es, 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 the moment when the boy walks with his aunt towards the truck, I had to ask him to stop. He did so, reluctantly, but he whistled a bit from time to time after that. Not all drivers are like Götz and Meyer, I have to say. They always knew when it was time for a song, for whistling, for yodelling, and it was duty first, and an order, even when expressed as a request, had to be respected. This is where it all began, I said as we got to George Washington Street where the Special Police for Jews were stationed although it might be better to say, I added, that everything ended here. And, of course, I continued, now it is clear and sunny, but you have to picture the December gloom, a chill morning, shivers that engulf the entire body. They had locked the front door for the last time, picked up their suitcases and set out. Adam stood and watched as his aunt turned the key in the lock and pressed the door handle and then, as she was leaving, straightened the skewed mat. They must have had at least an inkling, like all the rest, that they would never be back, and that they probably were setting out on the road their husbands and fathers had already taken, but they struggled with it, as you could see in the way they walked, interrupted by quick shudders, brief flights from the truth. They themselves fled, hoping that they would arrive where they were headed as someone else, that they could go back to their flowers in their pots on their windowsills while that other person kept walking towards the building housing the Special Police. Only Adam was there, heart and soul, because even if he had wanted to, he had no-one to flee to, nowhere to go back to. He held his little suitcase, ready, at last, to set out into the world. The driver whistled softly between clenched teeth. His whistling was closer to hissing, but I recognised the tune. Now I’d like to know, I said into the microphone, what would you have done in his place. Silence washed over the bus like water dumped from a basin. Even the driver turned. I waited. First a girl with long blond hair spoke. She pushed her fringe out of her eyes and said that she would take her hamster with her, that she couldn’t bear the thought of little Ćira, which must have been the hamster’s name, staying behind without her. My life without Ćira, she added, would be nothing. The rest all spoke at once. Apparently my students owned an entire zoo, and they would not leave their homes if they had to go without their dogs, cats, parakeets, canaries, turtles, rabbits, ant colonies, praying mantises. The boy with a ponytail was the one who had the praying mantises; he kept them in jars and sometimes let them fight. Even the driver piped up: he kept pigeons. I’m sorry, I said, but the instructions are clear and allow only clothing, bedding, dry food for three days, that sort of thing. Why, this is inhuman, exclaimed the blond girl. This time she didn’t brush her fringe aside, and her eyes flashed angrily behind her hair. If we keep this up, I thought, they’ll report me to the Society for Protection of Animals, but aloud I said: That is the difference I want to talk about, the fact that you keep imagining reality as if it were an artwork in which you have a choice, while in the tangible world there is no choice, you have to participate, you cannot step out of what is going on and into something else, there is nothing else except what is going on, whether you like it or not, and that means you must feel the cold taking over, and you must have at least an inkling that you will never be back, and that you will never see your pets again, and that your rooms, as you left them, will soon be entered by people for whom none of your mementos, none of those little things you fuss over, will mean anything. The blond girl began to cry. She sobbed and sniffled, and wiped her tears away with her arm. Adam, however, did not cry. He climbed up into the military truck, sat down on the wooden floor, hugged his suitcase. Around him women and other children crowded in, and in that jostling, surrounded by excited voices, he felt a certainty he had never known before. He wanted the truck to leave soon, and the ride to last long. The truck did leave soon, I told them, though the drive did not last as long as Adam hoped it would. Through a gap in the tarpaulin, Adam saw people in a queue, then the buildings began to move by faster and faster. The driver nodded, turned his key, shifted gears, pressed the accelerator. The blond girl had stopped crying. She was staring at the floor and, if I saw rightly, was chewing her lower lip. I should have given her a handkerchief, now it was too late. I spread my feet further to keep my balance, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t stop swaying, as if I were inching along high above them on a loosely strung wire. The route we are taking, I said into the microphone, is not, of course, the route they took, but the final result is the same: after the city comes the bridge, after the slopes and cliffs stretch the plains. They say, I went on, that plains are soothing, and there is truth in that, though this holds more for those who live there than those who carry at least a hint of uneven terrain in their feet. They, like all sailors on dry ground, do not know how to walk through these peaceful expanses, and they tend to trip even when there are no obstacles to trip over. Turn round, I said when the bus got to the bridge, and look at how the city is getting further behind us and closing up at the same time, and how although it hasn’t budged from where it was, it seems to be fading. All the students turned and peered over the backs of their seats, even the driver glanced into his rear-view mirror several times. You might talk about that as a physical pain, I said, as if someone is tearing patches of skin from your body. I heard several gasps, but no-one turned back to me. They stared at Belgrade as if it would disappear any minute. Only Adam remained quiet, crouched in his corner, unmoved by the general excitement, sighs and sobs. If he felt anything, it was excitement at the prospect of a journey, he had never travelled anywhere before, with a suitcase no less, and he started thinking of the books he had read,