Apt Pupil (Scribner Edition) Read online

  “How awful!” Monica said breathlessly. “More cognac, Mr. Denker?”

  “No thank you.” He smiled at her. “My wife had a saying from her mother: ‘One must never overdo the sublime.’ ”

  Todd’s small, troubled frown deepened slightly.

  “Do you think he was sent to one of the camps?” Dick asked. “Your friend Hessler?”

  “Hassler,” Dussander corrected gently. He grew grave. “Many were. The camps . . . they will be the shame of the German people for a thousand years to come. They are Hitler’s real legacy.”

  “Oh, I think that’s too harsh,” Bowden said, lighting his pipe and puffing out a choking cloud of Cherry Blend. “According to what I’ve read, the majority of the German people had no idea of what was going on. The locals around Auschwitz thought it was a sausage plant.”

  “Ugh, how terrible,” Monica said, and pulled a grimacing that’s-enough-of-that expression at her husband. Then she turned to Dussander and smiled. “I just love the smell of a pipe, Mr. Denker, don’t you?”

  “Indeed I do, madam,” Dussander said. He had just gotten an almost insurmountable urge to sneeze under control.

  Bowden suddenly reached across the table and clapped his son on the shoulder. Todd jumped. “You’re awfully quiet tonight, son. Feeling all right?”

  Todd offered a peculiar smile that seemed divided between his father and Dussander. “I feel okay. I’ve heard most of these stories before, remember.”

  “Todd!” Monica said. “That’s hardly—”

  “The boy is only being honest,” Dussander said. “A privilege of boys which men often have to give up. Yes, Mr. Bowden?”

  Dick laughed and nodded.

  “Perhaps I could get Todd to walk back to my house with me now,” Dussander said. “I’m sure he has his studies.”

  “Todd is a very apt pupil,” Monica said, but she spoke almost automatically, looking at Todd in a puzzled sort of way. “All A’s and B’s, usually. He got a C this last quarter, but he’s promised to bring his French up to snuff on his March report. Right, Todd-baby?”

  Todd offered the peculiar smile again and nodded.

  “No need for you to walk,” Dick said. “I’ll be glad to run you back to your place.”

  “I walk for the air and the exercise,” Dussander said. “Really, I must insist . . . unless Todd prefers not to.”

  “Oh, no, I’d like a walk,” Todd said, and his mother and father beamed at him.

  • • •

  They were almost to Dussander’s corner when Dussander broke the silence. It was drizzling, and he hoisted his umbrella over both of them. And yet still his arthritis lay quiet, dozing. It was amazing.

  “You are like my arthritis,” he said.

  Todd’s head came up. “Huh?”

  “Neither of you have had much to say tonight. What’s got your tongue, boy? Cat or cormorant?”

  “Nothing,” Todd muttered. They turned down Dussander’s street.

  “Perhaps I could guess,” Dussander said, not without a touch of malice. “When you came to get me, you were afraid I might make a slip . . . ‘let the cat out of the bag,’ you say here. Yet you were determined to go through with the dinner because you had run out of excuses to put your parents off. Now you are disconcerted that all went well. Is that not the truth?”

  “Who cares?” Todd said, and shrugged sullenly.

  “Why shouldn’t it go well?” Dussander demanded. “I was dissembling before you were born. You keep a secret well enough, I give you that. I give it to you most graciously. But did you see me tonight? I charmed them. Charmed them!”

  Todd suddenly burst out: “You didn’t have to do that!”

  Dussander came to a complete stop, staring at Todd.

  “Not do it? Not? I thought that was what you wanted, boy! Certainly they will offer no objections if you continue to come over and ‘read’ to me.”

  “You’re sure taking a lot for granted!” Todd said hotly. “Maybe I’ve got all I want from you. Do you think there’s anybody forcing me to come over to your scuzzy house and watch you slop up booze like those old wino pusbags that hang around the old trainyards? Is that what you think?” His voice had risen and taken on a thin, wavering, hysterical note. “Because there’s nobody forcing me. If I want to come, I’ll come, and if I don’t, I won’t.”

  “Lower your voice. People will hear.”

  “Who cares?” Todd said, but he began to walk again. This time he deliberately walked outside the umbrella’s span.

  “No, nobody forces you to come,” Dussander said. And then he took a calculated shot in the dark: “In fact, you are welcome to stay away. Believe me, boy, I have no scruples about drinking alone. None at all.”

  Todd looked at him scornfully. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Dussander only smiled noncommittally.

  “Well, don’t count on it.” They had reached the concrete walk leading up to Dussander’s stoop. Dussander fumbled in his pocket for his latchkey. The arthritis flared a dim red in the joints of his fingers and then subsided, waiting. Now Dussander thought he understood what it was waiting for: for him to be alone again. Then it could come out.

  “I’ll tell you something,” Todd said. He sounded oddly breathless. “If they knew what you were, if I ever told them, they’d spit on you and then kick you out on your skinny old ass.”

  Dussander looked at Todd closely in the drizzling dark. The boy’s face was turned defiantly up to his, but the skin was pallid, the sockets under the eyes dark and slightly hollowed—the skin-tones of someone who has brooded long while others are asleep.

  “I am sure they would have nothing but revulsion for me,” Dussander said, although he privately thought that the elder Bowden might stay his revulsion long enough to ask many of the questions his son had asked already. “Nothing but revulsion. But what would they feel for you, boy, when I told them you had known about me for eight months . . . and said nothing?”

  Todd stared at him wordlessly in the dark.

  “Come and see me if you please,” Dussander said indifferently, “and stay home if you don’t. Goodnight, boy.”

  He went up the walk to his front door, leaving Todd standing in the drizzle and looking after him with his mouth slightly ajar.

  • • •

  The next morning at breakfast, Monica said: “Your dad liked Mr. Denker a lot, Todd. He said he reminded him of your grandfather.”

  Todd muttered something unintelligible around his toast. Monica looked at her son and wondered if he had been sleeping well. He looked pale. And his grades had taken that inexplicable dip. Todd never got C’s.

  “You feeling okay these days, Todd?”

  He looked at her blankly for a moment, and then that radiant smile spread over his face, charming her . . . comforting her. There was a dab of strawberry preserves on his chin. “Sure,” he said. “Four-oh.”

  “Todd-baby,” she said.

  “Monica-baby,” he responded, and they both started to laugh.

  9

  March, 1975.

  “Kitty-kitty,” Dussander said. “Heeere, kitty-kitty. Puss-puss? Puss-puss?”

  He was sitting on his back stoop, a pink plastic bowl by his right foot. The bowl was full of milk. It was one-thirty in the afternoon; the day was hazy and hot. Brush-fires far to the west tinged the air with an autumnal smell that jagged oddly against the calendar. If the boy was coming, he would be here in another hour. But the boy didn’t always come now. Instead of seven days a week he came sometimes only four times, or five. An intuition had grown in him, little by little, and his intuition told him that the boy was having troubles of his own.

  “Kitty-kitty,” Dussander coaxed. The stray cat was at the far end of the yard, sitting in the ragged verge of weeds by Dussander’s fence. It was a tom, and every bit as ragged as the weeds it sat in. Every time he spoke, the cat’s ears cocked forward. Its eyes never left the pink bowl filled with milk.

 
Perhaps, Dussander thought, the boy was having troubles with his studies. Or bad dreams. Or both.

  That last made him smile.

  “Kitty-kitty,” he called softly. The cat’s ears cocked forward again. It didn’t move, not yet, but it continued to study the milk.

  Dussander had certainly been afflicted with problems of his own. For three weeks or so he had worn the SS uniform to bed like grotesque pajamas, and the uniform had warded off the insomnia and the bad dreams. His sleep had been—at first—as sound as a lumberjack’s. Then the dreams had returned, not little by little, but all at once, and worse than ever before. Dreams of running as well as the dreams of the eyes. Running through a wet, unseen jungle where heavy leaves and damp fronds struck his face, leaving trickles that felt like sap . . . or blood. Running and running, the luminous eyes always around him, peering soullessly at him, until he broke into a clearing. In the darkness he sensed rather than saw the steep rise that began on the clearing’s far side. At the top of that rise was Patin, its low cement buildings and yards surrounded by barbed wire and electrified wire, its sentry towers standing like Martian dreadnoughts straight out of War of the Worlds. And in the middle, huge stacks billowed smoke against the sky, and below these brick columns were the furnaces, stoked and ready to go, glowing in the night like the eyes of fierce demons. They had told the inhabitants of the area that the Patin inmates made clothes and candles, and of course the locals had believed that no more than the locals around Auschwitz had believed that the camp was a sausage factory. It didn’t matter.

  Looking back over his shoulder in the dream, he would at last see them coming out of hiding, the restless dead, the Juden, shambling toward him with blue numbers glaring from the livid flesh of their outstretched arms, their hands hooked into talons, their faces no longer expressionless but animated with hate, lively with vengeance, vivacious with murder. Toddlers ran beside their mothers and grandfathers were borne up by their middle-aged children. And the dominant expression on all their faces was desperation.

  Desperation? Yes. Because in the dreams he knew (and so did they) that if he could climb the hill, he would be safe. Down here in these wet and swampy lowlands, in this jungle where the night-flowering plants extruded blood instead of sap, he was a hunted animal . . . prey. But up there, he was in command. If this was a jungle, then the camp at the top of the hill was a zoo, all the wild animals safely in cages, he the head keeper whose job it was to decide which would be fed, which would live, which would be handed over to the vivisectionists, which would be taken to the knacker’s in the remover’s van.

  He would begin to run up the hill, running in all the slowness of nightmare. He would feel the first skeletal hands close about his neck, feel their cold and stinking breath, smell their decay, hear their birdlike cries of triumph as they pulled him down with salvation not only in sight but almost at hand—

  “Kitty-kitty,” Dussander called. “Milk. Nice milk.”

  The cat came at last. It crossed half of the back yard and then sat again, but lightly, its tail twitching with worry. It didn’t trust him; no. But Dussander knew the cat could smell the milk and so he was sanguine. Sooner or later it would come.

  At Patin there had never been a contraband problem. Some of the prisoners came in with their valuables poked far up their asses in small chamois bags (and how often their valuables turned out not to be valuable at all—photographs, locks of hair, fake jewelry), often pushed up with sticks until they were past the point where even the long fingers of the trusty they had called Stinky-Thumbs could reach. One woman, he remembered, had had a small diamond, flawed, it turned out, really not valuable at all—but it had been in her family for six generations, passed from mother to eldest daughter (or so she said, but of course she was a Jew and all of them lied). She swallowed it before entering Patin. When it came out in her waste, she swallowed it again. She kept doing this, although eventually the diamond began to cut her insides and she bled.

  There had been other ruses, although most only involved petty items such as a hoard of tobacco or a hair-ribbon or two. It didn’t matter. In the room Dussander used for prisoner interrogations there was a hot plate and a homely kitchen table covered with a red checked cloth much like the one in his own kitchen. There was always a pot of lamb stew bubbling mellowly away on that hotplate. When contraband was suspected (and when was it not?) a member of the suspected clique would be brought to that room. Dussander would stand them by the hotplate, where the rich fumes from the stew wafted. Gently, he would ask them Who. Who is hiding gold? Who is hiding jewelry? Who has tobacco? Who gave the Givenet woman the pill for her baby? Who? The stew was never specifically promised; but always the aroma eventually loosened their tongues. Of course, a truncheon would have done the same, or a gun-barrel jammed into their filthy crotches, but the stew was . . . was elegant. Yes.

  “Kitty-kitty,” Dussander called. The cat’s ears cocked forward. It half-rose, then half-remembered some long-ago kick, or perhaps a match that had burned its whiskers, and it settled back on its haunches. But soon it would move.

  He had found a way of propitiating his nightmare. It was, in a way, no more than wearing the SS uniform . . . but raised to a greater power. Dussander was pleased with himself, only sorry that he had never thought of it before. He supposed he had the boy to thank for this new method of quieting himself, for showing him that the key to the past’s terrors was not in rejection but in contemplation and even something like a friend’s embrace. It was true that before the boy’s unexpected arrival last summer he hadn’t had any bad dreams for a long time, but he believed now that he had come to a coward’s terms with his past. He had been forced to give up a part of himself. Now he had reclaimed it.

  “Kitty-kitty,” called Dussander, and a smile broke on his face, a kindly smile, a reassuring smile, the smile of all old men who have somehow come through the cruel courses of life to a safe place, still relatively intact, and with at least some wisdom.

  The tom rose from its haunches, hesitated only a moment longer, and then trotted across the remainder of the back yard with lithe grace. It mounted the steps, gave Dussander a final mistrustful look, laying back its chewed and scabby ears; then it began to drink the milk.

  “Nice milk,” Dussander said, pulling on the Playtex rubber gloves that had lain in his lap all the while. “Nice milk for a nice kitty.” He had bought these gloves in the supermarket. He had stood in the express lane, and older women had looked at him approvingly, even speculatively. The gloves were advertised on TV. They had cuffs. They were so flexible you could pick up a dime while you were wearing them.

  He stroked the cat’s back with one green finger and talked to it soothingly. Its back began to arch with the rhythm of his strokes.

  Just before the bowl was empty, he seized the cat.

  It came electrically alive in his clenching hands, twisting and jerking, clawing at the rubber. Its body lashed limberly back and forth, and Dussander had no doubt that if its teeth or claws got into him, it would come off the winner. It was an old campaigner. It takes one to know one, Dussander thought, grinning.

  Holding the cat prudently away from his body, the painful grin stamped on his face, Dussander pushed the back door open with his foot and went into the kitchen. The cat yowled and twisted and ripped at the rubber gloves. Its feral, triangular head flashed down and fastened on one green thumb.

  “Nasty kitty,” Dussander said reproachfully.

  The oven door stood open. Dussander threw the cat inside. Its claws made a ripping, prickly sound as they disengaged from the gloves. Dussander slammed the oven door shut with one knee, provoking a painful twinge from his arthritis. Yet he continued to grin. Breathing hard, nearly panting, he propped himself against the stove for a moment, his head hanging down. It was a gas stove. He rarely used it for anything fancier than TV dinners and killing stray cats.

  Faintly, rising up through the gas burners, he could hear the cat scratching and yowling to be let out.

>   Dussander twisted the oven dial over to 500°. There was an audible pop! as the oven pilot-light lit two double rows of hissing gas. The cat stopped yowling and began to scream. It sounded . . . yes . . . almost like a young boy. A young boy in terrible pain. The thought made Dussander smile even more broadly. His heart thundered in his chest. The cat scratched and whirled madly in the oven, still screaming. Soon, a hot, furry, burning smell began to seep out of the oven and into the room.

  • • •

  He scraped the remains of the cat out of the oven half an hour later, using a barbecue fork he had acquired for two dollars and ninety-eight cents at the Grant’s in the shopping center a mile away.

  The cat’s roasted carcass went into an empty flour sack. He took the sack down cellar. The cellar floor had never been cemented. Shortly, Dussander came back up. He sprayed the kitchen with Glade until it reeked of artificial pine scent. He opened all the windows. He washed the barbecue fork and hung it up on the pegboard. Then he sat down to wait and see if the boy would come. He smiled and smiled.

  • • •

  Todd did come, about five minutes after Dussander had given up on him for the afternoon. He was wearing a warm-up jacket with his school colors on it; he was also wearing a San Diego Padres baseball cap. He carried his schoolbooks under his arm.

  “Yucka-ducka,” he said, coming into the kitchen and wrinkling his nose. “What’s that smell? It’s awful.”

  “I tried the oven,” Dussander said, lighting a cigarette. “I’m afraid I burned my supper. I had to throw it out.”