arest 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, and then skipped forward two years and talked about how they burned the corpses on this very same site, about sifting through the ashes for valuables, and how, according to witness statements, the ash was dumped into the Sava River somewhere on Čukarica, where fishermen later found coins, belt buckles, buttons, wallets, metal lapel pins. I couldn’t stop, despite the pleading looks of my students and their sickened grimaces. Then the driver said it was high time for us to be getting back. But we mustn’t forget Adam, who had finally worked out that what he had been thinking about so much was close at hand. Naturally: a gas mask. Easy to think of, impossible to do, another way of saying the same thing. But if there can be such a place as this camp, Adam wondered, then why shouldn’t everything be possible, and why shouldn’t it be possible that there might be a boy at the camp who finds a way to get hold of one simple gas mask? The first reality is already so unreal that nothing within it seems unreal any more, Adam might have thought, but instead, he immediately latched onto the practical details, trying to answer the questions: “where” and “when”, because everything depended on them, especially that slender thread which keeps life going, and to which every “why” is a weight that threatens to interrupt it. In short: he remembered that at the camp headquarters building, where he sometimes went to do one little job or another, right by the entrance, on a shelf, he had spotted several gas masks, left there, as far as he could tell, for the officers working in that place. All he had to do was find the right moment, a time when he could grab one of them, and the best time seemed when a new transport was being prepared, and when most of the officers and soldiers were busy keeping order. So it was. Don’t ask me how it happened, perhaps Adam was invisible that day, but while the women and children were climbing up into the grey truck, Adam strode, the gas mask under his shirt, towards a secret place where he would hide the mask until the day when his turn came. I know this is going on too long, but there are some things you can’t describe differently. I hope that the driver will understand, I said, and all of them, as if by command, looked at the driver, who first turned round, as if there was someone standing behind him, and then shrugged helplessly. And so it was, when the moment came, that Adam tucked the gas mask under his shirt, put on his thick sweater and winter coat, hunched over to cover the bulge over his stomach, and took his little suitcase to the other truck, the one that came into the camp, and then went over to the gate, where they were gathering the group set for transport. Not far from them, one of the drivers was giving the children sweets. Which means, I said, that now we can go back to the bus. Adam was among the first to get on and made his way to the furthest corner. He looked around but could hardly see a thing, because the truck quickly filled with people who were pushing and pressing against each other, trying to find as comfortable a spot as possible for the long journey. Then the door began to close, and most of them turned towards it, which meant that Adam had a little more room, using it to slip out of his coat. In the meantime, people were calling to each other in the dark, women were summoning their children, children were crying, someone cursed angrily, a voice, suddenly and clearly, said: What matters is that we’re leaving, and everyone fell silent. Adam sniffed carefully, but all he could sense were the smells of human bodies. Maybe there is no poison, he thought, maybe they will just drive us around until we suffocate from lack of air. But all his doubts were dispersed when the truck stopped altogether, the engine died, and everything got quiet, and you could hear someone’s footsteps, then a rattling that seemed to come through under their feet. Adam unbuttoned his shirt. Who knows how, in the dark, when the truck started up again and you could smell the petrol in the air, he managed with all the bands and buckles, but he pulled the mask over his face, and after two or three trial breaths, he started breathing evenly. Everything that followed he already knew from his dream, but still, despite the dark, he closed his eyes. He opened them only when all sound had died away in the truck, and he clearly heard someone in the cab repeat, in German: