Imre Kertész - Fatelessness

As a final means, there are the beatings — whether expected or unexpected, sought or sedulously avoided — anywhere and at any time. I had my fair share of them too, naturally, no more but also no less than normal, the average, the ordinary, like anyone, any one of us — as many as are consistent with purely routine conditions in our camp rather than any particular personal accident. Inconsistent as it may be, I have to relate that I came in for these, not from an SS serviceman — someone who is in fact to some degree professionally called upon, authorized, even obliged in that respect — but from a yellow-overalled member of a more shadowy semimilitary “Todt” organization that, so I gather, has some sort of supervisory role over workplaces. He happened to be around and spotted it — Oh, what a yell! what a sprint! — when I dropped a bag of cement. Now, carrying cement must be welcomed by every Kommando — rightly so, in my opinion — with a peculiar joy that is accorded only on rare occasions and to which we would find it hard to admit, even privately among ourselves. You bow your head, someone lays a bag over your shoulder, you amble over to a truck with it, and there someone else picks it up, after which you amble back, taking a nice wide detour, the bounds of which are determined by the vagaries of the moment, and if you are lucky they will be queuing up in front of you, so you can snatch another breather until it’s your next turn. Then again, the bag itself weighs around twenty to thirty pounds altogether — child’s play compared with back home, one could even safely play ball with it, I reckon; but here I was, stumbling and dropping it. Worse still, the bag’s paper had burst and the contents spilled out, leaving a heap of the material, the treasure, the costly cement, powdering the ground. By then he was already on me, I had already felt his fist on my face, then, having been decked, his boot on my ribs and his grip on my neck as he pressed my face to the ground, in the cement, screaming insanely that I scrape it together, lick it up. He then hauled me to my feet, swearing he would teach me: “ Dir werd ich’s zeigen, Arschloch, Scheisskerl, verfluchter Judehund,” [23] “I’ll show you, asshole, shithead, goddam Jew-dog!” so I would never drop a bag again in the future. From then on, he personally loaded a new bag onto my shoulders each time it was my turn, bothering himself with me alone; I was his sole concern, it was me exclusively whom he kept his eye on, following me all the way to the truck and back, and whom he picked to go first even if, by rights, there were others still ahead of me in the queue. In the end, there was almost an understanding between us, we had got the measure of one another, and I noticed his face bore what was almost a smile of satisfaction, encouragement, even, dare I say, a pride of sorts, and from a certain perspective, I had to acknowledge, with good reason, for indeed, tottering, stooping though I might have been, my eyes seeing black spots, I did manage to hold out, coming and going, fetching and carrying, all without dropping a single further bag, and that, when it comes down to it, I would have to admit, proved him right. On the other hand, by the end of the day I felt that something within me had broken down irreparably; from then on, every morning I believed that would be the last morning I would get up; with every step I took, that I could not possibly take another; with every movement I made, that I would be incapable of making another; and yet for all that, for the time being, I still managed to accomplish it each and every time.

Cases may occur, situations present themselves, that no amount of ingenuity could possibly make worse, it would seem. I can report that, after so much striving, so many futile attempts and efforts, in time I too found peace, tranquillity, and relief. For instance, certain things to which I had previously attributed some vast, practically inconceivable significance, I can tell you, lost all importance in my eyes. Thus, if I grew tired while standing at Appell , for example, without so much as a look at whether it was muddy or there was a puddle, I would simply take a seat, plop down, and stay down, until my neighbors forcibly pulled me up. Cold, damp, wind, or rain were no longer able to bother me; they did not get through to me, I did not even sense them. Even my hunger passed; I continued to carry to my mouth anything edible I was able to lay my hands on, but more out of absentmindedness, mechanically, out of habit, so to say. As for work, I no longer even strove to give the appearance of it. If people did not like that, at most they would beat me, and even then they could not truly do much harm, since for me it just won some time: at the first blow I would promptly stretch out on the ground and would feel nothing after that, since I would meanwhile drop off to sleep.

Just one thing inside me grew stronger: my irritability. If anyone should encroach on my bodily comfort, even just touch my skin, or if I missed my step (as often happened) when the column was on the march, for example, and someone behind me trod on my heel, I would have been quite prepared instantly, without a moment’s hesitation, without further ado, to kill them on the spot — had I been able to, of course, and had I not forgotten, by the time I raised my hand, what it was I had in fact wanted to do. I even had rows with Bandi Citrom: I was “letting myself go,” I was a burden on the work squad, he would catch my scabies, he reproached me. But above all else, it was as if I somehow embarrassed or worried him in a certain respect. I became conscious of this one evening when he took me with him to the washroom. My flailing and protests were to no avail as he stripped me of my clothes with all the strength he could muster; my attempts to pummel his body and face with my fists to no avail as he scrubbed cold water over my shivering skin. I told him a hundred times over that his guardianship was a nuisance to me, he should leave me alone, just eff off. Did I want to croak right here, did I maybe not want to get back home, he asked, and I have no clue what answer he must have read from my face but, all at once, I saw some form of consternation or alarm written all over his, in much the same way as people generally view irremediable trouble-makers, condemned men or, let’s say, carriers of pestilence, which was when the opinion he had once expressed about Muslims crossed my mind. In any event, from then on, he tended to steer clear of me, I could see that, while I, for my part, was finally relieved of that particular bother.

There was no way I could shake off my knee, however, and an increasingly persistent pain in it. After a few days I inspected it, and for all my body’s accommodation to many things by now, I nevertheless thought it advisable to promptly shield myself from the sight of this new surprise, the flaming red sac into which the area around my right knee had been transformed. I was well aware, naturally, that a Revier [24] Sick bay or infirmary. was functioning in our camp as well, but then, for starters, the consulting hour coincided with supper time, and in the end I placed higher priority on that than on any treatment, and then too various incidents, this and that bit of knowledge of the place itself and of life, did not exactly boost one’s confidence. For another, it was a long way off, two tents farther over, and unless forced by absolute necessity, I would not willingly have embarked on such a lengthy excursion, not least because my knee was by now extremely painful. Eventually, Bandi Citrom and one of our bunk-mates, forming a cradle with their hands, a bit like storks are said to carry their young to safety, took me over anyway, and after I had been set on a table I was given a warning, well in advance, that it was most likely going to hurt as immediate surgery was unavoidable, which for lack of any anesthetic would have to be done without that. As far as I could make out what was going on, a pair of crosswise incisions were made above the knee with a scalpel, and through that they expressed the mass of matter that was in my thigh, then bandaged the whole lot up with paper. Right afterward I even mentioned supper and was assured that this would be taken care of, as indeed I soon found to be the case. That day’s soup was turnip and kohlrabi, which I am very partial to, and the portions doled out for the Revier had palpably been taken from the bottom of the vat, which was another reason to be satisfied. I also spent the night there, in the Revier tent, in a box on the uppermost tier that I had all to myself, the only unpleasant aspect being that when the usual time for a bout of diarrhea came around, I was no longer able to use my own legs, while my efforts to call for help, first whispering, then out loud, and finally yelling, were likewise fruitless. On the morning of the following day, mine and a number of other bodies were hoisted up onto the soaking-wet sheet-iron flooring of an open truck to be transported to a nearby place that, if I heard rightly, goes by the name of “Gleina,” where our camp’s actual hospital is situated. En route a soldier seated on a neat folding stool, a damply glistening rifle on his knees, kept an eye on us in the back, his face visibly surly, grudging, and at times, presumably in response to an occasional sudden stench or sight he could not avoid, grimacing in disgust — not entirely without due cause, I had to admit. Particularly upsetting to me, it was as if in his mind he had come to some opinion, deduced some general truth, and I would have liked to excuse myself: I was not entirely the only one at fault here, and in fact this was not the genuine me — but then that would have been hard for me to prove, naturally, I could see that. Once we had arrived, first of all I had to endure a jet of water from a rubber pipe, a sort of garden hose, that was unexpectedly unleashed on me and probed after me whichever way I turned, washing everything off me: the remaining tatters of clothing, dirt, and even the paper bandage. But then they took me into a room where I was given a shirt and the lower of a two-tier bed of boards, and on that was even able to lie on a straw mattress that, although obviously tamped and pressed down fairly flat and hard by my predecessor, and mottled here and there with suspicious stains, suspicious-smelling and suspiciously crackling discolorations, was at least unoccupied and on which it was finally left entirely up to me how I spent my time and, most of all, to have a decent sleep at long last.