"Gardner Dozois - Down Among the Dead Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

Bruckman ate his portion, counting the sips and bites, forcing himself to take his time. Later, he would
take a very small bite of the bread he had in his pocket. He always saved a small morsel of food for later
—in the endless world of the camp, he had learned to give himself things to look forward to. Better to
dream of bread than to get lost in the present. That was the fate of the Musselmanner.

But he always dreamed of food. Hunger was with him every moment of the day and night. Those times
when he actually ate were in a way the most difficult, for there was never enough to satisfy him. There
was the taste of softness in his mouth, and then in an instant it was gone. The emptiness took the form of
pain—it hurt to eat. For bread, he thought, he would have killed his father, or his wife. God forgive me,
and he watched Wernecke—Wernecke, who had shared his bread with him, who had died a little so he
could live. He’s a better man than I, Bruckman thought.

It was dim inside the barracks. A bare light bulb hung from the ceiling and cast sharp shadows across the
cavernous room. Two tiers of five-foot-deep shelves ran around the room on three sides, bare wooden
shelves where the men slept without blankets or mattresses. Set high in the northern wall was a slatted
window, which let in the stark white light of the kliegs. Outside, the lights turned the grounds into a
deathly imitation of day; only inside the barracks was it night.

“Do you know what tonight is, my friends?” Wernecke asked. He sat in the far corner of the room with
Josef, who, hour by hour, was reverting back into a Musselmann. Wernecke’s face looked hollow and
drawn in the light from the window and the light bulb; his eyes were deep-set and his face was long with
deep creases running from his nose to the corners of his thin mouth. His hair was black, and even since
Bruckman had known him, quite a bit of it had fallen out. He was a very tall man, almost six feet four,
and that made him stand out in a crowd, which was dangerous in a death camp. But Wernecke had his
own secret ways of blending with the crowd, of making himself invisible.

“No, tell us what tonight is,” crazy old Bohme said. That men such as Bohme could survive was a
miracle—or, as Bruckman thought—a testament to men such as Wernecke who somehow found the
strength to help the others live.

“It’s Passover,” Wernecke said.

“How does he know that?” someone mumbled, but it didn’t matter how Wernecke knew because he knew
—even if it really wasn’t Passover by the calendar. In this dimly lit barrack, it was Passover, the feast of


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 Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann - Down Among the Dead Men

freedom, the time of thanksgiving.

“But how can we have Passover without a seder?” asked Bohme. “We don’t even have any matzoh,” he
whined.

“Nor do we have candles, or a silver cup for Elijah, or the shankbone, or haroset—nor would I make a
seder over the traif the Nazis are so generous in giving us,” replied Wernecke with a smile. “But we can
pray, can’t we? And when we all get out of here, when we’re in our own homes in the coming year with
God’s help, then we’ll have twice as much food—two afikomens, a bottle of wine for Elijah, and the
haggadahs that our fathers and our fathers’ fathers used.”