Two Sams: Ghost Stories, The [S.S. Col.] by Hirshberg Glen

Author:Hirshberg, Glen [Hirshberg, Glen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Stories, Horror, Ghost Stories, Fiction
Publisher: Cemetery Dance Publications
Published: 2003-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Dancing Men

We’d been all afternoon in the Old Jewish Cemetery, where green light filters through the trees and lies atop the tumbled tombstones like algae. Mostly I think the kids were tired. The two-week Legacy of the Holocaust tour I had organized had taken us to Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg, where downed electrical wires slither through the brittle grass, and Bebelplatz in East Berlin, where ghost-shadows of burned books flutter in their chamber in the ground like white wings. We’d spent our nights not sleeping on sleeper trains east to Auschwitz and Birkenau and our days on public transport, traipsing through the fields of dead and the monuments to them, and all seven high-school juniors in my care had had enough.

From my spot on a bench alongside the roped-off stone path that meandered through the grounds and back out to the streets of Josefov, I watched six of my seven charges giggling and chattering around the final resting place of Rabbi Loew. I’d told them the story of the rabbi, and the clay man he’d supposedly created and then animated, and now they were running their hands over his tombstone, tracing Hebrew letters they couldn’t read, chanting “Emet,” the word I’d taught them, in low voices and laughing. As of yet, nothing had risen from the dirt. The Tribe, they’d taken to calling themselves, after I told them that the Wandering Jews didn’t really work, historically, since the essential characteristic of the Wanderer himself was his solitude.

There are teachers, I suppose, who would have been considered members of the Tribe by the Tribe, particularly on a summer trip, far from home and school and television and familiar language. But I had never been that sort of teacher.

Nor was I the only excluded member of our traveling party. Lurking not far from me, I spotted Penny Berry, the quietest member of our group and the only Goy, staring over the graves into the trees with her expressionless eyes half closed and her lipstickless lips curled into the barest hint of a smile. Her auburn hair sat cocked on the back of her head in a tight, precise ponytail. When she saw me watching, she wandered over, and I swallowed a sigh. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Penny, exactly. But she asked uncomfortable questions, and she knew how to wait for answers, and she made me nervous for no reason I could explain.

“Hey, Mr. Gadeuszki,” she said, her enunciation studied, perfect. She’d made me teach her how to say it right, grind the s and z and k together into that single, Slavic snarl of sound. “What’s with the stones?”

She gestured at the tiny gray pebbles placed across the tops of several nearby tombstones. Those on the slab nearest us glinted in the warm, green light like little eyes. “In memory,” I said. I thought about sliding over on the bench to make room for her, then thought that would only make both of us even more awkward.

“Why not flowers?” Penny said.

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