Imre Kertész - Fatelessness

Quite. I too was curious about that; they did not inform us at the brickyard. All they announced was that anyone inclined to do so could present himself for work, specifically in Germany. Just like the rest of the boys and many others in the brickyard, I found that idea immediately attractive. In any case, we were told by the men, identifiable from their armbands as belonging to a body called the “Jewish Council,” one way or another, willingly or forcibly, everyone would sooner or later be resettled from the brickyard to Germany, and the better places, not to speak of the concession of being able to travel no more than sixty per carriage, would be granted to those who volunteered first, whereas later at least eighty would have to be fit in, due to the shortage of wagons — the way they laid it all out to everyone did not really leave too much to consider, I had to agree.

Nor was I able to deny the validity of the other arguments, which concerned the shortage of space in the brickyard and its possible sanitary consequences, as well as the growing concern over food supplies: that was how it was, I could attest to all that. By the time we arrived from the gendarmerie (many of the grown-ups had registered that the barracks were called the “Andrássy Gendarme Casern”) every cranny of the brickyard had already been filled to overflowing with people. I saw among them both men and women, children of all ages, as well as countless old people of both sexes. Wherever I stepped, I would stumble over blankets, rucksacks, all manner of suitcases, bundles, and other impedimenta. Naturally enough, I too was soon tired of that, not to mention the myriad petty nuisances, annoyances, and vexations that, it appears, are inevitably bound up with communal life of that kind. Contributing further to that was the inaction, the senseless feeling of idleness, not to speak of the boredom; that too is why I don’t remember distinctly a single one of the five days that I spent there, and barely even the occasional detail in aggregate, though certainly the relief at having the boys there around me: “Rosie,” “Fancyman,” “Leatherware,” “Smoker,” Moskovics, and all the rest. As far as I could tell, not one of them was missing: they too had all been honest. Nor did I personally have that much to do anymore with gendarmes in the brickyard; I saw them more just standing guard on the other side of the fencing, mixed up with the occasional policeman here and there. The latter were in fact later talked about in the brickyard as being more considerate than the gendarmes, readily inclined to be decent, particularly in return for certain negotiated terms, whether in the form of money or any other valuables. Above all, so I heard, many commissioned them to pass on letters and messages; indeed, some insisted opportunities were even open through them — albeit rare and risky, they admitted — for escaping, though it would have been hard for me to know anything really definite about that. But then I recalled, and in doing so also came to a somewhat more precise understanding, I believe, what the seal-faced fellow at the customs post must have been wanting so much to have a word about with the policeman. That is how I realized that our policeman, by contrast, had been honest, which may well have explained how it was that every now and then, while knocking about the yard or waiting for my turn in the area of the communal kitchen, I would spot the seal-faced guy in the melee of unfamiliar faces in the brickworks.

Of the rest of the customs post crowd, I also saw the man with the bad luck again; he often sat around with us “young people,” so as “to cheer himself up,” as he put it. He too, it seems, must have found a place to camp somewhere close to us, in one of the many identical shingle-roofed but open-sided structures in the yard that had in fact originally served, so I heard, for drying bricks. He looked a bit the worse for wear, with mottled blotches of swelling and bruising on his face. We learned from him that these had all been the outcome of the gendarmes’ investigation, since they had come across medicines and food in his knapsack. His attempt to explain it was stuff that had come from older stocks and was intended purely for his very ill mother was useless: they alleged that he was obviously dealing on the black market. Similarly useless was his permit, and equally unavailing the fact that he, for his part, had always held the law in respect, never violating so much as a single letter of it, he related. “Have you heard anything? What’s going to happen to us?” he asked regularly. He would again bring up his family, not to speak of his bad luck. How much he had run around after the permit, how delighted he had been to get it, he recalled with a morose head-shaking; he would never have believed the business “would come to this,” that was for sure. It had all hinged on those five minutes. If he hadn’t had the bad luck… If the bus back then had… — those were the reflections I heard. He seemed largely content, however, with the beating. “I was left to the last, and that may have been my good fortune,” he recounted: “They were in a hurry by then.” All in all, he “could have come off worse,” was how he summed it up, adding that he had “seen uglier cases” at the gendarmerie, which was no more than the truth, as I too recalled. No one should think, the gendarmes had warned us on the morning of the investigation, that he would be able to conceal his crimes, money, gold, or other valuables from them. When it was my turn, I too had to lay out money, watch, pocketknife, and all my other belongings on a table before them. A stocky gendarme even frisked me, with brisk and what somehow seemed like practiced movements, from my armpits all the way down to the legs of my short trousers. Behind the table I also saw the lieutenant again, for by then it had already transpired from words the gendarmes exchanged with one another that the officer with the riding-crop was actually called Lt. Jackl. Towering next to him, on his left, I also immediately took note of a shirt-sleeved, walrus-moustached gendarme looking like a butcher, who had in his hand a cylindrical implement that basically struck me as being a bit of a joke, somewhat reminding me as it did of a cook’s rolling pin. The lieutenant was pretty friendly, asking me if I had any documents, though I saw not the slightest sign, not even the slightest glimmer, of my papers then producing any impression on him. That surprised me, but — most particularly in light of an abrupt gesture of dismissal from the walrus-moustached gendarme, with its unmistakable implicit assurance of the alternative — I considered it more prudent, it stands to reason, not to raise any objections.

After that, the gendarmes had led us all out of the barracks and, first of all, crammed us into the carriages of a special local train service then, at some spot on the banks of the Danube, transferred us onto a ship and finally, after that had berthed, took us a farther stretch on foot, which was how I had got to the brickyard — the “Budakalász Brick Works” to be more specific, as I was to learn there, on the spot.

There were plenty of other things that I also heard about the journey on the afternoon we had to register. The men with armbands were omnipresent, ready to answer any questions. They were primarily on the lookout for youngsters, the venturesome and those who were on their own, though they were assuring inquirers, as I heard, that there would also be room for women, infants, and the elderly, and they would also be able to bring along all their luggage. In their opinion, however, the cardinal issue was were we going to sort the matter out among ourselves, and thus with all possible humanity, or would we rather wait for the gendarmes to make the decision for us? As they explained, the consignment would have to be made up one way or another, and insofar as their lists fell short, the gendarmes would make up the enrollment from among us; so most people, myself included, saw it as obvious that we might do better for ourselves, naturally enough, the first way.