A Quiet Flame

“Thanks,” I muttered, and bent my head down to the flame. Too late I remembered it had been an old Gestapo trick. Straight out of the unofficial manual. Part III. How to silence a talkative suspect in the back of a black car. One fist holds the lighter. The other comes across from the other side of the car as the suspect ducks down to the flame, and knocks him out cold. At least, that’s what I suppose must have happened. It was that, or the Argies really did have an atom bomb and, accidentally, someone had pressed the fire button instead of the bezel on a cigarette lighter. For me, the effect was pretty much the same, however. One minute it was a nice, sunny day. The next, darkness all over the land until the ninth hour. And the sensation that I was humming like a very sick bee, as if someone had just put twenty thousand volts through a metal cap and a brine-soaked sponge attached to my cranium. For a moment or two, I thought I heard laughter. The same kind of laughter you get when you’re a cat in a sack full of stones and someone drops you down a well. I hit the water without so much as a splash and disappeared below the surface. It was a deep well and the water was very cold. The laughter went away. I stopped mewing. That was the general idea. I was pacified, the way the Gestapo liked. For some reason, I remembered Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo. He only lasted until 1934, when Goering lost control of the Prussian police. He ended up as a local government official in Cologne or Hannover, and found himself dismissed altogether when he refused to arrest the city’s Jews. What happened to him after that? A sucker punch and a trip to a concentration camp, no doubt. Like poor Frieda Bamberger, who died in the middle of nowhere with rubber seals on the shower doors. I couldn’t see where I was going, but I felt like I was already under the earth. I felt my hand poking up through the ground. Reaching for life . . .

Someone wrestled my arms around behind my back and tied my wrists together. I was blindfolded now. I was standing up and leaning across the warm hood of the Ford. I could hear the sound of airplanes. We were at an airport. I thought it must be Ezeira.

Two men lifted me under the arms and dragged me across the tarmac. My feet weren’t coming with me. It didn’t seem to hinder our progress. The noise of the aircraft engine grew louder. A metallic, oily smell filled the air and I felt the wind of the propeller in my face. It seemed to revive me a little.

“I feel I should warn you,” I said. “I’m not a good air traveler.” They hauled me up a short flight of metal steps and then flung me down on a hard, metallic floor. There was something else on the floor besides me. The something else shifted and groaned, and I realized there were others in the same boat as me. Except that it wasn’t a boat. It might have been better if it had been. Either way, I had now guessed what lay ahead of us. A river trip. The River Plate. Perhaps it was better this way, after all. At least we wouldn’t drown. The fall would kill us.

The door closed and the aircraft began to move. Someone, a man a few feet away, was reciting a prayer. Someone else was retching with fear. There was a strong smell of vomit and human incontinence and gasoline.

“So the rumors are true, then?” I said. “There are no parachutes in the Argentine air force?”

A woman started crying. I hoped it wasn’t Anna.

The plane engines roared. Just two of them, I thought. A C-47 Dakota, most likely. You often saw them heading out over the River Plate. People sitting outside the Richmond would look up from their newspapers and their coffees and make jokes about these airplanes. “There goes the opposition,” or “Why can’t Communists swim in the River Plate? Because their hands are tied together.” The floor underneath me began to vibrate loudly. I felt the plane accelerate, and we started our takeoff. A few seconds later, there was a lurch, and we were airborne and the vibration settled into a steady, droning rhythm. The plane began to climb. The woman crying was almost hysterical by now.

“Anna?” I called. “Is that you? It’s me—”

Someone slapped me hard across the face. “No talking,” said a man’s voice. He lit a cigarette, and suddenly I remembered why I was a smoker. The smell of tobacco is the most wonderful smell in the universe when you’re facing death. I remember being shelled in 1916 and how a cigarette had got me through without my losing my nerve or my bowels.

“I wouldn’t mind a smoke,” I said. “Under the circumstances.”

I heard a man’s voice murmur something from the opposite end of the aircraft and, a few seconds later and much to my surprise, some fingers pushed a cigarette between my lips. It was already alight. I rolled it into the corner of my mouth and let my lungs go to work on it.

“Thanks,” I said.