Götz and Meyer

king, 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 the Fairgrounds. When I was there, my entire body itched, but still that was easier to take. Belgrade was resting over there across the river. It was not, of course, the same city the prisoners had stared at hungrily, but it was silent in just the same way. No, that’s not right, I am not telling the truth: there were presentiments, guesses, rumours circulated, people noticed the absences, corpses were seen wrapped in sheets, but no-one did anything, no-one even tried to do anything. What could they have done? Would I have done something had I been in their place? Or would I have buried my head in the sand, happy that I even had a head and that sand still existed? I probably would have done just that, I certainly would have been an ostrich, everyone’s world was shifting then, everyone was learning to live from the beginning again. You can’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes, isn’t that true? No, said the woman I met at the Jewish Historical Museum, but I preferred not to argue with her. I didn’t want to argue with anyone. History was a millstone, a millstone doesn’t think why it is grinding grain. I pictured Götz and Meyer all white, covered in flour, and couldn’t help but laugh. What a laugh it would have been for the children at the camp to see their white figures! Even more droll than Götz’s, or Meyer’s, little poodle with a bow on its head. The children would have been even more delighted had more than the amount of milk allotted for daily consumption, more than the regular 30 litres, been delivered. If you count how many children and infants there were at the camp, it works out that every child got a spoonful. After making that calculation, I couldn’t eat dairy products for several weeks. The trembling density of yogurt made me nauseous, while the amount of milk you needed to moisten oat flakes seemed like needless waste. Without the milk and dairy products I had consumed, so to say, my whole life, I felt like a drug addict without my favourite drug. My hands shook, the chalk crumbled in my fingers, my eyes filled with tears, my legs refused to obey me, words lodged in my throat. Sometimes I would stand motionless for hours, rigid and trembling, and then for days I couldn’t stop moving, I was moving constantly, as if all the world’s furies were after me. I only recovered when I read in a book that the quality of the food in the camp improved dramatically in early March. There was no mention of milk, per se, but the prisoners did receive three barrels of marmalade. I am assuming that this was marmalade made from mixed fruit, which would suit all tastes, and all possible different preferences, in equal measure. I rushed off to the market and purchased a pint of sour cream, which I later ate spoonful by spoonful until I got sick. The improvement in the quality of food, it said in the book, and there are statements from witnesses to back this up, was accompanied by a change in the behaviour of the German soldiers and camp command. The earlier nasty treatment disappeared, or at least lessened, the humiliation and punishments stopped, some officers even began smiling. At that point, the stories of transfer to some other camp, in Romania or Poland, or even to a warm island somewhere, became almost real, tangible, and the nights got shorter somehow, passed quicker in guessing and dissuading, melting into days which no longer brought so much anxiety and uncertainty. Commander Andorfer showed the members of the Jewish Administration the rules of the camp, there was no longer any reason to hide them, he hadn’t hidden them earlier, he claimed, he simply hadn’t known they were there, so that he, too, you could see just by looking at him, had been pleasantly surprised. As a sign of gratitude, I guess, they let him win at cards for several days running. Meanwhile, Götz and Meyer were also preparing to travel. If they were married, they whispered tender words to their wives, if they had children, they promised they would be home soon, bringing presents. Nothing big, of course, children needn’t be exposed from a young age to luxury which might only damage them later in life. Geometrically speaking, Götz and Meyer were moving along a horizontal route that would allow the Jews at the Fairgrounds camp to begin their vertical journey. It would seem, of course, that they, the Jews, would be travelling horizontally as well, but the path they’d be taking would head upwards, skywards. In historical terms, the departure of the Saurer with Götz and Meyer from Berlin marked the end of a debate of many months on the fate of the Jews in Belgrade and Serbia. Certain Nazi officials wanted to transfer them eastwards, to one of the newly formed ghettoes or camps; others, obviously more traditionally minded, felt that they should continue with the firing squads; at the very top, however, the spirit of modernity reigned supreme, and there was a readiness to continue providing support for the development of a more humane and painless form of killing. Finally, when it was all put down on paper and compared — the price of ammunition, and the costs of transport, and the number of soldiers necessary for it to function without a hitch, and the amount of food and other supplies, and the unquestionable influences on the psyches of those involved — it was clear that the most efficient method, as those people insisted who believed in the advancement of scientific thought, was to send a gas truck to Belgrade. Two drivers, four guards and five, or seven, prisoners: a dozen people was all they needed to strike one problem off the agenda. Even if one were to add to that the work of the grave- and ditch diggers, it still cost less than organising the transport and overly long and sometimes chaotic shootings. I had to admit that one rarely comes across such crystal-clear and iron-firm logic. Had I been able to apply similar logic to my life, it probably wouldn’t have looked like a messy train schedule gone awry, which was the nearest image of its, or rather my, condition. This was best seen in my attempt to bring order to myself by introducing order to my family tree, and it all ended in nothing but even greater trouble. I wrote letters to my relatives in Australia, Israel, America and Argentina. I introduced myself, apologised for not having written for such a long time, I believe I even remarked that we were the last kernels on a gnawed ear of corn, and then I asked them whether they could tell me anything that might help me to better understand events which, I confess, defy comprehension, but which must have had some sort of meaning, because if they didn’t, then our lives, or at least mine, would be meaningless. No-one responded. At 80 and some, their average age, you are grateful that day and night and tangible things still exist, you no longer ask yourself why you are alive. But nonetheless several times a day I would peer into my letter box, hoping for the postman’s mercy the way a believer prays for a voice from above. I would grasp at the tiniest straw, I admit, just as the prisoners grasped at the straw of the stories they had heard from Commander Andorfer. We’ll be sorry, I told my students, if we ever stop telling stories because if we do, there will be nothing to help us sustain the pressure of reality, to ease the burden of life on our shoulders. Almost at the same moment, as if on command, all of them stopped writing and looked up at me. But, they asked, isn’t life a story? No, I answered, and touched my earlobe, life is the absence of story. Nonsense, said Meyer, or possibly Götz. We were sitting under a willow tree, smoking. I wasn’t sure what he was referring to, but I knew that there were plenty of things I would rather be talking about with him than the purpose of narration. I was thinking of life, Meyer announced, or was it Götz? and shrugged in his attempt to get rid of a cloud of midges and mosquitoes. It is more precious, he added, than you think, much more precious, believe me, I know what I’m talking about. This had gone too far! A man with no face who has channelled death in the direction of thousands of men, women and children’s bodies with his own hands is explaining the value of life to me, in admonishing tones, no less! Perhaps I should have taken that dermatologist’s index finger