We went on for a while longer, after which everything happened very quickly, unexpectedly, and in a slightly astonishing fashion. We turned off somewhere and, as best I could see, we had arrived, because the road carried on between the wide-open wings of a gateway. I then noticed that from the gate onward a different set of men stepped into the places of the policemen on our flanks, in much the same uniforms as soldiers but with multicolored feathers in their peaked caps: these were gendarmes. They led us on into a maze of gray buildings, ever farther inward, before we suddenly debouched onto a huge open space strewn with white gravel — some sort of barracks parade ground, as I saw it. I immediately glimpsed a tall figure of commanding appearance striding directly toward us from the building opposite. He was wearing high boots and a tight-fitting uniform jacket with gold buttons and a diagonal leather strap over his chest. In one of his hands I saw he had a thin crop, rather like the ones used by horse riders, which he was continually tapping against the lacquered polish of his boot uppers. A minute later, with us by then waiting in stationary ranks, I was also able to make out that he was handsome in his fashion, fit, and all in all with something of the movie star about him, given his manly features and narrow brown moustache, fashionably clipped, which went very well with his sun-bronzed face. When he got nearer, a command from the gendarmes snapped us all to attention. All that has stayed with me after that are two almost simultaneous impressions: the stentorian voice of the riding-crop wielder, akin to that of a market stall-keeper, which came as such a shock after his otherwise immaculate appearance that maybe this is why I did not take in much of what he actually said. What I did grasp, however, was that he did not intend to conduct the “investigation”—that was the term he used — into our cases until the next day, upon which he turned toward the gendarmes, ordering them, in a bellow that filled the entire square, to take “the whole Jewish rabble” off to the place that, in his view, they actually belonged — the stables, that is to say — and lock them in for the night. My second impression was the immediately ensuing indecipherable babble of commands, the bellowed orders with which the abruptly reanimated gendarmes herded us away. I didn’t even know offhand which way I was supposed to turn, and all I remember is that in the thick of it I felt a bit like laughing, in part out of astonishment and confusion, a sense of having been dropped slap in the middle of some crazy play in which I was not entirely acquainted with my role, in part because of a fleeting thought that just then flashed across my mind, which was my stepmother’s face when it finally dawned on her that it would be pointless to count on seeing me for supper this evening.
FOUR
On the train, it was water that was missed most of all. Food supplies, taking everything into account, appeared to be sufficient for a substantial period; but then there was nothing to drink with them, which was disagreeable, that’s for sure. Those on the train immediately declared that the initial spasms of thirst soon pass. Eventually we would almost forget about it, after which it would reemerge, only by then it would allow no one to forget it, they explained. The length of time that someone could last out, for all that, should the need arise, taking into account the hot weather and assuming he was healthy, did not lose too much water as sweat, and ate no meat or spicy food, if at all possible, was six or seven days, according to those in the know. As things were, they reassured us, there was still time; it all depended on how long the journey was going to last, they added.
Quite. I too was curious about that; they did not inform us at the brickyard. All they announced was that anyone inclined to do so could present himself for work, specifically in Germany. Just like the rest of the boys and many others in the brickyard, I found that idea immediately attractive. In any case, we were told by the men, identifiable from their armbands as belonging to a body called the “Jewish Council,” one way or another, willingly or forcibly, everyone would sooner or later be resettled from the brickyard to Germany, and the better places, not to speak of the concession of being able to travel no more than sixty per carriage, would be granted to those who volunteered first, whereas later at least eighty would have to be fit in, due to the shortage of wagons — the way they laid it all out to everyone did not really leave too much to consider, I had to agree.
Nor was I able to deny the validity of the other arguments, which concerned the shortage of space in the brickyard and its possible sanitary consequences, as well as the growing concern over food supplies: that was how it was, I could attest to all that. By the time we arrived from the gendarmerie (many of the grown-ups had registered that the barracks were called the “Andrássy Gendarme Casern”) every cranny of the brickyard had already been filled to overflowing with people. I saw among them both men and women, children of all ages, as well as countless old people of both sexes. Wherever I stepped, I would stumble over blankets, rucksacks, all manner of suitcases, bundles, and other impedimenta. Naturally enough, I too was soon tired of that, not to mention the myriad petty nuisances, annoyances, and vexations that, it appears, are inevitably bound up with communal life of that kind. Contributing further to that was the inaction, the senseless feeling of idleness, not to speak of the boredom; that too is why I don’t remember distinctly a single one of the five days that I spent there, and barely even the occasional detail in aggregate, though certainly the relief at having the boys there around me: “Rosie,” “Fancyman,” “Leatherware,” “Smoker,” Moskovics, and all the rest. As far as I could tell, not one of them was missing: they too had all been honest. Nor did I personally have that much to do anymore with gendarmes in the brickyard; I saw them more just standing guard on the other side of the fencing, mixed up with the occasional policeman here and there. The latter were in fact later talked about in the brickyard as being more considerate than the gendarmes, readily inclined to be decent, particularly in return for certain negotiated terms, whether in the form of money or any other valuables. Above all, so I heard, many commissioned them to pass on letters and messages; indeed, some insisted opportunities were even open through them — albeit rare and risky, they admitted — for escaping, though it would have been hard for me to know anything really definite about that. But then I recalled, and in doing so also came to a somewhat more precise understanding, I believe, what the seal-faced fellow at the customs post must have been wanting so much to have a word about with the policeman. That is how I realized that our policeman, by contrast, had been honest, which may well have explained how it was that every now and then, while knocking about the yard or waiting for my turn in the area of the communal kitchen, I would spot the seal-faced guy in the melee of unfamiliar faces in the brickworks.
Of the rest of the customs post crowd, I also saw the man with the bad luck again; he often sat around with us “young people,” so as “to cheer himself up,” as he put it. He too, it seems, must have found a place to camp somewhere close to us, in one of the many identical shingle-roofed but open-sided structures in the yard that had in fact originally served, so I heard, for drying bricks. He looked a bit the worse for wear, with mottled blotches of swelling and bruising on his face. We learned from him that these had all been the outcome of the gendarmes’ investigation, since they had come across medicines and food in his knapsack. His attempt to explain it was stuff that had come from older stocks and was intended purely for his very ill mother was useless: they alleged that he was obviously dealing on the black market. Similarly useless was his permit, and equally unavailing the fact that he, for his part, had always held the law in respect, never violating so much as a single letter of it, he related. “Have you heard anything? What’s going to happen to us?” he asked regularly. He would again bring up his family, not to speak of his bad luck. How much he had run around after the permit, how delighted he had been to get it, he recalled with a morose head-shaking; he would never have believed the business “would come to this,” that was for sure. It had all hinged on those five minutes. If he hadn’t had the bad luck… If the bus back then had… — those were the reflections I heard. He seemed largely content, however, with the beating. “I was left to the last, and that may have been my good fortune,” he recounted: “They were in a hurry by then.” All in all, he “could have come off worse,” was how he summed it up, adding that he had “seen uglier cases” at the gendarmerie, which was no more than the truth, as I too recalled. No one should think, the gendarmes had warned us on the morning of the investigation, that he would be able to conceal his crimes, money, gold, or other valuables from them. When it was my turn, I too had to lay out money, watch, pocketknife, and all my other belongings on a table before them. A stocky gendarme even frisked me, with brisk and what somehow seemed like practiced movements, from my armpits all the way down to the legs of my short trousers. Behind the table I also saw the lieutenant again, for by then it had already transpired from words the gendarmes exchanged with one another that the officer with the riding-crop was actually called Lt. Jackl. Towering next to him, on his left, I also immediately took note of a shirt-sleeved, walrus-moustached gendarme looking like a butcher, who had in his hand a cylindrical implement that basically struck me as being a bit of a joke, somewhat reminding me as it did of a cook’s rolling pin. The lieutenant was pretty friendly, asking me if I had any documents, though I saw not the slightest sign, not even the slightest glimmer, of my papers then producing any impression on him. That surprised me, but — most particularly in light of an abrupt gesture of dismissal from the walrus-moustached gendarme, with its unmistakable implicit assurance of the alternative — I considered it more prudent, it stands to reason, not to raise any objections.