"Paul-Loup Sulitzer - The Green King" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sulitzer Paul Loup)

Epke smiled at Reb. "August 1941. Around the twentieth." He smiled again. "And then you can tell me all about this letter, kid."
Lothar was kneeling in front of one of six iron trunks. He opened it. Inside, negatives and prints were meticulously arranged. His fingers ran over the aligned labels. Reb kept his head down. The silence continued.
"August 21, 1941," said Lothar.
There was a noise of riffled paper.
"Klimrod?"
A rough hand seized Reb by the face and forced him to look up. But he persisted in keeping his eyes closed, his features horribly tensed, this time without pretense:
"Open your eyes, kid. Isn't this why you went to Reichenau, why you came from Vienna to Salzburg?"
Reb put out his hand, took the photographs. There were three of them, showing the whole body, taken through a spy hole.
He saw his father, naked, with his atrophied legs, crawling on the floor, trying to scratch the cement with his nails. The photographs must have been taken at fifteen- or twenty-second intervals. They showed the progression of asphyxiation. In the last one, in spite of the black-and-white print, one could clearly make out the blood running from the mouth and the piece of tongue that the tortured man had ripped out himself.
The hand that was holding Reb let go. Reb fell to his knees, his chin against his chest. He turned slowly and rested his cheek against the cool stone wall.
"Burn this fucking stuff," said Epke.
The two other men, the false ambulance men, began pouring gasoline on the trunks after shooting off the padlocks.
"So, my dear Lothar," said Epke, very softly, "we wanted to start our own personal collection?"
The shot came almost immediately, hitting Lothar right in the mouth. The impact from the nine-millimeter fired point-blank threw the photographer backward. He fell on one of the trunks the men had set on fire.
"Let him burn with it," said Epke. "Now, your turn, kid. Why don't you tell me all about this letter?"
He raised the barrel of his Luger and pressed it between Reb's eyes. That gesture probably cost him his life. Through the pane of the little window, the MPs misunderstood its meaning. They opened fire, with a machine gun. At least two blasts ripped through Epke, just when the yellow and blue flames of the gasoline vividly lit up the room. He collapsed on Reb, which explains, notwithstanding the hypothetical good aim of the marksman, the fact that Reb was not hurt except for a scratch on his right shoulder.
As for the other two men, one tried to escape and was shot down on the threshold of the door with the chimes. The other one fought back, after he had thrown against the window the can of gasoline he was holding, which immediately caught fire. Hidden by the thick smoke coming from the smouldering trunks, he managed to hold off, by himself and for several minutes, the arrival of the policemen.
For nothing. He reappeared in the form of a living torch, and was mercifully finished off.
Reb was dragged outside, roughly at first, but was shown a little more consideration after the intervention of a French officer. He was covered with blood, although the blood was not his. Questioned by the Frenchman and his Austrian interpreter, he gave only vague, meaningless answers, staring at them with his large gray hallucinatory eyes.
When he had gone to the Salzburg Military Police to request some help (the step that led to the phone call received by Settiniaz), he had pretended to be acting on the orders of Captain Tarras, in Linz, and spoke of war criminals whose traces he had uncovered. The fact that he spoke to a Frenchman was not just luck; at that time, of the three Western powers, the French were by far the most ardent pursuers of high-ranking members of the Third Reich.
Tarras arrived in Salzburg live hours after the shooting, having decided to cover up Settiniaz's lie, at the cost of a great
discussion with Captain O'Meara, who was in charge of the OSS section in Linz. He handled the situation with his usual brilliant sarcasm. Besides, the circumstances lent themselves well: an investigation of Karl-Heinz Lothar's home revealed that the photographer, who had no woman in his house, had been taken away early in the morning by three unknown men, who had, at the same time, ransacked the house-undoubtedly looking for the contents of the trunks, which were found charred.
"Why are you complaining?" Tarras asked the military and civil authorities of Salzburg. "The situation is very clear. This Lothar had accumulated documents coveted by our dear Nazis, if only to destroy them. Which they did, quite adequately, I must say, executing Lothar for even further security. What could be simpler? Even policemen, even Military Policemen, by God, should be able to understand this. As for my young agent, he did indeed overstep the investigative orders I gave him. But you must understand his situation: his mother and sisters died in a camp in Poland and he is himself a most fortunate survivor. His zeal is understandable. And he is presently in a state of shock-that's quite obvious. Leave hun alone, please
He brought Reb Klimrod back to Linz, had him hospitalized, and, in truth, also tried his hand at questioning him. But the boy remained prostrate, withdrawn into a now total silence. His physical state was disquieting; he was at the extreme end of his resistance, and, worse yet, the wild fire in his eyes, which had struck both Tarras and Settiniaz, had disappeared. In a delayed action, he seemed to have been affected by the camp syndrome suffered by a majority of the survivors. After the first few hours or the first few days, they were suddenly overwhelmed by the senselessness of a life thus rescued and fell into apathetic depression.
David Settiniaz also remembers going to Reb's bedside on two or three occasions after Salzburg, surprised by the interest he took in the boy. Reb still refused to speak. About his family, about his father, about the men who had almost killed him. It was as if he knew nothing. Nor did he speak of Erich Steyr or of the vengeance ripening in him.

8

Captain Eliezer Barazini (he held the rank from the British, with whom he had fought as a Commando in Libya), had come to Austria during the last days of May 1945. His mission was clear and simple: to recruit and organize, secretly, the transport to Palestine of former camp survivors, with a marked preference for young men and women, very young, who would be ready to use, in combat, the potentialities forged in the fire of the crematoriums. He was a small, thin man, extremely polite, born in Palestine.
He saw Reb Klimrod for the first time on July 5, 1945, and, in truth, didn't pay much attention to him. The surname Klimrod was not a Jewish one, and the boy, recently arrived from Salzburg, was in such a poor physical and psychological state that Barazini would, anyway, have put off for weeks, or months, the very idea of emigrating, especially clandestinely.
The representative of the Jewish Brigade had two other candidates in mind that day, one of whom was in a neighboring room. The other, whose name was, coincidentally, Reb, was Rob Yoыl Bainish, a Polish Jew who had reached Mauthausen at the end of the winter of 1944-45. He had been part of a convoy of three thousand prisoners brought in February from Buchenwald to this camp in north Austria (a convoy that included Simon Wiesenthal and a Radziwill prince). Only a thousand arrived alive. In 1945, he was nineteen years old.
He was in the bed to the right of Reb Klimrod. He and Barazini spoke for a long time, in Yiddish.
Two days before the tanks of the U.S. Seventh Army reached Mauthausen, an SS man had broken Bainish's hip and his thigh with the butt of a rifle, and he had been taken to Room A, in Barracks Six, the "death barracks."
Barazini has no recollection of the sick boy lying right next to them, other than the fact that nothing he said to Bainish seemed to interest the stranger. Besides, even though he spoke fluent Hebrew and English, Barazini had enough trouble with Yiddish for it to occupy all his attention.
Bainish immediately agreed to the proposal made to him, with the understanding that he would leave as soon as his physical state would permit it.
Barazini announced that he would return in two weeks.
He did.

"I would like to speak with you."
The words had been in Hebrew. Barazini turned and at first didn't see anyone. The hallway of the hospital seemed deserted. Then he saw the long, thin figure huddled in the corner by a pillar, near the door he had just come through. The face didn't look familiar. The eyes, on the other hand, struck him by their extraordinary intensity.
"Who are you?"
"Reb Michael Klimrod. I am in the bed next to Yoыl Bainish."
His Hebrew was absolutely pure but he spoke slowly, with an almost untraceable accent, like the French have. And he hesitated on certain words, in the manner of someone using an almost forgotten language. He must have seen the question in Barazini's eyes, for he added: "My mother was Jewish. Hannah Itzkowitch, from Lvov. She was at Beizec, as were my sisters. My father taught me French, she taught me Hebrew and Yiddish. I also speak Italian and a little Spanish. And I'm learning English."
He moved, very slowly, and his large thin hand appeared from behind his back, holding Whitman's Leaves of Grass. But his eyes hadn't moved and remained locked with those of the Palestinian, with a rather annoying steadiness.
Somewhat disconcerted, the first question that came to Barazini's mind was: "How old are you?"
"I will be seventeen in September. The eighteenth."
Barazini had a feeling at that moment that he couldn't describe.
"And what do you want from me?"
"I would like to leave with Bainish, and the others, if there are any."
Klimrod's youth didn't trouble Barazini. Seventeen was, for many of the fighters of Eretz Israel-the land of Israel-almost old, at least it was in the clandestine groups, Irgun and Stern. His discomfort was caused by something else. For a few seconds, he envisioned a British infiltration attempt-this had already happened-to hinder the massive exodus the London politicians feared.