The Boxer (2 page)

It took her a couple of seconds to
cope
with his appearance, the typical nose for example, but then she called out, “Does anyone here know a photographer?”

Aron waited, without turning around. Behind him, he heard peoplestart talking again, more quietly than before. In spite of his resolve, when someonetouched him, he turned around instantly. A small boy stood in front of him. Ten years old at most — though to be able to estimate a child’s age takes practice, he says. “Come with me,” the boy said and, without hesitating, Aron followed him. But at the door the boy’s courage dissolved. He stopped and, frightened, looked back into the room. A woman nodded encouragingly and said, “Go on.”

They went a fairly long way. At a certain point, after they had turned left twice, Aron thought, If he goes left again, he’ll be taking me incircles. He could think of nothing to say to him, or of any reason to ask him his name, and he could expect nothing at all from the boy. So they walked along in silence, the boy always a couple of steps ahead of him. In a courtyard they came to a halt. The boy pointed at the building across from them and said, “There. On the third floor.”

Aron reached into his bag to look for a reward, but the boy had run away as soon as his assignment was over. There was, in fact, a sign next to a door on the third floor and, after repeated knocking, the photographer opened. Many people wear white coats, but by the way in which the light obviously bothered this man, the time it took him to stop squinting — though it wasn’t bright outside — one could immediately guess what his profession was. “Are you a photographer?” Aron asked.

“What else?”

“I need four passport photos.”

The young man moved aside so Aron could step into the narrow corridor. Aron had to allow for a brief but aggravating visual inspection to brush over him.

“You shouldn’t evaluate me, you should take pictures of me,” he said.

“Of course. Do you know how many people need photographs these days?”

“Where’s the stool?” Aron asked.

“Easy, easy, first we have to talk about the price.”

“Why? Don’t you know how much four passport photoscost? I’m sure I have enough money.”

The young man laughed and said, “You’re funny.

What would I do with money, the house is as good as new.

Do you have any cigarettes? Coffee?”

“How much would the pictures normally cost?” Aron asked.

Something must have impressed the young man, perhaps the seriousness of the question, or the emphasis with which it was posed. Either way, he felt he owed an explanation. “There are no normal prices. I could tell you what thepictures used to cost before the war, four photos for two marks. But what differencedoes that make today?”

“Just take my picture,” Aron said. “Somehowor other we’ll work out the price.”

The photographer hesitated but finally decided to run the risk. When they had finished, Aron said, “Listen, I agree we can’t base ourselves on prewar prices. Let’s assume that in the meantime prices have increased five hundred percent. So I’ll pay ten marks for the photos. When will theybe ready?”

The photographer ground his teeth and felt betrayed — he had exposed his precious film under false premises — but he wasted no more words over the payment. He took out a thick notebook, leafed through the pages, and said, “Six weeks. At the earliest.”

“That’s unacceptable,” said Aron. “You mustn’t get back at me this way, I haven’t done anything to you. Onthe contrary, I’m willing to pay an unlawfully high price. I’ll come by to pick up the photographs tomorrow, all right?”

A
nd the next day they were ready?” I ask.

“Naturally.”

“Naturally is good,” I say. “You threatened him.”

“Threatened? Are you crazy? What would I have threatened him with? All I said was what you just heard.

Where was the threat?”

“It must’ve been in your voice. Or in your eyes, how should I know?”

“Young man,” Aron says, “you’re letting your imagination run away with you. But if you mean that he was afraid, that’s something else again. A fear that had nothing to do with me. At the time, almost everyone was afraid.”

“And you really gave him the measly ten marks?”

“And a pack of cigarettes to boot,” says Aron. “But why should I have told him beforehand?”

T
he questionnaire was a bigger problem, which began with the very first question. Only after a long hesitation did Aron decide to put down his real last name. It appeared, after extensive consideration, neutral, harmless — anyone could be called Blank. Blank didn’t tell them anything.

His first name was a different story. It was revealing, gossipy. The name Aron had to go if Aron’s ultimate effort was to rid himself of his past. He knew that not everyone could draw a conclusion from such a name, only those who had been inculcated. But they were the whole issue;
only one would have been one too many
. He knew from experience that thosewho were inculcated could not keep their mouths shut. So they were exactly the ones he needed to throw off track. Then there was the problem of his appearance. He woulddeal with that later, if there was anything that could be changed. Yet it was clear to him that he could use this appearance, should it be necessary, in a deceitful, misleading way. Besides, if a man can look like a horse, he said to himself, and everyone will believe him when he claims he isn’t a horse, then in his case, too, an attempt to put matters straight would not be utterly hopeless. However, this could work only if he had a different first name. With this Aron, people would just smile knowingly and not believe him.

Aron proceeded in a most unusual manner. He swapped two letters. In the appropriate column he wrote his new name, Arno. In case of a formal inquiry, it could be explained as a spelling mistake that had been ignored out of laziness.

But why did he falsify his date of birth?

W
hy did you make yourself six years younger?”

“Can’t you figure it out for yourself?”

I try, and say, “Because you wanted your son to have a younger father?”

“That too, perhaps,” says Aron. “But why precisely six years?”

This is his only clue. For several days, I think of what meaningthe number six could have. At first a biological reason occurs to me. Six years could lie near a medically significant border — one can’t make oneself randomly younger but only within certain thresholds. Aron would satisfy these conditions with his six years. But he would have told me that.

Only several days later do I find an illuminating explanation, and the number six appears in a new light. The war lasted for six years. Aron was a prisoner in concentration camps for six years. Is he referring to those six years? Ifso, he could have canceled out a bad time and tried, with the only means at his disposal, to reattach the stolen piece of his life. But he makes no comment.

A
ron provided the remaining details truthfully, except for trivial issues, like thequestion of his place of birth. He wavered only one other time, when he had to name his job. For a moment he was tempted by the idea of changing all things past. This had less to do with the plan of erasing tracks, he said, than with decade-old dreams and his appearance. Yet he soon gave up the idea of raising himself to the status ofprofessor or doctor, or some other profession. It was immediately clear to him that such a declaration would require verifiable knowledge. So he wrote: Employee.

Aron was given the number of a room in which sat a man who wasn’t really a policeman, for his armband didn’t indicate any sort of rank, it showed only that the occupying forces did not consider him particularly suspicious. Aron handed over the documents. The man verified them and said, “The birth certificate is missing.”

“I don’t have one.”

“What do you mean you don’t have one?”

“It’s gone, burned. Like everything else. Is that so unusual?”

“Please,” said the man, “there must be somesort of proof of who you are. I don’t want to insinuate anything, but I’m sure you’ll understand that these days there are a lot of people who wantto cover up their past. We have to be very careful.”

Aron had expected some such complication, even though he was basically pleased that
someone with his face
could be taken for a man who wanted to hide his past. He took the certificate of discharge from his last concentration camp out of his bag and simply held it up to the man’s face, very calmly, and ready to take it back — as if its worth could bediminished by excessive looking.

B
ut I mustn’t believe, Aron says, that he was particularly restless. On the contrary, he had been overcome by an astonishing coolness. He knew exactly what he was letting himself in for, he says, and his nerves had, fortunately, held up very well. The man, even if one presumes that he was one of the well-meaning ones, could easily have noticed the discrepancies between Aron’s declarations and the entries on the discharge certificate. After all, in these situations, it should not be entirely insignificant if someone is called Aron Blank and was born in Riga in 1900 or Arno Blank, born in Leipzig in 1906.

“Why did you think of Leipzig, of all places?”

“My late brother was born in Leipzig.”

Aron had been fully prepared, he says, to distract the man somehow — with a heart attack or an emotional outburst — if he had suddenlybecome interested in the details on the discharge certificate. But, to his relief, that turned out to be unnecessary.

T
he man just glanced at it and said, “All right, all right, thank you.”

Thus it was clear that people who possessed such an ID had, in his eyes, an inexhaustible source of credibility. In an instant he had forgotten his suspicions. Yet this
penetrating
compassion in his eyes, a sort of participation — Aron found it revolting from the very beginning, but he now bore it for practical reasons. He quickly stuffed the certificate back into his bag, and a couple of hours later he had his papers.

F
or the first few days, the apartment that was assigned to Aron felt far too luxurious, considering the widespread poverty of the time. It consisted of two spacious rooms with parquet flooring, a kitchen, a bathroom with green tiles, and a long corridor, at the end of which was a large storage space, almost a third room. There was plenty of furniture, carpets, linens, and kitchenware. When Aron first stepped into the bathroom, he found perfumed soap in a container and eleven bottles of bath oils. The whole inventory became his as soon as he moved in, without a receipt or any kind of formal transaction; not a word was said about it.

The decor wasn’t to Aron’s taste but, at first glance, he says, he had been completely satisfied. Yet it was hard for him to get used to the fact that all these objects belonged to him, that he could sell them, use them, or throw them away as he saw fit. At first he reduced his contacts with the apartment to an absolute minimum. There was a luxurious king-size bed in the bedroom, painted white, with soft blankets. When he went to bed the first night, he sighed with pleasure — at last, a decent bed. But the anticipated pleasure proved to be fleeting;
a bed does not necessarily mean sleep
. Aron lay awake and found no protection from the past. His thoughts rummaged in it, in death and suffering, his two starving children lay beside him, his wife was repeatedly dragged from the room crying. The nauseating smell that his bedmates in the concentration camp exhaled — to which he must also have contributed — would not leave him. He took the oils from the bath and sprayed them around the room. Hours later, he figured that the bed was too wide. He took a blanket, searched the apartment for another place to sleep, and settled in the storage room, which was separated from the corridor only by a curtain. He lay down on the floor, immediately felt the improvement, but nonetheless had to wait until he collapsed from exhaustion.

Now and then, through the curtain and the door to the apartment, he heard steps on the stairs. Time and again he would get up and sneak over to the peephole. Thus he got to know his neighbors, who were still up and about at night. Then that wasn’t enough, and he observed them during the daytime as well. He pushed a table up against the door and put several pillows on it, so that he could sitcomfortably while he watched. He noticed six different men, sixteen women, and sevenchildren; then he kept seeing the same people over and over again. His apartment wason the third floor, so Aron never saw the people on the first and second floors unless they were visiting someone upstairs. That was definitely a disadvantage. Then oneday Aron saw himself sitting like that, on the table, on three pillows, his legs crossed like a tailor, hiding behind his door, in the dark corridor, in the middle of the day. He was shocked, he says, he thought, My God, who in his right mind ever behaves like this? A madman behaves like this, a cretin. How lucky you are that no one sees you like this. But the restlessness didn’t last long. He simply left his observation post and resorted to the window. Many people look out the window.

H
e was terribly startled when the doorbell rang for the first time. Through the peephole he recognized the short man with an amputated leg who had given him the key tothe apartment — the superintendent. Before he opened the door, Aron let him ring again.

“Thank God,” said the superintendent.

Aron couldn’t understand the man’s initial concern, or his subsequent relief. He led the super into the kitchen and asked him what he wanted. “Nothing specific, I just wanted to make sure everything was all right,” said the super.

“Why shouldn’t it be?”

“Let’s be frank,” said the super. “No one has seen you leave the house for at least two days.”

Aron thanked him for his concern, which was totally superfluous in this case — he simply led a withdrawn life. As he spoke, he had to suppress a smile. That someone who had been persecuted for years, who had succeeded in eluding numerous traps only thanks to a thousand tricks and ruses, that this person should now hang himself, or turn on the gas — he found such a thought highly amusing.