YOU CAN WAKE UP one morning at the unpleasant hour of the working man and discover with less surprise than mortification that you’ve been transformed into an enormous insect. You can go to your usual café believing that nothing has changed, and learn from the newspaper that you are not the person you thought you were and no longer safe from shame and persecution. You can go to your doctor’s office believing you will live forever, and leave a half hour later knowing that a gulf separates you from others, even though no one sees it yet in your face, that you carry inside you the shadow that waits invisible for all. You are the physician waiting in the dusk of your office for the patient to whom you must tell the truth, and you dread the moment of his arrival and the necessary, neutral words. But most of all you are the patient still unaware, who walks calmly down a familiar street, taking his time because he’s early for the appointment, leafing through the newspaper that he just bought and that will be left forgotten on a table in the waiting room, a newspaper with a date like any other in the calendar but a date that marks the borderline, the end of one life and the beginning of another, two lives, two yous that could not be more different.
You climb the stairway with the newspaper under your arm. You almost forgot the appointment, even thought of canceling it, the examination and the simple blood test, it all seemed so silly. You push the door of the doctor’s office and give your name to the nurse. You make yourself comfortable on a sofa in the waiting room and look at your watch, not knowing that it is marking the last minutes of vigor and health. You look at your watch, cross your legs, open a newspaper in the doctor’s office or in a café in Vienna in November 1935, when a news article will drive you out of your routine and out of your country and make you a stranger forever. A guest in a hotel, you woke up one night with a fit of coughing and spat blood. The newspaper tells of the laws of racial purity newly promulgated in Nuremberg, and you read that you are a Jew and destined to extermination. The smiling nurse appears in the doorway of the waiting room and tells you that the doctor is ready to see you. Gregor Samsa awoke one morning and found himself transformed. Sometimes in the streets of the city I thought was mine, I passed impoverished Jews, émigrés from the East, in their long, greasy overcoats and black hats, with sweaty curls at their temples, and felt repelled, glad that in no way did I resemble those obstinately archaic figures who moved through the spacious streets of Vienna as they had the villages they had left in Poland, Yugoslavia, or Ukraine. No one would stop me from walking into a park or a café, or print crude caricatures of me in the yellow press. But now I am as marked as they. The healthy, blond man reading his newspaper in a café in Vienna one Sunday morning, dressed in lederhosen and kneesocks and Tyrolean suspenders, in the eyes of the waiter who has served him so often will soon be as repulsive as the poor Orthodox Jew whom men in brown shirts and red armbands humiliate for sport, and he will travel with him in a cattle car and end up exactly the same way, a walking cadaver slipping in the mud of the death camps, wearing the same striped uniform and cap, sharing the same darkness and panic in the gas chamber. The doctor runs his fingers over a white seashell, strokes the mouse of the computer, seeking in your file the symptoms that confirm the diagnosis, the sentence, the word neither of you utters. When you go back outside, your eyes are at first dazzled by the sun. The passing men and women are strangers. You walk through the city that no longer is yours, and it is with less surprise than shame that you discover, what a bitter awakening, that you are a giant insect. You move through a sinister nightmare, though the places are everyday places and the light is that of a sunny morning in Madrid. You walk along a familiar sidewalk in Berlin, over glass from shopwindows shattered during the night, and smell the gasoline that fired the stores of your Jewish neighbors. Later you will remember the headlines, the photograph of Hitler, the chancellor, on a stage in Nuremberg, gesticulating before a panoply of flags and eagles, the large letters that announced your fate, that identified you as the carrier of a plague. You are Jean Améry viewing a landscape of meadows and trees through the window of the car in which you are being taken to the barracks of the Gestapo. You are Eugenia Ginzburg listening for the last time to the sound her door makes as it closes, the house she will never return to. You are Margarete Buber-Neumann, who sees the illuminated sphere of a clock in the early dawn of Moscow, a few minutes before the van in which she is being driven enters the darkness of the prison. You are Franz Kafka discovering with amazement that the warm liquid you are vomiting is blood.
narva
BACK HOME, I LOOKED in the encyclopedia for that name I’d never heard but kept repeating to myself during the taxi ride, a name I didn’t catch at first because my friend doesn’t speak very loud and it was noisy in the restaurant where we had lunch. It’s November, the evenings are much shorter now, and the winter dusk is still unexpected in the narrowest, darkest streets. We said good-bye at the door of the building he lives in, a block of modern apartments that don’t seem to fit his character or age or the life he’s led. Who could guess the life of this man, seeing him as he crosses the street or stands in the entryway of that anonymous building? A vigorous old man with a sparkle in his small eyes, a little bent, and with very fine white hair, like Spencer Tracy toward the end, or like my paternal grandfather, who was also in a war, but not one he marched off to voluntarily, and it may be that my grandfather never completely understood why they took him or realized the magnitude of the cataclysm his life had been dragged into, a life of which mine, if I stop to think about it, is in part a distant echo.
My friend is eighty, almost the age of my grandfather when he died, but he doesn’t think about death, he tells me, just as he didn’t think about it when he found himself on the Russian front in the winter of 1943, a very young second lieutenant soon to be promoted to lieutenant because of valor and having been awarded an Iron Cross. You don’t think about death when you’re twenty and in peril every minute, when with pistol in hand you advance across a no-man’s-land and suddenly your face and uniform are sprayed with the blood of the man beside you, who in one burst of machine-gun fire becomes a mound of entrails sprawled in the mud. You think only about how cold it is, or about the rations that never showed up, or about sleep, because the worst things in war are the cold and lack of sleep, my friend says, taking a brief, reflective sip of wine. He is seated directly across from me, older than any of the diners in the restaurant, all men, all the same age and wearing midlevel-executive suits, some speaking in an elementary but fluent English in that overly loud tone you tend to use when you’re on a cell phone in a public place. Their conversations mix with ours, the bleeps and music of their phones, the clinking of dishes and glassware, so I have to strain to hear what my friend is saying. I lean toward him across the table, especially when there’s a foreign name, of some German general or Russian sector or city I never knew existed, one of so many cities of the world that you will never hear of, just as millions of people don’t know the name of the small town where I was born, though it’s completely real to me, clear in every detail, in its census of living and dead, the living whom I hardly ever see now and the dead who are fainter in memory with each passing day, although sometimes they reappear suddenly, like my paternal grandfather who died fourteen years ago.