Götz and Meyer

ut 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 Saurer’s rear axle broke. Götz and Meyer were only human, after all. I have a feeling that the woman at the Jewish Historical Museum didn’t like that. She was silent for so long, looking right into my eyes, that in the end I wondered if she hadn’t heard me so I repeated what I had said. Indeed they were, said the woman, there can be no doubt about that. But what sort of human? It is incredible, the degree to which other people are so much better at grasping the essence of something which eludes us. Really, what sort of human beings were Götz and Meyer? What kind of man would, like the two of them, consent to do a job that meant putting five or six thousand souls to death? I find it hard to give a student a bad grade at the end of the semester, let alone at the end of the year, but that is nothing compared to the way Götz and Meyer must have felt. Or what if they felt nothing at all? I could stare all I wanted to in the mirror, to fill the voids of their faces with mine, but I still couldn’t come up with an answer. I went over to the family tree hanging on the wall, framed like some sort of abstract drawing. As always I felt only pain, a dull pain, I started losing breath, gasping like a carp out of water, and I could do nothing but rush outdoors, although all those walks ended up with my going to stand in front of one of the houses where my relatives used to live, or to the Fairgrounds, where I tried to picture the ice. That winter, the winter between 1941 and 1942, was so cold, it is no wonder some of the prisoners said openly that everyone, even God, had forsaken them. No matter how many clothes you wore, no matter how thick your coat or cloak, the cold would creep into your limbs and find its way to your heart. And when the heart is cold, there is no fire hot enough to warm you. The fire that burned in the heaters in the Fairgrounds pavilions could hardly have warmed limbs, let alone hearts. In vain the camp administration sent letters to the Municipality of Belgrade requesting larger amounts of firewood and, on one occasion, ten wedges for splitting stumps. A stump is a stump, and experienced woodsmen would give up on those knots that skewed saw teeth and blunted axes. The children wept, the elderly died, the women who went off to forced labour lost chunks of flesh and patches of skin from their arms. It was enough to bump into something, a witness said, and frostbite would form there immediately. I am someone who gets cold easily, and at the very thought of how cold it was my teeth start chattering; even tea couldn’t warm me then. Even today, for instance, my ear hurts where it froze, once, when I was a boy on the Tara Mountain. It’s my left ear, I often stroke the left lobe while I teach new material. Twelve years ago on television they showed a detective comedy involving Freemasons, and, at least in that series, they would recognise one another by touching their left earlobe. Ever since then, the students have called me Freemason. Did Götz and Meyer have nicknames? Would it change anything if I were to learn that their wives, if they were married, had pet names for them, something like Teddy Bear or Big Boy? By the way, in a list of Belgrade Freemasons I found the names of three of my relatives, two from my father’s side and one from my mother’s. There are secret threads that always surface, you just have to be patient. I count the frostbitten ear as one such thread, but also the fact that as a boy, I liked to stand behind cars and breathe in what I now know to be poisonous fumes. A small amount of carbon monoxide produces a mild sense of dizziness, and I probably found in that sensation a little joy or comfort in a world that, even then, seemed far too hostile, strict, and rigid. I am referring to the things, of course, that make the world what it is, not politics, I want to be sure that is perfectly clear. I knew nothing at that point about politics, or about the gas truck; after all, when I first happened upon the term “soul-swallower” in reference to the truck, my initial association was with some mythical creature, a being that delighted in plucking the feathers of life from weeping souls the way women plucked feathers from butchered chickens. In one sense, you might say, I was right, only because in a “soul-swallower” truck the soul plucks its own feathers in a bid to shed its ballast as soon as possible and soar skywards, as high as possible, where the air is still pure. In an encyclopaedia I found a map marking all the places where gas trucks were used by the SS. Most of the places were within the Soviet Union, a dozen in the Reich, and in only one case did the little dots upset the balance and dip southwards to Belgrade and the Fairgrounds. Seven hundred thousand people, it said in that same encyclopaedia, were killed in those vehicles, and that means that since some thirty gas trucks were produced, here I go calculating again, on average around twenty thousand people were asphyxiated in each. The calculation is incomplete because it does not consider the differences in capacity between the two models, the Saurer and the Diamond, but I wasn’t able to work that out. If I had a better grasp of mathematics, I wouldn’t be teaching literature, in which, unlike any true science, every interpretation has equal value, while as you increase precision you decrease overall quality, or, rather, you undermine the work itself. If a literary work is not in constant motion, I told my students, then it is not a work but a blind alley of the human spirit. The students nodded, their pencils hurried along the lines on their notebook pages, their lips silently repeated the thought I had just voiced. The first gas trucks were used in November 1941, in Ukraine, and then they dispersed in all directions: to Leningrad, Sebastopol, Berlin, Majdanek, Lvov, Piatigorsk, Danzig and Vienna. In comparison with these vast expanses, Götz and Meyer’s journey to Belgrade seems like a little side trip, perhaps needless or hasty, especially if you keep in mind the smallness of the job and the digression from the already established routes of movement. But some things are logical precisely because they cannot be explained by any other logic, right? Exactly, Götz and Meyer are logical precisely because they defy all other logic, as I don’t doubt that woman from the Jewish Historical Museum would say, with her glasses on or off, same difference. I resemble to myself that old rabbi of Prague who built a man-like creature of clay and breathed life into it, with the difference that I am trying to construct Götz and Meyer out of airy memories, unreliable recollection and crumbling archival documents. We know how the rabbi’s experiment turned out: the clay being rebelled against its creator, the rabbi just barely managed, standing on his toes, to erase one of the letters inscribed on the creature’s forehead, changing the word