She regretted that she had told him how, on that first Friday, a soldier had planted his body on hers.
*
Rabbi Schapiro knew of children who had knocked at the door of Hungarian people they had never set eyes on, and these people had given them a hiding place. Those were the unknown, the self-effacing, who softened the face of the Christian world.
“No-one is without a face,” he said.
“No,” she agreed.
She remembered Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin of the Waffen-SS, the longest serving member of Einsatzgruppe D, who loved to shoot rabbis. For him, one murdered rabbi was like ten murdered Jews. He had shown her a photograph of the unit in which he’d first served. It was like a school photograph, the boys still wet behind their ears, barely unleashed from their mothers’ apron strings. They belonged to one of four detachments of Einsatzgruppe D, which, together with Einsatzgruppen A, B and C, had in the course of one year, during their advance from the Oder to the Dnieper and Volga, murdered more than a million people.
Skinny and the rabbi could supplement this picture with photographs taken by the Allies that they’d seen, of the pits, filled with the bodies of people who, before their execution, had had to take off their clothes. Unforgettable scenes, of tumbled, waxwork-like bodies.
To Obersturmführer Sarazin death meant an intertwined mass of bodies whose approximate number he would record, with the help ofhis book-keeping corporal, and after affixing the unit’s seal, forward to Berlin, along with a crate packed with his victims’ belongings.
The Obersturmführer had told her: “We are a new culture.” They wished to have nothing to do with what had gone before.
The 17-year-olds from her transport had been made to run under a rope strung across part of the ramp, as soon as they had arrived. They had no idea what the test was for. The shorter ones, those who didn’t have to duck to get under the rope, like her girl cousin, went straight to the gas chamber.
The hungriest among the others picked up the rats the Hitlerjugend boys had left lying in the mud. Skinny decided not to tell the rabbi — not before supper — what they had eaten.
“What remains good and what is bad?” The rabbi said after a moment.
And then: “What we didn’t see didn’t exist.”
Not for the first time on that tenth day it seemed to her that the rabbi was talking in a confused way.
“Sometimes it’s better not to see,” she said.
“What makes you stronger — seeing or not seeing?”
He didn’t expect an answer from her; or for that matter, from himself. Even so, he felt guilt. Would anyone ever know more? Know the whole mosaic?
She didn’t have to tell him that the most credible testimony could be borne only by the dead, not by those like herself who had survived.
“It began a long time ago,” the rabbi said.
They had been having this kind of conversation every evening before supper, except that he had not been so feverish before. She urged herself to be patient, so that they could finally sit down at the table.
“Do I want from you something that no-one can ever explain to me?”
“It happened every day,” she said.
“You think so?”
“Some things can’t be explained,” she admitted.
Did the rabbi accept her as an adult? “Child,” he had said. That had been his first word to her. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to treat her as a child or as an adult.
“There are no words for it,” the rabbi answered.
Yes, so far there were no words for it, he repeated to himself.
Not once had the rabbi used the word prostitution. It had become for him, over the ten days she was with him, a metaphor for something greater than the fate of just one 15-year-old.
“Even the most sacred was desecrated,” he said. “Even the purest was soiled.”
Words, he said to himself. For the second time on that tenth day he felt the misery of the world into which they had been born. The darker side of man. That which was in the words and beyond them. The darkness of silence. That which would remain a secret.
“Words such as life, words such as ruin,” he said.
“Words can be resisted,” she suggested.
“Catastrophe,” he repeated.
“Night, darkness, the void,” he said.
And then, once more in Hebrew, as though it could not be expressed in German or Hungarian: “Shoah.”
It was getting late.
“My heart is turning to stone,” the rabbi said.
“I doubt that,” she objected.
“My feet are turning to stone.”
“You should sit down.”
“I spent years sitting down.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Neither did I.”
“It’s getting late,” Skinny said.
“We shall have to learn to speak again in order to understand one another.”
Hadn’t Captain Hentschel said something similar to her when she didn’t answer him — that perhaps she was still learning to speak?
“We shall rake our joys together like last year’s dry leaves, those past joys that became memories, and those which we are still looking forward to as a child does to a surprise or a present.”
In his head he heard the Song of Songs. He repeated to himself the proverbs of Solomon, but not one of them seemed right for the moment. And the Psalms seemed flat. He was whispering to himself through barely parted lips, which were dry from thirst and fever.
“You are entitled to hate them,” he said.
“I’m not sure that’s what I want.”
“Robbing a person of joy is like rape.”
He had not missed what she’d said — that humiliating was like killing.
“I would allow you to hate them,” he said.
“I don’t wish to.”
“No-one would be surprised.”
“Even so.”
“No-one would hold it against you.”
“It isn’t in me,” she said.
It seemed funny that, while she was desperate to eat, the rabbi was seeking answers to something he couldn’t understand.
“You had your back against the wall,” the rabbi said.
“My back and my face,” she corrected him.
“You are righteous.”
“I’d rather be full of laughter.”
Before them was the table, the candlestick, its candle still unlit, several plates, the bread on a wooden cutting-board, butter on a little dish, a salt cellar and cutlery. The rabbi wore an old alpaca jacket which was dirty. After supper she would clean it for him. The dark spots on the knife, fork and spoon handles reminded her of the bloodstains on the floor of Dr Krueger’s surgery and the four castrated young men standing by the wall, their arms hanging, ashamed and frightened while the doctor photographed them.
“I’m a little confused by it all,” she said.
“Would you like to light the candle?”
She didn’t hesitate, but picked up the box of matches from the table, took a match out, held it between her right thumb and forefinger, struck it and carefully lit the wick. The flame flickered for a moment, then steadied and grew.
Tears were running down the rabbi’s cheeks.
Could he have gone insane during those ten days? She did not regard herself as entirely sane, but preferred not to examine herself too closely.
“It’s behind me,” she said finally.
“I hope so,” the rabbi replied.
“Are we going to eat?” she asked.
“We are going to eat.”
Then he said: “Perhaps I believe the way your mother would still believe if she were alive.” It sounded to him as if he were really saying that he didn’t believe any more. Was he hoping to convince himself or her? What did he still not know?