“Something, certainly.”
“Three or six years?”
She smiled at him like a child at an adult or an adult at a child.
“Our ship sank,” he said. “Only some scattered shipwrecks survived.”
He looked at her carefully combed ginger hair, parted in the middle and still damp from her bath.
“Our train was derailed,” he continued. “The brakes, which used to function, failed.”
“Time I went to bed,” Skinny said. She would wash his shirts in the morning, she decided, even though it was the Sabbath. She would get it done before he woke.
“You should eat something before going to bed,” she said. “It doesn’t do you any good to only drink. I saw people in the camp who didn’t eat even the little they could have eaten.”
He did not ask her why, but if he had, she would not have told him that they had lost the will to live. Was the rabbi afraid that perhaps the war was not over yet, that some part of it might come back? She was looking forward to the moment when she could take off the clothes, underwear and woollen stockings that had belonged to Erzika. Was he waiting for the candle to burn down? Face to face with Skinny the rabbi felt older than the world, older than the stars and infinity. Older than the cabbala and all the sacred books. Older than the hidden meaning of all things. He was afraid to return to the faded meaning of the laws, precepts, customs and ceremonies. To the guiding principle ofhis religious and civic life. To the exegesis of the great prophets, to that which had not been published in print but which the girl in the tall chair in front of him had gone through.
God, Rabbi Gideon Schapiro said to himself, why have you taken away our pride and exposed us to contempt? Why have you driven us out of the light into darkness, us, your Chosen People? Why did you make the exalted low, the noble rotten, why did you deprive the wise of their reason, the weak of their strength, the desperate of their hope? Why did you permit the enemy we did not know to oppress us like the lowest of slaves? Why did you not let us sleep on that first night they humiliated and dishonoured us, never to awaken again? Why did you make us keep a soul in a dead body?
“It’s gone,” the rabbi whispered.
He sounded confused to her again. What was gone? She had no idea that the rabbi was referring to his soul. She had seen a lot of people in that state. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t even move, she just let the rabbi unburden himself.
“I’d like to say that we are rising from the ashes,” the rabbi said feverishly, “but we are drowning in them, you and I.”
Was the mountain of ashes so big that it had drowned their God?
“I’m free from it,” she assured the rabbi.
“You’re not.”
“Yes, I am,” she insisted. “I am with you.”
“Perhaps you will be free one day.”
“I’m sure of it.”
“As sure as there’s a heaven above me.”
“If that’s what you want to hear.”
The old grandfather clock struck ten — their usual bedtime. The rabbi blew out the candle.
“It’s stopped raining,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s stopped.”
She was happy she didn’t have to get up at 4.30 a.m., but could sleep until the light woke her. There would be no Oberführer sounding an alarm.
She waited for the rabbi to rise from his chair and then rose herself. His legs were shaking, but she pretended not to notice. That tenth day with the rabbi had made her see how a person lost his mind, how he could be seized by insanity like an invisible rain falling on parched ground.
He did not want to be locked in a world into which he had been forced by what had happened, yet at the same time he could not get into the world he didn’t understand. These two worlds were confronting one another in his head like two tanks, or like two warships sailing towards one another in the dark of night. The line on his forehead had deepened and perspiration was collecting in it. In his dark eyes a madness had taken root, flushed up by tears, but a madness with which one could live. Rabbi Gideon Schapiro was weeping again.
She left on the eleventh day, when she felt she should go and it seemed safe. The rabbi looked on her as on Mount Everest that could not be climbed, as on the Pacific Ocean that could not be swum, as on the abyss of all time. He felt dizzy, perhaps because he had not eaten properly for ten days. She had mostly been eating by herself. He fasted, wanting to starve as she had done. She had put on weight during her stay with him, she had filled out a little, though not much. Her silky, ginger hair had grown again.
He gave her a gold pocket watch on a chain, which played the Hungarian anthem. He had two — one had belonged to Elsa and the other had been his daughter’s. The latter he had traded with the baker for bread. He saw her to the door. He had not been out in the street for ten days.
She went to the station, to meet the two railwaymen who had taken her to the rabbi. One of them gave her a pair of high lace-up boots with metal studs. They would last her some time.
“Yes, God is within you,” the rabbi had said at the door.
These were the last words that Hanka Kaudersovâ would hear from Rabbi Gideon Schapiro.
Part Four
Ten
We were sitting in a café in Prague. Skinny was telling her story in bits and pieces.
There had been nights when she couldn’t sleep and when she imagined how time had slowed down for people in the gas chamber, when they could no longer breathe and every fraction of a second seemed endless. She would ask herself what right she had to live when all those she had known, including her mother and father, her brother and uncles and grandmothers and aunts and grandfathers, were no longer alive. It remained with her for a long time, as a cry whose echo did not fall silent. She had dark circles under her eyes, as she’d had in No. 232 Ost. She was paralyzed by the shadows cast by what she had behind her and before her.
In the first months after the war she mixed with a small crowd of those who had survived because the Germans had killed someone else in their place. A crowd of daughters without mothers, fathers without sons and sons without fathers, widows, a few elderly women and men, and a handful of children. She became used to a world without uniforms. She had a better memory than she would have wished. She laughed when Adler remarked that he had a memory like Emmental cheese. Echoes, images, words, shouted commands and places and colours chased each other round her head. Snippets of what had happened; where, how, to whom. That selection one Monday morning when it was raining and she was thinking to herself that if they picked her she would get soaked on the truck on the way to the gas chamber and arrive wet through.
For Adler, his past was a cat with nine lives. For me it was a tree protected by botanists, planted a long time ago.
“Are you afraid of the past?” she asked him.
Adler acted like a tiger with broken teeth, still able to tear off a chunk of meat and swallow it faster than he should — so that he never properly digested it.
“I see you’re making progress,” he replied. “I was beginning to suspect that you were afraid of the present.”
He was still trying to decide whether to look on Skinny as a victim or a heroine. He had not yet started writing his book about people in the camps. Evil and ugliness were bottomless; he realized that it was easier to focus on the brighter aspects, but there were many more of the darker ones. Evil was heavy, and good as light as a feather. There were no scales for it, or yardsticks.
“All right, so either we kill the past,” Adler said, “or we make it into shackles for our legs.”