Götz and Meyer

umped their heads on the ceiling as they tried to get as comfortable as possible. The people driving these vehicles, I continued, went through a special training course, and often among them, which may have been the case with Götz, or Meyer, or both, there were soldiers who had come back from the front because of injuries. At first, however, despite this training, certain mistakes were made which, fortunately, did not detract from the efficiency of the work, but did attract the attention of their superiors, so in Untersturmführer Dr Becker’s report, whose inspection trip I have already mentioned, I am sure that he draws attention to the necessity of gradually increasing the level of gas, because “it has been shown”, I read from one of the sheets of paper in my bundle, “that by releasing the gas as regulated, death comes swiftly and the prisoners die half-asleep. Now you no longer see convulsed and disfigured faces on those who have been suffocated, and there is not as much vomiting and defecation as there used to be earlier, when the gas was released all at once.” Their concern for the welfare of the prisoners is touching, I must say. I’ve said it before, I am repeating myself. Although I have no reliable information, I am convinced Götz and Meyer did not make that sort of mistake. I have not managed to track down any written complaints about their work. On the contrary, one might say, though there are no such expressions in military jargon, they fulfilled their assignment with a dedicated tenderness. I stood at the centre of the ring of students. Götz and Meyer are still quite far away, but soon their truck will pull up at the gate to the camp, there, behind you. Again I dedicated myself to my bundle of papers. The tense breathing of my students and, if I am not mistaken, the occasional sob, made me feel as if I were amid a tossing ocean of air. I was both floating and sinking, like a divided being that cannot re-connect. An awkward feeling that sends chills down my spine even now. The list in my hand turned into a flapping sail. Each of you, I said, will now become someone else, each will become first the name, and then the person who bore that name. I began handing out names as if I was scattering seeds. The boys became my boy cousins, the girls my girl cousins. I gave them an age for each name, an occupation, real or imagined, sometimes hair colour, density of eyebrows. I gave myself Adam. Adam was always separate from his group, even when he was a part of it. Shorter than the others, he always stuck out above them. That was when he began to think that maybe his preparation for his Bar Mitzvah was futile, because a week at the camp felt like a whole year, so by early March he felt he was already 25, maybe a little younger, he wasn’t quite sure of his calculations, but certainly older than he really was, so the Bar Mitzvah ritual was moot. He had earned his maturity during his second week there, when he turned 15, if we use his method of calculation, when he first bent over a person who had died. More precisely, an old woman who had died. Whether or not he got closer to God at that moment is tough to say. Maybe he merely saw that the path leading to God had far more turns in it than the image he had carried within himself. Here it looked like a winding path along a sunny slope, not very steep, so that climbing up would require almost no effort. All that changed when he bent over the old, dead woman, when it took so much effort to straighten up that his thighs wobbled and his knees buckled. In an ancient book it is written, I said, that sometimes you have to lean way down in order to see the face of the Lord. And now picture, each of you in your own mind, I went on, the faces of the people whose names you’ve been given. And not only their names, imagine them as whole people, their every move, every part of their body, each of you be the person, feel how that person’s muscles tense and their lungs fill, dream their dreams, okay, no-one was dreaming there, so instead just look, look with their eyes, and wait in a way you have never waited. Götz and Meyer would probably have been confused by such volubility, hardly surprising if you keep in mind the conciseness of military language and its resistance to gushing feeling. The students were also confused: what sort of waiting did I have in mind? Waiting, I said, for something to happen which would finally make some sense, because it was simply not possible that all this could be happening without making any sense. Then the waiting, I said, took the shape of a rumour about being transferred to a camp in Romania or maybe Poland, to a safer place, somewhere settled, the story had it, with other Jews and far enough from that city on the other shore, which was closing its eyes shamelessly to the scenes of their precipitous fall. While all this was going on, Götz and Meyer were receiving instructions for their special assignment, then they devoted themselves to checking even the most minute technical details of their Saurer’s special equipment. All that was left was to depart, which they soon did, heading towards people who, though at first glance seemingly motionless, were actually hurtling towards the two of them, waiting for them on precisely the spot where we are now standing. Then I began a roll-call, to turn them into little family groups, to arrange them in a column, and, though a little disorderly, they marched with even steps to the gate to the Fairgrounds camp. The bus was waiting, bathed in sunlight. The driver was asleep, resting his cheek on his arms folded over the steering wheel. As I called their names and as they got onto the bus, I told them they should imagine how the person whose name they carried entered the grey truck, whose dimensions I had repeated several times and which was driven by Götz and Meyer. You can’t see them now, I said, but take my word for it, they were refined gentlemen. Götz, or maybe Meyer, one of them, wouldn’t, as people often say, harm a fly, but he was capable of tossing a cat from the roof down into the concrete yard. Cats are stupid, he said, I would never like to be a cat. No-one laughed. Adam turned and glared at me. I started to say the names, the bus filled slowly, the driver woke up, smacked his lips and immediately began to whistle, the students’ faces were grim, anxious, they were all silent, although the mothers touched the children, the husbands leaned over their wives, but all in silence, as if under water or at a very high altitude, in rarified mountain air. Wherever it was, I found myself among my relatives, and I have no words to describe the sweetness I felt, that same way I felt when I hung the drawing of the family tree on the wall for the first time. Later I took it down, but now I am no longer certain where it is, on the wall or in a file. Perhaps that doesn’t really matter. More important is what happened with Adam when he saw the grey truck. That same moment he began to understand the language spoken by Commander Andorfer and the other soldiers, suddenly he could see that there were parallel worlds, that the worlds were created by language, and that it was enough to alter the meaning of several words in order to change the existing world into a new one. And he saw precisely where that new camp was, the one about which Commander Andorfer had informed the members of the Administration did, indeed, exist, and what route one had to take to get there. He didn’t know precisely what went on inside the grey truck, because he was not familiar with how an automobile engine works. He had never been interested in such things. Then one night he dreamed that from the dense darkness, faces of people who were asphyxiating flew out before him. He opened his eyes and stared at the pale darkness of the great hall, filled with all the possible sounds the human body can produce. So it was that he was awake and saw the moment when the hall would be empty, and he almost fainted at the deafening silence. But before that, I said into the microphone, we must see, no, we can’t see, because the people whose names you carry were in the dark, we must feel what they felt, packed into the Saurer, driven by Götz and Meyer. At first there wasn’t much, I mean, they felt almost nothing, they just groped in the dark for their nearest of kin, and they spoke, they all spoke at the same time, so that Adam, although far from them, heard quite clearly how the spoken words were smashing and shattering. The truck stopped two or three times, but it started up again soon, and then someone recognised by the sound that they were crossing the bridge. They were going back, at last, to Belgrade. Then just when they began to try and guess which streets they were driving along, the truck stopped. The people whose names you bear fell silent, I said, and then they listened tensely in the dark. They heard voices, recognised German, but none of them understood the words, then the door slammed, someone walked along the truck, went back, stood, you heard some sort of rattling on the floor, and as if that had been some predetermined signal, everyone began to speak at once, to shout and bang the sides of the truck, until the door to the cab slammed again and the engine started up. Adam claimed that at that point you could hear birds, but I don’t know whether he can be believed. The truck, apparently, was driving through town, and it would have to go quite far before they would be anywhere near a wood with birds. Götz and Meyer also don’t remember any birds, though sometimes, if I am not mistaken, they told it differently. Whatever the case, soon after that second start, the people whose names you bear began to notice the smell of fuel exhaust. At first it was pleasant, like some secret bond with the outside world, and then more and more repellent, but sweetish, followed by nausea, a powerful headache, choking, hoarse screams, although there were those who lowered their heads and fell asleep. I touched my lips to the net on the microphone and looked at the students. Most of them were straining to breathe, one girl had clutched her throat, someone’s hand struggled feebly towards the window and then slid helplessly back, one boy covered his eyes with his hands, two girls had their arms round each other, their heads on one another’s shoulders, I saw some lips moving, but except for the driver’s soft whistling I heard no sounds. If we keep this up, Adam thought, all of us are going to die. He went over to the carpenter’s workshop and asked if they had anything he could use to poke holes in an aluminium partition. How thick? asked the carpenter. Adam showed a thickness between his index finger and his thumb: This thick, he said. You are not big enough to manage a drill, answered the carpenter, but you could handle a spike and bang it through with a hammer. A spike, a drill, a rasp, it didn’t matter, the carpenter was right, Adam wasn’t up to handling tools, he wouldn’t be able to use them, with the best of will he couldn’t have done because Adam was weak, he had no strength in his arms, no force to his swing. He had to come up with something else. But what was happening to you, I asked, here? No-one answered. One student’s tongue protruded from his lips. Most of them were sitting, eyes closed, though there were some who were staring, motionless, but all of them had faces twisted, convulsed, in revulsion or pain. We can only guess, I said, what they felt as their knees gradually gave way, as they slipped to the floor, pressed down by the other bodies, pushed by hands which were clutching at whatever they touched, some were still shouting, showing not the slightest inclination to let up, and then suddenly the dark began to disperse, and in that bright light they could no longer see anything. I put down the microphone and went down the aisle. I opened several windows, patted the young man on the cheek whose tongue was protruding from his lips, pulled back the curtain the dark-haired girl had used to hide her face. Using the route we are using now, I said, or one very much like it, but certainly in Götz and Meyer’s truck, about five thousand people passed right through the centre of town over the next few weeks. Their names were different, but they were always the same people, just as they were this time. Boringly similar, Götz, or Meyer, on whom Belgrade hadn’t left much of an impression, would have said. Götz, or was it Meyer, did enjoy a lovely sunset one evening while he was strolling about the Kalemegdan fortress, though later on, when he thought back, he associated that image with a place in Ukraine where another river flowed, and there was a camp there, too, and all in all, a soldier’s life is monotonous, no two ways about it, it is possible to make a mistake, no-one loses or gains anything. I stopped talking and sat down in the last, empty row. I admit I no longer knew what to say. The bus drove through Karadjordje Park and descended towards the Autokomanda part of town. It was somewhere here, I said, that this same kind of silence reigned in that grey truck. The only people speaking were Götz and Meyer, but they were up in the cab, debating about a black cat because of which Götz, or maybe Meyer, the one who was driving, had to brake. Though maybe, since traffic was not as bad then as it is now, maybe the souls were still parting from the limp bodies and rising towards the corner, where they were awaited by the shining of the other souls, the light that the dying had discerned in the dark. Although the carbon monoxide could no longer hurt them, they still breathed a sigh of relief when they reached the end of their trip, in Jajinci, and through the open door wafted out into the fresh air, up to the heights. The souls couldn’t know that this was Jajinci, I said, just as you don’t know that, the place doesn’t exist for you, it exists only for me, and it existed, of course, for Götz and Meyer, although they tried to speak of it as seldom as possible, because they could never pronounce it correctly. In their jargon, Jajinci was “that place”. For example: We are driving a load to “that place” again. Meanwhile Adam has been frantically trying to catch up with time. He was certain poison was being introduced into the truck. He couldn’t figure out how, but those faces from his dream convinced him he wasn’t mistaken. Everything is true, even what we dream. No, I said, Adam didn’t know this was Jajinci, haven’t I explained that already? I got up again and walked to the front of the bus. The driver was whistling pretty loudly now, mumbling two or three words now and then, something like a refrain. I picked up the microphone, coughed, and then I turned, faced the students who had sunk into other people’s bodies. I spoke to them like a hypnotist who has to wake his audience. He walks among the rows before that moment, removing what he wants from their pockets and their hearts, convinced all the while that they are somewhere, in other worlds from which they will return borne by rapture, unable to notice immediately what has been taken. But what happens, I find myself wondering, if the hypnotist makes a mistake somewhere, those worlds are easy to create but difficult to sustain, and it would be easy for there to be collisions, overlap, balancing of coordinates, and what if, halfway through, so to speak, someone wanders from one and crosses over to another? I mean if the hypnotist says something and claps his hands, which world will the people who have been hypnotised wake up in? I would like your attention, I said. I did not clap my hands, but they all listened: they moved their dulled, and then clearer and clearer, eyes in my direction, they straightened up in their seats, smoothed their hair, moistened their lips. Over the next fifty days, I said, Götz and Meyer’s truck travelled this same route once, or sometimes twice, a day, except Sundays. Sunday is the day of rest. Every Sunday Götz and Meyer went for a walk, played cards, drank beer. Every Monday, however, they arrived promptly at the gate to the camp, tidy, shaved, they didn’t even have bloodshot eyes. Unlike Adam’s bloodshot eyes, a consequence, he reckoned, of his sleepless nights spent concocting a plan to master whatever it was that was suffocating the people in the back of the grey truck. By this time we had got to Jajinci, and here, without allowing them a chance to even breathe in the fresh air, started the long story about how the work was organised, how they dug the graves and buried the corpses, I mentioned the five Serbian prisoners, of whom there may have been seven,