Fatelessness (8 page)

FOUR

On the train, it was water that was missed most of all. Food supplies, taking everything into account, appeared to be sufficient for a substantial period; but then there was nothing to drink with them, which was disagreeable, that’s for sure. Those on the train immediately declared that the initial spasms of thirst soon pass. Eventually we would almost forget about it, after which it would reemerge, only by then it would allow no one to forget it, they explained. The length of time that someone could last out, for all that, should the need arise, taking into account the hot weather and assuming he was healthy, did not lose too much water as sweat, and ate no meat or spicy food, if at all possible, was six or seven days, according to those in the know. As things were, they reassured us, there was still time; it all depended on how long the journey was going to last, they added.

Quite. I too was curious about that; they did not inform us at the brickyard. All they announced was that anyone inclined to do so could present himself for work, specifically in Germany. Just like the rest of the boys and many others in the brickyard, I found that idea immediately attractive. In any case, we were told by the men, identifiable from their armbands as belonging to a body called the “Jewish Council,” one way or another, willingly or forcibly, everyone would sooner or later be resettled from the brickyard to Germany, and the better places, not to speak of the concession of being able to travel no more than sixty per carriage, would be granted to those who volunteered first, whereas later at least eighty would have to be fit in, due to the shortage of wagons—the way they laid it all out to everyone did not really leave too much to consider, I had to agree.

Nor was I able to deny the validity of the other arguments, which concerned the shortage of space in the brickyard and its possible sanitary consequences, as well as the growing concern over food supplies: that was how it was, I could attest to all that. By the time we arrived from the gendarmerie (many of the grown-ups had registered that the barracks were called the “Andrássy Gendarme Casern”) every cranny of the brickyard had already been filled to overflowing with people. I saw among them both men and women, children of all ages, as well as countless old people of both sexes. Wherever I stepped, I would stumble over blankets, rucksacks, all manner of suitcases, bundles, and other impedimenta. Naturally enough, I too was soon tired of that, not to mention the myriad petty nuisances, annoyances, and vexations that, it appears, are inevitably bound up with communal life of that kind. Contributing further to that was the inaction, the senseless feeling of idleness, not to speak of the boredom; that too is why I don’t remember distinctly a single one of the five days that I spent there, and barely even the occasional detail in aggregate, though certainly the relief at having the boys there around me: “Rosie,” “Fancyman,” “Leatherware,” “Smoker,” Moskovics, and all the rest. As far as I could tell, not one of them was missing: they too had all been honest. Nor did I personally have that much to do anymore with gendarmes in the brickyard; I saw them more just standing guard on the other side of the fencing, mixed up with the occasional policeman here and there. The latter were in fact later talked about in the brickyard as being more considerate than the gendarmes, readily inclined to be decent, particularly in return for certain negotiated terms, whether in the form of money or any other valuables. Above all, so I heard, many commissioned them to pass on letters and messages; indeed, some insisted opportunities were even open through them—albeit rare and risky, they admitted—for escaping, though it would have been hard for me to know anything really definite about that. But then I recalled, and in doing so also came to a somewhat more precise understanding, I believe, what the seal-faced fellow at the customs post must have been wanting so much to have a word about with the policeman. That is how I realized that our policeman, by contrast, had been honest, which may well have explained how it was that every now and then, while knocking about the yard or waiting for my turn in the area of the communal kitchen, I would spot the seal-faced guy in the melee of unfamiliar faces in the brickworks.

Of the rest of the customs post crowd, I also saw the man with the bad luck again; he often sat around with us “young people,” so as “to cheer himself up,” as he put it. He too, it seems, must have found a place to camp somewhere close to us, in one of the many identical shingle-roofed but open-sided structures in the yard that had in fact originally served, so I heard, for drying bricks. He looked a bit the worse for wear, with mottled blotches of swelling and bruising on his face. We learned from him that these had all been the outcome of the gendarmes’ investigation, since they had come across medicines and food in his knapsack. His attempt to explain it was stuff that had come from older stocks and was intended purely for his very ill mother was useless: they alleged that he was obviously dealing on the black market. Similarly useless was his permit, and equally unavailing the fact that he, for his part, had always held the law in respect, never violating so much as a single letter of it, he related. “Have you heard anything? What’s going to happen to us?” he asked regularly. He would again bring up his family, not to speak of his bad luck. How much he had run around after the permit, how delighted he had been to get it, he recalled with a morose head-shaking; he would never have believed the business “would come to this,” that was for sure. It had all hinged on those five minutes. If he hadn’t had the bad luck . . . If the bus back then had . . .—those were the reflections I heard. He seemed largely content, however, with the beating. “I was left to the last, and that may have been my good fortune,” he recounted: “They were in a hurry by then.” All in all, he “could have come off worse,” was how he summed it up, adding that he had “seen uglier cases” at the gendarmerie, which was no more than the truth, as I too recalled. No one should think, the gendarmes had warned us on the morning of the investigation, that he would be able to conceal his crimes, money, gold, or other valuables from them. When it was my turn, I too had to lay out money, watch, pocketknife, and all my other belongings on a table before them. A stocky gendarme even frisked me, with brisk and what somehow seemed like practiced movements, from my armpits all the way down to the legs of my short trousers. Behind the table I also saw the lieutenant again, for by then it had already transpired from words the gendarmes exchanged with one another that the officer with the riding-crop was actually called Lt. Jackl. Towering next to him, on his left, I also immediately took note of a shirt-sleeved, walrus-moustached gendarme looking like a butcher, who had in his hand a cylindrical implement that basically struck me as being a bit of a joke, somewhat reminding me as it did of a cook’s rolling pin. The lieutenant was pretty friendly, asking me if I had any documents, though I saw not the slightest sign, not even the slightest glimmer, of my papers then producing any impression on him. That surprised me, but—most particularly in light of an abrupt gesture of dismissal from the walrus-moustached gendarme, with its unmistakable implicit assurance of the alternative—I considered it more prudent, it stands to reason, not to raise any objections.

After that, the gendarmes had led us all out of the barracks and, first of all, crammed us into the carriages of a special local train service then, at some spot on the banks of the Danube, transferred us onto a ship and finally, after that had berthed, took us a farther stretch on foot, which was how I had got to the brickyard—the “Budakalász Brick Works” to be more specific, as I was to learn there, on the spot.

There were plenty of other things that I also heard about the journey on the afternoon we had to register. The men with armbands were omnipresent, ready to answer any questions. They were primarily on the lookout for youngsters, the venturesome and those who were on their own, though they were assuring inquirers, as I heard, that there would also be room for women, infants, and the elderly, and they would also be able to bring along all their luggage. In their opinion, however, the cardinal issue was were we going to sort the matter out among ourselves, and thus with all possible humanity, or would we rather wait for the gendarmes to make the decision for us? As they explained, the consignment would have to be made up one way or another, and insofar as their lists fell short, the gendarmes would make up the enrollment from among us; so most people, myself included, saw it as obvious that we might do better for ourselves, naturally enough, the first way.

A great diversity of views about the Germans also came to my attention right away. Many people, particularly the older ones with experience to look back on, professed that whatever ideas they might hold about Jews, the Germans were fundamentally, as everybody knew, tidy, honest, industrious people with a fondness for order and punctuality who appreciated the same traits in others, which did indeed, by and large, roughly correspond with what I myself know about them, and it occurred to me that no doubt I might also derive some benefit from having acquired some fluency in their language at grammar school. What I could look forward to from working, though, was above all orderliness, employment, new impressions, and a bit of fun—all in all, a more sensible lifestyle more to my liking than the one here in Hungary, just as was being promised and as we boys, quite naturally, pictured it when we talked among ourselves, though alongside that it crossed my mind that this might also be a way of getting to see a bit of the world. To tell the truth, when I reflected on some of the events of recent days, such as the gendarmes and, most of all, on my ID, and on justice in general, then even patriotism, when it came time to examine that emotion, did not offer much to hold me back.

Then there were the more skeptical types who were differently informed, claiming to be acquainted with other sides of the German character; still others who asked them, in that case, what better suggestion they had; and yet others again who, instead of that kind of bickering, came out in favor of the voice of reason, of showing by example, of being seen as worthy in the eyes of the authorities—all of which arguments and counterarguments, along with a whole lot of other bits of news, information, and counsel, were debated inexhaustibly by knots of people, small and large, incessantly breaking up and re-forming all around me in the yard. I even heard mention of God, among other things, and “His inscrutable will,” as one person expressed it. Like Uncle Lajos had done once, he too spoke about fate, the fate of the Jews, and he too, like Uncle Lajos, considered that “we have abandoned the Lord,” and that explained the tribulations that were being inflicted upon us. He aroused my interest a little bit all the same, because he was a man of vigorous presence and physique, with a somewhat unusual face, characterized by a thin but sweepingly curved nose, a very bright, misty-eyed gaze, and a fine, grizzled moustache that merged into a short, rounded beard. A lot of people were standing around him and curious about what he had to say, I could see. Only then did I become aware that he was a priest, because I heard him being addressed as “rabbi.” I even registered one or two of the more unusual words or expressions he used, such as the point where he admitted that, “through the eye that sees and the heart that feels,” he was bound to concede that “we here on Earth might, perhaps, dispute the severity of the sentence”—and here his voice, otherwise so clear and far-carrying, faltered and broke down for a minute, while his eyes became somehow even more misted over than usual, at which point, I don’t know why, I had the odd feeling he had actually been preparing to say something else and in some way he might have been a little bit surprised himself by those words. Still, he carried on, “he did not wish to delude himself,” he confessed. He was well aware, for it was enough to look around “this atrocious place and these tormented faces”—that was how he put it, and his compassion rather took me aback, since he himself was in exactly the same situation, after all—to realize how difficult a task he had. Yet it was not his goal, because there was no need, “to win souls for the Eternal Father,” for all of our souls were from Him, he said. He urged us all: “Don’t live in strife with the Lord!”—and not even primarily because it was sinful to do so, but because that path would lead “to denial of the sublime meaning of life”; in his opinion, however, we could not live “with that denial in our hearts.” A heart like that might be at ease, but only because it was empty, like the barrenness of the desert, he said; hard though it might be, the sole path to consolation, even in the midst of tribulation, was to glimpse the infinite wisdom of the Eternal Father, because, as he continued, word for word: “His moment of victory will come, and those who have been unmindful of His power shall be repentant and shall call out to Him from the dust.” If, therefore, he were now to say that we must believe in the advent of His ultimate mercy (“and may that belief be our succor and unfailing source of strength in this hour of afflictions”), then he was at the same time pointing out the sole manner in which it was possible for us to live at all. And he called that manner “the denial of denial,” since without hope “we are lost”; on the other hand, hope was to be derived from faith alone, from an unbroken assurance that the Lord would take pity on us, and that we should be able to gain his mercy. The reasoning, I had to acknowledge, seemed clear, though I did notice that he failed to say, at the end of it all, anything more precise about how we might actually achieve this; nor was he truly able to supply any good advice to those who were pressing him for an opinion on whether they should register for the journey now, or rather stay. I saw the man with the bad luck there too, on several occasions, bobbing up first with one group, then with another. Still, I noticed that while he was doing this the restless gaze of his beady, slightly bloodshot eyes was in constant motion, tirelessly darting on to other groups and other people. Every now and then, I also heard his voice as he stopped people, his face tensely inquisitive, wringing and fumbling with his hands while he was at it, to inquire: “excuse me, but are you also going to make the trip?” and “why?” and “do you think that will be better, if you don’t mind my asking?”