life to the word death. Is that what I want to do: to bring Götz and Meyer back to the shadows in the former Fairgrounds camp, to give them life so that, quickly, quickly, I make them die? The moral, however, of the Prague story is clear: no-one should play God, not a rabbi, not a writer, not a narrator, and words, no matter how powerful, can never replace the silence of God’s creation. Even if I were to oppose them, what would I do if Götz and Meyer, intoxicated with their new life, went mad and took up where they’d left off with their old work? There aren’t many Jews left in Belgrade, but the number doesn’t matter, what matters is the conviction, there would be work here, of course. Would I then be able to reach their foreheads, Götz and Meyer’s foreheads, and what would I erase: wrinkles, drops of sweat, the hair in their eyes? I am a squeamish man, I would have to use a handkerchief. Götz and Meyer would be so scornful! I would become an object of ridicule, stories about me would make the rounds in the barracks and the execution grounds, and Götz, though possibly Meyer, would imitate my gesture at the officers’ mess over and over again, patting a folded napkin against his forehead like a powder puff. I hope no-one will think I’m mad, though even I find it difficult to convince myself I’m not. Sometimes right in the middle of a class, I stop talking, stare at the tip of my pen or a pattern on the grimy windowpane, and don’t even finger my left earlobe. When I catch myself, I see thirty-two pairs of eyes fixed on me, unblinking. How can I explain to them that I am a living example of parallel literary worlds, that I am a protagonist from books which have not yet been written? How do I make it clear that I am made up of a plenitude of empty little squares and not a word will ever be written in any of them? That my life is becoming more and more hollow with each passing day, and that one day, perhaps right there in front of their eyes, I will float up like a balloon and remain wedged beneath the ceiling? My students are nice, they would run at once to shut the windows. But I keep opening them. I go over to the family tree, framed, hanging on the wall, and stare at it as if I am seeing it for the first time, I clamber from branch to branch, hop all the way across the treetop, feel as if all those young and old dead people are filling me, choking me, how they cluster like wasps on the haemoglobin in my blood, and then I rush to the window, fling it open, hoping I’ll set the opposite process in motion and free my haemoglobin from danger, that oxygen will flood my mind once more. There I stand by the open window and fill my lungs with air. I live in one of those modern neighbourhoods, and when I look outside, I see only the tower blocks across the way and a patch of sky. The sky over the Fairgrounds is far larger, and by the same token more hopeless, which, actually, was a comfort to the prisoners at the camp, because when the sky is close, then life is very far away. I don’t know where I read that, maybe I’ve made it all up, there is no mention of sky in any of the witness statements. But who could think of something so ephemeral, surrounded by barbed wire and caught between the freezing cold and starvation? Now Götz, on the other hand, or Meyer, loved looking up at the sky, especially at clouds, and often, even while they were driving, he would try to get Meyer, if it wasn’t Götz after all, to spot all sorts of shapes in them: an elephant, for instance, or a Zeppelin. Meyer, or maybe it was Götz, got so tired of his pestering once that he told Götz, or was it Meyer he told, that he’d better stop it. He didn’t so much say this as bark it at him like a high-ranking Gestapo officer. The veins on his neck bulged, his face went red, globules of spit sprayed between his clenched teeth and splattered the cab. Even men with nerves of steel, powerful and reliable in every way, have weak moments. Götz, or Meyer, stopped talking, pouted like a child, didn’t even want to eat his dinner. He was sorry he hadn’t brought along his book of poetry, nothing was as soothing as a nice verse. At breakfast the next day, however, all was well again, they told each other the dreams they’d dreamed the night before, as they always did, and precisely at the scheduled time the Saurer stopped at the gate to the camp. They’ve come, they’ve come, the whispers spread among the children, not the ones, of course, who were already standing in the queue, selected for the transport, with their mothers, with the occasional father as well, there still were a few Jewish fathers alive, not, therefore, among those children, but among the others, the ones whose turn was going to come in a few days, and now they were scampering about, along the barbed wire and among the pavilions, it was among them that the whispers circulated, the hope that in the magic circle of chocolates that morning some of them would be the select few. You take the chocolate on your tongue, press it up into the roof of your mouth, let the taste spread all through you. At that same time, the little company of gravediggers was busily digging the grave in Jajinci, although it looked more like a ditch, not too deep and not too shallow, spacious enough for about a hundred people. They dug in silence. The soil was good, moist, all manner of things would flourish in it. According to one witness statement, 81 or 82 ditches were dug, and that was only for those Jews who arrived in the Saurer, day after day, sometimes twice in a day. For those who were shot by firing squads, there were special graves, special ditches, I don’t know why, that witness didn’t know either, he couldn’t recall the dimensions, but killing, too, is an art, and it has its own rules, and it is one thing, I guess, when you lower an asphyxiated person into the ground, and something else again when the person, weighed down by the bullet in his heart, drops into the void. The gravediggers, of course, wasted no time on thoughts like that. It was their task to dig, and they dug. Time was precious, at any moment the Saurer might appear from round the bend, the gravediggers would leave, and from another truck, a military truck, four German guards would hop out with five, or seven, Serbian prisoners, and, actually, all of them were thinking the same thing: when will night come, when will night finally come? Several days later, leaning on the truck while Commander Andorfer smoked and the Serbian prisoners moved the corpses, Götz, or Meyer, as if it mattered, couldn’t stop himself and asked why they had to drive these revolting Jews, wouldn’t it be better to do all this closer to the camp, the truck could do what it did standing still, that would be, if he dared be so bold as to observe, far more economical. Untersturmführer Andorfer stopped mid-stride and thought about it. Then he had a puff on his cigarette and asked what they would do then with the processed individuals, they couldn’t stay forever in that truck, could they? Götz, or Meyer, hadn’t considered that and said the first thing that came to mind: they could toss them in the river. Andorfer winced with disgust. We are not barbarians, he said, if we have been called upon to give people a better life, then we should also give them a finer death. Götz, or Meyer, shrugged, he had nothing to say against an argument like that, and he was even sorry he’d made the suggestion in the first place. It was his job to drive, to re-connect the exhaust pipe to the opening on the underside of the truck, and later to clean the truck out and polish it for a new load. Why did he need to get involved in something that was none of his business? Precisely, said Andorfer as if he knew how to read minds. Later that afternoon, while he was playing cards with members of the Jewish Administration, his hand trembled and drops of coffee splashed the black king of spades and the red two of diamonds. Such are the times, you never know who will stab you in the back, and where, and when. Shivers travelled up and down his spine, there was an itch under his shoulder blades. I get itchy in that same place, I know the feeling. When it happens to me in my flat, it’s not so bad: I lean on the doorframe and scratch myself like a wild boar, but when I’m in the classroom, standing in front of my students, the itching throws me into indescribable torment. That is when I grab my left earlobe on purpose, drawing their attention to that Masonic gesture, and meanwhile secretly twisting my right arm behind my back and pushing my thumb hard into the itchy spot, as if I really do plan to drill straight through. There isn’t a student in the classroom that moment hoping more than I that the bell will ring for the end of class. I went to see a dermatologist who explained politely that most things which appear on the human body in the form of eczema, boils, red patches and, of course, itchy spots, no matter where they break out, are treated somewhere altogether different. I looked at him, curious, and he placed his index finger to his temple. Was there a history in my family of any sort of disease, the dermatologist wanted to know. His index finger was still pointing to his temple. Most of them died of poisoning, I said. There are some truths people simply will not believe, there is no point in trying to convince them. The dermatologist became serious and, though it was difficult for him, I could see, to pull his index finger away from his temple, he prescribed some sort of ointment for me, recommended bathing frequently, using mild soaps, eating as many fresh vegetables as I could manage and going for walks in the countryside. I went off to th