As dark as it is here, it was probably just as dark under the boat that time when it capsized right near the shore when the boy from the village was trying to sail it up to the dock. Before he walked back to the village, the girl had brought him to the raspberry bushes up by the sandy road. Later the boy had returned the favor by showing her how to swim. Right next to the shore where the water was so shallow that her feet grazed the bottom as she swam, she experienced for the first time the sensation of having the water buoy her up. It was this same summer that the woman from next door had showed her how to catch crabs. But did crabs exist? A lake, a boat, raspberry bushes? Was this boy still there if she couldn’t see him? Was there anyone else besides her left in the world? Now something is becoming clear to her that she has failed to consider all this time: If no one knows she exists any longer, who will know there is a world when she is no longer there?
She didn’t notice that the floor of the old building where she is hiding isn’t quite level, and since it is so dark that she cannot see anything at all, she also cannot see how the little rivulet now meanders out under the door of her hiding place into the abandoned kitchen of an abandoned apartment in abandoned Ulica Nowolipie in Warsaw. By the time the Appropriations Commando under the leadership of a German soldier takes over the apartment, the rivulet has formed a little lake on the kitchen floor.
For the last time now she has to walk north up Zamenhofa with the sun at her back. Beside her others are walking whom she doesn’t know, all fortunate coincidences have now run out of steam, now all of them are finally going home for good. In the empty streets that the procession crosses block after block lie the shattered tables and beds of those who walked this road before them on the paving stones in the shadow of the buildings. Since the ghetto was never particularly large, the girl knows quite precisely what she is leaving behind. Listing the few streets by name doesn’t even take as long as reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
Schmeling, they say, once put a tree trunk across his shoulders and walked like that the entire way from his summer cottage in the nearby spa town to the swimming hole in the village. This was to strengthen his arm muscles, the boy from the village had said to her. She’d told him she didn’t believe him, and the boy had insisted it was true, saying he’d been there himself when Schmeling arrived. At the swimming hole, Schmeling had tossed the tree trunk off his shoulders as if it were made of paper, he’d stretched his arms and then jumped into the water and swum out so far you couldn’t see him any longer. One of the villagers had shouted: For Heaven’s sake, our Schmeling is drowning! He’d believed it was true and had implored the villager to swim out after the boxer and save his life. But it had just been a joke all along.
Of the one hundred and twenty people in the boxcar, approximately thirty suffocate during the two-hour trip. As a motherless child, she is considered an inconvenience that might interfere with things running smoothly, and so the moment they arrive she is herded off to the side along with a few old people who cannot walk any longer and the ones who went mad during the trip, she is ushered past a pile of clothing as high as a mountain — like the Nackliger, she can’t help thinking and remembers her own smile that she smiled that day when the gardener told her the funny name of that underwater shoal. For two minutes, a pale, partly cloudy sky arches above her just the way it would look down by the lake right before it rained, for two minutes she inhales the scent of the pine trees she knows so well, but she cannot see the pine trees themselves because of the tall fence. Has she really come home? For two minutes she can feel the sand beneath her shoes along with a few pieces of flint and pebbles made of quartz or granite; then she takes off her shoes forever and goes to stand on the board to be shot.
Nothing is nicer than diving with your eyes open. Diving down as far as the shimmering legs of your mother and father who have just come back from swimming and now are wading to shore through the shallow water. Nothing more fun than to tickle them and to hear, muffled by the water, how they shriek because they know it will make their child happy.
For three years the girl took piano lessons, but now, while her dead body slides down into the pit, the word piano is taken back from human beings, now the backflip on the high bar that the girl could perform better than her schoolmates is taken back, along with all the motions a swimmer makes, the gesture of seizing hold of a crab is taken back, as well as all the basic knots to be learned for sailing, all these things are taken back into uninventedness, and finally, last of all, the name of the girl herself is taken back, the name no one will ever again call her by: Doris.
THE GARDENER
IN WINTER THE gardener brings the seasoned logs from earlier years up to the house in the wheelbarrow and kindles fires in the heating stoves for the mistress of the house and her niece.
He prunes the apple and pear trees. In spring he helps the mistress of the house carry down the crates in which she has stowed everything of value, to save it from the Russians. He fetches the oars and oarlocks when she is ready to go out in the boat to sink the crates on the shoal of the Nackliger. When the Russians arrive, they place nearly two hundred horses in the garden, around seventy on the smaller meadow beside the house, and around one hundred and thirty on the larger one to the right of the path that leads down to the lake. The horses scrape at the ground that is just beginning to thaw, transforming it into a morass within a single day, the horses eat everything around them that can possibly serve as food: the fresh leaves and blossoms of the forsythia bush, the young shoots of the fir shrubs and the lilac and hazelnut buds. The Russians confiscate the entire supply of honey. By this time the potato beetle, pursuing a course diametrically opposite to the direction in which the Red Army is marching, has already reached the Soviet Union and is preparing to devastate what potato fields there were spared by the Germans.
THE RED ARMY OFFICER
OVERNIGHT ANOTHER TWELVE horses were brought. Now more than two hundred total are standing in the garden, snorting and pawing the ground. The young Red Army officer walks among them as if walking through a stable whose roof is the moonless sky. The smell of animals closes off the garden against the night better than walls could or a gate. Trees black, bushes black, black the grass trampled beneath hooves, black the bodies of the animals that are so familiar to the youth that he could walk blind from horse to horse to make his way back to the house. He has ordered the others to set out once more to search the surrounding countryside for hidden animals. In the house it stinks of the excretions of his men. The more affluent the homes in which they make their quarters, the more shitting takes place, as if it were necessary to employ this method to restore equilibrium to something off kilter. His men, egging each other on, have shat upon the shiny stone floor, pissed against the painted door and vomited behind the stove. For this reason he has withdrawn to the upstairs of the house, reserving for his own use a small room with a balcony. He himself pees off the balcony and defecates in the garden, but only because he would rather be alone for these activities. Only recently, now that they have penetrated deep into German territory, has the fury of the soldiers reached such a level that they are using the insides of their own bodies to wage war. The more German houses they set foot in, the more painfully they are faced with the question of why the Germans were unable to remain in a place where nothing at all, not the slightest little thing, was lacking.