Each of us walking through this liberated and lonely sanctum, past its now quiet rooms, heard fragments of recognition in the bare trees. For once it had been both awesome and yet holy, having caused in each of us, silent marchers, at one time or another, a doubt for his own welfare and also a momentary wonder at the way they could handle all those patients. Once the days had been interrupted by the very hours and the place had passed by our minds new and impressive with every stroke. But now the days were uninterrupted and the shadows from the great felled wings sprawled colorless and without any voice about our ever moving feet. Then, scudding away through the maze, new, unkempt and artificial, the low clapboard storehouse emerged, champing of strange voices. It heeled, squat beneath its own glimmers of weak light, a small boarded place of congregation, hounded by the darkness of the surrounding buildings.
Without slacking pace, we neared the din and fray above the scratching needle, the noise of women dancing with women, and men with men, shadows skipping without expression across the blind of a half-opened door. They ceased to whirl only for a moment and then the feet shuffled again over the floor boards, and we, walking towards the building, smelled the odor of damp cinders and felt for a moment the black leaves settle about our ankles.
Jutta, the Census-Taker and myself, emerging from flat darkness into light that was only a shade brighter, bowed our heads, fending off the tinted glare that filled the spaces between the rigid dancers. Close together, we stood for a moment sunken in the doorway. Figures stepped forwards, backwards, caught in a clockwork of custom, a way of moving that was almost forgotten. Gathered in the storehouse, back to back, face measured to face, recalled into the group and claiming name instead of number, each figure, made responsible, appeared with the same sackcloth idleness as Jutta. They swung out of the mist and appeared with pocketed cheeks and shaven heads. They seemed to dance with one leg always suspended, small white bodies colliding like round seamless pods, and fingers entwined were twice as long as palms. They danced continuously forming patterns, always the same, of grey and pale blue. The beauties were already sick, and the word krank passed from group to group over devious tongues, like the grapevine current of fervent criminal words that slide through wasted penal colonies. The smallest women had the roundest legs that bounced against jutting knees, and the seams of their gowns were taken up with coarse thread. High above their shoulders towered their partners’ heads, loose, with cold whitening eyes, tongues the faded color of cheeks, curled back to the roots of forgotten words. Several girls were recently orphaned when Allied trucks, bringing German families back from hiding, had smashed, traveling too fast along the highway, and had scattered the old people like punched cows in the fields. Some of these danced together, stopping to see which way the other would turn.
I touched Jutta’s hand and we walked into the center of the floor while, leaning against the wall, the Census-Taker watched, trying to recall each passing couple. Jutta leaned and pushed, hung to my hand, stepped now upon my own foot, now upon another’s, and the stiff waltz whispered out of the machine. The Czechs, Poles and Belgians danced just as she, their wooden shoes sticking to the floor, wearing the same blue dresses with faded dots, some with bones broken off-center, some with armpits ringed as black as soot. For it was not the Germans who thought of coming together when there was nothing to say, when no one could understand the vast honored ideal swept under; it was the rest of Europe — bedridden with idleness, dumb with tremendous distance, unhealthy in confinement, these gathered in the storehouse — who had begun this dance in the evenings. A few true Germans were scattered among them. Men wandered through, seeking a girl they had lost. These men, startled and old, still wore unironed hospital gowns as shirts, moved ready to push the others aside with delicate arms, walked with their feet in sandals and with smoke-white faces. A young girl, sitting on a bench, gently rubbed her hands over an Italian officer’s trousers while he leaned back, his eyes closed, and she, smiling, watched the circle of dancers and smelled the boneless herring on his breath.
There was no drink to be had in the storehouse. The smell of pasteboard and dust hovered over the walls, Russian ex-soldiers grinned at each other like Mongolians in a corner, a half-French girl with tangled colorless hair, pregnant with a paunch beneath her belt, looked ugly and out of place; all were spiritless from the very strangeness of the country and so they crowded themselves, unwanted, into this end of town. All of them slept in the back rooms on hay that should have been fed to the herds.
In the brick building nearest the storehouse, Balamir had lain half-awake, sometimes in the mornings, or in the late afternoons when flowers were closing, in one of the large tubs, all but his head submerged in water the temperature of blood, and behind him had heard the waiting nurse who flipped the pages of a magazine. The evenings sidled through the long green shade, towels hung like mats from the walls. He was surprised to find that his hands floated. And always the pages flipping one on the other, pages beating just behind his head. The water gurgled out of the tub, disturbing the peace and quiet, the shaded air of the small room.
Through the minutes, the dancers were the same long lines of inmates stamping time to the phonograph, dancing in block-like groups with arms that were too long. In the back rooms, a few figures sprawled on the bunks overcome with an inexcusable exhaustion, weak and helpless under the low makeshift roof of the storehouse. Overhead the stars were clear.
“Shall we rest?”
“I only have a while more. Let’s dance.” She followed me. Jutta did not know that she looked like the others, that here in public no one knew the dress was washed, that her face, ribboned with long hair, was just as unkempt and unpleasant as the other tottering faces. If I had left her for a moment and then returned, she would not have known who her partner was, but looking over shoulders that were all alike, she would have danced on.
“Is it going to be difficult?”
“No.”
I, Zizendorf, like all men, was similar to her husband who had been captured, but it was something indefinable that made me particularly similar. The other men’s sleeves were too short, their heads too thin and bare, all actually unlike her husband; yet they were similar in a way, because seeing them she had started on the long glorious path, then had forgotten a great deal. But I was different from them all and was better for her than her husband.
She guessed that the hall might become empty soon and she would be alone. The shoulder was hard under the cloth, her back began to feel stiff and it was difficult not to go to sleep. A figure in a tight green suit kept changing the record, wiping it with a piece of rag. And in one of the back rooms smelling of flour that had long since been hauled away, where some sprawled or sat by windows streaked with dirt, a girl crouched on all fours, her head hanging forward, face covered with hair, the back of her neck shining like a small round coin, and clutched the sides of the bunk in motionless indecision. Down the corridor we danced, trooped like men about to change the guard, voices low and serious. White heads in pairs that were the same size, shape, identical bony structures, came together in the damp place and kissed. The girl lost her hold, fell forward and, face buried in a wrinkled grey shirt, tried to sleep.