The Birthday Buyer (5 page)

Thomas Zelman was unable to do that; he froze to death in the sea, on the night of his birthday.

Raca was not to not hear anything about the fate of her brother for a year. She never received letters from him nor imagined that they existed. One day Sofia told Yakov the story of her uncle who went down with the
Titanic
. She did so when she noticed her fiancé watching when Raca opened a drawer in the sideboard and took out a photo she kissed three times slowly. It was the photo of Thomas her brother that she raised to her lips every night before she went to bed. Nobody ever found out about the letters, and in conversations they mentioned the “American” uncle who died in the middle of the ocean as if it were a fabled story or an unreal, mythical event magnified by the provincial atmosphere in that small community of Rzeszów. For Sofia, imagining her uncle caught by chance in that shipwreck, embellished by the drawings in the magazines that reached their shop thanks to the spice suppliers from Krakow, was as fascinating as a novel, like the
Madame Bovary
she found so absorbing, or so many books she devoured by herself. Even Simon Cèrmik—who always a skeptic—would finish smoking his cigar talking about his brother-in-law as if he were the hero in an adventure story, whose deeds he exaggerated, but Raca left the room when her husband fantasized over that misfortune. “Don’t allow them to destroy your memory of me,” she heard her brother’s voice say inside her head. And she cherished that strange private space where only the ghost of Thomas Zelman was present.

1932. Thirteen years before Hurbinek’s death
.

The adolescent Yakov Pawlicka finishes his apprentice’s work in the afternoon in Uncle Elias Papoulk’s knife-grinding workshop and relishes the reading of stories of Sinbad the Sailor in a volume with thick battered covers. It is the only book in the workshop and the only book old Elias has ever read. “Don’t do as I do,” he tells his nephew, whom he sees open the book immediately once he has washed his hands after putting the tools away.

The truth is that young Yakov does read more books, as many as he can from the ones his parents keep in their dining room. “I read more books, but this is my favorite.” “How many books can you read in your life?” “I don’t know, thousands and thousands.” “Will you have the time, with all the work there is to do?” “I will do my work and read at night.” “No, you won’t, because you will have to look after your children, attend to your friends and love your wife.” “I will find the time. I really will, Uncle Elias.” “You will have to read in secret, but you won’t have much time for your secrets, so you will read very few books.” “I will read in secret.” “What else will you do in secret?” “How can I know what life will bring? Can anyone ever know?” “No, of course not, but there will be secret things you do by yourself, with no one else around, like the worm that burrows into the ground. And life will bring you many secret moments, by yourself. What will you do then, read?” “I will read.” “No, you won’t, you will lament, you will lament the fact that you are alive, you will point your fist at the sky and will be unhappy. You will do what I did, when I was knocked over by a cart, when I was your age and I shut myself in my room to suffer the pain by myself, without anyone hearing or seeing, and when my injuries most hurt, I stretched out and waited for death to come, wished it would come. I went four days without eating or sleeping, the bones in my feet had been crushed. Yakov, never be alone. You will end up imagining things and seeing devils. You will sell your soul to one.” “No, uncle, I won’t do any of that. I will read, and will read lots of books.” “I hope they let you, Yakoimele.”

1935. Ten years before Hurbinek’s death
.

What can Yakov Pawlicka see hanging from a lamppost in Berlin? An ear. But can it be a
human ear
hanging from a lamppost in Berlin? It is the ear of a Jew. And how does he know? There is a card at the bottom of the post that says “Jew’s ear = Pig’s ear.” They cut it off days ago and stuck it on a hook, then they attached the hook to a piece of string and threw it over the top of the lamp, where it hooked up.

It is the first thing Yakov sees when he leaves the station.

He has come to take a vacation in Berlin, where a German friend of his who was born in Rzeszów lives. His friend’s name is Sigmund. Sigmund what? Yakov can’t remember, or in fact doesn’t know.

Jamaica is Yakov’s dream. He tells Sigmund that in the Café Hannover. He has wanted to go to Jamaica ever since he saw a map of the island on an atlas that belonged to his parents, at school in Rzeszów. The name, Jamaica, seduced him. And the pirate stories his brothers David and Ira told him. He wants to go there in a sailing ship, sail around the island, anchor in Montego Bay, gaze at the horizon from the highest peaks of the Blue Mountains, sleep in Port of Spain.

Sigmund tells him to wake up, that dreams are not the most sensible things in present times, even less so for a Jew. But he doesn’t say the word “Jew” in the café; it wouldn’t be prudent. Instead he says “one of yours.”

When he heard that, Yakov wondered how much of a friend that Sigmund whom he knew from school, but whose family never visited the Pawlicka household could ever be.

A demonstration suddenly erupts around a corner where there are public baths, between the avenue and the street with the Café Hannover terrace. People are carrying placards with stars of David and demanding justice.

Sigmund says it is all very well to have demonstrations like this, but they aren’t realistic, and that one has to go with the flow of history.

The police gathers at the other end of the street and they charge on horseback. The police have swords and long leather nightsticks. The clash is brutal and people scatter everywhere. As they chase after the demonstrators, some police drive their horses into the straw chairs on the café terrace.

Yakov and Sigmund run to protect themselves from the blows the police are indiscriminately delivering to everyone. In the tumult, Yakov is suddenly surrounded by people running who drag him along as they flee in panic. He loses sight of Sigmund in the hysterical avalanche.

Eventually, in that labyrinth of streets, he finds he is alone with another young man of his age. They look at each other in fear, as they hear the sound of horse hoofs behind them, galloping over the street paving stones. Two mounted police approach, flourishing their swords.

The youth signals to Yakov, who follows unflinchingly, not sure what the next step will be. They enter a house whose sinister black door is open and climb the stairs to the first landing. The police rides in on horseback and up the stairs.

The young men are forced to go up to the top, to the fourth landing. The policeman reaches the third but his horse slips, takes fright and rears up, neighing and throwing off the policeman who tumbles down the stairs until he gets caught on a bend. As he falls his saber sticks into his left thigh and he lets out a loud howl. The horse continues its descent and tramples on its rider who writhes in pain.

As they watch the scene unfold, Yakov and his friend also rush downstairs. When he passes by the policeman, Yakov stops moved by fear and pity. His eyes seem to be calling out for help, but when he goes over, the policeman stretches his hand out to grab him by the arm. Yakov then sees hate in his eyes and two swastikas on the sleeves of his uniform.

Yakov manages to break away from the policeman. He is scared when he gets out into the street. He looks to his right and sees two other police on horseback savagely beating the young man who’d been accompanying him. Yakov flees in the opposite direction, but never sees another sign of Sigmund. Nor does he see him in his house when he rushes back to collect his luggage. That same night Yakov took the last train back to Poland.

Why Jamaica? Why those dreams? Does a place called Jamaica really exist? And why? They are questions to ponder in a train travelling across Europe, if you can’t get to sleep.

Ice skating is his favorite sport, for example when the Wislok is frozen and as hard as stone. He’s not sure why, but in that train that first takes him to Krakow and then, many hours later, to Rzeszów, Yakov can only think about two ideas that obsess him, opposed ideas that keep recurring: Jamaica and the frozen river in the city of his birth. “No, Jamaica doesn’t exist, Sigmund, and if it did exist, it wouldn’t serve any purpose,” he would now tell that strange, perhaps cowardly Sigmund if he ever saw him again. But he never would.

1925. Twenty years before Hurbinek’s death
.

Peaches, apples and wild strawberries in a basket at the feet of Sofia Cèrmik. She is surrounded by the loud voices of men who are strange but not hostile—one only has to see her mother’s relaxed face.

She is barely five years old and her mother Raca takes her by the hand while the men continue filling the basket with the fruit from the piles on the stall.

Sofia has never seen fruit. It is something new for her, as to a certain extent is her awareness that it is midday, that the springtime light is darkened by the pollen and dust in the air and that the smell wafting her way is as much from the fresh vegetables as from the rotten. But it’s a lot to ask of someone so young to distinguish between life and death.

The dense, golden sky is a warning that there will be storms in the afternoon, like yesterday. They will collect snails when it dries out, at sunset.

A man is sitting next to the stall with the peaches, apples and wild strawberries. He is holding a big wooden bucket between his legs. He keeps extracting prickly pears from a sack on the ground next to him. He picks them up very carefully so as not to prick himself on the spikes on their rough skin. Then he peels them with a knife and the moist, greeny fruit immediately appears. He places the peeled prickly pears in the wooden bucket. The man offers Sofia one. She hides behind her mother’s skirt, but Raca taps her on the head authorizing her to take it. The fresh, sharp taste of a prickly pear in her mouth will be a pleasurable sensation that will accompany Sofia in her short life.

In Auschwitz the search for that sensation was often to come to her mind—a raging desire because she so misses that simple pleasure—but it was to be a memory that wouldn’t find a way into that absurd horror. On the other hand she was to remember the morning when she acompanied her mother to the market and watched that man peeling prickly pears and how there was a fire near the esplanade full of peddlers, and black particles of soot started to fly through the air like a downpour of tiny pieces of coal.

Everyone runs to the pond to pump water, but Sofia only feels her mother’s hand squeezing hers. “They look like little black flies,” says Sofia referring to the wandering particles. “No, they are the ashes of the Synagogue, it’s burning.”

Sofia looks at the seven-year-old boy opposite who has just spoken to her. He is carrying a bag of juniper berries on his back and a basket in his hand where a cockerel is stretching its neck out of curiosity. “Do you remember me?” “Yes, you’re Yakov Pawlicka. I sometimes see you through the window when your mother is cutting your hair,” says Sofia as she strokes the cockerel’s crest.

The two of them are older now than their son was to be when he died.

1960. Fifteen years after Hurbinek’s death
.

It is snowing. The tractors with their improvised scoops are clearing the snow off the paths so the cows can water and the few vehicles in town can circulate.

But Raca Cèrmik is averse to all that, or rather lives isolated from all that, because she can’t forgive, or consent to life, or allow what she remembers to pass.

Raca Cèrmik, Zelman by her maiden name, is in her house in Rzeszów that looks over Targova Street, and is drinking her fourth cup of Turkish coffee of the day and smoking a long cigarette, and is looking back and wondering what became of her family.

What became of her little children whose photos in all sizes and frames fill the tables and shelves of her home?

What became of the soul of her cheerful, joking Aaron, who was always so mischievous, and dead aged twenty-six in Auschwitz?

What became of the soul of her impressionable, hard-working son Stefan, who was sickly and shy, and dead aged twenty-four in Auschwitz?

What became of the soul of her fragile, delicate daughter Sofia, her sweet, little Sofia, and dead aged twenty-three in Auschwitz?

And what might her elder children, Anna and Max, be doing, the survivors so far way, wherever they happen to be? They left this land and now write her letters and want her to go and live with them in a place called Detroit. But she won’t go.

What became of the soul of her relative, elegant, strong-minded Samuel Pawlicka who died in Auschwitz?

What became of the souls of the children of Samuel, David and Yakov, good Yakov who loved Sofia. All dead in Auschwitz too?

What became of the soul of her friend Gork Vigo, and her sisters Sara and Mikaela Zelman, who all disappeared in the oven of some concentration camp?

Where did each and everyone of them end up? How did each and everyone die? Did each and everyone suffer as they died? Raca Cèrmik, Zelman by her maiden name, tortures herself alone.

But she will never wonder after the soul of Hurbinek, her grandchild, because she doesn’t even know he existed. Life kept that hidden from her.

I was going to Auschwitz, but not anymore.

Dr. Voghs touches my knees as he examines X-rays of my legs carefully against the light. The expression on his face beneath rimless spectacles is worrying because it is like the defensive smile of a second-hand car dealer.

Voghs is on in years, possibly approaching retirement. He has replaced the young, rosy-cheeked doctor I had when I was admitted who is doing his training here with a mixture of indifference and conviction. On the other hand, Voghs reminds me of that terrifying type of person who lives in terror and whose immediate physical peculiarity is never to look you in the eye as they tell you something drastic related to what remains of your life, such as “You’ve got cancer” or “You will be executed tomorrow” or “Your daughter has died” or “You will never walk again.”

I have felt reduced to an object more than once in the Frankfurt Universitäts-Kliniken where I am hospitalized. The nurses, naturally, do their best to create the very real impression that you are a nobody.

Like an old country doctor, Voghs forces me to move my toes that stick out beyond the plaster casts completely paralyzing my legs. For the third time over the last few days since my accident, he asks me if I was traveling through Germany as a tourist. It’s become a routine, police kind of enquiry,“Going to Berlin, right?” he asks.

He thinks he is amusing. I think about what Joseph Roth said when the Nazis were ruling the roost in Germany with majority support. “Who in their right mind goes to Berlin of their free will?” Roth was referring to the
Ostjuden
, the Jews from the East, but I fear that his question, albeit a rhetorical one, still holds today.

I reply to Dr. Voghs that I was heading to Auschwitz. But not anymore. “To see the ossuaries?” he asks keeping his eyes firmly on my X-rays, though I surmise it’s out of clumsy innocence. I reply, surprised and hesitant, that I don’t know if there are ossuaries in Auschwitz. “I don’t know either, it’s what I’ve heard, I’ve never been,” he continues as if that were an end to the matter.

“Of course,” I recapitulated ironically, “what German ever goes to Auschwitz of his own free will?”

All the same I’ve never thought of ossuaries. Who ever thinks of ossuaries, like that, on the spur of the moment, without having a powerful reason to do so? Or, at the very least, who can ever think of ossuaries that aren’t the ones you find at the scene of any battle in past centuries that has now been converted into some sort of theme park? Or in the most out-of-the-way churches in Castile or Sicily? Or in archaeological museums. “You think there might be ossuaries in Auschwitz?” I ask Voghs maliciously. My chest hurts when I breathe. “I thought the crematoria were working all the time and that’s how they saved themselves the bother of piles of bones after they gassed people.” “I don’t know, it’s what I’ve heard, one hears so many theories . . . ” he says, still averting his gaze and taking on a condescending tone. He taps me on the knee and walks over to one of the other beds in the ward, still smiling cruelly behind his glasses.

I have seen the occasional ossuary and imagined that they are the remains of human beings waiting for an eventual onset of justice. Like in Ruanda. Like in Bosnia. Like in Cambodia. I expect those countries also have their Dr. Voghs. “Time inevitably brings about justice,” the old drunkard Roth used to say. Sooner or later, it does. I really believe that. Does that make me naïve?

Those who came out of Auschwitz did so down to their bones. They were no more than bones. That was their only possession, the skeleton that had survived, their own personal ossuary. They returned emptied out, bewildered, with no moral horizon or bodily flesh, sparse guts too worn out to function, ravaged, tortured, wandering. No language could contain the brutal range of their experience.

But life went on. They traveled from black to white, returned to the opposite pole.

What did they do afterward? How did they live, how did they die? What did they feel as daily life brought forgetfulness to such a marred memory? And yet prior questions existed, the anwers to which were beyond the reach of those who survived Auschwitz: What became of their towns, their villages and their homes? Where were their families? Down to what kind of bones had their loved ones, their friends, their neighbors and their rivals come? Could you perhaps describe as normal the life you lived after the Red Army reached Auschwitz and liberated the camp? We don’t know how many answers these questions might have been given, perhaps as many as there are survivors. But we
do
know that two million answers are eternally inaudible: the dead don’t speak.

And Hurbinek?

What remained of Hurbinek in the memories of those who were present at his final agony in that infirmary improvised in the Main Camp?

Let us start with Henek.

We know that Henek was really Belo König—Primo Levi says that, when he relates how the Polish nurses who couldn’t face looking after Hurbinek changed König to Henek—and how Belo König returned to northern Transylvania in July 1945. He joined the Hungarian army, where he displayed great courage in everything he did, being so full of life and energy. He forged a career and soon reached the rank of captain of the forces that confronted the Soviets in the streets of Budapest in 1956. Some thought Captain König was a hero. Others didn’t.

He married Claricia Novaceanu, a Romanian national skating champion, and had three children. He never knew the youngest, Joanine: the day she came into the world, her father was executed in a prison in Minsk where they court-martialed the “traitors” behind that 1956 revolt. Those who had dealings with him always mentioned how he smiled broadly right to the end. He didn’t have a last word to say. He uttered no farewells.

We know Claricia Novaceanu never heard him speak about the real Hurbinek. On the other hand, he did speak at length about the other people he met in Auschwitz (as was the case with an Italian chemist) and told terrible stories of what he had experienced there in a matter-of-fact tone. However, we don’t know if he ever referred in public to the crippled child he had looked after with so much devoted care. He apparently didn’t.

But Claricia Novaceanu did recall later, on the day her elder son Stanislazh was married in 1972, that Belo, alias Henek, used to tell Stanislazh, when he was very young, the story of a tree whose trunk housed a very pale being with the face and body of a little boy, a legless little boy. He had named this astonishing being Hurbinek and entitled the story “Hurbinek’s tree.” Claricia remembered it all of a sudden at the wedding; she remembered right there why that strange name was so unexpectedly familiar to her; she remembered it when her daughter-in-law asked her about Stanislazh’s childhood with the curiosity of someone who was in love.

It was a story her husband told time and again with slight variations, but always with the same conclusion: the unhappy, tiny inhabitant of that tree couldn’t get out because he had no legs, he wept inside the tree and, if you listened carefully, pressed your ear against the trunks of those trees, you could hear him moaning or gasping. That was why Claricia remembered how her children, when they were very young, would go from tree to tree, put their little faces next to the trunks and try to hear a voice, while Belo told them, “Listen hard, very hard and you will hear him. He sometimes says my name. He sometimes calls out to me.” And Stanislazh or his brother Josef would get very excited and suddenly shout “Yes, yes, he said Henek, he said Henek!”

Claricia remembered it then, as if it were a sudden revelation. But she didn’t know the source of that story, just as she didn’t know that a tree that held Hurbinek’s spirit within it grew in a place in Poland that the Germans once called Auschwitz.

Rubem never forgot the day when, with Levi and Henek, he buried Hurbinek’s small body at the foot of a tree. When he returned to Radzyn, his birthplace, the Hebrew schools where he taught weren’t there any more and he managed to find a job as a postman working for the Polish Post Office. He wept a lot, disconsolately, when he found out that what he had so feared was true: that his wife, Demetria, was gassed that same night they had reached Auschwitz and had been separated on the platform when one of the guards’ mastiffs bit her.

He had to undergo psychiatric treatment for years because he suffered from nightmares and woke up soaked in sweat and dirtied by his own defecations. They were dreams prompted by pure fear, the doctors told him. Yetzev would relate his dream, that was invariably the same: he could see the man right in front of him in a long queue changing into a tobacco pouch made from his own skin. Several SS tortured him until they broke him. The torturers’ words were broadcast round the camp from a loudspeaker: “If you don’t help us, it will hurt a lot.” And those final words would hang in the air: “hurt a lot . . . hurt a lot . . . ”A screaming voice drilled through his eardrum and Yetzev also shouted out,
Jawohl, jawohl
! When he woke up, he confirmed night after night that he no longer controlled his sphincters and had shit himself in bed.

A year before he died, in 1965, Rubem Yetzev decided to return to Auschwitz and seek out the tree beneath which Hurbinek was buried. He found it, or thought he had. He told the person accompanying him, someone much younger than himself: “Not a single day goes by when I don’t think about the child we buried by the foot of this tree. He has lived in my memory to this day.” The tree, a huge acacia, was very leafy and now brought shade to an irregularly shaped esplanade where Oven no. 2 had stood before it was blown up.

Old Yetzev stood there for a whole afternoon and stared at the capricious shape of the roots that stuck out. As he pictured Hurbinek’s fragile, pathetic body yet again, he tried unsuccessfully to chase from his head the memory of the earth that shifted in the covered graves where they executed and threw thousands of wounded Jews in Radzyn. He had seen that earth billow by itself as the bodies buried on top of each other swelled up.

We know that Ernst Sterman, a German Jew, a china manufacturer, visited high mountain spas and health establishments throughout the United States, where he went in 1946 to cure himself from the aftermath of the tuberculosis he contracted in the final months of his incarceration in Auschwitz. He was spared from one of the fatal “selections” because of a mere arithmetical error on the part of his guards. When it was time to count the bodies that were shaking with fear when they were about to enter the gas chamber though he hadn’t stripped naked like the others yet, a punctilious bureaucrat sent him back to the barrack. There was one too many, and chance meant it was him. He was hidden there for two months and contracted tuberculosis. He lost one lung and more than half the capacity of the other.

He disappears in 1955 and leaves our story, though not before leaving his testimony: “Life returns, life resumes and you cannot avoid its reality unless you cut your veins or hang yourself from a beam. I tried both, but in both cases there was always a hand, the hand of fate perhaps, to help me stop myself. When I was back home, after being in the extermination camp, and realized it would never be my home again because they were no longer in this world to share this same life with me—neither my children, my wife nor my close friends—when I realized I was alone, completely alone, I understood there were only two paths, death or life. And if I chose to live, though the wound would never heal, I’d have to press on, make money, earn my living day after day once again, shave every morning, laugh at what was funny, cry at what was sad. Except that sometimes I find the memory of Hurbinek intolerable, the child I saw die in Auschwitz, a very small child, sunk in a bunk, unable to overcome his permament shaking. I can never erase from my mind the sight of him dying; it always reminded me of the terrible pain and fear and helplessness my children must have felt in the hour of death.”

Scholomo Buczko, the cobbler from Pomerania, opened a new cobblers in Bratislava, where he was taken in by cousins when he came back from Auschwitz. He married a teacher of Russian there and trade prospered. He only remembered Hurbinek four times in the whole of his life, the times, one could say, when he remembered The Camp (Buczko always said “The Camp” when he was referring to Auschwitz).

The first time was April 13, 1950. He left home and took a tram. There he read in a newspaper that they had put a price on the heads of 25,000 war criminals in Germany. For a few seconds he thought of Hurbinek’s body in the abstract and thought that someone ought to pay for all that hurt they had inflicted.

The second time was June 21, 1953. When the game had just kicked off at a soccer field in his city, they opened the doors and placed a number of paralyzed and crippled children and adults behind the goals. From the terraces Buczko thought that if Hurbinek had lived he might have been one of those now leaning on crutches or using wheelchairs.

The third occasion was October 7, 1958. His wife gave birth to their fourth child and he held the baby for a few seconds in his arms. When he saw legs that were so weak and skin that was so white, he remembered the time he lifted Hurbinek up so Henek could change the blankets that were dirty with excrement for ones that were just as dirty. The concept of
clean
didn’t exist in The Camp. The two children weighed the same, despite the age difference, and that was what brought to mind Hurbinek’s tiny body.

The fourth was March 2, 1970, when Buczko was left paralyzed as the result of a car accident on the road to Prague. A drunken German (It just had to be a German! Buczko lamented to himself in later years) went through a traffic light and smashed smack into Buczko’s Skoda. They took more than two hours to extract him from the twisted metal, but he didn’t feel his legs in all that time. We know that he thought of Hurbinek for one last time. The prediction he’d always made that he would be linked to him for life was thus fulfilled.