A brief hush ensued, broken only by a single sound: Aunt Fleischmann took the empty dish from in front of me and carried it away; nor did I see her return subsequently. The two old boys asked, “What has that got to do with it, and what do you mean by it?” Nothing in particular, I replied, but it was not quite true that the thing “came about”; we had gone along with it too. Only now, and thus after the event, looking back, in hindsight, does the way it all “came about” seem over, finished, unalterable, finite, so tremendously fast, and so terribly opaque. And if, in addition, one knows one’s fate in advance, of course. Then indeed one can only register the passing of time. A senseless kiss, for example, is just as much a necessity as an idle day at the customs post, let’s say, or the gas chambers. Except that whether one looks back or ahead, both are flawed perspectives, I suggested. After all, there are times when twenty minutes, in and of themselves, can be quite a lot of time. Each minute had started, endured, and then ended before the next one started. Now, I said, let’s just consider: every one of those minutes might in fact have brought something new. In reality it didn’t, naturally, but still, one must acknowledge that it might have; when it comes down to it, each and every minute something else might have happened other than what actually did happen, at Auschwitz just as much as, let’s suppose, here at home, when we took leave of my father.
Those last words somehow roused old Steiner. “But what could we do?” he asked, his face part irate, part affronted. “Nothing, naturally,” I said, “or rather, anything,” I added, “which would have been just as senseless as doing nothing, yet again and just as naturally.” “But it’s not about that,” I tried to carry on, to explain it to them. “So what is it about, then?” they asked, almost losing patience, to which I replied, with growing anger on my part as well, I sensed: “It’s about the steps.” Everyone took steps as long as he was able to take a step; I too took my own steps, and not just in the queue at Birkenau, but even before that, here, at home. I took steps with my father, and I took steps with my mother, I took steps with Annamarie, and I took steps — perhaps the most difficult ones of all — with the older sister. I would now be able to tell her what it means to be “Jewish”: nothing, nothing to me at least, at the beginning, until those steps start to be taken. None of it is true, there is no different blood, nothing else, only… and I faltered, but suddenly something the journalist had said came to mind: there are only given situations and the new givens inherent in them. I too had lived through a given fate. It had not been my own fate, but I had lived through it, and I simply couldn’t understand why they couldn’t get it into their heads that I now needed to start doing something with that fate, needed to connect it to somewhere or something; after all, I could no longer be satisfied with the notion that it had all been a mistake, blind fortune, some kind of blunder, let alone that it had not even happened. I could see, and only too well, that they did not really understand, that my words were not much to their liking, indeed it seemed as if one thing or another was actually irritating them. I saw that every now and then Uncle Steiner was about to interrupt or elsewhere about to jump to his feet, but I saw the other old man restraining him, heard him saying, “Leave him be! Can’t you see he only wants to talk? Let him talk! Just leave him be!” and talk I did, albeit possibly to no avail and even a little incoherently. Even so, I made it clear to them that we can never start a new life, only ever carry on the old one. I took the steps, no one else, and I declared that I had been true to my given fate throughout. The sole blot, or one might say fly in the ointment, the sole accident with which they might reproach me was the fact that we should be sitting there talking now — but then I couldn’t help that. Did they want this whole honesty and all the previous steps I had taken to lose all meaning? Why this sudden about-face, this refusal to accept? Why did they not wish to acknowledge that if there is such a thing as fate, then freedom is not possible? If, on the other hand — I swept on, more and more astonished myself, steadily warming to the task — if there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate; that is to say — and I paused, but only long enough to catch my breath — that is to say, then we ourselves are fate, I realized all at once, but with a flash of clarity I had never experienced before. I was even a little sorry that I was only facing them and not some more intelligent or, if I may put it this way, worthier counterparts; but then they were the ones there right now, they are — or so it appeared at that moment at least — everywhere, and in any case they had also been there when we had said farewell to my father. They too had taken their own steps. They too had known, foreseen, everything beforehand, they too had said farewell to my father as if we had already buried him, and even later on all they had squabbled about was whether I should take the suburban train or the bus to Auschwitz… At this point not only Uncle Steiner but old Fleischmann as well jumped to his feet. Even now he was still striving to restrain himself, but was no longer capable of doing so: “What!” he bawled, his face red as a beetroot and beating his chest with his fist: “So it’s us who’re the guilty ones, is it? Us, the victims!” I tried explaining that it wasn’t a crime; all that was needed was to admit it, meekly, simply, merely as a matter of reason, a point of honor, if I might put it that way. It was impossible, they must try and understand, impossible to take everything away from me, impossible for me to be neither winner nor loser, for me not to be right and for me not to be mistaken that I was neither the cause nor the effect of anything; they should try to see, I almost pleaded, that I could not swallow that idiotic bitterness, that I should merely be innocent. But I could see they did not wish to understand anything, and so, picking up my kit bag and cap, I departed in the midst of a few disjointed words and motions, one more unfinished gesture and incomplete utterance from each.
Down below I was greeted by the street. I needed to take a streetcar to my mother’s place, but now it dawned on me that I had no money of course, so I decided to walk. In order to gather my strength, I paused for a minute in the square, by the aforementioned bench. Over ahead, in the direction that I would need to take, where the street appeared to lengthen, expand, and fade away into infinity, the fleecy clouds over the indigo hills were already turning purple and the sky, a shade of claret. Around me it was as if something had changed: the traffic had dwindled, people’s steps had slowed, their voices become quieter, their features grown softer, and it was as if their faces were turning toward one another. It was that peculiar hour, I recognized even now, even here — my favorite hour in the camp, and I was seized by a sharp, painful, futile longing for it: nostalgia, homesickness. Suddenly, it sprang to life, it was all here and bubbling inside me, all its strange moods surprised me, its fragmentary memories set me trembling. Yes, in a certain sense, life there had been clearer and simpler. Everything came back to mind, and I considered everyone in turn, both those who were of no interest as well as those whose only recognition would come in this reckoning, the fact that I was here: Bandi Citrom, Pyetchka, Bohoosh, the doctor, and all the rest. Now, for the very first time, I thought about them with a touch of reproach, a kind of affectionate rancor.