Panorama (58 page)

Josef finishes taking in the panorama and climbs down after a while, Simon having twice asked that he come down. Josef then becomes very talkative, saying it’s an enchanted landscape, foreigners hardly knowing it at all, most of their comrades having hardly any eye for such a landscape, and therefore they shouldn’t go wandering about, the Conqueror doesn’t want them to, his life being completely joyless, and therefore the lives of the oppressed should be even more joyless, the last vestiges of free movement perhaps about to be forbidden any day now, the laborers turned into prisoners in their huts. Certainly there are lovers of nature among their comrades, but worries and fears weigh upon their senses too heavily to allow them to take pleasure in the forest around them, Karl Peters himself having said that he preferred to read and study on his free days, others lounging about the room and playing cards, some playing football behind the barracks, some lying in the sun and chatting, there also being fervent letter writers, others simply tired or listless and dozing. Siegler had said that it had never occurred to him to go for a walk here, for he’s always so exhausted from working that he has to take a breather on the weekend. Simon suggests that they cut up the mushrooms they found that evening in order to dry them and give them to Siegler so that he can send them to his wife. Josef thinks that’s a great idea and says perhaps Siegler is thinking now of his beloved Italy, he being a deeply rooted man, the separation from his homeland too much for him, and possibly he’ll never get over it, for he sees nothing but relentless destruction ahead and lives only for memories that one can no longer enter, as he said in comparing it to the panorama.

Simon wants to know whether Josef is not just as pessimistic. No, he’s not pessimistic, yet optimism and pessimism are words he prefers to avoid, for they are questionable words, Josef preferring to think about his relationship to life in realistic terms, not clinical, because life is not clinical, though it is natural, but clinical is not the same as natural, Josef thinking of nothing less and nothing more than a positive attitude toward reality, or the seemingly real, but he doesn’t feel comfortable spinning out any grand theory, for what we can know is a present, namely
the
present. The dangers are not to be underestimated, but as long as it exists a person should not doubt that the present is a continual source of renewal. In this sense memory is of no use, no matter how good and helpful it can be, but the present is something
else, it being full of surprise and the unforeseeable, such that one should even dispense with any notion of free will, the desire for a view of the future that reveals all being unacceptable, Josef searching for the right words and finding that, yes, this desire is in fact impure, unclean, it is sinful, although he cannot deny that the horrible present circumstances prod each of us day in, day out, to conjure such a wish, at which Simon asks, “Do you have any hope, Josef?” No, not hope, that’s not what he’d call it, but instead a readiness to accept whatever might happen, it’s probably life itself that we should accept at any moment without fear. Nothing is more destructive than fear, for, senselessly, it leads to the death of meaning and is itself meaningless, fear able to enslave and murder before a death sentence is even lowered upon a man.

Simon says that, at thirty, Josef has already seen so much and lived so much, but he himself is still young, he having wandered through only a narrow portion, in which he has experienced an unforgettable family, the parents and the son, and not one of the three ever feeling alone for a single moment, and yet each was always there for himself without fail every time, each connecting happily with his surroundings, though that was never the main thing, for everything led back to the family, which after the father’s arrest was horribly destroyed. Josef then asks Simon not to forget his music, for more important than the memory itself is to allow music in its essence to come alive within him, even without a violin or making a sound, for thus you live entirely through your spirit, since that you are sure of, and that you have within you. Simon is ready to believe that, but he is always ripped away from it and destroyed. Whenever Sajdl stands behind him there is no music, and all he can do is think how he can empty his shovel into the railcar with the least amount of effort, though Simon will try to do what Sajdl wants him to while he works, and perhaps he can also sink into his music, perhaps it’s possible. By now the friends are tired from talking and stray from the path to find a bed of moss, resting there and eating their snack, it being warm and still, and immensely peaceful, Simon stretching out and going to sleep, Josef watching him and thinking, before the rustling of the leaves also causes him to fall into a reverie about the past and he sleeps.

I
T’S A GONG, NOT A BELL, A PIECE OF TRAIN RAIL THAT HANGS FROM A RACK
that looks like a gallows, someone having struck it hard three times with a truncheon, followed by many quick blows and one last hard blow!
Bong-Bong-Bong-zingzingzingzingzingzingzingzingzing-Bong!
It’s awful music that sounds from the darkness, a miserable sound, gloomy, there in the night, the hut dark, the room murky and cold, full of a horrible smell. The gallows music dies away and again there is silence, no, not complete silence, there is heavy breathing, a whistling throaty gurgle, forty bodies stretched out dead to the world, neither asleep nor awake, simply lying there, time having abandoned them, neither living nor dead, though one can also say that many are alive and some are indeed dead, it being hard to make out in the darkness who is dead and who is alive. Nothing else is here, only bodies, and the room is made of wood, above, below, all four walls made out of wood, the wood is planed bare, it looks reddish brown in the light, clearly new wood that not so long ago was still in the forest, there where the trees had been felled, soft, thin boards cut from their trunks. There is also a door that cannot
be shut, it has no latch and no handle, a door that is never open and never closed, instead moving with each gust of air, hanging on rusty hinges as it squeaks with the weaker and squeals with the stronger gusts of air. There is also a window, a simple frame with six small panes, for indeed the panes are set in the frame and are not broken, there also being a light, a bulb hanging from a wire, while above the socket that holds it there is even a tin shade.

Nothing else is here, no nails on the walls, no stools, no table, no bench, nothing, nothing at all, no beds, no straw mattresses, nothing but the bodies of the lost, clothed in rags of many colors, a few blankets scattered about, under which are bodies, as well as caps, ragged pieces of cloth without shape, a couple of tin bowls, some spoons, perhaps some other possessions gathered from the rubble and rubbish, otherwise nothing else, except fear, layer upon layer thickly packed together, living fear manifest within dried-up and evaporated bodies consumed by hatred and despair, though most of all fear, which will not die, even when they are whipped, as a sneer transforms itself into sleeplessness, and hope arises amid the decay, though perhaps hope cannot eradicate decay but instead struggles against fear. From outside there is a glimmer of light, while in a wide circle around the huts a network of barbed wire stretches through which electricity flows, cement pillars holding up the wire as it quietly runs along, separating fear from fear, since everywhere there is fear. There is no longer any difference between inside and out, fear cannot be checked by the wire, fear is on this side and that, as well as in the wire itself, powerful lamps attached to the concrete pillars that light up the night and stand there in the stillness of their own light, a light that shines on no one, nor does anyone think it real. But this light has a protective quality that cannot be destroyed by fear. It conquers fear as the light shines on the armed young men who crouch in the watchtower without rest. Yet there is no fear of attack, no one wants to defeat the fear inside, that which is well hidden away, no one wants to diminish it. The weapons in the tower are not aimed outward in order to protect fear from external threat, but instead peer inward so that the fear here remains constantly the same fear, the light illuminates fear, and those saddled with fear remain the enemies enclosed by the Conqueror with barbed wire in order that none flee, as they might be all that he has left to save him, since the Conqueror
stands afraid and in dire straits. He has lost almost everything he has fought for on all fronts, everything now destroyed and laid to waste, and fear knows that the despot has gambled it all away, although he still has a hold of the fear he has robbed from almost every country, and since these countries are already freed of the Conqueror the fear hauled off from them waits behind the wire, hears the train rail struck, sees the wretched blood of life mixed with decay, feels the festering abscesses and the oozing streaks caused by the whip, tastes the bitter saliva and smells the corrosive dust of the stones, all of them knowing that it is the end, time long ago having dissolved, though now the end is near.

Now the sirens sound, from near and far they sound, an oscillating wail, slowly it gathers from below and climbs high, then sinks down once again and is muffled, then it swells once again and repeats again and again, then voices call out, “Douse the lights!” Then it’s even darker in the room. As the lights on the concrete pillars go out there is even more night, everyone asleep and gurgling in his sleep, no one stirs inside the lockdown of the cold that holds sway over an endless weariness, nothing else but weariness. Josef, however, strains to listen, still under the blanket, only his head sticking out when the iron rail was struck, and now he is completely awake, never a heavy sleeper, only getting a few hours, lengthy sleep never possible here, though Josef himself doesn’t completely utilize the shortened time that is reluctantly granted them, something drawing him awake while the others try to catch another couple of minutes, themselves insatiable and risking a beating as they sleep on into the day watch, which was long ago forbidden, long ago, that’s what their couple of stolen minutes are, since every moment stretches out endlessly and no one knows what day or night means here.

Josef doesn’t want to be woken if he can avoid it. He wants to wake up when he needs to, he wants to live, and nowhere is sleep more like death, when the bodies are packed as close as they are here, as they try to protect one another and not freeze, the nights bitterly cold, although it is already the end of March. Perhaps it’s not always so cold, but here it is cold, here inside the wire, where fear lives, where three or four of the lost are lumped together, sharing two or three blankets between them, as long as they are not stolen, for when that happens a great hue and cry rises, as nowhere are human possessions guarded more jealously than in the lost ones’ camp. But
they are not possessions, they are loaned goods, and whoever thinks of property in the real world as anything other than loaned goods soon learns here that any possession is only borrowed, one cannot watch over it and guard it, it is simply surrendered, a thousand hands grabbing after every crumb and scrap, no scratched-in or painted-on name and no list making possessions safe from a neighbor’s reach, for here it’s a free-for-all, and there is no protection and no guards. Whatever serves the needs of the lost behind the wire functions as an act of grace, something that can lapse at any moment, for grace is not a possession to which any of the lost have a right, though the lost don’t know that, they upon whom hangs the intense pain of the threat of it all going on forever and who only want it to end, which is why their misery is so intense.

To Josef’s right lies Étienne, who was a cameraman in Paris and is a couple of years younger than Josef, while to the left lies Milan, the small dark-haired son of a murdered doctor from a small city in Banat who can’t be any older than sixteen. The majority of the lost are Jews from many different countries, but divided among the huts are members of many different nationalities—Poles, Ukrainians, French, Belgians, Dutch, Germans, Czechs, and other Slavs, Balts, as well as Spaniards, Italians, Norwegians, and others. Most of the lost are young, often no more than children barely over fourteen, the majority between twenty and thirty, some between thirty and forty, Josef at thirty-five being one of the older ones, though some are indeed beyond fifty. But the lost are ageless, for certainly they are not young, though they are not old, either, as the lost are of no time or era that other people will discover in later centuries, while agreed-upon laws have lost their meaning, knowledge and culture have become pointless because everything they represent is different from what can be learned or demonstrated here. The lost remain outside legal designation and analysis, every attempt at understanding is pointless, because everything about life behind the wire is strange and ungraspable, language incapable of expressing the nature of the lost in a way that would be comprehensible to those on the outside. The lost themselves don’t know this, for they have a language, many languages in fact, derived from languages that people out in the world would understand, though behind the wire these languages are diminished, expressing but little and shrunk to meager phrases in which hardly any of
the artful structures from which they were derived can be felt, an abject language, the words hard, snarled and barked out, even when whispered, the language never forming chains of linked sentences, the conversations of the lost never flowing, either hinting at something or grasping at something, otherwise given over to screams, leaping flames, and spasms of pain.