Just one thing inside me grew stronger: my irritability. If anyone should encroach on my bodily comfort, even just touch my skin, or if I missed my step (as often happened) when the column was on the march, for example, and someone behind me trod on my heel, I would have been quite prepared instantly, without a moment’s hesitation, without further ado, to kill them on the spot — had I been able to, of course, and had I not forgotten, by the time I raised my hand, what it was I had in fact wanted to do. I even had rows with Bandi Citrom: I was “letting myself go,” I was a burden on the work squad, he would catch my scabies, he reproached me. But above all else, it was as if I somehow embarrassed or worried him in a certain respect. I became conscious of this one evening when he took me with him to the washroom. My flailing and protests were to no avail as he stripped me of my clothes with all the strength he could muster; my attempts to pummel his body and face with my fists to no avail as he scrubbed cold water over my shivering skin. I told him a hundred times over that his guardianship was a nuisance to me, he should leave me alone, just eff off. Did I want to croak right here, did I maybe not want to get back home, he asked, and I have no clue what answer he must have read from my face but, all at once, I saw some form of consternation or alarm written all over his, in much the same way as people generally view irremediable trouble-makers, condemned men or, let’s say, carriers of pestilence, which was when the opinion he had once expressed about Muslims crossed my mind. In any event, from then on, he tended to steer clear of me, I could see that, while I, for my part, was finally relieved of that particular bother.
There was no way I could shake off my knee, however, and an increasingly persistent pain in it. After a few days I inspected it, and for all my body’s accommodation to many things by now, I nevertheless thought it advisable to promptly shield myself from the sight of this new surprise, the flaming red sac into which the area around my right knee had been transformed. I was well aware, naturally, that a Revier[24]was functioning in our camp as well, but then, for starters, the consulting hour coincided with supper time, and in the end I placed higher priority on that than on any treatment, and then too various incidents, this and that bit of knowledge of the place itself and of life, did not exactly boost one’s confidence. For another, it was a long way off, two tents farther over, and unless forced by absolute necessity, I would not willingly have embarked on such a lengthy excursion, not least because my knee was by now extremely painful. Eventually, Bandi Citrom and one of our bunk-mates, forming a cradle with their hands, a bit like storks are said to carry their young to safety, took me over anyway, and after I had been set on a table I was given a warning, well in advance, that it was most likely going to hurt as immediate surgery was unavoidable, which for lack of any anesthetic would have to be done without that. As far as I could make out what was going on, a pair of crosswise incisions were made above the knee with a scalpel, and through that they expressed the mass of matter that was in my thigh, then bandaged the whole lot up with paper. Right afterward I even mentioned supper and was assured that this would be taken care of, as indeed I soon found to be the case. That day’s soup was turnip and kohlrabi, which I am very partial to, and the portions doled out for the Revier had palpably been taken from the bottom of the vat, which was another reason to be satisfied. I also spent the night there, in the Revier tent, in a box on the uppermost tier that I had all to myself, the only unpleasant aspect being that when the usual time for a bout of diarrhea came around, I was no longer able to use my own legs, while my efforts to call for help, first whispering, then out loud, and finally yelling, were likewise fruitless. On the morning of the following day, mine and a number of other bodies were hoisted up onto the soaking-wet sheet-iron flooring of an open truck to be transported to a nearby place that, if I heard rightly, goes by the name of “Gleina,” where our camp’s actual hospital is situated. En route a soldier seated on a neat folding stool, a damply glistening rifle on his knees, kept an eye on us in the back, his face visibly surly, grudging, and at times, presumably in response to an occasional sudden stench or sight he could not avoid, grimacing in disgust — not entirely without due cause, I had to admit. Particularly upsetting to me, it was as if in his mind he had come to some opinion, deduced some general truth, and I would have liked to excuse myself: I was not entirely the only one at fault here, and in fact this was not the genuine me — but then that would have been hard for me to prove, naturally, I could see that. Once we had arrived, first of all I had to endure a jet of water from a rubber pipe, a sort of garden hose, that was unexpectedly unleashed on me and probed after me whichever way I turned, washing everything off me: the remaining tatters of clothing, dirt, and even the paper bandage. But then they took me into a room where I was given a shirt and the lower of a two-tier bed of boards, and on that was even able to lie on a straw mattress that, although obviously tamped and pressed down fairly flat and hard by my predecessor, and mottled here and there with suspicious stains, suspicious-smelling and suspiciously crackling discolorations, was at least unoccupied and on which it was finally left entirely up to me how I spent my time and, most of all, to have a decent sleep at long last.
It looks as though we always carry old habits along with us even to new places; in the hospital, I can tell you, I had to struggle at first with what even I myself found to be many inveterate and ingrained reflexes. Conscientiousness, for instance: to start with, it invariably awakened me at dawn on the dot. At other times I would start awake thinking I had slept through Appell and outside they were already hunting me; only after my racing heart had calmed down would I notice my error and accept what lay before my own eyes, the evidence of reality, that I was where I was, everything was all right, over this way someone was groaning, somewhat farther away people were chatting, and over there someone else had his pointed nose, stony gaze, and gaping mouth trained mutely on the ceiling, that only my wound was hurting, and besides that at most, as at all times, I was very thirsty, presumably due to my fever, quite clearly. In short, I needed a bit of time until I had fully taken it in that there was no Appell, that I would not have to see soldiers, and, above all, did not have to go to work — advantages from which, for me at least, no inconsequential circumstance or illness, at bottom, could detract. From time to time, I too was taken up to a small room on the floor above, where the two doctors worked, a younger and an older one, with my being a patient of the latter, so to say. He was a lean, dark-haired, kindly looking man, in a clean uniform, with proper shoes, an armband, and a normal, recognizable face that put me in mind of an amiable, aging fox. He asked where I was from and recounted that he himself came from Transylvania. In the meantime he had stripped off the peeling and by now caked, greenish yellow wad of paper that had been rolled around the knee area, then, putting his weight behind both arms, squeezed from my thigh all the pus that had accumulated there in the interim, and finally, with some instrument resembling a crochet hook, poked a rolled-up length of gauze between skin and flesh — for purposes of “maintaining an open passage” and “the drainage process,” as he explained, lest the wound heal prematurely. For my part, I was happy to hear this as, when you came right down to it, I had nothing to do on the outside; if I really thought things through, of course, my health was hardly of such pressing concern to me. Another comment he made, though, was less to my liking. He reckoned the single perforation on my knee was not sufficient; in his opinion, a second opening ought to be made on the side and connected with the first by yet a third incision. He asked if I was prepared to brace myself for that, and I was utterly amazed that he was looking at me as if he were actually awaiting an answer, my consent, not to mention authorization. I told him, “Whatever you wish,” and he immediately said that in that case it would be best not to delay. He duly set to on the spot, but then I found myself obliged to act a little bit vocally, which, I could see, got on his nerves. He even commented several times: “I can’t work like this,” for which I tried to make excuses: “I can’t help it.” After making an inch or so of headway, he finally abandoned the attempt, without fully completing what he had planned to do; even so, he seemed tolerably well pleased, noting, “It’s better than nothing,” since now, he reckoned, he would at least be able to expel the pus from me at two sites. Time also went by in the hospital; if I happened not to be sleeping, then I would always be kept busy by hunger, thirst, the pain around the wound, the odd conversation, or the event of a treatment; but even without anything to occupy me, I can say that I got along splendidly merely by bearing this pleasantly tingling thought in mind, this privilege and the unbounded joy it always afforded. I would interrogate each new arrival for news from the camp: which block they were from, did they by any chance know of a guy called Bandi Citrom from Block Fünf, medium height, broken nose, front teeth missing, but no one could recall such a person. Most of the injuries I saw in the surgery room were similar to mine, likewise mainly on the thigh or lower leg, though some were higher up, on the hip, the backside, arm, even the neck and back, being what are known scientifically as “phlegmons,” a term I heard a lot, the presence and particularly high incidence of which was neither odd nor amazing under normal concentration camp conditions, as I learned from the doctors. A little later on, there started to arrive cases who had to have a toe or two amputated, sometimes all of them, and they recounted that it was winter out there in the camp, so their feet, being in wooden shoes, had frozen. On another occasion, some manifestly high-ranking personage, in a tailored prison uniform, entered the bandaging station. I distinctly heard a quiet “Bonjour!” from which, along with the letter “F” on his red triangle, I immediately worked out he was French, then from the “O. Arzt” inscribed on his armband that he was clearly the chief medical officer in our hospital. I stared at him for a long time, because it was ages since I had seen anyone so elegant: he was not particularly tall, but his uniform was nicely filled out by appropriate bulges of flesh on the bones, his face similarly padded, every feature unmistakably his own, with expressible emotions, recognizable nuances, a rounded chin with a dimple in the middle, his olive skin gleaming softly in the light that fell on it, the way skin had generally done once, in the old days, among people back home. I assessed him as being not very old, maybe around thirty. I saw that the doctors too perked up a lot, striving to please him, explaining everything, but noticed this was not so much in the way that was customary within the camp as somehow in accordance with the old and, as it were, instantly nostalgic custom back home, with the sort of discrimination, delight, and social graces that one displays when given an opportunity to display how capitally one understands and speaks some cultured language like, as in this instance, French. On the other hand, though, I could not help noting that this cannot have signified much to the chief doctor, for he looked at everything, gave an occasional monosyllabic answer, or just nodded, but taking his time, quietly, gloomily, listlessly, with an immutable expression of some despondent, all but melancholic emotion in his hazel eyes from first to last. I was dumbfounded as I could not work out what might give rise to that in such a well-off, well-heeled Prominent, who had moreover risen to such a high rank. I tried to search his face, follow his gestures, and it only gradually dawned on me that, make no mistake, when it came down to it, even he was obliged to be here, of course; only gradually, and this time not entirely without an element of astonishment, a sort of serene awe, did the impression grow on me, and I reckoned I was on to something, that if I was right, then it must, it seemed, be this situation — in a word, captivity itself — that was troubling him. I would have told him to cheer up, since that was the least of it, but I was afraid that would be temerity on my part, and then it occurred to me that I didn’t speak French anyway.