InsaneJournal

Wilkommen (The Emcee [Cabaret], PG-13)
Title: Wilkommen
Characters: The Emcee [Cabaret]
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1049
Warnings: Nazis, death, and violence.
Summary: In here, life is beautiful.
Notes: A Yuletide '08 pinch hit for kenaz, and my favorite of the four I wrote for the challenge.

His is just another face in the ragged line of prisoners. Before the war, few really knew him, and now there are fewer still who might recognize him, his face devoid of makeup and its ever-present grin. He bunches his coat around himself and moves forward, valise in hand. These children should stop screaming. Why don't their mothers shut them up?

A guard splits the line from the train into two, and there is a vague flicker of recognition in the guard's eyes. The baton moves to the right.

He is one of the lucky ones. Lucky, however, is relative. He's alive, but maybe to be lucky is to be gassed, to be dead, to be away from the mud and the wire and the filth and the crying and the knowledge that what once was shall never be again. The fear of the guards, of the dogs. He's always hated dogs.

The fear, omnipresent, of slow and sinking death.

He doesn't expect the Nazis to be mercifully swift about it.

His name is long forgotten. He now answers to his number, as they all do. It's not the first time he's escaped into a new identity. It's not the first time he's slept in a bed with someone who doesn't know his name, who never will. He could laugh at the comparison if it didn't make a part of him curl up, wither away.

He escapes into the past when he can. Even when he is working, digging holes, his thin fingers gripping a broken shovel handle, the old songs still well up inside him and he forces back tears.

Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome.

He remembers the words, the melody, the oom-pah of the tubas, and when he can, he closes his eyes for a moment and sees the colours and lights of the cabaret, hears the giggles of the girls. But always he senses the presence of darkness in the back of the room.

How wrong he had been. The Nazis are nothing, he would reassure the others in the cabaret, even when officers gathered at the edges of the crowd, even when people disappeared under mysterious circumstances. They are nothing. And now it is time to go on. Places, if you please. Helga, your strap is slipping. Fritzi, please do not be late on your cue again tonight. Sally, you are lovely, as always. And here we go.

Fremde, etranger, stranger.

He digs graves.

Glücklich zu sehen, je suis enchanté.

He digs graves, and he doesn't look at the faces that go in them.

Happy to see you, bleibe, reste, stay.

He doesn't know how many days go by. How many weeks, months. Eventually, it snows. He recalls New Year's Eve, champagne, a bed full of writhing bodies, his in the middle, slippery and warm. Mouths everywhere, and laughter. New Year's Day, a hangover and a silk dressing gown, sausages for breakfast, and hot coffee, and the bodies from the night before either departed or still asleep.

If he didn't have a life to remember, he'd drown here in the monotony of the camp. For there is mud and wire and filth and crying, and there are blisters on his hands and there is little food, but mostly there is the never-ending twilight of hopelessness.

Leave your troubles outside!

He's left everything. They all have. He tries as long as he can to separate himself from the other prisoners. It was his defence in the world that no longer exists. But he realizes finally that that's a route to certain death here in the camp.

So he makes allegiances. Trades. Gives portions of his meals to those who need it more than he might.

We have no troubles here!

Patches of blue sky appear, though it is still winter. There is a murmur amongst the prisoners. He pays it no attention. The rumours have been wrong before.

In here, life is beautiful! The girls are beautiful! Even the orchestra is beautiful!

There is no point in getting one's hopes up.

He digs more graves, and then the crematory stops working. Bodies pile up. He finds a hiding place, fearful that his body may be next. He is smaller than he ever was before. His new stature makes it easier to hide.

Something to be grateful for.

The rest happens like this:

The Nazis disappear.

There are fires.

And then there are Russians.

He collapses.

In later years, it will be told that there was a joyous celebration. That the camp was liberated, that prisoners weeping tears of joy clasped their arms around the necks of Russian officers. That children and adults alike poured out of the camp. Some had to be carried.
He doesn't remember any of this.

He remembers, when he allows himself to remember, a hospital, clean white sheets, wisps of consciousness between long sleeps.

He is a very old man now. He never returned to the decadence of the cabaret, if it even still existed after the war. He didn't care to find out. That was the past. Now the camp is also the past. Germany is the past. He lives in has a flat on the second floor and he doesn't have to share a bathroom. His cat, with long black hair, is his once concession to the past. Her name is Sally.

He slips away one evening, a blanket on his lap, Sally purring nearby. She gets up, nudges at his hand. His arm slips, dangles over the arm of his chair, the faded number a dark smudge on his paper-pale skin.

Auf wiedersehen...

À bientôt...