Page 13

Those who believe that we are nothing more than survival machines—the end product of a billion-year evolutionary war—are incorrect. We are less than that since we have added conscious cruelty into the already vicious mix. And we are not the end product.

The Genetic Handbook , by Fiona Bayzelon

Anne

In the rainswept streets of Amberg a virulent hatred ran free, communicated from friend to friend, neighbour to neighbour. In the gutters, water gurgled its way to the drains, trickled through gratings, and was swallowed into a dark underground sea. In the alleys, in the beer houses, across the factory floor, ran a darker muttering. A long-brewed anger had begun to crest. A fire banked across years, fed on lies, devouring the tail of its own prejudice. If it were a volcano, this would be the stage just before the eruption, the time when the ground began to bulge and mound, smoke escaping the cracks, tremors running through the bedrock.

Even in the parlours, the knitting circles, and the creches the talk was of justice, of payback, of it being time. The insult could stand no longer. The list of imagined crimes had grown too long and crossed too many lines. The Jews had to pay. The Jews, and any who stood in the path of the nation’s greatness, any who threatened the purity of their blood, any who challenged the efficiency of the machine into which Herr Hitler was forging the nation.

Anne had not been privy to any of the conversations in which hatred fed off suspicion. She hadn’t seen suspicion devour the newspapers’ lies only to vomit out ten times more, their falsehoods both deeper and more fantastic. She had felt only the edge of the thing, and deduced the existence of the whole, just as a fossil hunter whose diligent chipping has revealed a single bone might know in their heart that the entire monster waits for them, entombed in the stone of the cliff that towers above them.

And yet, in Madame Orlova’s parlour an unexpected strangeness eclipsed the brewing violence outside. If not for their host’s own example of the many forms into which humanity might be cast, Anne would, to her own shame, have come to doubt that either man before her was in fact a man. As they took tea and talked of books, Yute seemed steadily more unusual, his whiteness beyond even that which might be credited to albinism. While Kerrol appeared to grow by the minute, shedding some cloak that had baffled Anne’s eyes. Even the enormity of seven feet in height wouldn’t encompass him. Perhaps eight might just do it. He might even threaten Goliath’s inhuman record and top three yards. Moreover, in the light of Madame Orlova’s old-fashioned oil lamp, his mane seemed closer to that of a lion than a man’s hair. His lips thinned almost to nothing, the planes of his face taking on a more canine shape. His body too threw new shadows, his legs not even jointed in the same way Anne’s were.

Stranger still, as the conversation continued and the tea cooled, Kerrol’s speech became harder and harder to understand, until at last it sounded to Anne’s ear like the growls and rumbles of a large, highly educated dog.

“I’m sorry.” At last Anne had to speak. “What language is it that you’re speaking now, Mr. Kerrol? I can’t follow it at all.”

Yute and Kerrol exchanged a look, the tall man raising a quizzical brow. Kerrol growled out something else, an interrogation of some sort.

“She says she can’t understand you either,” Yute said.

Kerrol nodded.

“Wait,” Anne protested. “How can he understand you but not me?”

“Everyone understands when I talk.” Yute frowned. “The words at least. It’s a talent left over from when I served the library in a more formal capacity.”

“More formal than a librarian?” Anne asked. “What were you? A shelf?”

Yute acknowledged her attempt at a joke with a small smile. “Something like that.”

“Would you be a dear, Anne, and fetch some little cakes from the kitchen?” Madame Orlova tilted her misshapen skull towards Anne. “I feel today is a day for cakes. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?” A sigh lifted her shoulders. “They’re under the china dome on the sideboard, and there’s a silver stand in the high cupboard by the back door.”

Anne got to her feet rather faster than she had intended. Even with the fascinating company, an offer of cake was something to be leapt at. She hurried through the indicated door and found herself in a narrow kitchen lined by cupboards with many small doors and drawers. A smaller window, divided into four little panes, afforded a view of a brick wall, the edge of a roof, and a sky already shading into night. Anne’s grandfather always maintained that whatever the clever Dr. Einstein might have to say about speed and time, the swiftness with which it passed was really more about the quality of the conversation. A good discussion would, he maintained, devour the hours and leave you staring at midnight before you knew it.

She found the cakes quickly enough beneath a flower-patterned dome. Smallish cubes of three-layer sponge with white icing and a pink icing flower on top of that. Finding the silver holder required rather more exploration, and Anne had all manner of questions concerning the odd mechanical devices, curious jars, spice pots, and newspaper-wrapped parcels she uncovered before finding the three-tiered cake stand.

Finally, equipped with a loaded stand, a collection of small plates decorated with poppies, and four little forks, Anne made to return to the others. She paused at the doorway, listening to the conversation.

“—don’t seem overly surprised, Madame Orlova?” Yute’s voice.

“It appears that the whole world is starting to come apart at the seams.” Anne couldn’t see the shrug, but she could sense it in the old woman’s voice. “When the world breaks, should we not expect new things to come through the cracks?”

“Kerrol says that when he spoke with the policeman and the others, they expressed a hatred for difference, the belief that anything which is in their eyes ‘imperfect’ should be destroyed. He feels it is only a matter of time before this society turns on its sick and disabled.”

“For someone who has only just arrived, he sees with a clear eye. Amberg, this whole country, is tinder waiting for the flame. I worry for Anne—”

Anne pushed in, cake stand in hand, feeling guilty for eavesdropping, even though in her experience it was often the only way to truly know what was going on in the world. The people who loved her were, by and large, unwilling to weigh her down with harsh truths, and those who didn’t seemed to feel that lies and insults would do her more harm.

“Have you seen our library yet?” Madame Orlova changed the subject.

“Not yet.” Yute straightened in his chair. “When was it founded?”

“We’ve had the provincial library for well over a hundred years.” Madame Orlova inclined her misshapen head. “Since my grandmother’s childhood. It’s not as grand as some, of course, but I like it.”

Anne offered the cakes around. Only Madame Orlova declined. Kerrol’s looked comically small, almost lost in the expanse of his hand. He studied it with interest, sniffing deeply, then consuming it in a single mouthful. The growl that followed was nearly as unsettling as the length of the tongue that searched his muzzle of a mouth for crumbs.

“Kerrol says your cakes are delicious, Madame,” Yute interpreted, though in truth it had sounded like a combat challenge.

“We should visit this library of yours, Anne, as soon as we’ve finished our tea,” Yute said. “I’m thinking that must be the place that called us here.”

Anne laughed, nervous in case they meant to break in. “It will be shut now, of course. Tomorrow is Thursday. I think it opens to the public at nine.”

Yute’s white eyebrows elevated. “The library…closes?”

“Yes.” Anne didn’t know what else he was expecting.

“Still, we must go there, and I don’t think we can wait. Better to take our chance now before word of our presence circulates.”

“I’ll come with you,” Anne said.

“You won’t. We will escort you back to your home.” Yute didn’t seem the type given to firmness but on this he sounded firm.

Kerrol growled his agreement.

Having finished their tea and cakes, and like visitors to an island of calmness amid the raging storm, they took their leave of Madame Orlova. The old woman pressed something from her knob-knuckled hands into Anne’s palm as they paused at the shop’s front door.

“I can’t take this.” Anne tried to give back the silver charm on its silver chain.

“I insist, child.” Madame Orlova closed her hands. “It’s from the old country, back when we Orlovs wandered from town to town entertaining everyone from serfs to princes. A ward against evil, for evil times.”

Anne saw the futility of refusing, and instead offered her thanks.

It had grown dark outside. Pools of light dotted the high street around infrequent gas lamps, and shadows twitched to the dance of flames.

There were too many people around, crowding the corner by the butcher’s shop, others smoking and talking in front of Fischer’s hardware store. “Follow me.” She let some urgency colour her voice. “Don’t run. Don’t look at anything.”

She angled across the street, threading between the lamps’ spheres of influence, aiming at the dark alley between the shoe shop and the milliner’s. Kerrol’s great height would be hard to miss, but perhaps she and Yute looked like children beside him, and perhaps all people would glimpse in the gloom was a father with his youngsters.

An exclamation of surprise followed them into the alley but no sounds of running feet came after it.

“Quickly now.” Anne sped up. She led Yute and Kerrol by a much longer route, through unlit streets, squelching down alleys that were scarcely more than slots where buildings failed to quite reach each other. They passed people in twos and threes, groups of men mostly but not just younger ones. Even in trios though, none of them seemed foolish enough to take exception to a giant looming out of the thickening night.

By this method, combined with a degree of luck, Anne led her two guardians back to the street their journey around Amberg seemed to have begun in. The pair’s mysterious appearance at the back of Anne’s grandfather’s bookshop still troubled Anne, and she resolved to question Yute about it before letting them take their leave of her. Had they broken in through the back door? It seemed to be the only possibility.

“Nearly there.” Anne glanced back at the others.

Kerrol growled and Yute translated, “It seems you have company.”

Squinting down the unlit street with the last streetlamp to her rear Anne could barely make out the Hoffman sign, but now that Kerrol mentioned it, the clump of shadows beneath the sign could very well be a tight knot of people gathered at the door.

Even as she slowed to a halt, a match struck ahead of them, the glow momentarily illuminating a bowed head, someone else’s arm, a third person’s coat. And then, with almost surreal slowness, instead of dying away, the flame wrapped itself around something the size of a fist. A torch like the ones the soldiers carried in the night parade. In the pool of its glow maybe nine or ten men…no, at least one of them was a woman. A jeer went up, all of them focused on something beyond the bookshop’s windows.

“Grandfather!” Anne started forward, terrified, but not for herself. “They must have seen my grandfather!”

A huge hand closed over her shoulder, arresting her progress with a low accompanying growl. Anne opened her mouth in protest but the blast that followed was nothing of hers. The sound of falling glass filled the aftermath, tumbling into the street from the window beside the one broken the week before.

“Grandfather! They’ve shot him!” She fought to free herself, and failed.

“No,” Yute said. “That came from inside.”

And as he spoke, one of the men outside staggered backwards and fell into the road.