Es ist aus, es ist aus. He tried to push away the body pressing against his legs, but it kept coming back and got heavier and heavier, so that in the end, when the truck stopped and the door started opening, he barely managed to manoeuvre out of his corner. The door had swung open by then, light was streaming into the smoke-filled truck, and Adam saw how the tangled heap of people was moving as if alive, and at the same time, stumbling, as if hurtling towards the source of light. Then this subsided, you could hear voices outside, and Adam slowly followed the smoke that was spilling out of the truck. He made his way with difficulty, climbing over the heaped-up bodies. When he peeked out, first he saw the sky, then greenery and excavated earth, all of it through a haze, and then he met the gaze of a man in a white shirt. Adam raised his hand to wipe the glass on the mask, and the man stumbled, fell to his knees and began to cross himself. It took Adam a little time to fiddle with the bands and buckles, then he slid down the tangled bodies closer to the door, and here he proceeded to remove the mask. Somehow this part was harder than putting it on, so that he didn’t even notice when the man in the white shirt was approached by a German soldier who smacked him on the back with his rifle butt. When Adam finally saw the soldier, he was raising his gun towards Adam, and Adam realised he could see him quite clearly, no trace of fog, he could even see the fine lines around the man’s eyes, squinting a little in the sun. How interesting, thought Adam, who was a curious boy, how does the bullet propel from the barrel? Then, slowly, the soldier’s trigger finger whitened with pressure. Adam didn’t hear the shot, but Commander Andorfer who, with Scharführer Götz, or possibly Meyer, was having a cigarette across the field, heard it. What was that? Commander Andorfer asked, his right hand in his pocket. Sounds as if someone fired a shot. He dipped his hand into the pocket, pulled out the little bag of cough sweets and offered them to the Scharführer. They listened, listened, but heard nothing. During that time Adam was falling. He fell slowly, bit by bit, as if crumbling, as if, he thought, he’d never fall all the way, but once he was almost to the ground, he felt how he suddenly pulled free of himself and rose slowly, straight up, skywards, until the people on the ground were tiny ants. So, said the driver, should we go back to the school? If I hadn’t been holding the microphone, I would have fallen, his voice shocked me so. I did muster the strength to say yes, and I caught sight of a little flicker in the glassy eyes of my students. For homework, I said, and the flicker was instantly snuffed out, write a composition on the theme: “Today I Am Someone Else”. I put the microphone back in its place, turned off the sound system. Adam was dead. I’d thought, I’d hoped he would survive. I could have lain down between the bus seats and fallen asleep instantly, I was so drained. It isn’t easy to show someone that the world, like a sock, has its other side, and that all you need is one skilful twist to switch one side to the other, skilful and quick, so that no-one notices the change, but everyone accepts that the wrong side is in fact the right side of the world. The bus stopped and the students rushed off, mumbling their good-byes. The driver took out the papers I had to sign, and for a moment, while I scribbled the letters that comprised my name, I thought of asking him how he had understood the story about the inside-out world, but then I noticed his lips, pursed, ready to whistle, and I gave up. There was something in that mouth that reminded me of Götz’s and Meyer’s lips, though I’d never seen them and could only imagine them, but I really did imagine them that way, at least in part, at least at the moment when Götz, or Meyer, raised his razor and started shaving. In all this the lips have no meaning whatsoever, I don’t know why I mention them. When I got off the bus, three of the girls from the class came over. They all three spoke at once, and, as far as I could gather, they wanted to know whether I truly believe that people have souls. I do believe that, I said. But Adam, the highest treble among the girls asked, was he greeted, I mean was his soul met by someone up there? We stared up at the sky for a moment. Of course, I said, they were all up there, a whole throng of golden souls hovering nearby, he could feel how all the pain poured from him and vanished into the endless blue. Yes, yes, yes, they said, again all three of them with one breath, obviously impatient, but in that case, they immediately wanted to know, if souls already exist, can they be lost? Of course they can, I said, although a soul that remembers can never be lost. Don’t all souls remember, they asked, surprised. Some of them don’t, I said, some try to forget. Yes, yes, yes, they said, thanked me, turned away and left. That was all I needed: a riddle at the end of a day full of dying. Today I had already been Adam, Commander Andorfer, Götz and Meyer, the Serbian prisoner and the German soldier, I could not also be an interpreter of human souls, regardless of the fact that I speak of them as if I meet them daily. I have never seen a soul, and I can only imagine one, just as I picture Götz and Meyer, whom I have also never seen. I did, indeed, one night, starting suddenly from a dream, catch sight beneath the ceiling of a small, silvery body, round and completely transparent, and when I blinked, it vanished. Now I am prepared to believe that that was a soul, perhaps not mine, but nevertheless a soul, although at the time I convinced myself that it was the afterglow of the headlights from a car that had rushed by in the road. In short, the talk of the soul reminded me that I had recently, maybe two weeks before, contemplated suicide. It was a moment when I asked myself for the umpteenth time, as I leafed through documents from the file of witness statements, what I would have done had I been at the camp and understood at one point, as the prisoners surely must ultimately have understood, that the transports in the grey truck were not the beginning of a journey to the promised camp, in Romania or Poland, but rather that in there, in the truck, hid the beginning and end of every journey — would I have waited obediently, even then, for the inevitable spin of the wheel of fate, or would I have sought some way to circumvent it? It was evening, I was already exhausted, and something else was demanding my attention, so that only later, as I was brushing my teeth, did it occur to me: I’d kill myself. Once that idea had nudged my consciousness, I could no longer shake it off. I lay there in bed, in the dark, breathing deeply and waiting for my heart to stop pounding. My resolve shocked me, there is no point in pretending it didn’t, despite the fact that it was expressed in the conditional tense. It didn’t take me long to get from there to the present time, not, of course, grammatical, but real, time, the one enveloping us. Here I should mention that I had earlier thought of suicide as an act of cowardice and was truly surprised by my readiness to see in it something else, for instance: the right to the choice of one’s last minute in life. I was drawn to the possibility of interpreting that as a symbolic liberation from Götz and Meyer, a statement of my superiority and their defeat. Taking everything into consideration, the most natural way to do it, if you can say such a thing of suicide, would be ending my life in a car. All I had to do was find an empty place, attach the exhaust pipe to a rubber hose and run the other end into the car, turn on the engine, close my eyes and wait. I ignored the fact that I had no car and did not know how to drive, but for that reason I spent a great deal of time debating the music for my funeraclass="underline" first I thought of Mozart, anything of Mozart’s, I’d always enjoyed his lightness, then I remembered Villa-Lobos and his compositions for the guitar, and finally I decided I would be more radical, but I couldn’t make up my mind between Stockhausen and Cage. I don’t know whether all people contemplating suicide are so finicky, but a long time spent going through my records convinced me that I had been mistaken and that I’d never have the strength to turn against myself, not the courage or the cowardice, not in a camp or outside it, rather I’d wait, like most people, for fate to come for me. I hesitated regarding Götz and Meyer, and real death seemed too high a price for a symbolic victory. So the rubber tube, which I had bought, just in case, in the market, is still in the bathroom, next to the tub. There, everything comes down to the same choice between victory and defeat. There is no middle road. If I had been in my flat at that moment, I wouldn’t have missed the chance to write that on a piece of paper and put it in the file with my name on it: there is no middle road. Aside from memory, of course, as I explained to my students: a soul that remembers cannot be lost. I know that I have already said that and that I’m repeating myself, but it is not my fault that life is built on repetitions and that its movement, which resembles a straight line, actually goes round in circles. We are like a dog chasing its tail but never catching it. There, I’m talking about dogs, and not the little fish in the aquarium that I did not manage to keep alive. One by one they flipped over on their backs and stared at me, balefully, with their rigid eyes. So it goes: first the fish are betrayed, then everyone else. My relatives, for instance. Then, in the grocer’s window, I caught sight of my reflection among the vegetables and biscuits and thought that I was being unfair towards that hunched, balding man. Everyone could see how much effort it took him to bear the burden of his years, though at least I knew that it was the weight of memory, the capacity of memory, that was at issue. Luckily I was close to home just then, and I could catch my breath. First I leaned against a sign post, then I wanted to sit on the bonnet of a parked car, but its alarm went off and I had to walk away quickly, turning back frequently, as if I, the innocent passerby, just happened to be interested in what was happening. I went into my flat, out of breath, and sat for a long time in the front hall, on the floor, undoing my shoelaces. I got up, avoiding the mirror on the opposite wall. Today I had already been so many people that I was afraid of what I’d see there. With my head bowed, my eyes closed, I slipped into my slippers and went into the kitchen. The bottle of home-made brandy and three glasses were still on the table, a trace of Götz and Meyer’s unexpected visit a few nights back. I don’t know why I’d never put them away, but I remembered the order of the glasses: mine stood a little further away from the other two, closer to the bottle, which it nearly touched with its wide rim. I drew the glass to me, then the bottle, and poured myself a brandy, just a little, only enough for me to lick it and taste how it burned. Sometimes all we need is the burning, I have to say that, regardless of the fact that I’m not one of those people familiar with rage. If I were, who knows how my encounter with Götz and Meyer would have ended on that bench at the old people’s home in the foothills of the Alps. It is good that they are not here. The burning might push a person to do things he might later regret. And so, without letting go of the glass, I went into the sitting room. I call it the sitting room, though generally I lie on the sofa in the evenings. There are times I sit there, too, until late at night. In the silence, behind one of the walls, you can hear the cuckoo in a wall clock. I switched on the light. There were no traces of any kind, not even mine. I no longer wondered where the drawing of my family tree was: it was on the wall, as it used to be. I stood there in front of it and carefully read each name, the years of birth and death, and the question marks. When I started, I believed that by working out what was behind the question marks I would resolve