek and his throat closed over. He’d never known a horse to lick anything other than a salt block.

He scooped a fistful of straw from the floor. “Let’s get you dry,” he said, rubbing the wisps over Midnight’s body. “Then we’ll see about jumping.” Alexander unfastened Midnight’s noseband, slid the bridle off and took the bit from his mouth. He lifted the snow-dusted saddle from his back, picked up a bristle brush and rubbed the ice crusts from his legs and combed the knots from his tail.

“Want something to eat?” He dragged over a bucket of water and the tub of sweet corn.

Midnight bent over the tub and nudged it towards Alexander. “How odd!” Alexander stared at the tub.
That’s
not
a trick I taught you.
Neither was the kiss. Alexander looked at Midnight as it dawned on him: someone else had taught Midnight to share his food. Someone who’d known him before he was a head-shy horse without a name. Of course someone had loved the Arabian before the war brought him to Auschwitz. Cared for him, taught him tricks, loved him, and then lost him. Alexander looked into Midnight’s black eyes. Something bad must have happened to him on the way to Auschwitz. Something bad which had stripped away his trust and made him wary of people.

“You can jump, can’t you?” Alexander asked, remembering the day lightning had struck in the yard and the way Midnight had flown at the barbed wire fence, lengthening his stride, then rocking back onto his hocks as he closed in on the jump. “The people you lived with before you came here taught you, didn’t they?” He smiled and, forgetting that the horse was head-shy, stretched out his hand to sweep his fingertips over the white blaze between Midnight’s eyes.

“Whoa!” Alexander flew backwards as the horse snorted and drew his head away sharply.

“I’m sorry! I forgot …” he stammered. “I won’t do it again.”

The Horse Platoon walked home in the dying light, past frozen paddocks and roads slick with ice. By the time Alexander returned to Auschwitz, the sky had darkened. The stars had no reason to sparkle and the sky was black, but inside the barrack a flickering light led the way to his bunk.

“Hanukkah!” Isidor’s mouth curved into a smile at the sight of the Rat standing in the middle of the room clutching a candle. “It’s the first night of Hanukkah.” He stepped out of his wet boots and hurried to join the group of men huddled around the barrack boss.

“
Baruch Atah Adonai Elohenu Melech Haolam
,” the Rat intoned.

“
She asa nisim la-avotenu bayamim hahem bizman hazeh
,” the men joined his Hebrew prayer, hope flickering in their red-rimmed eyes. The Rat flinched as the melting candle burned down to its wick, once again plunging the barrack into darkness.

“Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who performed miracles,” he continued in the dark, repeating the Hanukkah story that Alexander’s mother had told him when he was young. It had seemed wondrous then, Judah the Maccabee liberating the second temple from the Greeks and the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days.

“I don’t believe in miracles,” Alexander said to no one in particular. But that wasn’t entirely true. He’d witnessed wondrous things as a child: eggs cracking open to reveal clammy chicks, a mare giving birth, a rainbow touching snow. And even here: a horse’s kiss. They were all miracles, in a way. Miracles of nature even Hitler could not destroy.

Alexander fell asleep dreaming of shooting stars but woke to the sound of men being chased from their beds and the smell of unwashed bodies. Breakfast was a scrap of bread and a spoonful of snow. There was no time for coffee: the Horse Platoon was to march to the delousing block before sunrise.

“And the rest of you,” the Rat turned on the other men, “clean this place up. It looks like a chicken coop. I want to be able to eat off the floor.”

“But we were disinfected two weeks ago!” Isidor complained as the Rat chased the Horse Platoon from the barrack.

Alexander stepped into the disinfecting hall, bowed his head and waited for the razor, then followed the other broken-down bodies into the scalding showers and then into the yard to drip-dry, knowing that as soon as he pulled his dirty jacket on, he’d be covered in lice again. But his jacket was gone and in the hall, on the bench, in its place, was a neatly folded pile of clothes, an untarnished metal bowl and a shiny round spoon. The jacket had all its buttons and the pants had no holes. Alexander frowned. It would take him weeks to save enough cigarettes to pay the tailor to sew him another secret pocket. Isidor held up a pair of socks and shrugged.

At lunchtime Alexander found a piece of meat in his soup and a few minutes after that the commander whisked a man with a clipboard through the stable. He wore a heavy grey coat with a red and white armband on his left sleeve.

“Red Cross,” Isidor whispered.

The man pulled the ladle from the soup tureen and held it up to his nose.

“Beef,” the commander offered. “Yesterday it was cabbage and beet. Would you like to see the stalls?” The man nodded, scribbled something on his clipboard and followed the commander out. Alexander watched him walk through the stable as if it was a museum, taking pictures of the stablehands in their buttoned-up jackets, their skin shiny from the showers, their breath smelling of meat. The Red Cross man smiled at something the commander said, shook his hand and followed him into the yard. The kapo waited till they were gone, then carried away the soup.

Ask about the places left off the itinerary
, Alexander wanted to shout.
Go to Birkenau and ask to see the crematoria. Ask about the gas.
But he kept his mouth shut. The guards had pulled out their guns again.

When the commander returned to the yard later that afternoon, Alexander was waiting for him, his fingers frozen around the lead rope. He handed the commander the reins and watched him take Midnight through the gate, the fog closing in on them as they sped up to a gallop.

“It should’ve been me on his back,” Alexander said through gritted teeth, imagining the commander closing in on a jump and letting his weight sink to his heels as he tilted forwards and slid his gloved hands up Midnight’s neck.
It should have been me taking him over that first jump.
Alexander unfurled his fists and slunk back to the stable.

The hours dragged by. Alexander polished the tack, oiled the hinges on the door, mucked out the stall, prepared Midnight’s feed and returned to the yard. Out there in the leafless winter there was nothing to distract him from his gnawing belly, nothing to warm him but his memories. He shovelled a handful of snow into his mouth and gave in to them.

It was the previous winter. Alexander was thirteen and Lili was nine. A lifetime ago. Lili was in the yard standing next to the snowman he had built, with a carrot in her hand.
It’s for his nose
, she’d said, tossing him the carrot. He’d plunged it into the snowman’s face, above the small black moustache he’d fashioned from an old broom.
He looks like Hitler
, Lili had said, staring up at the snowman’s raisin eyes. Alexander drove the broom handle into Hitler’s side, tilting the arm up in a Nazi salute.
Ladies first
, he’d laughed, snapping a branch from a tree and handing it to Lili. Alexander smiled, remembering how she’d pounced on the snowman. She’d plunged a stick through his guts and another through his eye, yelping with delight. The snowman’s arm broke, his nose fell off, and when his head rolled off and his body crumbled, they’d trampled him to the ground until he was nothing more than a dirty heap of snow.