Götz and Meyer

s someone seeking his own fate, if not provoking it, and this is why I have never learned to drive, but that cannot be taken as a yardstick in conditions of war. I must be fair to Götz and Meyer, I often thought, not only because of their cautious drive to Jajinci but just for the sake of being fair. They, too, had the right to be misled and hoodwinked as much as the Jewish prisoners did, I can’t possibly deny that. But all I had to do was picture one of them crouching to move the exhaust pipe of the truck over, and everything in me would be smashed to bits. Their load was still alive then, the trip had only just begun, and the brief stop did not arouse any doubts among the Jews. They were far more disturbed by the fact that they were travelling in the dark and that there was no room for them to get more comfortable. They felt the aluminium-covered walls and the wooden flooring, they touched each other and thanked the Lord that they weren’t blind, it would be so terrible to live in eternal darkness, and then, with a shudder, the truck set off again, they could hear the engine rumbling good-naturedly, they could even smell the fuel, well that’s all right, at least they were back on the road again, just so they’d never have to return to the cold and the hunger. If they could have, they probably would have shouted to Götz and Meyer to drive a little faster, to get as far from there as possible, to pay no attention to their nausea and mild headaches, surely from all the jouncing around and lack of fresh air, these were just little discomforts compared to what they were leaving behind. They had no idea how much further and airier than anything they had imagined those distances would be. And Götz, and Meyer, drove along, whistling, exchanging jokes. Every job done according to a strictly defined formula becomes tedious in time. At first it is interesting, the second time confirms the first, by the fifth time it inspires annoyance, by the tenth it is routine, and by the fifteenth time Götz, or maybe it was Meyer, announces that he could drive to Jajinci with his eyes closed. Meyer, or was it Götz, who is always extra cautious, feels that it is probably a better idea to drive with your eyes open, all it takes is for a cat to cross your path, not even a black one, and everything acquires a new dimension, a new meaning. Götz, or Meyer, shrugs this off. There is no such cat, he says, which could stop the victorious advance of the German Reich, not even in a land as wild as this Serbia is, where the cats scratch more than they did back in the Fatherland. Then they fall silent. Both of them are thinking of the cats they used to know: Götz, or maybe Meyer, thinks of a Siamese cat which his maiden aunt used to comb every day and feed with all sorts of treats, while Meyer, or maybe it was Götz, recalls a tiny striped cat that used to come into their garden, and he put its eye out with a stone from his slingshot. And then he sinks into fantasies about flying a fighter plane. It isn’t nice, but there are times when he wishes that his fellow traveller would become ill, nothing too serious: a slightly worse cold with a bad cough, just enough so that he could be alone in the truck for one day, and then he’d put on his pilot’s cap by the obligatory open window. It never happened, and if it did, there is no written trace of it. They were healthy lads, sturdy and resilient like all true members of the SS, not like those nobodies behind them to whom everything stuck like flies to flypaper. How much time had to pass for the required fifth of a per cent to accumulate? And did the diameter of the exhaust pipe, no less than 58 nor greater than 60 millimetres, have a part to play in this? What would have happened if it had been larger? Or smaller? Look at what I have been filling my head with since I turned 50. I fill page after page with figures and information which I copy from books with fragile pages in archival cellars, although I have no idea what to do with most of it. For instance, on the basis of the report of the acting chief of the Section for Social Welfare and Social Institutions of the Municipality of Belgrade, written on April 17th, 1942, precisely 1,341,950 meals were issued to feed Jews at the Fairgrounds camp. What do I divide that by? If I presume that there were 5,500 Jews at the camp on average every day, and that no food was delivered right from the very first day, it works out that every one of them received nearly two full meals per day, more precisely: 1.96 meals per day. But if one knows that the number of delivered meals is based on the total amount of delivered foodstuffs, most of which were not edible to begin with, that produces a rather different figure, around 1.3 meals per day. The food at the camp was served up with spoons of various sizes, only some of which corresponded to the standard of four decilitres, and this, as well as the fact that during April the number of prisoners dropped dizzyingly, sends this calculation into the sphere of higher mathematics, at least it does for me, a teacher of the Serbo-Croatian language and the literatures of the Yugoslav peoples. It is no wonder that I can’t sleep night after night, and that in the morning, when I go down to the corner shop, I find myself counting loaves of bread in delivery crates, multiplying that number by the number of crates, and then multiplying that by the average weight of a loaf and, finally, dividing by 150 grams, which was what the prisoners at the Fairgrounds, according to the testimony of witnesses, received daily. One night, exhausted by all the figures, I dreamed of Götz, or maybe it was Meyer. We were sitting, he and I, in the cockpit of a fighter plane, crammed into the single pilot’s seat, and he told me, in Serbian but with a strong German accent, the figures on the number of shells and machine-gun rounds, the fuel consumption and the flight speed, and finally he turned to me and said that he had given away 327 chocolates. In my dream, just as when I’m awake, he had no face, the earflaps and ties on his pilot’s cap framed a space of whiteness. Only his lips were bright red, as if he had applied a thick layer of lipstick. I leaned over and looked out of the window, and below, quite clearly, I could see the blueprints for the Belgrade Fair, precisely as it was imagined by the architects Milivoje Tričković, Rajko Tatić and Djordje Lukić. And now, said Götz, or maybe it was Meyer, we will look at all of this up close, the plane began to plummet with a piercing whine, straight for the blueprint of the Central Tower, and, with a shriek, I woke. I lay in the dark, afraid to breathe. But if before I could have been in a plane, now I might be in the back of the Saurer, and the longer I held my breath, the longer I’d be able to preserve my soul. How long can a person hold his breath? Half a minute, one minute, two? I counted to 38 to myself, my lungs bursting. I gasped and gulped greedily at the air. In the flat above me I could hear soft footsteps and knew that it was my soul, cloaked in a garment of the thinnest light, moving lightly along a path I still had to discover. Götz and Meyer wouldn’t care for this frequent mention of souls, as I have said before. According to them, a person is a sack, and when everything is shaken out of the sack, it is over. All that is left is the rag, and rags are no good for anything. Sometimes, when they’d clean out the truck in the yard of the police station, Götz and Meyer would find odds and ends: a child’s shoe, a comb, a blurred photograph, a crust of bread, a handkerchief, a nail file, a brooch. Götz, or Meyer, would drop these things into a paper bag; Meyer, or Götz, preferred not to touch them. Nothing sadder than things without owners, even he knew that, just as he knew that the time of the Reich was a time of joy and little things like these dared not degrade it. How old were Götz and Meyer? One more question I can’t answer. When one of my students is unable to answer a question, for example on the structure of a wreath of sonnets, I do not hesitate to enter, first in my notebook and then in the register, a bad grade. If I were to apply the same criteria to myself, I would have been held back long ago. So it goes with history, the woman told me from whom I’d heard the story about my mother. She compared history to a big crossword puzzle. For every little square you fill, there are three more empty, she said, and even if you manage to fill them, new ones open up immediately, even emptier. Knowledge can never catch up with the power of ignorance. It seemed to me that I had read that somewhere before, but I no longer had the strength to open new little empty squares in myself. That was what I said to the woman who sat across from me and in whose spectacles I could clearly see my own baffled countenance reflected. She shook her head sadly. It is terrible, she said, to live in history, and even more terrible to live outside it. If she had given me the precise solution to my crossword puzzle, she couldn’t have surprised me more. I saw how the face reflected in her glasses — or, in fact, two identical faces side by side — shuddered and licked their lips, powerless to come up with any sort of response. In the end I mumbled that it reminded me of the folk tale about the dark lands. History is a dark land, the woman smiled, you’re damned if you venture in and damned if you don’t. Whatever you do you’ll regret it forever. I said nothing. Even Götz, or Meyer, couldn’t extricate me from that one. For a while longer I poked around in the volumes of documents, as if I were sorting through grains of rice to pick out the pebbles, and then I slipped outside, afraid that if I stayed, I’d lose myself completely in the lenses of her glasses. I walked down 7th of July Street clutching my satchel with papers and books under my arm, and turned into Gospodar Jovanova Street. According to a variety of sources, as many as four of my relatives lived here with their families. One of them was the man Haim, later gloriously renamed Benko, the only one for whom I knew the date of death. Or, more precisely: I could place the date of his death within the four or five days when they were exterminating the doctors and patients of the Jewish hospital in Visokog Stevana Street, which seems pretty precise compared with the span of fifty days or so during which the transports went on from the Fairgrounds camp. When the rest of Belgrade’s Jews were transported to the camp on December 8, 1941, the staff and patients at the Jewish hospital were spared. Apparently — a poor word to use when speaking of history, I realise that, but it cropped up from the empty little squares of the crossword puzzle — so, apparently, there was a plan to move the entire hospital to the Nikola Spasić Foundation pavilion, which never happened, although part of the hospital’s equipment was moved to that pavilion, to the camp infirmary, so that the medical staff, at least temporarily and ostensibly, was spared the horrors of residing at the camp. The Jewish hospital was opened in the summer of 1941, and during the winter months it quickly filled with patients from the camp, so that by March 1942, when Götz and Meyer’s truck docked at its door like some big boat, there were about five hundred patients at the hospital. The day before, all the Jewish doctors and other staff had been arrested, with their families, and all of them were also being held at the hospital, putting the total number at over seven hundred souls. By March 22 or possibly 23, the hospital was empty, and the souls were wafting through the spacious skies over Jajinci. There is an assumption — yet another word unsuited to history — that this was a sort of rehearsal for the much larger and more serious job at the Fairgrounds, and it is certain that Götz and Meyer did their job well, and that Schäfer, Andorfer and Enge and many other leaders could breathe a sigh of relief, and even pat each other on the back. One can therefore conclude that Götz and Meyer had arrived in Belgrade two or three days earlier, so they did not have a chance to see the town, although they would certainly do so later, mostly from the truck but also on short strolls, which Götz was better at, though it may have been Meyer. Meyer, or possibly Götz, preferred to sleep in his spare time, and he never complained that his dreams disturbed him. You couldn’t say the same for Götz, or was it Meyer, who often awoke at night, sometimes making a lot of noise, and then he’d go out for a walk to get a bit of fresh air. I doubt that his conscience played any part in this, I’m inclined to attribute it all to poor digestion. Haim himself, as a doctor, would have said as much to Götz, or Meyer, had he only had the opportunity to ask him amid the pandemonium when they loaded everyone onto the truck in front of the Jewish hospital. There was none of this tumult a few days later when the same truck began stopping in at the Fairgrounds. Here things were quiet, and there was even enthusiasm at the thought of leaving, which certainly pleased Götz and Meyer, and they made no effort to hide it. Everyone likes being appreciated in the work place, why not Götz and Meyer? Meyer even confessed to me that he felt his heart beat faster and that later, when he recalled those days, he would shiver. Look at this: I am beginning to imagine myself talking with people whose faces I don’t even know. I knew precious little, indeed, about the faces of most of my kin, but in their case I can at least look at my own face in the mirror and seek their features there, whereas with Götz and Meyer I had no such help. Anyone could have been Götz. Anyone could have been Meyer, and yet Götz and Meyer were only Götz and Meyer, and no-one else could be who they were. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that I constantly had this feeling that I was slipping, even when I was walking on solid ground. The void that was Götz and Meyer so contrasted with the fullness of my relatives, if not of their real beings at least of their deaths, that my every attempt to reach fullness required that first I had to pass through void. For me to truly understand real people like my relatives, I had first to understand unreal people like Götz and Meyer. Not to understand them: to conjure them. Sometimes I simply had to become Götz, or Meyer, so I could figure out what Götz, or Meyer (really I), thought about what Meyer, or Götz (really I), meant to ask. This Götz who was not really Götz spoke to this Meyer who was not really Meyer. My hands tremble a little when I think of it all. Nothing easier than to stray into the wasteland of someone else’s consciousness. It is more difficult to be master of one’s own fate; simpler to be master of someone else’s. In the morning, while I dressed, I’d be Götz and Meyer. I did not allow myself to be distracted by details, for instance: wondering whether German soldiers wore short-sleeved undershirts, or dog tags with their personal details round their necks. I always wore singlets, cut high under the armpits, important because I sweat so much, and nothing was going to make me stop wearing them. This was about something else. I would look at myself, let’s say, in the mirror and say: Now Meyer is combing his hair, and then Götz would ask Meyer what he’d be having for breakfast. Once I got up in a foul mood, as Götz, and when asked that same question, told Meyer angrily: bananas. Lord, how Meyer laughed. His razor bounced around in his hand! Later, when he rinsed off the foam, he noticed a little nick on his left cheek, but that only reminded him of Götz’s reply, and then he burst into guffaws again. Götz didn’t say anything, because by then he was already in the kitchen, where he watched as I made coffee. Quite the bright one, that Götz, never to put the cart before the horse. As they drove towards Belgrade, he never carped to Meyer, possibly Götz, about speeding. It is important to tend to State property entrusted to your care, but even more important to tend to good relations with your work colleagues, since your success in completing any assignment depends far more on that than on anything else. Speaking of carts and horses, I should say that Götz and Meyer fussed over their Saurer as if it were some rare thoroughbred horse: they groomed it, cleaned and washed it, changed its tyres as if they were horseshoes, filled it with the finest petrol, and if there had been a way for them to give it sugar cubes, I am sure they would have done. You can hardly blame them for being so dejected when the Saur