0 comments/ 10382 views/ 0 favorites Heart of the Sunrise By: Adrian Leverkuhn The Starlight Sonata, Part III Heart of the Sunrise ©2008 by Adrian Leverkuhn (Note: The first part of the Sonata appeared under the title "Woman in Chains"; the second part as "The Stones of Years".) I Once upon a time Tracy had cared about the world she lived in... and the life she'd taken for granted for so long. But that world, like the life she'd known so well, was gone... The people that had defined the contours of that life had vanished in a confused instant. Now she felt the remnants of that life – if at all – as a pale echo, almost like an old mirror shattered on cold, wet stone. She could look down onto the scattered fragments of her life and just make out the barest semblance of what had been... Even so, she knew the remnants of that life were still alive – she could feel their echoes in this new dream that had consumed her... This vast oceanic uncertainty that hazily resembled some sort of life... And yet... '...it's not as if I ever really tried to forget...' And then the stars would speak to her: '...but it is gone – for now,' the music would say. 'That world, that life, it has grown silent to you.' And she had accepted that silence as one might a gift from a stranger. And yet... ...remnants of that life were all around her – scattered everywhere. Everywhere – like the scars she could not feel...she saw the truth of that other existence everywhere she looked: the empty kitchen and the clean coffee maker, the cold stove that she had cooked eggs on hundreds of times, the empty pitcher once so full of orange juice... so full of life... And yet... ...she felt – that other life – must have been – the truth – once upon a time... And yet... ...there were the stars, and they never stopped telling her their stories... She had been surprised to learn she had no choice but to listen... and learn. _____________________________ The scars of war were everywhere. Huge open scabs dotted the blackened landscape, virulent sores where Russian bombs had fallen on retreating Germans, whole sides of buildings crumbled and slumped against burned-out ruins – like old drunks dropped dead beside broken dreams after one hard life too many. Trees scorched and tattered, scorched leaves reluctant to bud, dry grass beneath bare limbs, all withered – and waiting. Waiting... German had fought a running retreat across this ground; line engagements of a bygone era had given way to aerial bombardments and swiftly evolving battles between heavily armored columns of tanks – but it was the land itself that had ultimately lost this war. Lithuania in the summer of 1945 was a land destroyed by marching armies that had bruised her and burned her and bled her dry. The dried bones of young men once free to dream now littered fields like stones causally tossed aside by spoiled children. Farms that had produced the lifeblood of generations lay fallow and deserted, centuries-old markets and town-squares had fallen in a battered series of petulant cries. Roads – even if they were little more than cart-paths – disappeared under crimson washes of blood-soaked mud; bridges meant to hold perhaps an ox and a heavily loaded wagon lay broken under the weight of main battle tanks – and now all of man's ill-purposed machines, their rusted hulks still oozing the life-blood of hate from their ruptured guts, lay waiting under a thoughtless sun for time to reclaim them. So many had fallen – here in these woods and on these grassy plains. And yet... Evil had had such a free hand here among the trees. And yet... ...something was astir in these woods. Stars shone down at night on a painful metamorphosis. Waiting for life to begin again, the product of this stunning change drifted among the trees, singing their song of themselves to any who had the heart to listen. It was this way almost everywhere in the world after the war, but in Lithuania, under the hot summer sun of 1945, it was as if the silence of this new world had quite unexpectedly become unbearable. _____________________________ On a low bluff overlooking the Neman River southwest of Alytus, nestled deep within the wooded ridges of southern Lithuania, was a small farm located on the edge of a large forest that had been known for hundreds of years as the Vidzgiris. In the summer of 1945, dazed Jews wandered through these woods – until Russians in green uniforms picked them up and sent them to refugee camps. The Russians who rounded up these walking scarecrows had no way of knowing that many of these wandering Jews had just been released from other camps over the past few weeks; they could not have known these drifting ghosts had only just recently escaped German soldiers in gray uniforms and disappeared into the dark forest with nothing but their lives. These wandering Jews now feared anyone in a uniform, and the boys who tried to help were confused – for these young conscripts had yet to learn the simple truth of scarecrows: Hate does not concern itself with borders or nationalities – or the color of the wool on a man's back – just as Evil is not limited by those who deny its existence. Indeed, those first tentative summer days brought with them something like the dawn of a new era, an age when for some people simply eating and breathing in relative freedom took on the distinctive aura of religious epiphany. And yet... ...Tomas Podgolskiv found as he wandered through the Vidzgiris that he had become something of an agnostic. He no longer wanted to worship on the altar of gyroscopically-controlled electro-mechanically-actuated steering vanes; he no longer wanted to watch his creations streak into the upper reaches of the atmosphere – knowing as he did they weren't bound for the stars. It had been thrilling at first, he thought as he reached for his wife's hand – until he learned, until the Germans taught him – that these exploratory devices had indeed been intended for other, less noble purposes. Podgolskiv had scarcely known his "release" was itself something of a minor miracle; and that the Germans had allowed him to live was, he would discover over the next few weeks of his life, something of a mixed blessing. But with this understanding had come a stark realization: life was fragile, and now he was determined to make up for lost time, to make the most of what time he had left on this earth. He would start a family. He would plunge his hands into the earth and raise food to feed hungry mouths. It came on him like a calling. And yet... There were few who could or would realize that this seismic shift in perception had come at a terrible cost... When he arrived by car in Weimar one June morning in 1944, he had been escorted down wet, empty streets toward a processing center that, ultimately, lead him through the gates of a settlement he had never heard of before – a place called Buchenwald. For such an auspicious day, it had begun in the most ordinary way possible. He remembered the black sedan, the autobahn, the narrow country lane that ambled north through gauzy amber fields to the sleepy village of Weimar, then walking past Goethe's house, amazed the Linden trees the old man had planted were still so verdant and solid after more than a hundred years, and as he walked by the formal ochre walls he remembered reading Faust when he had been just so – young. Though it had been many years since those quiet words had slipped through his mind in a dusty classroom, something deep and hard stabbed at his consciousness, and echoes of those words beat the air above his head and made him wince. Then just as suddenly, as if a portal between two worlds had opened... the ground around him shook violently... 'But...What is that?' he stuttered loudly when the road ahead filled with stars. He had, if only inside that sundered moment, stumbled on cold cobbled streets, then guards behind pushed him in the back, forced him onward into the yawning darkness that stretched ahead. But hundreds of stars had appeared in the air all around him – they had been there! - as if inside the brief and the dim pity of self-awareness something had pushed him aside... as if to make room for something else. And yet... Podgolskiv smiled as he walked now, smiled – for what he had seen in the cold, wet air put his mind at ease, and suddenly he felt the light waiting on the other side of the night. _____________________________ August, 1945. An undiluted sun falls on an indifferent land; the air is still but laden with promise. A solitary field full of shooting beets and potatoes, green and tan and rich, the yielding crops well fed on the blood of hundreds of men and women and children that have fallen on their flight over this very ground not so long ago. A man and a woman on their knees, picking weeds that have grown between rows of crops, killing pests that cling to once-verdant leaves with fingers mud-caked and blistered. Sweat rolls down the man's face, clings to the end of his nose, falls to the ground only to dissolve quickly under the remorseless sun. The man sits back on his knees and pulls the front of his shirt up to wipe sweat from his face; he shrugs when he finds the cloth already too wet and wipes the sweat away with his hand and flings the drops away. "My God. I have never felt such heat in my life," the man says as he leans back into his work. The woman by his side does not pause, she does not look up. Her long, delicate fingers do not belong in the earth, yet she works quietly, without complaint, as her alabaster skin wilts under the brutal afternoon sun. She does not sweat – her body does not know how; yet she can not complain – her mind has grown immune to pain from living in the darkest depths of Hell for four years and even now she equates free speech with sudden death. And yet... The man and the woman have just known love of a different sort. They have learned what it means to live in the moment, and what it means to live within a world filled with unreasoning hate. "We must finish this section," the woman replies, her head bent to the task. They move slowly down the row, and as the sun settles on the far horizon they take a ladle of cool water from a pail hanging in the shade of a young tree. They might dream of better days, but to what purpose? The woman holds her hand to the light and she examines the graceful arc of her fingers, the intricate delicacy of the music she has produced with them is now long forgotten. _____________________________ Tracy holds her hand up to the fading sun and regards her fingers with a mixture of wonder and contempt. They seem to respond to the call of someone or something else and the rest of her body follows along like a puppet on a string. 'Why won't you leave me alone?' she says into the gathering darkness. _____________________________ 13 August 1941, it is early morning and Josif Karnavicius leads the huddled and whimpering Jews through the first tendrils of dawn into the dark womb of the Vidzgiris. The day before Russian prisoners dug trenches in the yielding earth, and now locals and a handful of Germans in black uniform stand waiting in the darkness. Karnavicius leads the Jews to a spot in the forest and tells them to remain where they are for a moment. Men with machine guns close in on the huddled mass like wolves. A little girl clings to the hem of her mother's dress as sinister shadows take form in the darkness all around, and she watches as the men raise weapons and begin shooting. She is aware of convulsive pain for a moment – then – nothing. She hovers in this sundered instant, but soon smiles as the darkness around her fills with the light of ten billion suns. Heart of the Sunrise Ch. 02 ©2008 by Adrian Leverkuhn (Note: The first part of the Sonata appeared under the title "Woman in Chains"; the second part as "The Stones of Years".) * Chapter II At times it felt like a fever. Hot and close, like death stalking. Then the music would come. Out of the light and into her hands. She could not stop it, she could not control it; the music possessed her completely yet occasionally it must have taken pity on her and let her be -- for a moment. She would drift as if on the wings of fallen angels... Then the music would come back for her and shake her soul, wring all that it could from her clumsy fingers -- testing her, pushing her. Dark chaos full of wild magic would take her mind and in the flood fill it with a language she had never known, then on the ebb she would drift in distant recall of the life she had known once. Wondering... why? Like a virus. The question penetrated chaos, left her shaken and scared. It was as though a virus had infected her and in the periodic deliriums of her fevered madness a great noise consumed her and she tried to make sense of what she heard but nothing ever could. Nothing ever could. She saw fragments of the life she had known in the stillness, the shattered mirror on cold stone, and within these brief moments there was some comfort, but increasingly she saw fragments of another life superimposed over her own. As if two bodies occupied the same space and time -- together. Then the music would come for her again -- and take her completely. It was all very odd. ___________________________ The little sailboat swung on a mooring in water that looked as if it had been poured directly from a swimming pool. So cool and silver-frosted blue was the still water that the little, blue hull seemed suspended in air above a sandy, white plain. Only the quivering shadow of the little hull on the sand below gave away the illusion. A thin man of indeterminate age, perhaps middle-aged, perhaps well beyond those middling years, sat in the little boat's awning-shaded cockpit, a cup of tea in his hand. He looked at a bustling village some hundred yards away, at the old oak trees lining the ridged mountain that slashed downward like a blade to red-tiled roofs and white-washed walls, and at the row of gleaming white yachts lined up along the quay, then he looked down at the crumbled yellow paper he clutched grimly in his other hand. A telegram. Like a blinding clash of cymbals or the nervous rolling of deep thunder, the words on the paper picked at his mind and wrinkled his brow. A tired old cat bounded up from below and looked at the man, then walked noiselessly across the cockpit and jumped down by his feet. She circled twice then settled on his bare feet and began purring. The man put down his tea and began to scratch behind the cat's ears. The purring grew louder and he smiled, if only to himself. The cat, an ancient if otherwise undistinguished gray tabby, was named Pyewacket, but the man out of habits old and dear called her Pye, and after consenting to be scratched for a few minutes she hopped up into the man's lap. Back arched, claws extended gently, she leaned into the man as if to take the measure of his mood. "Well old girl," the man said in tired, Baltic tones, "it seems we will be having company soon." He looked at her, at the top of her head and her scruffy back, and he reached under her and rubbed the soft skin that loosely covered her belly. He could feel her slump into his body more deeply now, could hear the explosive rumble of purring that sprung from deep within her as his fingers ran through her fur, and he smiled deeply. The man read the telegram again and folded the yellow paper, put it in his shirt pocket, then looked over the water to the village of Capri spread across the knifelike mountain. They would be landing in Rome, at da Vinci, in the morning, so with customs and the train to Naples by noon, the noon-thirty hydro-foil across the bay would put them in a little after two. 'What could it mean?' he asked himself for the hundredth time. He turned the words over and over again in his mind, yet every avenue they led him to presented a new and uncomfortable dilemma. LEV THE WOMAN IN CHAINSstopSHE HAS RETURNEDstopLARGE PARTY ARRIVING FRIDAY MORNING ROME ALITALIAstopWILL MEET YOU AT THE QUISISANA FOR COCKTAILS AT SIXstopBY THE POOLstop MISHA A large party, at that hotel? He shuddered to think what that would cost and wondered who might be picking up the tab for that one, then felt the cold icy grip of dread that told him that of course, he would. Oh, Misha. Some things never change. _____________________________ She was washing dirt from potatoes she had carried in from their field not a half hour before when she first heard the sound. Not quite a rustling of dry autumn leaves, not quite the gentle whisper of a fresh breeze through the pines behind their cottage -- no, the sound was more a sigh. It was, she thought, as if the earth itself had sighed. She dropped the potato she had been washing and walked to the open door. Tomas was gathering wood for the fire, yet whatever she had heard -- the experience had been hers alone. Her husband swung his axe with great care, split wood into fragments that would provide heat for the night -- yet that was all that had happened. He had not heard -- it - whatever it was she had heard. She had turned back toward the pale of potatoes when she heard the rustling again, and this time she ran out into the yard. The sun was now fading from the far horizon, the last bands of purpled-amber were settling across the western sky. She peered off into the woods -- into that infinite darkness -- and without understanding why she closed her eyes. Suddenly she was back in Paris and music swarmed around her like crisp, heady perfume. Without thinking she walked from the house, past Tomas, past the few apple trees that were just bearing fruit, and she walked into the woods -- this Vidzgiris around which so many dark rumors fell -- her mind alive with the sights and sounds of Paris in another time. She walked a few minutes lost in her reverie, long enough to lose her way, and soon, with the growing darkness, she grew slowly aware she ought to feel afraid -- but she felt nothing of the kind. Indeed, she experienced something that felt rather like hope, or maybe even faith -- and that she was where she was supposed to be. She heard the sigh again, but no -- there was something different about the sound now -- something almost melodic... hypnotic. A man's voice... singing... She moved toward the voice, careful not to make any untoward noise. Trees and gas-lamps stood superimposed over one another, as if they were occupying the same space and time. The voice seemed to transcend time... A man, old and gray, kneels beside a shallow depression on the forest floor... 'ose shalom bimromav She hears him sing... his voice full of infinite sorrow... hu yaase shalom alenu His body shakes with the grief of ages... v'al kol yisra'el, v'imru amen ... and she recognizes the Kaddish, the mourner's prayer, the prayer for the dead. She stands transfixed, unable to speak or even move. There is barely enough light to see, yet she can see the man clearly. He cries for a long time, then stands, and as he stands he lifts his hands as if he is freeing a caged bird... She gasps at what she sees, and the man turns toward the sound, a terrible fury in his eyes... Heart of the Sunrise Ch. 03 The Starlight Sonata, Part III Heart of the Sunrise ©2008 by Adrian Leverkuhn (Note: The first part of the Sonata appeared under the title "Woman in Chains"; the second part as "The Stones of Years".) III Anna Podgolskiv recoils in horror when she feels the full fury of the old man's eyes bore into her soul. She stumbles backwards, trips on a fallen limb and loses her balance, her hands out to soften the landing. As she hits the soft forest floor she sees the lights of a concert hall in Paris flicker and dim as if the curtain is about to rise on some vast, grand performance – yet she feels for a moment as if she is suddenly shifting between two worlds – and then the forest is alive with the flickering light of fireflies. They drift among the trees, tentatively at first, some almost shy, but after a moment she can see a pattern emerge in the chaos. They are moving in a circle – moving around the old man. Slowly, deliberately, everything as if in a dream. Though the man looks at her his hands remain above his head, gathering airs grow full of silent anticipation. The fireflies draw nearer and nearer to the man as if he inhabits the center of a vortex, and slowly, as they draw nearer to the man's outstretched hands, each firefly in turn grows brighter and brighter. The light grows brighter and brighter, painfully so, and Anna holds her hands up to shield her eyes. She sees blood on her hands, the blood of thousands, and at the very last instant she is aware of a concussive explosion. She feels the very atoms of her body being ripped apart by the furious light of ten billion suns, and for the first time in her life she knows great peace. _________________________________ The jet circled endlessly in cloud, lurching in violent turbulence as lightning flashed inside the womb of a dark grey morning. Rome lay still mostly asleep below, but every now and then a brief glimmer of the city below slipped into view – but was as briefly gone in the stream. Todd Wakeman, his face pressed to a plastic oval window, looked at grey wings flexing wildly in the fading night, strobes and shards of lightning pulsed through clouds that screamed silently on the other side of an aluminum membrane that barely separated his body from the howling maelstrom just inches from his face, and he was full of wonder at the very absurdity of human existence. Hearts and bones hurtling through the night over an ocean and a continent, they were time travelers – of a sort. What had once been unthinkable was now accomplished in merest hours, yet it was all a sort of twisted veneer. Civilization itself was just a veneer, a very thin veneer, he thought as something glimpsed below resembling the coliseum flashed through his mind's eye. Rome had never fallen, it had simply been subsumed from within; the bureaucracy of empire had transformed itself into a religion and had become an empire anew – Rome had indeed become eternal. Even though the idea was faintly troubling, Wakeman smiled at the thought. There was order in empire, a mild comfort to be had from the stability of ordered thought... Wasn't that the very essence of medicine... and of the modern? Sitting behind the wing he watched as a bewildering variety of surfaces sprouted and shaped the air outside his window, slowed the huge Boeing as it settled toward rubber-streaked concrete somewhere in the mists below. He turned and looked at Tracy Tomlinson beside him, and at Judith Somerfield beside her, and he thought of a young girl wrapped in chains falling into the infinite darkness of a Siberian lake. 'We've all been linked by this – somehow,' he said to himself once again as the impossibility of it all wrapped itself through the womb of his one small life. 'But by what? Or by whom?' ________________________________ The light was fading, her eyes clearing, and she was aware of his presence beside her. She moved her hands, slowly, from her face, looked up into ancient eyes, almost blue, like a fall day before a first hesitant snow. Clear, yet not. Clouds, but not yet. The fury contained inside was gone now, latent, manifest; pyroclastic eyebrows arched, an old face lined with sedimentary strata – fragmented by eons, by time unimaginable. Wild hair, storm-streaked and long, long – hanging like tendrils of smoke long. A coarse cloak or tunic, like burlap but woven from the fabric of... what? The earth? Woven from Time itself? Anna Podgolskiv was frightened. Frightened by limitless power confronting illimitable evil. Sorrow without end, without beginning. She turned her head, looked for a way out of this place, but the forest was now full of stars, radiant, steady, unmoving as if fixed by the power of the old man's eyes. Fireflies? "Why are you here?" The words came from his mouth, but the sounds were rounded and full, as if his mouth was full of stones. She wanted to laugh when she heard his voice until she heard the stones of years rolling like thunder though his words, then they held her – like stars in trees, frozen in amber. "I heard a... a sound." "A sound." Not a question... a statement. "A strange sound, like rustling leaves, only metal." "Chains," the old man said. "You have heard my chains." "Chains! Yes, that's it. Chains. Did you hear them, too?" Clouds passed over his eyes, but still they held her. "You must leave this place," he said after a moment lost to the stream of time. "Now. And do not return, no matter what you hear from those who know this place." He bent to help her stand and she felt his dry, hot skin on her arm. "You have hurt yourself," he said when she was standing beside him. She watched as he held her hand in his, watched as his eyes regarded the blood on her hands. He pulled a clean rag from his tunic and wiped her hand clean, yet a fierce heat remained where he had touched her skin. "Who are you?" She was hardly aware she had spoken the words, yet the old man seemed to recoil from them, the stars that peopled the forest seemed to flicker and dim – like some vast performance was coming to an end – but he turned to her and smiled. "Just a useless old man. Go now, please. While you can." She turned to leave and walked a few tentative steps away from him then turned to look at him. He was kneeling on the ground, the blood soaked rag in hand, lost in prayer. She walked quietly back to her house and cooked dinner, not knowing what to think or say. Tomas had not heard a sound. Heart of the Sunrise Ch. 04 (Note: The first part of the Sonata appeared under the title "Woman in Chains"; the second part as "The Stones of Years".) IV Naples and the Molo Beverello fell astern; the white cliffs of Capri lay ahead across a smooth, blue sea. The hydrofoil cut through the easy chop like a knife, men and women sleek and tan stood on the aft deck leaning back on teak rails, sunning themselves, lost in the idle concerns of the sun-borne. Deck-hands coiled lines while waitresses from the bar fanned out offering Campari and Pellegrinos. Two wispy plumes drifted from Vesuvius across an otherwise perfectly clear sky. Ina Balinski sat in the boat's austere passenger cabin beside Tracy Tomlinson and her sister Becky; the motion inside wasn't exactly uncomfortable but any waterborne conveyance made Balinski green, and the foil's peculiar motion was no exception. She looked at the twins and noted that both still seemed to inhabit some other dimension; they both – to her – appeared transiently psychotic... like schizophrenics fighting too much Thorazine. She could only shake her head at the chain of events that had led her to this sun-drenched sea. The whole affair, from Tomlinson's queer awakening to Misha Podgolskiv's equally perturbing revelation about the 'woman in chains' had been profoundly unsettling to Balinski. That she had been Leonard Berensen's confidante and off-and-on lover for twenty years had only served to confuse her more. Who was this woman? What did she want? More importantly, just what the hell was she? What had happened to her? Nothing made sense, least of all Leonard's role in all this. She looked at Misha doing his best to play the role of the sleek European industrialist and stifled another laugh; he succeeded at little more than looking a minor pretender –which, she had garnered from long experience, was in word and deed all he had ever been, and perhaps would ever be. But Ina Balinski had never known the true depth of Misha's betrayal, and perhaps never would. Had she understood the full nature of the peculiar history gathering around them all as the shuttle sped toward Capri it was unlikely she would have facilitated this reunion. She had worked long and hard to protect Leonard's anonymity, and to isolate him from his brother's corrosive smallness. As things stood now her role in this little drama might have been complete if not for her overwhelming love for Berensen, her desire to be with him always. That he seemed oblivious to her need only heightened her desire. Her limited understanding of the man had helped construct a Promethean edifice out of the man, and she had shared that towering image of the man with the world; Berensen's reputation rested on his music, to be sure, but reputations are all too often manufactured and embellished to suit commercial needs, and his reputation had been in her capable hands ever since his surprise emergence from the Soviet Union thirty years ago. She had shaped and molded his public persona as surely as any sculptor could have; for Ina Balinski the dividing line between truth and edifice had long been too blurred. She felt eyes boring into her, actually felt her flesh burning under the flashing intensity of Tracy Tomlinson's stare, and she turned to look at the young woman again. The blank stare was gone now, the woman's ghostly pallor had given way to verdant, almost virulent femininity, and the power now manifest in the woman's eyes was frankly breathtaking – and sobering. "What are you?" Ina Balinski said, though she was unaware she had spoken aloud. "I am times." Tomlinson's face remained fixed on hers for a moment longer, then the flat mien returned – and all was as before. "Times?" Balinski said aloud. "Times?" All she heard was the roar of engines and air rushing by, the present rushing past on its way to memory. She closed her eyes and gasped as a huge star formed in the blackness. Winged fingers of fire seemed to reach out for her, and she was aware of wanting to run. She felt the fingers reach into the very core of her being, and instinctively she knew her life was at an end. "Why? Why now?" she heard a voice saying, and she was faintly surprised to realize it was her voice drifting in time. She watched as worlds of blue water and white clouds receded and gave way to blackness once again, and she smiled as her eyes filled with the light of ten billion suns. Heart of the Sunrise Ch. 05 V The twins came two years later, deep in the night of the seventh day of the seventh month. The midwife spoke softly of how gently the first had come, and how harshly the second; all Anna Podgolskiv could think about was her husband, and what had taken him from this moment. What was love that it could be so easily sundered? A bureaucrat from the city, some man named Karnivicious, had -- they were told by a friendly neighbor -- been asking questions about Tomas -- where had he come from, what had he done during the war? Tomas simply left the next day. Three men in a worn black ZIS sedan came by and he left with them. No word of explanation, no threats or packed bags, just here one minute and gone the next. Her first impulse had been to withdraw inside herself -- as she had in Buchenwald -- but there hadn't been anything sinister about the men at all; they had in fact seemed outwardly friendly to Tomas, indeed, almost protective of him. The helpful neighbor returned a few days later and told her that Tomas had gone with a man named Sasha, and that he was safe. Safe? Safe from what? She received a letter from Tomas in late July, from where she did not know and he would not say, and while he said only that he was working his words were hollow, almost meaningless except in their capacity to hurt and confuse. Neighbors, meanwhile, helped with the harvest, helped with the boys, and slowly Anna began to reorder her life around the two little boys. Slowly she began reorder her life as a single parent... ...When one day in October she received a letter from Tomas telling her people would be coming from Leningrad to bring her and the boys north to a new home. The next day she met Sasha Levine for the first time, and her life would never be the same. ___________________________ Waves lapped against the hull, a cool breeze whistled through the rigging, and Leonard Berensen stepped down into his Zodiac and started the little outboard motor. He checked the fuel in the little red tank out of habit then cast off the line and pushed the inflatable off before he slipped the transmission into forward and twisted the throttle; even though the village was little more than a few hundred yards away he hated rowing with a passion and almost always used the little motor. Today he was dressed a little more formally than usual, which meant he had put on khaki trousers instead of his habitual khaki shorts, and it just wouldn't do to arrive at the hotel in a sweaty mess. It was a bit of walk as it was, and a steep one at that. He could make out the 1300 hydrofoil coming in, but its speed seemed a little fast, then he saw an ambulance waiting on the quay and the first flutters of an uneasy afternoon settled in his gut. Had something happened to Misha? He rolled on more throttle and the little grey bow lifted as the Zodiac lifted up on a gentle plane. The wind in his face picked up, a wave slapped under the bow and a fine wash of spray rose and settled on his shoulders, and the feeling of injury grew overpowering with each new thought. The hydrofoil drew up alongside and Berensen could see people clustered on the aft deck, some kneeling, some pointing and shaking their head, but he couldn't make out anyone directly. Carabinieri were walking impatiently along the pier, medics in orange jackets stood beside the men who would handle lines as the boat docked. There was an air of professional detachment about the men milling around up there that told Berensen someone was in serious trouble, and they studiously ignored him while he maneuvered around the quay and tied off to a barnacle encrusted pier. When the hydrofoil docked medics ran onboard and Berensen climbed out of the Zodiac and walked down the old stone quay. He saw Misha first, Misha and two women who looked like zombies from a bad 50s B-movie. He stood back from the crush until medics walked off with a covered body on an old rolling gurney; subdued passengers followed under a wan afternoon sun and walked over to hotel vans and scooters like a small herd of cattle being ushered into a slaughterhouse. Death had come stalking and everyone apparently felt anxious relief at having been spared on this day. Berensen felt his own brand of relief as he watched his brother trundle down the gangplank and clumsily look after the body on the gurney. "Misha! Here!" Lev Podgolskiv called to his brother, and the Zombies and two others turned toward his voice when Misha mouthed his usual insecure greeting. The group walked his way, and he could see sadness in his brother's eyes. 'How little things change,' Lev said to himself -- but his eyes were immediately drawn to the women by his brother's side. 'The eyes,' he said inwardly, 'there's something in the eyes...' He watched as they came closer, then a shadow passed through his body as a cloud might when passing in front of the sun. "This can not be," Lev Podgolskiv said. "But it is," his brother said. "Unmistakable, isn't it?" And indeed it was. Lev looked into the women's eyes, from one to the other and back again. Yes. Unmistakable. At first he thought he was looking into the eyes of Valentina and Sara Lenova, then it was as if the very earth sighed - and he found he was looking into what he thought was his mother's until he recognized those familiar, adoring eyes. He turned and looked at the gurney again. "Oh God, no. God, no." He turned to look at Misha, hate searching in his soul. "Lev, we must go. We have to talk." He looked at the other two people standing beside Misha -- at two impossibly young kids, one with a stethoscope dangling from a pocket inside his jacket, the other with eyes so full of questions he wanted to comfort her, to hold and protect her. He saw her looking at one of the zombie-women, then at Misha. Then she turned and looked at him, and something in the way she looked at him told him that everything was going to work out as it should. He smiled at her, and she smiled back, her eyes full of understanding. * ©2009/adrianleverkuhn Heart of the Sunrise Ch. 06 VI "He is in Russia, near Moscow. The name of the village is Shchyolkovo." "I don't understand," Anna Podgolskiv said. "Russia? Moscow? Why?" "We tried to get him out of the, well, trap that had been set, but this was the best we could do. Apparently when the Red Army took Peenemunde they took custody of many scientists and engineers. Most have been moved to this village. The Soviets are building a community near there, a community of people involved with rockets. Tomas is one of the most gifted designers there is, the metallurgy of nozzles, or so I've heard, and we think his name must have come up... Local officials had been called in to search. " "I don't understand? You keep saying 'we'? Who is this 'we' you are so fond of reminding me of?" "We," Sasha Levine said while he looked at Anna with piercing grey eyes, "represent a group trying to locate Jews and get them to Palestine. While we can." "What do you mean, 'while we can'?" "Surely you must understand that the war is not over. The lines have been redrawn, certainly, but the hatred that has defined our lives for two thousand years has not disappeared. Only now is the depth of the tragedy becoming known, like Buchenwald, and great things are happening in Palestine, in the United Nations. We may have a home at long last, soon, a home for all the Jews, now that the British are no longer a factor in the region." She looked at him, at the complexities within his offer. Who was he? "Tomas wants me to come to Leningrad," she said petulantly. "It was in his last letter." "He's not in Leningrad, Anna. He never has been." "But, why? Why have they taken him so far away?" "I think it is mistake for you to go there. If you do go I think it unlikely you will ever leave Russia. That would be a tragedy for us all, Anna. A great tragedy." The words hit her like a slap across the face, yet she felt the recoil in her belly. "What? What do you mean by that?" The man looked around, unsure of himself, sure of what he wanted to say, unsure of how to say it. "I saw you play in Paris once," he finally said and Anna quickly looked away, her eyes now distant, almost vacant. Neither knew what to say as memories drifted in the air between them, and time seemed to slow, then stop. Sasha longer to hear her play again, Anna longed for the silence of oblivion. "That was a long time ago," she said at last. "Another life." "I understand," Sasha said. "I think you would find our new homeland very welcoming, Anna. And I promise to keep working to get Tomas out." "Do you think he is -- what are you saying -- trapped in this village?" The man shrugged his shoulders, looked away. He could not bring himself to tell her he had been searching for her for two years, and how desperate he was to get her to Palestine. She would question his motives, perhaps rightfully so, and he was afraid of this particular truth, what it might cause in the minutes just ahead. "Answer me!" Anna Podgolskiv exploded. He turned back to her, took her eyes into his: "No," he said with grim finality. "Then he went of his own accord? Is that what you're telling me?" She looked down at the floor; the boys grew restless in their cribs. "Yes." She turned away, covered her eyes. Sasha saw one of the boys looking at him and he turned to meet the child's gaze. "Why?" he heard her moan. 'Because he was a stupid, a simplistic, idealistic fool,' he wanted to say. 'Because in the end he loved his silly rockets more than anyone, or anything, else. Nothing more than that, really. Just a simple fool. And he will destroy us all.' But instead he remained quiet, silently watched thief-like grief steal into the room and take her from him, from the promise of homeland. At length she turned back to him and he saw the truth of Tomas's triumph in her eyes. "It will be a long journey," he said with finality, admitting his own inevitable defeat. "Three days to Leningrad with the railroads as they are." He looked at her longingly, protectively. "From there? I cannot say. But you should be prepared to travel for a week, perhaps longer." She nodded, tried to smile. "Is it as cold as I've heard?" "Colder." She sighed, tried to laugh but found only the infinite white drifts of despair without end calling her name. She walked to the window and looked out into the forest, saw a firefly drifting among the trees... "There was an old man, in the woods," she heard herself asking. "He was, I think, saying prayers. When I saw him he was kneeling in a shallow depression; it felt as if the earth had swallowed up something when I found that place. Do you know anything about him?" He looked at the innocence of an age betrayed on her face, at numbers tattooed on the inside of her arm, then at the truth of her words. Would she ever really be able to hear that truth? "No. No I don't." He looked into her eyes, at the understanding in her soul, and he knew he had underestimated her. "I love him, you see. Haven't you ever loved someone, Mr Levine?" "No. No, I haven't." The boys stirred in their little cribs, and he thought of his own boys as they looked at him that last time. He rubbed the numbers on the inside of his arm, conscious that his own burning grief would never go away. He -- like so many others -- had lost so much at Auschwitz, so much that could never be replaced. She moved dismissively to her children. "Will you need my help?" he asked, already knowing what her answer would be. "No, Mr Levine. Tomas has made all the arrangements." He nodded, looked at her again, then walked out into the gloom of night. He heard her boys crying as he walked to the battered old car; he might have fought to push back tears of his own -- had he not lost the ability to cry when the metal doors had closed on his own children. * ©2009/adrianleverkuhn Heart of the Sunrise Ch. 07 VII The people from Leningrad were due to come for them in the morning, but their bags were already packed. The boys were on their backs now, in their crib, sated breast milk full on their lips, but Anna felt cool and restless even so, resigned to a fate of her own choosing but her heart full of regret that seemed to have taken her right to the edge of a vast, beckoning cliff. Her future was, she knew, in the abyss that lay before them all; her past was an unusable wreckage of skeletons shuffling by on their way to ovens that consumed devotion and vomited evil across a darkened sun. There had been nowhere to hide, really, nowhere to run, so she had turned inward to cling to the only real thing in her life – her love for Tomas. What was Israel? An idea? Another godforsaken idea? How many more ideas would there be to keep humans from the ultimate truth of their existence – that love was the only destiny worth living for? All the proof she needed of that truth lay beside her and she looked at her boys with wonder anew in her eyes. What future could she make for them if she denied the very truth of existence now, at the beginning of their lives? She smiled at them, listened to their contented coos – her heart so full of love she thought it might burst – when she heard the sound again, the sound of chains in the forest. She did not know what to do – she felt at once calm and afraid – but for Anna Podgolskiv memory had not been an honest forge. So she stood and walked to the window again, the window where she had stood so many times over the past two years looking at Tomas working in the field, her soul full of wonder at the life that was alive and growing in her belly... at the window where life and love had come back for her... yet she gasped when she looked out over the ragged grass of her life into the woods beyond. The forest was alive with fireflies... millions of them! They all seemed to be drifting toward their house, floating on amber mists that as well seemed to be drawn to this place. Anna stepped back from the speckled glass and looked at the boys again, her racing heart now, full of reasoned fear. She stepped back, back closer to the crib, but even from here she could see the writhing mist pulsing closer to the house; she reached down and picked up both of the boys and held them close to her breast. Light came and shone in the window, a vast, unnatural light, blue-white and fierce, and soon even the boys seemed aware something out of the ordinary was gathering around them all. Lev seemed attentive, focused, almost interested, while Misha grew increasingly uneasy and fussy. Lev clung to his mother's dress while Misha tried to push himself from her grasp – but Anna clung to them ever more desperately, the fierceness of her grasp rising with each pulsing of the light. When she could stand it no more and panic was setting in she bolted for the door and ran from the house. It was hard to see him at first, the old man from the forest, but she could just make him out there in the woods, walking towards the clearing and her house. The woods were alive with fireflies, an infinite sea of glowing orbs ebbing from the shelter of the forest and pooling around and on the house itself. It was an impossible scene, more impossible still as the old man seemed to be covered entirely in chain... heavy, rusted links covered with glistening blood, blood dripping with malevolent release and falling not to the ground but up into the sky. His head was down, his pace steady, and as he grew near she could just make out parts of his face, then only the faintest sliver of the old man's eyes. There was no mistaking his direction, either: he was walking right toward her – no deviation, no hesitation. Fireflies settled on her now, and on the boys, only they weren't flies. They were – light. Only light. She looked down at Lev and saw orbs floating in front of his eyes, saw the reflected light of millions of orbs dancing on the glassy surface of his eyes, and she saw the smile on his face, in his soul, and she relaxed. The sound the chains made grew subdued, like they were sounds from a dream far away in time, and Anna Podgolskiv looked up, looked up into the old man's eyes, now only inches from her own, but she saw he wasn't looking at her. He was looking first into Lev's eyes, then Misha's, looking as if there was a decision at hand, a decision to be made, but she saw weariness in the old man's eyes and knew the decision had been eons ago. At length he put a hand on Lev's head, the other on her arm, and it was as if a circuit had been completed; as something irresistible flowed through her veins once again into Lev she sensed the completion of one journey and the beginning of another. The old man regarded her for a moment then turned away, resumed walking but now toward the fallow field beyond the house. After a few steps he seemed to hesitate, then he stopped and turned, at finally he spoke to her. She saw infinite sadness in his eyes, and that sadness fell on her with savage fury – like a question that has no answer. "He will not forget." Then the old man smiled at her, a gentle smile, and he was gone. The sun was down now, the forest a black wall in front of her, and she noticed it was now completely dark – the firefly orbs had vanished as suddenly and as quickly as the old man had, all but one. This single orb hovered before her, before the boys, and slowly resolved in the air before them all. The form of a woman, translucent, milky white and shimmering, grew before them. Anna had never seen her before, and the woman seemed at once young and ancient. She stepped forward, and chain in her hands, and she held it before her cloudy form as if to hand it to them. But only Lev responded. He reached for the chain and held it in his tiny hands, regarded it with curious detachment for a moment and Anna watched as he turned it over in his hands. The night grew hushed, and very dark now. The woman was gone, indeed, there was only the simple darkness of night around them all now, the black wall of the forest seemed to have disappeared as well. Anna could feel the ground underneath her feet but suddenly she felt disoriented, it was as if she was floating in the sea. The stars had grown impossibly bright and she knew without thinking what lay ahead. Light flared, she covered Misha's eyes, and soon they were awash in the light of ten billion suns. ©2009/adrianleverkuhn