The Birthday Buyer (4 page)

IG Farben also manufactured Zyklon B, the gas that was used in the extermination chambers, an invention of Rudolf Höss, one of the Auschwitz commandants.

Being a slave meant working twelve to fifteen hours with hardly any food or clothes, all to the profit of the Reich and, above all, of IG Farben.

Being a slave meant working until you were exhausted, until you were dead.

Being a slave meant making a profit from death; buying the deaths of others for free.

Being a slave meant you were nobody, were the object of all the manias, perversions and whims of the German SS. A slave had been shot down when he left the building where he worked simply because two German soldiers had laid a bet about who had the best aim. Another slave who wasn’t working sufficiently hard was tied up a few inches from a jug of water and left to die of thirst. They changed the water everyday in front of him.

The Russian Red Army liberated the camp of Auschwitz Birkenau in January 1945. Primo Levi then began the long journey home that took him through Poland, Russia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and finally Italy. By the time he reached his home in Turin, the same house where he was born, it was already October.

He spent the rest of his life—thirty years—working as a chemist who specialized in synthetic varnishes. He sometimes worked as a translator. He wrote articles and gave lectures. Life after slavery wasn’t easy.

He published books and won prizes.

His was a strange death.

He committed suicide on April 11, 1987 by throwing himself down the stairwell in the narrow space left by the lift. It happened like this.

He had walked back from the Barichelo laundry carefully carrying a clean gray suit wrapped in brown paper on a coat hanger.

He had taken a detour on his way home, and lingeringly walked down as far as the Piazza Bononi and Academia Albertina to take a final look at the Balbo gardens.

He asked the concierge, Jolanda Gasperi, for the post, but she didn’t have it at hand.

He walked up the stairs to the third floor, actually the fourth, very slowly. An hour later he opened the door and threw himself down those same stairs as if he were diving headfirst into the cold waters of a river. Perhaps during the very last second, that is what he believed, that he was throwing himself into the cold waters of the Po.

Others say it was an accident: a particular medication he was taking made him dizzy and one dizzy spell caused him to fall over the banister. The fact is that Mrs. Gasperi, the concierge, who had taken up the mail he’d wanted only a few minutes before, hadn’t noticed anything strange in his attitude, no expression of anguish that was any worse than normal, and no somber tone in his voice. He had thoughtfully thanked her, as he always did.

He had always been a discreet, taciturn man, though on occasions he could be full of vitality. He preferred to pass unnoticed, but life had ceased to have any meaning forty years earlier, when he watched how Henek placed the final spadefuls of earth over the small grave where the remains of Hurbinek lay.

He sometimes convinced himself that those who had died there were better than the survivors. It wasn’t easy to overcome that perverted guilt, the guilt of having saved oneself.

Those who knew him well know that he was often tortured by the thought that he had forgotten the number tattooed on Hurbinek’s arm. That was his worst slavery, together with the slavery of having survived. He had memorized the number and then over time forgotten it, despite himself. It would have been a useless, shaming memory, but one that was necessary.

1936. Nine years before Hurbinek’s death
.

Before entering the living room where all her family is waiting, Sofia Cèrmik adjusts her new tulle dress in a dark, neat and tidy bedroom that looks over Targova Street, the most commercial street in the city of Rzeszów, in the Carpathians of Upper Galicia.

Gathered there already are Raca her mother, Simon her father and Uncle and Aunt Pitlik and the Vigos, her single aunts, Sara and Mikaela, her elder brothers, Max and Aaron and the young Stefan and Anna. Friends and customers of her father also visit the house and bring small token presents. They are all happy and are all going to celebrate her birthday with her. She is sixteen.

She is young and beautiful with a bright, cheerful face, and to that day she has lived without worrying about what is happening beyond the Vistula and the San and its small tributary the Wislok that flows very close to their house, very close to Simon Cèrmik and his partner, Uncle Gork Vigo’s salted fish and meat and spice store, beyond the wooded Carpathians and beyond the great city of Krakow, where she has never set foot and whose bookshops she dreams about.

When she emerges from the small bedroom in the new tulle dress that is her mother’s present, she is greeted by a loud burst of applause in the dining room and hallway. The hurrays ring out like the green branches of trees lashing a tanned hide.

All the family relatives start to kiss Sofia, as do neighbors who keep coming and her girl friends from school, and suddenly a luminous party atmosphere spreads throughout the Cèrmik household.

It was a special Spring day.

The china cups are brimming with hot chocolate and they eat sponge cakes baked by Raca.

It’s five o’clock in the afternoon and a guitar strikes up a romantic song that speaks of love and travel.

Gradually, chocolate splashes every face, moustache and beard, and the women’s red lips and children’s pale cheeks. The dogs of the house lick up the leftovers on the plates in the kitchen.

There are garlands and flowers in every corner of the living room held up with the many books in the house. Shopkeeper Cèrmik brings out bottles of anisette and other liqueurs he offers to his guests. His eyes ooze with satisfaction behind his glasses.

Simon Cèrmik makes a toast to his favorite daughter who sips on her glass, glowing and blushing.

Sofia is slim, but her shape is subtle, firm and well defined. Just a few months ago she abandoned the last traces of herself as a little girl and changed into a woman with a slender waist and broad hips. Her skin is smooth and her hair fair, fragrant and very curly. Her voice, sweet, low and enveloping.

Yakov, the son of the Pawlickas, the schoolteachers, has come to the birthday party and can’t take his eyes off her. Although she is rather taken aback, Sofia returns his look and offers him a cup of hot chocolate.

They have known each other forever but it is the first time they have looked at each other like that. Tall as houses, dreams are sometimes real and can be reached like the stars, Sofia thinks as she watches Yakov and feels her fingers brush his as they have never done before. Or are the stars dreams? People in Rzeszów are still not sure. Some went on singing deep into the night.

1945. Seven months after Hurbinek’s death
.

Targova Street in Rzeszów has hardly changed in these years of war. The shops are the same, although they have lost the color they had and it has been a long time since they sold anything new or truly useful.

Targova Street, the old business hub in the small city, is now swept by gusts of wind that blow up clouds of dust that were never so thick in the pre-war years.

Grandmother Raca Cèrmik, Zelman by her maiden name, stares through the window at that end-of-autumn wind. Russian troops had knocked on her door yet again asking her for milk and meat, but the houses have no cows, hens or rabbits. The gardens bear sparse produce that soon rots. Raca gave the three baby-faced soldiers a couple of fresh turnips and a head of garlic.

They have taken all the wine and spirits that were in the cellar, the old bottles kept there for big occasions by her husband Simon Cèrmik, felled by a heart attack on that same Targova Street, in 1942, when a German soldier forced him to run from one end of the street to the other carrying a large drum of gasoline. As he lay on the sidewalk, the German poured it over him and set fire to him, but old Cèrmik was already dead.

Raca stands and looks out of the window after the Russian soldiers have gone, but she’s not really looking at the wind, however much the wind puts on a show, blowing away paper, leaves and clothes from washing lines.

Raca sees another street in other times.

She sees that distant morning when Sofia was five years old and a man crossed Targova Street in a very determined fashion, knocked on their door and asked for the girl.

It was a Norwegian painter, though he looked more like a homeless man. His name was Gottwold, he was very tall and an inevitable sadness dwelled on his bearded, lean face. He had noticed Sofia when she was playing in the entrance to the Cèrmik store. He simply wanted to draw a portrait of her.

Raca opened the door, and asked Gottwold in after he had told her what he wanted to do. He had come from Katowice, where he knew his sister was married to a Pole by the name of Dayna, but when he got there, he discovered this Dayna, whom he did not know personally, had killed his young wife and their two children and had then taken his own life. Devastated by the news of that tragedy, Gottwold wept for his sister for some time but then, rather than returning to Norway, where no one was waiting for him, he stayed in the district tramping around like a surly gypsy shunning the presence of human beings. He painted whatever he felt like. He’d been doing that for three years and his backpack was stuffed with paper and cardboard covered in drawings. He had recently been wandering around Mielec and Kolbuszowa, where Raca came from, very near Rzeszów, and perhaps that was why Sofia’s mother decided to give him lodging for a time.

A few days later Gottwold painted Sofia.

Now as Raca looks out of the window and remembers that man coming, the Cèrmik house is desolate and cold because she has lived there alone ever since the Germans took her family away. Raca doesn’t try to clean or keep it warm. Nor are there many photos or portraits left on the walls or cupboards, although she does have lots of memories. They pass through her mind time and again as she waits for insanity to sweep here into these memories and save her from this world.

The portrait that the sad, silent Norwegian drew of Sofia hangs in a prominent position in her bedroom. When she looks at it, for a few seconds Raca thinks that brighteyed girl will run into the house at any moment, terrified by one of those vague, frightening things that scare children but are only fantasy stoked by non-existent horrors. Then the immense, infinite love that Raca has always possesed slips out of her hands.

1941. Four years before Hurbinek’s death
.

There is a lot of fear in Rzeszów on the day when Sofia Cèrmik and Yakov Pawlicka get married. In recent weeks there have been massacres of Jews carried out by the
Einsatzkommandos—
the SS police batallions—in the small towns close to Debica, only twelve miles to their west, and Przeworsk, further east and near the frontier. Nobody, it seems, did anything to prevent them.

Sofia and Yakov decided they wanted to marry before they met the fate destiny held in store.

Yakov is a mechanic and knife grinder. He looks sturdy, although he is short, and bald and stubborn when it comes to getting what he wants. He had taken over the business after his mother’s eccentric brother, Elias Papoulk, hung himself from the branch of a tree in the birch forest you can make out from Sofia’s bedroom, on the far bank of the Wislok. Elias Papoulk had died a childless bachelor, and Yakov had been working as an apprentice for him.

Yakov has loved Sofia and Sofia has loved Yakov ever since they were adolescents. They have pledged to live happily, “come what may.” They will work together. They will protect each other from all evil. They swear that under the
chuppah
, the wedding canopy. “You will listen to me.” “I will listen to you.” “You will take my hand.” “I will take your hand.”

After their wedding, they go to live in the same house where the unfortunate Elias lived when he was alive. He had secretly bequeathed it to his nephew before committing suicide. Apart from a workshop with all the tools a mechanic needs, there are around a hundred hens, enough to make a little business from the sale of eggs. “If those German dogs don’t make their lives impossible,” comments Rachel, Yakov’s mother, when someone rhetorically asks about the young couple’s future.

It is an austere wedding: there is hardly any wine although they do have beer and the local mead that is brown and sweet. It is held at the Pawlickas’ house because the Cèrmik’s house has been flooded by the swollen waters of the River Wislok. “Don’t worry about the dowry,” Simon Cèrmik tells prospective father-in-law Samuel Pawlicka. “My daughter’s money didn’t get soaked.” “It’s not your money that will make my Yakov happy.” “No, it won’t be the money.” “He and the lot of us will be happy if those dogs forget us.” “May God will that.” “May He indeed.” Samuel repeats wearily as he looks up at the sky.

While the two men talk, Yakov has started to sing. He sings very well, everybody agrees, his is a powerful, melodious voice. His best friend, Pavel Ramadian, a mustachioed joker from Armenia who came to Rzeszów with his parents to work in the Carpathian woodmills accompanies him on the violin.

Sofia is proud and blushes when Yakov sings. The song he sings speaks of a falcon that flies alone until it falls in love with a pigeon, but the pigeon is afraid and flies far away so the falcon can’t reach her.

Then Pavel sings an impish song to make the women laugh.

There aren’t many guests at the wedding because nobody in the town is in a mood to celebrate. It is not a wedding full of happiness yet there is laughter and a will to live. They all congratulate and hug each other as if wanting to keep at bay the ill omens that give them sleepless nights, and congratulate the families of bride and groom and wish the couple a long life and healthy children who can pray for them when it is time to die.

Few people are actually there, not because the Cèrmiks and Pawlickas are not much loved in Rzeszów—they are families the community appreciates highly—but because over the last year many neighbors have begun to flee further south with all their belongings, toward the Danube, Bulgaria and Greece, and from there to Palestine. Few people attend because few have stayed on.

But those who do come to Sofia and Yakov’s wedding do so to feel they are leading normal lives with their friends, if possible for one last time. They eat with relish the geese reared by Raca and her single sisters. They dig into the tender flesh of roast kid, and trays of aromatic black pudding and devour the desserts—figs with honey, clusters of walnuts and blackcurrants in bittersweet sauce.

They eat to drive away thoughts of when the plague will reach their door. They eat in silence. A silence broken by Yakov’s songs and Pavel’s sad music, Pavel who is drunk and sobbing. “It’s the bride. She is young and beautiful.”

Pavel suddenly climbs onto a chair, and tells the children who are making such a din on tables at the back to be quiet, and offers a solemnly worded toast to the newlyweds. It is a long, poetic toast and he asks them to celebrate this wedding every ten years, all together in bigger and bigger parties. “So that the house may prosper and our souls as well.”

They all raise their glasses but their skin looks gray. Their faces and hands are gray. The smoke from cigarettes and pipes wreathes their faces and makes the gray even grayer.

Yakov kisses Sofia on the lips. Then he puts his mouth close to her ear. The exhausted guests applaud politely. “We will have lots of children and I will love you for a hundred years.” “Yakov, Yakov, I’m sorry, forgive me.” “Why do you say that you are sorry, why do you ask me to forgive you?” “Because I won’t live so long.” “Oh, yes, you will. Somewhere you will live with me.”

1965. Twenty years after Hurbinek’s death
.

Cousin Moritz Pawlicka listens attentively, as he waits on the sidewalk of New York’s Fifth Avenue, to the words being broadcast from the radio of a taxi parked by a fire hydrant. They sound like words recited in Hebrew. He is on his way to work at a newspaper, the
New York Post
, but stopped to listen to those words because he has suddenly been stirred by a memory from his childhood: he is a child, is in his native Poland with his whole family seated behind the desks in Grandfather Samuel’s school while a storm rages outside. The claps of thunder make the glass panes vibrate. Moritz keeps his fear to himself and pretends, or better still, Ira his father soothes him by affectionately caressing the back of his neck. He gives one hand to his father while the other plays with a button on Uncle Yakov’s jacket. His brand new Aunt Sofia is leaning on Yakov and smoothing his hair sweetly with her hand. It is
Passover
and they are all listening to the patriarch Samuel Pawlicka reading the
Haggadah
in his grave, firm voice, though Moritz notices that now and then they try to look out of the corners of their eyes into the street. The diaphanous air seems unthreatening and the clouds he cannot see are turning yellow in the distance. Moritz will never forget that afternoon when he heard the story of the exodus of the Jews to Egypt, although he had heard his grandfather tell that story many times before, because the thunderclaps weren’t coming from the sky but from German canons.

1912. Thirty three years before Hurbinek’s death
.

Thomas Zelman is writing a letter to his elder sister, Raca. He is in the English port of Southampton and has embarked on a fashionable liner and it is a rainy day in April. They will set sail in a few hours and Thomas writes under a canopy on the fourth deck, surrounded by people bawling their goodbyes. He is telling Raca in his letter that he has found work in Boston, in the house of relatives who left Rzeszów at the end of the nineteenth century and set up home in America. He will work as a milliner like them. Those same relatives who will welcome him sent him money to purchase a third-class passage on a giant boat that all the newspapers have featured, the
Titanic
. Thomas Zelman is twenty years old, impulsive and happy. He sends kisses to all the family in his letter. “They will soon be dollar bills,” he says. April 14 is his birthday and he asks Raca to think of him on that day. He will be on the high seas and will do what he can to have a bottle to uncork. He wonders at the end of his letter whether he will get very seasick on the boat. He has never been on board one. However, a new life awaits him. The century promises much and he feels rumbustiously alive as if he were on a never-ending binge. He seals the envelope and is about to go on land to take the letter to a post office but it is too late. Night is falling and they have removed the gangplanks and the bands are competing with the din of the horns and howls of passengers under the shower of confetti falling from the main decks. He re-opens the envelope and adds a PS in which he pledges to his sister that he will write to her daily on the boat and will send her all the letters together from America as soon as they reach port.