This time Isaac thought he might actually cough up a lung. The hacking, wracking cough that had plagued him for almost two months had finally reached the stage where he could no longer go out to work. That was bad. Very bad. As long as he could work, the guards would not take him away to… where exactly he was not sure, but no one who was sick had ever come back from such an escorted trip. That argued against any kind of hospital or other facility that could produce a cure. He had been at the top of his class in arguing Talmud, but there was law behind the Talmud, and no law that he could understand governed this place, unless perhaps it was the law of the jungle.
The striped clothing that constituted a kind of uniform for the prisoners had been snug on his body when first he had received it. Now the trousers hung from his prominent hipbones and threatened to drop floorward if he moved the wrong way. He had not been conscious of losing weight, but how could he have done otherwise? Between what passed for food in what was laughingly called a camp, as if they were there for recreation and enjoyment, and the toll taken by his illness, the flesh had melted from him like wax from a slow-burning candle.
Not much longer to burn, Isaac thought ruefully. With effort that taxed his little remaining strength, he hauled himself from his bed. At least he had the lower bunk. Otherwise it would likely have been a one-way trip. He dragged one foot after the other over to the bucket that served as sanitary facilities for any non-workers remaining in the ramshackle barracks. It would, in the time that constituted the long run for him, be worth the effort. If he had committed the pardonable sin and let go of his bladder in the bed, he would have had to lie in his own waste. And the next occupant would have had to tolerate the smell that sank into the hard surface. He took an odd kind of pride in retaining his absurd sense of courtesy even in the heart of the nightmare.
Isaac's shuffling steps on the way back to his bunk nearly drowned out the low moan. He stopped short to listen. There it was again, coming from behind him. Who could it be? No one else was supposed to be there, though this morning the guards had spent more time than usual on that side of the room. Was he about to find out why?
The face on the ratty pillow was a stranger's. The eyes that looked up as if expecting abuse were blue and slightly fever-glazed. Remarkably clean teeth bit into lower lip as if to hold back another moan. Small dots and streaks of blood stained the front of the inevitable striped shirt. Who was this newcomer, and how had he come to be there? And in a barracks that held adult men? Isaac was barely twenty himself, but this boy, this child… Was he even bar mitzvah age? Pain and fatigue made him look appallingly young.
"Hello?" the older man said tentatively. "I'm Isaac. Isaac Goldberg." His breath caught in his chest, and he swallowed hard to suppress the coughing that threatened to break out.
"Erik." The youngster's voice was barely above a whisper. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Erik Lehnsherr." He winced as the gentle rise and fall of his abdomen shifted the fabric that covered it. A new streak of blood soaked through and spread out like the legs of a spider.
Isaac frowned. Were there open wounds beneath the shirt? They would need to be tended, and soon. The filthy conditions in the camp provided an ideal breeding ground for infection. If untreated, gangrene would be the inevitable result, and even compared to the other options, that would be an unpleasant way to die. He reached out to grasp the loose fabric. "May I?" A curt nod was the only response.
After two years of camp life, Isaac would have thought himself unshockable. He would have been wrong. The wounds that were bleeding were so nearly parallel that they must have been executed by a careful hand with deliberate thought behind it. They ran the width of the boy's abdomen between navel and ribcage. And they were just the most recent signs of abuse. Other cuts, whose differences of width and depth showed that they had been made by a variety of blades, were scattered around the pale skin of chest and abdomen, always in parallel groupings. None of them were deep enough to disable. Clearly they were calculated to cause maximum pain, and nothing more.
Blue eyes stared from an impassive face. As Isaac's brown gaze met the pale one, the youngster's lips twitched in a humorless smile.
The older man opened his mouth to ask who had inflicted such deliberate torment and why, and then closed it again, realizing that the answers did not really matter. The people in charge did as they chose with the prisoners. They did not need a reason. "Let's see if we can get that cleaned up," he offered instead.
The pitcher of lukewarm water was intended to last him all day. I'll be thirsty long before nightfall, he thought, pouring small streams of water slowly, carefully over the open wounds. The boy, Erik, hissed briefly with pain and then forced himself to silence, watching as his host used the least soiled sections of his shirt to wipe away the worst of the blood and grime.
It was a slow and tedious process. At the end of it, Isaac was overcome by the fit of coughing that had threatened throughout most of the cleansing. He raised damp fabric to his mouth to muffle the worst of the sound, and held it there while his chest heaved and fluid gurgled and rose in his throat. Attracting the attention of the guards who patrolled at regular intervals would not be good for either of them. When he moved the shirt away, a bright fresh blotch of blood stained it. He touched questing fingertips to the moisture beside his mouth, and they came away crimson. His shoulders rose in the traditional Jewish shrug, as if apologizing for his own affliction.
"You might just be worse off than I am." The words were both grudging and wry. Erik's head tilted forward, and he looked down awkwardly at his own body. "Maybe not." His head fell back onto the hard surface of the bed. "Ow." He grinned, confirming that the deliberate acknowledgement of the minor pain was intended to be humorous.
Isaac grinned back. "Ow? Would you like me to –" The end of the thought was lost in the coughing that took him once more. He almost choked on his own fluids in the effort to silence himself at the sound of guard boots crossing the floor. He sidled away and prayed that he would not be noticed.
"You! Come with me. Herr Doktor Schmidt wants you in the infirmary." The voice that barked out the order was far louder than necessary for the confined space.
Me? Isaac thought. Oh. No. Erik was the target of the words.
The youngster winced as he pulled his shirt down over the still-oozing wounds. "Why?" The question was barely more than an exhaled breath.
"Beats me." The guard's expression made it abundantly clear that one Jew was much like another to him. He paused to scowl discouragingly at Isaac, who stopped himself short on his way to help Erik to his feet. "Maybe he doesn't want you dying on him until he decides the time is right," the uniformed man continued, his voice bright and cheery.
How long did someone have to work in a hellhole like this before he became so desensitized to the horror that he could joke about there being a right time for another human being to die? Again Isaac realized that he was not yet past being shocked.
He watched his erstwhile patient's narrow back until it disappeared from sight. I hope he'll be all right, he thought, knowing full well that one way or another, Erik would not. Then he staggered back to his bunk and collapsed on the hard surface. He curled himself around the ache in his chest and prayed that either his breathing would clear or it would cease. In that moment he was not entirely sure which he would prefer.