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 the meaning of the question mark I had become, but I hadn’t even got as far as the dot under it. I brought my glass to my nose: it smelled of brandy but without the burning, if burning has a smell. I looked over again at the sketch of the family tree with its cropped treetop out of which a few, nearly dry, branches protruded. It was easy to see that this tree would no longer bear fruit, you didn’t need to be especially clever to realise that, just as those people who cropped it didn’t need to be much good at gardening. Götz and Meyer, for instance, though it wouldn’t have surprised me had I learned that one of them tended roses. Then it seemed to me that I heard a noise from the kitchen, but first I wanted to be sure that the sketch of the family tree understood what I had done today: that I, in picturesque terms, had sowed the seeds of remembering among my students, especially among those three girls from the class; there would be no fruit from that seed, but if it fell on fertile ground, at least that would prevent the weeds of forgetting from growing. Because as long as there is remembering, that was what I had really wanted to say to them, there is a chance, no matter how slim, that someone, once, somewhere, will look at the real faces of Götz and Meyer, something I hadn’t managed to do. And as long as their faces are nothing but a stand-in for any face, Götz and Meyer will return and repeat the meaninglessness of history that becomes, in the end, the meaninglessness of our lives. The tree is silent, it does not answer. I, too, say nothing. After a few words there is no longer any point in speaking. Sounds come from the kitchen again, and I turn, still holding the glass, and walk towards the kitchen door. There is no-one, however, in the kitchen. Two glasses, rinsed, are upside down on the edge of the sink. On the table, right in the middle, is the coiled rubber tubing. Next to the tubing is a piece of paper, and on it lies a pencil, though there is nothing on the paper. There is no bottle, but now I have no time to look for it. I put down the glass, walk into the front hall and listen. It turns out that I am listening in the wrong direction, because the noise that finds me, no louder than the rustling of papers, comes from my left, from behind the door of the study. I go over there slowly, on tiptoe, my calves and thighs ache with the effort. As I walk, I reach for a weapon, any weapon, because I know, I know who is behind that door and what they are doing, although I have never seen them and can only imagine them. I catch sight of the umbrella hanging on the coat stand, old-fashioned, all of a piece, with a long ferrule and curved bamboo handle. I take it, tuck the handle under my right arm, nudge the door open, and with the umbrella brandished like a spear, I burst into the study with a shriek. The point needn’t even be sharp, I think, as I lunge through the dark. I feel slowed by resistance, the shudder of penetration, then lurch, full force, into the wall.