She had not been included in the small number of craftsmen and doctors whose lives were considered useful enough to be preserved… A policeman had pushed her towards a dusty mound in the marketplace where three drunken men were standing. She had known one of these men before the war: he had been in charge of some railway depot; now he was the Chief of Police. Before she had even understood that these three men were the arbiters of life and death, the policeman had given her another shove; she had joined the buzzing crowd of men, women and children who had been pronounced useless.
Then they had walked towards the airfield in the stifling heat of their last August day. As they walked past the dusty apple trees by the roadside, they had prayed, torn their clothes and uttered their last piercing cries. Natasha herself had remained quite silent.
She would never have thought that blood could be so strikingly red. When there was a momentary silence amid the shooting, screaming and groaning, she heard the murmur of flowing blood; it was like a stream, flowing over white bodies instead of white stones.
The quiet crackle of machine-gun fire and the gentle, exhausted face of the executioner – he had waited patiently as she walked timidly to the edge of the pit – had hardly seemed frightening at all… Later, during the night, she had wrung out her wet shirt and walked back to the town. The dead don't rise from the grave – so she must have been alive.
When she made her way back to the ghetto, through the small alleys and yards, she had found people dancing and singing on the main square. A band was playing a sad, dreamy waltz that had always been one of her favourites. Couples were whirling round in the wan light of the moon and the streetlamps; the shuffling of soldiers' boots and girls' shoes merged with the music. At that moment this young, drooping girl had felt joyful and self-assured. Quietly, under her breath, she began singing in anticipation of some future happiness. From time to time, when no one was watching, she had even tried to waltz.
47
David could only very dimly remember what had happened since the beginning of the war. There was one night, though, when a little of what he had just lived through came back to him.
It was dark and his grandmother was taking him to the Bukhmans. The sky was full of stars and the horizon was quite light, almost lemon-green. Burdock leaves brushed against his cheeks like cold, moist hands.
Everyone was sitting in a hiding-place in the attic, behind a false wall. In the sun the black sheets of corrugated-iron roofing gave off a fierce heat. Sometimes the smell of burning penetrated their hiding-place. The ghetto was on fire. During the day they had to lie absolutely still. The Bukhman's daughter, Svetlanochka, kept up a monotonous crying. Bukhman himself had a weak heart and in the daytime he looked as though he were dead. During the night he ate some food and quarrelled with his wife.
Suddenly they heard dogs barking. And words in a foreign language: 'Asta! Asta! Wo sind die Juden?' There was a growing rumble over their heads: the Germans had climbed out of the dormer-window onto the roof.
Then the thundering in the black tin sky died down. Through the walls they heard quiet, sly blows – someone was testing for echoes.
The hiding-place became silent. It was a terrible silence, a silence of tensed shoulders and necks, of bared teeth, of eyes bulging out of their sockets.
Then little Svetlana began her wordless lament. Her cries broke off very abruptly. David looked round and met the frenzied eyes of her mother, Rebekka Bukhman.
Once or twice since then he had glimpsed those eyes… And the head of the little girl – thrown right back like the head of a rag-doll.
He could remember everything that had happened before the war.
Those memories came back to him all the time. He had become like an old man – living on his past, loving it and cherishing it.
48
On David's birthday, 12 December, his mother had bought him a picture book.
A small grey goat was standing in a clearing; the darkness of the forest seemed particularly sinister. Among the dark-brown tree-trunks, the toadstools and the fly-agarics, you could see the wolf's green eyes and his red jaw with its bared teeth.
Only David knew about the now inevitable murder. He banged his fist on the table, he screened the goat with the palm of his hand – but he knew there was no way he could save it.
During the night he shouted out: 'Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!'
His mother woke up. As she came towards him, she was like a white cloud in the darkness. He yawned blissfully, knowing that the strongest power in the whole world was now defending him from the darkness of the forest.
When he was older, it was the red dogs in The Jungle Book that most frightened him. One night his room had become filled with wild red beasts; he had made his way barefoot, past the sticking-out chest of drawers, to his mother's bed.
When he was feverish and delirious, he always had the same nightmare. He was lying on a sandy beach and tiny waves, no bigger than the smallest of little fingers, were tickling his body. Suddenly, on the horizon, appeared a blue mountain of water; it got bigger and bigger as it rushed silently towards him. David lay there on the warm sand; the dark blue mountain loomed over him. This was something even more terrible than the wolf and the red dogs.
In the morning his mother would leave for work. He would go down the back stairs and pour a cup of milk into an empty crab-meat can – this was for a thin stray cat with a pale nose, weepy eyes and a long fine tail. And then one day a woman who lived next door had said that some people had come in the early morning, put that disgusting animal in a box and taken it away to the Institute, thank God…!
'Where on earth is this Institute? How can you expect me to go there? It's quite impossible. You'll just have to forget that unfortunate cat,' his mother had said as she looked into his pleading eyes. 'How are you going to survive in the world? You mustn't let yourself be so vulnerable.'
His mother had wanted to send him to a children's summer-camp. He had cried and pleaded with her, throwing up his hands in despair and shouting: 'I promise I'll go to my grandmother's, but please not that camp!'
His mother had taken him to his grandmother's by train. On the way he refused to eat; the idea of eating a hard-boiled egg, of taking a meat-rissole from a piece of greasy paper, made him feel ashamed.
His mother stayed there with him for the first five days and then had to go back to work. He said goodbye to her without a single tear, but he put his arms round her neck and hugged her so fiercely that she said: 'You'll strangle me like that, you silly. There are lots and lots of cheap strawberries here, and in two months time I'll come back and fetch you.'
There was a bus-stop next to his grandmother's house. The bus went from the town to the tannery. The Ukrainian word for bus-stop was zupynka.
His late grandfather had been a member of the Jewish Bund; he had been very famous and had once lived in Paris. As a result, his grandmother was greatly respected – and frequently given the sack from her work.
He could hear radios blaring out through the open windows. 'Attention, attention, this is Radio Kiev speaking…'
In the daytime the street was quite deserted; it only came to life when the apprentices at the tannery came past, calling out across the street: 'Bella, did you pass? Yashka, come and help me go over Marxism again!'
In the evenings everyone came home – the tannery workers, the shop assistants, and Sorok, an electrician at the local radio-station. His grandmother worked for the trade-union committee at the surgery.