I wasn’t sure what to think. I’m still not sure what to think. That’s evidence of what is, without a doubt, the camp’s great victory over its prisoners; that is, over those it didn’t kill. The others, the ones who came out of it alive, like me — all of us still carry a part of it, deep down inside, like a stain. We can never again meet the eyes of other people without wondering whether they harbor the desire to hunt us down, to torture us, to kill us. We’ve become perpetual prey creatures which, whatever they do, will always look upon the dawning day as the start of a long ordeal of survival and upon nightfall with an odd feeling of relief. Disappointment and disquiet ferment in us. I think we’ve become, and will remain until the day we die, the memory of humanity destroyed. We’re wounds that will never heal.
“Maybe you don’t know we had a baby before the war,” Schloss went on. “It was when you were far away, studying at the University, and maybe Fedorine didn’t write you about it. The baby didn’t live long — four days and four nights. It was a boy. The midwife, old Paula Beckenart, may she rest in peace, said he looked just like a little Schloss. She helped him out of Gerthe’s belly on the seventh of April. Outside the birds were chirping and the larch buds were becoming as big as plums. The first time Paula placed him in my arms, I thought I wouldn’t know how to hold him. I was afraid I’d squeeze him too tight or smother him with my big hands, and I was also afraid of dropping him. I imagined him breaking apart like crystal. Gerthe laughed at me, and the little one hollered and waved his arms and legs. But as soon as he found Gerthe’s breast, he started sucking her milk and didn’t stop, as if he wanted to empty her completely. I’d had Hans Douda make a cradle from the trunk of a walnut tree. It was a fine piece of wood he was saving to make a wardrobe, but I put the gold coins on his workbench and the deal was done.”
Schloss had big, dirty fingernails. As he told me about his child, he made an effort to clean them — without even looking at them — but they stayed black.
“He really occupied that cradle. He beat the bottom of it with his little feet as hard as he could. He made a pretty noise, like the sound of ax blows coming from deep in the forest. Gerthe wanted to call him Stephan, and I preferred Reichart. To tell the truth, we’d been caught off guard; we’d both persuaded ourselves that the baby had to be a girl. We had a name ready for the little girl who never came: Lisebeth, because Lise was my mother’s name, and Gerthe’s mother was Bethsie. But when the little man made his appearance and the midwife held him up in the air, we had no name for him. Throughout the four days of his short life, Gerthe and I squabbled constantly over his name, laughing the whole time. I’d say, ‘Reichart’; she’d reply, ‘Stephan.’ It became a game, a game that ended in hugs and kisses. And so when the child died, he didn’t have a name. He died nameless, and I’ve blamed myself for that ever since, as though it was part of what killed him.”
Schloss fell silent and bowed his head. He stopped moving entirely, as though he’d ceased to breathe. My mouth tasted like cinnamon and cloves, and the gnawing in my stomach hadn’t let up.
“Sometimes I dream about him at night. He reaches out to me with his tiny hands, and then he leaves, he goes away, like there’s some force carrying him off, and there’s no name I can call out, there’s no name I can say to try and hold him back.”
Schloss had lifted his head and spoken those last words with his eyes fixed on mine. His eyes were big, overflowing; they took up too much space; I felt as though they were crowding me out. He was surely waiting for me to say something, but what? I knew well that ghosts can cling stubbornly to life and that sometimes they’re more present than the living.
“One morning I woke up and Gerthe wasn’t in bed anymore. I hadn’t heard anything. She was kneeling beside the cradle and not moving. I called her. She didn’t reply. She didn’t even turn her head toward me. I got up and went over to her, crooning the names, Stephan, Reichart… Gerthe leaped to her feet and pounced on me like an animal gone crazy, trying to hit me, tearing at my mouth, scratching my cheeks. I looked into the cradle and saw the baby’s face. His eyes were closed, and his skin was the color of clay.”
I don’t know how long I stayed with Schloss after he told me that. I also can’t recall whether he kept talking about his child or just sat there in silence. The fire in the hearth died down. He didn’t add more wood. The flames went out, and then the few embers. It got cold. At some point, I stood up and Schloss accompanied me to the door. He clasped my hand at length, and then he thanked me. Twice. For what?
On the way back, my head was buzzing, and I had the feeling that my temples were banging together like cymbals. I found myself saying Poupchette’s name aloud, again and again: “Poupchette, Poupchette, Poupchette, Poupchette …” It was like throwing little stones into the air, pebbles of sound that would bring me home quickly. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about Schloss’s dead baby, about all the things he’d told me, about the few hours the child had spent in our world. Human life is so strange. Once you’ve plunged into it, you often wonder what you’re doing here. Maybe that’s why some, a little cleverer than the others, content themselves with opening the door a crack and taking a look around, and when they see what’s inside, they want nothing more than to close that door as fast as possible.
Maybe they’re right.
XXI
—
want to go back to the first day, or rather to the first evening: the evening when the Anderer appeared in our village. I’ve reported his meeting with the oldest Dörfer child, but I haven’t described his arrival at the inn a few minutes later. My account is based on the statements I took from three different eyewitnesses: Schloss himself; Menigue Wirfrau, the baker, who’d gone to the inn to drink a glass of wine; and Doris Klattermeier, a young girl with pink skin and hay-colored hair, who was passing in the street when the Anderer arrived. There were other witness, both in the inn and outside, but the three named above related the events in almost exactly the same way, except for one or two small details, and I thought it best to rely on them.
The Anderer had dismounted to speak to the Dörfer boy and he walked the rest of the way to the inn, leading his horse by the reins while the donkey followed a few paces behind. He tethered the animals to the ring outside; then, instead of opening the door and entering the inn like everyone else, he knocked three times and waited. This was such an unusual thing to do that he had to stand there for a long time. “I thought it was a prankster,” Schloss told me. “Or some kid!” In short, nothing happened. The Anderer waited. No one opened the door for him, nor did he open it for himself. Some people, among them young Doris, had already gathered to observe the phenomenon: the horse, the ass, the baggage, and the oddly attired fellow standing outside the door of the inn with a smile on his round, powdered face. After a few minutes, he knocked again, but this time the three blows were harder and sharper. Schloss said, “At that point, I figured something out of the ordinary was going on, and I went to see.”
So Schloss opened the door and found himself face-to-face with the Anderer. “I nearly choked! Where did this guy come from, I thought, the circus or a fairy tale?” But the Anderer didn’t give him time to recover. He lifted his funny hat, revealing his very round, very bald pate, made a supple, elegant gesture of salutation, and said, “Greetings, kind sir. My friends”—here he indicated the horse and the donkey—“and I have come a great distance and find ourselves quite exhausted. Would you be kind enough to offer us the hospitality of your establishment? In exchange for our payment, of course.”