The Birthday Buyer (18 page)

It was a good quality blanket that ended up in tatters in a Soviet camp, where the female SS guard died five years later, the one who took Hurbinek by the arm after stripping him of his blanket and lifted him up like a young pup to bang him against the little brick wall that ran acrosss the barrack.

And she would have done so—it wouldn’t have been the first time—if it hadn’t been for a lean, wily Jewish helper in the
Lagerarzt
, who was forced to be present at all the roll calls and participate in the cruel search for booty, deformed men and women, twins, hidden children, or people with some physical peculiarity. She thought that child with its tiny, still body that looked atrophied, with his sunken eyes, was the most wretched, defeated being in the world, and would be a suitable item. A sinister smile spread over her face, though it wasn’t at all proud. That trophy would improve her position; it would give her a partial reprieve, they wouldn’t kill her, yet.

As for Ruchel Szlezinger, the girl with the shining, intelligent eyes, she was sent to the gas chamber within an hour. They applied the usual, horrific practice, the routine immolation of her innocence, that now no longer stirred the remaining survivors in the emotional wasteland that was Auschwitz. Hurbinek, for his part, would lose his shoes in Dr. Mengele’s infirmary; it wouldn’t matter because by then his legs would have lost all feeling.

There was a toy in section B2a of the barrack given over to Mengele’s experiments, a rough-and-ready toy, handmade by a puppet maker like Geppetto de Collodi. It was a wooden doll that had lost most of its original colors: the slender body of a fairy-tale prince. A gypsy girl had taken it there. Mengele had given the girl’s skin radiation treatment to the point of producing burns that gradually spread over the rest of her skin, from the calves to the base of her neck. The girl died after two weeks. The wooden doll began to be used by Mengele and his collaborators as a means to calm the disconsolate sobbing of the children they were experimenting on. It was perhaps the only toy in Auschwitz and acted as a bait.

Children of different ages were housed in an outbuilding with bars like a big laboratory cage for mice. Several small white beds made that prison seem aseptic and scientific, but they were insufficient to take all the prisoners they lodged there, sometimes for months, depending on the nature of the experiment. Hurbinek stayed with Mengele for four months. He was tortured in various ways: they first focused on his food and weight, that was incredibly low, with progressive increases and reductions in the amount they gave him; then Mengele spent ages studying his anatomy before injecting him with controlled dosages of petrol, but then decided not to, although he did consider—made a note in his notebook to that end—boiling him and then extracting his bones and reconstructing him. However, he was finally chosen for a bone graft onto his spine. The operation was carried out without any medical precautions or concerns for his health, something that never worried Mengele. He kept him under observation for four or five weeks after the operation. It was a miracle he survived such torture.

Hurbinek had the wooden doll in his possession for a few days after he was brought to Mengele’s barrack, but it was then taken away from him. He got it back after the operation. During those weeks the boy gripped the doll tight and tried to wail when it fell on the ground, though he never succeeded. A nurse would give it back to him and Hurbinek would stare endlessly at the doll, scrutinising the cracks in its red cape and the blue circles on the trousers or gold brushstrokes on the crown. What could any of that mean to him? I can’t begin to imagine how curiosity develops in the midst of such torment.

One day toward the end of autumn, Mengele leaned over Hurbinek and took the doll from him and threw it far away. The small doll broke into two. Then two women grabbed Hurbinek and put him on a battered stretcher in the passageway, near the back door. Mengele had decided to let him die once septicemia from his spinal injuries set in. Mengele forbade any kind of cure. When the baby disappeared from his stretcher, nobody missed him; they assumed someone had taken him to the crematorium.

Ángela Pérez León was a Spanish Sephardic Jew who’d been living in Bohemia since the end of the civil war. She suffered as she wondered what could be the purpose behind that senseless phase of history that had come her way. She couldn’t forgive, wasn’t able to garner more hatred, but was in such a state of defeat that many mornings, when the cold of dawn met the blue light of the new day, she anxiously strived to believe she must already be dead. The next moment of reality for her was the worst, most cruel torture that could be inflicted on the remnants of humanity everyone in the camp had become.

In Auschwitz Ángela had the misfortune to belong to the group of women prisoners forced to do support work in a
Sonderkommando
. She stripped the corpses in section B2a, Mengele’s infirmary, before other Jews piled them up on a barrow and burned them in the open air, in a wood behind Crematorium V in Birkenau, when the ovens couldn’t keep pace that winter. She was the person who took Hurbinek, still alive, to her barrack, 346, where she looked after and protected him until Christmas Eve, 1944, when
SS Obergruppenführer
Heinz Rügen walked in, found the child and shot her in the back of the neck. She was also the woman who introduced buttons into Hurbinek’s life.

Ángela removed the jacket from the corpse of a five-year-old boy, Mosze Gold, one of Mengele’s victims alongside Gavrilo, his twin brother. The woolen jacket had mother-of-pearl buttons, five large iridescent buttons the size of a small coin. Hurbinek touched them, in all likelihood, and felt their warm, polished surface, since that jacket stayed with him until he died. Marx was right when he said that social relations exist between objects, because those buttons had been manufactured in Denmark from seashells brought from Jamaica—that place Yakov Pawlicka so longed for—and had been imported by a Polish firm in 1938. The mother of the Gold twins bought the buttons in a haberdashery in Krakow next door to the Merkur Hotel on Krakowska Street where Yakov and Sofia checked in for their honeymoon, and sewed them on the jacket she herself had made for Mosze. She chose silvery buttons for Gavrilo. How could that mother ever have imagined that those Jamaican mother-of-pearl buttons would end up between the small, clumsy fingers of a dying child whose only homeland was that sewer of horror and rottenness?

After Hurbinek died, Henek, who picked him up from the snow where Heinz Rügen had thrown him, kept this knitted jacket for many years, until he finally forgot it on his nth move, as one leaves behind things that no longer belong to anyone. However, he did pull off a button which he always kept on a silver chain round his neck.

The last object in Hurbinek’s imaginary museum is a scarf a Russian soldier tied round his sweaty, feverish forehead, when the camp was liberated. The scarf, as I picture it now in my imagination, or as it really must appear among Lucia Levi’s possessions, is clean and ironed: it isn’t very big, there are frayed threads at the corners and small tears; its ivory color has almost, but not quite, faded, and you can still make out the drawing of a Chinese dragon in the center. Hurbinek first wore it round his head like a ribbon—Henek would put it on and remove it—and later, days before he died, he put it around his neck to warm him up because he was shivering so much.

It was the young soldier Yuri Chanicheverov who put it on Hurbinek one day in early March 1945, after he entered the infirmary-barrack and found the dying child between Henek and Levi, who were caressing him. Disturbed and moved by the scene, he first soaked it in water from his water-flask. He thought something cool would do him good.

Yuri’s sister Zhenia had given him the scarf she had bought in Moscow the day he left for the front as a souvenir. Yuri always wore it like a bracelet on the sleeve of his combat jacket. After Hurbinek died, when Henek and Yetzev went to bury him under that big tree, Levi removed the scarf from his neck and hid it inside the sleeve of his striped uniform. It carried an ambiguous smell of ammonia and persistent damp.

Primo Levi began writing about Hurbinek from that moment. He knew nothing about the child’s past and refused to hazard any impossible future for him. However, the dirty scarf and its dragon stuck in his memory forever.

Levi survived his suffering and a year later, back in Turin, washed and ironed the scarf himself, and put it with other objects thrown up by life in a small, locked wooden box he would only open very occasionally. “Look at it, look how it enshrines everything and enshrines nothing,” he would often be on the point of saying. But Lucia Levi, his widow, never really did work out what that old scarf was doing there among the things her husband kept so tidily. Finally, she spread it over a small stand beneath a flowerpot of red and yellow verbenas.

The night nurse on the sixth floor in Frankfurt’s Universitäts-Kliniken woke me up this morning. I could swear he was singing and that I heard his crooning. The street lamps on Theodor Sternstrasse are still glowering, a dim, suspicious yellow I associate with discomfort, low voltage and disappearances. I’m numb and the plaster casts are excruciating. It’s my last day here. Voghs, the ambivalent Dr. Voghs, will come at noon and summarily discharge me, after all these weeks, with no more moratoria, checks or analyses, as if I had been exposed as an impostor. I bet that in his childhood my doctor was one of the children who appear in photos of the time surrounding Hitler, saluting and waving their little red swastika flags. Then he’ll ask, averting his gaze, whether I’m thinking of continuing on my tourist route and will recommend a drive to Heidelberg, for example. “It’s my city. I’m sure you will really like its streets. They are very picturesque. They weren’t bombed.” I will reply by asking if he really thinks that in my state, with two crutches and a chest hurting from a broken rib, I’m up to wandering around touristy streets. He’ll say, still averting his gaze, that the jury is still out on that one.

When the night nurse made me open my eyes because of his humming and noise, I was dreaming. I wasn’t dreaming a dream of my own, but Hurbinek’s, that is if he ever managed to dream. You can be sure he only had nightmares in his subconscious, at most an animal, liquid dream of being in Sofia’s lap, his brief, unique feeling of pleasure in life. I know what that’s like. I once woke Zoe my daughter up when she was in the middle of a nightmare and now remember her hugs and trembling, her mysterious gratitude, fearful smile and gradual shift to a happier, wakeful reality. Hurbinek felt none of this. Perhaps Henek cradled and comforted him out of his bad dreams, toward the end of his life; that was probably good Henek’s nighttime, conscientious undertaking, but it was already too late.

Primo Levi says people in Auschwitz dreamed of hunger. It was the continuation of the same thought they had when awake. The fortress of our dreams, the place where no one else can enter, quickly collapsed when exhaustion sunk prisoners into the precious trance of sleep. Their tiny capital soon ran out, because hunger immediately surfaced and woke them up, or followed a strategy of keeping them asleep as if that were yet another torture that forced them to experience unconsciously the same unpleasant reality they faced when awake. As if decided by some painfully cruel decree, dreams in Auschwitz were circular, couldn’t be distinguished from wakefulness, you dreamed and you woke up, you woke up and you dreamed, not knowing where one state began and another ended. They didn’t divide time into day and night, but immersed it in permanent, ambiguous confusion: reality as nightmare, nightmare as reality.

The dream the nurse woke me from was a dream I’d borrowed, like Walter Benjamin’s when he thought he was someone else, an anguished mathematician dreaming that a legion of ants ate a lizard in a minute and then calculated how many lizards can be consumed in a month, a year, a whole life-time, and how long it would take to consume that whole world species of lizard and how many ants it would take to wipe the lizards off the face of the earth. In
my
dream—that was really Hurbinek’s—I remembered every single person I had known in my life, everyone I had ever come across, if only once. A glance, or a touch was enough. Each face I’d seen, each voice I’d heard, every detail of clothing, every gesture I’d registered. Every individual, good, bad and indifferent. My dream was exhaustive; a face appeared and immediately revived the moment our lives had crossed. Everything I had forgotten gradually erupted in my dream. It was like a task I had to complete, I knew I was working on that assignment and still had many people to remember. It was an exhausting dream. And a photo of each and every one of these people was hanging from a tree. Hurbinek and myself were standing under a large, leafy tree, and he was saying they were going to bury him under that tree. I looked up and saw thousands of photos sticking out from between its branches. I then remembered “Hurbinek’s tree” as Henek called the story that he later invented for his son Stanislazh.

I am getting my things ready. The consul assured me he would drive me to the airport. I will ask him to drive me around the city beforehand. I want to pass by the Alte Oper in a vain hunt for Heinz Rügen’s house. It is simply my inevitable curiosity, something akin to walking on the brink of a precipice and looking over. I don’t know which house will be his or what it will look like. It’s probably that hotel I am imagining, perhaps one by the name of Helvetia—
neutral names, to avoid stupid allegiances, the German post-war stance, etc.—and Rügen’s widow, a seventy-year-old blonde who goes for a swim every afternoon in the public swimming pool, is now married to a fine upstanding man who returned depressed from the front, a fine orderly policeman who benefited from state grants and US aid, and various pardons, the usual looking the other way Germans so appreciate. First he opened a tavern and then a boarding house, and later when the city became so prosperous, what with its fairs and its banks, the boarding house became a hotel, initially quite small, but then he extended it, had to take on more staff, although none would be his new wife’s children, the children of
SS Obergruppenführer
Rügen. Both now enjoy a pension and are good citizens of Europe with democratic views in matters of environmental policy.

I have seen photos of certain Auschwitz camp guards, members of the
Waffen SS
, photos that must surely hang from the tree of photos in Hurbinek’s dream. They are very young, almost innocent out of sheer youth, at most eighteen or twenty years old. Nonetheless, they have that cold, cruel, perfectly superior look. The SS insignia on the jacket collars of their uniforms eloquently denotes pride and obedience. They can kill and hold their heads up high. They can kill everybody. Nothing and nobody will stop them. I can imagine each committing some kind, any kind of atrocity. And yet not one has been executed, tried or arrested. So if they haven’t died from an old people’s ailment in their beds, surrounded by their family, after a life lived to the fullest, I may meet them now when I walk out into the street, still quite chipper fifty or sixty years on, retired from work, schoolmasters, professors, engineers, mechanics, traders, civil servants working for the Federal Republic or Lander, car salesmen, taxi drivers or bank employees. They are all out there in the street. They all had long lives, enjoyed many birthdays and are full of little stories they love to tell.

I still don’t know why a character from the hospital came to take my photo when I was still wearing the green nightshirt, and standing with the help of my crutches. The nurse tells me it’s do with insurance, because the Universitäts-Kliniken cannot cover the cost of my stay. I feel stupid on these crutches, almost naked, barely covered by my patient’s garb. Unwantingly, I feel as if I am a victim, that I’ve suffered far too much, though the truth is the only thing that’s happened is that I’ve been in hospital for a short period of time, and have not exactly been badly treated. It’s all been quite straightforward, considering that I could now be dead on that wretched stretch of motorway. I wonder what strange metamorphosis I’ve undergone. Was it my truncated trip to Auschwitz, being held powerless and paralyzed in Frankfurt, or perhaps the rarefied atmosphere in this hospital, all mixed up with my thoughts as I invented Hurbinek’s lives? The Russians entered Auschwitz in January, 1945 and took thousands of photos. Photos of the remains, of corpses, of the emaciated bodies of the survivors. Photos of those driven mad. Photos of those who’d been hung. Photos of the wretched. Photos of ill-covered mass graves. A vast album of an immense funeral. Photos containing nothing honorable: destructive, accusing, inhuman photos. Photos of debris. Photos showing irrefutable examples, to be wielded against any possible lies. Photos that at number one thousand become monotonous. Photos so there is no need to use your imagination. Photos of this world. Photos, to a point, “for the insurance,” like mine in that hospital. The time for penitence, then, began with those photos.

After getting dressed I went over and said goodbye to my roommate, Oskar, who listens to music all the time, speaks English and constantly reads sports papers. He will be left by himself. There were three empty beds and now, with mine, there will be four. They’ll soon fill them I expect. His hip is shattered, and a truck was to blame, as it was in my case. It happened in a tunnel on Autobahn A-3, the same one where I had my accident. That detail means we have something in common. When I shake his hand, I hear music that I recognize on his headphones.

“Jazz. Always Helen Merrill,” he says with a smile. “My father played with her. From Chicago. My father, I mean. I’m not, my mother and I are Germans, from here. I was listening to that in the tunnel, at the time of the crash. I didn’t register a thing.”

“I was listening to Leonard Cohen,” I say.

“He was a Jew, wasn’t he?”

“Apparently.”

Music and coincidences. March 3, 1945, Dimitri Yeliptkin, a soldier in the Third Division of the Red Army, who never knew of Hurbinek’s existence, set up an old gramola in the Main Camp in Auschwitz, put a record on, turned the handle and took a photo while it played Mozart’s
Requiem
. “I wanted to photograph the music,” he said. As coincidence would have it, he did so the day that Hurbinek died.

I left the room very slowly, and then left the hospital equally slowly.

I have often wondered why Primo Levi didn’t take Hurbinek further, why he thought two pages were enough to bear witness to his life, why he decided not to investigate his life, and years later find out where that child came from, the truth, in other words, that Hurbinek was in fact Ari Pawlicka. However, today I think Primo Levi did, he did take it further, as far as he could.

Perhaps it happened like this.

Perhaps on a day late in October, 1955 Primo Levi happened to leave home in the middle of the morning, as usual, and went to the Post Office where he had a post box. He found a letter from Henek, who was living in Budapest at the time under his real name, Belo König. In this letter, Henek answered the question Primo Levi had asked in a previous one about how far it might be possible to find real data on Hurbinek’s family, since he thought it was only right to give that short, tortured life a history, and it was making his dreams unbearably painful. Henek wrote that from what he had later been able to find out, there had been 114 cases like Hurbinek’s in Auschwitz, and that he too was obsessed by the void in the past of that baby boy they’d cared for and buried. He decided to find out more, now that times had drifted into a kind of amnesia, and told Levi he had initiated a rough-and-ready search for information, asking around in circles of ex-prisoners, with the help of Polish friends. Soon, he said he would at least be able to tell him what city he came from, which ghetto, and then it would be easier to get closer to the district and family. Primo Levi and Henek sustained correspondence over a couple of months. Levi tried to dissuade him from jumping to the conclusion that it would be easy to find this out, although in fact Henek never managed to give him any specific name, or any of the more specific details he optimistically promised in each letter. He was on the brink, he would say, and that was all. He seemed to be going in and out of the same maze. Then a long time went by, several months of complete silence, and Henek’s letters stopped coming. Then, one midday when a blizzard of snow was blowing Primo Levi opened his post box and found a letter from Budapest, but from Henek’s wife, Claricia, not from Henek. She wrote very sparingly that Henek had died. So as far as Levi was concerned, his friend’s investigations into the origins of Hurbinek remained inconclusive, although he sometimes imagined when re-reading his letters, that the courageous Henek had never had any more than good intentions, or perhaps a mutual attempt to salvage the memory of little Hurbinek, erased forever from the map of Europe, like that of his entire people.

Yes, perhaps that is what happened.

I’m coming to the end and am still the naïve birthday buyer for Hurbinek. I shall soon depart from this country where “death is a German Master,” as in Paul Celan’s famous line. A few more words and I will be gone.

In the tree of photos from Hurbinek’s dreams there are two photos on which my gaze lingers as I wait for the Spanish consul leaning on my crutches under the canopy over the hospital entrance, motionless and invisible like a ghost in the eyes of passers-by.

One of the photos is of Sofia standing in a park in Rzeszów, next to the castle. It was taken by an itinerant photographer. Sofia is eighteen years old; she is wearing a small, plain hat on the tilt, almost like a helmet. It was a present from her aunt Mikaela. Her head is slightly bowed, she is smiling shyly and lifting her right hand to say hello. She is carrying a handbag on her forearm that’s made of small pieces of metal like a kind of chain mail. Her gloved left hand is clasping her other glove. It is a nondescript photo, like many others that could have been taken that afternoon in that park, like so many others Sofia no doubt possessed. It is a happy photo she always carried with her and left in the Krakow ghetto when they were forced to leave the house in a rush. It was lost among the debris from the building when the Nazis demolished it soon after, and was then retrieved by someone who found it among the garbage in a rubble site and kept on a whim, someone or other who never knew her, who looks at it and wonders who that woman might be. It is a photo Hurbinek would never see.

The other photo is my accident. I am lying on the hard shoulder of Autobahn A-3. A bright metal sheet apparently made of silver is covering my head and torso. You can see my shoes and part of my trousers. A few feet away, you can catch a glimpse of part of my car, smashed up, its wheels up in the air. The feet of other people, perhaps nurses or police, intrude in one corner. “There is no hope,” might be a caption for the photo. It could be anybody’s corpse, but I have no doubt that it is mine. It is a photo of me where you can see that I am dead. Or so they said. Perhaps I was born anew that day, perhaps Hurbinek was born anew with me as well. That’s why the photo is hanging there on the tree in that strange dream.