The Birthday Buyer (11 page)

Hurbinek was going to Auschwitz, but not anymore.

Now here we have Walter Hanna, fifty-nine years of age, an ironic, seductive radio journalist specializing in sports—football, boxing, and above all swimming—residing in Salonika, Greece, 15 Mitropoleos Street, in an attic from which one can see the White Tower (he has always lived there, they’ll even put a plaque on the façade). Single and homosexual, he has lived his life alone but not isolated; he has shared his most recent life with a lover, the singer Dimitriou Mitarakis, who has just died. He was his only family, plus friends, dozens of friends, because Walter Hanna is a very sociable, charismatic man. He also discovered he has
AIDS
and hasn’t long to live, “I have loved so much . . . ” he silently consoles himself and is not afraid. “Those of us who survived the Nazis can never be frightened again,” he liked to say, “and possess a mysterious durability.” He has lived on the edge, true enough, and squeezed dry the boundaries of every transgression, perhaps because he thought that “mysterious endurability” made him immune. When Dimitriou died, he told him,“I have been very happy.” He kissed him on the lips and added,“Thank you.” But now in the spring of 2001 Walter Hanna is in a hospital, on the outskirts of Berlin. That is what he requested, almost insisted upon, he doesn’t want to enter Berlin, he wants to be as far away as possible from the Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse;
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles
, that “Germany above all,” echoes around his head and gives him goose bumps; he remembers that Joseph Roth, whom he reads and re-reads frequently, had already said that no Jew went to Berlin of his own free will. He is in the hospital because he has been in a car accident, like me, when he was driving to Auschwitz. He didn’t mean to go through Berlin, but he’d been misled several times by the German motorway signs and took the wrong turn. The map in his rented car was no use, was too old. Before he realized it, he was already twenty-five miles from the capital, and any other route, back to Dresden or down to Prague, would have have sidetracked him even more. Then he skidded and crashed into a camper that was parked on the hard shoulder. It’s not serious, but they gave him a blood test in hospital and confirmed what he already knew. The medical report has the hint of a fatal diagnosis: he is bleeding internally and it’s dangerous to continue in such state. “How strange,” he thought, “it’s as if they were sentencing me to death here, yet again, fifty years later.”

He was always Jewish and always lived among Jews. The Sephardis of Salonika, savagely reduced after the war, welcomed him as they did so many thousands who came from the camps and were on their way down to Palestine. He was in a truck full of moribund children. Only five were saved, and he was one, and nobody remembered his real name, so he gave himself the one he has now when it was time to go into the army, perhaps because he liked Walter Rogas, an Italian sporting journalist. He was declared unfit for service because his legs were shorter than normal. Now that he knows his end is near, he decided to go to Auschwitz and confront his destiny, face the inevitable pilgrimage to that kernel of History. But now finds himself in a German hospital, unable to move, and at the mercy of ghosts. Hurbinek will never make it to Auschwitz. At least for a second time.

Nevertheless there is something that is still possible, an absurd hope: that Walter Hanna, the journalist whose voice in Greece is as famous as Melina Mercouri’s, is
really
inhabiting the same present as myself, the very same day, the very same hour as I imagine him, not very far away, in another German town, both of us simultaneously in hospital. And it could be absolutely for real, it could be true that at the very moment when I am rescuing Hurbinek from the dead and giving him a life, the real Walter Hanna, or whatever his name is, is there, in that hospital, because he was
really
born in Auschwitz and had
really
made the journey, his life’s last, that far. Then Hurbinek had certainly lived
über alles
, above all else, as the hymn goes.

Henek has got up and attuned his ears to try to catch the words apparently coming out of Hurbinek’s mouth.

For several days the child has been uttering a sound that is incomprehensible to those surrounding him in the barrack. In fact, they are two words—
mass-klo
,
matisklo
—or perhaps just one, the variations introduced by his hoarse, agonizing breathing. Patzold, who first mistook them for Bohemian vowels, is reminded of Latin declinations, with their different endings and suffixes, and consequently imagines Hurbinek to be Romanian in origin, though as far as he knows there are very few Romanians in the camp.

In that cold, dark February, Henek, sitting on one side of the child’s bed—a sort of cradle he himself made—observes the small bulk that is Hurbinek, who cannot curl up because his legs have gone dead, and crosses Hurbinek’s hands over his chest, in a position straining to retain heat, where his breath can reach them, though he shivers constantly.

Henek strokes the woollen hat with ear flaps they have given him. Hurbinek’s gaunt, dirty face, that seems even more gloomy in the dim light filtering through the cracks from outside, sways rhythmically on a pillow stuffed with straw. He looks more like a doll than a child. Henek listens attentively, tirelessly, to the language of his protégé.

He thinks there are two words, one ending in
as
and the other in
o
. Some, like Primo Levi or Franz Patzold, argue they can only hear one, one spoken hesitantly, uttered inevitably haltingly because of his gasps, as if he had hiccups (hence the sudden separation of the two syllables or aspirated
tis
sound). Sometimes Henek hears
maschs glo
and at others claims that the second word, transformed into
blo
and then
klo
is repeated twice or three times, with the syllables switching place:
blo - klo - blo - klo
. The boy might even be saying three words:
mass
[maschs]
blo klo
. And these three words belong to the refrain of a lullaby rather than a sentence with any meaning. They remind Henek remotely of the words of a lullaby he knows, although he is sure the words aren’t Hungarian. He explained that to everyone, when, as well as asking how many words little Hurbinek is uttering, they wonder what they might mean. Henek felt they were very similar to “the mill wish woosh” he recalled in a dialect ditty sung by peasant women in the Beskides, a lullaby children repeated, imitating the sounds animals and objects make on a farm.

dar ruk ko ko

dar bletz crep crep

dar maschs blu blo

[
cock doodle doo

fire crackle crackle

mill wish woosh
]

Ernst Sterman thought Hurbinek was trying to say his name, but when had he ever learned such a thing? As for Scholomo Buczko the cobbler, he was simply whimpering like a sick baby animal. For others, like Rubem Yetzev, the word spoken by Hurbinek was simply a word of affection he had repeatedly heard at intervals in his short life, a kind of “duck,”“luvvie” or “darling” or just “my little one,” said by someone, perhaps his mother, or by whoever picked him up and saved him and brought him there where, alone and lost, he was clinging to a survival that seemed increasingly unlikely. For school master Yetzev they were the only warm, loving words Hurbinek had heard in his short little life, words whispered by a trembling voice, in danger, at a decisive moment, that he now repeated like a small animal stiff with cold and fear, hoping to hear the affectionate tone of that protective voice that had taught him them before disappearing. The psalm-like insistence with which Hurbinek said those words in all his suffering was but his instinctive expression of despair and anguish.

Gradually, as days went by, they all became increasingly obsessed by those short words. They were fascinated by their ambiguous, indefinable meaning. Each individual detected the meaning he wanted to hear for himself: some longed for songs from their childhood, other recalled the innocence of their early years or were transported by melancholy to a moment when they were happy, one of those moments that is as hard as a rock and rushes back into the memory like a lost paradise that, when times are bad, can prop up an entire life. Each of them, in the foul-smelling barrack, thought of a moment in the past that was frozen in time, abstracted from history, when they experienced the happy eternity they so longed for, a state of stillness, a premature but sweet anticipation of death.

In the words of Hurbinek, everyone began to want to utter a language of their own, a language without past or present, or at any rate without the past they abandoned as the greatest exercise in horror a human being could ever suffer. They all wanted to remove themselves from that place and time and fly off on the gurgles made by that moribund baby to a life of quiet elsewhere, that would preserve them in a bubble of the most elemental bliss, that relates every feeling and moment of warmth to the maternal bosom.

The dirty blankets covering Hurbinek are his real language. In his heart of hearts, Henek, the extreme realist, understands that with a survivor’s keen common sense stripped of metaphor. And that contradiction between lullaby or loving whisper, as absent from Auschwitz as the sun is from the night and the filth all around, makes Henek weep in the early morning, when dawn’s icy light brings a tinge of blue to the excrement from patients with dysentery that is dotted throughout the barrack. By his side Hurbinek grates his gritted teeth: he wasn’t asleep. His large eyes were simply entering a state of lethargy in which his gasps blotted out the slightest sound he articulated, but Henek knew that wasn’t a dream, only an extreme point of exhaustion in Hurbinek’s hurried search for an answer to his requests, expressed in that clumsy, inchoate language.

Reality, like pain, made its mark once more during those weeks: someone died (Abrahan Levine, from diphtheria, cared for as best he could by Rubem Yetzev); some extracted food from the Polish nurses and others waited in their beds, trying to recover the strength that had deserted them. Hurbinek’s words thus became one more element in that reality, transfigured nonetheless into a symbol of what those men were experiencing. That obsessed them for a month: deciphering, understanding, interpreting those three miserable, enigmatic, barely audible words, because they knew they might be the only words possible at such a time, at that precise moment.

Those able to move took shifts night and day by the side of Hurbinek’s bed, hoping that the Word, just one, might be revealed in all its purity, that would allow them to surrender to him and save their life. And be saved, thanks to that word they surmised but never heard, or at least that was what some—Berek Goldstein or Chaim Roth—imagined. Hurbinek became for many an extraordinary Messiah in a process of silent self-immolation.

In a way, those men depended on the language imposed by Hurbinek, since at the end of the day they unconsciously began to think that those words expressed what they themselves wanted to say though they realized to their astonishment they never did; words that enclosed ambiguous meanings, like the periods in Chemistry for Primo Levi, and sought a way out to reach the name from the world of the unnameable: “hunger” or “fear” or “bread” or “heat,” or perhaps a blind, deep, elemental demand for an explanation via a robust verb the young boy could never find; at best or above all, those words merely wanted to ask “why?” And that was why they snatched at scraps of knowledge in childish verse or the most primeval “I love you.” They were returning to that primitive, primary language for urgently naming fear, desire or dire necessity.

That language sank them all in silence. It was one paradox produced by the sight of Hurbinek. For a month they barely spoke if it wasn’t to refer to him; they only responded to the sounds that child made, sounds that immediately vanished, the prescient symptom of an intense, humiliating wail. A dirty silence, as dirty and silent as streets were now, and houses, bodies, mathematics, novels, trombones, newspapers, and the dead throughout Europe.

Henek strains to listen to Hurbinek’s voice. He brings his lips close to his cheek. He knows it is a privilege. “Hello, my little sweet,” Sofia Pawlicka, Cèrmik by her maiden name, would have said, in other circumstances, had she been alive.

Some words belong to a dream.

Walter Benjamin had a dream on June 28, 1938. He was climbing a ladder but couldn’t see the top. Other ladders like his were everywhere, that other people were climbing. They took a long time; they were very steep at the end. The ladder came to a sudden halt and he saw he had reached the top, a fragile step separating him from the void. He looked around and saw other men in the same situation, at the top of their respective peaks. One raised his hand to his head and said, “I am dizzy and feel sick” and hurtled down from the peak. That dizziness spread and they fell one after another, after they’d raised their hands to their foreheads. When Benjamin felt dizzy symptoms—or thought he did in his sleep—he woke up.

And I have just woken up from a similar dream in the hospital in Frankfurt: in my dream I was on the top of a mountain of rubbish and filth. I couldn’t identify the kind of rubbish, but I knew,
as a matter of course
, that it was foul-smelling; there were old clothes, scrap metal and even human remains that I accepted,
as a matter of course
. Next to me, at the top of the mountain, someone had nailed up a sign:
FRANKFURT
. From where I stood, I could see two other mountains, also containing all manner of filth and rubbish. The sign on one said
AUSCHWITZ
and on the other
WARSAW
. There was a man like myself on both peaks, deaf in fear and shock.
I knew
that both men were me, but they didn’t have my face. Then one of them, the furthest away, (
WARSAW
), sank into his mountain,
as a matter of course
, and was swallowed up by the detritus. The other man and I stared at each other, but as we did so, the second was also swallowed up by his mountain (
AUSCHWITZ
). The nurse woke me up because I was waving my arms and was soaked in sweat. She was afraid I had a temperature and gave me an injection, but when I came round and she left the room, I couldn’t get to sleep again. The cold presence of the nurse reminded me that I was still in Frankfurt, and I thought of Benjamin. I thought how I was in the city that had allowed Mengele to qualify as a doctor, yet hadn’t accepted Benjamin as a teacher in Goethe University. Benjamin wrote that some kinds of important dreams endure in the shape of certain words. I wonder which word would contain his dream of the men falling from their mountain peaks. Perhaps it was simply that word: peak, or maybe dizziness, and hence, the end, and hence, and why not? revenge. In my case, the word that encapsulates my dream is paralysis. I was going to Auschwitz, but not anymore. Or the word is shit, and hence origin, and terror.

What dream did Hurbinek’s words belong to?

With one finger, Henek lovingly cleans the dribble from the boy’s lips and listens. Henek listens every day, Henek listens every night.

After the horror, dumbness is all, and Hurbinek was dumb. His words—if that is how one can describe those syllables that emerge from his mouth, like the sigh from a disenchanted angel who lets himself drift into death, and not the projections from the men around him in this shack for the sick—his words were simulacra of an elemental language as unutterable as a sacred or accursed name.

There are words that are not possible.

Jean Améry wrote in one of his books,“Words cease in any place where a reality is imposed that is totalitarian in form.” Améry was in Auschwitz and survived. He discovered what “totalitarian in form” meant in its purest state, where death was gratuitous and life was worthless. He had coincided with Primo Levi in the Buna-Monowitz factory, but they didn’t meet then. Améry’s real name was Hans Mayer and he was from Vienna. He changed his name in 1938 when he sought refuge in Belgium. But here’s another throw of the dice by fate: by chance he chose the name of John Amery, son of the former British Minister of War and founder of the Legion of St. George, a military society created to support the Nazis at the heart of Great Britain. Did he ever realize? Maybe not. It is irrelevant, perversely curious. John Amery was hung by the Allies, and Jean Améry, like Primo Levi, committed suicide. He took an overdose of barbiturates in a Salzburg hotel in 1978, after mercilessly pouring scorn on the word-mongering of poets who were friends of the Nazis, like Ernst Bertram and Gottfried Benn. Benjamin said that as we get older words make more of an impact, and even a single word, however impossible it may seem, can impact so strongly it can lead to a new, even definitive state of mind. Perhaps the word Améry found was the same one that Hurbinek uttered: the desperate attempt to voice silence. Or the lost line from the lullaby sung by the peasant women in the Beskides mountains that Henek had sung. After the horror, only dumbness can ensue.

Henek makes an effort. I admire the effort he makes to do things. Like, for example, getting Hurbinek to speak. He spends a lot of time by his side, teaching him to pronounce his name, Hurbinek, a name that isn’t even his real one, a name they’ve all given him there, after Henek interpreted a few vague sounds, the almost guttural noises the child made, and suggested that name quite persuasively because they suddenly reminded him of the name of a footballer he once met who played for Ferencváros.

“He got out of a car in my town and said hello to everyone. And shook my hand.”

When Henek comes back from flirting with the nurses (or them with him, particularly Jadzia, the thin, anemic Polish nurse who’d been tortured and didn’t dare touch Hurbinek and when she did so, she couldn’t avoid showing her repugnance), he spends hours caressing the arms of the child so they don’t get cold and tenderly spelling out his name in syllables,“Hur-bi-nek, Hur-bi-nek, Hur-bi-nek.”