Moon Path

Copyright

www.EvolvedPub.com

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MOON PATH

Copyright © 2019 Steven Greenberg

Cover Art Copyright © 2019 Kabir Shah

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ISBN (EPUB Version): 1622532244

ISBN-13 (EPUB Version): 978-1-62253-224-7

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Editor: Lane Diamond

Interior Designer: Lane Diamond

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PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

At the end of this novel of approximately 77,354 words, you will find two Special Sneak Previews: 1) GALERIE by Steven Greenberg, a thrilling work of historical fiction that examines how Holocaust horrors still resonate generations later, and how even deep wounds of betrayal can ultimately heal, and; 2) INVISIBLE BY DAY by Teri Fink, an award-winning WWI historical fiction piece we think you’ll enjoy. We provide these as a FREE extra service, and you should in no way consider it a part of the price you paid for this book. We hope you will both appreciate and enjoy the opportunity. Thank you.

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Disclaimer:

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or the author has used them fictitiously.

Books by Steven Greenberg

Enfold Me

Galerie

Moon Path

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www.StevenGreenberg.info

Praise for GALERIE by Steven Greenberg

Steven Greenberg’s chilling novel, Galerie, opens the minds of readers to a time when there was no clear right and wrong, when there was only life and death, and the defining line depended on what the individual person was willing to do to assure the preservation of his or her life and that of their loved ones. As Vanesa’s Uncle Tomas tells her as a child, ‘Many things in your life will leave you, but we never really lose anything as long as we remember. Your memories, the good and the bad, will never abandon you.’ And whilst some people might be willing to do anything, to sacrifice anything just to live, there are others who could not in good conscience give up their souls in order to live a mere shell of a life, one marred with disturbing memories. A powerful story about a troubling time in history with poignant lessons about choices and consequences. ~ Readers’ Favorite Book Award FINALIST, 2016, Fiction - Historical - Event/Era

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...a story that will mesmerize readers from page one. ~ Singing Librarian Books

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Imagine Steven King wrote Schindler’s List. Though it is well accepted that Nazi atrocities were among the most horrible in history, Galerie manages to break away from the accepted treatment of Europe’s darkest hour and explore the horror from an unexpected point of view. In his meticulously well researched novel, Greenberg picks open scabs that other authors have all agreed to let lie. I identified so personally with the heroine that I was sucked in to the story, even though at times I wished I could put the book aside to escape the unraveling mystery and horror. ~ Nikki

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...brings the psychological and cultural legacy of the holocaust up to date... ~ Escapology Reviews

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...so provocative that it is impossible to put down. ~ Sydology

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Buy this book and say goodbye to your family for the weekend, because you will not want to put it down... ~ Eric W. Swett

BONUS CONTENT

We’re pleased to offer you not one, but two Special Sneak Previews at the end of this book.

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In the first preview, you’ll enjoy the Prologue and First 3 Chapters of Steven Greenberg’s critically-acclaimed, award-winning GALERIE.

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OR GRAB THE FULL EBOOK TODAY!

FIND LINKS TO YOUR FAVORITE RETAILER HERE:

STEVEN GREENBERG’S Books at Evolved Publishing

In the second preview, you’ll enjoy the First 5 Chapters of Teri Fink’s critically acclaimed, award-winning INVISIBLE BY DAY.

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OR GRAB THE FULL EBOOK TODAY!

FIND LINKS TO YOUR FAVORITE RETAILER HERE:

TERI FINK at Evolved Publishing

Table of Contents

Copyright

Books by Steven Greenberg

Praise for GALERIE by Steven Greenberg

BONUS CONTENT

Table of Contents

Dedication

MOON PATH

Prologue – Samuel

Chapter 1 – Samuel: I Am My Words

Chapter 2 – Samuel: The National Interest

Chapter 3 – Samuel: Resonating to the Core

Chapter 4 – Samuel: Finding the Words

Chapter 5 – Aron: A Chance to Do Good

Chapter 6 – Aron: Wherever You Go

Chapter 7 – Danuta: I’ll Be Waiting

Chapter 8 – Aron: Will You Remember?

Chapter 9 – Samuel: The Doghouse

Chapter 10 – Samuel: Lost

Chapter 11 – Danuta: Stop What You’re Doing

Chapter 12 – Aron: Tobruk Has Fallen

Chapter 13 – Aron: Behind the Beauty

Chapter 14 – Samuel: Perfection

Chapter 15 – Samuel: Three Letters

Chapter 16 – Danuta: Touch Me

Chapter 17 – Aron: Powerlessness

Chapter 18 – Aron: Trust

Chapter 19 – Samuel: Desert Wind

Chapter 20 – Samuel: Absence

Chapter 21 – Danuta: Panic

Chapter 22 – Aron: Close to Hell

Chapter 23 – Danuta: The Raw

Chapter 24 – Samuel: Cost

Chapter 25 – Aron: Hope

Chapter 26 – Danuta: Demons

Chapter 27 – Samuel: The Trail

Chapter 28 – Aron: The Production of Nothing

Chapter 29 – Aron & Samuel: Secrets

Chapter 30 – Aron: A Hollow Victory

Chapter 31 – Aron & Samuel: Love, Hate, Forgive, Repeat

Epilogue – Samuel

Special Sneak Preview: GALERIE by Steven Greenberg

Acknowledgements

About the Author

What’s Next?

More from Evolved Publishing

Special Sneak Preview: INVISIBLE BY DAY by Teri Fink

Dedication

In loving memory of Michal Greenberg, my first inspiration.

You are always with me.

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For my brother.

Prologue – Samuel

Pechora River Gulag Transport Ship - Soviet Union, January 1941

My hands... I saw these most vividly. I looked down at them in wonder as it happened.

Because they weren’t really my hands. They were not the hands I’d brought from Vilnius, and certainly not those I’d had in Warsaw. The dirt on these hands had colonized the depths of the ragged fingernails, had swarmed into the vein-ringed chasms of the chapped skin. These hands were calloused, sickly, rough.

My hands were familiar with the cool obsidian of a fountain pen, with the warmth of coffee shop porcelain. They knew the silkiness of Danuta’s inner thigh much better than splinter-infested shovel handles, dented tin cups, and sweat-slick cervical tissue.

For these hands, I discovered with horror, were locked tight around a human neck.

I never knew the man’s name. I never cared. I’d woken with a start from a deep slumber, a sleep fueled by gulag exhaustion and starvation, and by the gut-wrenching seasickness from which I’d suffered since we came aboard the prison ship. But I hadn’t slept so deeply as to shut out the man who tugged at the rag-wrapped bundle on which my greasy head rested. That bundle contained my solitary remaining collared shirt, my spare socks, and the crusted oilskin that embraced my letters.

My letters!

I was on him in a moment, with an energy that rose from somewhere unnamed, somewhere I—even then—hoped never to revisit. I, who scarcely ever hit a man, found myself pinning this one to the floor with suddenly elephantine weight, born not of the NKVD-supplied ration of moldy bread, river water, and thin soup, but rather of sheer fury.

My thumbs pressed deep into his windpipe, and at some point, he stopped struggling. The arms that flailed futilely at my grimy hands stilled. The contorted back straightened, the knees bucking my coccyx reposed, and his eyes, betraying unmistakable clarity and unimpeachable relief, begged me to continue.

Kill me, they said. Show me this one decency, will you not?

The man had allowed himself to be murdered, and those hands—not my hands—obliged.

The foulness of the man’s final breath still stung my nostrils, and the cramped muscles of my hands—those hands—started to ache. I turned my adrenalin-engorged eyes to the hundreds of dirty faces peering down from three levels of roughly welded bunks. I clutched my bundle to my chest, and turned to the rust-sweating wall.

"My letters...  my letters!" I hissed viciously in the momentarily silent hold. Then, as the men turned back to their gambling, masturbation, petty arguments, and lice gathering, my softening voice intoned as if in whispered prayer to the implacable iron wall, "My Danuta."

Chapter 1 – Samuel: I Am My Words

Warsaw, Poland, November 1937

Would not Brzozowski’s anti-determinism preclude your assigning us homework this week, professor? I stood from my chair on the left side of the steeply-tiered lecture hall as sparse winter sunlight angled in from the hall’s narrow windows, illuminating galaxies of dust motes in its beams. My folding seat retracted suddenly as I stood, making a crash that was a finale in the silence following Professor Lutoslawski’s solemn closing remarks.

I turned to face the other students of Introduction to Modern Polish Thought, as they started to gather their things in anticipation of the lecture’s end. I put on my most inquisitive face, widened my eyes innocently, opened my hands in a childlike ‘why not?’ gesture, and turned back to the Professor. "After all, if the experience of work follows from the physical act of working, would it not be overtly deterministic to actually do homework in order to, shall we say, ‘experience the experience’?"

A titter of laughter flitted from seat to seat, echoing up and down the tiers of the lecture hall. This was not going as I had hoped.

The Professor looked up from his crumpled lecture notes and stroked his goatee pensively. The hint of a smile crossed his stern lips.

Perhaps there’s hope?

No, for then his eyes narrowed, and his booming voice shook the smirk off my face. "The utterly flawed logic of your statement, which I assume was on some pubescent level intended to amuse, is actually an excellent argument for extra reading, young man. You may add Chapters 51 through 54 to your reading list and summarize these for the class next week. Good day."

The titter swelled to a hearty collective guffaw, quickly swallowed by the snapping of a hundred retracting seats, heels against hardwood floors, and the rustling of books being stuffed into canvas rucksacks.

Jacek looked over at me from his seat across the hall, shaking his dark curls with a smile. Again? His look said, Must you?

I smiled back from my place on the ghetto bench. Yes, I must. I must, because you don’t become the youngest staff writer at Nasza Opinia, which is my plan, by holding back.

Even from the side of the lecture hall newly designated for Jews only, I expressed my thoughts and hoped like hell that someone wanted to listen. Because if I didn’t express them, I would know that no one was listening, and not being listened to....

Is there really anything worse? If I’m not listened to, who am I?

Because I was then—had always been and would always be—my words. I was Samuel Katz, but I couldn’t actually say I was born of great words. I’d have loved to claim I was the son of a writer whose words illuminated thousands of nescient eyes, but no. In fact, my father’s words, tripping eloquently across the carbon-copied quarterly employee newsletter in the Praga branch of Bank Zachodni, which he’d managed for these past ten years, may have moved some office drones to giggle around the water cooler, but they were never of greater impact. This happened not because he lacked thoughts of inherent value or the eloquent words with which to express them, but because he chose—from timidity or humility—not to share them. He chose to remain unheard.

How can one with the ability to move mountains choose not to do so?

My father once did move mountains, in his quiet way. He moved himself from the raucous shtetl of his childhood to Warsaw. He chose to raise his family in the secular vibrancy of Warsaw’s up-and-coming Praga neighborhood. He insisted we children speak only Polish at home, despite the fact that he and Mother regularly slipped back into their childhood Yiddish, especially when they argued. He made the break with what he called the Dark Ages of Jewish life in Poland, into what he called the enlightenment of equality and mutual respect. We were to accord ourselves always, he reminded us nightly over family dinner, as Poles of Jewish extraction, not Polish Jews.

As the students filed out past me, I still smiled sheepishly while making a tidy stack of my textbooks and sliding the pile smoothly into my faded canvas rucksack.

The majority of students had already left the hall, and Jacek waited for me just outside the door, smoking, his eyes lowered to the floor. The heel of one foot casually supported his weight as he leaned against the wall in a ne’er-do-well pose. He’d adopted this bad boy persona as subtle compensation for his short stature, perhaps, or his entirely urbane upbringing, or some combination thereof. He pinched his cigarette so tightly between thumb and forefinger that its tip flattened into a narrow oval, on which he sucked with the intensity of a hungry infant at a nipple.

He looked up as I approached him. He peered around quickly and—he thought—surreptitiously. Jacek never realized that I knew of his embarrassment at being friends with a Jew, even though we had been friends since kindergarten.

"That was a stupid joke, malpeczko, he said. Aren’t you ever going to learn to keep your mouth shut? He’d called me malpeczko—monkey—ever since I’d revealed, over too many glasses of vodka one evening, that it was the diminutive of my favorite stuffed animal as a child.

I’ll keep my mouth shut if you keep your finger out of your nose in lecture, you pig. God, it was so far up there, I swear I could hear you scratching your brain.

Now it was his turn to smile, but only for a moment. He lowered his voice further. "Seriously, you need to watch your mouth. You don’t hear the whispers on my side of the lecture hall. The only reason they’re not louder is because the professor is a Jew, too." Jacek got that look that always reminded me of the squirrels we loved to feed in Lazienki Park—wide-eyed, wary, concerned.

That look was the inspiration for my own hastily conceived pet name for him. "Relax, wiewiorka, I said, far more loudly than necessary. After all, I’m a citizen of the Great Second Republic of Poland. I have full legal rights and civic obligations, and am entitled to do or say anything that a fellow Pole unfortunate enough to have a foreskin can do or say. As long as I do it from my fucking side of the lecture hall, that is." I looked around brazenly, hoping for an audience. There was none, but I still felt vindicated.

I’d been stunned to be relegated to the ghetto benches in Warsaw University lecture halls. I could think of no allegory to use, no children’s fable to quote with a moral that illustrated my point. Only these words came to me: stunned and infuriated. The order had come directly from the Polish Ministry of Education, and the university Rectors had seemed eager to comply. The decision had been, after all, widely popular among non-Jewish students. So, I’d filed into the Student Administration office one grey day last month, together with a long line of Jewish students, so a bored secretary could stamp my student ID card with the innocuous-looking and euphemistic purple stamp: Seated on Odd Benches.

This is the undertow, Samuel, my father had told me over dinner that evening, his calm voice doing little to assuage my boiling anger. Yes, it is unpleasant, even dangerous, but it is a natural part of the tide of enlightenment on which we now float. Of course, there are those that have trouble accepting our integration into Polish society, but we have the legal and social tools to fight back, do we not? We have rights, and we must never fear to exercise them.

By we, my father had apparently meant you. He had yet to join me in demonstrating against this affront to the enlightened Polish society in which he purported to believe. He had yet to sign his name to any of the petitions against the ghetto-bench, or to lend his words to my occasional articles in Glos Gminy Zydowskiej, the Voice of the Jewish Community. He had to consider his position in the community, he claimed. He had to consider his increasingly tenuous position at the bank.

Once again, he’d chosen to withhold his words, instead of putting them to good use.

Jacek lit another cigarette, flipping the lock of hair from his eyes to avoid singeing it as he did so. He adamantly refused to trim his bangs, thinking it lent an air of mystery to his otherwise plain visage.

I thought he looked like a poodle on a bad hair day, but had learned to hold my tongue.

"On a different note, malpeczko, why don’t you come out with us this evening? There’s a poetry reading, drinks afterwards. Would it add an extra crack to your Semitic ass if you spent one evening away from your notebooks? Maybe you’ll meet a girl, and be able to spend a few less hours in the bathroom with the lingerie catalogs."

I stuck my tongue out at him. I’ll leave my notebooks if you agree to finally get rid of your dolls, little girl. And don’t tell me again how they’re miniature cast-whatever soldiers. They’ll always be dolls to me. Grinning, I turned to leave for my next class.

I did indeed have plans that evening with my notebooks. I’d reached a key juncture in my play, and had spent the day running the next scene’s dialog repeatedly through my head, but it hadn’t fully formed yet, not quite ready to come out. So, on a whim, I turned back.

"Fine. You know what, wiewiorka? I will come out this evening. Let’s see if your gentile poetry holds more my attraction for my mammoth foreskin-free putz than the pictures of your sister I’ve got under my mattress. Should I come by at 8:00, or will you still be having your diapers changed then?"

I walked away, trailing the glow of our friendly banter behind me like a cloud of sweet pipe tobacco smoke.

***

I never even considered that the evening would, defying all physical and temporal logic, never come for me. My clock stopped that afternoon, and in many ways never restarted. It stopped just after they grabbed me, pushed me against the wall, and pulled out that knife.

More accurately, it stopped when she first spoke.

Chapter 2 – Samuel: The National Interest

Pechora River Gulag Transport Ship, Soviet Union, January 1941

The giggles grew louder as Danuta gave me butterfly kisses, her feathery eyelashes fluttering against my forehead and cheeks. Now she showered my face with rose petals, laughing as she did so. The petals bounced lightly across my eyelids, then slid, burning, into my nostrils. I snorted reflexively, and they hit the back of my throat like pepper, causing me to sit up so rapidly that I banged my head on the bunk above. Still the petals crawled over my face.

I clawed at them blindly as they now mixed with blood from the fresh scalp wound, opened by the sharp steel beam that supported the bunk just half a meter above my supine body.

Lice shower!

The realization hit me even before the dream of Danuta completely evaporated.

Lice! The Ukri!

It was a common prank. The Ukri, the Ukrainian gang that ruled this netherworld that was the prison ship’s hold, had given me one of their infamous lice showers. They collected piles of them, each man contributing hundreds from his own plentiful stock. It took hours, but there was no shortage of time down here, where we eight hundred prisoners had been crammed these past three weeks with no room to even stand, and only limited access to the three on-deck toilets. The Ukri would gather them into a rag, sneak up on the unsuspecting victim, and shower them over his sleeping face. The panicked and hungry insects made quickly for any orifice available, invading eyes, ears, mouth and nose with equal vigor, to the uproarious entertainment of the bored spectators.

A revolting experience, by my old standards. Yet in this hell, as a ward of the Soviet NKVD—the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—my standards had changed. Rumor had it they were sending me to build a work camp in some frozen wasteland near the Arctic Circle. I had last bathed over two weeks before, in freezing water. Despite the omnipresent cold, I wore thin cotton pants, a grey rag with arm holes that served as an undershirt, and a threadbare and filthy jacket that would not have even lined the cat’s bed back in Warsaw. My feet remained bare, save the rags I’d tied haphazardly around them. I had last eaten off a plate three months previously. This morning, I waited for three hours in a line of prisoners to climb the ladder to the deck, for the privilege of emptying my watery bowels into a hole through which the cold river spray stung my chapped buttocks. On the way back down, I filled my battered tin cup with a grey soup in which some unidentifiable vegetables floated like bloated grey corpses.

I ate it with relish. My standards, you see, had changed.

In this leaner, feral version of myself, I recognized the lice shower for what it was: a hazing—a good thing. The Ukri, despite my being a Jew, were taking me under their protection, likely because of the prisoner I’d killed.

Oleg, the Ukri second-in-command, clapped me on the shoulder as I climbed out of my bunk, blood still streaming from my throbbing head. I slipped in the filth that sloshed back and forth on the floor with the gentle pitching of the ship, and he steadied me with a powerful hand. He smiled, showing a gapped row of blackened teeth. "You’re okay. For a Zhid, that is."

Despite myself, I smiled back.

***

If I were to write a scene of how I met Danuta, it would read like this:

SETTING: A late-night, smoke-filled bar. Around a long rough wooden table, center stage, sit a collection of raggedly clothed intellectuals. Books, cups, and full ashtrays cover the table, conveying a lengthy and intensive discussion. All are arguing, raising a cacophony of voices. Samuel, at the head of the table, stands, and a respectful hush falls.

SAMUEL: (He speaks with passion and authority, gesturing with his cigarette.) Yes, Misha, but can you not see that Schulz’s ontological issues clearly overshadow the epistemological? There are no facts, as Nietzsche says, only interpretations. This was Schulz’s view, too. (He smiles playfully.) Or perhaps when you’re in your cups, you have trouble grasping the finer implications of this? You see....

As Samuel continues making the motions of his passionate speech, his voice fades, and the audience hears only silence. The stage lights fade too, and two spotlights come up, one gently illuminating the gesticulating Samuel, and the other Danuta.

Danuta is seated halfway down the table, listening raptly to Samuel. His words are clearly moving her deeply. She nods her head and leans forward as if to better engage with his brilliance.

Samuel suddenly stops speaking and looks directly at Danuta. He’s intrigued by this new and beautiful face, so intrigued that he loses his chain of thought.

SAMUEL: (He speaks gently.) Hello, do I know you?

DANUTA: (She smiles sweetly.) Not yet, but you may.

Not yet, but you may. Yes, this is how I would write the scene. Unfortunately, it would be utterly inaccurate, because no one has ever listened to my words with rapture, nor has my brilliance ever struck anyone dumb. Nor have I ever addressed more than three people at once, except at family dinners, and then only when asking someone to pass the peas.

In fact, I met Danuta under circumstances that were, to say the least, dramatically less flattering—nearly personally injurious.

***

Warsaw, Poland, November 1937

I left Jacek, whistling to myself as I exited the narrow hallway from which heavy wooden doors led into numerous lecture halls, and came into the building’s foyer. The vast chamber sat nearly empty, it being near lunchtime. Only one boisterous group had gathered around one of the long wooden benches that lined the walls of the entranceway. I recognized them from afar as National Democrats—my political nemeses—and would have preferred to avoid being anywhere near them. Unfortunately, there was no other way out of the building.

Does one ever really learn to live with slurs? Does one eventually develop a thick skin, so epithets roll off one’s back? Or do the words work themselves slowly into the flesh—like microscopic cacti barbs, innocuous at the initial prick, but building to a critical mass of pain— that must eventually either scratch the soul or erupt violently? I’d been called every imaginable form, permutation, or slang of Jew from childhood. Somewhere along the way, I’d accepted it as a simple fact of life, and today should have been no different.

But it was.

Since the advent of the ghetto bench, I’d been volcanically on edge. I reached critical mass when the egalitarian future my father had dangled before me had been rudely yanked away—with a derisive laugh, at that. This anger, I found, felt liberating and empowering. I no longer feared the bullying, and I welcomed the chance to use my newfound linguistic courage to boldly fling barbs back at my attackers. Reckless? Perhaps, but I didn’t care.

When the National Democrat Cro-Magnons started in, I didn’t hesitate to answer back with vitriol, perhaps fueled by my humiliation in the lecture hall. What I didn’t take into account was the complete emptiness of the building, and my own relative distance from the safety of the exit. Before I’d even finished my opening diatribe about the size of their hooded genitalia being in direct proportion to the size of their clearly miniscule brains, the Cro-Magnons had me surrounded.

They literally backed me into a corner, holding my shoulders and legs tightly