“In a little while I’m off to bed,” she said finally.
“It’s like it was in the Electrician’s House,” I joked, referring to our dances in Terezîn. The music at the Blackbird’s Nest was the same as the Germans had played in their officers’ mess and the Kameradschaftsheim, which we used to listen to secretly from a distance, as if it were forbidden fruit, even though it was behind a timber wall separating the ghetto from the road leading out of it.
The head waiter was very friendly, he never passed our table without a smile. He must have been in his forties.
“It’s nice here,” she said.
She was afraid that the authorities or the school would investigate her past until they dug up what she was not willing to tell them. She tried either to forget about it or, at least, to distort it for herself. She fashioned her own world.
“What did you tell that rabbi of yours?” I asked.
“I didn’t tell him everything.”
“It would have been too much for him?”
“What would have been too much for him?” she asked cautiously.
“We both know what.”
“I don’t.”
“Don’t you feel corrupted?”
She looked at me questioningly, and then a little smile appeared on her lips. For me, it was a beginning after the end of the world. It was a smile ofhelplessness, embarrassment or shame, but at the same time one of hope, determination, a decision to live, perhaps not as before. A page torn out from the Book of Destruction which Rabbi Gideon Schapiro had told her about in Pecs. The rabbi was a new milestone in her personal history, and hence also in mine. Unlike the Book of Good Deeds, which writes itself, the Book of Destruction is written by many hands.
She needed to get it off her chest and this was the evening.
“Do you know what shocks me? The way I simply accepted the death of so many people, including my family. Losing a brother was as natural as Sunday following Saturday. Maybe it was just fear that it would break you otherwise. You put it away somewhere, even though it pressed on you from all sides. You promised yourself you’d mourn later, when you had more strength. Where did this hardness, this indifference spring from, this numbness or whatever it was, when you knew perfectly well that you’d never really be able to come to terms with it?”
She paused for a moment before continuing.
“I’m afraid I may be capable of watching one person after another die. Am I sick? Infected? Has it corrupted my soul? I don’t want to kid myself that it’s a question of strength. The death of one, two, thousands or even a million people no longer means what it once did. To me it’s more important that I’m still alive myself. So someone dies, even someone very close to you, and you just go on. You must always go on. And this is where I have got to.”
“Amen.”
“Yes, amen.”
“It’s also where I have got to.”
I was reminded of an ancient saying, dug up by someone — what reason cannot cure, time will.
We went out nearly every evening, dancing, to the cinema or the cabaret. They were playing wartime hits — “Under the Old Lamppost”, “Ciribiribin” and others. Skinny was startled when the girl announcer said that the arrangement had been sent from Terezin by Fricek Weiss of the Ghetto Swingers. It had been passed on by a friendly gendarme. That was in 1944, the year that the Germans prohibited dancing in Prague. Fricek Weiss died in a gas chamber because he wore glasses, the announcer said.
Eleven
Twelve: Hermann Ritter, Tobias Zluwa, Dieter Schramm, Ebergardt Kassner, Edward Petzina, Uwe Deutsch, Joachim Arnheim, Oswald Funcke, Ernst Jensen Bessel, Otmar Strasser, Kundar Jäckel, Peter Heiden.
Twelve: Korb er t Grünn, Bruno Jechmann, Kar tin Klause, Edmund Baumgartner, Pranz Gregor, Hannes Bäck, Ewald Herder, Quido Haasse, August Keitel, Ernst Traurig, Katthias Dofleben, Lothar Kemnitz
Twelve: Rudi Schlaff, Wolf Köhler, Pritz Dimmel, Heinrich Presser, Hans Dorpmüller, Wilhelm Kleinmann, Gund Kleimer, Pritz Seidel, Albert Steinfuss, Karian Schulte, Hans-Peter Schullmann, Walter Pechvogel.
“My mother was killed by a car last year,” Beautiful said. “Forty-three days later my grandmother died. Forty-three days after that my aunt, my mother’s sister. Soon I will have been here 43 days.”
Skinny did not know how to answer her. Was a person’s fate determined before they were born? They were sitting in the latrine, suffering with diarrhoea. Beautiful saw herself differently from the way the soldiers saw her, or Madam Kulikowa, or the other girls, who were all jealous of her and watched whom the Madam sent to her. There was insecurity in her blue eyes.
“I’ve got enteritis and I’m cold,” Skinny said. “I don’t want to sit here longer than we have to.”
They had been eating frozen potatoes for three days running.
“It’s one of my bad days,” Beautiful said. “But I don’t want to blame myself for having been born.”
“Not a good day for me, either,” Skinny said.
The sentry was circling the boarded hut at a decent distance. They could hear his footsteps, his hobnailed boots. After a snowfall, before the snow was cleared, the sentries walked noiselessly. They waited for him to pass. The military censors had held back a postcard sent to Beautiful because it had a grease stain on the stamp carrying Adolf Hitler’s face.
“I never was a virgin,” Beautiful said.
Skinny was listening to the wind. It came from the north; there had been no snow for two days.
“I don’t want you to be afraid of me,” Beautiful continued. “When I’m with a soldier I think of a tree whose sap is oozing out. Or a stone from which someone is trying to squeeze blood. I feel like a garden where no-one plants anything, they only pick the fruit. And it’s not that tree in the Garden of Eden. I think of gardeners who don’t tend the soil. I think of my mother before she died.”
She handed Skinny a carefully folded square of newspaper.
“It’s what they kill the Jews with. Don’t spill it. It comes as a powder like this or in crystals. A Scharführer gave it to me. He explained that it’s a mixture ofhydrogen and hydrocyanide. They call it Zyklon B.”
“What did he give it to you for?”
“He had nothing else to give me. He probably didn’t want to carry it about with him.”
“What am I to do with it?”
“I’ve got some for myself. I carry it in a sock.”
“You think I want to kill myself?”
“Who doesn’t sometimes?” Beautiful smiled shyly.
The latrine stank of quicklime. When they talked or breathed through their mouths the stench was not so overpowering.
From the bridge came the clanging of a train. A military transport.
“Always reminds me of the train which brought me here,” Beautiful said.
Skinny rolled the folded paper into her sock as Beautiful had done. She too thought of the train on which she had arrived.
From the waiting room came the sound of music — works of the Strauss family. Skinny thought there was too much blood even in the waltzes: “Vienna Blood,” “The Emperor Waltz” and “The Blue Danube”. Madam Kulikowa played “Vienna Blood” at least five times a day.
The guards were singing “Heimat, deine Sterne” from the film Quax, the Pilot without Fear or Blemish. It was a marching song for hobnailed boots.
In the officers’ bathroom used by Hauptsturmführer Hanisch, the commandant of the guard detachment, stood an earthenware bathtub on cast-iron lions’ paws — booty from a Polish home in the early days of the campaign. The water was heated by oak logs; the beech had all been burned. The guards had chopped down trees far and wide.