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During the German retreat from Russia during World War II, a Nazi tank commander, Colonel Knatte, attempts to save himself by calling upon the powers of a local Jewish magician.
The Colonel's Jeep
by Daniel Pearlman
THE COLONEL'S JEEP
a short story byDaniel Pearlman
(10,200 words)
Daniel PearlmanDepartment of EnglishUniversity of Rhode IslandKingston, RI 02881
THE COLONEL'S JEEP
A short story byDaniel Pearlman
(10,200 words)
1
The sputter of a motorcycle interrupted the colonel's reflections on Wagner's _Götterdämmerung_. His head did not budge; his eyes remained fixed, through the windshield of his American-made jeep, on the metal fortress rolling along in front of him. Of his three remaining tanks, the Tiger rumbled slowly over the frozen rutted road keeping a hundred meters ahead of him. From the top of the tank, a crewman scanned the patchy forest through binoculars, watchful also of the ragtag procession of infantry and trucks behind. Two Panzers brought up the rear, but for several days now the massive Russian onslaught had ignored Colonel Knatte's limping unit.
Had he made a wrong turn, he wondered, in the smoke and confusion of the last air attack? Or were the other units crawling ahead faster than his? All that he had each day to remind him that he was still in the midst of a war was the far-off, sporadic thunder of bombs and artillery shelling. By now he should have run into some other regimental stragglers. The prolonged isolation worried him, but the last idea he would accept was that he was "lost."
Although alone, he was moving west and enjoying a holiday from further bombardment. The road was passable, and snow had ceased falling for days. There was grumbling among the troops about losing touch with their brigade (whatever was left of it), but at least they had to thank him for this respite from battle, for this welcome stretch of time to lick their wounds. Rations would last for six days more, fuel for eight (unless temperatures again fell to the point at which the tanks had to be kept idling all night to prevent them from freezing!). Surely, long before their fuel gave out, they were bound to be absorbed into the main body of the retreat. All this would have been enough to muffle his nagging anxieties--if he didn't also have Von Steinhausen on his back.
Colonel Knatte did not want to turn and look at the motorcycle coming up on the left. It was another twitching fragment of a proud thing that once had been a squadron. The isolated unit had been cut down again--to the strength of barely a company--after a strafing five days earlier by a lone Soviet fighter, a stray flea hopping off the Russian bear's back. A plane made of wood! A toy that would have been blown out of the skies by the tailwind alone of a Ju 52--before the Luftwaffe committed suicide at Stalingrad (under orders from _Der Führer_, of course).
"What is it now?" came a weak, raspy voice from the back of the jeep.
The colonel tossed a glance over his left shoulder at the blanket-wrapped form of his special charge, his "protégé," who lay uncomfortably splayed over the whole of the back seat, his head propped up on rags that doubled as polishing cloths. The canvas-topped jeep with intact side curtains had no doubt belonged to an officer, thought the colonel. The canvas kept out the freezing wind, yet the captain had begun to shiver.
"You are awake, Hauptmann Von Steinhausen? Have you had much rest this morning?"
"Not very much, Herr Oberst."
"How are you feeling, captain?"
"Not particularly good, Herr Oberst. Perhaps we are about to hear some news. Perhaps we've made radio contact with the rest of the brigade."
"Have patience! It won't be much longer before we run into a unit with proper medical facilities."
"With someone who can saw off my leg."
"We must not assume that such drastic measures will be necessary, Captain." On and off, for two days now, Von Steinhausen had been having bouts of delirium. This was one of his rarer moments of lucidity. He had refused to be dumped among the close-packed wounded in the only truck left that had room for them. Knatte had obliged, bundling him up and stashing him in the back of the jeep by himself.
"My father will be happy if you get me back in one piece, even if slightly foreshortened."
"The general placed complete confidence in me, and I do not intend to disappoint him."
"If you get me back alive, no matter what parts are missing, he will still be sure to angle you a promotion."
"My career is the last thing on my mind, Captain Von Steinhausen!" The impertinence of the pup! He was sure that if the captain were in full possession of his faculties he would have spoken more tactfully in the presence of the driver. Promotion, indeed, was not on Knatte's mind. The _destruction_ of his career was more likely if Von Steinhausen were to die. The general had dropped a broad hint to that effect. And the captain's death seemed so imminent a possibility--the gangrene seemed so advanced--that Colonel Knatte was willing to try anything to save him.
He did not like how close alongside the jeep the cyclist had managed to position himself. All that he had left between himself and dignity was this Ford-built jeep, captured several months ago from the American-supplied Russians, when Moscow had not seemed so very far away. A sturdy substitute for the Horch 40 command car he had lost two bombings ago, the olive-drab jeep had become a shining testament to his pride of leadership in adversity. His driver cleaned it up for him each morning and during each break in the exhausting march westward.
The colonel had the hood waxed and then polished to such a high gloss that he boasted he could use it to shave by. This polishing, he would freely admit, was a _magical_ sort of ritual--a fanciful attempt to reverse the flow of time so that the army was _not_ engaged in "retreat" but was returning to its pristine strength and hope, as if wound up inside a film that was being run backward. ...
The cycle teetered within a scratch of the fender.
The colonel pushed back his side curtain. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he shouted.
"I'm sorry, Herr Oberst. I have no intention of grazing your jeep." The cyclist dealt skillfully with the ridges and gullies in front of him. "The peasant we picked up an hour ago has been interrogated. He claims he knows of someone who can help our wounded."
"A local physician?"
"He calls him a healer, sir."
"Some peasant herbalist?"
"No. Some sort of ... magician, sir."
"Magician! Is this some sort of a joke, Obergefreite Weiss?"
"The man swears by him, Colonel, sir."
"If he has good boots, make sure you remove them after you have him shot."
"Jawohl, Herr Oberst."
"Wait," said Captain Von Steinhausen, almost inaudibly. "Sometimes country healers are better than the best medical specialists in Berlin."
The colonel thought for a moment. A shaman! A _Medizinmann_! It was grasping at a straw, but what could he lose by trying--except valuable time and some fuel? He had much more to lose, in fact, if he did _not_ explore even the remotest possibility and his neglect were reported to the general. "All right, Corporal Weiss. Where do we find this magic Russian?"
The corporal waved his arm to the right. "In a little village about ten kilometers north, through the woods."
Ten kilometers was stretching it! "All right, Corporal. I will talk to your peasant about this native Russian healer."
The motorcycle took a serious jolt, but the rider recovered his balance. "This healer is not a ... native Russian, sir."
"No? What then, a gypsy?"
"He says he is a Jew, sir."
"A Jew! ... Is there a Jew left alive in this part of Russia? I thought the _Einsatzgruppen_ prided themselves on their thoroughness."
"Before the Führer, our family physician was a Jew, Colonel Knatte," said the captain. "I'm sure my father won't take it amiss if we tried."
The colonel stroked his chin for a while, then ordered his driver to signal to the tank crewman ahead of him. They would set up camp in the woods. The troops had been moving since dawn; they could use a protracted break. "I would not doubt," said the colonel, "that a Jew with some knowledge of medicine might be regarded by a _muzhik_ as a magician."
2
Reb Yoel Sternberg was surprised by the knock at the door--the _outside_ door of the shed he had built onto his house. Was Rabbi Dovidl so impatient for him to repair the synagogue bench that he had sent out one of the old men into the cold late-morning wind, out to the edge of the village, just to see how Mr. Fix-it was doing? Whoever was out in that wailing wind had to be dying to get into the shed! The large stove in the house served also to heat the shed, through a metal duct he had built--to the awe of every khassid in the village.
Reb Yoel was distrustful of the silence following the knock. "Who is it?" he called. No one answered. He called to his wife through the closed door that communicated with the kitchen. "Rivka?" Again, no answer. No answer from Rivkele?
Taking no chances, he snatched up a hammer from the fender of his old truck. Before the war the old pick-up had earned him his livelihood, but now, long useless from the lack of fuel, it had rusted away and served only as a storage bin for scraps of anything a handyman could salvage from a world that had collapsed around his ears.
Reb Yoel slid back the bolt and opened the door a few inches. "Fedka!"
It was Fyodor Vasilievich, for years the village's _shabbes goy_, chopping firewood and heating the stove for the synagogue on the Sabbath. Four or five years ago, on the death of his wife, Fedka had moved in with a widowed sister in the distant town of Krichev. "Come in, Fedka. What brings you back to our miserable, Godforsaken Drozh?"
"Forgive me, Mr. Yoel." Bundled up in a ragged coat unfit for a horse, Fedka spread his palms in the air. "I was in a work crew which the Germans broke up when they began moving back in the opposite--" Suddenly the door sprung open and the peasant, shoved forward, dropped face-down in the shed.
"_Lass das, Jude_!" The German sergeant, brandishing a submachine-gun, nodded at Reb Yoel's hammer. Numb with terror, he dropped it. A smart-looking officer now elbowed aside the soldier and stepped through the doorway, taking in everything at a glance.
"You are Yoel Sternberg the healer, are you not?" said the officer in trilled German.
"The people around here call me so, yes, Colonel," said Yoel.
"_Herr_ Oberst!"
"Yes, Herr Oberst."
"And take off your cap when you talk to me, Jew."
"Sorry, Herr Oberst," said Yoel, slipping his fur cap under his arm.
"You recognize my rank and you speak with a Viennese accent. Where are you from and what are you doing out here?" At a signal from the colonel, the sergeant stepped in and shut the door behind him. Fedka rose warily to his feet.
"I left Vienna just before the Anschluss, sir. My good Viennese neighbors, whom I had often helped when their physicians had given up on them, began accusing me of practising medicine without a license--even of witchcraft, believe it or not!" Reb Yoel tried a broad smile, but the Nazi officer's glare failed to change. "I picked out this little Khassidic village because it was nowhere, because I wanted to get lost, because no _real_ doctor would ever set foot in a miserable hole like Drozh. And because the rabbi needed a handyman."
"You and your entire village could be shot for harboring this truck, you know."
"We could be shot just for existing, sir, but why for a truck that has not run for years?"
The colonel looked at the truck and gave the flattened rear tire a dismissive kick. "This peasant says you cured both his wife and his cow of severe illnesses that each contracted after expelling their respective litters. Is this true?"
"I don't like to take credit for it personally," said Yoel. Shrugging his shoulders, he glanced down at the colonel's polished boots below the hem of his thick woolen overcoat. "These hands, somehow, are able to serve as a lens through which certain 'forces,' let's call them, whether natural or supernatural--"
"Yes, yes, I know there must be some explanation. Frankly, I don't care if the devil himself lends a hand. ... And explain to me this nonsense about making it rain! Your peasant here claims that you were able to end a drought that threatened the local farmers with complete loss of their crops. Is that why you are also known as a magician?"
Reb Yoel threw out his palms. "What do you expect of ignorant peasants, Colonel, sir? They begged me to hoke up some sort of a rain-making ceremony. I did everything I could to get out of it, you know. I threatened them that the devil could be listening, and that if the Evil One gave them rain, he might take a few lives in payment. 'That's all right with us,' they said. Desperate, you know. Well, the fact that it did rain--"
"--was pure coincidence, naturally," the colonel interjected, "but your peasants were particularly impressed by the death of three of their elders as soon as your week-long downpour was over."
"I've never liked people calling me a 'magician,'" said Yoel, shaking his head.
"I don't give a damn what you are, Sternberg. A member of my staff received a shrapnel wound to the right lower leg that now looks badly gangrenous. At the moment we have inadequate medical services. If you can help him, I will forget I ever saw you and your village."
"And if not, Herr Oberst?"
"Your fellow villagers have all been placed under guard at your synagogue, Sternberg. If I were you, I would think positively."
"The act of healing requires a communal ceremony," said Yoel, trying desperately to cloak the tremor in his voice. "The only place large enough for us all to assemble, and which is reasonably well heated, is the synagogue."
"We found a good many of the older men gathered there already. And apart from their wives, there weren't too many others available to round up. Where are all the _young_ people, Sternberg?"
"You came upon a village dying of old age, sir. I'm about the youngest left, and I'm in my forties. Our youth have either been drafted into the army, or have drifted away to more prosperous towns." Could the colonel see in his eyes that he was lying? Reb Yoel looked away. He had told him exactly the same story that the old folks at the synagogue would have told him. If the colonel came to suspect the truth, that the majority of the young had joined the ranks of the partisans, no one in the village would be spared, thought Yoel, whether his 'medical' services proved efficacious or not.
"You will ride with us then to your synagogue. Come and sit with Captain Von Steinhausen in the jeep. He is the officer you are to treat."
"My wife--"
"She has been taken to the synagogue. Go and put your coat on, quick!" The colonel turned around to his companion. "Sergeant Gerhardt, take the peasant outside and dispose of him."
On hearing the colonel's order, Reb Yoel was unable to move. If to save his old friend he could have summoned all the demons out of hell, no matter the consequences ... He started mumbling a prayer, the _Shemá_. A shove in the back sent him stumbling toward his overcoat, which hung like the corpse of a bear from a hook beside the workbench.
Copyright © by Daniel Pearlman . All rights reserved unless specified otherwise above.
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