People crying and people saying Kaddish.
I brought over the ashtray. I felt a little light-headed, but I poured us the rest of the whiskey anyway.
What else have you got left when you know the next day you’re going to be shot, eh? Nothing. You either lie down and cry or you lie down and say Kaddish. I didn’t know the Kaddish. But that night, for the first time in my life, I also said Kaddish. I said Kaddish thinking of my parents and I said Kaddish thinking that the next day I’d be shot kneeling in front of the Black Wall of Auschwitz. It was ’42 by then and we’d all heard of the Black Wall at Auschwitz and I had seen the Black Wall with my own eyes as I got out of the truck and knew perfectly well that was where they shot people. Gnadenschuss, a single shot to the back of the neck. But the Black Wall of Auschwitz didn’t look as big as I’d imagined. It didn’t look as black, either. It was black, with little white pockmarks. It had white pockmarks all over it, said my grandfather while pressing invisible aerial keys with his index finger, and I, smoking, imagined a starry sky. He said: Splashes of white. He said: Made by the very bullets that had gone through the backs of so many necks.
It was very dark in the cell, he went on quickly, as if not to get lost in that same darkness. And a man sitting beside me began to speak to me in Polish. Maybe he heard me saying Kaddish and recognized my accent. He was a Jew from Łódź. We were both Jews from Łódź, but I was from Żeromskiego Street, near the Źielony Rynek market, and he was from the opposite side, near Poniatowskiego Park. He was a boxer from Łódź. A Polish boxer. And we talked all night in Polish. Or rather, he talked to me all night in Polish. He told me in Polish that he had been there for a long time, in Block Eleven, and that the Germans kept him alive because they liked to watch him box. He told me in Polish that the next day they’d put me on trial and he told me in Polish what I should say during that trial and what I shouldn’t say during that trial. And that’s how it went. The next day, two Germans dragged me out of the cell, took me to a young Jewish man, who tattooed this number on my arm, and then they left me in an office, where I was put on trial by a young woman, and I saved myself by telling this young woman everything the Polish boxer had told me to say and not telling the young woman everything the Polish boxer had told me not to say. You see? I used his words and his words saved my life and I never knew the Polish boxer’s name, never saw his face. He was probably shot.
I stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray and downed the last sip of whiskey. I wanted to ask him something about the number or about that young Jewish man who had tattooed him. But I only asked what the Polish boxer had said. He seemed not to understand my question, and so I repeated it, a bit louder, a bit more anxiously. What did the boxer tell you to say and not say, Oitze, during that trial?
My grandfather laughed, still confused, and leaned back, and I remembered that he refused to speak Polish, that he had spent sixty years refusing to speak a single word in his mother tongue, in the mother tongue of those who, in November of ’39, he always said, had betrayed him.
I never found out if my grandfather didn’t remember the Polish boxer’s words, or if he chose not to tell them to me, or if they simply didn’t matter anymore, if they had now served their purpose as words and so had disappeared forever, along with the Polish boxer who spoke them one dark night.
Once more, I sat looking at my grandfather’s number, 69752, tattooed one winter morning in ’42, by a young Jew in Auschwitz. I tried to imagine the face of the Polish boxer, imagine his fists, imagine the possible white pockmark the bullet had made after going through his neck, imagine his words in Polish that managed to save my grandfather’s life, but all I could imagine was an endless line of individuals, all naked, all pale, all thin, all weeping or saying Kaddish in absolute silence, all devout believers in a religion whose faith is based on numbers, as they waited in line to be numbered themselves.
Postcards
The naked isle. That’s how Milan titled the first postcard I received. Two acrobatic dolphins leaped in the foreground, inviting me to come visit them in some aquatic park in Florida. Milan had filled the blank space on the back of the huge card (maybe half a letter-size page) with microscopic print, so minuscule and scrunched up that the whole text looked as if it had been written by a child. A skilled child, but a child nonetheless.
Gypsy singer Šaban Bajramović was born in the Yugoslav city of Niš in 1936. At age eighteen he deserted from Tito’s army, and as a result the communist authorities sent him to Goli Otok, which means the naked isle: a giant, desolate rock on the Dalmatian coast where the prisoners died of dehydration, from so much sun, so much neglect. Šaban Bajramović had deserted the Yugoslav army for a woman. He managed to survive a year on Goli Otok (I am writing a letter and crying / I am dying in prison here / The years pass, flying / And they are not freeing me). There, on that rock, he learned to write. The other prisoners called him Black Panther. The other prisoners slashed his face and nearly disemboweled him: a huge scar runs from his chest to his pelvis. When he was finally freed in 1964, he recorded his first songs and used the money he earned to buy himself a white suit and a white Mercedes, both of which he lost in a dart game that very same night (When I had the money, I gave it all away / And now I have no money / I have no friends / So I implore the little snail to sell me his little house). Šaban Bajramović’s music is not Šaban Bajramović’s music. He’s never copyrighted it, never protected it. No one knows where he lives, where he’s traveling. All of a sudden, he’ll turn up at some Gypsy music festival in Sarajevo or maybe the Gypsy cafés in Budapest. All of a sudden, he’ll disappear again. And that, my dear Eduardito, is how one of the best Gypsy singers of all time lives. As if he were still a black panther. As if he were still the sole survivor on that inhospitable naked isle. Roving around, all alone, who knows where. No ties or responsibilities or boundaries of any kind. No boundaries.