Götz and Meyer

transport and load, and the story about the fabled camp in Romania, or Poland. Although when Götz and Meyer are at issue, I must admit I do not know who is who, which makes me, in a sense, more ignorant than those who knew nothing of their names. I keep on about names, as if they mean something, but in fact, I may have already said this, they are empty shells, shed skins, except that a shell, when you put it to your ear, murmurs like the sea, while nothing can be heard from their names but silence. I can’t listen to silence any more. Not long ago, about 3.00 in the afternoon, when the rush hour is at its worst, I walked for a long time round the streets, went to the houses where my relatives used to live, and then I tried to determine which route each of them took that December morning when they went to the headquarters of the Special Police for Jews. They were bent over, lugging their bundles, dragging suitcases along the pavement, checking to see they’d locked the door and watered the plants. Someone said that he couldn’t remember when he’d got up this early, but he didn’t regret it, the morning air was so pleasant. The air around me, at that very moment, was extremely unpleasant. I walked through the streets that Götz and Meyer’s Saurer had passed through. I was on the corner where something had touched me once, but I didn’t feel anything this time. Maybe in the meanwhile, in the time between my two visits to that imagined history, my relatives had moved? I will have to check that in the lists. I refer to lists, but in fact this is a vast documentation, in countless files with headings and a variety of symbols directing you to other files with related material, which allowed me to put my hand quickly on all the documents relevant to any person or event. Every one of my relatives or, more precisely, every family had its own file, as did Commander Andorfer, the Jewish hospital, the Gestapo, the Department for Social Welfare and Social Institutions, Jajinci. Götz and Meyer, too, had their file, but in it were just copies of the telegrams announcing their arrival and departure. The instructions on their file cover direct you to the following files: Saurer — technical equipment; Saurer — application, maps; Commander Andorfer, Untersturmführer; Riga; Correspondence — Austria; Correspondence — Germany; the Fairgrounds; a file with my name on it. Götz and Meyer are mentioned here and there in these files, but altogether there was barely enough to fill a page. Their faces continued to be white splotches, resembling flags of surrender, which was altogether the wrong impression, because if there was anyone in need of hanging out that sort of flag, it was I, not Götz and Meyer. Several times I was, indeed, tempted to surrender, I was barely able to restrain myself from doing so, as I was lost in the labyrinth of the family tree or among the papers thrown on the floor of my room. I, too, have had times when I have felt like giving up, said Götz, or maybe it was Meyer, the monotony of the work was killing me, the endless repetition, one day at the wheel, the next day responsible for the exhaust pipe, and then over again, as if there was nothing else left in life. The other, Meyer, or Götz, made no effort to conceal his disagreement. Exactly, he said, this is our life as long as the task we have been assigned to exists. He had long been suspicious of his fellow officer’s genuine devotion to the ideals of the Reich. His work effort was not being questioned, there could be no doubt about it, just as there could be no question of his loyalty, but there was something too tender in him, yes, it radiated from his melancholy, along with something else he couldn’t put his finger on, but he was certain that the key to the door to the other side was right here. He couldn’t say exactly what that other side was, this was something he still had to discover, but it was enough to open all four eyes and listen to the night voices from the adjacent bed. If I had known that, Götz, or was it Meyer, the first one, told me in confidence, I would have treated him differently. There you go: you open your heart to people and they hold their noses. I hadn’t understood what he was trying to say, but I had no will to pursue it. I felt uncomfortable while I sat with them under the Sava Bridge and drank beer. The beer dulled me, the heat reached us despite the shade and the river, the pavilions at the Fairgrounds were at my back, or at the back of my neck. Here, not far from us, prisoners were carrying their dead over the ice-shackled river. They must have seemed like black dots to someone looking down at them from the Kalemegdan fortress in the centre of Belgrade. They moved so slowly, it took them so long to get across, that an observer had to take his gloves off from time to time and rub his eyes. The cold nipped at their faces, tightened the skin on their chins, gnawed at their ears. The ground slipped under them at every step, but still the prisoners had a firm hold on the corpses, as if there was something that might happen to them if the corpses fell from their hands and slid onto the ice. No-one dies twice, said Götz, or Meyer, and burped. He couldn’t know that, two years after their stay in Belgrade, the German Occupation forces decided to burn the corpses they had buried at Jajinci. So my relatives did die twice after all, once in the darkness of the back of the truck, aching for fresh air, and a second time on a heap of bodies, aching to rest in peace. As they were disinterred, a witness states, valuables were stripped from the corpses: rings, watches, chains, gold teeth. After the corpses had been burned, the ashes were sifted in case any objects of precious metal had been missed. That covered the cost, I reckon, of the disinterment, and there must have been a little extra left over. The things that were collected were sent to Berlin in the end, and Götz, or Meyer, and I kept sitting there under the bridge, drinking warm beer. I asked him whether he knew how long fish live. It suddenly occurred to me that in the Sava maybe there still is a fish alive who was swimming around under the ice at the time and saw the shadowy figures walking so carefully with their heavy loads. Götz, or Meyer, described a circle over his forehead with the neck of the beer bottle which might have meant he thought I’d gone clean out of my mind. This is not far from the truth. Anyone else in my place would have been worried, even seen a doctor, there are various places a person can go to get advice, but I keep clenching my teeth and going on as if nothing has happened. Sometimes you win when you admit defeat, but not with me. I would rather tilt at windmills, even the old and decrepit kind, the way they are now, Götz and Meyer, if they are alive. I never met them, I can only imagine them. I’m back where I began. This is what my life has turned into: stumbling, looking back, starting anew. One of those three lives I was living in parallel, maybe even a fourth. The rest continued to follow me, unchanged, and I’d wake up like Götz, or Meyer, eager to work, and go to sleep like a 13-year-old boy preparing for his Bar Mitzvah and repeating words in a language that made his throat ache. None of my relatives in the camp could be described as a 13-year-old boy, nor do I know where he came from, nor which life he belongs to. Götz and Meyer are also unable to help me. If we had remembered all those faces, they say, we’d remember nothing else. The boy kept popping up, and on one occasion, instead of my own hands, I saw his, clear as day. He was clutching a mug of milk and he was thirsty. He was in me that day, when, in a voice squeaky with excitement, I proposed to my students that we spend our next class in a hands-on demonstration. Although beside themselves at the thought that they wouldn’t have to be in school, they wanted to know what was going to happen. The boy had, in the meanwhile, faded, leaving me to respond. It was going to be about the difference between the tangible world and art, I explained, but also about the similarity between an instant of reality and a figment of the imagination. I was pretty busy for a few days. I had to find a school bus, collect money from the students, work out the route, get my thoughts together. This last item was the hardest for me, I admit. Then on the family tree, in a forgotten corner, I found a distant relative, a Matilda, who had died in 1929. I never learned anything about her, as if she was cloaked in a family secret. I couldn’t find her grave in the Jewish cemetery, even in the overgrown Ashkenazy section. Because of her I went to see the Jewish cemetery in Zemun, although none of my relatives ever lived in Zemun, with the exception, of course, of those months they spent at the Fairgrounds camp. And so, taking care that Götz and Meyer didn’t notice, I explained to myself that poor Matilda must have died in childbirth. The boy who was born then, who had been dragging the prickly Hebrew words out of my throat, came from her extra-marital affair with a man whom she never betrayed. The boy was given the name Adam, and Matilda, as if her death was not enough, was dropped into the deep well of forgetting. Her photographs were ripped up, her old school books burned, her clothing given to charitable organisations. How it happened that Adam was never entered onto the lists of Belgrade Jews, I’ll never know, but his name was not on the summonses distributed in December 1941. Despite that, and despite the advice of the aunt whose home he lived in then, Adam packed his little suitcase on the evening of December 7, before he went to bed. Along with some underwear and a warm blue jersey, he packed the white shirt and black trousers that had been set aside for his Bar Mitzvah, and two apples which he took from the cupboard in the kitchen. One of these would be filched by an unknown boy who would threaten to beat him if he cried. He didn’t cry. I told all this to the students while we drove around town on the bus. I spoke over the driver’s sound system. I held the microphone in my right hand, and I clutched my notes in my left. There was nothing in the notes I didn’t already know by heart, I just needed them there as encouragement. The faith in paper is odd, as if history is no more than a trace of ink, as if paper is more enduring than everything else. I clutched that wad of paper like a thief snatching a squash from a field, claiming that all he was trying to do was find shelter from the wind. I stood there, arms akimbo, to keep my balance as the bus rocked like a boat, which I referred to as Noah’s Ark. If there was a wind blowing, I didn’t feel it. While I was speaking, the driver hummed a melody to himself so at