The Worm in Every Heart

“What’s the inscription say, anyway?”

Lev clicks tongue to teeth, backtracking, and lets his moving finger underline the words. “Home to Xawery, Crusader, Martyr . . . could be Martyr-maker, I’m reading it right . . . and Incorrupt. Contemplator for his sins, and ours. Keep him safe and secret, at your own souls’ cost.”

Kotzeleh glances around: Blood in the water, seeping like oil; skittering shadows on every side. She reaches for her knife, instinctively, as one seems to move a bit too fast and spider-like for comfort—but finds it right where she left it, sheathed in the hollow of her back between skin and waistband. Cold weight of metal, familiar like the pulse that hammers in her throat, sharp enough to scratch with every breath.

“Well, he’s out of his box now,” she points out. “Gone walking, I suppose; Taifun-gerat must have woken him up.”

From Chavah, a hoarse whisper: “Kotzeleh, please . . . don’t say that, don’t say such things, please . . . ”

“Why not? You think he can hear us?”

“Oh, Kotzeleh . . . ”

“’Where his blood falls, lilies grow,’” Lev mutters, to himself, meanwhile. “But no, this Latin’s so old—or might be it’s some form I’ve never seen before, Slavic-crossed. Hungarian? Romanian, that’d work too—a Romance language, anyway—”

Chavah bends lower, cries harder, her tears making salty little circles in the sewer-water’s scum; Kotzeleh shoots her a glance, before turning back to the shadows . . . shadows of gaping monk-corpse, of leering ikon-image, of fluttering, watery reflection, all of which suddenly seem somehow larger, and closer. Darker, too.

(As though that were really possible.)

“’Where he lets blood to fall, there lilies grow’—yes, I’m almost sure this time. That could be it.”

“Lev,” she starts, impatient—then stops, listening hard, as he just keeps on mouthing out the words in question, like he hasn’t even heard her. Straining into the darkness above the raspy rise and fall of Chavah’s breath, an incipient wail in every drawn lungful.

“’Where he lets blood.’ Like a barber? Lilies are a holy flower, though, the kind you offer to saints, to the Virgin Mary . . . ”

But: “Lev,” Kotzeleh says again. Her hand moving, so much unasked it feels like someone else’s, to take up its natural position on her knife’s hidden hilt.

“Yes?”

“What do lilies smell like, exactly?”

Lev sniffs the air, frowning. Sniffs again. Frowns deeper.

“Like that,” he replies, eventually.

* * *

Sometimes Kotzeleh wonders, even now, so long after: Who she might have become, instead of what. Some comfortable grandmother, a smiling Bubeh in flowered house-dress and sensible shoes, safely insulated from the past by as many layers of love as she could gather to herself; some elegant matron or spinster teacher in Krakow, in Paris, in New York, in Tel Aviv. Some apple-cheeked old lady, her gold hair faded to grey and her killer’s bones hidden deep beneath wrinkles and varicose veins, beneath fat and frippery, beneath the instinctive (if inaccurate) assumptions of those who’ve never had to spit on the Torah in order to stay alive, to stand by and watch their neighbors lined up against the nearest wall. To clap and cheer as children are loaded onto trains bound for crematoria, or breathe the human tallow-soaked ashes from a burnt-out sewer pipe’s back-blast . . .

What did you do in the War, Madam Mendesh? Oh, not Madam—very well, then. My apologies.

(So: Would that be Miss, instead? Or Missus?)

It must be nice to survive, she supposes—she, who always fancied herself a survivor, even when things were at their utter bleakest. If nothing else.

For Kotzeleh, however, the War goes on and on; there is no truce, no quarter, no V-Day to divide history into “before” and “after.” Nothing but the same damnable darkness to fathom, ever and always, slow and painful as some diver lost far beyond his depth—hallucinations, pressure in the chest, that awful sinking feeling. An upside-down, mapless world full of (fellow) monsters.

For all of which, along with her many other sins, she knows—on some level—that she must surely have God to thank.

* * *

Lilies and blood, Lev’s eyes on hers, Chavah’s weeping. Then all at once, the fallen wall behind them cracks further, issuing five or so Germans in a spew of blackened bricks and melted mortar: Blinking, coughing, bloody like afterbirth. The straggly remains of some back-up platoon caught in the Taifun-gerat‘s indiscriminate sweep, clutching their weapons so close you’d think they were substitutes for the crucifixes Hitler’s already outlawed; a strange faith, but their own. And easier by far to pull the trigger than pray, Kotzeleh supposes, considering the usual outcome of either action—

Suddenly, she’s locking eyes with Lev’s gun-barrel rather than him, its sight drawing a careful bead on her forehead. “Down in the mud, Polack whore,” Lev tells her, utterly matter-of-fact, as she gapes—then adds, to them: “You think I won’t shoot, if I have to? Though I do hate to waste a hostage, especially one this juicy . . . ”

Hidden behind a fresh fall of masonry, Fat Chavah kneels lower still, blinking her seared eyes furiously, hunting ‘round for something—anything—to use as a weapon. While Kotzeleh simply stands there doing her level best to look the kidnapped Christian, shivering shoulders hunched to hide where her hand is bound for, giving them the tearful blue eye through the dirty gilt fall of her hair. Thinking, all the while:

Oh, Rabbi, you idiot. Like the Mayor of Chelm, you’re God’s own fool.