Wake The Stone Man Read Online Free Page B

searchlights pointed at the train. The doors opened and bodies fell out. I thought they must have fainted because there were so many people crammed together on the train. Lines of people were loaded into big open-backed trucks. Trucks moved through the night and fog towards a building. A building that looked like the residential school.
    Then men. I saw naked men. Stark naked. I’d never seen a naked man before. I’d seen girls at swimming class in the change room but never a naked man. I saw a long line of old naked men facing me and I thought oh god, oh god what kind of a movie did I walk into? I looked down the aisle to see if I could squeeze past the couple at the end. Their knees were sticking out so far I wouldn’t be able to get past them. I looked to my left. A few men were sitting at the end of the aisle. In front another man and woman — they looked old — and beside them some men were sitting alone.
    I looked up again. Shaved heads. Striped pajamas. Inside the long low buildings, rows and rows of bunk beds stacked with people like chickens in a chicken coup. A woman’s big white scared eyes, like the eyes of the girl on the train. The music was creepy and sad.
    The barbed wire fence again, and there was a man hanging on it, the tops of his fingers curled over the fence. Curled over like Nakina’s fingers the day I saw her climbing the chain-link fence. His head was tilted back, a hole through his forehead, and because the movie was in black and white the blood that dripped down his cheek was black. The camera pulled back and I saw that he was hanging dead on the fence, hooked there by the collar of his coat.
    Rows and rows of men and boys — naked again but this time their legs were thin and I could see their ribs, and I didn’t think it was dirty that they were naked because their faces were so sad and their bodies so thin, and their penises were small and shrivelled. I wanted to wrap them in warm blankets.
    I saw a country cottage. A man in a uniform with a swastika on his shoulder and a woman in a flower print dress were having tea in front of the fireplace. There was a dog beside them. The woman looked bored.
    I saw the date 1942 on the screen, then more men in uniforms looking at a model of a building with a brick chimney. More trains, more trucks and women and children herded naked into the buildings with the chimneys — then bodies on the floor. I couldn’t look at the subtitles anymore, I couldn’t take my eyes off the children. Now women and children were standing in a field in front of a firing squad. There was a crack of fire as the guns went off and the women and children fell. A muffled cry, then weeping. Was it me? No, the older woman two rows down in front of me was crying. She had her head on the shoulder of the man beside her.
    A body in a bed. He was dead but his eyes were wide open. That terror look again — the eyes all white. I wanted to close my eyes but I couldn’t. Piles of eyeglasses and combs, and the camera panned back to show a large pile of human hair then farther back to show a wide field of human hair. Furnace doors opened and human bones were shovelled out. I remembered what Nakina had said — genocide — the slaughter of a race.
    Piles of body parts, unattached legs still wearing socks, hands over legs over heads. A tin pail of men’s heads, all with their eyes open. A head upside down with a big black hole where an eye should have been. Then a tractor. It moved slowly, slowly forward, scooping up bodies in its shovel. Forward slowly, arms, legs, ribs, heads rolled and writhed in a strange dance. A muffled scream and this time it was me.
    There was colour now. Green. The wide green field. And below the words: “Who amongst us will keep watch for the new executioner? Who amongst us will keep watch?”
    The lights came on in the theatre and I lowered my head and closed my eyes. I could hear the people shuffling