The Bookkeeper: A Serialized Novel, Page 51
Two women, separated by decades; one a Mossad agent, the other a prisoner in a concentration camp, and bound together by one man: the Bookkeeper.
Collecting her next set of components, she resolved to never be that woman. She would either die in the camp, her soul slipping free, but still human, or she would walk back through those gates, a burning light still in her eyes. She redoubled her efforts at the table and soon she felt she found her hands were learning as if on their own.
After a dozen more times through the process, her confidence and pride growing, Uta was able to divide her attention enough to talk.
“What are we making?” she asked.
“Rockets,” the woman replied after a moment’s hesitation.
“Rockets? What is a rocket?” Uta asked.
“It shoots up into the air,” the woman said. While continuing to work she made an arc with her hand, “And then lands on a target many kilometers away.”
“Many kilometers away?” Uta said, her hands faultering in their work. She had never heard of such a thing. It seemed more like some kind of dark magic than anything that could possibly be real.
“I’ve heard,” the woman replied, “that the rockets can shoot from France, over the water, and into England. I don’t know if that is true or not.” The woman said this with so little emotion in her voice that it frightened The woman sounded more as if she were talking about planting flowers in a garden than some weapon that could kill innocent people from a great distance. If all this was true, maybe the Nazis were not in danger of losing the war after all; maybe her faint hope of escaping with her life was just a fairy tale. She needed to find a way to escape from this hell, because the end of the war certainly wasn’t going to save her. She threw herself into the work in an attempt to block the thoughts from her mind. It was repetitive and mindless, but it allowed her to let her thoughts drift free. Without Uta noticing her mentor slipped away.
If you liked this, please check out my other work:
Or my serialized novel in three parts:
Dark Thoughts Book 1: Hearing Voices