He did not see the beginning, he only saw the continuation. He knew now where Skinny had been and what she had done. He tried to see her ordeal in conjunction with justice, so that he would not attribute even a shadow of guilt where it was not due. He could not explain what even religion had no answers to. He was confused and disoriented. He reflected on boundless shamelessness. She had wanted to stay alive, and she could stay alive by undergoing what she had endured. When is staying alive a sin, or wanting to stay alive? When is the mere wish to stay alive blasphemy? The rabbi found himself at a point he had not reached before. There was no longer a yes or no answer. A position of good and bad, of right and wrong. What was a lie and what just an error? What was just and what unjust?
He wished it were simpler, for himself and for her. As wide open as the sea when he stood at its shore; as the sky when he looked up. Not disappearing in a fog as the stars at dawn or a shadow at night. The line between justice and sin, between blasphemy and honour. Not an accusation against those who were unable to defend themselves.
Rabbi Gideon Schapiro felt that in a land without God, in a world without God, among people without God, under the pulled-down pillars of the heavenly vault, an unbearable burden fell upon him, like boulders that would crush even the strongest man.
“Thus the disaster came about,” the rabbi murmured. “That’s where the devil came from. That’s what opened the door and the windows and swept away all barriers.”
Then he added: “Shoah”
She heard the word for the first time. It was Hebrew. From the rabbi’s expression, from his shining brown eyes, the beads of sweat that appeared on his forehead, she could guess what it meant. He pronounced the three Hebrew characters as if he were pulling a rock down upon himself.
On her first day at the brothel she had regarded her pain as a punishment — just as Estelle did. She had committed a sin and her only excuse was that she wanted to stay alive. The rabbi wondered when wishing to stay alive could be a sin. She had not expected the depth of her humiliation, nor the pain, nor her unpreparedness, her sense of vertigo and free fall — until she eventually got used to it. Not that “used to” was really the right term. Had it helped that she had to conceal all the pain, just as she did her origin? She shared with Estelle a tendency to blame herself for something that was not their fault. They were surrounded by a world within which was their private world, invisible to others, a world of personal guilt which became their home.
“There is no more justice,” the rabbi said.
Then he added: “It is an unending chain.” He was thinking of the injustice that enveloped them. He knew of no book that could teach one how to live in such a time.
“We have learned to die,” he whispered. Was he saying that they were waiting for a second heaven? She didn’t wish to ask him.
It did not bother her that he was talking in riddles. Perhaps she, too, sometimes talked in this way, even though it did her good to speak openly. She wondered how far she should allow her openness free rein. She was afraid that she might herself become terrified by what she was telling him.
They were waiting for the first star to appear.
“What are we, each of us?” the rabbi asked. And Skinny answered him, just as quietly: “I am just a lump of flesh.”
She ate well. The rabbi was a good cook. She left practically nothing of what he put before her or let her prepare for herself. She devoured the soft Hungarian bread with its crisp crust that the baker delivered, and the Hungarian salami the butcher brought. At first, the rabbi paid them in Hungarian pengö, later with gold rings and other valuables, until eventually he had nothing left and the butcher and baker supplied him on credit.
On the third day the rabbi opened a large cupboard. One half of it contained the clothes of his wife, the other the clothes and accessories of his daughter.
“Her name was Erzsika,” Rabbi Schapiro said.
She realized they were both dead.
“Take whatever you need. It’s as if they were giving it to you,” the rabbi told her.
She looked at a cotton nightshirt and a flannel one. The rabbi took them out from the stack of underwear and handed them to her. She did not know yet which of the two she would sleep in, perhaps neither. She had become accustomed to wearing things that had belonged to dead people.
During the night she dreamt of Erzsika, the rabbi’s daughter.
The rabbi did not mention them to her again. Not until much later did she ask about them at all. Hints were sufficient; she worked out the rest for herself.
On the fifth day they kept silent. Skinny rested and ate. She spent hours in the bath, immersed to her chin, in hot, then tepid and finally cold water — as she was accustomed to. It was unbelievable to feel clean. She divided her day into two halves: during the first half she remembered the faces, hands, feet and bodies of the girls from No. 232 Ost, Madam Kulikowa, the guards and the officers, while in the second half she planned how she would live her new life. At first these ideas were vague but gradually they acquired a sharper outline. No. 232 Ost was always in the background for these. She lay in the water and talked to the girls about what the day held in store, she saw herself passing the guards, recalling individual faces, uniforms, and cars. She was still afraid of The Frog, as though he were just round the corner, instead of the pharmacy, the tailor’s shop, the tavern, the baker and the butcher, with its brightly coloured notices in Hungarian. Lying in the bath, staring at the ceiling, she watched the wolves and swept the snow from the entrance to let the vehicles enter and leave the yard of No. 232 Ost.
On the sixth day the rabbi said to her: “You were in a house without God; in a country without God. Under stars where God was absent.”
It sounded like an echo. Surely he had said this before?
“Among people who had walked away from the Ten Commandments. You were in a heathen, German land.”
“I was in Poland,” Skinny said.
“You were in Europe.”
On the seventh day Rabbi Schapiro asked her — as if she was the rabbi and not he: “Isn’t God everywhere, invisible and omnipresent?”
They were at the end of the circle and back at its beginning.
“He is powerless,” she said, as if this were a question one could answer. That was how it seemed to her. Who was she going to confess this to, if not to a rabbi? She did not want to say it again.
The rabbi was ashamed to look into her half-childish, half-adult green eyes. He did not want to see in them a sea of death covered with ashes. She didn’t only have sad eyes: she had eyes that saw what she had been through and what was ahead of her. There was in her a primitive awareness that she was alive, in spite of everything. That was quite a lot. She was like a small island of life in an ocean of death. She could not admit to herself that with her 15-year-old eyes she had, during those 21 days, seen more than Rabbi Gideon Schapiro in all the years that he was a rabbi; more than all the rabbis of all generations the world over, throughout the past 40 centuries.
He was looking at her long legs, her thin thighs and childish breasts and resisted the thought of the men she had been with. He hesitated to ask the question, which endlessly troubled him: Was God merciful? Or what was the opposite of mercy. He realized that he was not the first person to accuse God.