A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar Page B

hoping to catch the fat copper’s shoe, but I missed.
‘You’re all that, Wolf,’ Morhaim said. ‘But I don’t think you killed Edith Griesser. And while I would have no problem having you thrown in jail for the rest of your unnatural life, it occurs to me that, if you are not the killer, the real killer will still be out there, and that he may well kill again. And I do not want that on my conscience.’
‘How admirable,’ I said. ‘For a Jew.’
Keech grunted above me and slapped me on the side of the head, hard. I blinked back tears of rage. Morhaim looked at me with those sad brown eyes.
‘I will ask you one last time,’ he said. ‘Where were you last night?’
I hung loosely from Keech’s enormous hand. Stared into the unsettling brown eyes of Inspector Morhaim. Lowered mine.
And told him.

4
     
    In the dream he was standing on a high podium in a town square in Nuremberg. It was a beautiful day and the sky was bright and blue and before him, below him, were thousands of people, men and women and children, their faces raised to him, their lips slightly open, adoration in their eyes. He spoke, and it was like an angel speaking down from Heaven, and the festivities below ceased, little boys with yellow and red balloons and women in their Sunday dresses and good German men who worked hard and went to church and paid their taxes, and the sausage sellers and the candyfloss sellers and the beer sellers and the SA men in their uniforms like a guard of honour and all for him. He spoke, with passion and intensity, raising his fist in the air, slamming it on the stand, shouting, spittle coming out of his mouth, but easing them in, at first, then rising, rising, rising until they were all a-frenzy – shaking, some of them were. He pictured the women wet under their dresses; it was said the power of his voice alone could bring them to a shuddering climax. The men with their fists raised, ready to follow him, the boys and girls watching wide-eyed as history was made. Higher and higher until women fainted and men grew berserk, ready to march now and fight and fulfil his orders, for it was the future he promised them: a glorious one.
    Higher and then lower and gently until they rose blinking as if they had been sleeping and were now awake and looking all about them in wonder and awe, at a world remade anew. They had called him the Drummer, then: and it was said that all of Germany marched to his tune.
     
    *    *    *
     
    In another time and place Shomer rises blinking. Shomer rises energised and refreshed from the bunk he shares with nine other men and he makes the bed exactly to specification and puts his feet into the wooden clogs with illicit paper padding them and the sores on his feet rubbing and pussing. With the others he shuffles to roll-call, with the others he stands in rows as they wait, and Yenkl stands beside him, puffing on his pipe.
    They wait for two hours in the cold before the SS officer arrives to take their numbers and tally the figures of the living and the dead. Shomer’s
kommando
once again marches to the same frozen piece of ground to continue the digging of the graves. The routine does not vary, and the graves do not end. At last Shomer is allowed to go to the latrines and Mischek, the scheissbegleiter – that is, the toilet companion or timekeeper – comes with. The latrines are cesspits divided into partitions for the Jews and the non-Jews: the common criminals and the politicals and the prisoners of war. Shomer goes into the Jews’ latrine and Mischek, the dirty little Russian Jew, keeps time.
    ‘Have you read my latest review?’ Shomer says to Yenkl, sitting beside him on the shared latrine and opening up the latest broadsheet from Berlin. He lets out a loud fart and laughs. ‘I must stop eating such heavy meals,’ he says, patting his stomach.
    ‘Soup!’ Yenkl says. ‘What is more wholesome than soup, with a slice of bread, to keep a man’s spirit up?’
    Shomer’s