Götz and Meyer

when, how and where, but no-one questions the initial assumption any more. With its meaninglessness it forges new meaning, crystal clear, and thereafter that is held up as the measure of all other meaning. You are on the right track, say Götz and Meyer, and wink at me in unison. I’d never seen Götz and Meyer, I could only imagine them. I imagined them hacking at chunks of mountain crystal with powerful blows and building the wall before which I stand, fifty years later, a limp little lamb. I’m sure that this notion of immutable transparency occurred to those prisoners, back then, but they saw themselves inside some sort of glass ball, exposed to the world’s uncaring eyes, teetering on the brink of a downward slope. Their ball rolled away, my wall stood there, still. Then I remembered that I’d read somewhere that there are no outer walls, only inner ones, and that we must climb out from inside if we wish to overcome what rises before us outside. Okay, okay, I said to Götz and Meyer, who were nodding eagerly, but how can someone proceed if he has never even discovered the way that leads to the outer doors? Götz and Meyer shook their heads helplessly. Perhaps I am expecting too much of them, they are, after all, only ordinary people, practical, skilled at something that requires no questions or answers. And what is so bad about that, asks Götz, or maybe Meyer, in a tone bordering on the surly, and is there anyone who knows, who genuinely knows, that he wouldn’t act precisely the same way in our place? I don’t know what to answer him and whether there is such an answer. I don’t know why I am talking with him in front of the prisoners scowling at us through the barbed-wire fence. They are convinced that I am getting in the way of their departure that started out so nicely, that I am dissuading the people who, with their arrival from far away, have brought a glimmer of light into the prisoners’ lives. And indeed, at first, when Götz and Meyer’s Saurer arrived, the prisoners raced to see who would be the first to travel. Commander Andorfer, I imagine, must have rubbed his hands with glee. Later, when some of the members of the Jewish Administration had begun to show some doubt, Andorfer fumed and, his language harsh, leaning on his arms as he spoke, said that doubt was one of the greatest human frailties, he wanted no weaklings in his camp, whatever would become of the Reich if the Führer allowed himself to be enticed, even for a moment, by doubt, and would he, Andorfer, be sitting with them had he doubted his own words, and why doesn’t someone deal out those cards? But doubt is like sourdough: once you make it, it keeps rising. Since Götz and Meyer’s truck always stood outside the camp, and only the select had access to it, the prisoners, according to witness statements, tried to make use of another truck, the one for transporting each group’s personal belongings. They agreed that when the trucks reached their destination, the people who had been taken away were to leave a message in a predetermined spot inside the truck, letting the others know where they had been unloaded. It couldn’t be so hard to do, surely they would be unloading their own things from the truck, certainly the Germans wouldn’t be doing something like that for them, but no search of the truck, when it returned to the camp the next day, ever produced any sort of result. The dead, of course, don’t write. Souls communicate in a different tongue. But there were always those for whom this meant nothing, for whom proof was not proof, after all pencilled messages are so easily misplaced and dust can parch the lips. Nothing had changed, nothing could change. The women and children, the occasional elderly person, sometimes even a man or two, and one of the medical staff continued climbing up, day after day, into the Saurer, though with flagging enthusiasm. Commander Andorfer ordered that if there weren’t enough volunteers, they would start drawing up transport lists, but everything continued as planned, without much resistance, without a fuss, because as long as there was hope, there was a chance it might be borne out, wasn’t there? And besides, nothing warms hope like a full stomach, and in April and May 1942, judging by the documents that have been preserved, there were no complaints about the amount and quality of the delivered food. Since the number of prisoners was dropping, they were all finally being served with spoons of the same size, the stew was thicker, the bits of potato more numerous, the corn mush a little less watery. Some children even got sweets two or three times from Götz, or Meyer, which would have been unthinkable before. I asked Götz, or possibly Meyer, why the sweets, didn’t that seem just a tad hypocritical? No, said Götz, or possibly Meyer, because when a person works at a monotonous job, he needs some respite, otherwise there is the danger that he might lose his élan and, worst of all, that he might ultimately turn into an automaton, which, though precise, would function with less of a will. Indeed, I concede. We talked in my room. A recording of Mozart’s music was playing on the turntable. We sat and smoked and listened to the sounds coming from the bathroom, where, as he always did on Sunday afternoon, Meyer, or maybe Götz, was splashing in a tub full of bubbles. He always took a long time to bathe, was capable of playing with yellow duckies and a little red boat for hours, and later, without the slightest compunction, stroll buck naked around the flat looking for his clothes. Götz, or Meyer, was full of gratitude for the organisational capabilities of Untersturmführer Andorfer, since, he said, it was no mean feat to meet all the conditions for the normal functioning of a camp. For instance, he said, you had to make sure that all the members of one family got onto the same transport, and that the number of staff in the kitchen diminished proportionately to the decreasing number of prisoners, that you held on as long as possible to the cobblers and locksmiths, and that you coordinated the number of block commanders and camp policemen, and that, most important, the camp administration functioned impeccably. Did I have any idea, I was asked by Götz, or perhaps it was Meyer, how much effort was needed to coordinate all of that? I wonder, said Götz, or Meyer, does that man ever have time to sleep? There must be writing and erasing to be done, he went on, you couldn’t just write any old thing, there were essential acrobatics and somersaults and who knows what all, endless patience, for instance, let alone love for one’s work, and he had to have some sort of schematic plan, something like that web you have up there in the frame on the wall. He stopped, looking over at my family tree. Hey, he asked finally, what do all these people mean to you? I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t exactly know where Meyer, or was it Götz, was, had he gone out, by chance? If the postman ran into him, he would not fare well. And Commander Andorfer certainly had his hands full. The camp emptied quickly, he had to prepare his final accounting, determine the state of the supplies, draw up an inventory, make a list of essential repairs, run through his final checklist, and with all that goes a certain emotional tension, a feeling of rupture, a mild sort of grief, almost melancholy, that it was all over, with a dose of anxiety, of course, as to how it would be evaluated up there where things are evaluated. He wasn’t thinking of Heaven, he had Berlin in mind. Of course there were additional distasteful details to deal with, especially when it turned out that even with two round trips daily of Götz and Meyer’s truck, the camp was not emptying fast enough. Andorfer had to relent under pressure and reinstate the good old firing squad, which had an especially detrimental effect on Götz and Meyer, who saw this as belittling their efforts, as well as altogether underestimating the significance of scientific advancement. But little differences of opinion like that are possible in every job, and in such situations it is always a good idea to seek compromises rather than aggravate discord and weaken military and every other readiness. Whatever the case, on May 10, 1942 the last group of Jews was taken from the Fairgrounds camp, including the members of the Administration and their families, and what was left of the cooks, tradesmen and doctors. Once they were gone, a feathery cloud of silence descended on the camp. It rolled sluggishly round the emptiness of absence, and like a sponge it absorbed the sounds that tried to hide in the vacated pavilions, in the straw crushed between the boards of the cots, in the grease lining the bottoms of the kitchen pots, in the papers tossed on the floor of the Central Tower, in the shoes that were never picked up after they’d been re-soled. On the mounds between the third and fourth pavilions, spring had long since come, grass was beginning to sprout. There are no reliable witness statements on the subject, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. There were six women left in the camp, non-Jews, whose husbands and families had been taken off on various transports. They wandered the empty expanses of the camp for a week in deafening silence, bumping into one another. Sometimes it is like that: space which grows is actually shrinking, and what you used to long for becomes what you most dread. I fled, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get away from the cloud of silence that threatened to burst my eardrums. I hope, I told the woman at the Jewish Historical Museum, that one piece of the cloud, or maybe even a whole, tiny cloudlet, its close cousin, managed to reach Jajinci and the five, or seven, Serbian prisoners, and that it buffered, at least a little, the zing of the bullets that united them with those they had so devotedly sent to their last rest. That is the only consolation, I said, I could offer them. Yes, answered the woman, but history, unfortunately, is not meteorology. But the heart, I wanted to tell her, is a meteorologist. I didn’t say anything, I went down to the centre of town, to Terazije, hoping that the urban bustle would help me shake off the pain nesting in my ears. Then I assigned my students an essay on the theme “The Sound and the Fury”. I attended basketball games, sat in smoke-filled halls where people played bingo, drank beer in cafés where they were playing folk music. Nothing helped. Silen