Children of the Dusk by Janet Berliner, George Guthridge Page B

against the tent post holding up the front canopy. And all the while, his ears were tuned to the voices in the medical tent.
    "It's not my forgiveness you really want, Erich," Miriam said.
    "Solomon's?"
    "Your own."
    "Would Solomon follow your lead--if you could find it in your heart to forgive me?"
    The cold muzzle of a rifle touched the nape of Solomon's neck. "Move, or I'll kill you."
    "Would you want him to forgive? Would you debase yourself so much, Erich Alois?" Miriam said. "It would surely be debasement in your view, would it not?"
    Solomon stood with hands lifted, the medallion clenched in his palm, as the guard walked in a semi-circle, faced Sol, and peered into the HQ tent.
    "The Herr Oberst isn't here," the guard announced, eyes narrowing with suspicion. "Not the radio operator, either. No one ." He moved around Sol with the cautious wrath of a cur sniffing a rival. "Just what did you think you could get away with here, Jew?"
    He jammed the barrel into Sol's gut. Sol doubled over in pain but managed to keep the medal concealed.
    "Get back to your sty! Sturmbannführer Hempel will hear about this!"
    "The Oberst is next--"
    "Silence!" The guard swung the rifle butt-first, missing Sol's forehead by a centimeter.
    Sol staggered toward the sleeping area. He hesitated as he entered the gate, allowing the guard time to kick him because a boot was better than a bullet, and crumpled, groaning, onto the matted grass. As he lay with his face in the sod, trying to wheeze air into his lungs and drive out the fear and humiliation, he wondered if he should get word to Erich about the incident. The colonel's orders had been explicit: no beating or berating of prisoners unless they deserved it. The problem was that Sol could not say anything without revealing that he'd overheard the conversation in the medical tent, and Erich was not beyond killing him for being privy to his weakness.
    The pain subsided and the guard drifted into shadows to smoke a cigarette. Sol crawled over to the edge of the fence. He felt the paralytic fear instilled in him in Sachsenhausen. The only difference was that here the unfinished construction made in-compound movement relatively easy.
    Then a knee bore down against Sol's back and a guard gripped his hair, forcing up his head. Grinning, the guard slapped the flat of his bayonet against Sol's cheek.
    "Did you summon them, Rabbi ?" the man said, directing Sol's vision to the lemurs. "You and your Jewish sorcery?"
    "Stick him!" another voice said.
    The guard lifted the weapon. "What, and spoil the fun? The Sturmbahnführer has plans for him."

CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    E rich thought he remembered Taurus calling him sometime during the night. Remembered staggering to the medical tent, collapsing to his knees before the dog and wrapping his arms around her warm neck, mentally begging her to forgive him for bringing her to this terrible place. He remembered standing over Miriam, she lying beneath netting as hazy as a wedding veil.
    "Can you ever see it in your heart?" he thought he had said.
    After a long silence, she had answered, "Someday, perhaps. If you think my forgiveness would help."
    "And Solomon?"
    "What about Solomon?"
    "Would he follow your lead?"
    "Do you believe he could? Would you really want him to?"
    He awakened to a false dawn heavy with humidity. It made his sinuses swell and brought on a headache behind his eyes. When he dragged himself out of the chair he'd slept in and looked outside the tent, there seemed to him to be a sheen to the air, as though the sky had fractured and fallen. He winced and closed his eyes, wanting nothing more than to shut himself in for the day--alone with his military books and maps, the smell of dusty canvas, and what was left at the bottom of the bottle.
    "Bastards," he said, with the triumvirate of Hempel, Pleshdimer, and the syphilitic clearly in mind. "We'll see about you after the dogs and I get through with you."
    He had no intention of using his dogs for