I had not seen Skinny since September. I found her again in Prague about three months after the end of the war. It was a hot August; the days were close, with sudden brief thunderstorms. She attracted me with something that I probably would not have liked in another girl. I sensed right from our first meeting in Prague that there was in her something she didn’t wish to talk about and which I should not even wish to know. But, as is natural, this made me even more curious. And the more curious I was the more reticent she became.
Some people in Prague were told they should not have come back but stayed where they were. One of them jumped out of a window. He had been a machine gunner in the eastern army. Two of his brothers were killed and he had lost his father, his mother and three children. His heavy Maxim gun, so recently effective against the Germans, didn’t help him with peacetime. He wrote a farewell note that was published in the Bulletin of the Jewish Communities; they printed it on the last page.
Skinny thought it odd that there could be anti-Semitism when there were so few Jews left. It was rumoured that nine-tenths of them been killed. Suddenly we realized that one could survive the war and be defeated after it. But that, our mutual friend Ervin Adler argued, was not our affair. Could the echo be stronger than what had produced it?
While in the camps, we had idealized the outside world, not realizing that it didn’t give a damn about us. Between us and them were invisible shadows, fences and barriers. Some of the walls were high and thick; getting over was not easy. For a while we each remained behind our walls, peeping at one another over the top. Adler had met an elderly gentleman in the park who, after gazing at him for a long time, eventually summoned the courage to ask him whether, by any chance, he had also come back from a concentration camp. Before Adler could even reply the man said, “I do apologize.”
It seemed laughable to Adler, but it was the first thing he told us that day.
“It’s an unfinished story,” he said.
Fortunately we were at an age when you didn’t feel sad for 24 hours a day, even though it was just as impossible to feel happy for 24 hours a day. We endeavoured to raise our spirits with free meals in one of Prague’s soup kitchens, where the three of us were frequent visitors. Once Adler said that he wouldn’t like to be a widow dining there, being reminded by the blobs of fat floating on the soup of the eyes of her dead husband. Skinny did not find this remark funny. Where did Adler get his ideas from?
“Who did they kill in your family?” he asked her.
“All of them,” Skinny said.
“Same here,” Adler said.
They fell silent. It was the same for practically everybody. Adler had found it rather ridiculous when his concierge asked him how the world could have permitted it. Now it seemed just as ridiculous to Skinny. I was glad no-one asked me the same question. I had been in an orphanage even before the war. I imagined my grandmother Olga’s fate without having to ask. People over 35 had a slim chance, those over 60 none whatever.
“What will you inherit?” Adler asked her.
She didn’t answer him.
Because Skinny had so often lost all she had, after the war she clung to everything she could get hold of. She had three pairs of boots. She called them “my dear little boots,” even though she just looked at them and wore other shoes. Or she would play with a new skirt (or rather an old-new one she’d been given by Mrs Jäger of the Jewish Community’s social welfare department) and address it by name, as “my dear little red skirt”. That one kept its name: the Red One. She also had a green one, a check one and a striped one which was pleated. She had to feel things, to touch them. She would reassure herself during the night — getting out of bed — that they were hers. She reconciled herself from the outset to the fact that she could lose her things and she was surprised if she kept anything. To have and not to have, to receive and to lose: inversely proportional dimensions. Loving her new things as she did, she was unaware that some of it looked like stuff from a second-hand clothes shop. But while her wardrobe became more and more colourful, she felt naked and impoverished — probably because she wanted to be ready in case misfortune once more befell her.
She spoke about her family.
“My father saw Germany as a locomotive at full speed. Us he saw as tied to the rails. The train was rushing towards us. Nothing could stop it.”
She did not say then that her father had thrown himself at the high-voltage fence at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nor did she say anything about Rottenführer Erich Schratz. Schratz had beaten her father’s face, his head, his private parts for six days running. The seventh day was a Sunday and the Rottenführer was not on duty. But he had given instructions to the block leader. This man did not beat her father so hard, but he could not ignore his orders. That was the day her father took his life.
Her mother had met her fate on a bridge, just a few steps from her native land. And Ramon was dead too. He was almost 14. Would he have gone on with school? Her father had believed that a trade would be preferable.
I could guess what she was thinking of, because she added: “Good and evil. Perhaps Hitler didn’t think he was a devil.”
I shall not forget the way Adler — with whom we became a threesome with all the advantages and disadvantages of such an arrangement — inspected Skinny one day. It was in Wenceslas Square in front of the Hotel Europa, where we used to meet. For an instant his eyes rested on the centre of her skirt, then he raised them. She was standing before him in a thin blouse, a rather long skirt, high boots as for mountain walking, and floral-patterned socks — a very pretty girl. He appreciated her reticence. Adler was apt to seek in others what he was afraid of in himself. Probably the thing that bound us together was that we didn’t have a lot to share, since none of us had very much — a subsidy from the Repatriation Office, a few clothes supplied by the social welfare department, and in Skinny’s case, a green US Army blanket from which she had fashioned a single-breasted winter coat with green buttons made by an acquaintance of her mother’s. It matched her eyes. We spoke about her, Adler and I. I didn’t want to wind up like Adler — he loved her one day and spoke ill of her the next.
I watched her closely when she was unaware of it. There was something of the expression of a frightened deer, as well as its charm, in her green eyes with their gingery lashes and paler eyebrows. Her face seemed to me every bit as pretty as Greta Garbo’s, whom the three of us had seen in Ninotchka, La Dame aux Camâias and Queen Christina. She had a kind of dignity, that of the humiliated, in her face, her features, her head and her movements, in the way she behaved and expressed herself.
After all she’d been through she still believed in that empty place between her crotch and her abdomen, which no-one would fill or dishonour or violate unless she invited him in. It was not, of course, the only empty place in her. I tried to imagine her belly as a hidden secret box. And she still believed in her father’s love for her mother when she was conceived.