Excellent…Absolutely excellent…”

 

Bernhard Krunstadt had created his masterpiece. This time he was certain of it. The white marble sculpture of Frieda Goldstein would be his testament, and more important than that, his salvation. He had only a bit more to do around the neck, some fine chiseling to achieve the unique feminine delicacy that had been Frieda’s; afterward, he would not need to sculpt one additional chip from a new stone to attain his immortality.

 

Inside his studio, Krunstadt had created the sculpture entirely from memory of the woman, no mean feat for even the most talented artist. He had managed to salvage a faded old photograph of her taken at the peak of her beauty, and the likeness provided inspiration enough to turn a block of marble into a work of genius.

 

Of course, it would have been impossible to perfectly capture the flesh and blood Frieda in stone. It seemed miraculous that even God had created such a woman. Not so miraculous was the ease it took for one man to destroy her, and Krunstadt had spent a lifetime doing penance with his hammer and chisel. He had traveled miles from his homeland to achieve his atonement, making a new life for himself in America to start fresh, and today it seemed his retribution would finally be paid in total. It had taken him almost fifty years to attempt capturing Frieda’s likeness in stone, although his nearly completed work was more a testament to the woman’s ageless beauty than to his sculpting skills.

 

[Yes…she’s magnificent.]

 

A glass of wine would go nicely now, just before he completed the finishing touches. A few sips, and when he was done with his creation, he might do justice to the rest of the bottle of Rheingau as a personal celebration of his triumph. He poured himself a small amount of the white wine, holding it to the light and studying the clear liquid inside the glass as if some lost image might appear in its luster.

 

[“How easy it is to say you love me, Bernhard…so easy to say the words…”]

 

Krunstadt raised his glass to the woman in marble, his homage to the young nurse plucked from her hospital duties by the invading army during one night in a besieged Warsaw ghetto a thousand lifetimes ago.

 

“To you, Frieda, and to the brief happiness, we were never meant to share.”

 

He drank the wine in rapid gulps, and its potent bitterness caused his head to spin so suddenly, he had to sit. Bernhard closed his eyes and remembered when the world was different, when life itself was unlike any other time.

 

And he remembered the girl…

 

~ * ~

 

…the dark-haired girl with the spicy temperament who secretly shared the bed of a handsome young officer. On a winter’s night, their last, while her eyes spilled with angry tears, love and hate had somehow combusted between the two to create something indefinable. A raging fire does not extinguish itself, and on that night, Bernhard could not allow its flames to consume the both of them.

 

“Frieda…Frieda…You ask too much of me.”

 

“Too much, Bernhard? Too much? I have witnessed the Pogrom beatings and rapes in our streets. You are a powerful officer in the Wehrmacht. You know of the executions and disease here. It is not too much to ask that those in your charge allow my family to leave Warsaw and remain unharmed! My mother and father gather the remnants of their belongings, even as we speak. There is talk of refuge in Hungary for the displaced families. You have the authority to find them safe passage, Bernhard. You say you love me, but you show no love outside of this bed. Are you like the others, as much a man of stone as the figures you sculpt?”

 

Perhaps she truly hated him, and what passed for passion was only a despicable means to an end. He had considered this, of course. She had been given no choice when he selected her to come to his bed, and she was a shrewd enough woman to turn her circumstance to her family’s advantage. Now her dark eyes locked with his, and the soothing words that should have come easily stuck inside his throat.

 

 Frieda, you cannot possibly understand the complexities of—m”

 

He stopped himself. How could the woman comprehend the duty he had to his country? She was a Jewess, too arrogantly proud to recognize that destiny belonged to him and to his race. Krunstadt found the quality of her defiance oddly exciting because he admired her strength, but that same defiance also made him despise her. It was as if some odious poison grew within his heart whenever he held Frieda in his arms, and he did not know whether to make love to her all night or beat her senseless. He could never allow anyone in a position of authority to discover she shared his bed. There were none among the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo, who would have permitted Krunstadt the luxury of loving her.

 

“There is talk of the camps, that Warsaw is but a holding place for all of us until—”

 

“Enough!” he interrupted. “You ask too much! There are things which should not—and can not—be changed. Your family will be fine.”

 

“Like all the others who are taken to Umschlagplatz?”

 

“Yes. Fine. All of them.”

 

That was not exactly the truth. Umschlagplatz was the plaza to which the Warsaw Jews were regularly herded for deportation to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.

 

The camps.

 

He expected the girl was too smart to believe him even if she so desperately wanted to, and when he reached for her, Bernhard felt certain she would spit in his face. Instead, she turned away while saying nothing, and this was much worse. Krunstadt could deal with her anger more easily than her withdrawal. In later years the officer often asked himself if the girl’s refusal of him that night had determined his decision.

 

Frieda left Officer Krunstadt’s bed, insisting on joining her aged parents during this most treacherous of nights. She put on the crisp nurse’s uniform whose armband displayed the six-pointed star prominently exhibiting in bold letters the word JUDE. The uniform had kept her safe until now, for medical persons were a valuable commodity among the higher-ranking officials, and none questioned the woman’s frequent visits to officers of the S.S. Still, the star let no one forget what she was.

 

Bernhard did not stop her from leaving. It would have been foolish to try.

 

After midnight Krunstadt smoked the first of many cigarettes, taking the short walk to a poorly lit cross street near his quarters. From a distance, he watched as soldiers pulled Isaac and Anna Goldstein from their home. The old woman was screaming, but her husband remained silent and did not resist. Under the Warsaw moon, Frieda’s elderly parents were herded at gunpoint, along with many others, into the crowded streets.

 

He saw Frieda push her way into the crowd, toward the soldiers standing closest to her mother. The girl was no longer wearing her nurse’s uniform but instead the drab gray clothing of a factory worker worn by practically every Jew in Warsaw. Had she worn the nurse’s dress, a soldier would have spotted her, would have pulled her away from the herded rabble. But this the girl clearly did not want.

 

“You do not have to do this, Frieda,” Bernhard muttered to himself. “There is no need, no point…”

 

Amid cries and shouts, Krunstadt stood too far off to hear the young woman’s protests to the tall soldier holding the rifle. Her wild gesticulations suggested first pleading and then anger directed at the man who poked the weapon repeatedly into her mother’s back.

 

Krunstadt’s mind supplied the words he knew Frieda must have spoken.

 

“No! Don’t take them, please! No! No!”

 

And then …

 

“Damn you! Damn all of you!”

 

Krunstadt saw her pound the man’s shoulder, watched him push her aside, and set his rifle’s aim on her. Anna Goldstein noticed and threw herself between her daughter and the man, pulling at the officer’s arm with such determination he almost dropped his weapon. He struck her shoulder with the butt of his rifle, and the old woman toppled near the curb. The tall soldier turned and waited for her to stagger to her feet, then shot the old woman in the head.

 

Hearing the crack of the gun, Isaac Goldstein looked behind for only a moment, then pulled his daughter from the tumult. Perhaps he did not recognize the supine body of his wife that lay twisted in the street, her drab clothing freckled with blood; perhaps he did not see the others step around her as if only a fallen bird lay on the ground. From afar, the old man’s expression remained unreadable, and his only reaction was to quicken his pace, tugging Frieda’s arm to remove her from danger.

 

Because the girl was not wearing her medical clothing, she would also be shot had she attempted to leave the filing mass of people. Bernhard Krunstadt thought of running to Frieda’s side, revealing that this young woman was his personal nurse, that she had a permit to remain behind. But he did not move.

 

The girl’s mother was dead, and Krunstadt knew Frieda would never abandon her father even knowing the mass of ragged workers, both young and old, was being led to the trains at Umschlagplatz. There seemed no point to rescue one who chose not to be rescued. He watched father and daughter become swallowed by the moving herd.

 

Bernhard remained in the streets, the crowds still shambling past him while his cigarette burned to ash. Occasionally the flash of gunfire stabbed the darkness like a sudden crack of lightning. The night had turned especially cold, and the officer tightened his collar against the harsh wind. He waited until two soldiers carried off the remains of the old woman. By then, the chill had become bitter, and Krunstadt badly wanted to return to his quarters. But there remained

something he had to do.

 

The door to the Goldstein home had been kicked open. Krunstadt climbed the staircase to the second story and located the girl’s room. As he had imagined, it was a dismal place whose plaster ceiling was badly damaged and whose gray paint was peeling everywhere. He rifled through several drawers. There was no money, of course, nothing of any value, but Krunstadt looked for only one thing.

 

Inside the parents’ room, he found it. The photograph of Frieda must have been taken on a warm summer’s day, and there in an open field, she was smiling more radiantly than Bernhard had ever seen. He quickly shoved the portrait into his pocket.

 

This was the woman he wished to remember. Her astonishing smile had already been significantly altered in the ghetto of Warsaw, a smile soon to be recast into something horrible. He did not want to think about the human skeleton she would become at Buchenwald, nor imagine what living atrocity into which she would have been transformed when death finally took her.

 

 He never was given that choice. As years passed, during the darkest hours of the night, Bernhard Krunstadt lay awake imagining the girl’s final days in the camp, imagining her haunted eyes hollowed like black sockets and wondering if Frieda Goldstein’s last words had been screams.

 

~ * ~

 

The sculptor held the faded photograph in his palm, losing himself in it.

 

Of course, the name no longer was Krunstadt, not since he had left Germany almost fifty years past, but Bernhard could never think of his identity as anything else. He cared little if the title associated with his art bore the ridiculous American name of Edgar Kornman. He knew who he was.

 

The ’79 Rheingau had proven more effective than he had anticipated. Curiously delicious, it had diverted him from his purpose. He placed the photograph alongside the wine glass and took hammer and chisel in hand.

 

The girl’s likeness in white marble had astounded its creator. His heart raced just looking at her reborn smile, recaptured from a moment of happiness somehow miraculously plucked from the past. Krunstadt had no idea his hands possessed such ability. But there remained the neck of his sculpture to complete, and one misguided tap of the hammer could easily annihilate his finished work. He held his chisel before him to steady his hand, then began.

 

“Tonight, Frieda, the burden is lifted. Tonight you release me.”

 

He stopped himself before his hammer struck the chisel. Something was different, something not quite right. The change in the sculpture was not readily apparent, and at first, Krunstadt believed it a trick of his vision. The figure had altered only slightly, and he could not put his finger on the peculiarity. Bernhard studied his work closely before he saw.

 

The woman’s cheekbones had hollowed somewhat, turning her face gaunt. The arms and legs also had lost muscle tone and seemed rawboned. The marble’s luster had dissipated, and the stone grayed, giving the woman’s likeness a wan and sickly appearance. The smile now was uncertain and tentative.

 

Krunstadt stepped away from his work as if from some diseased thing.

This was not the Frieda Goldstein he had sculpted!

Rationality quickly returned. The wine had been especially potent, and he had consumed an entire glass of the Rheingau rather quickly. Good wine often played nasty tricks. That had to be it. It was the wine!

 

But when he turned again to Frieda’s marble likeness, she had grown thinner still! Her eyes had vanished inside twin darkened pits, and her body approached emaciation.

 

Krunstadt’s lips formed a scream, but he could not make a sound, nor could he move one inch, his legs encased in concrete.

 

“...and are you as much a man of stone as the figures you sculpt?” she had asked.

 

“Frieda, you ask too much!”

 

Like some filth-ridden infection, the disease had spread. The woman’s chiseled smile now was gone completely, and with a movement almost imperceptible, her thin finger pointed toward the sculptor in accusation. Bernhard’s mouth opened, but he could do nothing more than listen to the shrieking inside his head.

 

“No, Bernhard...You are the one who has asked too much!”

 

The gray stone of the figure crunched with movement, and the bony arms reached out to him, the sculpture a monolith of human scale struggling to be born. He could not move, could not even turn away so as not to see.

 

Krunstadt needed no further explanation for what seemed so unthinkable. He had not sculpted this grotesque creature he saw before him. But the lesson came a little late. The marble figure fell upon him, her bony fingers pulling him to her. Skeletal arms wrapped around him, crushing him in a lover’s embrace that suggested anything but passion. He felt his bones turn brittle like dried twigs as his marble creation drew him closer while wrenching his breath from him and sapping the last remnant of his strength. Trying to push her, he caught a brief glimpse of his own hand, saw his fingers mutate before his eyes, withering as if with sudden advancing age and turning matchstick thin. He wanted to scream, wanted to howl so the whole world might hear, but his lungs retained only enough wind for him to hack and wheeze.

 

Frieda Goldstein pulled Bernhard closer while every bone inside him splintered, then snapped…

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