Children of Captain Grant and In Desert and Wilderness. He had even started writing a story not long ago about a boy, a stowaway on a boat that sank somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. He got off with a few of the sailors, in a boat that had no oars, no food or water, and here he stopped, and couldn’t figure out where to take the story next. The river they were crossing, of course, didn’t much resemble an ocean, but water is water, isn’t it? Everyone agreed. Some things are simply accepted without the need for a lot of convincing. When the truck crossed over to the other shore, Adam thought of a huge city, entirely of glass, in which you could see the endless blue of the sky. The reality, of course, at the Fairgrounds was something else entirely, but no less exciting than the one the 13-year-old boy was imagining. He got up early in the morning, shivered during roll-call, tasted the watery soup, watched them carrying away the dead, and yet at certain moments he couldn’t repress the happiness he felt that he was experiencing it all. He knew that he was in the middle of the greatest adventure of his lifetime, and he did not want to miss a single part of it, although he was no different from that little boy in the boat who was dependent on the whims of the sea’s currents. Adam didn’t understand the currents that were sweeping him along, but he could sense their force, and he soon realised that there was no point in resisting. But what happened, asked a student in a checked shirt, to his prayers? I never mentioned prayers, I answered into the microphone, all I said was that he was preparing for his Bar Mitzvah, when he was to come of age in his faith. I did say that. And he really had been working at it, I think, repeated to himself the part of the Five Books of Moses that you are supposed to read in Hebrew. I do not believe I convinced the student in the checked shirt. At that age, suspicion is a constant companion. On that point, of course, Götz and Meyer were not so different from them. They trusted only Germans, anyone else might cross over and join the enemy at any moment, if they hadn’t already done so. They even cast suspicious glances at each other now and then. The enemy has been known to crop up in the most unexpected places. By this time we had arrived at the Fairgrounds. Before that, we passed a hotel and business premises entirely of glass, quite similar to those in Adam’s fantasy, and which never would have occurred, for instance, to Götz and Meyer, although they drove their truck through this area countless times. They were thinking of other things: of where they were born — a place somewhere, I assume, deep in the German or Austrian Alps — but no need to rush things, the time would come for Götz and Meyer, indeed. First I told the students about how the camp was organised, no, first we walked around in silence, I allowed them to sense the space, I prepared them for what it used to look like, and only then did I begin to tell them about how the camp was organised, the accommodations, the daily schedule, the workshops, the living and the dead. They stood huddled in a circle around me, as if they were afraid to step back at all. They had already known, of course, that they were on a journey with no return, but hope kept them from truly believing that. There can be no doubt that the greenery contributed, the dense greenery that had surrounded the Fairgrounds on all sides, so that from far away a person would be convinced he was coming to a wooded area, and once he stepped into the tangle of shadows, he might think it was a park, rather overgrown, yet still a park. So I slowly erased it all, that greenery, removed it leaf by leaf, picked up every twig, until nothing was left but the bare, decrepit buildings, standing in a void. Nothing is more awful than a void, nothing more present than absence. After all, I told them, that was how Adam felt: he was here, but actually he wasn’t, just as the camp, despite its overcrowding, consisted of an empty place in which every step echoed like the blow of a hammer on an anvil. Do you understand what I’m talking about? They didn’t. They looked at me and blinked, the way people blink when they are startled by a gust of wind or the sun bursting through the clouds, and what would they do if I were to ask to hear how their teeth chatter, their stomachs growl, their joints creak? Adam heard all those things, from other people and from himself, especially at night, when he had to bite the pillow to stop his teeth from chattering and curl up in a ball to quiet the howling of his stomach. By day, he’d double over with a nasty cramp cinching his stomach in a steel vice, but even then he kept his eyes open, because someone had to see it all and remember every humiliation, every escape into madness and flight into dreams, every bit of frostbite or bruise from being struck by the butt of a gun or kicked by boots. But why, said a girl with spectacles, when, at the end, he would, I mean, since he knew, he had to know, that after everything else the only … She didn’t finish her sentence. She couldn’t say the word