'Who am I? In the end, who am I?' Sofya Osipovna wondered. 'The short, snotty little girl afraid of her father and grandmother? The stout, hot-tempered woman with tabs of rank on her collar? Or this mangy, lice-ridden creature?'
She had lost any hope of happiness, but many different dreams had appeared in its place: of killing lice… of reaching the chink in the wall and being able to breathe… of being able to urinate… of washing just one leg… And then there was thirst, a thirst that filled her whole body.
She had been thrown into the wagon. In the gloom, which had seemed like complete darkness, she had heard the sound of quiet laughter.
'Is that a madman laughing?' she asked.
'No,' answered a man's voice. 'We're just telling jokes.'
Someone else said in a melancholy tone of voice: 'One more Jewess on our ill-fated train.'
Sofya Levinton stood by the door and answered people's questions, frowning as she tried to get used to the darkness. She felt suddenly overwhelmed, not only by the stench and the noise of people crying and groaning, but by the sound of words and intonations she had last heard in childhood.
She wanted to step further inside, but found this impossible. Feeling a thin little leg in short trousers, she said: 'Forgive me, son; did I hurt you?'
The boy didn't answer.
'Mother,' said Sofya into the darkness, 'perhaps you could move your dumb little boy. I can't stand here for ever.'
'You should have sent a telegram in advance,' said a hysterical voice from the corner. 'Then you could have reserved a room with a private bath.'
'Fool!'
A woman whose face she could now just make out, said: 'You can sit down beside me. There's plenty of room here.'
Sofya could feel her fingers trembling. Yes, this was a world she had known since childhood, the world of the shtetl – but very changed.
The cattle-wagon was full of workers from different co-operatives, girls at teacher-training college, teachers from a school for trade unionists; there was a radio technician, an engineer who worked at a canned-food factory, a livestock expert, and a girl who worked as a vet. Previously, such professions had been unheard of in the shtetl. But then Sofya herself was still the same small girl who had been afraid of her father and grandmother – she hadn't changed. Perhaps, at heart, this world remained equally unchanged. But what did it matter? Changed, or unchanged, the world of the shtetl was poised on the brink of the abyss.
'Today's Germans are just savages,' she heard a young woman say. 'They haven't even heard of Heinrich Heine.'
A man's voice from another corner said mockingly: 'What help's this Heine of yours been to us? The savages are rounding us up like cattle.'
People plied Sofya with questions about the position on the different fronts. Nothing she said was very encouraging and she was promptly told she had been misinformed; she realized that this wagon had its own strategy, a strategy founded on a passionate hunger to remain alive.
'Surely you must have heard that an ultimatum has been sent to Hitler demanding the immediate release of all Jews?'
Yes, of course. What saves people when their bovine melancholy, their mute fatalism yields to a piercing sense of horror – what saves people then is the opium of optimism.
They soon lost interest in Sofya. She was just one more prisoner -with no more idea of her destination than anyone else. No one asked her name and patronymic; no one remembered her surname. She realized with surprise that although the process of evolution had taken millions of years, these people had needed only a few days to revert to the state of cattle, dirty and unhappy, captive and nameless…
She was also surprised how upset everyone still got over trivia, how quick they were to quarrel with one another. One middle-aged woman turned to her and said: 'Look at that grande dame over there! She sits there beside that chink in the wall as though no one except her son has a right to any fresh air.'
The train stopped twice during the night. They listened to the squeaking boots of the guards, occasionally making out odd phrases of both German and Russian. The language of Goethe sounded quite appalling in the middle of the night at a Russian wayside halt, but the Russian spoken by the collaborators was still more sinister.
Like everyone else, Sofya began to suffer from hunger and thirst. Even her dreams had something pathetic about them; she dreamed of a squashed tin with a few drops of warm liquid at the very bottom. She scratched herself with the quick, jerky movements of a dog scratching itself for fleas.
Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely. And however wretched and miserable this existence was, the thought of violent death still filled her with horror.
It began to rain; a few drops came in through the barred window.
Sofya tore a strip from the hem of her shirt, made her way towards the wall and pushed the material through a small chink. She waited for it to absorb the rainwater, pulled it away and began to suck; it was cool and damp. Soon, the other people sitting by the wall were following her example. Sofya felt quite proud of herself; she was the one who had thought up a way of catching the rainwater.
The little boy she had bumped into during the night was still sitting nearby; he was watching everyone squeeze their shreds of material into the chinks. The dim light was enough for her to make out his thin face and sharp nose. He must have been about six years old. Sofya realized that he hadn't moved or said a word while she had been there; nor had anyone else said a word to him. She held out her wet rag and said: 'Here you are, son.'
He didn't answer.
'Go on. It's for you.'
Hesitantly, the boy stretched out his hand.
'What's your name?' she asked.
'David,' he answered quietly.
Sofya's neighbour, Musya Borisovna, told her that David was from Moscow. He had come to stay with his grandmother and been cut off by the outbreak of war. The grandmother had died in the ghetto and he had been left with another relative, Rebekka Bukhman; her husband had fallen ill and she wouldn't let the boy sit beside her in the wagon.
By evening Sofya had had her fill of conversations, stories and arguments; she was even talking and arguing herself. She often began with the words: 'Fellow Jews, what I think…'
Many of the people in the wagon were looking forward to the end of the journey; they thought they were being taken to camps where each person would be given work in his own field and the sick would receive special care. They talked about this incessantly. But, deep down, their souls were still gripped by a silent horror.
Sofya learned that there were many things in human beings that were far from human. She heard about a paralysed woman who had been frozen to death by her sister; she had been put in a tub and dragged out onto the street on a winter's night. She heard about mothers who had killed their own children; there was one in this very wagon. She heard about people who had lived in sewers for months on end, eating filth like rats, ready to endure anything if only they could stay alive.
The conditions the Jews lived in were terrible; and they were neither saints nor villains, they were human beings.
Sofya's pity for these people grew particularly intense when she looked at little David. Most of the time he just sat there without saying a word; sometimes he took a crumpled matchbox out of his pocket, looked inside, and hid it away again.
For several days now Sofya hadn't wanted to sleep. She sat there, wide awake, in the stinking darkness. 'I wonder where Zhenya Shaposhnikova is now,' she thought suddenly. As she listened to people's cries and mutterings, she realized that their heads were filled with painfully vivid images that no words could ever convey. How could these images be preserved, how could they be fixed – in case men remained alive on earth and wanted to find out what had happened?