Apt Pupil

6

The face that came in answer to Todd’s insistent finger on the bell was haggard and yellowed. The hair, which had been lush in July, had now begun to recede from the bony brow; it looked lustreless and brittle. Dussander’s body, thin to begin with, was now gaunt… although, Todd thought, he was nowhere near as gaunt as the inmates who had once been delivered into his hands.

Todd’s left hand had been behind his back when Dussander came to the door. Now he brought it out and handed a wrapped package to Dussander. ‘Merry Christmas!’ he yelled.

Dussander had cringed from the box; now he took it with no expression of pleasure or surprise. He handled it gingerly, as if it might contain explosive. Beyond the porch, it was raining. It had been raining off and on for almost a week, and Todd had carried the box inside his coat. It was wrapped in gay foil and ribbon.

‘What is it?’ Dussander asked without enthusiasm as they went to the kitchen.

‘Open it and see.’

Todd took a can of Coke from his jacket pocket and put it on the red and white checked oilcloth that covered the kitchen table. ‘Better pull down the shades,’ he said confidentially.

Distrust immediately leaked onto Dussander’s face. ‘Oh? Why?’

‘Well… you can never tell who’s looking,’ Todd said, smiling. ‘Isn’t that how you got along all those years? By seeing the people who might be looking before they saw you?’

Dussander pulled down the kitchen shades. Then he poured himself a glass of bourbon. Then he pulled the bow off the package. Todd had wrapped it the way boys so often wrap Christmas packages — boys who have more important things on their minds, things like football and street hockey and the Friday Nite Creature Feature you’ll watch with a friend who’s sleeping over, the two of you wrapped in a blanket and crammed together on one end of the couch, laughing. There were a lot of ragged corners, a lot of uneven seams, a lot of Scotch tape. It spoke of impatience with such a womanly thing.

Dussander was a little touched in spite of himself. And later, when the horror had receded a little, he thought: I should have known, It was a uniform. An SS uniform. Complete with jackboots.

He looked numbly from the contents of, the box to its cardboard cover: PETER’S QUALITY COSTUME CLOTHIERS — AT THE SAME LOCATION SINCE 1951!

‘No,’ he said softly. ‘I won’t put it on. This is where it ends, boy. I’ll die before I put it on.’

‘Remember what they did to Eichmann,’ Todd said solemnly. ‘He was an old man and he had no politics. Isn’t that what you said? Besides, I saved the whole fall for it. It cost over eighty bucks, with the boots thrown in. You didn’t mind wearing it in 1944, either. Not at all.’

‘You little bastard? Dussander raised one fist over his head. Todd didn’t flinch at all. He stood his ground, eyes shining.

‘Yeah,’ he said softly. ‘Go ahead and touch me. You just touch me once.’

Dussander lowered the hand. His lips were quivering. ‘You are a fiend from hell,’ he muttered.

‘Put it on,’ Todd invited.

Dussander’s hands went to the tie of his robe and paused there. His eyes, sheeplike and begging, looked into Todd’s. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I am an old man. No more.’

Todd shook his head slowly but firmly. His eyes were still shining. He liked it when Dussander begged. The way they must have begged him once. The inmates at Patin.

Dussander let the robe fall to the floor and stood naked except for his slippers and his boxer shorts. His chest was sunken, his belly slightly bloated. His arms were scrawny old man’s arms. But the uniform, Todd thought The uniform will make a difference.

Slowly, Dussander took the tunic out of the box and began to put it on.

Ten minutes later he stood fully dressed in the SS uniform. The cap was slightly askew, the shoulders slumped, but still the death’s-head insignia stood out clearly. Dussander had a dark dignity — at least in Todd’s eyes — that he had not possessed earlier. In spite of his slump, in spite of the cockeyed angle of his feet, Todd was pleased. For the first time Dussander looked to Todd as Todd believed he should look. Older, yes. Defeated, certainly. But in uniform again. Not an old man spinning away his sunset years watching Lawrence Welk on a cruddy black and white TV with tinfoil on the rabbit-ears, but Kurt Dussander, the Blood Fond of Patin.

As for Dussander, he felt disgust, discomfort… and a mild, sneaking sense of relief. He partly despised this latter emotion, recognizing it as the truest indicator yet of the psychological domination the boy had established over him. He was the boy’s prisoner, and every time he found he could live through yet another indignity, every time he felt that mild relief, the boy’s power grew. And yet he was relieved. It was only cloth and buttons and snaps… and it was a sham at that. The fly was a zipper; it should have been buttons. The insignia was wrong, the tailoring sloppy, the boots a cheap grade of imitation leather. It was only a trumpery uniform after ail, and it wasn’t exactly killing him, was it? No. It ‘Straighten your cap!’ Todd said loudly.

Dussander blinked at him, startled.

‘Straighten your cap, soldierf Dussander did so, unconsciously giving it that final small insolent twist that had been the trademark of his Oberleutnants — and, sadly wrong as it was, this was a Oberleutnant’s uniform.

‘Get those feet together!’

He did so, bringing the heels together with a smart rap, doing the correct thing with hardly a thought, doing it as if the intervening years had slipped off along with his bathrobe.

‘Achtung?

He snapped to attention, and for a moment Todd was scared — really scared. He felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice, who had brought the brooms to life but who had not possessed enough skill to stop them once they got started. The old man living on his pension was gone. Dussander was here.

Then his fear was replaced by a tingling sense of power.

‘Aboutface!’

Dussander pivoted neatly, the bourbon forgotten, the torment of the last three months forgotten. He heard his heels click together again as he faced the grease-splattered stove. Beyond it, he could see the dusty parade ground of the military academy where he had learned his soldier’s trade.

‘About face!’

He whirled again, this time not executing the order as well, losing his balance a little. Once it would have been ten demerits and the butt of a swagger-stick in his belly, sending his breath out in a hot and agonized gust. Inwardly he smiled a little. The boy didn’t know all the tricks. No indeed.

‘Now march? Todd cried. His eyes were hot, glowing.

The iron went out of Dussander’s shoulders; he slumped forward again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Please—’

‘March! March! March, I said!’

With a strangled sound, Dussander began to goose-step across the faded linoleum of his kitchen floor. He right-faced to avoid the table; right-faced again as he approached the wall. His face was uptilted slightly, expressionless. His legs rammed out before him, then crashed down, making the cheap china rattle in the cabinet over the sink. His arms moved in short arcs.

The image of the walking brooms recurred to Todd, and his fright recurred with it. It suddenly struck him that he didn’t want Dussander to be enjoying any part of this, and that perhaps — just perhaps — he had wanted to make Dussander appear ludicrous even more than he had wanted to make him appear authentic. But somehow, despite the man’s age and the cheap dime-store furnishings of the kitchen, he didn’t look ludicrous in the least. He looked frightening. For the first time the corpses in the ditches and the crematoriums seemed to take on their own reality for Todd. The photographs of the tangled arms and legs and torsos, fishbelly white in the cold spring rains of Germany, were not something staged like a scene in a horror film — a pile of bodies created from department store dummies, say, to be picked up by the grips and propmen when the scene was done — but simply a real fact, stupendous and inexplicable and evil. For a moment it seemed to him that he could smell the bland and slightly smoky odour of decomposition.

Terror gathered him in.

‘Stop!’ he shouted.

Dussander continued to goose-step, his eyes blank and far away. His head had come up even more, pulling the scrawny chicken-tendons of his throat tight, tilting his chin at an arrogant angle. His nose, blade-thin, jutted obscenely.

Todd felt sweat in his armpits. ‘Halt!’ he cried out.

Dussander halted, right foot forward, left coming up and then down beside the right with a single pistonlike stamp. For a moment the cold lack of expression held on his face -robotic, mindless — and then it was replaced by confusion. Confusion was followed by defeat. He slumped.

Todd let out a silent breath of relief and for a moment he was furious with himself. Who’s in charge here, anyway’: Then his self-confidence flooded back in. / am, that’s who. And he better not forget it.

He began to smile again. ‘Pretty good. But with a little practice, I think you’ll be a lot better.’

Dussander stood mute, his head hanging.

‘You can take it off now,’ Todd added generously… and couldn’t help wondering if he really wanted Dussander to put it on again. For a few seconds there…..