Deadly Pedigree

9



Max Corban wept over the scrapbook, as he had done so often.

Darkness still cloaked the morning outside. Lately, sleep had become more difficult for him. The aches and pains of his damaged life tormented him. But worse: each night he awoke terrified, exhausted, lost. The body could be dealt with; but the mind…he had seen many people go mad in the concentration camps; they were the lucky ones, remaining unaware of the inevitable, ultimate horrors to come. He knew what his mental turmoil meant. It was how the final madness starts.

He had put water on to boil, in the kitchen of his little house. His life now was no more than a teaspoon of instant coffee, sere and bitter. Only another scalding inundation could offer peace, dissolution into a puff of smoke, the peace of death.

It was their fault fifty years ago. Her fault today. No difference.

The scrapbook on his kitchen table held the story of his return from the grave. Liberating soldiers had snapped photos of the stick figures that had once been human beings. Corban moved his fingers over the image of one such figure in a pitiful crowd, as if feeling the bones beneath the stretched skin. It was he himself. Even now, when he looked in the mirror, that is what he saw staring blankly back at him, below the flesh.

He turned pages. There were happier pictures of the years after the war. Of other survivors, new friends, and his future wife; of relief workers and Allied soldiers who had taken a fancy to him; of simple pleasures like card games, picnics, reading…that, after the war, had been so precious to him.

Further on, the scrapbook documented his and his wife’s journey to America, from the first applications for emigration, to the final papers of their naturalization. He read again, for the thousandth time, some of the letters from the people who had helped him. He had kept in contact with a few of them for many years; now, most were gone. And one of them, on his recent death, had finally sent what Max most needed–a weapon of information.

It had been thirty-five years since the sad day he opened the letter on the next yellowed scrapbook page. His friends, the letter informed him, Maurice and Erna Balazar, had been murdered. Thirteen years after the war, they were murdered in their own hometown in Germany, in an act of local terrorism, leaving an orphaned child.

The four of them–Corban and Mignon, Maurice and Erna–had been through a lot together, in those many months in the displaced-persons camps. That is where they had met and nursed each other back to health.

Corban shook his head. The war had changed nothing. Would they always win?

After the war, the Balazars eventually decided to go to New Orleans. They asked relatives there for sponsorship; but difficulties arose. The Corbans, after leaving Europe, had tried New Jersey first as a residence; they had not hit it off with his distant relatives there. Having caught some of Maurice’s enthusiasm for New Orleans, Corban and Mignon wanted a taste of the exotic city themselves. They made it their home.

For many years, Corban did not know exactly what went wrong for the Balazars, even though his friends in the relief agencies had solicited his help after the deaths in 1958 and had sent him copies of some documents relating to the lives and families of Maurice and Erna. But the name of the New Orleans relatives went unmentioned; nor had he any recollection that the Balazars had told him, back in the DP camps or in the few letters from them that very soon trickled to a stop. Maybe these relatives had died or moved away from New Orleans in the intervening years; he presumed the agencies were doing the best they could.

In 1958 the Corbans knew only that there was an orphaned child, and that the agencies needed their help in trying to place her with other American cousins. They knew of no others, but Corban and his wife immediately volunteered to adopt the girl. Suddenly, however, their communication with their friends in the agencies ceased…until several months ago.

He had memorialized it all in his scrapbook. And the scrapbook must be saved. It was his mission. Like Job, he had been chosen to do God’s bidding. There were no coincidences; his suffering now had meaning. God had brought him here, He had thrown him back into the clutches of the beast. The beast that had killed a people, the beast that had killed his family and friends.

The beast was hungry again, hunting, on the move. He knew he did not have much time.

The water boiled, but Corban did not notice it.

He took a large tan envelope from the back of the scrapbook, dumped the contents on the table, and tore page after page from the book, until there were more than two dozen before him. He worked them into the envelope; pieces of the foxed pages crumbled like brittle bones to the floor.

Soon it would be light. He made his way through his neat house, located tape to seal the envelope, and some stray stamps he did not bother to add up. He licked and stuck them onto the thick package, over the older stamps. In the Yellow Pages, he found Nick’s name and address and hurriedly wrote the words and numbers with a pen that was running out of ink.

Corban opened his front door. Outside, it was quiet; nothing moved on the fog-blurred street. He wore pajamas, and though the night was warm, he shivered as he scurried the few feet to the mailbox.



In the last moments of darkness before daylight, Corban stood in the middle of his kitchen, listening. He had heard the goose-steps of doom before; he heard them now. Again the insatiable beast galloped toward him.

He turned slowly to face the evil that was rumbling through the utility room, even now at the kitchen door. Vividly he remembered how, in the camps, such moments of horror took mere seconds, but stretched into infinity as his lagging mind struggled to process them.

The kitchen door flew open, kicked by a strong foot.

Like a match in a tornado, Corban rose from the floor in the grip of the intruders.

He could not be sure how many there were–two, as there had been a few days before, a hundred, a million?…He felt himself rapidly, roughly carried down the hall, into his bedroom. Then there was utter darkness, stifling closeness. He could not breathe.

Yet he was not afraid.

Come then, death. His mind formed the words, but his mouth could not speak them. I am ready. I have won.





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