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

"No."
"What kind of name is that? Originally."
"French."
"Sounds Polish."
He had already turned away, barking orders. Rinaldi was gesturing at me. We entered a building that had served as offices for the SS detachment. "This room," asked Rinaldi, "or that one?" I chose the first one, which had a little waiting room furnished with three or four chairs. Blackstock had disappeared, off somewhere taking photographs. Rinaldi had found a piece of cardboard and was fixing it to the door. On it he wrote, going over the letters several times to thicken them:
WAR CRIMES.

I stood there, overwhelmed by the stench and the strange and vibrant silence of Mauthausen, which was still populated by thousands and thousands of survivors. I felt such shame and
despair that, thirty-five years later, I can still relive it, experience again the nausea and the humiliation.
I had to get out, at one point. I can see myself walking through the dense crowd, which hardly opened in front of me. I went through one barracks, then another, and in the last one the medical teams had not yet arrived. There, a semidarkness reigned, yellowed here and there by the dusty spring sun. There were two-day-old corpses lying next to those who were still alive, three or four in each bunk. Skeletal shapes, heaps of old rags and bones, moved and crawled as I went by. The pestilence increased. I was brushed against, I was grabbed. I panicked and ran. I found myself outside, in the sunlight, shaken with spasms of nausea. I reached a narrow space between two buildings. I was all alone, or I thought I was. I vomited, and only then, in the same way you feel a burn, did I feel eyes staring at me.
The grave was a few feet away. It measured only six by six feet. The earth that had been removed was neatly piled in a triangular hill, in which a shovel was planted. A few handfuls of dirt had been carelessly thrown into the grave, but the layer of quicklime placed there before had already corroded the mounds . . . as well as the naked bodies of the men they had tried to bury hastily. One could guess what had happened: the eight or ten naked bodies thrown into the ditch, pushed down with a gun butt or a heel to form an even surface. Then the quicklime, then the earth. But the dead kept rising to the surface. I could see hands, abdomens, penises, mouths, and nostrils charred and eaten away by the calcium oxide, the bones sometimes exposed and already rotted.
And right in the middle of the nightmarish tangle, I saw a face, frightfully drawn, covered with black spots of dried blood, in which a pair of light eyes shone with amazing sharpness. .
They followed my every movement as I drew away from the wall against which I'd been leaning. And I remember thinking of the steadiness of a stare frozen by death. I stepped closer to the grave. And a voice rose, in slightly accented French reciting Verlaine.
"Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, Ia vie est lр, simple et tranquile . . (My God, my God, life is there, simple and tranquil . .
What happened then was out of a dream.
"Cette paisible rumeur-ld vient de la yule (That peaceful murmur comes from the town . . .) The verses came automaticafly to my lips, and it seemed I spoke them.
I know only that I went up to the grave. I crouched at the edge of it, put out my arm, and my fingers touched the large bony hand of the seventeen-year-old boy we would later call "The King."

1

The King said later that he opened his eyes and saw a soldier appear. He didn't recognize the uniform, which wasn't that of the SS, or the Volkssturm. It didn't resemble those of the Rumanian, Italian, or French contingents that had fought alongside the Wehrmacht in the last few years. And it certainly wasn't a Russian. He had seen Russians, either prisoners or shot by Obersturmbannfdhrer Hochreiner, always looking to improve his personal score of men, women, or children shot in the back of the head. On May 4, 1945, the Obersturmbannfllhrer was up to two hundred and eighty-three shot in the head, and an apparent sadness had shown on his face when he had announced to Reb Klimrod that he, Reb, would be his two hundred and eighty-fourth recorded victim, whatever regret that might cause either of them after having lived together, so tenderly, for the last twenty months.
The King said he had actually regained consciousness a few moments before he saw the soldier arrive. He doesn't know how long before. It was a slow, progressive awakening, marked at first by the extraordinary discovery that he was still alive. Then followed, in successive steps toward full consciousness, first, the last precise moment recorded by his memory, that of the Obersturmbannflihrer kissing him one last time full on the mouth before placing the barrel of the Luger against his neck, then the still-unclear revelation that he was buried alive, his face almost free, covered only by a thin layer of earth. Then only, did he feel the pain: at the back of his head, but that was a dull pain, and in several places on his shoulders, his forearms, and his abdomen, everywhere the quicklime had bit. He realized he couldn't move at all, except for his head and his left hand. The rest of his body was caught in the tangle of naked
corpses. Lying right across him, and having greatly protected him, was Zaccharius, the fourteen-year-old Lithuanian whom the Obersturmbannftihrer had taken from the Grossrosen camp to join his harem of boys.
He moved his neck. Bits of earth and Zaccharius's arm slipped, just enough for him to see the sun. He didn't hear the soldier approach. Then he saw him, with his back turned and retching. His thinking was not clear enough yet to see a connection between this man in a foreign uniform, retching, and the sudden desertion, the previous day, if it was the previous day, of the Mauthausen camp by the Obersturmbannfbhrer and his special team. It did not occur to him that the soldier might be an American. He simply sensed that the newcomer belonged to a foreign world. And for this reason only, he thought it best not to speak German. He chose, among the other languages he knew, French. He spoke, and the man answered-in fact, continued the recitation of the poem Reb had begun automatically, and it happened as if it were a prearranged signal, a key phrase to be exchanged between two men who had never seen one another until that moment, but were fated to meet. The man came close to the grave, knelt down, put out his hand, and touched Reb's left hand. He said something incomprehensible, then, in French: "Are you hurt?"
"Yes," said Reb.
He could see the soldier's face clearly now. The man was very young, blond, with wide-open blue eyes. Silver bars shone on his collar. He didn't seem to be carrying a weapon. He asked: "Are you French?"
"Austrian," said Reb.
The man was pulling him now, but to no avail. The mixed layer of earth and lime loosened a bit more, revealing Zaccharius's body, the buttocks and back entirely eaten away.
"Oh, God" exclaimed the man, beginning to retch again.
Reb's huge gray eyes followed his every move.
"And you, what is your nationality?" Reb asked.
"American," answered the young soldier.
His heaving had subsided. He managed to stand and meet the gaze of the amazing gray eyes.
"There are perhaps more survivors besides you .
"I don't think so," said Reb. "They shot each of us in the back of the head."
His speech was extraordinarily slow and calm. He moved his left hand. "You will not be able to get me out alone," he said. "I am not lying flat. Actually, they buried me almost standing. Is there anyone else with you?"
"The United States Army," replied Settiniaz, without any sense of the absurdity of his answer and without the slightest intention of being humorous. He was bewildered and almost frightened by the man's calm. And, incredible as it seemed, he thought tie detected a spark of gaiety in the light eyes.
"In that case, you might be able to get some help. What is your name?"
"Settiniaz. David Settiniaz. My father was French."
Silence. The lieutenant hesitated.
"Go," ordered Reb Klimrod, with the same hallucinatory softness. "Hurry, please. I am finding it hard to breathe. Thank you for coming. I will not forget."
The gray eyes had an odd gleam.

2

David Settiniaz returned with Blackstock, a doctor, and two infantrymen. Blackstock photographed the grave as it was when they discovered it. These photographs were never published, or even put in any file. But they were purchased, thirteen years later, by the King, from Roy Blackstock and his wife. Blackstock is of the opinion that the boy survived not just because of a stupefying set of circumstances. The position of Klimrod's body, as they removed him, showed that he had begun a ferocious climb toward the surface as he was being buried. He had cleared a way through the corpses of his eight companions, the task made all the more difficult by the fact that he had been among the first thrown into the ditch and the top of it had been stamped down by SS boots before being covered with quicklime, then earth.
The grave contained nine bodies, all of young boys, ranging in age from twelve to seventeen, Reb Klimrod being the oldest and the only one to survive.
He was unconscious again by the time they finally got him out of the ditch. Settiniaz was astounded by the boy's height, which he estimated at six feet, and by his weight, about one hundred pounds.
He was twice wrong. On May 5, 1945, Reb Klimrod, four months away from his seventeenth birthday, measured six feet one and a half inches, and weighed eighty-six pounds.
He had been shot once in the back of the head, behind the left ear. The bullet had slightly grazed the lower lobe, had split the base of the occipital, and plowed the neck muscles above the nape, skimming the vertebra. In effect, the other wounds were more serious and probably more painful. Two more bullets were removed, one from the boy's right thigh, the other