Fatelessness (28 page)

After that, I sat between the two of them for a while, it having been a long time since I had sat on a comfortable settee with claret red velvet upholstery. Aunt Fleischmann appeared in the meantime, bringing in a decoratively bordered white china plate on which was a round of bread and dripping garnished with ground paprika and finely sliced onion rings, because her recollection was that I had been extremely fond of that in the past, as I promptly confirmed I still was. The two old men meanwhile recounted that “it wasn’t a picnic back here either, to be sure.” From what they related I gained an impression, the nebulous outlines of some tangled, confused, undecipherable event of which I could basically see and understand little. Instead, all I picked out from what they had to say was the continual, almost tiresomely recurrent reiteration of a phrase that was used to designate every new twist, turn, and episode: thus, for instance, the yellow-star houses “came about,” October the fifteenth “came about,” the Arrow-Cross regime “came about,” the ghetto “came about,” the Danube-bank shootings “came about,” liberation “came about.” Not to mention the usual fault: it was as if this entire blurred event, seemingly unimaginable in its reality and by now beyond reconstruction in its details even for them, as far as I could see, had not occurred in the regular rhythmic passage of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months but so to say all at once, in a single swirl or giddy spell somehow, maybe at some strange afternoon gathering that unexpectedly descends into debauchery, for instance, when the many participants—not knowing why—all of a sudden lose their sanity and in the end, perhaps, are no longer aware of what they are doing. At some point they fell silent, then, after a pause, old Fleischmann suddenly asked: “And what are your plans for the future?” I was mildly astonished, telling him I had not given it much thought. At that, the other old boy stirred, bending toward me on his seat. The bat soared again, this time alighting on my knee rather than my arm. “Before all else,” he declared, “you must put the horrors behind you.” Increasingly amazed, I asked, “Why should I?” “In order,” he replied, “to be able to live,” at which Uncle Fleischmann nodded and added, “Live freely,” at which the other old boy nodded and added, “One cannot start a new life under such a burden,” and I had to admit he did have a point. Except I didn’t quite understand how they could wish for something that was impossible, and indeed I made the comment that what had happened had happened, and anyway, when it came down to it, I could not give orders to my memory. I would only be able to start a new life, I ventured, if I were to be reborn or if some affliction, disease, or something of the sort were to affect my mind, which they surely didn’t wish on me, I hoped. “In any case,” I added, “I didn’t notice any atrocities,” at which, I could see, they were greatly astounded. What were they supposed to understand by that, they wished to know, by “I didn’t notice”? To that, however, I asked them in turn what they had done during those “hard times.” “Errm, . . . we lived,” one of them deliberated. “We tried to survive,” the other added. Precisely! They too had taken one step at a time, I noted. What did I mean by taking a “step,” they floundered, so I related to them how it had gone in Auschwitz, by way of example. For each train—and I am not saying it was always necessarily this number, since I have no way of knowing—but at any rate in our case you have to reckon on around three thousand people. Take the men among them—a thousand, let’s say. For the sake of the example, you can reckon on one or two seconds per case, more often one than two. Ignore the very first and very last, because they don’t count; but in the middle, where I too was standing, you would therefore have to allow ten to twenty minutes before you reach the point where it is decided whether it will be gas immediately or a reprieve for the time being. Now, all this time the queue is constantly moving, progressing, and everyone is taking steps, bigger or smaller ones, depending on what the speed of the operation demands.

A brief hush ensued, broken only by a single sound: Aunt Fleischmann took the empty dish from in front of me and carried it away; nor did I see her return subsequently. The two old boys asked, “What has that got to do with it, and what do you mean by it?” Nothing in particular, I replied, but it was not quite true that the thing “came about”; we had gone along with it too. Only now, and thus after the event, looking back, in hindsight, does the way it all “came about” seem over, finished, unalterable, finite, so tremendously fast, and so terribly opaque. And if, in addition, one knows one’s fate in advance, of course. Then indeed one can only register the passing of time. A senseless kiss, for example, is just as much a necessity as an idle day at the customs post, let’s say, or the gas chambers. Except that whether one looks back or ahead, both are flawed perspectives, I suggested. After all, there are times when twenty minutes, in and of themselves, can be quite a lot of time. Each minute had started, endured, and then ended before the next one started. Now, I said, let’s just consider: every one of those minutes might in fact have brought something new. In reality it didn’t, naturally, but still, one must acknowledge that it might have; when it comes down to it, each and every minute something else might have happened other than what actually did happen, at Auschwitz just as much as, let’s suppose, here at home, when we took leave of my father.

Those last words somehow roused old Steiner. “But what could we do?” he asked, his face part irate, part affronted. “Nothing, naturally,” I said, “or rather, anything,” I added, “which would have been just as senseless as doing nothing, yet again and just as naturally.” “But it’s not about that,” I tried to carry on, to explain it to them. “So what is it about, then?” they asked, almost losing patience, to which I replied, with growing anger on my part as well, I sensed: “It’s about the steps.” Everyone took steps as long as he was able to take a step; I too took my own steps, and not just in the queue at Birkenau, but even before that, here, at home. I took steps with my father, and I took steps with my mother, I took steps with Annamarie, and I took steps—perhaps the most difficult ones of all—with the older sister. I would now be able to tell her what it means to be “Jewish”: nothing, nothing to me at least, at the beginning, until those steps start to be taken. None of it is true, there is no different blood, nothing else, only . . . and I faltered, but suddenly something the journalist had said came to mind: there are only given situations and the new givens inherent in them. I too had lived through a given fate. It had not been my own fate, but I had lived through it, and I simply couldn’t understand why they couldn’t get it into their heads that I now needed to start doing something with that fate, needed to connect it to somewhere or something; after all, I could no longer be satisfied with the notion that it had all been a mistake, blind fortune, some kind of blunder, let alone that it had not even happened. I could see, and only too well, that they did not really understand, that my words were not much to their liking, indeed it seemed as if one thing or another was actually irritating them. I saw that every now and then Uncle Steiner was about to interrupt or elsewhere about to jump to his feet, but I saw the other old man restraining him, heard him saying, “Leave him be! Can’t you see he only wants to talk? Let him talk! Just leave him be!” and talk I did, albeit possibly to no avail and even a little incoherently. Even so, I made it clear to them that we can never start a new life, only ever carry on the old one. I took the steps, no one else, and I declared that I had been true to my given fate throughout. The sole blot, or one might say fly in the ointment, the sole accident with which they might reproach me was the fact that we should be sitting there talking now—but then I couldn’t help that. Did they want this whole honesty and all the previous steps I had taken to lose all meaning? Why this sudden about-face, this refusal to accept? Why did they not wish to acknowledge that if there is such a thing as fate, then freedom is not possible? If, on the other hand—I swept on, more and more astonished myself, steadily warming to the task—if there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate; that is to say—and I paused, but only long enough to catch my breath—that is to say, then we ourselves are fate, I realized all at once, but with a flash of clarity I had never experienced before. I was even a little sorry that I was only facing them and not some more intelligent or, if I may put it this way, worthier counterparts; but then they were the ones there right now, they are—or so it appeared at that moment at least—everywhere, and in any case they had also been there when we had said farewell to my father. They too had taken their own steps. They too had known, foreseen, everything beforehand, they too had said farewell to my father as if we had already buried him, and even later on all they had squabbled about was whether I should take the suburban train or the bus to Auschwitz . . . At this point not only Uncle Steiner but old Fleischmann as well jumped to his feet. Even now he was still striving to restrain himself, but was no longer capable of doing so: “What!” he bawled, his face red as a beetroot and beating his chest with his fist: “So it’s us who’re the guilty ones, is it? Us, the victims!” I tried explaining that it wasn’t a crime; all that was needed was to admit it, meekly, simply, merely as a matter of reason, a point of honor, if I might put it that way. It was impossible, they must try and understand, impossible to take everything away from me, impossible for me to be neither winner nor loser, for me not to be right and for me not to be mistaken that I was neither the cause nor the effect of anything; they should try to see, I almost pleaded, that I could not swallow that idiotic bitterness, that I should merely be innocent. But I could see they did not wish to understand anything, and so, picking up my kit bag and cap, I departed in the midst of a few disjointed words and motions, one more unfinished gesture and incomplete utterance from each.

Down below I was greeted by the street. I needed to take a streetcar to my mother’s place, but now it dawned on me that I had no money of course, so I decided to walk. In order to gather my strength, I paused for a minute in the square, by the aforementioned bench. Over ahead, in the direction that I would need to take, where the street appeared to lengthen, expand, and fade away into infinity, the fleecy clouds over the indigo hills were already turning purple and the sky, a shade of claret. Around me it was as if something had changed: the traffic had dwindled, people’s steps had slowed, their voices become quieter, their features grown softer, and it was as if their faces were turning toward one another. It was that peculiar hour, I recognized even now, even here—my favorite hour in the camp, and I was seized by a sharp, painful, futile longing for it: nostalgia, homesickness. Suddenly, it sprang to life, it was all here and bubbling inside me, all its strange moods surprised me, its fragmentary memories set me trembling. Yes, in a certain sense, life there had been clearer and simpler. Everything came back to mind, and I considered everyone in turn, both those who were of no interest as well as those whose only recognition would come in this reckoning, the fact that I was here: Bandi Citrom, Pyetchka, Bohoosh, the doctor, and all the rest. Now, for the very first time, I thought about them with a touch of reproach, a kind of affectionate rancor.

But one shouldn’t exaggerate, as this is precisely the crux of it: I am here, and I am well aware that I shall accept any rationale as the price for being able to live. Yes, as I looked around this placid, twilit square, this street, weather-beaten yet full of a thousand promises, I was already feeling a growing and accumulating readiness to continue my uncontinuable life. My mother was waiting, and would no doubt greatly rejoice over me. I recollect that she had once conceived a plan that I should be an engineer, a doctor, or something like that. No doubt that is how it will be, just as she wished; there is nothing impossible that we do not live through naturally, and keeping a watch on me on my journey, like some inescapable trap, I already know there will be happiness. For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the “atrocities,” whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentration camps.

If indeed I am asked. And provided I myself don’t forget.

The End