Götz and Meyer

sea is too strong a word, that their light, a feeble light at best, was shining on a puddle, nothing more. I savoured, no point in pretending I didn’t, the wince of disgust flitting across the void of their faces. It seems to me, Götz, or Meyer, whispered to Meyer, or Götz, that he doesn’t like us. Meyer, or maybe Götz, said nothing. He shoved his hands into his pocket, pulled out a paper bag and offered me some chocolate. I put out my trembling fingers, ashamed of the loud gurgling sound that came from my stomach, took a chocolate, all dark and sticky, put it on my tongue, pushed it into my cheek, pressed it up against the roof of my mouth, and for an instant forgot everything, the cold and the hunger, the insomnia and the pain in my joints, the itching on my skin and scabs on my face, and I pranced around like a colt, like a kid, like a fawn, like all those animals in the picture books I had hidden under the straw bedding, and then I spread my arms and scampered back and forth, my knees high, making squeaky sounds and flying without a fumble into the spaces that opened up among people. Look at that kid, someone said, whizzing around like a plane. I opened my eyes. The wall clock was ticking softly, mutely, as if ashamed. Books were tossed around the room, files with photocopied documents, boxes of photographs, illustrated history books, statements from survivors, chronicles of war events, the memoirs of generals, diaries and letters. I didn’t dare to move. I stood there and felt how I was retreating more and more into myself, drowning. I closed my eyes. No, no, Götz and Meyer said in unison, that won’t help. I’d never seen them, I could only imagine them. There is no other way, said the rabbi at the funeral of my senile cousin, except the way that leads straight to the heart and then, purified, springs from the heart. If only I knew where the heart is, I mused, everything would be simpler. I packed up and went off to a village called S—. No-one remembered the thin woman with the little boy. They remembered a tall woman with a chubby little girl and a man with a moustache who told fantastic stories about distant cities. I went from house to house and stared at the chickens, but not a single one showed the slightest inclination to approach my open hand. I spent the night in an unpainted house in a room on the first floor, on a sofa bed that no-one had slept on before me. In the morning I spread kajmak cheese on a thick slice of bread and stepped into the dewy grass. Birds chirped in a little glade of trees up on the hill. I knew nothing about birds. It could have been a pygmy owl or a nutcracker, an oriole or a goldfinch, a thrush or a nightingale. You can’t tell? asked Götz and Meyer. Disgraceful! They said those words as clearly as if they were standing right there. I spun round. A dog was sitting on the threshold. Mother never let us keep animals in our flat. Father fought for an aquarium with tropical fish, but the condition was that, no matter what, there could be no more than five fish in it. More than five, Mother said, is a horde, not a school, of fish. I closed my eyes again. Then I raised my arm and, without looking, started walking. Back when I was a boy, I liked to close my eyes, said Götz, or possibly Meyer, and how wonderful, the world looked so much nicer that way. I was the one who was supposed to say that, not Götz, or possibly Meyer, impersonal creations that they were, though I can no longer say things in my own voice with any certainty. I tried to picture how the three of us looked as we sat on a bench in the park, Götz, or Meyer, to my right and Meyer, or Götz, to my left. Their faces empty, shadows moving across my face. At night, when I dream them, we hold hands. In the morning, when I get up, I rinse my hands for ages under cold water, scrub them with a small, bristly brush, rub them until the skin complains. I bring them carefully to my nose, as if I’m holding a crystal bowl. I see that someone is watching me from the mirror, but I pretend not to notice. My life, I say aloud in the middle of a lecture on romanticism, is like a memory that doesn’t know who is remembering it. The students look up, watch me, unblinking, briefly startled, then they shrug and quickly note down my words. If Götz and Meyer were to knock at your door tomorrow, I continue, what would you do? The students put down their pencils, look at each other, whisper. Who are Götz and Meyer, one girl finally asks, I mean, what did they write? They, I say, made pure poetry out of bodies. In rhymed verse? The question comes from the second row. In free verse, I respond, with a great deal of repetition. That means, says a boy from the first row, that they were before their time? I’d rather put it, I say, that they were outside time or, even better, that they did all they could to make time stand still. I confused them, no-one dared complain. Just in case, I touched my left earlobe. That reassured them. It reassured me. I am dangling from my earlobe like an earring, I am swaying like a pendulum, fluttering like a buttercup in a crack in a concrete path. The path leads nowhere, it ends, you might say, before it begins. Sir, says that first girl, I don’t get how this Götz and Meyer wrote poems in tandem, I always thought poetry comes out of solitude, inspiration, I don’t know, arrives from afar, and speaks with a language that is understandable, I guess, to one person alone, and then that one person translates it, right? into language all of us can understand. There is one thing you must understand when we are talking about Götz and Meyer, I say and release my earlobe. It seemed, I continue, as if there were two of them, but if you got under the skin a little, you would quickly have seen that the two were one and the same person. Hey, shouts a young man with a ponytail, like in that movie! He doesn’t say which, but I know what they watch, I can picture this product of futuristic genetics. Precisely, I say, as if they had been painted by the same brush, and furthermore, then there was an entire army of people who were all the same. And all of them, the girl asked, wrote poems? They never stopped, I say. My earlobe is burning, warning me, but there is no turning back. Allow me, I say, to recite one of their poems to you. I feel the students’ attention growing denser around me. I cough and say: Daniel, Isak, Jakov; Bukica, Estera, Sara; Solomon, Rafael, Haim; Rašela, Rifka, Klara. The class erupted in peals of laughter. I laughed with them, because only when I do that, opening my mouth wide and squeezing my eyes shut, can I hide the tears. Did Götz and Meyer ever burst into tears, except when they watched sappy romances in cinemas about poor girls falling into the hands of unscrupulous and ruthless capitalists? Tears are the most ordinary of excretions, Götz, or Meyer, said, while driving to Belgrade. They talked about all manner of things, it was a long trip, and so it was that they came to the subject of tears. I despise people who cry, said Meyer, or possibly Götz. Yes, replied Götz, or Meyer, real men never cry. Although, he said, growing solemn, I did cry when my aunt died. That doesn’t count, Meyer, or Götz, consoled him. I was sorry for her cat, said Götz, or Meyer, it miaowed so sadly as we lowered my aunt into her coffin. He bowed his head and pressed the corner of his eyes with his thumb and index finger, but when Meyer, or Götz, glanced over at him, he put it down to the grime. There certainly was grime, it’s not that there wasn’t, they could feel it between their teeth, touch it in their hair, even in their eyebrows, let alone on their uniforms. Every job has its downside, such is the order of things in the universe, and there is no point trying to change that. Take that brush and use it, Götz, or Meyer, must have told Meyer, or Götz, a thousand times if he’d told him once. If he’d been a pilot, which he had always wished he could be, at least he wouldn’t have had to worry about the grime. But the uniform is the pride of every SS officer, and clothing, despite that old saying, does, after all, make the man, and Meyer, or possibly Götz, dedicated himself assiduously to cleaning. That was why, after all, task forces always ordered their victims to strip before they were shot. Naked, they were no longer people, which had an auspicious effect on the firing squad, because it is always easier to kill people who are nothing. And besides, naked people don’t run away, mostly they try to shield their genitals and stand still, finding their last defence in a feeling of shame. The people who went into the “soul-swallower” still wearing their clothing at least weren’t shamed, and that is some sort of comfort, isn’t it? There is no comfort in death, the woman I met at the Jewish Historical Museum said, especially not in a death that someone else chooses for you. I wasn’t thinking of them, I shouted, but of myself, because those small consolations are the only weapon with which I can stand up to the meaningless and horrible void filling the faces of Götz and Meyer, and without them, without those small consolations, I would sink right to the bottom, I would accept that what happens represents an implacable order of things and not some monstrous distortion, that human dignity is an illusion, that nothing exists except the dark face of evil, which each of us carries within, some people have it closer to the surface of their being, some in their depths, and actually, it isn’t that we resist the repetition of evil, rather that sooner or later we recognise it in ourselves, joining with it in the end. I stopped talking, out of breath. I was always exhausted by long sentences, especially those which could have been said with fewer words, and even more by those that could have not been said at all. I never learned the lesson from that ancient saying that silence is a wall around wisdom. I talk until my mouth hurts, until my throat gets dry, until my larynx gets tied up in knots, as if words mean something, as if I could really save someone. Like a man who, lost in a forest, walks round in circles and keeps coming back to the place he started from, I keep starting from the beginning, closing my eyes to the failure of all my attempts. So I sat down, as if nothing had happened, and started writing letters to the military archives in Germany and Austria, to the documentation centres in Israel and America, even to Riga and Moscow, anywhere where there was the slightest possibility that I might stumble onto some trace. It is impossible, I figured, that Götz and Meyer vanished as if the earth had swallowed them up, although, in fact, it was easiest to imagine that off in the grass, by some road somewhere, their bones were rotting in an unmarked grave. In a couple of unmarked graves. No matter how odd it may sound, I did not wish for their death, rather I longed desperately for their life. I wanted to meet them, lively or decrepit old men, I wanted their faces to fill slowly with wrinkles or moles, see their teeth or hear the clacking of their dentures, sit with them on a bench in front of a house in a village or at the dining-room table in some old people’s home, to hear the air wheezing in their lungs, how their hearts beat and guts growled, to watch them leaning on sticks, blinking at the glaring neon light, the spittle pooling in the corners of their mouths. I wouldn’t ask them anything. I’d just sit there next to them and be quiet, and let my quiet wash over them. And then, when there was nothing left in them but that quiet, when they were swimming in it like fish in the sea, I wanted them to turn to me, and in their eyes, which had finally filled with colour, blue or brown, I would be able to see that they knew who I was though they had never seen me, and they would know that they had lost the chance to know me, I wanted to see them remember. At that point I could get up and go, but I’d stay a little longer. I would sit next to them and watch the sun set behind the hill and the shadows moving towards us with giant steps. That is that: that is the end of the road. In reality, however, the end of the road was nowhere in sight. The answers I received brought me no closer. They led me to the vast expanses of the Soviet Union, described camps and ghettoes in Poland, listed data on the killing of ailing Jewish children in Kislovodsk, listed names which meant nothing to me. In May 1942, Untersturmführer Dr August Becker visited, on assignment, several places where gas trucks had been used, with the objective of ascertaining their efficiency and proposing further guidelines. In his final report he mentioned two problems: the great mental pressure on the members of the SS who unloaded the trucks themselves, because they did not wish to entrust this job to prisoners who were prepared to take every available opportunity to escape, as well as a second problem, the frequent breakdowns resulting from the poor condition of Soviet roads. There is nothing to suggest that Dr Becker came to Belgrade. Had he done that, I don’t doubt that Götz and Meyer would have agreed with his second conclusion, keeping in mind the problem with the rear axle on their Saurer. However, in the case of the first problem, they could point to what had clearly been successful cooperation with the prisoners, who not only unloaded the trucks but buried the corpses, which had an exceptionally salutary effect on the German soldiers, so that during the work you could often hear their cheery banter; for all that, it was enough to promise the prisoners some sort of reward, in this case they were promised that when they had completed their work, they would be sent to a work camp in Norway. Götz and Meyer, of course, were not the masterminds behind this successful organisational structure, they would not want him to think they were taking credit for someone else’s accomplishments, far from it. They don’t know who deserves the credit, perhaps Commander Andorfer, but whoever came up with the idea showed that, with a little self-confidence, one can overcome problems which seem, at first, to be insoluble. Fine lads, Götz and Meyer, aren’t they now? Under other conditions, considering how diligent they were, surely they would have headed up a labour union. But, had he heard their testimony, Dr Becker woul