The Birthday Buyer (2 page)

I have devotingly read the books written by Primo Levi and have been captivated, horrified and filled with admiration. I have read his stories, his wonderful tales. I was struck with awe when I read his autobiographical writing about his long journey to the hell of Auschwitz that begins in 1943 when the fascists arrested him in the Aosta Valley. First
If This Is a Man
, then
The Truce
, and finally
The Drowned and the Saved
. Shortly after writing this last book, in April 1987, he threw himself down the stairwell from the third floor of his house. He died from the injuries sustained in that brutal fall. He was sixty-eight years old.

There is a photo of him in the glove compartment of my shattered Ford that is now in one of the car pounds run by the Frankfurt
polizei
. It is dedicated to me. He had been awarded the Campiello Prize for a second time for
If Not Now, When
? It was December 1982 and work had taken me to Turin. I remember it was dusk and that I went for a long stroll. There was a throng milling around beside a shop window in a small square. I went over and to my surprise I saw Primo Levi inside signing copies of his most recent book. I didn’t have a copy but he very kindly took a photo of himself from a leather wallet and wrote his name and mine and the date on it. I had no choice but to take that photo with me on my journey to re-tell—as if in a modest, personal homage—the life of a three-year-old boy who only ever experienced suffering. The photo of the guardian of his memory.

The taciturn, peaceful look on his face augurs his suicide. He deceived no one. Like Jean Améry. Like Paul Celan. Like many other anonymous survivors who decided to stop re-inventing themselves day by day.

Hurbinek was dumb. Or couldn’t speak. He’d make a supreme effort writhing his small triangular face as his eye sockets sunk down deeper and deeper, and he made only sounds, scraps of syllables, words that nobody understood. They might be moans, might be snatches of a song he had heard, might be the word that held his real name, always a mere approximation, always voiced by a terrified child who wants to live at any cost. If in fact what Hurbinek wanted, what floated in his eyes
was
the intense desire to speak, to explode in sounds, alongside his unspeakable exhaustion, total absence of energy, when it seemed every breath would be his last, the last drop of life fleeing as he gasped and panted, when his tiny lungs went anxiously up and down, always at the point of collapse.

A six-figure number had been clumsily tattooed on his arm.

He was paralytic, couldn’t swivel his hips and his legs were two sticks without any muscle that barely if ever managed to support him.

I have always been left astounded by the kind, peaceful looks on the faces of aged Nazi murderers in their old age or when they appear in public accused of a crime against humanity. Hunted for years, then discovered, arrested and held while awaiting trial, those murderers are transformed in the process. They become faces worthy of compassion and benevolence. Like those belonging to the Eichmanns or Barbies or Pinochets or Pol-Pots when they are being tried (or in the future to Karadzic, Mladic and Milosevic, or the Ruandans Kabunga, Renzaho and Bizimungu). They seem good, innocent people, alien to everything they are accused of. It is then that I remember the mountains and mountains of teeth and molars I saw in that documentary when I was a child. It is then that the tooth pullers come to the foreground of my mind.

And then I think of a similar face, our family dentist’s, when I was a child. That tooth puller must have been a real Nazi, I recall, because he would tell me or one of my brothers: “Don’t complain, at least I give you an anesthetic. Think about the Jews when their molars were simply wrenched out.” At the time neither my brothers nor I understood what that enigmatic story told by our affable, gray-haired dentist referred to, the resigned warning of someone who knows more than he is letting on. Now, of course, we all know what he meant.

I make an effort. My legs hurt; the powerful painkiller given me by the elderly nurse made its impact some time ago; the plaster casts are enormously irritating. But what is my
small-scale
grief compared to the
infinite
suffering of Primo Levi or Hurbinek? I wonder in my hospital bed. I make an effort to push myself up on my elbows and sit on the bed; I stretch my neck; in the distance, through the barred window I can see the winged crests of the sculptures of the Alte Oper. It has all been rebuilt—so I’ve been told—the whole city is new, remade after the war. Bombing raids destroyed Frankfurt. In 1944 the wife and children of Heinz Rügen, the
SS Obergruppenführer
who applied for a post in Auschwitz Birkenau, lived on a broad or narrow street—I’m not sure which—near the Alte Oper.

Against his best wishes Heinz Rügen wasn’t able to celebrate Christmas with his family on December 24, 1944, the day he wrote a letter, his last, to his wife and children; the letter has been preserved and is highly affectionate, moving even. It ends with a beautiful image: “As I write to you, a tear has dropped onto my finger and is rolling down to the end of my nail. It slips onto the paper. I’m sending it to you even though it will be dry by the time it reaches you.” He signed and folded it and put it in an envelope emblazoned with a swastika that he popped into the pocket of his uniform. The Russian soldier who shot him a month later found it there, in the truck that Rügen was riding in, abandoning the death camp where he had so desired to serve the Führer. But before that, that same day when he wrote the letter, on Christmas Eve, Heinz Rüger, well bundled up, left the guard post. It was very cold. He lifted his hand to touch the pocket with the letter, perhaps reminding himself he shouldn’t forget to leave it in the office out-tray or tenderly remembering his beloved ones at home. He approached barrack 346. He strode toward one of the bunks. He pushed out a woman who was probably young but looked aged. Nobody knows who she was, but she was Ángela Pérez León, a Spanish Sephardic Jew married to a train driver from Bohemia whom she’d not seen ever since she’d come to the camp. The woman was clutching a little body that didn’t cry at all when she fell. Rügen dragged her out of the barrack and shot her in the nape of her neck near the door. The bullet came out through her nose. Then he grabbed the baby by an arm and hurled it into the distance as if it were a doll. Hurbinek flew through the air. Rügen thought he wouldn’t waste another bullet, the heavy snow that was falling would be enough to finish off the little monster. To an extent he was carrying out the order he had given that very morning that his men had apparently ignored. He was tired of seeing that kid’s paralytic body time and again. How could it still be alive? Heinz Rügen couldn’t think about his children and be forced to see that scum, day in day out. Now the Russians were at the gates to the camp he ought to quickly complete the task he had undertaken. The tear at the end of my nail, he thought.

The three-year-old kid shivered on the snow, on the central roadway, until Henek picked him up later.

Rügen died in the truck taking him and his men to the old German border after they had abandoned to their fate the walking corpses that remained in the camp. He was one of the last to leave. Others had already departed, and taken the healthy prisoners with them on forced marches that left a trail of dead on the roads. The bullet hit him in the chest and the impact made him fall off the truck. His troops abandoned him there; nobody could do anything for him and the driver preferred to speed on his way.

The chaos of Auschwitz didn’t disappear when the Russians arrived. There is confusion, a constant noise of shouting and praying, some happy, some indignant, others hardly able to overcome their state of paralysis and denied humanity. They no longer know that they are men because they have long ceased to be. Those who can walk, go to and fro through mud and snow. Nobody speaks to them. Nobody worries about anyone. The Soviet soldiers simply look on, awkwardly, as if they were at the gates to hell. They don’t dare act as liberators. They don’t understand what their eyes can see. Nobody gives orders. The inmates don’t understand what is happening, although they all—most of them dying—know that the SS have gone and that that is a good thing.

They improvised an infirmary at one corner of the esplanade, in a shack previously used by the guards for executions by hanging. The less seriously sick had to look after the others. There were no doctors, only Soviet or Polish nurses to-ing and fro-ing, unable to do anything, terrified and disgusted by what they found with every step they took. They set up a line of twenty bunks in the shack with very thin straw mattresses.

Buczko, the cobbler, a thirty-four-year-old native of Pomerania stricken with dysentery, carried the prisoner Primo Levi in his arms: Levi had a raging temperature, was delirious and couldn’t walk by himself. He was from the Buna-Monowitz camp.

The schoolteacher from Radzyn, Rubem Yetzev, fifty-five, with horrific rheumatism in all his joints, was looking after three sick inmates who had dragged themselves that far. Rubem Yetzev had carried them one by one over his shoulders along the last stretch to the infirmary, put them on bunks and then stretched out on one himself. The three men were Abrahan Levine, Elias Achtzehn and Ernst Sterman, and were suffering respectively from diphtheria, acute typhoid and tuberculosis. The first two were to die in the shack.

The ice-cream manufacturer, Chaim Roth, forty-seven, born in Katowice, looked after Ira his brother, who had gone out of his mind and kept biting his hands.

Henek, fifteen, a worker from Transylvania in Hungary, carried the three-year-old he’d rescued from the snow on Christmas Eve, wrapped up in an SS overcoat. He had been looking after him ever since. The child struggled to breathe and only his restless eyes had any life. His eyes weren’t sad, but anguished, weren’t blank but insistent. He said nothing, except for a strange word that Henek interpreted as Hurbinek.

The rest of the sick were: Prosper Andlauer (French), Franz Patzold (Bohemian), Jan Vesely (Hungarian), Ahmed Yildirim (Slovakian), Manuel Valiño (Spanish), David Bogdanowski (Polish), Joseph Grosselin (French), Auguste Friedel (French), Konrad Egger (German) and Berek Goldstein (Polish).

The bunk is made from a plank of old, unplaned pinewood. The sparse mattress smells of damp and rot, the same sweet smell that permeates the whole camp, the smell of decomposing bodies. Covered in a blanket made from remnants of filthy, striped jackets, Hurbinek lies there quiet, defenceless, almost still, looking nervously toward the ceiling and sometimes all about him, his mouth open and round and like a fish’s. He never stops shaking, he never has, he’s been shaking his entire little life. By his side Henek strokes his forehead, talks to him and smiles. He has stayed with him ever since he furtively retrieved him from the central roadway, and with a nimbleness Henek still retains though nobody knows how he manages it. He warmed him with his own body heat and held him to his chest as long as he could, even hid him until the SS ran off, still whimsically killing as they drove along in their cars.

Hiding that body wasn’t difficult.

Hurbinek clutches one of his fingers. Henek tries to play a kind of game and tries to prop Hurbinek up, but he can’t support himself. His little body hardly takes up a third of the bunk under his blanket. His badly shaven head spotted with sores is visible, and under the blanket his lungs can be made out, going up and down, but then there’s nothing, as if there was no more body beyond that small thorax. His skinny legs seem crushed, non-existent, artificial.

Hiding such a body isn’t difficult.

“Hurbinek was a nobody,” writes Primo Levi, “a child of death, a child of Auschwitz.”

When they asked Henek about that child, he invented a new story every time. He’s my brother, he’d say, or he is the son of a Russian woman I met a year ago, he’d say, or the son of a man who just died and who left him to me, he’d say, another Hungarian like me.

Hurbinek’s voice was almost inaudible. Its sounds were all mixed up with his asthmatic gasps as he panted and tried to breathe. Henek discerned the word Hurbinek in that timid, faint death rattle, repeated time and again, as if it were all he could say. Those syllables took shape on his parched lips, hur-bi-neck. That’s his name, Henek said, an affirmation to inject greater realism into the stories he was inventing about the origins of that kid who clung on to life and defeated death. He’s with me, Henek always added, as if he were still afraid someone might try to snatch him away. Henek wanted to look after Hurbinek. He had become his reason to live.

I’m trying to be punctilious over the detail, I would hate to leave anything out now I have decided to give life to my small child. From my bed in Frankfurt I now see Hurbinek’s pale, terrified face, that ashen or gray earthy color people acquired in Auschwitz. I can see him now, I really can. I only have to close my eyes and touch my body underneath these sheets, in this hospital, to imagine the shape of Hurbinek’s body. My knee is enough. What would Hurbinek’s knee have been like? It is starting to obsess me. What
were
Hurbinek’s knees like? A tear at the end of my nail.

I think Hurbinek lived just that length of time not to have memories, the time about which nobody could say I did such and such, went to such a place, felt such an emotion. Except for rare exceptions, all our memories begin
after
we are three, not before. That’s why I’m horrified to think that Hurbinek, with all his strength and desire to live, only experienced a pre-life, only lived a strange extension of his mother’s uterus. And yet all he lived in that time without memories was the permanent suffering, pain and fear that were his food, his playthings, the air he breathed.

Henek soon gave up on the daily exercises to restore life to Hurbinek’s atrophied legs. It wasn’t about whether blood was circulating through them or not, or whether they’d frozen or not, and that was why it made no sense rubbing them as much as Henek did. He only managed to warm them slightly. His legs never grew, it was as simple as that. Perhaps as a result of some congenital failing or kind of torture, his legs were always spindly like that. His legs grew at a different pace, if what happened to Hurbinek can be graced by the word “growth.” Skinny, very skinny, limply hanging from his hips, without bones to join them to his hips, as if skin alone had joined them to his torso and they had then become dislocated and cut off from the rest of his body. Hurbinek’s legs were like a ragdoll’s. Henek was familiar with the circuses in Budapest during the city’s great summer fairs, and was reminded of those puppets hanging on strings manipulated by a puppeteer in a Punch and Judy show. Hurbinek’s legs were always very cold and his tiny, tiny feet were frozen and pretty.

He’d raise his arms very slowly and his gaunt face twitched with pain when his arms were high enough to hug Henek’s neck. It took a long time for that to happen. When Hurbinek hugged or seemingly hugged Henek and the latter felt on his cheek a light kiss or something similar, Henek, who was now experiencing similar symptoms of dysentery to Primo Levi and the other inmates there, went out into the yard and dragged his feet as he ran, as if he were engaged in a half-hearted march rather than a proper race. He would weep, in an Auschwitz where nobody wept anymore. A tear at the end of his nail.

Hurbinek’s eyes are dark and large.

Or seem to be large because his face has shrunk. One could say the flesh is slowly departing from Hubinek’s face.

On the other hand, his eyes are still growing.

Hurbinek’s eyes never stop moving. They look out or yearn. All his reactions to stimulation are painful, everything his senses feel hurts. Whatever he hears, whatever they put on his tongue, whatever he touches or smells. Everything perplexes him, remains unexplained, and above all he has to respond using his scant energy to struggle to the edge of the next minute of his life. He needs to know but doesn’t know what he should know. His eyes say it all, laden with questions. Primo Levi often goes over to him. They both look at each other but they don’t see the same thing. The Italian strokes the child’s face. He helps Henek when it is time to look after him, and cleans away the dribble that forms at the corner of his lips. He gives him water but Hurbinek does not eat or drink. He throws everything up.

Hurbinek’s face is angular, is sunken, has hollow depressions everywhere, and seems transparent. Primo Levi writes how the eyes in that face want “to break out of the tomb of his dumbness.”

Hurbinek’s eyes are a language in themselves.

I try to remember what my daughters were like when they were three years old. They simply never tired of playing; their words began to be tinged with irony, they spoke in sentences using the wrong words, chattered, were amusing and happy. They wanted everything and asked for everything. They needed words. They needed to talk and talk and talk. They were affectionate, ran to me, and kissed me as they clambered onto my shoulders. They were whimsical, could be annoying, called out unsuitedly in the middle of the night. They were loving, liked to blackmail, amuse, seduce, were nice to smell and their skin was firm and smooth. Carrying them to bed in my arms made me feel tremendously tender. I read them stories and watched them sleep peacefully, in their secure, rounded world. They had frights and I eased them away. I was at their side. They weren’t alone. And they always knew that.

Could Hurbinek . . . ?

“His stare clamored with explosive urgency,” writes Primo Levi. “It was a stare both savage and human, even mature, a judgement, which none of us could support, so heavy was it with force and anguish.”

I love Henek. His life is terrible, I know, but I love him. He was barely a young man, just fifteen years old, and had already killed lots of men, all Romanians, with his father, according to Primo Levi, on the border with Romania where he lived and worked in a factory. His whole family had died in Auschwitz. He’d been in the children’s barracks. They didn’t last long there, they soon ended up in the hands of the doctors who experimented on them, or sent them straight to the gas chambers. What use were children in Auschwitz? Henek managed to become the
Kapo
in that barrack and saved many children from being sent to either of those two fateful ends. Even so, he paid a high price: whenever an SS came and gave him the order, he had to select the ones who were to die. It was a way to survive, he told Primo Levi, without any scruples.