The Holocaust Lover
Published in Issue #20(Excerpt from a Novel)
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Tobsha Pechersky was hiding from the Nazis. He knew it without knowing it. He didn’t know he knew, but deep inside of him, in the part of him where his love for her resided, he absorbed this knowledge. From the moment he saw her footprints in the snow, he intuited with an understanding that surpassed reason. Tobsha was concealing herself from the Wehrmacht. From the SS. From the Einsatzkommando. From the Ordnungspolizei. From the Sonderdienst and the Schutzpolizei and the Gendarmerie. Tobsha was hiding from the partisan-hunters and from the Saurer gassing vans.
He probably even knew it the instant he reached the crest of the road and noted the absence of smoke from the cottage chimney. With the late afternoon temperature at around five degrees, with nearly two feet of fresh snow on the ground, she couldn’t be in the cottage without the fire going. Yet the old automobile was out front, thickly crusted with snow, its windows blinded with icy cataracts; it obviously hadn’t been moved in days. She might have hiked to the farm, but he didn’t think so, not this late in the day, not over drifts that were frequently calf-deep in the pasture. Too easy to step into an ankle-twisting fold of the land and into a covered runnel of icy water. Could she possibly have fallen asleep and let the fire go out? But she never slept in the daytime. Had some accident then befallen her?
Chimneys.
It was when he reached the door of the cottage and saw her footprints that he was certain. The tracks, nearly but not quite obliterated by the...
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