Spark of Life (8 page)

T
HE BARRACK WAS DARK
and stank. It was a long time since there had been any light in the evenings. “509,” whispered Berger. “Lohmann wants to speak to you.”

“Has it got that far?”

“Not yet.”

509 groped along the narrow passages to the wooden partitions near which was outlined the dim square of the window. “Lohmann?”

Something rustled. “Is Berger there, too?” asked Lohmann.

“No.”

“Get him.”

“What for?”

“Get him!”

509 groped his way back. Curses followed him. He trod on bodies lying in the corridors. Someone bit him in the calf. 509 beat on the unknown head until the teeth let go.

After a few minutes he returned with Berger. “Here we are. What is it?”

“Here!” Lohmann stretched out his arm.

“What?” asked 509.

“Put your hand under mine. Flat. Careful.”

509 felt Lohmann’s thin fist. It was as dry as a lizard’s skin. Slowly it opened. Something small and heavy fell into 509’s hand. “Got it?”

“Yes. What is it? Is it—?”

“Yes,” whispered Lohmann. “My tooth.”

“What?” Berger shuffled nearer. “Who did it?”

Lohmann began to chuckle. It was an almost soundless, ghostlike chuckle. “I did.”

“You? How?”

They felt the satisfaction of the dying man. He seemed childish and proud and deeply reassured. “Nail. Two hours. Small iron nail. Found it and bored the tooth loose with it.”

“Where’s the nail?”

Lohmann reached out beside him and handed it to Berger. Berger held it up to the window and then fingered it. “Filth and rust. Did it bleed?”

Lohmann chuckled again. “Berger,” he said, “I can risk blood poisoning.”

“Wait.” Berger searched his pocket. “Has anyone a match?”

Matches were precious. “Not me,” answered 509.

“Here,” said someone from the center bunk.

Berger struck the box. The match flared up. Berger and 509 had kept their eyes closed so as not to be blinded. This way they could see for several seconds longer. “Open your mouth,” said Berger.

Lohmann stared at him. “Don’t be foolish,” he whispered. “Sell the gold.”

“Open your mouth.”

Across Lohmann’s face flitted something that could have been meant as a smile. “Let me alone. Good to have seen you once more in the light.”

“I’m going to put iodine on it. I’ll get the bottle.”

Berger gave 509 the match and groped towards his bunk. “Lights out!” someone squawked.

“Shut up!” answered the man who had produced the match.

“Lights out!” squawked the other voice again. “D’you want the guards to mow us down?”

509 stood in such a way that his bent body was between the wall and the match. The man in the center bunk held his blanket against the window while 509 protected the little flame sideways with his jacket. Lohmann’s eyes were very clear. They were too clear. 509 glanced at the stub of match that had not yet burned out, and then at Lohmann, and he thought how he had known Lohmann for seven years and he knew this was the last time that he would see him alive. He had seen too many such faces not to know it.

He felt the heat of the flame on his fingers, but he held it till he could no longer stand it. He heard Berger return. Then darkness was suddenly there, as though he had been struck blind. “Got another match?” he asked the man in the center bunk.

“Here—” The man gave him another. “The last one.”

The last one, thought 509. Fifteen seconds of light. Fifteen seconds for the forty-five years that still were called Lohmann. The last ones.

The little flickering circle. “Lights out, damn it! Knock the light out of his hand.”

“Idiot! No swine can see anything!”

509 held the match lower. Berger stood close to him, the bottle of iodine in his hand. “Open your mouth—”

He stopped. Now he too saw Lohmann clearly. There had been no point in getting the iodine. He had really fetched it only in order to be doing something. He put the bottle slowly into his pocket. Lohmann looked calmly at him without blinking. 509 glanced away. He opened his hand and saw gleaming in it the little
lump of gold. Then he glanced again at Lohmann. The flame scorched his fingers. From the side a shadow struck at his arm. The light went out.

“Good night, Lohmann,” said 509.

“I’ll be back again later,” said Berger.

“Just leave me,” whispered Lohmann. “This now—is easy—”

“Maybe we’ll find a few more matches.”

Lohmann didn’t answer any more.

509 felt the gold crown hard and heavy in his hand. “Come out,” he whispered to Berger. “We better talk it over outside. We’re alone there.”

They groped their way to the door and went to the side of the barrack that was protected against the wind. The town was blacked out and the fires to a large extent extinguished. Only the tower of St. Catherine’s church still burned like a gigantic torch. It was very old and full of dry timber; the fire-brigade hoses were powerless against it; there was nothing to be done but to let it burn itself out.

They squatted down. “What’ll we do?” asked 509.

Berger rubbed his inflamed eyes. “If the crown is registered in the office, we’re lost. They’ll investigate and hang a few of us—me first.”

“He says it wasn’t registered. When he arrived, they hadn’t started that here. He’s been in the camp seven years. At that time gold teeth were knocked out, but not registered. That came later.”

“Are you sure of that?”

509 shrugged his shoulders.

They were silent for a while. “Of course we can still tell the truth and hand over the crown. Or stick it in his mouth when he’s dead,” explained 509 at last. His hand closed tightly round the little lump. “You want to do that?”

Berger shook his head. That gold was life for several days. Both knew that now they had it, they wouldn’t give it up.

“Couldn’t he have broken the tooth out years ago and sold it himself?” asked 509.

“Do you think the SS would fall for that?”

“No. Certainly not if they discovered the fresh wound in his mouth.”

“That’s the least worry. If he holds out a bit longer, the wound will heal. Besides, it’s a molar in the back; that makes checking more difficult, if the corpse is already stiff. If he dies this evening, he’ll be that far by the morning. If he dies early tomorrow we’ll have to keep him here till he’s stiff. That should work. We can fool Handke at the morning roll call.”

509 looked at Berger. “We’ve got to risk it. We need the money. Especially now.”

“Yes. There’s nothing else left for us to do. Who’s going to get rid of the tooth?”

“Lebenthal. He’s the only one who can do it.”

Behind them the barrack door opened. A few men dragged out a figure by its arms and legs and lugged it to a heap beside the road. Here lay the dead who had died since the evening roll call.

“Is that Lohmann already?”

“No. Those aren’t our people. They’re Mussulmen.”

The men who had dropped the dead staggered back to the barrack.

“Did anyone notice that we got the tooth?” asked Berger.

“I don’t think so. They’re almost all Mussulmen lying there. The only chance is the man who gave us the match.”

“Did he say anything?”

“No. Not yet. But he can always come and ask for his share.”

“That’s our least worry. The question is if he considers it a better business to betray us.”

509 thought for a while. He knew there were people capable of doing anything for a crust of bread. “He didn’t look like it,” he said finally. “Why else would he have given us the match?”

“That hasn’t anything to do with it. We must be careful. Otherwise, we’re both done for. And Lebenthal as well.”

509 knew that too, well enough. He had seen many a man hang for less. “We must watch him,” he declared. “At least until Lohmann is cremated and Lebenthal has got rid of the tooth. After that he won’t be able to do anything.”

Berger nodded. “I’ll go in again. Maybe I’ll find out something.”

“Okay. I’ll stay here and wait for Leo. He must still be in the labor camp.”

Berger got up and went over to the barrack. He and 509 would have risked their lives without hesitating if anything could have saved Lohmann. But he could not be saved. So they talked about him as about a stone. The years in the camp had taught them to think realistically.

509 crouched in the shadow of the latrine. It was a good place; here no one paid any attention to him. For all the barracks together the Small camp had only one large communal latrine which was built on the boundary between the two camps and to which an endless procession of skeletons, continuously moaning, shuffled to and from the barracks. Practically everyone had diarrhea or worse and many lay around in a state of collapse, waiting until they had once more gathered sufficient strength to stumble on. From both sides of the latrine ran the barbed-wire fence separating the Small camp from the labor camp.

509 crouched in such a way that he could watch the gate which had been cut into the barbed wire. It was there for the SS block leaders, the block seniors, the corpse carriers and the hearses.
Berger was the only one in Barrack 22 allowed to use it when he went to the crematorium. To all others it was strictly forbidden. The Pole, Silber, had called it the croak-gate because the prisoners committed to the Small camp returned through it only as corpses. Any guard was allowed to fire at a skeleton trying to get into the labor camp. Almost no one tried it. Nor from the labor camp did anyone cross over except those on duty. The Small camp was not only under a moderate quarantine; it was also generally considered hopeless by the other prisoners and regarded merely as a kind of cemetery in which for a short while the dead still staggered about.

Through the barbed wire 509 could see a part of the labor camp’s roads. They teemed with prisoners making the most of what was left of their free time. He watched them talking to one another, standing together in groups and wandering along the roads—and although it was just another section of the concentration camp, it seemed to him as though he were separated from them by an unbridgeable gulf and as though over there were something like a lost home in which life and comradeship still existed. Behind him he heard the soft shuffling of the prisoners staggering to the latrine and he didn’t need to glance around to see their dead eyes. They hardly spoke any more; at most they moaned or squabbled in weary voices; they didn’t think any longer; camp humor dubbed them Mussulmen because they were utterly resigned to their fate. They moved like automatons and no longer had any will of their own; save for a few physical functions everything in them was extinct. They were living corpses and died like flies in frost. The Small camp was full of them. They were broken and lost and nothing could save them—not even freedom.

509 felt the coolness of the night deep in his bones. The murmuring and moaning behind him was like a gray flood in which one could drown. It was the temptation to surrender the self—the temptation against which the Veterans desperately fought. 509
moved his shoulders involuntarily and turned his head so as to feel he was still alive and had a will of his own. Then he heard the final whistle in the labor camp. The barracks there had their own latrines and were locked up at night. The groups on the roads broke up. The men disappeared. In less than a minute everything over there was empty, and only the cheerless procession of the shadows in the Small camp remained—forgotten by the comrades on the other side of the barbed wire; written off, isolated—a remnant of lost trembling life in the territory of certain death.

Lebenthal did not come through the gate. 509 saw him suddenly walk diagonally in front of him across the ground. He must have entered from somewhere behind the latrine. No one knew how he smuggled himself through; it wouldn’t have surprised 509 if he had used a foreman’s armband or even that of a kapo for the purpose.

“Leo!”

Lebenthal stood still. “What’s happening? Look out! The SS are still over there. Come away from here.”

They went over to the barrack. “Did you get something?” asked 509.

“What?”

“Food. What else?”

Lebenthal raised his shoulders. “Food! What else!” he repeated irritably. “What d’you think? Am I the kitchen kapo?”

“No.”

“Well! What d’you want from me, then?”

“Nothing. I merely asked if you got hold of something to eat.”

Lebenthal stood still. “Food,” he said bitterly. “Do you know that every Jew in the camp is to have two breadless days? Weber’s orders.”

509 stared at him. “Is that a fact?”

“No. I made it up. I always invent things like that. It’s funny.”

“My God! That’ll make corpses!”

“Sure. Heaps. And you still want to know if I got some food—”

“Be quiet, Leo. Sit down here. This is a bloody story. Just now! Now, when we need all the grub we can lay our hands on!”

“Do we? So perhaps it’s all my fault, eh?” Lebenthal began to tremble. He always trembled when excited, and he got easily excited; he was very touchy. With him it meant about as much as drumming one’s fingers on the table would mean with another. It came from the permanent hunger. It magnified and diminished all emotions. In the camp, hysteria and apathy were twins.

“I’ve done what I could,” wailed Lebenthal softly in a high breaking voice. “I’ve lugged things along and taken chances and provided, and now you come and declare we need—”

His voice drowned suddenly in a boggy, incomprehensible gargle. It sounded as though one of the camp’s loudspeakers had broken down. Lebenthal’s hands fumbled over the ground. Now his face looked no longer like an offended skull; it was merely a forehead with a nose and frog-eyes and underneath a lot of flabby skin with a hole in it. At last he found his false teeth on the ground, wiped them on his jacket and pushed them into his mouth. The loudspeaker was working again and the voice was back, high and wailing.

509 let him wail without listening. Lebenthal noticed it and stopped. “We’ve often had breadless days,” he said feebly at last. “And more than two at a time. What’s the matter with you that you’re making such a fuss about it today?”