A Voice Still Heard

The trees seemed to bridge the gap between earth and air; the tall evergreens turned blue at the tips, and silver haze hovered above the skyline. The SS man regarded the haze in boredom. His inferiors wheeled barrowfulls of twisted figures from the gas chambers to the crater-sized pit before him. With each batch his nose wrinkled slightly. “They smell even after their deaths,” he thought, drawing his shoulders back sharply.

He reverted to a game of counting bones invented during his years as a private. The SS man showed no symptoms of anything other than perfect order. His mustache, perfectly trimmed, perched atop his thin lips and made the weaselly jaw seem wider. His cap sat perfectly aligned on his head and completed the beribboned jacket and precisely starched pants.

After fifty or so bones the wind began to blow more fiercely and the SS man heard it whine in the trees; then the wind subsided, but the whine did not. The SS man looked around himself, though he felt certain the wind was still in the trees. The sound came again – a low moan, and the air stood as unnaturally still as the corpses. His eyes drifted over the Polish landscape, almost hoping to see a hungover private or wounded animal.

Movement in the craterfull of bodies caught his eye, and he stared with horror at a chest still breathing. The breasts had shrunk to two pale pink circles on either side of the breastbone; below them the lungs pumped quickly, altering the translucency of the skin with every contraction. Flesh contoured itself to every tendon, ligament and bone in the neck. The SS man could not rip his eyes from the eyes of the body – they were locked with the sky, black in the center and shot blood-red around it. The moan came again, the chest moved rapidly to accommodate the effort – “God…”

The SS man was unable to move. “God” resonated in his mind. He had said it in praise, in fear, in vain, but never with the weight the thin treble voice carried. The chest flickered.

“You’ve betrayed me.”

“No. No, I will not have this!” The lock on the SS man’s jaw had broken, and grabbing a shovel from an abandoned wheelbarrow he was determined to break the chest in two and end this terrifying nonsense. The wood handle shrieked against the SS man’s leather gloves as he aimed the tip of the spade at the breastbone.

“Betrayed us –”

The SS man drew his arm back slowly, his eyes fixed once again on the black and red eyes in the pit, and watched the chest and eyelids flutter violently –

“But I forgive...”

The shovel came down in the dirt, followed by the knees of the SS man. Mud christened the precisely starched pants, the beribboned jacket. Privates flocked to him and formed a circle around his limp form; they assured each other that he’d be fine after a vacation from all the bodies of these Goddamned Jews.