“I will have the building ready within the month.”
“It has to be ready. That’s an order.”
Franz lay in your arms in the hotel room in Cholula, Isabel, and you listened and said nothing because you knew that that was why he had come to you. And he was laughing softly, hidden in your arms, remembering that it had been a cold night and the river had been frozen. He walked into the fortress and one of the guards said that it would be fun to skate as they had as boys. The earth crunched beneath their boots. There was no snow, but the earth was stiff with frost. It was hard to see clearly. The floodlights were on but the evening mist hung low and diffused the light and made it almost as opaque as the mist itself. And for once there was utter silence. What made him aware of it was the absence of the barking of the dogs. At Terezin the dogs could always be heard, at all hours, but tonight they were silent. Maybe it was also the absence of human voices. When the voices of men are still, much becomes audible that usually is not. The scrape of boots over concrete. The pad of bare feet on bare dirt. The creak of unoiled hinges. The distant tap of a typewriter. The click of rifle locks being cocked. The sounds of the snouts of dogs and the lips of children as they eat.
The building rose steadily, quickly. He attended its construction closely, for although the foremen knew their business, he wanted to keep an eye on things, and for the time being he had nothing more important to do. Often he knew that his presence was not needed and perhaps even not welcomed. But he went every day, returning to the fortress at night, sometimes in the truck, sometimes in the Mercedes with the Commandant, sometimes alone, walking, thinking. Thinking that it was his first job. Repeating it: my first job, Isabel, my first job. Yes, Franz, they sent me there because I was efficient, it was their decision, not mine. Yes, Franz, I want to understand you.
In the beginning the bodies of those who died in the Terezin fortress were taken to the incinerator in Theresienstadt, the town that had been transformed into a ghetto by Himmler’s orders. Later that was not enough and he, as architect attached to the camp, was ordered to build a crematorium on the site of the old kiln neat Litomerice. He finished it on schedule and the two ovens were installed with their iron tracks and the lever that moved the cadavers into the ovens mechanically. The ashes were returned to the fortress in urns marked F or M, Frau or Mann. Later the ashes were simply thrown into the river, and still later, when it became impossible to control the epidemics in the fortress, a common burial pit was opened near the north wall. Nevertheless, the commerce continued: in return for a sum of money, the relatives and friends of a deceased prisoner received an urn filled with earth from Terezin. Not Ulrich. Ulrich refused.
He went to the railroad, where they were working now, every morning, passing through the town that had become a single ghetto, returning at night across a field that had once been planted to beets but now was fallow with open ditches that had to be avoided. Beyond the field was the rutted dirt road that led to the fortress. The darkness was silent. Sometimes a faint buzzing behind his back, a sound that could not be defined. Then the lights of the fortress opaque in the ground fog. And no one spoke, Isabel. It was a place that has to be remembered like a silent movie. Did you ever see Caligari? No, how can you know what it was. They made a poll among youths: who is Hitler? No one knew, Pussycat, no one remembered now, no one young had heard anyone talk about him. Have you noticed that? And Franz talks to you, the most youthful of all of us: the walls of Theresienstadt stood straight, the mansard roofs and the gardens of the old buildings were all straight and nevertheless nothing seemed straight, it all seemed oblique, to exist in an insane space with insane coordinates of its own, to be like a stage backdrop where the lines are all drawn to recede as if straight in the true perspective of a scene, but in reality are all slanted and distorted. A backdrop seen from too close, without the illusion. Shadows that were real colliding with painted shadows and creating a maze of false light and true light, apparent distance and true distance. And everything richly ornamented, that mania for the decorative, as if there were an effort to make the lunacy of an asylum viable and normal. Have you never heard of Caligari? Above all, the silence. Sometimes he tried to hear something, anything, and found that he could hear only his own breathing. And she, later, if they had ever talked, could have told him that in the silence of Theresienstadt there had been secret music, singers who looked just like everyone else and came and went by day without drawing attention to themselves. Their sheets of music were passed from hand to hand and one day two old men were able to smuggle violins and violas to their meeting place. A cello that had been hidden in an abandoned barn arrived in a cart beneath a load of hay. She could have told him, if they had talked, but they never talked. All he knew was that a work crew one day discovered an entire set of orchestral instruments hidden behind a bricked-up wall. In their cases and wrapped against the dampness, a complete set, brasses, woodwinds, drums.
The Commandant was not angry but on the contrary pleased. “A stroke of luck. We need to prepare a ceremony for the official visit. What could be better than a concert?”
“Again and again we try to justify ourselves for what we did.”
“Really?”
“Yes. The words never matter.”
“Why don’t they matter?”
“Because they are always the same. The words everyone knows.”